It seems there is no way that the federal plan could develop into that grandiose project [the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Chain Royal Commission importing plan].
But the federal nuclear waste project starts the process in some important ways.
Environmentalists had better stop rejoicing and start examining the machinations behind the Federal Government plan.
Exhuming South Australia’s nuclear waste import dump plan, Independent Australia, 7 December 2016, The SA nuclear waste dump may be dead in the water but a nuclear waste import plan may now be a Federal affair, writes Noel Wauchope.
POLITICAL SUPPORT for South Australia’s nuclear waste import project has collapsed……..
You would think that, with an election coming up in 2018, Jay Weatherill might ponder on the advantages of making a gracious retreat, respecting the remarkably strong recommendation from his own Citizens’ Jury, that the international nuclear dump was not to go ahead “under any circumstances“.
But Jay Weatherill is persisting with the plan, even though it is a bell tolling his political suicide. We can only suspect that Weatherill has some very poor advisers, or that he is beholden to the nuclear lobby.
Let not the anti-nuclear movement rejoice
The plan for importing nuclear waste to South Australia has been several decades in the making and this recent government push has cost at least $13 million. The nuclear lobby is not giving up so easily. The focus now shifts to the plan for a Federal Government nuclear waste dump in Barndioota.
It would be naive to think that these two plans are not connected.
Australia has a relatively small but enthusiastic pro-nuclear lobby, led by Ben Heard and Barry Brook. Ben Heard – who has just started a pro-nuclear group seeking charity status – made the connection between the two waste dump plans, explaining why South Australia could take not only Australia’s but also the world’s nuclear waste.
It is a simple, and in a way logical, idea to say that once a place is radioactively polluted, well, why not choose that place to dump more radioactive pollution? ……..what if we got a nuclear waste dump in South Australia? One that started out storing “low level medical” nuclear waste but then got “intermediate level” nuclear waste originally derived from Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor? Especially as medical nuclear wastes are so short-lived — radioactivity lasting generally for just hours, or a few days, it would be pretty silly to have a great big repository site, with not enough wastes to fill it.
……..if medical wastes are radioactive for only hours, or a few days, why would they need to be transported for thousands of miles across the continent? They are produced in very small quantities and currently stored near the point of use — in hospitals. (There’s actually a strong argument for the use of non-nuclear cyclotrons to produce these isotopes close to the hospitals, rather than at the centralised nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.)
So, an underground nuclear waste facility for medical wastes, at remote Barndioota, in South Australia, doesn’t seem necessary.
But then there’s the processed nuclear waste returning to Lucas Heights, from France and the UK. The Australian Government describes this as intermediate-level waste that isn’t harmful unless mismanaged. The French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) has classified it as high-level (long-life) waste according to standards set by ANDRA, the French national radioactive waste management agency. High-level waste is ANDRA’s most severe nuclear waste classification.
Nuclear Shipment Truth Exposed
It is pretty clear that the purpose of the proposed Barndioota nuclear waste dump is the disposal of Australia’s intermediate to high-level waste returning from overseas…….
It seems there is no way that the federal plan could develop into that grandiose project [the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Chain Royal Commission importing plan].
Federal nuclear waste project to start the process
But the federal nuclear waste project starts the process in some important ways.
First, the plan must navigate several legal difficulties. In 2010, former premier Mike Rann brought in laws to prevent a national nuclear waste dump being placed in South Australia — laws which would have to be repealed before the Federal Government could proceed. Federally, the National Radioactive Waste Management Act 2012 did water down prohibitions on nuclear waste dumping but there are still provisions that have to be overcome, particularly in relation to Aboriginal rights.
Secondly, there is that Aboriginal question. I think that the State and Federal governments are justifiably wary of the opposition they might meet from Indigenous communities — and they are working on that problem. The South Australian Government recently imposed Aboriginal Regional Authorities upon the State’s Indigenous communities. These are being used to fast-track and rubber stamp development over much of the land. They would be integral to Jay Weatherill’s strategy of manufacturing consent……
An unspoken part of the process must surely be the development of the Federal Government’s nuclear waste facility in South Australia, which would conveniently overcome some big hurdles and would make that State look like an attractive place for a nuclear hub.
