EcoRadio

Author: admin

  • Aluminium companies want cheap Papuan power

    Alcoa, Rio Tinto show interest: US aluminium giant Alcoa and Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto are also believed to have shown interest in the project.

    Project would triple PNG capacity: The project would have the capacity to produce 1800 megawatts of electricity in a country with a current installed capacity of just 55OMW.

    30-year old plan: Plans for damming the Purari have been on the shelf for more than 30 years, but local company PNG Sustainable Energy has dusted off a 1974 feasibility study and expects to complete an initial proposal for the project by the end of the second quarter.

    Rusal smelters: Rusal, which is considering PNG as a site for a new aluminium smelter and whose Russian smelters are powered by hydro plants, met PNGSEL last week to discuss the project. The Russian smelter would account for the bulk of Purari’s generation, taking about 12,000-13,00OMW.

    Who is behind PNGSEL: PNGSEL is a joint venture between Australian engineering consultants Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation and the PNG Sustainable Development Program, a development trust that owns 52 per cent of PNG Ok Tedi copper and gold mine. Chaired by Australian academic Ross Garnaut, the trust was created by BHP in 2002 to own and manage its stake in Ok Tedi after it severed ties with the mine to absolve itself of river pollution.

    PNGSEL seeks partners before Govt application: Subject to feasibility, PNGSEL is now looking for joint-venture partners ahead of making any development application to the PNG Government.

    Dam ready by 2012: The dam would take about four years to build and, allowing for approvals and finance raising, could be in operation by mid-2012.

    The Australian, 23/1/2007, p.22

  • $6 billion is being put into Australia’s irrigation systems.

    Mr Turnbull says the new plan will make every drop of water count. "The most important thing ... is to properly manage [storages] on a uniform basis," he said.

    "Ensuring there is compliance, the water sharing plans across the basin so that they're consistent and that they are complied with, that we address over-allocation where it occurs.

    "We pump this very large sum of money, there's nearly $6 billion is going to go into making our irrigation systems the most efficient in the world.

    "If we want to maintain a big agricultural base in southern Australia, and do so in circumstances where we're going to have less rain and of course hotter temperatures so there will be even less runoff, in those circumstances you've got to use water as efficiently as you can, and this program will do that."

  • Whose money is it anyway?

    Mr Walker said Friends of the Earth had been contacted by many people who
    were outraged at the gall of the decision by Woolworths to donate a day’s
    trading profits to the Country Women’s Association. "Of course this money
    is a welcome contribution to rural communities, but we should not for a
    minute overlook the ongoing complicity of such chains in both rural
    poverty and environmental harm. This is pure spin on the supermarket’s
    part. If Woolworths were serious about the lives and land of farmers, it
    would change its corporate practices from top to bottom."
    Mr Walker noted that Australian farmers are frequently paid less than the
    cost of production for their goods. The demands and costs of supermarket
    production mean that few have the time or money to care properly for their
    land. Many are trapped in a cycle of debt, having invested large amounts
    to comply with their contracts with supermarkets. Half of all farms rely
    on off-farm incomes for household subsistence.
    Mr Walker cited interviews with Australian farmers, who have reported that
    their products are often returned because they don’t meet the excessively
    high cosmetic standards of Australian supermarkets – standards that can
    only be achieved by using pesticides, fertilisers and factory farming
    methods. He noted that these same methods consume huge quantities of
    water, considerably reduce biodiversity (in waterways as well as on the
    land), and ultimately impact on productivity. "Salinity, poor soil and
    OH&S hazards are just some of the costs to farmers of supermarket
    production," he said.
    In Australia and around the world, hundreds of small scale farmers leave
    their industry every year, driven out by low prices and erratic sale
    conditions directly attributable to the power of big supermarket chains. Here, farm numbers have fallen by 25% in 25 years.
    Friends of the Earth has widely distributed a flyer challenging the power
    of large supermarkets, and Mr Walker called on Australian shoppers to do
    their best for farmers here and overseas by shopping at markets, farmers
    markets, co-operatives and small retailers.

