Western Australia Walkabout against uranium -month-long pilgrimage from Wiluna to Leonora
https://thewest.com.au/news/kalgoorlie-miner/walkabout-against-uranium-ng-b88547279z, , 26 July 2017 A month-long pilgrimage from Wiluna to Leonora to campaign against uranium mining will begin next month in the wake of the State Government’s approval of four proposed uranium mines earlier this year.
Program co-ordinator Marcus Atkinson said the seventh annual Walkatjurra Walkabout will see 50 to 60 participants walk 10km to 15km a day while connecting with land and culture and supporting the sovereign rights of Aboriginal people to protect their lands and support a nuclear-free future.
Mr Atkinson said considering the Government’s recent decision, this year’s walk was particularly pertinent.
“We want to stop uranium mining and connect with country and culture,” he said.
“It is about supporting traditional owners to show that people from all over the country and the world are standing with them.”
One of the mines, the Yeelirrie uranium project, was approved against the recommendation of the Environmental Protection Authority which said mining would lead to the extinction of several unique species of subterranean fauna.
The Conservation Council of WA and members of the Tjiwarl native title group have taken Supreme Court action against the Yeerlirrie project.
CCWA director Piers Verstegen cited environmental, economic and social concerns over the approval of the mine.
He said environment groups could not allow any project that would knowingly cause the extinction of unique species to go unchallenged, given the precedent it would set.
Mr Atkinson said the walk, which is quite a significant undertaking, was the most effective way of acknowledging the importance of the land. “Often we bring traditional owners to Perth to speak about the significance of the land, but those words and stories are so much more powerful when you are out on the country,” he said.
“It emphasises the fact that this isn’t a place in the middle of nowhere and it is worth saving.
“We need to take a step back and make a decision which is best for WA, not a handful of multinational companies.”
The Walkatjurra Walkabout begins in Kalgoorlie on August 8.
To register to be a part of the walk or for more information, visit walkingforcountry.com.
In Canberra, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander affirms that he would obey, if Trump ordered a pre emptive nuclear strike
US admiral stands ready to obey a Trump nuclear strike order CANBERRA, Australia (AP) 28 July 17 — The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander said Thursday he would launch a nuclear strike against China next week if President Donald Trump ordered it, and warned against the military ever shifting its allegiance from its commander in chief.
Adm. Scott Swift was responding to a hypothetical question at an Australian National University security conference following a major joint U.S.- Australian military exercise off the Australian coast. The drills were monitored by a Chinese intelligence-gathering ship off northeast Australia.
Asked by an academic in the audience whether he would make a nuclear attack on China next week if Trump ordered it, Swift replied: “The answer would be: Yes.”
“Every member of the U.S. military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as commander and chief appointed over us,” Swift said.
He added: “This is core to the American democracy and any time you have a military that is moving away from a focus and an allegiance to civilian control, then we really have a significant problem.”
Pacific Fleet spokesman Capt. Charlie Brown later said Swift’s answer reaffirmed the principle of civilian control over the military.
“The admiral was not addressing the premise of the question, he was addressing the principle of civilian authority of the military,” Brown said. “The premise of the question was ridiculous.”
The biennial Talisman Saber exercise involved 36 warships including the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, 220 aircraft and 33,000 military personnel……. https://apnews.com/e7a5db2a77b94ce78f6ef13b6562b8e2/US-admiral-stands-ready-to-obey-a-Trump-nuclear-strike-order
The world watches Australia – saving the Barrier Reef, – or pandering to Adani?
Australia’s Greatest (Dying) Global Asset, JULY 26, 2017 “……..on a local level, it’s a magnet for tourism that generates around $6 billion ($4.8 billion USD) a year. This is what the Australian government seemed intent on protecting when it removed all references to the reef and the way it was being ruined by warming waters, among other things, from a United Nations report on climate change last year.
But it’s also more than that.
“Corals are foundational,” Dr. Cantin told me, comparing the reef to giant forests, like the Amazon. “It’s not just people from tropical countries who care about them.”