An Albuquerque watchdog group is calling for an additional federal review before WIPP can reopen. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad has been working for nearly three years to recover from a radiation accident in February 2014.
Roof collapses at WIPP raise new safety questions, Albuquerque Journal By Lauren Villagran / Journal Staff Writer Tuesday, December 6th, 2016 In a salt mine more than 2,000 feet underground where drums of nuclear waste are embedded in enormous rooms – some radiologically contaminated – workers heard a loud noise and saw a spray of salt dust.
It was just before 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 3 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Still recovering from a radiation accident nearly three years ago, managers of the nation’s only deep geologic repository for defense nuclear waste had just two weeks prior decided to shut down the far south end of the mine after the salt ceiling collapsed in two places.
Suspecting a rock fall, workers reported the incident to the Central Monitoring Room on the surface. Managers called for an evacuation of the underground and, following the latest safety protocol, activated the Emergency Operations Center 26 miles away in Carlsbad as a precaution.
The next day, a team of geotechnical and radiological control experts, members of the mine rescue team and a representative from the Mine Safety and Health Administration descended into WIPP. They found a massive area of the ceiling in Room 4 of Panel 7 had crashed: a rock fall two-thirds the length of a football field, eight feet thick.
WIPP is supposed to reopen this month. The U.S. Department of Energy has not publicly changed its position that WIPP will begin putting waste underground in December, a symbolic “end” to a recovery that still will likely go on for years.
Why would any reasonable society actually WANT to expose themselves to danger and the greatest known risk to human kind and for a completely incomprehensible time of at least 100,000 years till the danger of contamination of earth, waters and human beings subsides!!! For money? For jobs? What substitute is money and jobs for some at the cost of clean air, uncontaminated water, uncontaminated land for food growing, a safe environment to bring up children, a healthy environment to bring up children, a clean environment for every generation? What extraordinary motivation is driving those who want to risk all this to involve South Australia our homeland further into the contamination from which there will be no return?
Josephite SA Reconciliation Circle Royal Commission into the Nuclear Fuel Cycle SUBMISSION TO ISSUES PAPER 4“…Regarding the storage of high level (or nuclear long lived) waste, the Royal Commission must
• accept and
• make perfectly clear to the citizens of South Australia
that there are simply NO World’s Best practice for the storage of high level (or nuclear long
lived) waste.
The material is simply too dangerous, will live on dangerously for an outrageous 200,000
years (CCSA 2015) – and despite the fervent hopes ofthe nuclear industryIlobby- there are
no technological solutions to its safe storage – now or likely to be in the foreseeable future
and quite possibly never.
Unfortunately there is no safeguard in the assurances of those who claim that the situation is
safe and weapons proliferation won’t happen ‘because we say it won’t ‘.
As long term South Australian citizens our members are well placed to know that –
in the Ernul Maralinga nuclear explosions and the later even more damaging so called ‘minor
trials’ which contained plutonium there were ready assurances given by those whose vested
interests were served by the nuclear explosions going ahead. (as quoted in 1.8. above)
The effects of the Emu and Maralinga fallouts affected many South Australians particularly
those living in the remote Far West and North West of our state and in the areas around
Coober Pedy. Many were Aboriginal and their life style of ground cooking and other factors
placed them in an extremely vulnerable position. This experience – personal in most cases
and to their families in others – is what galvanised the Senior Women Elders of Coober Pedy,
known as the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta (KPKT) to lead what became the national successful
campaign of 1998-2004 against the Federal Government’s imposition of a national radioactive
dump on their land.
All of us were living when the Government used the country for the bomb…Some were living at Twelve Mile, just out ofCoober Pedy… Whitefellas and all got sick. When we wereyoung, no women got breast cancer or any other kind ofcancer. Cancer was unheard of with me either and no asthma. We were people without sickness. The Government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now again they are coming along and telling us poor blackfellas, ‘Oh, there’s nothing that’s going to happen, nothing is going to killyou.’And that will still happen like that bomb over there. KPKTApril 1998 Continue reading →
US to build $1.6B Idaho facility for warships’ nuclear waste, WNTV.com 6 Dec 16 By KEITH RIDLER Associated Press BOISE, Idaho (AP) – A $1.65 billion facility will be built at a nuclear site in eastern Idaho to handle fuel waste from the nation’s fleet of nuclear-powered warships, the Navy and U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday.
