EcoRadio

Author: admin

  • Pokies campaign on Today Tonight

    Pokies campaign on Today Tonight

    Inbox
    		 x

    Erin – GetUp! info@getup.org.au
    6:09 PM (1 hour ago)
    to me
    Dear NEVILLE,

    Just a quick update on the ongoing poker machine reform campaign; the past week has been a busy one and I thought you’d want to know about it. 

    Last week began with GetUp member, renowned computer engineer, and the first woman and first living person inducted into the Australian ICT hall of fame, Ann Moffatt, speaking out on a Today Tonight segment. Ann revealed for the first time the unbelievable fact that a major poker machine manufacturer, still in business today, employed a team of 10 psychologists to develop pokier machine logic that would be passed on to Ann and her team of programmers to implement. When Ann found out, she terminated her company’s relationship with the poker machine client.

    If you missed the segment and you want to learn more about one of the reasons we have so many Australians addicted to poker machine gambling, you can watch it here:

    Ann’s story on Today Tonight reached more than 1.1 million Australian viewers and once again stressed just how dangerous high loss poker machines currently are for our communities. That’s why hundreds of GetUp members successfully called for an Extraordinary General Meeting of Woolworths Ltd; at the EGM GetUp members and shareholders will be asking the largest owner and operator of poker machines in Australia to commit to making its machines safer for all Australians.

    On a less public-facing side of the campaign, I’ve just returned from the Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) conference in Melbourne, where GetUp had an informational stall to brief investors – the people who will either be voting or who represent people who will be voting – on poker machine reform at November’s EGM. Our campaign materials and conversations informed key industry players about the important social justice implications and risks that are associated with continued investment in high loss poker machines and let them know about the upcoming opportunity to vote for safer machines at November’s EGM. 

    The majority of investors and advisors I spoke with were very impressed with the campaign to date and that’s because of you. Without your support we could not have run ads in cinemas across the country, delivered petitions, sent letters to the CEOs of Woolworths and Wesfarmers, successfully called an EGM or funded the legal fight that ensued. The efforts of our movement have been successful in getting investors to think more about the risk – both to the brand and also to the public – of Woolworths’ continued investment in such demonstrably harmful products. Many let me know they will be watching closely as the campaign unfolds.

    For that reason, we’ll be back in touch soon with some powerful and important ways in which you can use your power as a member of a superfund in order to help bring about poker machine reform.

    Thanks for all that you do,
    Erin, for the GetUp team.

    GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you’d like to contribute to help fund GetUp’s work, please donate now! If you have trouble with any links in this email, please go directly to www.getup.org.au. To unsubscribe from GetUp, please click here. Authorised by Sam Mclean, Level 2, 104 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.

  • Fast and loose: trains on the new north-west line predicted to run at 60 km/h

    Fast and loose: trains on the new north-west line predicted to run at 60 km/h

    Date
    August 28, 2012
    • 114 reading now
      • 334

    Jacob Saulwick

    Transport Reporter

    WHEN it comes to talking a big game, Sydney’s train planners are world class.
    Consider this: the most recent prediction is that the north west rail link will deliver commuters from Rouse Hill to Chatswood at an average speed, including 12 stops, at about 60km/h.
    This might be technically possible. But if the predicted speed, included in planning documents for the $9 billion project, is achieved it will make the link one of the fastest metro-style train lines in the world, quicker than feted metros in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore.
    First up this reporter is comparing apple and oranges.  The North West link is a heavy-rail link NOT “a Metro” per some of his cited examples/
    The former Labor government made similar predictions for its ill-fated north west metro in 2008. Some planners struggled to believe those predictions, just as some struggle with the latest.
    Labor’s ill-fated north west metro (in 2008) was exactly that a “Metro” style line, with steel wheels augmented by rubber tires or out-rigger solid or pump-up rubber wheels.  It was designed as a deliberate union busting ploy of explicitly Not being under by existing union coverage.

    The latest proposal for the north west rail link is to build it as a 23-kilometre extension to the 13-kilometre Epping to Chatswood rail line.
    When finished, in about 2019, a private operator will run single-deck trains in a shuttle between Rouse Hill and Chatswood.