And, he said, those who do care are increasingly concerned. The effects of climate change are accelerating beyond what the ecosystem can handle. Rib Reef, where Dr. Cantin was diving, was teeming with color and life just a year ago; now most of it is just coral skeleton covered in algae that looks like soot.
There is still time to adjust. “It’s a big system,” Dr. Cantin says, with areas that can recover if given a decade or so of prime conditions.
But the world is watching to see what will happen next.
Will tour operators and the Australian government speak with more force about the damage from climate change? Will the giant Adani coal mine, which would bring more coal ships close to the reef, gain final approval? Will more of the reef die — or recover — in the coming year?….https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/world/australia/letter20-great-barrier-reef-climate-change-coral.html
USA govt deliberately delayed compensation – waiting for sick nuclear workers to die
Longtime critics of the program’s administration point to numerous examples not only of claimants dying after years of waiting for their compensation but of spouses who refiled for survivorship claims dying while waiting for their compensation awards.
Labor Department Whistleblower: Agency Officials Intentionally Denied or Delayed Pay-Outs to Nuclear Workers in Hopes They Would Die Government attorney who raised red flags said Perez, other Obama officials ignored his complaints about hostility toward nuclear-worker claims, Washington Free Beacon
A senior attorney at the Labor Department is accusing agency officials of writing and manipulating regulations to intentionally delay and deny congressionally mandated compensation to nuclear-weapons workers who suffered from sicknesses—and in some cases died—as a result of their work building the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal.
The attorney, Stephen Silbiger, says Labor Department leadership under former Labor Secretary Tom Perez ignored years of his complaints about the “open hostility” he said some officials exhibited toward claimants, many of whom are too poor and sick to fight the agency’s denials and red tape in federal court. Continue reading
Resignation of Australia’s Minister Representing The Coal Industry – Matt Canavan
Out with “minister for Adani” – in with a minister for renewables? http://reneweconomy.com.au/minister-adani-minister-renewables-48967/#undefined.uxfs By Sophie Vorrath on 26 July 2017
An alliance of Australia’s top environmental NGOs, formed to oppose the development of what would be the nation’s largest coal mine in northern Queensland, has seized on the resignation of federal resources minister, Matt Canavan, as an opportunity for the Turnbull government to appoint an energy agnostic replacement, and to drop its support for the controversial Adani coal project.
Fat chance, but here’s the idea.
Stop Adani Townsville said on Wednesday that Canavan had acted less like a resources minister and more like “the self appointed minister for Adani” – the Indian company behind the massive proposed Carmichael coal mine and rail project in the Galilee Basin – while steadfastly ignoring the “enormous opportunities” in the state’s north for renewables.
Canavan, who quit Federal Cabinet on Tuesday after it was revealed he had “unwittingly” taken out dual Italian citizenship, is, indeed, well known for his pro-fossil fuels stance, as well as for his indifference to the Paris climate treaty, and the science behind it.
Some notable recent quotes from the minister, who also oversees the northern Australia portfolio, include “Stop trying to save the planet” – Tweeted in response to Queensland’s zero emissions target; and “forget about climate change.”
But most notably, Canavan has been a staunch defender of the virtually indefensible Adani coal mine, often using highly questionable data to support his argument, despite the weight of evidence showing it to be environmentally unviable, and loaded with financial risk.
“This unexpected turn of events is an opportunity for the Turnbull government to rule out the $1 billion public loan to Adani for its private rail line and leave the success of the mine project to the market,” said Stop Adani Townsville member Wendy Tubman on Wednesday.
Canavan has also been one of a number of key conservative ministers pushing for the development of a new coal-fired generator in northern Queensland, preferably funded by the government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund.
Meanwhile, as we reported here in May, there is some 4,200MW of large-scale wind and solar projects, all of them in central to northern Queensland, and billions of dollars worth of other projects in the pipeline, including biofuels and even a battery gigafactory in Townsville.
“Townsville and the region are sitting on a gold mine of opportunities,” Oliver Yates, the former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and a spokesman for Future North, told RenewEconomy at the time.
Said Tubman: “A gross error of Canavan has been to politicise the work of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, turning it into a slush fund for the Turnbull government, which appears desperate to support Gautam Adani’s private business interests.