Officials said the new facility is needed to keep nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines deployed.
The new construction will be at the Naval Reactors facility on the Energy Department’s southeastern Idaho site that covers about 890-square-miles of high-desert sagebrush steppe. The area also includes the Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation’s primary lab for nuclear research.
“This action will provide the infrastructure necessary to support the naval nuclear reactor defueling and refueling schedules to meet the operational needs of the U.S. Navy,” the Department of Energy said in a statement.
Officials said site preparation is expected to begin in 2017 with construction of the facility likely to start in 2019, creating 360 on-site jobs. The facility is expected to start operating in late 2024. The Department of Energy formally announced the plan with publication of what’s called a record of decision in the Federal Register. The record of decision made public Tuesday was signed last month by Admiral James F. Caldwell Jr., director of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
The record of decision concludes a lengthy and public environmental process that also looked at continuing using outdated facilities at the eastern Idaho site or overhauling them…..
The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, a joint Navy and Energy Department organization, has been sending spent Navy fuel to the Idaho site since 1957. It’s transported by rail from shipyards. Dahl declined to describe security at Navy site.
“Appropriate security will be provided for the new facility,” he said.
Officials also declined on Tuesday to describe security measures at the rest of site, but access roads have armed checkpoints and visitors must leave passenger vehicles far from facilities and ride buses into secured areas.
Nuclear waste coming into Idaho prompted lawsuits when state leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought the site was becoming a permanent nuclear waste repository. The lawsuits culminated in a 1995 agreement, then a 2008 addendum, limiting such shipments and requiring most nuclear waste to be removed from the federal site by 2035. The deal applies to the Navy’s spent nuclear fuel.
Under the agreement, fuel waste coming to the new facility after 2035 will only remain for the six years it takes to cool in pools. After that, it’s required to be put in dry storage and taken out of Idaho. However, the nation has no repository for spent nuclear fuel at this time, so where it will go is not clear…..http://www.wbtv.com/story/33941726/us-to-build-16b-idaho-facility-for-warships-nuclear-waste
Call to build nuclear power plant in Portland The Age, Benjamin Preiss, 6 Dec 16, A nuclear power plant should be built in the western Victorian city of Portland to supply cheap electricity to Alcoa’s troubled aluminium smelter, according to a local-micro party MP.
Vote 1 Local Jobs MP James Purcell has warned that Portland, which has a population of about 10,000, will become a “ghost town” if the smelter closes and cheap power generation is not created. He says the recent power failure that damaged the Alcoa’s aluminium smelter illustrated the need for nuclear energy.
Earlier this month the smelter suffered a major setback when one of its two “pot-lines” was closed due to a disastrous power failure……..
Mr Purcell has called on the Andrews government to consult with the people of Portland to determine whether they would support a nuclear facility.
He said major industries, including wood chipping and wool processing were ideal for Portland. But they relied on substantial amounts of power. Mr Purcell said an energy efficient method of power generation would revitalise Portland and ensure the creation of “many thousands of jobs” into the future. “House prices will be double what they are and you finish up with a thriving town or region,” he said………
Agriculture Minister Jaala Pulford told Parliament that the Labor Party’s national platform did not support the establishment of nuclear power plants.
She said the government was in “regular dialogue” with community leaders in Portland and would continue to work on a solution to the problems at Alcoa.
Greens energy spokeswoman Ellen Sandell urged Mr Purcell to abandon his push for nuclear power and support renewable energy sources.
“The people of Portland need sustainable jobs and clean energy. They don’t want a toxic waste problem and the dangers of a nuclear power plant in their backyard,” she said.
the Australian government’s desire to have the AIIB’s investment strategy give more priority to fossil fuel projects runs contrary to Australian public opinion.
According to an online poll from Market Forces, taken between 15 and 19 August by Essential Research, 62% of Australians would prefer multilateral banks like the AIIB and World Bank to use taxpayer dollars to fund renewable energy projects.
The poll, of 1,017 respondents, found just 13% of Australians would prefer money to fund fossil fuel projects (with 26% unsure).
Draft guidelines were circulated by the bank that suggest it should prioritise investments in renewable energy projects across Asia while the Turnbull government has argued fossil fuels will play a significant role in energy generation in the region for decades to come..
