Environment

Quit Coal released the statement below on July 27. * * * It can be easy to despair when you are campaigning so hard on an issue for so long. Sometimes you can feel like the government just isn’t listening to you and that all your efforts are a bit pointless … but not today. We have been campaigning for over a year against the proposal by company HRL to build a dirty brown coal power station in Victoria.

Since the idea of Zionism (a Jewish state in historic Palestine) first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals, the state of Israel has represented its colonisation of the land of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the earth.

Two leaders of the Labour Party Pakistan and the Progressive Youth Front (PYF) narrowly escaped torture by a special interrogation unit due to prompt protests in Pakistan and around the world, Farooq Tariq, LPP national spokesperson for the LPP, told Green Left Weekly. Baba Jan and four comrades were jailed last September for standing up for people's rights in the Hunza Valley, in the remote province of Gilgit-Baltistan, after their villages and farmlands were flooded in 2010.

Adopting a centre-left reforming image, Peruvian President Ollanta Humala was narrowly elected last year on the back of widespread discontent with destructive neoliberal development policies and a widening wealth gap. His supporters were filled with the hope that real and substantive change was imminent. Other progressives welcomed the Humala victory more cautiously, arguing that it was at least the lesser of two evils. The alternative was ultra right-winger Keiko Fujimori.

And the winner is: solar power. Residents in the South Australian town of Port Augusta have voted overwhelmingly for solar over gas to replace the town’s coal-fired power stations. The result, announced on July 22, was 4053 votes for a concentrating solar-thermal power plant, 43 for gas. In the end, 98% of voters favoured solar. The result is testament to newly-formed local group, Repower Port Augusta, whose dedication ensured that almost one-third of residents voted, an impressive outcome for the voluntary exercise.

A report published on July 23 calls for Australia to institute a moratorium on new fossil fuel developments as the centrepiece of a global campaign to phase out fossil fuels. Hundreds attended the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane meetings to launch the latest report from climate research group Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), Laggard to Leader: How Australia Can Lead the World to Zero Carbon Prosperity.

Nuclear fission is an innately dangerous process – and the nuclear industry’s record of handling the dangers has been well short of perfect. Traditionally, that’s been enough for the environment movement to reject nuclear energy. Climate change, though, subjects this established position to an important challenge. The final death toll from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, by some estimates, could reach hundreds of thousands. But a full-scale climate disaster could kill most of humanity − thousands of millions of people.

About 200 people packed Petersham Town Hall in Sydney's inner west on July 25 for a night of trivia and fundraising organised by Stop Coal Seam Gas Sydney. The group, which has campaigned for 20 months against exploratory CSG drilling planned for St Peters, had a recent victory when Dart Energy said it would not go ahead with drilling in the suburb.

A nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than a billion people would be at risk, according to research released in April by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and its Australian affiliate, the Medical Association for Prevention of War.

The statement below was released by Toolangi residents on July 27. The lock-on is taking place on the corner of Myers Creek Rd and Monda Track, Toolangi. *** What do you do when you watch magnificent native forest habitat on your beloved mountain being bulldozed, loaded on to convoys of huge log trucks and carted off to the woodchippers to be turned into paper! You get angry and determined – that’s what!

Lynas, an Australian corporation that is trying to operate a toxic rare earth refinery in Kuantan, Malaysia, failed in its latest attempt to silence criticism from community groups opposed to the refinery.

On July 17 the Minister for Agriculture Joe Ludwig released the green paper for Australia’s first-ever National Food Plan. According to the minister, this plan: “[W]ill ensure Australia has a sustainable, globally competitive, resilient food supply that supports access to nutritious and affordable food.”