Carbon tax a spur for urban renewal

An alternative approach would be to re-examine the ways in which we use water to identify how we might best use all the water resources available to us on a ‘fit-for-purpose’ basis. By harvesting rainwater for use in the shower, laundry, toilet flushing and garden we would greatly reduce our demand for potable quality water. This would greatly reduce our energy consumption in pumping water. It would mean we would not need to build more dams with their high levels of embodied energy. Nor would we need such high capacity water mains etc which also have high levels of embodied energy.

We would also greatly reduce our discharges of storm-water which are the greatest sources of pollution of the harbours, rivers and bays on which our cities are built.

By local processing of water we not only produce water ‘fit for purpose’ for local use at a lower energy cost we would not have to pump so much of it.

This issue is of increasing importance to Sydney because so much of its water supply and sewerage system is now obsolete and needs to be replaced.

Developing water services on ‘greenfield’ sites is expensive but redeveloping them on the existing model for existing cities is even more so.

Other cities and major towns face similar problems and also need to re-examine the efficacy of the nineteenth century Chadwickean approach to the provision of water services they adopted.

Unfortunately the major urban water services authorities, and Sydney’s is no exception, have a strong ‘big engineering’ culture now overlaid by a powerful economistic approach which leads them into highly centralized, big-pipe-in-big-pipe-out approaches and solutions that are highly energy expensive and lead to expensive water services.

The carbon tax and consequential increase in energy costs provide the opportunity to develop a new highly decentralized water services supply system.

Adopting a decentralized water cycle management system would not only lead to significant reduction in energy consumption it would:

1. massively reduce the environmental stresses in the eco-systems from which we extract or harvest water,
2. mean we could reduce the environmental stresses in the eco-systems on which our cities are built by exploiting the rain that falls on them; and
3. reduce the stresses imposed on the eco-systems into which we currently discharge our waste water flows.

That is, the carbon tax initiative provides the excuse - if one was needed - to modernize and adapt our urban water services systems to make the cities and towns more sustainable and resilient.

Intercity and intra-city transport systems

It is widely understood that energy consumption is at the heart of our demand for transport services.