“Two party system is broken:” Key climate independents back away from major parties — RenewEconomy
Key independent candidates decline to endorse either major party to form government, saying the ‘two party system is broken’. The post “Two party system is broken:” Key climate independents back away from major parties appeared first on RenewEconomy.
“Two party system is broken:” Key climate independents back away from major parties — RenewEconomy
“We must halve energy use to avoid climate catastrophe:” UNSW — RenewEconomy
New study finds that without a significant reduction in global energy consumption, renewables are chasing a target that keeps getting further away. The post “We must halve energy use to avoid climate catastrophe:” UNSW appeared first on RenewEconomy.
“We must halve energy use to avoid climate catastrophe:” UNSW — RenewEconomy
Origin snaps up 1GW of solar projects as it plans for future without coal — RenewEconomy
Origin makes biggest commitment to large scale solar to date, with a project pipeline of nearly 1GW as it readies for life after coal. The post Origin snaps up 1GW of solar projects as it plans for future without coal appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Origin snaps up 1GW of solar projects as it plans for future without coal — RenewEconomy
New Murray-Darling Basin Authority boss fails to mention environment in all-staff memo
New Murray-Darling Basin Authority boss fails to mention environment in all-staff memo
Staff raise concerns after incoming chief executive Andrew McConville emphasises agricultural outcomes in introductory letter
April 29 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Should People Get Rid Of Their Garden Lawns?” • Many of us create or maintain lawns in our gardens without giving it a second thought. But could these innocent patches of greenery be a colossal waste of space? They are relatively easy and cheap to maintain, but there are many more environmentally friendly […]
April 29 Energy News — geoharvey
Climate change is increasing the likelihood of another pandemic, researchers warn
Climate change is increasing the likelihood of another pandemic, researchers warn
Global warming is pushing species to find new geographic locations in which to live, causing interactions with humans and elevating the risk of zoonotic diseases.
TODAY. Media angst about Ukraine, Australia’s election campaigning – but are we forgetting global heating?
Australia sure is an island, and not just geographically speaking. Australia is now playing its role, joining USA in the weapons-to-Ukraine frenzy. But that’s about the extent of our interest in matters overseas.
We hardly noticed the plight of Pacific islands as sea levels rise, though we’re quick to worry about China’s military influence in the region.
It seems to take a young student of Indian ethnic background to mention climate change. Are Australians noticing what is happening in India and Pakistan? Global heating has become all too important there – as extreme heat continues, with drastic effects on health, food production, fires, electricity supplies. For many Indians, life is near to becoming unliveable.
Australia enjoys a sort of false immunity to climate change. Our leaders of both big political parties haven’t really woken up to this, despite bushfires and floods. Are they even aware of what is happening in India?
Pakistan, India reel under intense heat wave
Market Screener, By Jibran Ahmad and Sumit Khanna, 29 Apr 22,
PESHAWAR, Pakistan/AHMEDABAD,India (Reuters) -Pakistan issued a heat warning after the hottest March in 61 years while in parts of neighbouring India schools were shut and streets deserted as an intense heave wave on Friday showed no signs of abating.
Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Climate Change, Sherry Rehman, urged the federal and provincial governments to take precautionary measures to manage the intense heat wave, which touched highs of 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) in parts of the country.
“South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan are faced with what has been a record-breaking heatwave. It started in early April and continues to leave the people gasping in whatever shade they find,” Rehman said in a statement.
Temperatures were predicted to rise by 6 to 8 degrees Celsius above average temperatures after the hottest March on record since 1961, she said.
More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related impacts in the region, scientists have warned, linking the early onset of an intense summer to climate change. For the first time in decades, Pakistan had gone from winter to summer without the spring season, Rehman said.
The government has also told provincial disaster management authorities to prepare urgently for the risk of flash-flooding in northern mountainous provinces due to rapid glacial melting, Rehman said.
Glaciers in the Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Karkoram mountain ranges have melted rapidly, creating thousand of glacial lakes in northern Pakistan, around 30 of which were at risk of sudden hazardous flooding, the climate change ministry said, adding around 7 million people were vulnerable.
A senior scientist at the India Meteorological Department said https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1519938880824176641?s=20&t=NgygE8RS-D4wfM-OJxp9Ew on Friday heat conditions would persist for at least the next three days, but that temperatures would fall after the arrival of monsoons, expected in some parts by May.
The health problems triggered by the heatwave were posing a bigger worry than the expected fourth wave of COVID-19, doctors in India said.
