Australian government working with pro-nuclear zealot Jonathon Mead to plan US/UK nuclear submarines for Western Australia.
Australia’s defence forces investigating Garden Island nuclear submarine capabilities. Peter Law, The West Australian, Fri, 26 August 2022,
The strategic review of Australia’s defence forces is investigating the capacity of HMAS Stirling at Garden Island to simultaneously receive multiple nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK.
The Henderson maritime precinct, south of Perth, has also been identified as a potential site for maintenance work on Australia’s planned nuclear submarine fleet, former defence minister Stephen Smith revealed.
Mr Smith and retired Air Chief Marshal Sir Angus Houston were earlier this month appointed to lead the sweeping review of the army, navy and air force, which will report to the Albanese Government by next March.
Speaking at the Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference in Perth on Friday, Mr Smith said a draft report with initial findings would be given to Defence Minister Richard Marles on November 1.
Mr Smith said the review was working “hand in glove” with a separate task force chaired by Vice-Admiral Jonathan Mead, which is looking at the options for Australia acquiring a nuclear submarine powered capability.
The pair this week visited Garden Island to see what infrastructure improvements were needed in the short and long term, “if a number of nuclear submarines, UK or US, would arrive at HMAS Stirling tomorrow”.
“We also are interested in, ultimately, on the basis that at some stage Australia acquires nuclear submarines, what potential do we have for maintenance and sustainment on the Henderson maritime strip,” he said.
Similar visits will take place in Port Adelaide and Brisbane in coming months, as well a tour of the nation’s “northern and western approaches”, including at RAAF bases Curtin and Learmonth………………….. https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/australias-defence-forces-investigating-garden-island-nuclear-submarine-capabilities-investigated-c-8018706
Ranger Mine uranium-contaminated waste trucked to Darwin suburb.
finding 50 kg of uranium tailings waste off-site is not a “small scale” event as claimed by ERA, and near three months for this radioactive event to make the media…
Potentially ‘deadly’ toxic waste accidentally trucked into Darwin
Energy Resources Australia is investigating how Ranger Mine toxic waste came to be transported through the Kakadu National Park and left on a truck in a Darwin suburb.
In June an excavator at Ranger Mine used to dig uranium tailings, was removed from the site with 50kg of mixed material still inside the vehicle.
The removal of any toxic waste is a major breach of Energy Resources Australia’s Ranger Mine rehabilitation plan as it poses a deadly contamination risk to people and the environment.
According to Energy Resources Australia the compacted waste was in a steel encased void of an excavator and not detected by radiation screening before leaving the site………………………
Supervising Scientist Keith Taylor said the breach was “regrettable” but he was confident there was no risk posed to people or the environment.
“There have been other incidents of this nature, most notably the 2004 prosecution which is of public record,” he said.
“There have been others as well but that is the most notable.”
Mr Taylor said scientists and ERA were working together to review the ‘clearance processes,’ which includes a radiation screening.
Mirarr Traditional Owners and the NLC were made aware of the incident on June 3.
In February, ERA announced the rehabilitation plan for Ranger Mine had blown out to an estimated $1.2bn.
It left the company scrambling for cash and relying heavily on its major shareholder Rio Tinto.
Imperiled Ukrainian nuclear power plant has the world on edge – a safety expert explains what could go wrong
The Conversation, Najmedin Meshkati, 26 Aug 22, “…………………………………… What are the risks to a nuclear plant in a conflict zone?
Nuclear power plants are built for peacetime operations, not wars.
The worst thing that could happen is if a site is deliberately or accidentally shelled. If a shell hit the plant’s spent fuel pool – which contains the still-radioactive spent fuel – or if fire spread to the spent fuel pool, it could release radiation. This spent fuel pool isn’t in the containment building, and as such is more vulnerable.
Containment buildings, which house nuclear reactors, are also not protected against deliberate shelling. They are built to withstand a minor internal explosion of, say, a pressurized water pipe. But they are not designed to withstand a huge explosion.
As to the reactors in the containment building, it depends on the weapons being used. The worst-case scenario is that a bunker-buster missile breaches the containment dome – consisting of a thick shell of reinforced concrete on top of the reactor – and explodes. That would badly damage the nuclear reactor and release radiation into the atmosphere, which would make it difficult to send in first responders to contain any resulting fire. It could be another Chernobyl.
What are the concerns going forward?
The safety problems I see are twofold:
1) Human error……….
