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  • Italian town exports renewables

    What has happened in Varese is unusual. On a national level, Italy is set to fall short of its EU objective of generating 25 percent of its gross electrical consumption from renewable energy sources by 2010. Italy’s share of renewables was just 13.93 in 2005.

    But the mayor of Varese, Michaela Marone, and her predecessor, Maurizio Caranza, turned their vision of a town driven by renewable energy into reality by leveraging funds from the EU and using their authority to cut through red tape.

    The town uses wind, solar and small-scale hydropower, a mix best adapted to its hilly terrain covering a total of 140 square km — and it has plans for more hydropower.

    Today, renewables bring not only environmental benefits but also improved living standards to a town that had suffered from years of steady decline. An additional 350,000 euros [US $514,000] in tax revenues is handed over to the council each year by the private company that owns the renewable energy network.

    "We fulfill all the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol and are non profit. We use all of our profits towards paying the electricity bills of the people in the town," Michaele Marone, the town mayor, told RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

    Four wind turbines located on a ridge 1100 meters above sea level — where the average annual wind speed is 7.2 meters per second — generate 8 million kWh of electricity a year that is fed into the local grid managed by Acam, a power company in La Spezia.

    The electricity from the wind turbines alone reduce carbon emissions by 8,000 tons, representing 0.05 percent of the region’s total annual carbon emissions.

    Photovoltaic (PV) panels have been installed on the town hall and the local school. The town hall has 102 PV panels covering 95 square meters and generating 12,700 kWh a year, which supplies 98 percent of the total energy consumption of the building.

    Varese’s secondary school has 39 PV panels covering 36 square meters and producing 4,600 kWh a year, which supplies 62 percent of the energy used.

    In addition to that, the town’s swimming pool is heated by solar power and a program to promote the use of wood pellet stoves is in the works.

    In conjunction with the development of a renewable energy infrastructure, the town has also launched initiatives to make Varese 100 percent sustainable. A total of 108 organic farms now supply 98 percent of the town’s food; water is purified using environmentally friendly technology and waste has been significantly reduced.

    The town has seen a six-fold increase in tourists in the last ten years, many coming just to see its renewable energy network.

    Varese Not Alone

    Although certainly a pioneer in Renewable Energy, Varese is not the only town in Europe to adopt such measures. The same thing is happening in many towns across Europe.

    Güssing in Austria with 27,000 inhabitants has also switched to renewable energy sources — and has also moved from poverty to prosperity, underlining the potential of renewable energy for creating new jobs and new investment.

    And it’s not only rural towns that are forging ahead with renewable energy projects. There has been a marked increase in the numbers of cities across Europe adopting initiatives to cut carbon emissions and develop green energy.

    Following Rome and London, Paris launched a new "Plan Climat" or climate plan on October 1st 2007 to reduce carbon emissions.

    Munich, Germany has also developed a strategy for cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.

    Beatrice Alcaraz from Energie-Cités, an association of European local authorities for the promotion of local sustainable energy policies that represents more than 500 towns and cities, told RenewableEnergyAccess.com that the driving force behind all of this expansion was EU policy.

    "Municipalities have to adapt their national policies to the European directives, that is the European directive of public building. They also have to develop the renewables to achieve the EU energy and climate objectives," she said.

    The EU is targeting urban areas because more than 80 percent of the European population lives there, and the energy consumption of cities is growing.

    The latest figures from French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie (Ademe)) show that the energy consumption of French cities grew by 14.5 percent between 1990 and 2005 from 27 billion KWh in 1990 to 31 billion kWh in 2005.

    "The rapid development of renewable energy in so many towns and cities across Europe augurs well," said Beatrice Alcatraz, speaking about how cities are combating this increase in energy consumption while keeping down carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

    Though cities cover only 0.4 percent of the world’s total area, they consume 75 percent of the energy and generate about 80 percent of the carbon emissions according to a study by the Münchener Rück.

    Jane Burgermeister is a RenewableEnergyAccess.com European Correspondent based in Vienna, Austria. 

  • Wild storms lash outback town

    With winds of almost 80km/h, the town was hit by a second storm that dumped 20mm and some light hail in just 10 minutes several hours later.

    The mayor of Balonne Shire, Cr Robert Buchan, a local since 1948, said it was the worst storm to hit the town in 25 years.

    He said there had been damage to homes, shops and roads but most had escaped largely unscathed.

    "There were a lot of trees over cars, we had trees landing on buildings, damaging the roofs, and water damage in some houses and business," he said.

    "It came through so quickly and the drain system couldn’t drain the water away quickly enough.

    "But generally speaking, we’ve got off very well. There were some very large trees that went over that didn’t hit anything. It’s not that no-one’s affected but it’s not Cyclone Larry."

