To understand what drives America’s frighteningly militaristic stance and warmongering, follow the money. After the Cold War ended, US negotiators promised Mikhail Gorbachev that America would not enlarge NATO, and the world enjoyed a period of relative peace. But the United States reneged on its promise a few short years later: “No war” was bad for business! In 1997 Norman Augustine, the head of Lockheed Martin, traveled to Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other newly liberated Eastern European countries and asked: Do you want to join NATO and be a democracy? (Joining NATO doesn’t make you a democracy.) But in order to join NATO, these small countries had to spend billions of dollars to buy weapons.
That’s the dynamic that instigated NATO’s expansion from the end of the Cold War to the present time — right up to the border of Russia
Despite Donald Trump’s vows to seal the US border and eradicate ISIS, the real terrorists of the world today are the United States and Russia. They possess 94 percent of the nuclear weapons on the planet, and they hold the rest of the world hostage to their provocative and self-serving foreign policies and misadventures. As a result, we are closer to nuclear war now, at the start of the twenty-first century, than we’ve ever been before, even during the height of the Cold War.
While we must be concerned about global warming — the other existential threat to the planet — it is imperative that we do not take our eyes off the nuclear threat. To do so is to risk sleepwalking to Armageddon. Continue reading →
South Australia, with its nest of nuclear industry enthusiasts, should consider the history of South Carolina, stuck with numerous dead nuclear projects.
The South’s legacy of abandoned nuclear reactors, The Slate, BY CAROLINE PEYTON AND SPECIAL TO THE STATE’S EDITORIAL BOARDNOVEMBER 02, 17COLUMBIA, SC “……..The cancellation of the V.C. Summer expansion project testifies to innumerable missteps, but our collective amnesia has missed the bigger story: The South’s long, messy nuclear history is a catalog of modest successes and epic failures.
Sadly, the V.C. Summer project shutdown is nothing new for the South. It has happened at least 22 times since the 1970s. Some plants existed merely as blueprints, while others were canceled mid-construction. Across the region, half-finished projects stand as emblems of bungled industry efforts. At its core, this history has been defined by secrecy, miscalculations and decisions made by the few at the expense of ordinary people. Continue reading →
The CEFC, in its annual report, said it had invested more than $2 billion in new capital to support renewable energy projects valued at more than $6.5 billion. Over the previous two years, the CEFC had only committed $1.32 billion in total.
Its total portfolio of investments now sits at $3.4 billion.
The CEFC said for every dollar it had invested in a project it helped to leverage an additional $2.10 from the private sector.
As well as investing in renewable energy projects, the group announced funding for a lithium mine, tapping into the growing demand for the metal that supplies rechargeable batteries.
The group also has an ongoing $1 billion Reef Funding Program investment, focused on targeting clean energy projects in the Great Barrier Reef catchment area, and supports the Australian government’s Reef 2050 plan to aid the long-term health of the reef.
CEFC’s projects are forecast to produce an annual abatement of nearly 7.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or more than 121 million tonnes of CO2-e over its projects’ lifetimes.
The investments have had a positive yield for the nation beyond decarbonisation, CEFC chief executive Ian Learmonth said.
“Our $3.4 billion portfolio of investment commitments had a forecast lifetime investment yield of more than 5 per cent,” he said.
In the future, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation said it would invest in distributed energy, energy storage, improved grid transmission, network security and demand-response management.
The CEFC’s pipelines of investment has more than doubled since it began in 2014.
“This growth reflects increased interest in clean energy investment, coupled with a broader understanding of the role of the CEFC in working with investors and project developers,” the company said in its annual report.
could it be that our own government is walking into the middle of an economic contest between China and India for control over industry and infrastructure?
Surely our government wouldn’t be using public money to subsidise Adani’s mine, undermining its own country’s interest and supporting China to strengthen its grip on power and infrastructure in countries neighbouring India?
Last month I claimed that using a $900 million, publicly funded loan to bail out Adani’s otherwise unviable Carmichael coal mine proposal was the height of absurdity.
The Australian government has been equally desperate, creating an agency and filling it with taxpayers’ money so we can fund a project opposed by the majority Australians.
But the government’s efforts to support Adani stretch well beyond the financial.
Market Forces executive director Julien Vincent said more than a dozen commercial banks had ruled out involvement in the Carmichael mine and rail project due to its “financial and reputational risk”.
“To know that NAIF and EFIC are aware of these risks should underscore the argument against giving a $900 million loan to Adani,” he said.
Mr Vincent pointed to the Infrastructure Facility’s investment mandate, which says it “must not act in a way that is likely to cause damage to the Commonwealth government’s reputation”.
