South Australian Cabinet nuclear stooge Leesa Vlahos already spruiking for nukes!
Labor MP Leesa Vlahos says pro-nuclear debate ‘getting easier’ March 16, 2015. South Australian Labor MP Leesa Vlahos says pro-nuclear advocates have started to win the debate in the five weeks since Premier Jay Weatherill announced a royal commission into the nuclear industry……(subscribers only) http://www.afr.com/business/mining/uranium/labor-mp-leesa-vlahos-says-pronuclear-debate-getting-easier-20150313-143fhw &http://www.mypolitician.com.au/SA/politician/leesa-vlahos
Environmental law will be undermined by Trans Pacific Partnership
the TPP would give foreign corporations like TransCanada broad power to demand compensation for policies that do not conform to their “expectations.”
In other words, any time our government takes an “unexpected” step to protect our air, our water, our economy, or the health of our families from dangerous projects like Keystone XL, corporations could use that as a reason to ask a tribunal to order the government to pay.
TPP provisions would undermine environmental efforts http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/opinion-tpp-provisions-would-undermine-environmental-efforts?utm_content=buffer4500f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer 01/21/16 03 By Michael Brune For years the Sierra Club has warned that international trade deals could be used by corporations to undermine U.S. environmental protections. Now the Canadian oil company TransCanada is attempting to do exactly that in response to President Obama’s rejection of its Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Science researcher debunks Tony Abbott’s climate claims
Tony Abbott’s climate claims debunked: researcher dissects 2013 statement Guardian, Michael Slezak, 23 Jan 16 Sophie Lewis was so annoyed about the way science was ignored in the political debate about climate change she went to work to disprove the myths. Climate scientists are regularly infuriated by the things politicians say. But it’s not often they publish a scientific paper tearing a politician’s comments to shreds.
Sophie Lewis, from the Australian Research Council’s centre for excellence in climate science, has done exactly that, dissecting statements about climate records made by the former prime ministerTony Abbott in 2013.
Last week, temperature figures showed 2015 was officially the hottest year on record. Before that, 2014 was the hottest year on record. And scientists are expecting 2016 to once again win the dubious honour.
Heat records are being broken with wild abandon. Last year, 10 months broke temperature records.
Climate scientists say a rise in the average temperature caused by greenhouse gas emissions makes extreme heat records more likely.
In 2013, the UN’s top climate official, Christiana Figueres, linked bushfires in Australia to climate change. Abbott called such claims “complete hogwash” and said drawing links between broken records and climate change was a sign of desperation.
Lewis says she was frustrated by the gap she saw between what the science showed and what some politicians said was happening.
In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes, Lewis pulls Abbot’s comments apart, shred by shred…………
The first way to understand Abbott’s claim is that in any system, the longer you wait, the more often you will see records fall. But Lewis points out that the exact opposite is true. In a system without any sort of trend, such as a random string of temperatures, the first one will be a record-breaker, by default. The second one will have a 50% chance of being a record-breaker. The third has a one in three chance of being a record breaker … and so on. In a very long temperature series, you should see very few records being broken, and they will break less often over time.
Unless, of course, there is a warming or cooling trend………
Lewis ran a series of climate models in which the greenhouse effect was removed – so all that was left was natural variability. Unsurprisingly, in those models, high temperature records were less common than they are in reality. In other words, the record-breaking that we have seen cannot be explained by natural variation……http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/23/tony-abbotts-climate-claims-debunked-researcher-dissects-2013-statement-australia
US govt making it harder for nuclear workers to get compensation for radiation-caused illnesses
the directive signals an initial step toward trying to dismantle or rein in a $12 billion compensation program that has made payments to more than 53,000 sickened workers or their survivors since 2001.
Nuclear workers fear new policy will make it harder to win compensation
Department of Labor says nuclear facilities are much safer since 1995
Workers and advocates worry it will be more difficult to prove cases
A fight is underway to get policy repealed in order to protect sick employees
BY LINDSAY WISE, ROB HOTAKAINEN AND FRANK MATT McClatchy Washington Bureau, 22 Jan 16 WASHINGTON
Abelardo Garza was working near tanks full of toxic sludge at Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state last Aug. 14 when one of his co-workers noticed a strange smell.
Within minutes, Garza’s nose started bleeding. The next morning, he awoke gasping for breath.
It was the fourth time in five years that Garza would end up in the hospital after suspected exposure to chemical vapors at Hanford, a 586-square-mile site where workers once made plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
Now Garza, 65, worries that a new federal directive the government says was intended to speed up compensation claims by sick and dying nuclear workers could harm his chances of qualifying for benefits if his health worsens in the future.
The directive, which became effective in December 2014, orders claims examiners to conclude that workers at Department of Energy nuclear facilities have not have any significant exposure to toxins since 1995 “in the absence of compelling data to the contrary.”
To Garza, the wording of the government’s directive feels like a dismissal. Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 