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  • Melbourne Carbon Trading Opens

    "The clean technologies are actually looking for that extra piece of value that actually makes their product competitive," he said.

    "So by these organisations buying the credits or buying the offsets, what they’re doing is virtually sponsoring clean technology."

    Greenpeace has welcomed the opening of the trading scheme but says a government target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is still needed.

    Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham says without a target, the reductions will take too long.

    "We know that you can make a difference with voluntary measures," he said.

    "But you won’t make a difference anywhere near as quickly as you will if a government makes a decision that something will happen and sets a target for reducing our greenhouse pollution."

  • Combat Wombat powers tunes with sunshine

    Cool setup: "I’ve already recorded two tracks for my upcoming solo album in here. It’s just great to know that it’s actually a reality, I am now recording in my solar-powered studio for my next project. It’s so cool to see it all falling into place."

    Sustainable studio: Built with recycled materials – second-hand basketball court flooring, recycled sound-deadening boards and rock-wool insulation – the studio set-up isn’ just an example of quaint DIY, but a functional carbon-neutral unit. According to Peckham – who along with his band mates had previously built an ad hoc solar-powered sound system and wind-powered cinema, mounted to their self-converted vegetable oil-powered van – the studio can, in favourable conditions, operate for eight to 10 hours a day, five days a week.

    The Age, 6/7/2007

  • Aust economists call for Kyoto action

    Climate call: 271 economists say major economic damage could be done to Australia.

    Climate call: 271 economists say major economic damage could be done to Australia. (Getty Images)

    Seventy-five professors of economics have called on the Federal Government to stop undermining international efforts to tackle climate change and ratify the Kyoto Protocol without delay.

    They are among 271 Australian university economists who have signed a statement drawing attention to the economic damage that could be done to Australia for failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    Professor Peter Dixon says the Government’s efforts on climate change have been marginal.

    "We’ve been most concerned to protect our sales of coal," he said.

    "Of course, we will lose a considerable amount of sales of coal whether we sign or whether we don’t in the end because in fact, the main part of the solution to the greenhouse gas problem will be reductions in worldwide use of coal."

    Meanwhile, state and territory leaders have written a joint letter to Prime Minister John Howard saying they would like to be included in a national emissions trading scheme.

    The Federal Government is due to receive a report on climate change at the end of the month and will make a decision on a scheme.

    The letter re-states the premiers’ and chief ministers’ position that they have committed to starting a carbon trading scheme by 2010.

  • Overfishing shuts down power stations

    Scientists believed depleted fish stocks have removed competition for jellyfish, allowing them to breed to plague proportions, reported The Courier Mail (18/6/2007, p.13).

    Plagues of stingers: Jellyfish blooms, where the creatures multiply rapidly into untold millions:

    • clog water intakes on ships and power stations;

    • ruin fishing nets; and

    • can wreck engines.

    Dr Kylic Pitt, from the Griffith University School of Environment, said Japan was experiencing plagues of the giant jellyfish nemopilema. "At more than a metre wide and up to 200kg, they become caught in fishing gear and damage boat engines and mechanical equipment," Pitt said.

    Industrial implications: The Port of Brisbane was experiencing blooms of catostylus or blue blubber jellyfish. In 2004, thousands of blue blubbers stopped the P&O cruise ship Pacific Sky from sailing from Brisbane after they were sucked into a water intake. A jellyfish bloom also shut down a coastal power station in Manila in the Philippines in 2000. A survey of Lake Illawarra, near Wollongong in NSW, found it contained 18,000 tonnes of blue blubbers.

    The Courier Mail, 18/6/2007, p. 13

  • A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak

    July 14 / 15, 2007

    Language as an Instrument of Crime

    By RANNIE AMIRI

    It is indeed a great irony that George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, the same year Israel was created. For this nation, above all others, has proven itself most adept in the use and promulgation of doublespeak.

    Defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "evasive, ambiguous, high-flown language intended to deceive or confuse," Israeli governments have always relied on it to justify the expansionist nature of their state, excuse the confiscation of land and minimize the extent to which its inhabitants have been mistreated or abused.

    A few examples:

    The Security Fence

    The monstrosity which Israel is constructing along the entire length of the West Bank is no more for security than it is a fence. The barrier, started in 2003 and now more than half complete, is scheduled to run over 450 miles and reach a height of 25 feet ­ four times longer than and twice as high as the former Berlin Wall. Composed of concrete and electrified wire, surrounded by trenches and mounted with strategically positioned sniper towers, calling it a "fence" is more than farcical.

    Israel's security fenceIn 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled construction of the barrier illegal (a verdict, of course, ignored). Within the last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs issued a report indicating that it will "restrict access to workplaces, health, education, and to places of worship." In addition, it fully recognized that Arab-majority East Jerusalem will be severed from the West Bank by its route. In another area, 50,000 Palestinians would be completely isolated and restricted to the zone between it and Israel resulting in their inability "to access critical services such as schools, clinics and shops in either Israel or the West Bank without special permits."