2) Power failure
The second problem is that the nuclear plant needs constant electricity, and that is harder to maintain in wartime.
Even if you shut down the reactors, the plant will need off-site power to run the huge cooling system to remove the residual heat in the reactor and bring it to what is called a cold shutdown. Water circulation is always needed to make sure the spent fuel doesn’t overheat.
Spent fuel pools also need constant water circulation to keep them cool, and they need cooling for several years before they can be put in dry casks. One of the problems in the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan was the emergency generators intended to replace lost off-site power got inundated with water and failed. In situations like that, you get “station blackout” – and that is one of the worst things that could happen. It means no electricity to run the cooling system.
In that circumstance, the spent fuel overheats and its zirconium cladding can create hydrogen bubbles. If you can’t vent these bubbles, they will explode, spreading radiation.
If there is a loss of outside power, operators will have to rely on emergency generators. But emergency generators are huge machines – finicky, unreliable gas guzzlers. And you still need cooling waters for the generators themselves.
My biggest worry is that Ukraine suffers from a sustained power grid failure. The likelihood of this increases during a conflict because power line pylons may come down under shelling, or gas power plants might get damaged and cease to operate. …………………….
How else does a war affect the safety of nuclear plants?
One of the overarching concerns about the effects of war on nuclear plants is that war degrades safety culture, which is crucial in running a plant……………………..
War adversely affects safety culture in a number of ways. Operators are stressed and fatigued and may be scared to death to speak out if something is going wrong. Then there is the maintenance of a plant, which may be compromised by lack of staff or unavailability of spare parts.
Governance, regulation and oversight – all crucial for the safe running of a nuclear industry – are also disrupted, as is local infrastructure, such as the capability of local firefighters. In war, everything is harder…………….. https://theconversation.com/imperiled-ukrainian-nuclear-power-plant-has-the-world-on-edge-a-safety-expert-explains-what-could-go-wrong-189429
Russia-Ukraine war: Ukraine announces mandatory evacuations
Guardian 27 Aug 22, Residents near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine have reportedly been given iodine tablets, amid mounting fears that the fighting around the complex could trigger a catastrophe. It comes after the plant, Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, was temporarily disconnected from Ukraine’s national grid after all lines to it were cut on Thursday………………
- By Friday afternoon, Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear agency, said one of the two working reactors had been reconnected to the grid. The one reactor is building up capacity, the agency said, thanking the plant’s working for “tirelessly and firmly” keeping “the nuclear and radiation safety of Ukraine and the whole of Europe on their shoulders”.
- ………………………….A team of inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog are poised to make an emergency visit to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, according to reports. Sources have told the Wall Street Journal that it is “almost certain” that a mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit the plant early next week, although details are still being completed.
- EU energy ministers will gather for an urgent meeting as soon as possible to discuss the current energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Czech prime minister said. The Czech Republic currently holds the presidency of the European Council.
- Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, has announced plans to expand mandatory evacuations for civilians living on the war’s front lines. Speaking on national television, Vereshchuk said evacuating women with children and elderly people would be a priority from some districts of the eastern Kharkiv region and the southern Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv regions.
- …………………………………….. The German ambassador to the UK has acknowledged that there is a risk that public support for Ukraine could wane this winter as the energy crisis intensifies.
Chinese people are not enthusiastic about the nuclear industry
From a comment by Terry Southard 26 Aug 22
China is now, the world’s biggest economy. China has a large, educated middle class and large employed, informed, working class. Most chines have little respect for Americans, in theUSA or Americans, that visit China.
At least a half million Chinese, rose up against two proposed nuclear power plants and, a plutonium reprocessing plant in the in Jiangsu region, of china post-fukushima, in 2016. Thousands of Chinese took to the streets, in two separate cities, in China, to protest new proposed reactors and a used nuclear fuel plutonium processing plant, in their region in 2016.
The central government in Bejing, backed down, and stopped the plutonium plant and reactors in those two regions in china.