    SES volunteers were called out to 12 emergencies last night, working until midnight to provide tarpaulins and sandbags to businesses in the CBD affected by the rising waters.

    Most of them are council employees and were preparing to help clean up the battered CBD this morning.

    "One business had a foot of water come through it, there was some corrugated iron blowing around the place and roof damage from the guttering overflowing," said the SES’s Andy Christie.

    On the plus side, last night’s storm was the climax of a solid month of rain that has all but eliminated the drought in that area.

    Cr Buchan said the Beardmore Dam, once down to just 4 per cent capacity, was now overflowing and the parched landscape of recent years was now healthy and green.

    Water harvesters are also harvesting water for the first time in years, he said.

    The last great storm to affect the town was in 1982 when about 150mm fell on a single night.

  • Raid on Maori village opens old wounds

    What many found most appalling were the tactics used to arrest three of the suspects in Ruatoki and the nearby town of Whakatane, both home to the uncompromising Tuhoe – the only Maori tribe that still rejects the government’s sovereignty, 167 years after the British colonized the islands.

    For some, the raids stirred memories of repression of Maori more than a century ago. "They came in here like in a B-grade film," said Tame Iti, a well-known Tuhoe activist arrested in the Ruatoki raid.

    "It was an attack on the community. It was an attack on me as a freedom fighter, and as a sovereign person of this country." The town of Ruatoki is dotted with small houses, some just sheds, that lie in flat fields by a rural highway on the northern of New Zealand’s two main islands. Iti said police stormed in and held his family including children at gunpoint, firing two shots into tires on his truck to immobilize it. After the arrests, protests broke out in a dozen towns and cities and abroad in the United States, England and Australia, itself home to 250,000 Maori.

    The police actions against the Tuhoe "set back relations between Maori and the government 100 years," said Pita Sharples, co-leader of the Maori Party and a member of parliament. Authorities said that during 18 months of covert monitoring, they had heard armed activists at the camps – in the forested hills of Te Urewera, the Tuhoe ancestral lands – talking of political assassinations and bombing power plants.

    The arrested included some white New Zealanders. In a controversial move, local newspapers published police intercepts of those conversations. In them, the suspects discuss using "sudden" and "brutal" attacks to divide "Aotearoa," the Maori name for New Zealand. The suspects also surmise that foreign terror groups would be blamed, according to the newspaper accounts.

    Iti said the camps he was involved in taught bush survival skills and firearms safety, something he has been doing for Tuhoe and other youth for 30 years. He rejected any connection to terrorism. Iti was charged last year with reckless use of a shotgun and desecrating the New Zealand flag at a Maori ceremony on Tuhoe lands.

    The charges were dropped after he pointed out that it was an Australian flag and that he had fired into the ground. The Tuhoe said four weapons were seized in the raids, but Detective Inspector Bruce Good told The Associated Press there were 20, including AK-47 assault rifles, shotguns, rifles and pistols, plus silencers, scopes, ammunition and firearms parts.

    The government planned to charge 12 suspects under the Terrorism Suppression Act, enacted following the 9/11 attacks. But Solicitor General David Collins, the country’s top justice official, ruled the anti-terror law was too complex to apply in this case. The arrested, now free on bail, face lesser charges of illegal possession and use of firearms. The Maori are descendants of Polynesians who migrated to New Zealand about 1,000 years ago.

    Tuhoe, the most isolated and poorest of the Maori tribes, are proud that their ancestors refused to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which created New Zealand under British sovereignty. The treaty guaranteed the Maori could keep their lands, forests, fisheries and culture – commitments Maori say were broken as European settlers flooded in. In 1867, colonial troops invaded Tuhoe territory and confiscated much of its land.

    Twenty years of guerrilla fighting ensued. The Tuhoe resistance has won wide respect from other Maori, who remain proud of their fierce warrior heritage. Other Maori have been "colonized" by European culture, the Tuhoe say. Prime Minister Helen Clark said police and the government will need to start building bridges over the divide.

    They face an uphill battle, particularly with the Tuhoe. Sharples, the Maori Party co-leader, said invoking the Terrorism Suppression Act has branded all Maori as possible terrorists with international links. It "could create repercussions on peoples’ attitudes to authority and the police in the future," he said. "It’s created further mistrust by Maori of the authorities."

  • Slavery alive and well in USA

    Source from UK Independent

    Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

    By Leonard Doyle in Immokalee, Floride

    Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

    When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

    The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

    Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

    Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country’s top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.

    But conditions in the state’s fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children – excluded from the protection of America’s employment laws and banned from unionising – work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

    Until now, even appeals from the former president Jimmy Carter to help raise the wages of fruit-pickers have gone unheeded. However, with Florida looming as a key battleground during the the next presidential election, there is hope that their cause will be raised by the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards.

    Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America’s overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes – a near impossibility – in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress".

