Zoe Kenny

The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”
The July 1 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the “southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin has seen some rainfall, but not enough to stave off zero water allocations when the new irrigation year begins on Sunday… Howard’s grave warning in April of no water for irrigators from July 1 in Australia’s food bowl has been realised, with soaring fruit and vegetable prices expected to follow.”
Two of the world’s worst climate vandals — US President George Bush and PM John Howard — are preparing their lofty green rhetoric in the lead-up to the so-called “climate change” Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney in September.
“Not many people realise that Hawaiians feel that our country is under an occupation”, Terrilee Kekoolani, an organiser with the DMZ Hawaii activist coalition, told a public meeting of 20 people on June 19. She was in Australia to take part in protests against the US-Australian Talisman Sabre war games in Queensland.
Under pressure to prove his government has answers to the global warming crisis, on June 3 PM John Howard backed the corporate polluter-friendly recommendations of his Task Group on Emissions Trading, set up on December 10.
Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007
Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys
Monthly Review Press, 2007
304 pages, US$25
Activists marked World Environment Day (WED) — June 5 — with a protest in Bourke Street Mall that highlighted corporate plunder of the planet.
Environmental activists, excluded from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s May 27-30 energy summit, erected a large inflatable cooling tower outside the fenced-off security zone surrounding Darwin’s Parliament House. Energy ministers from the US, Australia and the Pacific rim failed to come up with any solutions to the global warming crisis, reaffirming instead the dominant role of fossil fuels in future energy supplies.
The deepening of Australia’s drought- and global-warming-driven water crisis has thrown into sharp relief the historical and current inadequacy of the Liberal-Labor political establishment to put the needs of working people before those of big business.
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.