Australia joined the AIIB in June 2015, with then-treasurer Joe Hockey pledging an initial $930m to the bank. The AIIB has been working with the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and a range of other banks to satisfy an estimated US$8tn infrastructure shortfall across Asia.
The bank is still in the process of creating its identity, but its founding members, including Australia, have declared the AIIB should be a “green bank.”
The draft guidelines suggest the AIIB should not consider financing nuclear plants at this stage, because the bank would “have to develop the capacity to be involved in such complex and capital-intensive projects”. It says this decision could be revisited if justified.
It also suggests the AIIB should prioritise renewable energy generation over fossil fuel power. Continue reading →
There could be just two years left before the North Pole disappears, news.com.au, Charles Firth, 7 Dec 16 “…….Santa is a fantasy but climate change is not, and it’s started to do truly alarming things to the North Pole.
Over the past few weeks the temperature of the North Pole has been 22 degrees hotter than the average temperature for this time of year. That’s not a typo. It’s not 2.2 degrees hotter. It’s 22 degrees Celsius hotter.
The reason it’s such a huge difference is because even though night is now falling, the temperature around the poles is still getting hotter rather than colder. That’s never happened before. What it means is that the gap between average temperature and this year’s temperature is getting wider and wider by the day. [graph on original] …….
Peter Wadhams, a professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University, now reckons that it could be as little as two years before ice disappears completely from the North Pole during the summer months…..
What the ice melting at the North Pole means is that, once it’s gone, you’ll be able to drive a boat across the North Pole.
No more photos of intrepid tourists reaching the North Pole, doing a cheesy thumbs in front of a sign saying “North Pole”. No more stories of Santa’s sleigh. There will be no ice for him to drive his sleigh across.
In addition to the environmental implications, the cultural implications of this are also huge…….
“Part 1 “The Adani mine is getting a lot of press after a recent protest in Melbourne rallied for the environment and the damages that the mine will cause.
However, here in QLD the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council is fighting an extensive legal battle against the mine to protect their country in Central Queensland .
“Brisbane Line Reporter Jack McDonnell spoke with Murrawah Johnson a spokesperson from the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council about the Adani mine and the councils campaign.
To gain a perspective of how long they have been battling this decision I asked her to tell her story about how she travelled around the world last year lobbying banks so they wouldn’t fund this mine.”
Households to power up to half Australia, zero emissions within reach: CSIRO, The Age, Adam Morton , 6 Dec 16
As the Coalition backs away from a pledge to consider a climate change policy that the energy industry says it needs, a new study is projecting a rapidly growing mass electricity generator for Australia in the decades ahead: the public.
The two-year analysis also found an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity sector – a form of carbon trading that was to be considered by a government climate policy review until that plan was abandoned on Tuesday afternoon – would be the cheapest way to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
It suggests it could save customers $200 a year by 2030, while helping create a reliable electricity grid with zero emissions by 2050. Energy Networks chief John Bradley said a low-cost shift to zero emissions would depend on a national climate and energy plan with bipartisan support.
“By contrast, carbon policy which could change dramatically at every election, or differs in every state, is a recipe for a high-cost and less secure electricity service,” Mr Bradley said.
The Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap forecasts that up to 10 million households and small businesses would have solar panels, battery storage, smart homes and electric vehicles if pricing and incentives were changed to better reflect demand. This would “transform the grid into a platform more like the internet, where customers can trade and share energy”.
It recommends an emissions intensity scheme for power stations be introduced by 2020, following a similar call by the Climate Change Authority, now dominated by Coalition-appointed board members.
On Tuesday, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg backed away from saying the government would consider this sort of scheme as part of a wide-ranging departmental review of climate policy next year. A handful of Coalition backbenchers, including Cory Bernardi and Craig Kelly, had called for any form of carbon pricing to be rejected…….
The report found thermal plants, including coal and gas fossil fuels, would be critical in balancing intermittent renewable energy in the years ahead, but would eventually be replaced by technologies using battery storage and biomass.
Getting there would present significant technical, economic and regulatory challenges. It would transform the system away from its original design – large centralised power stations – to a much more decentralised network.
It said a coordinated plan for 2050 could:
Make average annual household bills $414 less than they otherwise would have been.
