Environment

  • Victorian Renewable Energy Target now law

    Victoria became the first state to have a Renewable Energy Target (RET) written into law on October 20. The Victorian RET has been set at 25% renewable energy by 2020, and 40% by 2025.

  • Rocky Hill coalmine rejected

    A concerted campaign to stop Gloucester Resources Limited’s open-cut coalmine on agricultural land in Gloucester has been rewarded. The NSW Department of Planning and the Environment recommended on October 23 that GRL’s Rocky Hill mine not be given approval. 

  • Stop Adani movement faces new challenge

    A potential new battlefield has opened up in the fight against Adani’s proposed mega coalmine for the Galilee Basin in Queensland. To date, the campaign against the coalmine has successfully pressured several companies – including Australia’s Big Four banks – to rule out financing the project.

    However, as the board of directors of procurement contractor Downer EDI Mining – which is in the box seat to construct the Adani mine infrastructure – prepared to face shareholders at its November 2 Annual General Meeting, news broke that the company and Adani were in negotiations with Chinese state-owned enterprise China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) over its possible involvement in financing the project.

  • Six new books for green-lefts and left-greens

    Climate & Capitalism editor and author of A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism Ian Angus takes a look at six new books on Marx’s ecosocialist views, climate change and health, theory and action, inevitability versus contingency in evolution, new politics and the meaning of Marx’s Capital.

  • Honduran communities resist mining project

    I was in Honduras last October visiting Azacualpa, a municipality under threat from Canadian corporate mining giant Aura Minerals and its San Andres mine in La Union, Copan.

    At the time, residents from the rural municipality were successfully holding off the combined forces of the mine management, its security forces, the regional police, the local mayor, the provincial governor, the regional military commander and the Minister for Homeland Security (who arrived in the community by helicopter with his own entourage of state security bodyguards).

    A year on, Aura Minerals, with the collusion of the post-coup Honduran regime, is moving to break the stalemate.