“Poll after poll show Queenslanders want large-scale renewable energy projects not a dangerous coal mine that will fuel climate change and destroy the Reef.
“Three times as many Queenslanders oppose taxpayer subsidies from Federal or State governments to the Adani mine as support them,” she said.
Trump’s budget guts science, wrecks the nuclear safety work of the USA Department of Energy
The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people
Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that D.O.E. program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.
Trump’s budget … cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster
WHY THE SCARIEST NUCLEAR THREAT MAY BE COMING FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department’s budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities? BY MICHAEL LEWIS SEPTEMBER 2017 “………..Two weeks after the election the Obama people inside the D.O.E. read in the newspapers that Trump had created a small “Landing Team.” According to several D.O.E. employees, this was led by, and mostly consisted of, a man named Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, D.C., propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a side business writing editorials attacking the D.O.E.’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon……….
…..There was a reason Obama had appointed nuclear physicists to run the place: it, like the problems it grappled with, was technical and complicated…….. Continue reading
The retreat of the Arctic ice caps – seen from above
Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.
even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. “At the same time that we’re getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate its importance to the public,” one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers
Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care? By Avi Steinberg, Guardian, 27 July 17
From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, looking down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, it’s easy to see why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres (1,500ft) – high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass – is nearly impossible to fathom when you aren’t sitting at that particular vantage point.
But it’s different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasa’s monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real time – dramatising, in a sense – the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions…..
The crew of Nasa’s Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade – the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.
Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12-hour daily flights, as often as weather permits…….
On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding plane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 – and what they didn’t, or couldn’t, tell me revealed even more…… Continue reading
28 July More REneweconomy news
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Australia’s largest solar farm – 220MW – under constructionReach Solar to proceed with second stage of Bungala solar farm near Port Augusta, snatching title of largest solar farm under construction.
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Consumers vs the empire: The economics favour partial grid defectionThe economics are now increasingly in favour of partial grid defection. You’re a fool if you don’t have rooftop solar PV and you could.Weatherill lets fly at right wing attack against renewablesJay Weatherill in pugnacious mood at launch of Mark Butler’s Climate Wars book, promising to repeat his Frydenberg shirtfront with PM Turnbull if given the opportunity.Innovation, disruption and the utility business modelThe power sector’s rapid transformation has barely started, but implications for incumbents are beginning to be felt and speculated.NT indigenous communities begin shift to hybrid solar and storageARENA backed NT project commissions first 10 solar, battery storage systems, cutting diesel fuel use by more than a million litres a year.Fossil fuels and Australian tools: It’s time to go fully electricSally Perini has four electric cars, a fully electric ride on mower and a suite of electric tools. And for good reason: One two-stroke leaf blower used for one hour can produce as much hydrocarbons as 150 cars over the same time.
28 July REneweconomy news
- EnergyAustralia: “The truth about coal is that it is not cheap”
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EnergyAustralia says coal is not cheap and idea that new coal plants could reduce electricity costs is a “myth”. This comes as the ACCC vows to focus on bidding practices in wholesale markets, an issue completely ignored by AEMC, the market rule maker.
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ACT launches second phase of battery test centre, early results inEarly results suggest that lithium-ion out-performs both the advanced and traditional lead-acid battery packs in terms of round-trip efficiency.
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Electricity sector “gold plating” behind sky-high prices – not renewablesTAI report says electricity sector gold-plating costing households $400-$500 a year. Cost of carbon price: “barely noticeable.”
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AGL expands smart technology portfolio with $13m in US start-upAGL invests $13 million in smart lock and smart home controls start-up in US, expanding its push into new technologies.
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Queensland launches “world’s largest” EV fast-charging networkQueensland govt launches Electric Super Highway, names first 18 locations for “green-powered” EV fast charging stations.
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Digging for carbon cuts: How the mining industry can win with renewablesAn unprecedented drop in renewable energy prices, the high energy intensity of mining, and the volatility of fossil fuel pricing have combined to create a groundbreaking opportunity for decarbonizing the mining industry.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 