Cut network costs to consumers by 30 per cent.
Avoid $16 billion in spending on poles and wires.
Lead to customers with solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles earning $2.5 billion a year from network businesses.
More terrifying than Trump? The booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial,Guardian, Graham Readfearn, 6 Dec 16,
Conspiracy websites and hyperpartisan media outlets are building huge online audiences who want to hear climate change is a hoax “…….
Climate change is an issue he [Alex Jones]covers regularly on his shows, where he has interviewed climate science deniers such as Christopher Monckton (a familiar name to Australians given his multiple speaking tours here), Marc Morano and James Delingpole.
While it’s easy to dismiss the conspiracy culture pushed by Jones as pseudoscientific rubbish, it is not so easy to dismiss the size of the audience he has been building. Jones’s website gets 57m page views per month – double where it was six months ago.
According to analytics site Social Blade, the Alex Jones YouTube channel has 1.8m subscribers and just racked up its one billionth (that’s not a typo) video view. (For comparison, the BBC News YouTube channel has 992,000 subscribers.)
Jones’s Infowars site is part of an ecosystem of hyperpartisan media outlets that insist climate change is a hoax. Like Jones, that ecosystem is rapidly building a receptive online audience.
Those sites can now reach hundreds of millions of people with headlines insisting that human-caused climate change is a hoax, that global warming has stopped or that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good.
Rather, the story claimed that thousands of scientists had come forward to declare that climate change was a hoax. The writer was a guy running a website in Los Angeles who worked for eight years for the UK conspiracy theorist David Icke.
Icke thinks the moon might be some sort of spaceship, that the world is controlled by a globalist illuminati and, yes, that climate change is a hoax. Icke is a regular guest on Infowars.
Infowars will often source material from Breitbart – the website that used to be run by Trump’s campaign chairman and soon-to-be chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Many of Breitbart’s most popular climate change items are written by Delingpole, a British polemicist. Guess what he thinks of climate change?…..
Breitbart is also building its audience. According to data from SimilarWeb, the site now gets 168m page views per month, doubling its reach in the past six months……
I’m happy to admit the online growth and reach of climate science denialists and conspiracy theorists terrifies me. Why?
The problem is not that these sites exist but that not enough people seem to know the difference between actual news, fake news, partisan opinion and conspiratorial bullshit. One of those people is the president-elect of the United States.
Either that, or people don’t even care to differentiate between fake and real, especially if what they read taps into their own prejudices.
There is a concerted attempt to cut sensible climate policy off at the knees by building a popular online movement against the science itself.
For decades, the fossil fuel industry and so-called “free market” ideologues at conservative thinktanks have misled the public on the science and the risks of climate change.
Now, the decades of material produced by that climate science denial machineryis finding a new audience. Those talking points are being reheated and screamed, in FULL CAPS.
So what’s the answer? No one seems to know but much appears to be in the hands of Google and Facebook.
When Permafrost Melts, What Happens to All That Stored Carbon? http://www.enn.com/climate/article/50183The Arctic’s frozen ground contains large stores of organic carbon that have been locked in the permafrost for thousands of years. As global temperatures rise, that permafrost is starting to melt, raising concerns about the impact on the climate as organic carbon becomes exposed. A new study is shedding light on what that could mean for the future by providing the first direct physical evidence of a massive release of carbon from permafrost during a warming spike at the end of the last ice age.
The study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, documents how Siberian soil once locked in permafrost was carried into the Arctic Ocean during that period at a rate about seven times higher than today.
“We know the Arctic today is under threat because of growing climate warming, but we don’t know to what extent permafrost will respond to this warming. The Arctic carbon reservoir locked in the Siberian permafrost has the potential to lead to massive emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere,” said study co-author Francesco Muschitiello, a post-doctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
To understand how melting permafrost influenced the carbon cycle in the past, the scientists examined the carbon levels in sediment that accumulated on the seafloor near the mouth of the Lena River about 11,650 years ago, when the last glacial period was ending and temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere spiked by several degrees.
