Zane Alcorn

The Youth Affairs Council of Victoria (YACV) is calling on the Victorian government to consider lowering the voting age, following the tabling of a report in the ACT parliament recommending 16- and 17-year-olds in the territory be given the vote.
The federal government announced on September 23 that it has — for the first time — adopted an actual target for energy generation from “clean” sources. Under the plan, 15% of Australia’s electricity would be generated from such sources by 2020, including renewable energy like wind and solar, as well as “clean, green” nuclear power and “clean coal”. Prime Minister John Howard heralded the plan as “a major cost saving and regulatory breakthrough”.
Sixty people held a colourful protest on the steps of the Victorian state parliament on July 18, as part of a long-running campaign to have the Tullamarine toxic waste dump closed and the site cleaned up. The dump, which is operated by the Cleanaway corporation, is located adjacent to Tullamarine airport. It is within 1.5 kilometres of the suburb of Westmeadows and is close to other residential areas.
Activists marked World Environment Day (WED) — June 5 — with a protest in Bourke Street Mall that highlighted corporate plunder of the planet.
On May 5, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its final working group report, the third in a series, as a part of its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), aimed at evaluating global warming. The IPCC published its first assessment report in 1990, a supplementary report in 1992, a second assessment report in 1995, and a third in 2001.
Climate change is a dire threat to human existence. Yet the plans to tackle it put forward by the Coalition and Labor fall far short of what is necessary. Politicians present as "common sense" that renewable energy can play only a peripheral role in Australia. However, Zane Alcorn explains the potential for a renewables-based transformation of Australia's electricity grid, beginning in 2008.
Brisbane rock band Powderfinger have removed a song from their upcoming album after being threatened with legal action by the lawyer of a cop who is on trial for beating aboriginal Palm Island man Mulrunji to death.
“Nuclear fools’ day” protests will mark Palm Sunday — April 1. The protests are in response to the most significant push for expanded uranium mining in Australia since the Hawke Labor government’s 1983 decision to defy public opinion and allow uranium mining to continue at Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine in the Northern Territory, and to be developed at Australia’s two other largest uranium deposits — BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam (Roxby Downs) mine in South Australia, opened in 1988, and Rio Tinto’s Beverley mine (also in SA) in 2001.
A small Western Australia-based company, Eden Energy, is working on a project to convert most of India’s public buses to run on a cleaner type of gas that will reduce smog in packed Indian cities. Eden Energy owns the patent for a fuel known as Hythane, or HCNG, a compressed mixture of hydrogen and compressed natural gas.
Petrodollar Warfare
By William Clark
New Society Publishers, 2005
$29.95 267pages
The founding conference of the Australian Youth Climate Change Coalition (AYCCC) was held in Melbourne on November 20-22. The meeting involved representatives from 30 organisations, including the Australian Student Environmental Network, United Nations Youth Association, Oz Green, GetUp!, the Oaktree Foundation, the Greens and Resistance. There were also representatives from government youth councils, high school activist groups and university student councils, as well as university-based environmental and social justice groups.
Cullerin windmill

Despite PM John Howard's call for a "full-blooded debate" about energy, greenhouse and uranium mining, there has been little discussion about renewable energy sources such as wind power.