#radionational

Robert Hillard – the Managing Partner with Deloitte Consulting and one of the  coauthors on our recent report Bitcoin, Blockchain & Distributed Ledgers — was interviewed by Future Tense on Radio National.

Radio National lead with:

Now, Robert Hillard is our first guest today. He's a Managing Partner with Deloitte Consulting and he's just completed a report looking into the potential of blockchain as a platform for business. He's found potential all right, but he's also found some serious downsides to its application, which is why we've asked him onto the program.

Robert captured our conclusions from the report nicely, pointing out that we found blockchain overhyped, it's impact was under appreciated.

So if we think back to how disruptive [the internet] was, despite the fact that we didn't really understand it at the time, you immediately realise that a disruptive technology like blockchain is something that is hard to understand now. We don't know exactly how it's going to be applied but we have a very strong sense it's going to be something that affects many aspects of our lives in the years to come.

Technology never survives contact with society intact as technology and society influence each other. One of our favourite examples is that the development of nuclear power didn't result in the creation of nuclear powered cars (even though Ford did develop a concept). Many of the early predictions of of blockchains will look silly in hindsight but, at the same time, we shouldn't underestimate the long term impact.

Robert points out blockchain will enable new was of doing business and the creation of new types of businesses, but first we need to understand blockchain's limitations. Two obvious ones are it's cost (which we've written about elsewhere) and the usability of blockchain solutions.

Produced by ELLICE MOL for The Science Show on ABC Radio National

Beef production has adverse environmental effects. In addition to impact on land and water, cattle, being ruminant animals produce methane, emitted from both ends. This accounts for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. Ellice Mol reports on the latest accounting of greenhouse gases from animal farming, and how these emissions can be reduced.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Did you know that agriculture accounts for about a third of emissions but is nonetheless left out of most of the schemes. Is this wise? Ellice Mol reports.

Ellice Mol: The biggest sector of agricultural emissions is livestock and the gases produced from both ends of cattle as they digest their feed.

Tony McMichael: Globally the livestock industry at large and particularly beef cattle industry has a major impact on the world's environment.

Ellice Mol: Professor Tony McMichael from the Australian National University.

Tony McMichael: The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation produced a report in 2006 called 'Livestock's Long Shadow' and they're making the argument that the impact of intensive forms of beef production around the world is affecting fresh water supplies, affecting the use and the sustainability of land, and of course is contributing to climate change via the energy that goes into the sector and in particular the methane gas that is produced by cattle as ruminant animals in the course of fermentation of their diet. Already livestock production around the world is doing a lot of damage to local environments and accounts for about one-fifth of the world's greenhouse gas emissions when you look at that sector as a whole. So it's a major environmental problem that is already pushing us beyond sustainable limits.

Ellice Mol: Farmers have always had to cope with climate variability, as Katrina Sinclair, research economist with the NSW Department of Primary Industries, explains.

Katrina Sinclair: Over the last ten years there's been an increase in the amount of fodder that they're storing as a risk management strategy because they've been exposed to these very dry years in a row. They've experienced some bad years, and we've got farmers here that are already storing more fodder. They've been starting to grow more prairie grass, increasing the acreage. So farmers are making changes and it doesn't strictly sit under the banner of climate change, it's in response to how the seasons have been.

Ellice Mol: With a reprieve from the drought in sight, the Australian cattle herd is projected to rebuild over the next few years, which means livestock emissions will increase. The Department of Climate Change estimates the number of grass-fed beef cattle in Australia will reach 28.7 million head by 2020, the highest it's ever been. Professor Tony McMichael says the current level of meat consumption is unsustainable.

Tony McMichael: The world is on a trajectory at the moment for levels of meat consumption that is simply not sustainable with current methods of production. Indeed, the G8 meeting has very recently said that in order to meet demand it's likely that meat production would have to increase by 80% by the year 2030. Frankly, that's not sustainable, and I think environmental scientists in the Food and Agricultural Organisation recognise this.

