Nuclear Power and Public Opinion in Australia – theme for Sept 2011
Who really favours nuclear power? Well, a minority of Australians enthusiastically support it. – careerists in the nuclear industry, careerists in politics, academia, careerists in the Murdoch media, highly paid uranium workers, communities that exist only because of mining, – (the latter can’t really afford not to support it)
Less enthusiastic Australian supporters are those who follow the good old Australian dictum
– ”she’ll be right mate”. You don’t need to think. You know that the “experts’ in the Murdoch media know best. It’s safest to support the Establishment. After all, there’s supposed to be money in uranium investing. Very many Australians wrongly believe that BHP and Rio Tinto are ethical, and are Australian companies.
BUT – even in Australia, land of the golden yellowcake investment dream, there is a growing minority who
enthusiastically do NOT favour the nuclear industry. And they probably number many more than the pro-nukes. Their numbers are growing, as information spreads about the diseconomics of the nuclear/uranium industry, and its global destructiveness.
As their numbers grow they form part of a world-wide movement whose aim is to shut down this toxic industry – forever.
Organised climate change denial by some Conservative White Males in Australia
“organised climate change denial” had spread from US conservative think-tanks to other nations, including New Zealand and Australia……conservatives were unduly confident about their own views on climate change “also makes them less open to differing views or able to accept that they might be wrong”…..Only 38 per cent of Liberal-National politicians thought humans were causing global warming, compared to 89 per cent from Labor….
The CWM effect: What climate change’s biggest sceptics have in common, The Age, Graham Readfearn, August 18, 2011 (This article also shows pictures of Cardinal Pell, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Christopher Monckton) When it comes to climate change, most people have heard of the greenhouse effect, but what about the “conservative white male” effect?
A US-based study has found that white men with politically conservative views are far more likely than the rest of the population to doubt the science of human-caused climate change.
And the “conservative white male effect” has been linked to Australia, with one prominent researcher citing the existence of a successful, politically engaged and outspoken coterie operating in high-profile positions that attract wide media coverage. Continue reading
Fossil fuel industries have a stranglehold on Australia’s renewable energy development
Part of the problem is that Australia’s renewable energy industry is, by and large, a subset of the fossil fuel industry. Origin, AGL and Truenergy have a stranglehold on electricity markets and they want to decide the pace of our response to climate change…..
Renewable energies are the only zero emission solution that we know will work, at scale – and once a plant is built we get free fuel forever.
Body politic sapping energy from climate change plans, SMH, September 3, 2011 The wheels of clean energy are turning in ever-diminishing circles as politics hogs its place in the sun, writes Paddy Manning. PARTY-POLITICKING on the carbon tax is to be expected. It would be scandalous if a Coalition state government came out and backed the multiparty climate change committee’s ”clean energy future” package.
What is galling is watching the clock turn back on state policies designed to help tackle climate change. Backsliding on support for renewable energy in Victoria and NSW is a foretaste of life under Tony Abbott.
According to the Clean Energy Council, Premier Ted Baillieu happily kissed goodbye to as much as $3 billion in wind farm investment this week – a perverse outcome given Victoria’s excellent wind resource. What will that do for the state’s competitiveness in clean energy, let alone for Australia’s response to climate change? It seems Baillieu and his colleagues couldn’t care less. Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
