Two hundred people rallied outside NSW parliament on November 23 and handed over 20,000 petitions that call for a moratorium on coal seam gas (CSG) mining, a royal commission into the industry's impacts on communities and the environment and a ban on fracking.
Coalition Premier Barry O'Farrell promised before the last election that his government would convoke a parliamentary debate on any issue upon receiving at least 10,000 petitions.
Simon Butler
Non-profit climate research group Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) has slammed global engineering company WorleyParsons, saying the firm has suppressed a damning report into the emissions produced by coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
Climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle has released a website that spoofs the NSW Minerals Council’s new advertising campaign, which claims the state’s mining companies are “world class”.
Rising Tide’s parody uses a similar layout and design to the NSW Minerals Council website, but points to the industry’s poor track record in the areas of environment, community, economy, health and innovation.
When Annie Leonard put her groundbreaking cartoon The Story of Stuff online in late 2007, she would have been really happy if 50,000 people had watched it. “To my utter amazement we got 50,000 viewers on the first day,” she told Green Left Weekly during a recent visit to Australia.
Annie Leonard is the creator of the Story of Stuff project, a series of animated films that discuss our pressing social, environmental and economic concerns and the effort to build a more sustainable and just world.
Occupy Sydney activists organised a protest outside the Qantas shareholders conference on October 28 at the University of New South Wales in support of Qantas workers struggling for decent wages and job security.
Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr says he is excited by the Occupy Wall Street protests against US corporations, which deserve “a roughing up … after the abuses that blighted the lives of ordinary families”. Yet he has decided the protest movement has no future.
The occupy movement is spreading, and in more ways than one. It’s spreading across the globe — by October 11 occupytogether.org could boast of 1273 occupy events planned worldwide. But the movement, united under its slogan “We are the 99%”, is also reaching out to, and involving, other established social movements. Environmentalists and climate campaigners have linked up with Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Hundreds of climate activists joined a 5000-strong march there on October 5. Their message was well received by other protesters.
Inspired by the three-week-long Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, which has now spread to more than 100 cities across the US, ad-hoc activist coalitions in several Australian cities have called for similar occupations beginning on October 15.
Wall Street-style occupations have been called for Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. By October 6, close to 1300 people had indicated on Facebook that they would attend the Melbourne event.
A decade ago most experts would have thought it impossible. But several teams of scientists say the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to its smallest recorded extent, volume and area.
Environmental physicists from the University of Bremen said on September 9 the Arctic ice cap extent was “small as never before”.
If you’ve even casually followed the climate debate in Australia over the past few years, it’s most likely you’ve heard a Labor or Liberal party politician utter the phrase: “Governments should not pick winners.” The idea is that governments’ role is not to give direct support to renewable energy such as wind power or solar power, but instead to create the market conditions where the best, most efficient technology can come to the fore. But the argument is always used as an excuse for why governments cannot pick clean, renewable energy.
The US embassy in Canberra secretly assessed Australian ethnic minority groups, Indigenous prisoners, the Socialist Alliance, anti-war protesters, Cuba and Palestine solidarity activists and Amnesty International for links to political violence and terrorism, an embassy cable released by WikiLeaks on August 29 has revealed.
The cable, titled “Canberra — Security Environment profile”, was sent to the FBI, the CIA, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the Secretary of State in Washington on March 2, 2009.
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