The other thing that can be done of course is to radically change some of the production methods for producing ruminant animals, cattle and sheep for example. And third, we could actually switch our meat preferences to other types of animals, and in Australia that would include eating an increasing proportion of kangaroo meat.

Ellice Mol: How is the consumption of kangaroo better for the environment?

Tony McMichael: First, it's basically a healthier meat. Human bodies are well attuned to consuming lean game meat. We've evolved to eat it over two million years. It has a much lower content of saturated fat, much more of what we call fish oils, the unsaturated omega 3 fatty acids that are actually good for us. Second, the kangaroos are not ruminants, they don't ferment their food in the way that cattle and sheep do and they don't produce the vast amounts of methane gas which is such a potent greenhouse gas, many times more potent than carbon dioxide. And third, of course, they tread much more lightly on the Australian environment, they're not cloven-hoofed animals and they don't damage our topsoils.

Ellice Mol: However, as population growth steadily increases, Tony McMichael says the global demand for meat and dairy products is set to have a major impact on the environment.

Tony McMichael: We have a serious problem arising in the world with respect to the levels of meat consumption in a world that is becoming increasingly over-populated. At the moment the international average is of the order of 100 grams of meat a day. In America it's over 300, in Africa it's less than 30. If we were to have a population of nine billion by the year 2050 and we were to have huge developing countries like China, India, Brazil, Mexico, all intending to eat meat at that sort of level, the amount of meat we would have to produce in the world would be extraordinarily greater than today, more than double.

Ellice Mol: Dr Van Zwieten says the agriculture sector will need to adopt new farming methods to cope with climate change as the demand for food increases.

Lukas Van Zwieten: Farming will have to do better than what it is at the moment because human population is increasing, we all need to eat, and the demand for food globally is certainly increasing. So we just need to look at ways of doing things better, and new farming methods are always being developed. We've got lots of people on the ground doing research, working with farmers to try and improve the system.

Ellice Mol: Cattle are just part of the problem. The use of fertiliser in crop production is also a major contributor to harmful emissions. Research conducted by Lukas Van Zwieten and his team has led to a pasture improvement product known as biochar made from plant and animal waste. The process also creates a source of renewable energy.

Lukas Van Zwieten: Conversion from tilled cropping systems through to pasture has been established to increase carbon content in soil, thereby sequestering carbon. Our particular angle is conversion of the labile carbons in the forms of animal manures or in the forms of plant material such as cellulose and lignin into more permanent forms of carbon. We call it biochar. In that whole process we're converting some of that carbon into energy, so electricity, and also into a very stable form of carbon which should be able to be traded on the carbon market.

Ellice Mol: This technology could harness 7 million tonnes of bio-waste that exists in NSW alone.

Lukas Van Zwieten: Wastes that are currently going to landfill include things like bio-solids, include green wastes, include domestic wastes such as paper and food scraps, by-product forestry residue. We've got animal feedlot manures, we've got paper mill wastes, just to name a few. We've got wastes from the macadamia industry, we've got wastes from the rice industry. All sorts of agricultural and urban wastes can potentially be put through the pyrolysis unit which converts those biomasses into electricity through the conversion of the biomass into flammable gas which can get turned into electricity and also biochar.

Ellice Mol: Emissions from landfill account for 13% of global greenhouse gases. It's the second largest source of methane after emissions from cows. While researchers are still working on methods to reduce methane emissions from cattle, the technology to reduce methane from landfill already exists.

Lukas Van Zwieten: Well, the technology is ready to go now. I guess we're just in the final stages of proving the methodology up. We've recently commenced a scoping study for the north coast of NSW to have a look at the volume of biomass that's available for slow pyrolysis in the region. We're looking at the price of electricity, we're looking at the potential price that we might get for the biochar. So once all of these figures start aligning, business will come in and we'll start dictating the implementation of these new technologies.

Robyn Williams: Lukas Van Zwieten, senior research scientist at the NSW Department of Primary Industries. And that report by Ellice Mol.