environmental

Climate action group No Planet B released the statement below on February 15.

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Two people and a banner are suspended from the side of Black Mountain Tower in Canberra as part of a global day of action for Tasmania’s native forests threatened by logging giant Ta Ann.

Stop Signs: Cars & Capitalism ― On the Road to Economic, Social & Ecological Decay
By Bianca Mugenyi & Yves Engler
RED Publishing & Fernwood Publishing
2011, 259 pages,
$27.95 (pb)

The car, say Canadian authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, who took a bus ride across the United States, is a doomed jalopy going nowhere. It fails, especially in the “home of the car”, on every green count.

Cars are the single largest contributor to US noise pollution and 40,000 people in the US die from car accidents each year (one million across the globe).

State planning minister Brad Hazzard released draft guidelines to regulate NSW wind farms in December. The guidelines allow anyone with a residence within two kilometres to veto a wind power project.

If the guidelines become law, this would put the brakes on the wind industry, as the coal seam gas industry bolts ahead.

Cajamarca, a town with tragic associations in Peruvian history, is the setting of another devastating imperialist onslaught.

In 1532, a band of Spanish conquistadores ambushed the Inca king Atahualpa in the central plaza of this Andean town.

The brutal spirit of conquista is alive and well in contemporary Cajamarca, in the form of the US-based Newmont mining corporation, an outfit with a slick PR machine and a very dirty environmental and human rights track record.

Friends of the Earth Australia released the statement below on February 3.

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Friends of the Earth have refuted claims made today by the National Irrigators Council (NIC) that environment groups want government to deliberately flood people’s homes during the current NSW flooding.

“This absurd statement has no factual basis and reveals a callous desire to exploit fear for political gain,” said Murray-Darling Friends of the Earth Campaigner Jonathan La Nauze.

“We extend our hearts to those people battling floodwaters in NSW and wish them every assistance.

In a big win for environmentalists and the planet, the administration of United States President Barack Obama announced on January 20 that it would deny a permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline to transport oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada.

Anti-tar sands activists in the US and Canada have been seeking to stop the pipeline, planned to transport oil from the Athabasca tar sands in north-east Alberta to refineries in the United States. Mining the Athabasca tar sands is one of the most environmentally destructive practices on the planet.