“We are getting many patients who have suffered heatstroke or other heat-related problems,” said Mona Desai, former president of Ahmedabad Medical Association in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
She said that 60-70% of the patients were school-aged complaining of vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal colic, weakness and other symptoms.
Roads were deserted in Bhubaneshwar, in India’s eastern state of Odisha, where schools have been shut, while neighbouring West Bengal advanced the school summer break by a few days.
Delhi sweltering under extreme heat, electricity shortage
| India is facing the worst electricity shortage in more than six years as Delhi saw its hottest April in 12 years on Thursday at a maximum of 43.5C. The temperatures in the national capital are predicted to linger around 44C with peak summer heat still to come before the cool monsoon rains in June. The extreme heat parching across large swathes of south Asia this week has also prompted health officials in the western state of Gujarat to take measures, as they braced for a potential spike in patients. Meanwhile, the leap in power demand has left India scrambling for coal, with inventories running lowest pre-summer levels in at least nine years. Several states including Rajasthan and Haryana in the north and Andhra Pradesh in the south observed the worst power cuts in over six years as the government struggled to manage surging power demands. Independent 29th April 2022 https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/india-heatwave-2022-delhi-latest-b2068112.html |
Climate change ‘already’ raising risk of virus spread between mammals
Mammals forced to move to cooler climes amid global warming are
“already” spreading their viruses further – with “undoubtable”
impacts for human health, a new study says. The research, published in
Nature, uses modelling to map how climate change could shift the geographic
ranges of 3,100 mammals species and the viruses they carry by 2070.
It finds that climate change is increasingly driving new encounters between
mammal species, raising the risk of novel disease spread. The world’s
“biodiversity hotspots” and densely populated parts of Asia and Africa
are most likely to be affected. The findings suggest that climate change
could “easily become the dominant [human] driver” of cross-species
virus transmission by 2070, the authors say.
Carbon Brief 28th April 2022
For the first time, U.S. renewable energy output exceeds nuclear generation, EIA finds
Utility Dive, By Elizabeth McCarthy. 28 Apr 22,
Dive Brief:
- The growing number of large solar and wind energy projects resulted in renewable generation beating out nuclear energy last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday.
- The nation has seen a steady rise in renewable generation, with the biggest share from solar, which is expected to continue because of the lower cost and greater safety of this intermittent power resource, clean energy advocates say. That is despite the Biden administration’s multi-billion dollar program to keep online baseload nuclear power plants scheduled to retire.
- Natural gas supplies the biggest share of electricity in the county but its share is also expected to decrease over the next three decades. EIA projects solar will replace it as the dominant source of generation in the U.S. by 2050.
- Dive Insight:Utility-scale renewable generation in the U.S. reached 795 million MWh in 2021, compared to 778 million MWh of nuclear generation.“This is a ‘good news’ story,” said Ralph Cavanagh, Natural Resources Defense Council energy program co-director.
- The news gets better for renewables when considering that private investments in clean technology rose to over $27 billion in 2021, up from about $20 billion in 2020, according to a report by the American Investment Council released last week. Private equity companies over the last decade have invested close to $150 billion and backed more than 1,000 clean technology companies in the U.S., it added.
- The biggest mover on the U.S. generation front has been solar as installation costs have dropped 70% over the last decade. That has led “the industry to expand into new markets and deploy thousands of systems nationwide,” according to a Feb. 11 joint statement by the Edison Electric Institute, NRDC and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Supply chain issues pushed up prices last year “but did not eliminate solar power’s competitive advantages in retail and wholesale markets,” the organizations wrote in their joint statement to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. EIA’s April 26 analysis does not include rooftop solar or other smaller renewables serving predominantly onsite demand. Factoring in just “end-use solar, the milestone for surpassing nuclear generation would have been reached earlier,” said Syne Salem, an EIA engineer. The tally also excludes small-scale wind and some industrial and commercial combined-heat-and-power systems.