The emails, obtained under freedom of information laws, have fuelled the mine’s opponents, who say granting the $900 million loan would pose unacceptable risks to taxpayers and the Commonwealth.
Indian mining giant Adani has proposed a $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Gallilee Basin, sparking legal challenges and widespread protests.
Australia’s big four banks have ruled out funding the project, and Adani has sought a federal government loan to build a railway line from the mine to the Abbot Point coal terminal, near the Great Barrier Reef.
The loan is being considered by the Turnbull government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, a taxpayer-funded concessional loan scheme. Critics have derided the facility as a Turnbull government slush fund.
Emails obtained by environmental campaign group Market Forces show officials involved in assessing the loan proposal have for months been weighing up Adani’s environmental and financial history.
Much of the content of the emails has been redacted. However one dated November 24 last year has the subject line “NGBR [North Gallilee Basin Rail] Project – Proponent’s environmental track record”.
Attached to the email is a Greenpeace briefing paper titled Adani’s record of environmental destruction and non-compliance with regulations.
The email was sent between senior officials at Australia’s export credit agency, Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, which is providing support to the Infrastructure Facility. Continue reading →
Australians have contorted ourselves to look like we’re responding to climate change without really doing so.
Enter the Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee…..That this is the best we can do — indeed that this is a relative triumph for Mr. Turnbull — illustrates just how tangled Australia’s climate politics have become. The country has taken a long, hard look at every warning about the costs of delayed climate action and ignored them all. And, subsequently, it has paid for those costs through high energy prices and curtailed investment.
Australia Has a Climate Change Lesson for the World https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/opinion/australia-climate-change.html?_r=0, By WALEED ALY, MELBOURNE, Australia— No issue has been such a political graveyard in Australia as climate change. At least three prime ministers from the last decade have had their tenure buried there: John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard all lost their jobs, at least in part, for trying and failing to deliver polices to combat climate change.
To this list, you could add Malcolm Turnbull’s stint as opposition leader, which ended when Tony Abbott challenged him as party leader over his acceptance of the emissions cap-and-trade plan of the prime minister at the time, Mr. Rudd.
Today, of course, Mr. Turnbull is prime minister (a role he seized, in turn, from Mr. Abbott). And he is the latest to run this gantlet, having just announced a new energy policy that he describes as a “game changer” in Australia’s never-ending climate wars.
He might even be right. But it’s hard to tell because what he has offered is not so much a policy as a framework for what might become a policy. Continue reading →
Adani coal mine: Townsville City Council under fire for pumping $19m into airstrip, ABC,
7.30 By Peter McCutcheon 1 Nov 17, Townsville City Council’s decision to help fund an airstrip for the proposed Adani coal mine has come under fire from locals.
The council agreed to contribute up to $18.5 million to finance the airstrip at the proposed Carmichael mine site, about 300 kilometres south of the city.
Rockhampton Regional Council also agreed to contribute to the project, which is estimated to be costing about $30 million.
Under the arrangement with Adani, the Indian company would source the bulk of its mine and construction fly-in-fly-out workforce from the two cities.
“Why does a billionaire want two councils in Queensland to pay $36 million for an airstrip?” Peter Newey, convenor of the Townsville Residents and Ratepayers Association, said. “He [Gautam Adani] would be able to afford at least two dozen of them and then gold plate them. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
More than 50,000 people have signed an online petition — started by Mr Newey — calling for Townsville City Council to withdraw its support for the airstrip.
A member of the council’s city image committee, business owner Lucy Downes, also had concerns. “I despaired to be honest, because that money could have been used to reactivate the CBD,” she said…..
Townsville wants guarantee from AdaniTownsville City Council is seeking a bank guarantee from Adani to refund any losses, should the Carmichael coal and rail project not proceed. Mayor Jenny Hill told 7.30 she would like construction on the airstrip to start this year, despite Adani not yet securing bank finance for the $16 billion project……..
Adani waiting for loan Adani said it may not secure bank finance until next March, and it postponed plans last month for a ground-breaking ceremony…….Adani also said it is critical that it receives a loan from the Federal Government’s North Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF).
The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are “the warmest in the history of modern civilization.” The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming.
The findings contradict statements by PresidentTrump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate.
“I believe that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in an interview earlier this year. “There’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.”
That is not consistent with the conclusions of the 600-plus-page Climate Science Special Report, which is part of an even larger scientific review known as the fourth National Climate Assessment. The NCA4, as it’s known, is the nation’s most authoritative assessment of climate science. The report’s authors include experts from leading scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy, as well as academic scientists.The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, “will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally.” Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit relative to pre-industrial times. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.