Nuclear danger is not gone, http://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/2016/12/05/guest-columnist-nuclear-danger-gone/94986056/Dr. Bert Crain M.D., GUEST COLUMNIST9:12 a.m. EST December 5, 2016 The issue of nuclear weapons is a terrible problem shared by all humanity. The dangers we are facing do not loom large in the public consciousness as they did right after World War II when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists voiced their first warnings that we should not elect to live in the dread of sudden annihilation and the publication The Nation felt strongly that it was now “one world or none”. We stumbled through the Cold War facing off the Soviet Union with a policy of mutually assured destruction. MAD worked but we were lucky. There were many close calls, the Cuban Missile Crisis being perhaps the best remembered.
Nearly 10 years ago four senior statesmen including two former secretaries of state offered a commentary in The Wall Street Journal that documented the tremendous danger, but also historic opportunity, that then existed. They emphasized the increasing hazard, the steps that should be taken, and the importance of U.S. leadership in a bold initiative consistent with our moral heritage. They emphasized that there was urgent need to amplify the gains that had been made in the Reagan-Gorbachev summits and subsequent détente of 1987. Barack Obama reinforced those leaders’ vision, calling for nuclear abolition in his speech in Prague in April 2009.
The danger now is greater than it was during the Cold War. Since the Russian Federation annexed the Crimea, invaded the Ukraine and began fighting for Bashar El Assad in Syria, the rhetoric has escalated with nuclear weapons once again being celebrated as symbols of national power. Some statesmen believe that Putin’s posture is more bravado from a fearful Russia encircled by NATO and trying to keep Ukraine in their domain.
In any case since the greatest threat we face is the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the U.S., the talk can be unnerving. In addition, all of the nuclear armed states are planning costly upgrades in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. We are threatening to start a new arms race. Many, including the late cosmologist Carl Sagan, an eloquent advocate for science and humanity, considered nuclear proliferation as collective madness.
Those who are anchored to nuclear weapons argue that nuclear deterrence has prevented a major power conflict since 1945. The price has been millions of people held hostage to the threat of extinction. It is now critical to also realize that unlike the ideological conflict of the Cold War, when everyone wanted to live, religious extremists intent on mass murder of nonbelievers and a glorious martyrdom will not be deterred by mutually assured destruction. This chilling fact alone should push the nuclear armed states toward cooperating in verifiable reductions and securing fissile material.
Many of us have been working for decades to enable public opinion through enlightened self- interest to push governments to not do insane things, but the political-military-industrial complex is a hungry beast. The newest and most potent abolitionist movement is The Humanitarian Initiative proposed by a majority of the non-nuclear states. On Oct. 27, 123 nations at the UN General Assembly, voted in favor of adopting a resolution that sets up negotiations in 2017 to establish a legally binding instrument that abolishes nuclear weapons. Physicians for Social Responsibility urges our nation’s citizens to embrace sanity, to pressure our elected officials to support this international effort and to demand a stop to a new nuclear arms race.
Bert Crain, M.D. is a member of Western North Carolina Physicians for Social Responsibility. For more see www.psr.org and www.wncpsr.org
The pope’s remarks came during a gathering of scientists at the Vatican, at which he said there has “never been such a clear need for science” to guide human actions to safeguard the future of the planet.
“It is worth noting that international politics has reacted weakly — albeit with some praiseworthy exceptions — regarding the concrete will to seek the common good and universal goods, and the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded,” the pontiff said, according to a translation provided by the Vatican. He added that the “‘distraction’ or delay” in implementing global agreements on the environment demonstrates how politics have become submissive “to a technology and an economy which seek profit above all else.”
Trump, who is set to become one of the only world leaders to question the notion of global warming, has vowed to “cancel” U.S. participation in the international climate accord signed last year in Paris, in which countries pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions sharply in coming years. In addition, Trump has called for rolling back pollution regulations on the oil, gas and coal industries and shrinking the role of the Environmental Protection Agency.
This week’s comments echoed an encyclical regarding the environment issued by Francis last year in which he wrote about the “urgent challenge to protect our common home” and argued that “the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.”
At the Vatican, Francis praised the work of scientists, who he said must remain independent and emerge as leaders in fighting for climate action.
“I would say that it falls to scientists, who work free of political, economic or ideological interests, to develop a cultural model which can face the crisis of climatic change and its social consequences,” he said, “so that the vast potential of productivity will not be reserved for only a few.”
Antinuclear 