In the state that claims to have the greenest energy on the Australian mainland, South Australia’s climate camp will confront two of the country’s dirtiest power stations. The Northern and Playford B plants, fuelled by cheap but low-grade brown coal, are just outside Port Augusta, a four-hour drive north of Adelaide.
Renfrey Clarke
With its belching cows and giant diesel-powered tractors, the farm sector is widely known to be an important contributor to Australia’s impact on climate change. Just how important, however, is not often recognised.
One hundred percent renewable energy in Australia by 2020! That was the bold call endorsed by members of more than 150 climate action groups at the Climate Action Summit held in Canberra in January.
Sometimes you have to hand it to capitalism. It’s sheer magic the way the system takes promising concepts, hands them over to the market and turns them into howling social and environmental disasters.
Biochar production has been the object of considerable research and experimentation in Australia.
The key United Nations report used as the basis for climate change policies in many countries, including Australia, seriously underestimated the dangers of global warming, one of its leading compilers has warned.
With Victorias bushfire holocaust now confirmed as Australias worst-ever natural disaster, people are reasonably asking: are these events linked to climate change?
If the world’s foremost scientific authority made a point of condemning what we were doing, most of us would at least pause to wonder if we were getting things right.
If authoritative, peer-reviewed science suddenly found obesity or smoking to be twice as lethal as earlier believed, would the news be all over the media? Of course it would.
Evidence is mounting of a coordinated global oil industry effort to seize upon the international economic crisis as an opportunity to rebel against ecological controls and bludgeon concessions out of governments.
Given the Earth’s atmosphere and its oceans are a closely interlinked natural complex, steeply rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are having dramatic impacts on the seas as well.
The following article is based on a speech delivered by Renfrey Clarke to the Climate Emergency: No More Business as Usual conference held in Adelaide on October 10-11. Clarke spoke as a representative of the Socialist Alliance.
With recession now a reality in the United States, and highly likely in Japan and much of Europe, global business is coming out fighting against government policies that might restrict its ability to keep making profits. Measures aimed at limiting carbon emissions have come under fire.
Millions of tonnes of the potent greenhouse gas methane have apparently begun leaking from the seabed beneath wide areas of the Arctic Ocean, the British Independent reported on September 23.
On September 5, the government’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, released his recommendations for medium-term cuts to Australian greenhouse gas emissions.
If the firm Altona Resources has its way, South Australia within five years will have a major new source of base-load electricity, set to feed into the power grid for many decades to come. Not only that, but the firm promises to supply the Australian market with as much as 10 million barrels per year of diesel fuel.
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