$270 million spent on doomed Metro Rail Service
$270 million spent on doomed Metro rail service
- From: The Daily Telegraph
- January 27, 2010
Source: The Daily Telegraph
WITHOUT a single sod being turned, $270 million has already been spent on a metro rail project the State Government is on the verge of scrapping.
A break-down of the metro budget obtained by The Daily Telegraph exposes the high price of constant dithering on what was supposed to be the showpiece of the Government’s transport plan.
Transport Minister David Campbell has admitted 80 boreholes are all the Government has to show for its multi-million dollar metro investment.
Coalition pushes for Population debate.
Over 60% of Australians calling for Population Debate
Coalition pushes for population debate
AAP © Enlarge photo
The coalition is backing a federal Labor MP’s call for a national debate about Australia’s population growth.
Kelvin Thomson, the member for the Victorian seat of Wills, believes Australians are hungry for a debate about how big a population the nation can sustain.
Government projections indicate the population could reach 35 million by 2050, with Melbourne and Sydney each accommodating seven million people and Brisbane five million.
“We are sleepwalking into an environmental disaster,” Mr Thomson wrote in The Australian newspaper on Wednesday.
United nations caught out again on climate change
United Nations caught out again on climate claims
- From: The Australian
- January 25, 2010
THE UN climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to a rise in natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny – and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. The report’s author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.
The link was central to demands at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $US100 billion from the rich nations.
However, the IPCC knew in 2008 that the link could not be proved but did not alert world leaders, who have used weather extremes to bolster the case for action on climate change.
THE NEW ECONOMICS OF CARBON OFFSETS
carbon trading
21 Jan 2010
The New Economics Of Carbon Offsets
How do offset schemes really work? Mark Schapiro visited a carbon sink in Brazil to find out what it will cost to keep the world’s lungs alive — and who is going to pay
I am standing in the shadow of General Motors’ $1 tree. It’s a native guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as tree No. 129. I’ve come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil’s Atlantic forest, to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees like this one.
No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná — one of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country’s south eastern coast. Just 7 per cent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth’s richest centres of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon’s.
Alaskan senator seeks to block EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases
Alaskan senator seeks to block EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases
Lisa Murkowski pledges to use obscure measure in attempt to strip powers from the Environmental Protection Agency
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 January 2010 22.39 GMT
- Article history
Republican Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski is seeking to strip the EPA of its powers to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty
Barack Obama faced a direct challenge to his government’s powers to curb global warming pollution today, just 48 hours after an election upset put the rest of his agenda at risk.
In a speech to Congress, a Republican senator from Alaska announced she would use an obscure and rarely used measure to try to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a dangerous pollutant.
iCING OVER THE FACTS
Icing over the facts
BEN CUBBY
January 23, 2010
The war on science took an absurd turn this week, writes Ben Cubby.
To stand near the snout of a glacier is to take a glimpse of geological time grinding forward on its non-human scale. The vast mass of compressed ice crushes everything in its path to gravel, but it does so with invisible slowness, mostly creeping back and forth at the rate of a few metres a year.
The consensus position among glaciologists is that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating at a startling rate that in many cases can only be explained by the rising temperatures brought about by climate change. It is also true that some glaciers remain static or are growing as a result of regional weather patterns, some of which are also influenced by global warming.
This week saw unprecedented fascination with glacier research, and people who had never before shown the slightest interest in the subject before bombarded universities and research centres with questions.
The flurry of attention was sparked by a front-page story in The Sunday Times in London, reprinted the next day in some Australian newspapers, which pointed out that a mistake about the timing of glacier retreats had crept into one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ”working group” reports. The report said that Himalayan glaciers could be gone or greatly reduced by 2035 – a rate of decline far outstripping other glacier fields around the world.