    Planning documents for the line anticipate the total trip – 36 kilometres – to take 37 minutes.
    The government insists this speed – about 60km/h , including eight stops on the north west rail link, and four on the existing Epping to Chatswood line – should pose no problem.
    Here I would tend to agree with the government planners.  My question is why so slow?  Only 60km/h on a new line while the old freight network has large chunks at 80km/h?

    This would be an impressive feat. One of the best metro lines in the world, Hong Kong’s Kwun Tong Line, for instance, runs through 14 stops for 16 kilometres at a total speed of about 35km/h.
    Singapore’s North East Line takes over half an hour to travel for 20 kilometres, past 15 stops, at a speed of about 37.5km/h.
    Both those example must have stations closer than a kilometre apart. Such short placement would give you no time for acceleration before you would be slamming the brakes on again to stop at the next station.
    Rail experts and train manufacturers were reluctant to talk on the record about the travel times, as most have an interest in getting work on the project.
    But one manufacturer said the speed might – might – be able to be achieved with top-of-the-line train technology, and very fast interchanges at all stops.
    The manufacturers reluctance was probably in a large measure due the reporters obvious agenda of getting a good story!

    Another rail expert said: ”The times don’t look kosher.”
    This was partly because so much of the line will be in tunnel – 28 kilometres of the 36. The existing Epping to Chatswood line already has a maximum speed limit of 80km/h, and a number of segments demanding slower speeds.
    It would be interesting to know exactly what those slower speeds are and why.  Are the speed limits to do with what is safe for the existing / legacy rolling stock?.

    ”Once you go in tunnels you’ve got extra windage as the train pushes the air away,” the expert said.
    This expert is a great example of “X” an unknown quantity of “spurt” drip under pressure.  A decade ago what the “expert” is saying was true, but not today.  He is obviously unaware of the French breakthroughs regarding this knotty aerodynamic issue.  The answer comes from a counter intuitive extension to the tunnels with strange holes in them.  Prior to the French discoveries their high speed trains use to subject onlookers to sonic booms as the pressure-waves ahead of trains broke the sound barrier!  Now the pressure waves and booms are gone and the trains are travelling much faster through those same tunnels now with fancy mods!

    Smaller tunnels create more wind resistance.
    ”The less free space you have got, the more windage,” he said. The north west rail link is being built with small tunnels.
    Yes & No see above, depends on how they are done. Number of pressure escape chimneys? ….
    Another consultant told the Herald to ask Transport for NSW to ”provide details of assumed dwells at each stop, acceleration rates, braking rates, maximum speeds and travel times (not counting dwells) between each station. If they can’t or won’t provide this, they’re hiding something.”
    No kidding!  Maybe their performance criteria for the tender evaluation.

    A spokeswoman for Transport for NSW declined to provide details of assumed dwells at each stop, acceleration rates, braking rates, maximum speeds and travel times – not counting dwells -between each station.
    Instead, the spokeswoman said the new line would have stations much further apart than comparable lines, allowing trains to operate at higher speeds for longer distances.
    ”There will be reduced dwell times on Sydney’s new single deck trains because they will have more doors than double-deckers and customers will be able to get on and off faster,” she said.
    ‘Modern trains have fast acceleration and deceleration rates – the exact train performance specifications are dependent on the final rolling stock procured for the project.”
    All true.  Would be nice to get a hold of the Expression of Interest, or Call for Tenders documents for the rolling stock.

  • Air pollution reaching extreme levels, warns Hunter Valley council

    Air pollution reaching extreme levels, warns Hunter Valley council

    Date
    September 3, 2012
    • 5 reading now
      • 1

    Saffron Howden, James Robertson

    Graeme Gibson

    “We’re concerned that the Hunter Valley is going to end up being a brick pit and not much else” … Graeme Gibson. Photo: Max Mason Hubers

    HUNTER VALLEY winemakers and residents will today step up the campaign against mining in their backyards as the local council warns dust in the region is reaching ”extreme” levels.

