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Potential jailing not as scary as threat of Maules Creek mine

Date January 24, 2013 Category Opinion 75 reading now

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Jonathan Moylan

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Jonathan Moylan…’Most people would have given up and rolled over by now.’ Photo: Peter Lorimer

Over the past month, there has been a great deal of talk about why I – a young translator from Newcastle – would risk jail to expose ANZ’s investment in Whitehaven’s Maules Creek coal project. But a more important verdict is expected to be passed down next Thursday, when the federal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, is tipped to make a decision on the expansion of Idemitsu’s Boggabri coalmine and Whitehaven’s Maules Creek mine.

For the past few years, Maules Creek farmers have shown a great deal of courage in their attempts to prevent the biggest expansion of the coal industry in NSW. The increase in deadly coal dust, the draw down and potential contamination of the aquifer and loss of thousands of hectares of critically endangered forest threatens farmlands and animals such as koalas, not to mention people.

Rather than requiring the mine to rehabilitate the forest after 21 years, the state government has approved a plan that would leave a final void, or pit lake, that would drain the water table for 1000 years. Those are Whitehaven’s calculations, not mine.

The Iroquois people of North America survived by asking how people seven generations ahead would be affected by their actions – but here, hundreds of generations will be affected. The compromise offered by the Maules Creek community, underground mining, was dismissed out of hand by the industry and the Planning Department on the basis that it would not be as profitable.

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Most people would have given up and rolled over by now but the community has pushed on. Despite letters, research, submissions, meetings with ministers, rallies and direct action, they failed to receive the attention they deserved. Farmers have found that when a coal or gas company comes knocking on your door wanting to buy your land, you have little choice – if you refuse, the value of your property will plummet and the company can eventually resort to compulsory acquisition.

Over my lifetime, I have seen the world’s largest coal export port – my home town of Newcastle – expand rapidly, doubling its output in 15 years, with an accompanying increase in dust, asthma and respiratory illnesses. Current expansions would double coal exports again. It would be irresponsible and irrational for me to do nothing about this. The coal expansion in the Liverpool Plains will directly affect me and my home town.

I joined the Front Line Action on Coal blockade in Leard State Forest because I believed that the Maules Creek community deserves our support. We will curse ourselves in the future if we are too cowardly to meet the challenge of rapid coal mining expansion with the response it requires today. Clicking ”like” on Facebook will not be enough to save our health, forests, farmlands and climate.

The NSW approval for the Maules Creek mine was given by an unelected committee, the Planning Assessment Commission, which failed to assess cumulative impacts as required by the Director-General of Planning. A convoluted process initiated by the O’Farrell government prevents mine approvals from being challenged on their merits in court. Cut off from a democratic remedy, it is little wonder that communities across NSW and Queensland are standing in front of bulldozers and chaining themselves to gates. And sometimes, as we saw in Felton, Queensland, this month, the community wins.

Whitehaven is a company with political influence that small communities can hardly match. The chairman, Mark Vaile, is a former deputy prime minister and former leader of the Nationals. The main lobbyist, Liam Bathgate, is Barry O’Farrell’s former chief of staff and ex-general secretary of the Nationals.

The industry as a whole, which employs less than 2 per cent of the population and directly affects larger industries such as agriculture, tourism and manufacturing, has shown its willingness to use its clout to oust the prime minister (remember what happened to Kevin Rudd during the mining tax debacle), silence its opponents and impose its preferred policies whenever its interests are under threat.

This conflict transcends politics and has brought together people from all walks of life. Last week’s heatwaves and bushfires have thrown light on a greater threat. Allowing a massive expansion of the coal and gas industries when we need to invest in renewable energy means we are playing dangerous experiments with the Earth’s natural systems, which we do not fully understand.

We are living in a dream world if we think that politicians and the business world are going to sort out the problem of coal expansion on their own. History shows us that when power relations are unevenly matched, change always comes from below. Every right we have has come from ordinary people doing extraordinary things and the time to act is rapidly running out.

Life, water, health and climate are things you cannot put a price on. For Maules Creek, it is up to Burke to pass sentence. In terms of the bigger picture, it’s up to us.

Jonathan Moylan is a member of Front Line Action on Coal.

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Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/potential-jailing-not-as-scary-as-threat-of-maules-creek-mine-20130123-2d78s.html#ixzz2Ir08cipZ

By Katrina Bolton, ABCJanuary 24, 2013, 10:26 am

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New Labor recruit Nova Peris is being warned she faces a challenging situation, if she does not win over rank and file party members.

Ms Peris has been put forward by Labor’s national executive for top spot on the Northern Territory’s Senate ticket.

The move has sidelined both the sitting Senator Trish Crossin and Labor’s former deputy leader Marion Scrymgour, who had nominated for pre-selection.

Ms Scrymgour says people in the Territory branch are angry, but Nova Peris will need their support.

“At the end of the day, it’s not going to be the Prime Minister standing up here, handing out her how-to-vote cards,” she said.

“The people who are going to be handing out her how-to-vote cards are rank and file party members.”
The national executive’s final pre-selection decision will be made in the next week.

