Welcome to issue #36 for December 2025.

We hope that you will all have a happy and healthy Christmas and come back in the New Year re-energized for 2026. We will be returning in February.

COP30 is over and was largely a non-event. Many are starting to feel that the COP process has been thoroughly hijacked by the fossil fuel industry. Australia’s involvement in COP31 in Turkiye could be a “two-edged sword”, because it will tar us with the same brush.

As we have all seen, the National Party have dropped any Net Zero target – this excellent video explains the hypocrisy of their position. Then, the Liberal Party followed them and has dropped the net zero target but are paradoxically saying they will continue to reduce emissions. Hopefully, this will send both parties further into oblivion because most (especially younger) Australians want to accelerate the energy transition to renewables to reduce costs.

After a lot of community effort all across Australia, Labor have agreed to partner with The Greens for improved nature laws – see here. This is a much better outcome than partnering with The Liberals.

I was very pleased to read that Auspost and some parcel delivery firms are buying lots of electric vehicles to replace petrol ones – the much lower fuel and maintenance costs make these very good investments.

This good video explains how climate change denial at the federal level is not slowing the relentless push towards renewable energy and reducing emissions at the state and local levels in the USA, which is good to know.

The Victorian state government has set aside $210 million over the coming 4 years for its Safe Local Roads and Streets program. Councils can bid for grants of up to $2 million for local projects to improve streets. In Port Phillip we desperately need better cycling infrastructure and better tree canopy cover for local streets – has the City of Port Phillip applied for any of these grants?

It was very disappointing to read that Australia’s battery regulators seem to be ignoring (or are unaware of) European trends towards expanding refurbishment activities to delay recycling old batteries to increase their lifecycle value. Why do Australian regulators always seem to lack vision and imagination?

Along the same lines, I was also very pleased to read that EN15194 has been reinstated (an international standard to control the quality of batteries that are imported into Australia). If you look closely at the reports, the vast majority of recent battery fires in Australia seem to be attributed to non-compliant batteries in smaller vehicles. One wonders why the Standard was ever deleted from the import framework in 2021, and why it has taken so long to reinstate it!

I recently learned that there are no new coal fired power stations planned for anywhere in South America, and Brazil got 88% of its electricity from renewables in 2024, and Uruguay has gotten 99% of its power from renewables in recent years. And several other South American countries are quickly ramping up their renewables power generation capacity. Here in Australia, electric power generated by the combination of solar PV, wind, hydro and biomass overtook coal fired power on a monthly basis for the first time in September 2025, according to a leading energy analyst.

According to this commentator, AI is starting to cost regular people lots of money because of higher electricity prices to pay for electricity grid investments for data centres – all to make useless “slop videos” that nobody in their right mind wants!

By now, you have probably heard about the ubiquitous presence of microplastics in the global environment and the dangers that they pose to us. This good article from the BBC explains how you can eat less microplastics. It all jarringly reminds me of DDT!

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed

 Theodore Roosevelt

We are living and working on the unceded lands of the Yalukit Willam people. We pay our respects to the traditional owners of the land and their ongoing connection to land, waters, sky and culture.

Have Your Say

The City of Port Phillip currently has environment related public consultations open on:

• the Plan for Port Phillip and ideas for improving life in our neighbourhoods
• the Ripponlea Place Plan and Burnett Gray Gardens play space upgrade
• the Alexandra Street, St Kilda East Green Corridor
• (not strictly environmental) Supporting Positive Aging in Port Phillip

As always we recommend that you Have Your Say

The Port Phillip EcoCentre is running its ever popular St Kilda Repair Cafe and Bike Kitchen and Climate Cafe events during December. See here for details. We are continually impressed by the great work that they do.

There are also some climate campaigns that you might want to contribute to:

• Every week there is a Friday Climate Vigil, 12:30-1:30pm at the electoral office of Josh Burns MP (Labor, Macnamara) – the more the merrier!
• Our BCCAG friends have a petition asking Tim Wilson MP (Liberal, Goldstein) to publicly support Net Zero by 2025, as he promised in 2022
• Senator David Pocock has a petition asking the federal government to save the CSIRO from budget cuts. We need a strong CSIRO to support climate action.
• The Australian Marine Conservation Society have a petition asking the government to further improve its recently released framework to stop illegally-caught seafood from entering Australia, eg it is missing a catch documentation scheme for tracing products
• The Australian Conservation Foundation has an open letter campaign asking government MPs and Senators to fix our nature laws.