    More telling is where the barrier is being built. According to the UN report, 80% of it on West Bank land.

    The "security fence" is thus an offensive structure rather than the defensive one it purports to be. It is just one illustration of how Israel attempts to obfuscate a reality ­ in this case, a very expensive land grab – through use of language.

    Moderate Physical Pressure and Work Accidents

    Israel was at one time the only country to officially sanction the use of torture, euphemistically referred to as "moderate physical pressure." Lea Tsemel, a defense lawyer and founder of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) remarked, "Israel is the only Western country that openly uses torture. This is not some brute in the secret services beating up a prisoner. It’s done in the open. There is quiet legitimation by a high-ranking commission and government ministers" (New York Times, May 8, 1997).

    The Sunday Times had already arrived at the same conclusion in June 1977: "Torture of Arab prisoners is so widespread and systematic that it cannot be dismissed as ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders. It appears to be sanctioned as deliberate policy."

    Whenever a detainee died under torture, it was dismissed as an unfortunate "work accident." It took a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 to ban the practice. Unfortunately they have now reversed themselves. A judgment issued this past June allows Shin Bet to use methods regarded by PCATI as torture when in a "ticking bomb" situation. With likely wide interpretation of this circumstance, it appears a green light has just been issued to reinstate the practice.

    The Absent Present

    This bizarre term was used describe those Palestinians who were not driven out of Palestine in 1948, but remained within what was to later become Israel. If they temporarily left their homes or were away from their land during the war, they were prevented from reclaiming it. Confiscation of the property of the "absent present" was then permitted (Haaretz, January 14, 1955).

    The Abandoned Areas

    "We take the land first and the law comes after."

    – Yehoshafat Palmon, Arab Affairs advisor to the mayor of Jerusalem (Guardian, April 26, 1972).

    Whether to assuage the conscience of emigrating Jews or not, the Zionists who founded Israel passed a series of discriminatory laws with harmless and protective sounding titles explicitly for the purpose of expropriating inhabited Palestinian land. In some instances, these laws were made retroactive.

    They carried such names as the Emergency Defense Regulations, the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, the Emergency Articles for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands, and as described above, the Absentee Property Law.

    These laws all attempted to reinforce the myth peddled by Zionists depicting Palestine as "a land without a people." Nonetheless, they were aptly described by the Jewish writer Moshe Keren as "wholesale robbery with a legal coating."

    Definition of Israeli doublespeak: the use of language to hide crimes of the state.

    It would surely make Big Brother proud.

    Rannie Amiri is an independent commentator on issues dealing with the Arab and Islamic worlds. He may be reached at: rbamiri@yahoo.com.

    Reference

    1. Zayid, Ismail. Zionism: The Myth and the Reality. American Trust Publications, Indianapolis, 1980.

  • US Floats Carbon Tax

    “I sincerely doubt that the American people will be willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,” said Mr. Dingell, whose committee will be drafting a broad bill on climate change this fall.

    “I will be introducing in the next little bit a carbon tax bill, just to sort of see how people think about this,” he continued. “When you see the criticism I get, I think you’ll see the answer to your question.”

    The idea behind a carbon tax is to provide an incentive to reduce the use of fossil fuels like oil and coal, which are loaded with carbon, and increase the use of cleaner, renewable fuels like solar power, wind and fuels made from plants and plant waste.

    Many economists like the idea of a carbon tax, saying that it would be simple to administer and could profoundly affect energy choices.

    But most Democrats are staunchly opposed, saying that a tax would raise the costs of travel, commuting and heating and cooling homes, and that it would be wildly unpopular at a time when voters are already angry about high energy costs. Republicans, they said, would seize on any such proposal as proof that Democrats were bent on raising taxes and increasing the size of government.

    Indeed, many Democrats still cringe at the memory of President Bill Clinton’s trying to pass a broad “B.T.U. tax” in 1993 on most forms of energy. The measure passed the House but not the Senate, and more than a few Democrats believe the effort was one reason they lost their majority in the House in 1994.

    Now, House and Senate Democrats are writing bills that would require factories and power plants to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases through a so-called cap-and-trade system of mandatory requirements and tradeable pollution credits.

    Most of the proposals would impose mandatory limits on the amount of carbon dioxide that companies would be allowed to produce each year, and those limits would become steadily more rigorous over time. A factory or a power plant that is already below the limit could sell its unused allocations to companies that were over the limit.

    The United States already uses a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that cause acid rain.

    The European Union has adopted a system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, though the system has come under considerable criticism for letting companies game the rules and for failing to reduce emissions in line with European goals.