China and Australia top list of ‘carbon bomb’ projects

Greenpeace analysis shows 14 planned giant fossil fuel projects will increase global emissions by 20%
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Oliver Milman

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 January 2013 13.00 GMT

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The Shengli opencast coal mine in Xilin Hot, Inner Mongolia. China’s five north-western provinces aim to increase coal production by 620m tonnes by 2015. Photograph: Lu Guang/Greenpeace

China and Australia top a global list of planned oil, gas and coal projects that will act as “carbon bombs” and push the planet towards catastrophic climate change, a Greenpeace report warned on Tuesday.

The Point of No Return study, by consultancy firm Ecofys for Greenpeace, calculated that the 14 giant fossil fuel projects would produce 6.3 gigatonnes of CO2 a year in 2020 – as much as the entire United States emits annually.

The largest contributors will be China’s five north-western provinces, which aim to increase coal production by 620m tonnes by 2015, generating an additional 1.4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Australia’s burgeoning coal export industry, already the largest in the world, is in second place due to its potential growth to 408m tonnes of shipped resource a year by 2025, resulting in an annual 760m tonnes of CO2.

Meanwhile, controversial exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic could release 520m tonnes of CO2 a year, with further major emissions set to flow from other new fossil fuel frontiers, such as tar sands oil in Canada and shale gas in the US.

The Greenpeace report states that these 14 “carbon bomb” projects will increase global emissions by 20% and eat up nearly one-third of the carbon budget that the International Energy Agency says can’t be breached if warming is to be kept below 2C, considered the threshold for dangerous climate change.

The analysis suggests that there is a 75% chance of keeping emissions below the 2C target if all 14 projects – which are at varying stages of planning and approval – are cancelled, with emissions peaking in 2015 before falling by 5% annually.

“If these projects aren’t wound back, we’re looking at an extra 300bn tonnes of CO2 by 2050, which will make it very difficult to meet the 2C target,” said Georgina Woods, lead campaigner for Greenpeace Australia.

“The fossil fuel industry is diversifying and finding new ways to extract resources, often in toxic and dangerous ways.”

“This is a last-ditch push by these companies to entrench themselves in a changing energy market. Countries which have agreed [at UN climate talks] that the 2C tipping point can’t be passed should not allow these projects to go ahead.”

The report comes at a time when China and Australia, the countries set to oversee the two largest CO2 escalations, have been forced to contemplate the potential downsides of major fossil fuel exploitation. Beijing has experienced unprecedented air pollution blamed on industrial output and Australia is suffering a record-breaking heatwave which has been linked to climate change.

Last year, projects such as those on Greenpeace’s list were labelled “sub-prime” assets posing a systemic risk to economic stability by a group of high-profile investors, politicians and scientists.

The group warned Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King that efforts to keep the world below 2C of warming will demolish the value of carbon-heavy assets listed in the City of London, creating a “carbon bubble” that will impact institutional investors and pension funds.

BREAKING NEWS Wednesday, January 23, 2013 1:42 PM EST
House Approves Three-Month Debt Limit Extension
Avoiding an economic showdown with President Obama, the House on Wednesday passed legislation to suspend the nation’s statutory borrowing limit for three months, without including the dollar-for-dollar spending cuts that Republicans once insisted would have to be part of any debt limit bill.
The measure, however, did include a provision that docks the pay of lawmakers if one of the chambers of Congress fails to pass a budget blueprint by April 15. That provision provided House Republicans with a rationale for giving in on the debt ceiling, at least temporarily.
“It’s real simple: no budget, no pay,” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said before the measure passed by 285 to 144. More than enough Democrats joined Republicans to make up for more than 30 Republican defections.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/us/politics/house-passes-3-month-extension-of-debt-limit.html?emc=na

Europe ‘has failed to learn from environmental disasters’

Report says thousands of lives could have been saved and damage to ecosystems avoided if early warnings heeded
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John Vidal

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 January 2013 06.00 GMT

The remains of Chernobyl nuclear power plant reactor number four. Europe has failed to learn the lessons from many environmental and health disasters like Chernobyl, the report warns. Photograph: Igor Kostin/Corbis

Europe has failed to learn the lessons from many environmental and health disasters like Chernobyl, leaded petrol and DDT insecticides, and is now ignoring warnings about bee deaths, GM food and nanotechnology, according to an 800-page report by the European Environment Agency.

Thousands of lives could have been saved and extensive damage to ecosystems avoided if the “precautionary principle” had been applied on the basis of early warnings, say the authors of the 2013 Late Lessons from Early warnings report published on Wednesday.

They accuse industry of working to corrupt or undermine regulation by spinning and manipulating research and applying pressure on governments for financial benefit. “[It has] deliberately recruited reputable scientists, media experts and politicians to call on if their products were linked to possible hazards. Manufacturing doubt, disregarding scientific evidence of risks and claiming over-regulation appear to be a deliberate strategy for some industry groups and think tanks to undermine precautionary decision-making.”