There simply aren’t enough Chinese students rushing to enrol into nuclear engineering courses, to produce the workforce for an expanded nuclear program.7 China’s ambitious nuclear expansion plans would require at least 50,000 students to be trained by 2030, but barely a few hundred students raise their hands each year.8 The shortage of trained nuclear technicians and engineers has already led to safety incidents.8
By contrast, in 2015, China invested five times more in renewables than nuclear power.4 Those nuclear projects will take many years to complete, whereas renewables are deployed and put to immediate use. Moreover, China’s nuclear investments may have an uncertain future and may meet the same fate as their renowned ghost cities. Significant Chinese street protests against nuclear, in 2013 and 2015, indicate a growing groundswell of discontent.9,10 https://nuclear-news.net/2017/01/16/nuclear-game-over/
China halts work on $15 billion nuclear waste project after protest
Bruce Gagnon Interview: An Objective Look at U.S. Foreign Policy
“Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons”.
BY JOHN RACHEL, 26 Aug 22,
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Bruce Gagnon for his most current thoughts.
Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and was a co-founder of the Global Network when it was created in 1992………………. He is currently an active member of Veterans for Peace.
……………Here is what Bruce had to say.
Q. We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.
A. The banksters in London and Wall Street are the essential movers and shakers of US-UK-NATO foreign policy. The CIA is their primary arm of control. Add to them the burgeoning global military industrial complex and the political ‘mis-leaders’ they generously contribute to. The corporate controlled mainstream media are also accessories to the present day crimes. Together they add up to a formidable crew of what I call ‘pirates’ who are stealing the national treasures throughout the western capitalist world and using them to supress and colonize others across the Global South and here at home.
Q. We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. ……………….. war inevitable and peace impossible?
A. During the reign of George W. Bush in Washington, at the time of the US ‘shock and awe’ attack in Iraq, I was watching C-SPAN one evening. They introduced then Naval War College instructor Thomas Barnett (author of a book called ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’) and they announced that in the audience were hundreds of top-level Pentagon officers and CIA bigwigs. During his talk Barnett told the assembled that due to globalization of the world economy every nation would have a specific role to fill. In the US he said we won’t make ‘consumer products’ anymore because it was cheaper to send those jobs overseas. Our role in the US, Barnett said, would be ‘security export’. Thus it should be no surprise that the #1 industrial export product of the US today is weapons. When weapons are your #1 industrial export product, what is your ‘global marketing strategy’ for that product line?
Barnett (introduced as Rumsfeld’s ‘strategy guy’) also told the leading brass that the Pentagon would be endlessly fighting to take control of the ‘non-integrating gap’ around the globe – those parts of the world that were not submitting to the authority of corporate globalization. He instructed the audience to go and teach these ‘new concepts’ to those under their authority if they hoped to get promoted within the system in the years ahead.
For more than a year after this Barnett presentation I witnessed him being squired around Washington speaking to Republican and Democrat audiences on C-SPAN. It was evident to me that his ‘new doctrine’ was a bi-partisan plan. Since that time it has become quite clear that this is true as we now see the Democrats leading the proxy war on Russia – using Ukraine as the hammer in this dangerous and provocative attempt to force regime change in Moscow. Pelosi’s recent ill-fated trip to Taiwan also indicates the plan to force regime change in Beijing.
Imagine that Washington and its NATO allies, who limped out of Afghanistan after 20 years of brutal occupation there, are now planning for war with Russia and China. The absurdity is beyond imagination. It reveals much about their psychopathology.
As long as this reality persists then we will move from one war to another. Arundhati Roy says, “Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons”. She is right on the money…………………..
Q. Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?
A. When they talk about ‘national interests’ they are actually talking about the interests of the banksters. When they talk about ‘freedom’ they are talking about their freedom to steal the national wealth from nations with resources and the people around the world. Washington claims that Russia wants to re-create the former Soviet Union and take control of Europe. In 2022 Russia is spending $66 billion on their military. It is a defensive military to protect their vast border regions. The US this year is spending $800 billion plus. When you add up the hidden military spending in the other pots of gold – like the nuclear weapons spending inside the Department of Energy budget – the US total is around $1.2 trillion this year. They are robbing us blind and we keep handing over our hard-earned tax dollars. Why?………………………………………………….
- We need to convert the military industrial complex (the war machine) to build public mass transit systems, tidal power systems, solar, wind power and the like – all of which would create more jobs than weapons manufacturing does.
- We need to ban corporate funding of elections. We need to open up a multi-party system so that more voices can be heard by the voters.
- We need to end the massive poverty that exists (which will be worsening in the near future) by taxing the rich and corporations.
- Stop the massive corporate subsides – welfare for the rich.
- We need to close down the more than 800 US military bases around the world and cut the Pentagon budget by at least 80%.
- We only need a defensive military that protects our borders.