Why you need a climate safe room, and how to create one in your home

Our changing climate means homes and workspaces also need to change. By retrofitting buildings, we can create healthier, more sustainable urban spaces. Read this article from Melbourne University researchers on how to create a climate safe room in your home. This video also succinctly explains the problems with heatwaves.

New research suggests that El Nino and La Nina events in the Pacific Ocean that significantly affect Australia’s weather are going to get much more regular and extreme in coming years. Extreme heat waves will become much more common.

Electric cherries: The world’s first 100% electric, zero fossil fuel orchard

This fascinating video talk explains how a New Zealand cherry farm became all-electric, using no fossil fuel powered equipment. It has solar panels and batteries for charging all the farm vehicles and other equipment, and sells excess power to the grid. This change has cut operating costs very significantly by over NZ$40,000/year, e.g. no more fuel purchases. It has also raised the public profile of the fruit produced by the farm and allows it to charge a 15% price premium (See Saul Griffith’s Plug In! book, p 217p-8). The explanation of what the farm has done makes it clear that most farmers could improve their long term business profitability by going all electric.

Is “plastic = bad” always true?

This thoughtful video from the ever reliable Engineering with Rosie YouTube channel explains that analyses of the benefits and problems with humanity’s use of plastics should be much more nuanced. Moreover, recycling plastics can sometimes be more damaging than landfilling them. Reducing and reusing plastics is a much better long term strategy.

agrivoltaics – save the farm, save the future

This inspiring video very effectively explains the synergies between renewable energy production and farming so that both can benefit greatly. It is talking about Colorado in the USA, but much of what they say is very relevant to Australia. Also, it is very focused on solar panels, but the opportunities for wind farms are equally compelling.

One major issue that comes from replacing fossil fuel power stations with solar panels and batteries is how to replace the grid inertia and strength services that the large spinning masses in these old power stations provided? It is starting to look like the best solution to this problem is grid forming inverters, which use electronics to have the same effect on the grid as spinning masses. See here for details.

Are zero energy bill homes possible on a wide scale?

This video explains how Kraken Technologies, a UK based energy company, is partnering with housing estate developers in the UK, Germany and New Zealand to build new energy efficient homes that include solar panels, heat pumps and batteries and then Kraken manages these estates and guarantees that they will not pay an energy bill for 10 years.  The concept works because, on average, the homes generate more power than they consume and Kraken on-sells the excess to the rest of the grid. Interestingly, Australia’s Origin Energy is a significant investor in Octopus Energy, the Kraken Techonlogies parent company, but they do not have any comparable Australian projects.

Urban bats: nature’s misunderstood pollinators

Bats have been driven from forests by climate change and deforestation and are adapting to urban situations – we are seeing a well nurtured, big colony of flying foxes in Yarra Bend Park that can swell to 60,000 animals during summer, for example. As ancient and intelligent creatures, bats remind us that by creating bat-friendly cities, we can foster biodiversity and reconnect with the natural world around us. Don’t scapegoat them, because bats are helping us greatly in rewilding our urban spaces to make more room for the other creatures on our amazing planet. Learn more.

Why do we need urban forests?

This is a very good video if you want to learn about the importance of urban forests and how to build them – it is about Los Angeles, California, but many of the points made are relevant to Melbourne, and I agree with much of what they say about palm trees!

I was very pleased to read about the Victorian government’s Planting for a Greener Melbourne project, which aims to plant 500,000 trees in lower coverage parts of our city. Port Phillip’s tree coverage is well under the 30% canopy cover target, and hopefully they will apply for grants from this scheme to implement the Balaclava and St Kilda East Urban Forest Precinct Plan.

A bit of fun…

The Volonaut hoverbike let’s you “fly like a superhero” – as long as you are OK with being deafened and choked by dust and do not want to get too far off the ground. Learn more. I think an e-bike is much more practical.

Looking for a good Christmas read…