- U.S. nuclear electricity generation fell to its lowest level in a decade, EIA reported, with the retirement of one reactor in 2021, New York’s Indian Point 1040 MW Unit 3. Nuclear generation made up 19% of the electric generation last year and it’s expected to fall to 12% by 2050, EIA concluded.Since 2013, a dozen nuclear units have retired in the U.S. and the decline is projected to continue despite the Department of Energy’s$6 billion program to help extend their operating life.. The owners of three plants that could tap into those DOE funds, Entergy and Pacific Gas & Electric, are continuing to decommission them. The only new nuclear plant being built is the 2,228 MW Vogtle project in Georgia that has seen big cost overruns and delays……………………….. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/for-the-first-time-us-renewable-energy-output-exceeds-nuclear-generation/622899/
Poor outlook for Joe Biden’s $6 billion effort to keep old nuclear reactors going
Biden’s $6B nuclear plan hits ’24th hour’ roadblock
By Peter Behr, Hannah Northey | 04/28/2022 The Biden administration’s $6 billion effort to keep struggling nuclear plants operating is facing a barrier in Michigan and California.
A top energy executive yesterday confirmed that one of the first plants poised to qualify for financial support under the Energy Department’s newly unveiled lifeline — Michigan’s Palisades plant — remains on schedule to close May 31, throwing the Midwestern state’s climate goals into question.
Leo Denault, CEO of Entergy Corp., owner of the Palisades plant, told security analysts yesterday that a buyer who succeeded in acquiring the generator would also bear refueling costs and other expenses.
“We will work with any qualified party,” he said. But he added, “I do want to be very clear. Entergy is exiting the merchant nuclear business. The plant will have to stop operating in May. We’ll be out of fuel.”………………….
Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the Diablo Canyon owner, has also said the DOE offer does not change its intention to close the California facility. Diablo Canyon’s reactors 1 and 2 have planned closing dates of November 2024 and August 2025, respectively……….
A spokesperson for DOE said yesterday they were unable to speak about the unique challenges and closure decisions facing various nuclear plants, nor could they provide a precise number of struggling plants potentially eligible for financial assistance…………………………… https://www.eenews.net/articles/bidens-6b-nuclear-plan-hits-24th-hour-roadblock/
Photovoltaics vs. nuclear power on Mars
Photovoltaics vs. nuclear power on Mars https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/04/29/photovoltaics-vs-nuclear-power-on-mars/
Solar might be more efficient than nuclear energy to supply power for a six-person extended mission to Mars that will involve a 480-day stay on the planet’s surface before returning to Earth, according to new US research.
APRIL 29, 2022 EMILIANO BELLINI Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have compared how PV or nuclear energy could power a crewed outpost for an extended period on Mars and have determined that solar offers the best performance.
“Photovoltaic energy generation coupled to certain energy storage configurations in molecular hydrogen outperforms nuclear fusion reactors over 50% of the planet’s surface, mainly within those regions around the equatorial band, which is in fairly sharp contrast to what has been proposed over and over again in the literature, which is that it will be nuclear power,” said UC Berkeley researcher Aaron Berliner, noting that two energy sources were compared for the power supply of a six-person extended mission to Mars involving a 480-day stay on the planet’s surface before returning to Earth.
The US team considered four different scenarios: nuclear power generation with the miniaturised nuclear fission Kilopower system, PV power generation with battery energy storage, PV power generation with compressed hydrogen energy storage produced via electrolysis, and hydrogen generation with compressed hydrogen energy storage (PEC).
In our calculations, we assumed a capacity factor of 75% to account for the solar flux deviation throughout the Martian year and sized energy storage systems to enable 1 full day of operations from reserve power,” the group explained. “We then calculated the carry-along mass requirements for each of the power generation systems considered.”
The scientists found that, of the three PV-based power generation options, only the photovoltaics-plus-electrolyser system outcompetes the nuclear system based on carry-along mass. They also said that the optimal absorber bandgaps for the PV systems depend heavily on the location on the surface of Mars, the total depth of the air column above a given location, gradients in dust and ice concentrations, and orbital geometry effects that cause different effective air column thicknesses for locations near the poles.
In our calculations, we assumed a capacity factor of 75% to account for the solar flux deviation throughout the Martian year and sized energy storage systems to enable 1 full day of operations from reserve power,” the group explained. “We then calculated the carry-along mass requirements for each of the power generation systems considered.”
The scientists found that, of the three PV-based power generation options, only the photovoltaics-plus-electrolyser system outcompetes the nuclear system based on carry-along mass. They also said that the optimal absorber bandgaps for the PV systems depend heavily on the location on the surface of Mars, the total depth of the air column above a given location, gradients in dust and ice concentrations, and orbital geometry effects that cause different effective air column thicknesses for locations near the poles.
Anzac Day and the conflict-loving neocons
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/anzac-day-and-the-conflict-loving-neocons,16300, By David Donovan | 27 April 2022
This year’s Anzac Day has been politicised into a call-to-arms against China by our Coalition leaders. Founder and publisher Dave Donovan calls for war profiteers to be condemned.