- Do all these things and we might have a chance if we don’t first perish from a red-hot nuclear war or climate crisis.We don’t have time to fool around.
- Folks need to get off their arses and speak out NOW. ………..
A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making
, Time and again, mining company Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up waste from decades of uranium processing. It didn’t happen.
Reader supported News, Mark Olalde and Maya Miller/ProPublica, 25 Aug 22
he “death map” tells the story of decades of sickness in the small northwest New Mexico communities of Murray Acres and Broadview Acres. Turquoise arrows point to homes where residents had thyroid disease, dark blue arrows mark cases of breast cancer, and yellow arrows mean cancer claimed a life.
Neighbors built the map a decade ago after watching relatives and friends fall ill and die. Dominating the top right corner of the map, less than half a mile from the cluster of colorful arrows, sits what residents believe is the cause of their sickness: 22.2 million tons of uranium waste left over from milling ore to supply power plants and nuclear bombs.
“We were sacrificed a long time ago,” said Candace Head-Dylla, who created the death map with her mother after Head-Dylla had her thyroid removed and her mother developed breast cancer. Research has linked both types of illnesses to uranium exposure.
Beginning in 1958, a uranium mill owned by Homestake Mining Company of California processed and refined ore mined nearby. The waste it left behind leaked uranium and selenium into groundwater and released the cancer-causing gas radon into the air. State and federal regulators knew the mill was polluting groundwater almost immediately after it started operating, but years passed before they informed residents and demanded fixes.
The contamination continued to spread even after the mill closed in 1990.
The failures at Homestake are emblematic of the toxic legacy of the American uranium industry, one that has been well-documented from its boom during the Cold War until falling uranium prices and concerns over the dangers of nuclear power decimated the industry in the 1980s. Uranium mining and milling left a trail of contamination and suffering, from miners who died of lung cancer while the federal government kept the risks secret to the largest radioactive spill in the country’s history.
But for four decades, the management of more than 250 million tons of radioactive uranium mill waste has been largely overlooked, continuing to pose a public health threat.
ProPublica found that regulators have failed to hold companies to account when they missed cleanup targets and accepted incorrect forecasts that pollution wouldn’t spread. The federal government will eventually assume responsibility for the more than 50 defunct mills that generated this waste.
At Homestake, which was among the largest mills, the company is bulldozing a community in order to walk away. Interviews with dozens of residents, along with radon testing and thousands of pages of company and government records, reveal a community sacrificed to build the nation’s nuclear arsenal and atomic energy industry.
Time and again, Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up the area. Time and again, they missed their deadlines while further spreading pollution in the communities. In the 1980s, Homestake promised residents groundwater would be cleaned within a decade, locals told the Environmental Protection Agency and ProPublica. After missing that target, the company told regulators it would complete the job around 2006, then by 2013.
In 2014, an EPA report confirmed the site posed an unacceptable cancer risk and identified radon as the greatest threat to residents’ health. Still, the cleanup target date continued shifting, to 2017, then 2022.
Rather than finish the cleanup, Homestake’s current owner, the Toronto-based mining giant Barrick Gold, is now preparing to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees the cleanup of uranium mills, for permission to demolish its groundwater treatment systems and hand the site and remaining waste over to the U.S. Department of Energy to monitor and maintain forever.
Before it can transfer the site to the Department of Energy, Homestake must prove that the contamination, which exceeds federal safety levels, won’t pose a risk to nearby residents or taint the drinking water of communities downstream.
Part of Homestake’s strategy: buy out nearby residents and demolish their homes. Local real estate agents and residents say the company’s offers do not account for the region’s skyrocketing housing costs, pushing some who accept them back into debt in order to buy a new home. Those who do sell are required to sign agreements to refrain from disparaging Homestake and absolve the company of liability, even though illnesses caused by exposure to radioactive waste can take decades to manifest.
Property records reveal the company had, by the end of 2021, purchased 574 parcels covering 14,425 acres around the mill site. This April, Homestake staff indicated they had 123 properties left to buy. One resident said the area was quickly becoming a “ghost town.”
Even after the community is gone, more than 15,000 people who live nearby, many of them Indigenous, will continue to rely on water threatened by Homestake’s pollution.
The company said it has produced models showing that its waste won’t imperil the region’s water if it walks away. The NRC says it will only grant a groundwater cleanup exemption if that’s the case.