“This is good, solid climate science,” says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State University, who says he made minor contributions to the report’s conclusions on sea level rise. “This has been reviewed so many times in so many ways, and it’s taking what we know from … a couple of centuries of climate science and applying it to the U.S.”
The assessments are required by an act of Congress; the last one was published in 2014. Alley says this year’s goes further in attributing changes in weather to the warming climate, especially weather extremes. “More heat waves and fewer cold snaps, this is very clear,” he says. The report also notes that warmer temperatures have contributed to the rise in forest fires in the West and that the incidence of those fires is expected to keep rising.
Some of the clearest effects involve sea level rise. “Coastal flooding, you raise the mean level of the ocean, everything else equal you get more coastal flooding,” Alley says. The report notes that sea level has risen 7 to 8 inches since 1900, and 3 inches of that occurred since 1993. The report says that rate is faster than during any century over the past 2,800 years.
The report also points out that heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency across the U.S., especially in the Northeast, and that is expected to keep increasing.
Other connections are harder to nail down, Alley says, such as whether a particular hurricane can be attributed to climate change.
“The Climate Science Special Report is like going to a doctor and being given a report on your vital signs,” says environmental scientist Rachel Licker of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She notes that the authors assessed more than 1,500 scientific studies and reports in making their conclusions.
Alley adds that the new report “does a better job of seeing the human fingerprint in what’s happening.” He says that while he hasn’t read all of it yet, he sees no evidence that it has been soft-pedaled or understates the certainty of the science.
Alley notes that “there’s a little rumbling” among climate scientists who are concerned that the Trump administration will ignore this effort. “I think the authors really are interested in seeing [the report] used wisely by policymakers to help the economy as well as the environment.”
The report has been submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Trump has yet to choose anyone to run that office; it remains one of the last unfilled senior positions in the White House staff.
‘ … The Wangan and Jagalingou people, who are also fighting a court battle to retain their right over their land, are of the view that if the Adani coal mine is built, their cultural heritage will be destroyed beyond repair.
‘“The land, the springs, the waterways, the mountain ranges, are not just physical forms for us.
They are remnants of our ancient culture.
‘If the mine is built, there will be no record of us ever having been there”,” said Adrian Burragubba, spokesperson of the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council.
‘They said that they are prepared to battle it out for as long as it takes.
‘“Every inch of that land is mine. Every blade of grass, every drop of water, each leaf on a tree, each bird, each animal, is mine. And I am going to fight for it. I want to tell Adani – I am not your slave,” an animated Burragubba said when I met him in Brisbane in late July. … ‘
‘Kabir Agarwal is an independent journalist whose writings have appeared in
The Kashmir Walla, The Times of India, Mint, Al Jazeera English and The Caravan.
He can be found on twitter @kabira_tweeting.’ thewire.in/author/kabir-agarwal
Independent 1st Nov 2017, Germany generated enough wind power at the weekend for consumers to get
free energy. So much was generated by wind turbines in weekend storms that
costs fell to below zero. Bloomberg reported that power prices turned
negative as wind output reached 39,409 megawatts on Saturday. To balance
supply and demand in this situation, energy producers close power stations
or pay consumers to take extra electricity from the network.
Lina Caneva | Editor | @ProBonoNews 2 Nov 17,Australia’s international development charities have passed a resolution at the sector’s annual conference in Melbourne calling on the federal government to halt “disturbing developments” which are set to restrict Australian charities’ funding and advocacy.
The Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), the peak-body for Australian non-government organisations involved in international development and humanitarian action, also called on the federal government to “use its position on the UN Human Rights Council to become an international champion for civil society”.
In a preamble, the resolution expressed concern at a “number of disturbing developments in Australia (which) may constrain the role of charities in undertaking advocacy”.
ACFID’s members voted to call on the government not to impose proposals on expenditure-caps advocacy by charities and a ban on international philanthropy to charities who undertake advocacy……..
“Increasingly, fear and division are being used around the world as a precursor for draconian laws and regulations which are crippling democratic freedoms and stifling citizen-led groups. ACFID’s members are all too aware of this trend as they are forced to adjust to severely constrained operating environments, instituted by governments overseas.
“A free and vibrant civil society is crucial in maintaining peace; keeping governments accountable; and protecting people’s rights.
“Backed by Australia’s democratic values and with our membership of the Human Rights Council, the Australian government is well-placed to defend civil society space on the international stage. We are calling on the government to embrace this opportunity.”
ACFID said it was continuing to work with its members and a consortium of charities to support and protect space for civil society overseas and in Australia.
Earlier this year ACFID released a position paper outlining concerns about the ban on foreign donations to political parties which it said may result in charities who advocate being prevented from accepting international philanthropy.