ACCORDING TO one report, Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s opponent in Dickson, Labor candidate Ali France, is increasingly confident of deposing him from his marginal north Brisbane seat.
“It will be better than last time around,” she told Roman Mackinnon. “[I’m] definitely feeling hopeful we can kick him out.”
We can hope, but not too much. Because Dutton is the sort of former cop who looks as if he might have enjoyed a bit of kicking in his time ─ on the boot end, not as the ball.
On the day before Anzac Day, Dutton – out of what seems more a skull than a living head − honoured the grim sacrifice of generations of Australian military personnel, by preparing us all for more war. We need to “prepare for war” with China, said Peter Dutton,
It’s the oldest trick in the book: the khaki election. Beloved by conservatives like Dutton, whose reptile brains are ever ready for fight and flight. And it just might work for them again. Because Australia is a war-loving nation, with a people ever ready to send the cream of their youth to kill and be slaughtered in any scrap going down, anytime, anywhere, for any reason.
We love war so much, Remembrance Day in November is not enough for us, we need to relive the action again each year in April for what has truly become our national day. On 25 April, we take the day off for marches and parades, for drinking and gambling, all to recall our futile role in an ill-planned invasion of a distant land for a European empire. One that ended in disaster and defeat, but which has become some sort of macabre national death cult and celebration – yes, celebration, because that is what it is − of militarism and folly.
Of course, it’s not our fault, we Australians. It is how we have been taught. The death cult has been inculcated into us almost from the teat. It is an intrinsic part of our culture. I don’t need to tell you, knowledgeable reader, about the military-industrial complex or that war is a racket. Our National War Memorial in Canberra is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
You know that, like you know that it is good for business. And Australia is deeply invested in the war business. After Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey shooed the car industry from our shores in 2014, the Coalition’s only plan to maintain a heavy manufacturing base in this country is through the production of war materials: guns, rockets, tanks, troop carriers, shells and other such armaments.
They also, through normalising war, ensure there is always enough new meat to send to the slaughterhouse each time. A country that profits from war, surely, has a vested interest in perpetuating it.
Isn’t that something we should consider on Anzac Day each year, as we mourn our dead? That our Government does not really care about the tragedy and sacrifice of war, or the deaths of our children, but instead wants to make a buck out of it?
Scott Morrison cares so little for those he considers his lesser – the ones he would send to fight China – that he was seen on Monday, during the Dawn Service, texting on his phone. War is just a potential vote winner for him, as it is for the ghoulish Dutton.
Celebrate Anzac Day, certainly. Take to the streets and honour the dead. But do it with a sense of outrage. That we needlessly sacrificed so many of our brave sons and daughters. For nothing but the conquest of empire and the dreams of mortal power of our cold and psychopathic leaders.
Take to the street to condemn those who feel no pangs about sending our children off to die. Take to the streets on Anzac Day to condemn the warmongers and profiteers. Because there is no glory in war: just blood, and tears, and shit and death.
Today: The ANZACs and the Ukrainians: the dangerous mythology of heroically fighting to the death.
Australia has just celebrated the memory of a World War One battle which, in essence, was for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps to make what was a suicidal push at Gallipoli against the Turkish troops of the Ottaman Empire. It was part of British strategy against Germany, and to relieve the pressure on the European and Eastern fronts of the war, Britains ally, the Russian government had also formally requested a ‘show of strength’ against Turkey, one of Germany’s allies’.
The result?
The campaign was a costly failure for the Allies, with heavy losses (44, 000 dead) and no gains made. Of the 60,000 Australians that fought at Gallipoli, there were 26,000 casualties and 7,594 were killed. Conditions were filthy, and dysentery was rife.
The longer term result?
By some magic – this whole thing has been turned into a glorious military myth about Australia’s identity.
Australia enthusiastically celebrates the national identity – the national spirit -the courage of these young men, many just teenagers, who lost their lives, or their health, in this failed military adventure. Of course they were brave, and should be remembered with great sadness, – but not turned into a hymn to militarism
And Ukraine?
Today’s Age – print version has this headline – ”National identity forged in the fire of Russian aggression’‘ We are regularly being told that Ukraine can win this war. I believe that the reality is otherwise. The USA and NATO are happy for this war to go on as long as possible, with their goal of weakening Russia – let it be fought to the last heroic Ukrainian.
1 This month.
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
19 May – Webinar- Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-05-19 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 