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Australia’s renewable energy transition has prompted the construction of dozens of large-scale solar farms. The boom helps reduce Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels, but requires large areas of land to be converted to host solar infrastructure.
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Spanish architect David Romero recently released a series of digital visualisations of unbuilt architectural projects by one of the 20th century’s most eminent American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. His fascinating 3D renderings underscore the potential of this technology and tell us a great deal about the breadth and ambition of Wright’s vision more than six decades after his death.
The Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 were cataclysmic: a landmark in Australia’s environmental history. They burnt more than 10 million hectares, mostly forests in southeast Australia. Many of our most distinctive, ancient and vulnerable species were worst affected.
The January 27 storm that hit Auckland broke all previous rainfall records and has caused widespread damage, mostly from flooding and landslides. But while climate change helps explain the intensity of the rainfall, the way land has been used and built on in the city is a major factor in what happened.
We know everything in our homes gathers dust. What you probably don’t know is whether there are toxic contaminants in your house dust, and where these might come from.
We’ve built our cities to be vulnerable to – and exacerbate – major weather events such as the one we saw in Auckland on Friday. While almost no city in the world could fully escape the effects of four months’ worth of rain in 24 hours, there are many things that could have been done to avoid some of the worst impacts.
The Japanese government has announced a fresh round of incentives for people to move out of the Tokyo region. From April 2023, families seeking a new life in greener pastures will receive JPY1 million, per child. This represents an increase of JPY700,000 on previous such payments.
At the end of last year, the world’s average price to emit one tonne of greenhouse gases was around US$5.29 (AU$7.77). For pricing to work as we want – to wean us off fossil fuels – it needs to be around $75 by the end of the decade, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Renewable energy’s share of Australia’s main electricity grid has more than doubled from 16% to 35% in five years, and the federal government wants this figure to reach 82% by 2030.
Soaring electricity prices have made 15% of Aussies think about installing solar panels, a recent survey found. Another 6% were already weighing up the move, on top of the 28% who had panels.
Nearly all economists and most politicians seem to agree stamp duty is a bad tax. But nearly all state and territory governments rely on it to keep the lights on.
It has been 20 years to the day since bushfires burst out of the Brindabella Ranges and into the suburbs of our nation’s bush capital. Four lives were lost, many people were injured and more than 500 homes were destroyed.