    A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house shaded by palm trees. The bungalow stood abandoned this week, a Cadillac in the driveway alongside a black and chrome pick-up truck with a cowboy hat on the dashboard. The entire operation was being run by the Navarettes, a family well known in the area.

    Also near by was the removals van from which Mariano Lucas, one of the first to escape, punched his way through a ventilation hatch to freedom in the early hours of 18 November. With him were Jose Velasquez, who had bruises on his face and ribs and a cut forearm, and Jose Hari. The men told police they had to relieve themselves inside the van. Other migrant workers were kept in other vehicles and sheds scattered around the garden.

    Enslaved by the Navarettes for more than a year, the men had been working in blisteringly hot conditions, sometimes for seven days a week. Despite their hard work, they were mired in debt because of the punitive charges imposed by their employer, who is being held on minor charges while a grand jury investigates his alleged involvement in human trafficking.

    The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish. When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked by the Navarettes. "They physically loaded him in the van and made him go to work that day. Cesar, Geovanni and Martin Navarette beat him up and as a result he was bleeding in his mouth," a grand jury was told.

    The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals – mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky. The fruit-pickers’ caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month – more per square foot than a New York apartment – and are less than 10 minutes’ walk from the hiring fair where the men show up before sunrise. At least half those who come looking for work are not taken on.

    Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will. Conditions have barely changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables. "We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them," Murrow said, in a phrase that still resonates in Immokalee today.

    For several years, a campaign has been under way to improve the workers’ conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald’s, the world’s biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.

    "We see no legal way of paying these workers," said Steve Grover, the vice-president of Burger King. He complained that a local human rights group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers "has gone after us because we are a known brand". But he added: "At the end of the day, we don’t employ the farmworkers so how can we pay them?"

    Burger King will not pay the extra penny a pound that the tomato-pickers are demanding he said. "If we agreed to the penny per pound, Burger King would pay about $250,000 annually, or $100 per worker. How does that solve exploitation and poverty?" he asked.

    Burger King is not the only buyer digging in its heels. Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London’s upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes.

    In a statement Whole Foods said it was "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supports "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

    The Democratic candidates for the presidency do not often talk about exploited migrant workers, but there are hints that Barack Obama will visit the Immokalee fruit pickers sometime before Florida’s primary election on 5 February.

    Jimmy Carter recently joined the campaign to improve the lot of fruit-pickers, appealing to Burger King and the growers "to restore the dignity of Florida’s tomato industry". His appeal fell on deaf ears but 100 church groups, including the Catholic bishop of Miami, joined him.

  • Rudd gags CSIRO

    Mr Paterson says it is not an unusual move, and similar things happened under the previous government.

    He says he does not support the view that statutory authorities are independent "for all purposes", rather independent for specific purposes "for which they were created".

    He denies the directive requires the institutions to have their material vetted by the PM’s office.

    "It doesn’t need to be vetted, and there’s no suggestion in the language that was used or any language that I’ve used to suggest that something was being vetted," he said.

    "This is not about constraining academic observation or comment in an independent area, this is not about independent commentary from scientists, this is about institutional media releases.

    "It’s about ensuring a consistency in message."

    Mr Paterson says the move allows the Government to be aware of what is being published.

    "If you’ve got key themes that a Government has gone to the people on in critical areas in terms of its platform, it is not surprising, it is unexceptional that a government would want to be aware of a message that was being put out," he said.

    "We were being asked by these agencies for guidance and we’ve provided that guidance to the individuals.

    "It’s written in reasonably relaxed language, it’s not a directive. Some of the facts in the stories that have been published this morning are not accurate and clearly one of the agencies that we provided that guidance to has passed it straight on to the press."

  • Australia pressures Japan on Whalint

    Japan has since promised not to include humpback whales in its cull in Antarctica this season.

    Mr Smith says the suspension is a positive step, but there is more work to be done.

    "We will continue with the array of policy proposals that we announced during the week," he said.

    "We will continue bilateral pressure on Japan, our bilateral diplomatic efforts to make the point to Japan that we want their so-called lethal scientific whaling to stop."

    Mr Smith says he and the Japanese Foreign Minister discussed the importance of Australia and Japan’s strategic relationship being maintained despite a difference of opinion on the issue.

    Whale watching industry

    The Whale and Dolphin Watching Association of Australia has welcomed Japan’s move to suspend the killing of humpback whales, but says it will not be completely happy until the Japanese stop whaling altogether.

    Whale and Dolphin Watching vice-president Brian Perry says there is no reason why the Japanese should continue with whaling of any sort.

    "There’s no reason to go hunting whales, especially for research," he said.

    "It’s a sham – everyone knows that there’s no research done, you don’t have to go out and kill 900 whales just to find out what whales are about.

    "We probably know more about the whales than what the Japanese do, just by interacting with them."