    In an email to a Singleton councillor on Saturday, the council’s general manager, Lindy Hyam, said she had written to the head of NSW Environment Protection Authority after five separate official ”health alerts” relating to air pollution at Mount Thorley, near Singleton, were issued in a matter of weeks.

    Each alert stated that air pollution had ”exceeded national health standards for PM10”, or particulate matter 10 micrometres or less in diameter.

    ”I also went out and had a look,” Ms Hyam said in the email on Saturday. ”It was like a dust storm. Extreme in my view.”

    A spokesman for the NSW Office of Environment said healthy air contained a maximum of 50 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic metre over 24 hours. The readings in the Hunter over the past few weeks were in the range of 50 to 58 per cubic metre, above the safe standard.

    He said the levels had been affected by hazard reduction burning, drier weather and wind.

    The Hunter Valley Protection Alliance, which has been lobbying hard behind the scenes against AGL’s proposed coal seam gas activity in the area, will today launch a campaign targeting consumers, including visitors to the popular tourist and wine-tasting region.

    ”We’re concerned that the Hunter Valley is going to end up being a brick pit and not much else,” the alliance’s deputy chairman, Graeme Gibson, said.

    ”The playground of Sydney is going to disappear or be polluted.”

    Mr Gibson said rehabilitation of existing coalmines had slowed and this was affecting air quality. Many Hunter Valley residents now had to substantially filter the rainwater from their tanks before drinking it and had been ”abandoned by all levels of government”, the alliance said.

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/air-pollution-reaching-extreme-levels-warns-hunter-valley-council-20120902-258jn.html#ixzz25Miqa3sB

  • The day the world went mad MONBIOT

    The day the world went mad

    As record sea ice melt scarcely makes the news while the third runway grabs headlines, is there a form of reactive denial at work?

    Satellite image of Arctic sea ice

    Satellite image of Arctic sea ice. Photograph: Reuters

    Yesterday was August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad.

    Three things of note happened. The first is that a record Arctic ice melt had just been announced by the scientists studying the region. The 2012 figure has not only beaten the previous record, established in 2007. It has beaten it three weeks before the sea ice is likely to reach its minimum extent. It reveals that global climate breakdown is proceeding more rapidly than most climate scientists expected. But you could be forgiven for missing it, as it scarcely made the news at all.

    Instead, in the UK, the headlines concentrated on the call by Tim Yeo, chair of the parliamentary energy and climate change committee, for a third runway at Heathrow. This sparked a lively debate in and beyond the media about where Britain’s new runways and airports should be built. The question of whether they should be built scarcely arose. Just as rare was any connection between the shocking news from the Arctic and this determination to increase our emissions of greenhouse gases.

    I wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms.

    The third event was that the Republican party in the United States began its national convention in Tampa, Florida – a day late. Why? Because of the anticipated severity of hurricane Isaac, which reached the US last night.

    As Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, noted earlier this year:

    “Basic theory, climate model simulations, and empirical evidence all confirm that warmer climates, owing to increased water vapor, lead to more intense precipitation events even when the total annual precipitation is reduced slightly … all weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

    (h/t: Joe Romm at Climate Progress)

    The Republican party’s leading lights either deny climate change altogether, or argue that people can adapt to whatever a changed climate may bring, so there’s nothing to worry about.

    The deluge of reality has had no impact on the party’s determination to wish the physical world away. As Salon.com points out, most of the major figures lined up to speak at the convention deny that man-made climate change is happening.

    When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.

    www.monbiot.com

  • Pacific is big enough for all, insists Clinton

    Pacific is big enough for all, insists Clinton

    Date
    September 2, 2012
    • 8 reading now
      • 1
    Daniel Flitton

    Daniel Flitton

    Senior Correspondent

    View more articles from Daniel Flitton

    …

    Video settings

    Please Log in to update your video settings

    Video settings

    Please Log in to update your video settings

    Clinton shores up Pacific ties in Cook Islands

    Hillary Clinton seeks closer ties with Pacific nations while bolstering relations with China.

    Video will begin in 1 seconds.