U.S. pursues direct diplomacy with North Korea despite Trump rejectionArshad Mohammed, Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON (Reuters) 1 Nov 17, – The United States is quietly pursuing direct diplomacy with North Korea, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s public assertion that such talks are a waste of time.
Using the so-called “New York channel,” Joseph Yun, U.S. negotiator with North Korea, has been in contact with diplomats at Pyongyang’s United Nations mission, the official said, at a time when an exchange of bellicose insults between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has fueled fears of military conflict.
While U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Oct. 17 said he would continue “diplomatic efforts … until the first bomb drops,” the official’s comments were the clearest sign the United States was directly discussing issues beyond the release of American prisoners, despite Trump having dismissed direct talks as pointless.
There is no sign, however, that the behind-the-scenes communications have improved a relationship vexed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, the death of U.S. university student Otto Warmbier days after his release by Pyongyang in June and the detention of three other Americans.
Word of quiet engagement with Pyongyang comes despite Trump’s comments, North Korea’s weapons advances and suggestions by some U.S. and South Korean officials that Yun’s interactions with North Koreans had been reined in.
“It has not been limited at all, both (in) frequency and substance,” said the senior State Department official………
At the start of Trump’s presidency, Yun’s instructions were limited to seeking the release of U.S. prisoners.
“It is (now) a broader mandate than that,” said the State Department official, declining, however, to address whether authority had been given to discuss North Korea’s nuclear and missile program.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China welcomed any dialogue between the United States and North Korea.
“We encourage North Korea and the United States to carry out engagement and dialogue,” Hua told reporters, adding that she hoped talks could help return the issue to a diplomatic track for resolution.
…… Speaking at the United Nations on Sept. 19, Trump vowed to “totally destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States or its allies, raising anxieties about the possibility of military conflict.
Twelve days later, after Tillerson said Washington was probing for a diplomatic opening, Trump said on Twitter that his chief diplomat was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” – his mocking nickname for the North Korean leader.
Democratic U.S. senators introduced a bill on Tuesday they said would prevent Trump from launching a nuclear first strike on North Korea on his own, highlighting the issue days before the Republican’s first presidential trip to Asia.
…… The New York channel is one of the few conduits the United States has for communicating with North Korea, which has itself made clear it has little interest in serious talks before it develops a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the continental United States.
The last high-level contact between Yun and the North Koreans was when he traveled to North Korea in June to secure the release of Warmbier, who died shortly after he returned home in a coma, the State Department official said.
……. The official said, however, that “the preferred endpoint is not a war but some kind of diplomatic settlement” and suggestions that Washington is setting up a binary choice for Pyongyang to capitulate diplomatically or military action were “misleading.”
Diplomacy, the official said, “has a lot more room to go.”
But Trump’s threats against North Korea are believed to have complicated diplomatic efforts.
ESB to use inflated costs for wind and solar to justify NEG
Energy Security Board to use vastly inflated costs of wind and solar to justify its National Energy Guarantee. By using prices around 30-40 per cent above actual costs, will support its argument for little new wind and solar to be built in the coming decade.
Lets be honest: Australia is well behind on renewables
Australia’s fossil fuel share of electricity generation is higher than that of our peers. This chart is ugly for Australians who care about doing our bit in the 21st century.
NE: A rushed job that takes us backwards, not forwards
National Energy Guarantee appears to be a plan to get through the Coalition Party Room, and then a plan to have a plan. Unfortunately, that means many more months of uncertainty.
Rejected teenagers: the trend of closing young coal plants
It’s not just old coal power plants that are being closed down. In Italy, the US, and the Netherlands, coal plants that are barely teenagers are being targeted for closure.
Supreme Court of Qld: Environmental Law Australia envlaw.com.au
‘This case study involves a major dispute in the Land Court of Queensland
over the Carmichael Coal Mine proposed in the Galilee Basin of central Queensland
and a subsequent judicial review challenge to the mine’s approval
in the Supreme Court of Queensland.’
‘ … Two separate disputes (also not the subject of this case study) about the mine involve native title issues
raised by the Traditional Owners of the land on which the mine was proposed,
the Wangan and Jagalingou People.
‘The first of these disputes involved hearings in the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) and
the Federal Court under the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (NTA) after the
Wangan and Jagalingou People rejected an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) proposed by Adani
for the grant of the mining lease for the mine. …
‘The second dispute concerning native title issues involved an application by
elders of the Wangan and Jagalingou People in the Supreme Court of Queensland for judicial review
of the grant of the mining lease under the MRA based on native title grounds.
That application was also dismissed.
An appeal in the Queensland Court of Appeal was also dismissed in August 2017.
Antinuclear 