But while Homestake and other mining companies have polluted the region, it’s been the NRC and various other agencies that stood by as it happened. ProPublica found the NRC has issued exemptions from groundwater cleanup standards to uranium mills around the country, only to see pollution continue to spread. This has occurred as climate change hammers the West, making water ever scarcer.
“Groundwater moves. Groundwater doesn’t care about regulations,” said Earle Dixon, a hydrogeologist who reviewed the government’s oversight of uranium cleanup and pollution around Homestake for the New Mexico Environment Department and the EPA. Dixon and other researchers predict contamination at Homestake will likely spread if cleanup ends.
The company has denied that its waste caused residents’ illnesses, and judges ruled in Homestake’s favor in a case residents filed in 2004 alleging the site caused cancer. Doctors testified that the pollution was a substantial factor contributing to residents’ cancers, but tying particular cases to a single source requires communitywide blood, urine and other testing, which hadn’t been done…………………………………………………..
ProPublica found that, as with most uranium mills in the U.S., Homestake built no liner between the earth and the sandy waste left over from milling, known as tailings. This happened even though an engineer with the New Mexico Department of Health warned the company only weeks after the mill opened that it needed to at least compact the soil underneath its waste to prevent leaks. Without a liner, pollution seeped into aquifers that supplied drinking water. In 1961, the same engineer wrote that groundwater samples showed radium 226, a radioactive and cancer-causing element, at levels as much as 31 times higher than naturally occur in the area, indicating “definite pollution of the shallow ground water table by the uranium mill tailings’ ponds.”
A federal report a year later identified even higher levels of radium 226 in groundwater…………………………..
More than 500 abandoned uranium mines pockmark the Navajo Nation, and Billiman’s father, a Navajo Code Talker in World War II, died of stomach cancer, an illness associated with downwind exposure to nuclear tests. Boomer has written the story of uranium into lyrics, singing about the harm caused by the waste that was left behind…………………………………………….more https://www.rsn.org/001/a-uranium-ghost-town-in-the-making.html
Why Dr Jane Goodall is still hopeful about the Earth’s future
Why Dr Jane Goodall is still hopeful about the Earth’s future
The world-leading primatologist says poverty and unsustainable lifestyles are among the main drivers of environmental destruction.
The west’s false narrative about Russia and China
https://johnmenadue.com/the-wests-false-narrative-about-russia-and-china/ 26 Aug 22, The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement:
At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US.
https://johnmenadue.com/the-wests-false-narrative-about-russia-and-china/ By Jeffrey Sachs, Aug 24, 2022, The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.
The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.
President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.
The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.
Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.
Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.
The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.
Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.
At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.
Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.
Terawatts of solar and a million new jobs: New report crunches net-zero numbers — RenewEconomy
New report outlines the scale of Australia’s net-zero emissions challenge, but also the significant nation-building opportunities. The post Terawatts of solar and a million new jobs: New report crunches net-zero numbers appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Terawatts of solar and a million new jobs: New report crunches net-zero numbers — RenewEconomy
DP Energy unveils plans for five offshore wind projects in Australia — RenewEconomy
Developer of Australia’s biggest wind and solar hybrid project becomes latest to unveil offshore wind plans in Australia, with five projects up to 2GW each. The post DP Energy unveils plans for five offshore wind projects in Australia appeared first on RenewEconomy.
DP Energy unveils plans for five offshore wind projects in Australia — RenewEconomy
Tasmania reveals staggering pipeline of proposed renewable energy projects — RenewEconomy
ROI process reveals a massive 25,000GWh of new renewable energy projects currently seeking approval for development on Australia’s island state. The post Tasmania reveals staggering pipeline of proposed renewable energy projects appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Tasmania reveals staggering pipeline of proposed renewable energy projects — RenewEconomy
If we want to replace fossil fuels with renewables, we must cut energy consumption — RenewEconomy
New study finds it will be almost impossible for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels by 2050 unless Australia reduces its energy consumption. The post If we want to replace fossil fuels with renewables, we must cut energy consumption appeared first on RenewEconomy.
If we want to replace fossil fuels with renewables, we must cut energy consumption — RenewEconomy
August 26 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Sterling: The Inflation Reduction Act Just Shattered The Ceiling For Clean Energy In Vermont” • Incredibly and finally, the Inflation Reduction Act has begun the shift to a clean energy America. What does this mean for Vermonters? A lot. For starters, if you are looking to go solar, you will now get 30% […]
August 26 Energy News — geoharvey
Antinuclear 