    Replay video

    US SECRETARY of State Hillary Clinton has announced an expanded role for the US Navy and renewed American engagement in the Pacific, while trying to reassure China that ”the Pacific is big enough for all of us”.

    In her much anticipated trip to the South Pacific, widely seen as an attempt to curb Beijing’s growing influence, she told the Pacific Islands Forum that the US considered the region strategically and economically vital ”and becoming more so”.

    Later, delivering a briefing on regional security, Mrs Clinton said a coastguard program to combat illegal fishing would be expanded to include the US Navy. ”This will allow countries to take advantage of US Navy ships that are already in the region or transiting through the region to get help in enforcing their own laws,” she said.

    US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) speaks at an event on peace and security in Rarotonga, Cook Islands on August 31, 2012. Clinton vowed on August 31 the United States would remain active in the South Pacific for the

    Challenge … Hillary Clinton with the commander of the US Navy’s Pacific Command at the forum in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Photo: AFP

    ”Additionally, we are working with Australia, New Zealand and France to strengthen our Pacific maritime surveillance partnership.”

    She was flanked by the head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear.

    He said their joint appearance was unusual, and Mrs Clinton’s remarks reinforced the importance of the Pacific islands to the US.

    ”Five trillion dollars of commerce rides on the (Asia-Pacific) sea lanes each year, and you people are sitting right in the middle of it,” he said. ”We will enhance the US Navy and coastguard Ship Rider program so that we can more effectively combat the illegal activity and enforce conservation measures and build nation capacity to do the same.”

    Mrs Clinton said the benefits of expanded patrols were significant.

    ”I know there are those who see America’s renewed engagement in the Pacific perhaps as a hedge against particular countries,” she said. ”The Pacific is big enough for all of us.

    ”We all have important contributions and stakes in this region’s success, to advance your security, your opportunity and your prosperity.”

    With a Chinese vice-minister also at the talks that followed the 15-member Pacific Islands Forum this week in the Cook Islands, Mrs Clinton again made plain a desire to make this the ”America’s Pacific century”. She pointed to the hundreds of US warships, coastguard and fishing vessels sailing Pacific waters, $330 million annual support to island nations, and invoked the wartime sacrifice of American troops battling the Japanese.

    ”We have since then underwritten the security that has made it possible for the people of this region to trade and travel freely,” she said.

    ”We have consistently protected the Pacific sea lanes through which a great deal of the world’s commerce travels, and now we look to the Pacific nations in a spirit of partnership.”

    Forum officials refused to allow reporters to hear the contribution by China’s vice-minister, Cui Tiankai, to the talks, despite having been allowed to hear speeches from Canada and Japan. Earlier, Mr Cui said China did not seek to compete with any countries in the region. “We are here in this region not to seek any particular influence, still less dominance,” he said.

    ”We are here to work with the island countries to achieve sustainable development, because both China and the Pacific island countries belong to the ranks of developing countries.”

    Mrs Clinton’s appearance has been the talk of the Cook Islands in the recent weeks.

    Prime Minister Henry Puna said Mrs Clinton was the highest-ranking US participant in the regular post-forum talks.

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/pacific-is-big-enough-for-all-insists-clinton-20120901-2573m.html#ixzz25JDd5Eep

  • METHANE UNDER ATLANTIC ICE.

    Andrew Glikson
    7:27 PM (12 minutes ago)
    to me

    Good grief …

    There are now enough recoverable carbon resources to elevate CO2 and temperature levels to “dinosaur-like” levels (see graph below).

    Which is unlikely to happen as C emission is self-limiting, i.e. it is difficult to seen C-emitting industries persisting beyond  500 ppm CO2.

    I enclose my latest paper.

    Andrew

    2-9-2012

    From: Neville Gillmore [mailto:nevilleg729@gmail.com]
    Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2012 7:09 PM
    To: Andrew Glikson
    Subject: Large Methane Reservoirs Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet, Study Suggests

    THE SHIFT IN STATE OF THE ATMOSPHERE AND EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS.pdf THE SHIFT IN STATE OF THE ATMOSPHERE AND EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS.pdf
    378K   View Download