  • Iraq: The Genocide Option

    However, along with the Salvadoran option the U.S. military had also stepped up its own activities in one of a series of "surges," among them the assault on Fallujah in November 2004, and using the Fallujah model, with the application of massive firepower in Sunni-dominated areas, much of it from the air, moving from town to town, in an effort to kill Sunni resistance fighters and render their home bases unusable. Because of the lavish use of firepower and limited concern with Iraqi civilian casualties, this process is very costly to civilians in the area of attack. Civilians also suffer from the fact that the invading troops not only don’t speak their language, but become extra hostile as they suffer casualties from a resistance that lives among the local population. This results in greater ruthlessness and increasing numbers of cases of literal direct mass murder as in Haditha. [3]

    This is reminiscent of U.S. policy during the Vietnam war, where torture and multiple Haditha-type massacres, enormous firepower, napalm, B-52 bombing raids, and chemical warfare applied to jungles and peasant farms, ravaged the country, leaving much of it a wasteland, killing several million civilians, and leaving a heritage of traumatized, injured and chemically damaged people as well.

    It is important to understand that the most violent warfare, including My Lai and its many many look-alikes, as well as the use of napalm and dioxin-based herbicides, was applied in the southern part of the country, which the United States was allegedly "protecting" from an invasion from the north. The methods of warfare themselves demonstrated that the alleged protection and "saving" was a lie, but it should be recognized that the reason these horrors could be applied more lavishly in the south rather than the north is that the south was controlled by the U.S. occupation and its puppet government, so that, unlike North Vietnam, the terrible violence wrought against the southern peasantry could be relatively hidden and kept from public and international scrutiny.

    The U.S. attack on Vietnam may be termed the "Genocide Option," as the killing and destruction went far beyond anything that took place in El Salvador, and threatened the survival of the southern population. Southern Vietnam had its U.S.-organized death squads, with Operation Phoenix famously accounting for possibly 40,000 assassinations of NLF cadres and unknown other victims of this murder program.

    El Salvador also had impressive death squads, but couldn’t match the scope and intensity of the violence wrought by the United States on the distant peasant society, which brought into play all weapons in the U.S. high-tech arsenal short of the nuclear-many being tested against live experimental victims–used in enormous volume, without moral restraint (and with minimal protest from the "international community").

    By 1967 the level of violence had reached a point where Vietnam scholar Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity…is threatened with extinction..[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size." [4] In the south, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some 25 million acres of farmland and 12 million acres of forests. One and a half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and 800,000 orphans. The chemical defoliation operations were vast and their effects could take many generations to reverse, and they resulted in a further generation of malformed children (500,000 in one 1997 estimate). [5]

    This was a truly genocidal attack, both in volume and threat to viability and with its demand that the resistance surrender as the condition for termination of the assault. (In a marvel of transference, the oft-expressed U.S. position was that the refusal to surrender demonstrated a low Vietnamese valuation of Vietnamese life! In a further marvel of Western impudence, the Krstic decision by the NATO-organized Yugoslavia tribunal found that "genocide" had been committed by a NATO target group [Bosnian Serbs] because killings–which explicitly spared women and children–might have ended the viability of a single small town in Bosnia.)

    Another feature of the Vietnam War of relevance today is that all through its murderous course it was argued in the United States that it must go on in order to avoid a post-occupation "bloodbath"! The huge ongoing and genocidal bloodbath was needed to prevent a hypothetical one that never did materialize. [6]

    The genocide option threatens Iraq, where the United States is engaged in direct military action against another virtually defenceless population-in contrast with El Salvador where proxies did the dirty work. Military technology has advanced further, and the complete amorality of the Deciders and their willingness to kill without limit to achieve their goals or save face is clear. It is important for the Deciders that not too many U.S. service personnel be killed, as this has a definite negative effect on the national willingness to move forward to "victory" (or at least temporarily fending off acknowledging defeat). If U.S. casualties can be reduced by more intensive firepower, at the expense of greater Iraqi civilian casualties, that has been and will continue to be the route taken. Furthermore, U.S. pacification violence applied to Sunni-dominated towns is implemented out of sight of the mainstream media (although not completely hidden given the bravery of some non-imbedded Western journalists and Al Jazeera).

    The Bush "surge" is a desperation maneuver, and in a context of ever-stronger political objections to more U.S. personnel in Iraq and sensitivity to U.S. casualties, there is good reason to believe that the Bush answer will be even more intensive firepower in Baghdad and other cities and villages in which the insurgents mingle easily with the civilian population. Bush even warns U.S. citizens of more blood and gore "even if our new strategy works exactly as planned." Furthermore, partly via the use of the Salvadoran Option and partly by U.S. manipulation of sectarian conflict, [7] the invasion-occupation has produced a deadly civil war in which the Sunnis and Shiites engage in large-scale communal ethnic cleansing and killing, adding to the toll.

    There can be little doubt that the rate of civilian killing in Iraq is about to rise from something like the recent Lancet estimate of 655,000 to a larger figure. If "genocide" was committed in Bosnia, where recent establishment analysts concluded–embarrassingly, given the earlier institutionalized total of 250,000– that approximately 100,000 people died on all sides, including military personnel, [8] surely we have a case of genocide in Iraq just during the period 2003-2006. And Bush is about to give us more, with the Democrats and UN looking on but doing nothing to restrain the killing machine.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if democracy worked and a popular antiwar vote had some effect? And if the global double standard now in force was not so gross and the perpetrators responsible for this genocidal outburst could be brought before a real tribunal in the interest of real global justice before their next surge?

    Endnotes:

    1. Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "’The Salvadoran Option’," Newsweek, January 14, 2005.

    2. Quoted in Craig Murrary, "Civil War in Iraq: The Salvadoran Option and US/UK Policy," http://www.uruknet.org.uk/?s1=1&p=27587&s2=20.

    3. Tom Engelhardt, "Collateral Damage: the ‘Incident’ at Haditha" http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_060806O.shtml; Chris Floyd, "Lesson Plan" http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/06/02/120.html; Linda Heard, "Media and Tal Afar": http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/63044; Ghalil Hassan, "Iraq: A Criminal Process," Global Research, Nov. 27, 2005.

    4. Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

    5. Peter Waldman, "Body Counts: In Vietnam, the Agony of Birth Defects Calls an Old War to Mind," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 1970.

    6. Gareth Porter, "The Bloodbath We Created," http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1214-32.htm

    7. Ibid.

    8. See Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results," European Journal of Population, Vol. 21, No. 2-3, June, 2005, pp. 187-215, www.yugofile.co.uk/onlynow/EJP_all.zip . Also see the ongoing work of Mirsad Tokaca et al. at the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center, which produces month-by-month updates of the latest estimates for deaths attributable to the war on the webpage "The Status of Database by the Centers," http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus/Overview_of_jobs_according_to_%20centers.htmFear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni. The patience of the Shia is wearing very thin. But their leaders want them to consolidate their strength within the government after their election victory in January.

  • Generators put wish list for emissions

    John Boshier, Executive Director, National Generators’ Forum, set out the generators’ wish-list. It was for policy that:

    • places a price on greenhouse gas emissions, through a tax, an emission cap or an emissions trading regime should provide adequate compensation to existing asset holders who suffer loss of revenue or asset value;

    • provides consistent and efficient national greenhouse response programs are preferred over the existing mix of multiple federal and state based programs;

    • responds to future climate change impacts as a result of greenhouse gas emissions is a complex issue that will need to be accepted by the general public. The NGF supports activities to facilitate informed debate on the subject;

    • measures n a manner that does not impact on the efficient operation of the National Electricity Market;

    • lots consultation "NGF members are expert in developing and operating electricity generation plant in a least-cost manner and seek to use this expertise to contribute to the greenhouse policy debate with all stakeholders;

    • voluntary greenhouse gas abatement early action incorporated in greenhouse policy’;

    • no picking of "technology winners" but policy and regulatory frameworks support all zero and low emission technologies in order to achieve least-cost outcomes;

    •  priority on research, development and demonstration in order to accelerate the commercialisation and deployment of zero and low emission technologies in order to minimise future mitigation costs;

    • policy should be based on available technology in order to minimise costs.

    Contact: John Boshier, Executive Director, National Generators’ Forum, ph: (02) 6243 5120, fax: (02) 6243 5143, email: john.boshier@ngf.com.au website: http://www.ngf.com.au Reference: Submission from the National Generators’ Forum Limited on the Discussion Paper – Possible Design for a National Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme

    Erisk Net, 20/12/2006

  • A Three Minute Truth

    This Ministry of Sound video captures the pertinent points from the Incovenient Truth very nicely.

    Visit this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJTDSEPSfhk to send it to your friends.