The peer-reviewed study, which is aimed to improve understanding of scientific information, looks at 18 areas including radiation from mobile phones, birth control pills in the aquatic environment, and invasive species. It found that governments often introduced laws much too late to prevent deaths and massive financial costs, but were highly likely to ignore scientific warnings and resist any regulation. The authors found more than 80 cases where no regulation was introduced when it later turned out that the risk from a technology or chemical was real, or still unproven.

Nuclear power

The study says the Fukushima disaster in 2011 may have released twice as much radiation as the Japanese government admitted. The emissions of radioactive caesium-137 from Fukushima are said to have started earlier than the authorities have claimed, to have lasted longer, and to have spread over a wider area of land than previously believed.

The authors say that it is far too early to make any responsible estimate of the potential health impact of the Fukushima disaster.

The report reopens the controversy between pro- and anti- nuclear power advocates about the health damage from in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While the World Health Organisation has claimed that only 28 people died and there could be a possible 4,000 additional cancer deaths , the EU study states that the numbers of deaths could range from “at least 17,000 to 68,000 over 50 years”.

In a sharp rebuke to pro-nuclear advocates who have argued that the accident produced very few extra cancers, it argues that it is wrong to focus solely on cancer as an outcome of Chernobyl. “Post-Chernobyl non-cancer impact may be very great, including immunological disorders, and cardiovascular disease – especially among the young,” it says.

Reactor accidents are said to be by far the single largest risk now facing the nuclear industry. According to the study, the probability of a future major nuclear accident has increased 20-fold since Fukushima

An urgent re-appraisal of the way that nuclear power stations are assessed for safety is long overdue, says the study. “Whatever one’s view of the risks and benefits of nuclear energy, it is clear that the possibility of catastrophic accidents must be factored into the policy and regulatory decision-making process. Both the regulation of operating nuclear reactors and the design-base for any proposed reactor will need significant re-evaluation.”

Genetically modified food and crops

The report also says that GM crops provide no direct benefit to consumers, are over-hyped, not necessarily safe and are largely unsuitable for the great majority of the world’s farmers.

It argues that “top-down” GM companies cynically manipulate the international patent and subsidy systems to gain maximum returns. “Modifying genotypes and capturing them as [intellectual property] through plant variety protection and patents is a far easier means of capturing financial benefits than attempting to [innovate] with cover crops, rotation schedules and composting, farmer-initiated training and education and small scale marketing and credit programs,” it says.

The study compares the potential of high-input GM farming with that of low-tech “agro-ecological” methods increasingly employed by small farmers in developing countries, and argues that the risks of GM are downplayed and its benefits overplayed.

“Evidence is accumulating of inflated benefit claims and of adverse effects. The benefits that may have been overstated are the reduction in pesticide use, the reduced use of more toxic pesticides, higher yields and farmer income. The safety of GM crops is presumed when there is a lack of evidence of harm, as if this were equivalent to evidence of lack of harm, when it clearly is not. Hence many of the safety conclusions … are assumption-based, rather than evidence-based, reasoning.”

The study does not dismiss GM crops but says they have limited value as presently employed. Rather than being a widely used technolgy, GM is limited to very few countries and just 3% of the world’s farmland, says the report. “Despite more than 30 years of research and development and nearly 20 years of commercialisation of GM crops, surprisingly only two traits have been significant in the marketplace – herbicide tolerance and insecticide production. And they are grown at scale only in a small number of countries. Industry-derived figures report a large number of global hectares under GM cultivation, but when examined … indicate an uneven global commitment to GM crops.”

Bubbling Up Organics in an Ocean Vent Simulator

Jan. 22, 2013 — Fizzy ocean water and the alkaline fluid that bubbles up from deep ocean vents are coursing through a structure at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. that is reminiscent of the pillared Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz.

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Scientists with the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s JPL Icy Worlds team have built this series of glass tubes, thin barrels and valves with a laser and a detector system. The set-up mimics the conditions at hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth’s ocean and also detects compounds coming out of it. They want to see if sending these two liquids through a sample of rock that simulates ancient volcanic ocean crust can lead to the formation of simple organic molecules such as ethane and methane, and amino acids, biologically important organic molecules. Scientists have long considered these compounds the precursor ingredients for what later led to chains of RNA, DNA and microbes.

A group of researchers at JPL, including senior geologist Mike Russell, Icy Worlds Principal Investigator Isik Kanik, postdoctoral fellow Laurie Barge, graduate student Lauren White and visiting scholar Takazo Shibuya, have been testing this “origin of life” theory in a refrigerator-sized apparatus at an annex to the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL. The latest segment of the experiment will track the transformation of carbon molecules into the hydrocarbons methane and ethane. Scientists want to know where the carbon for the organic molecules originates.

“What we’re trying to do is to climb down and create the conditions for the very first steps to the beginning of life as we know it,” said Russell, who is leading the experiment. “That’s the hard part.” The experiment is a key component of the Icy Worlds project, which is managed at JPL for the NASA Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The project aims to learn more about potentially habitable environments such as Mars, as well as liquid water environments on icy bodies like Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa. “If this ocean experiment is successful, scientists would have a better handle on where to look for the building blocks of life on Earth and beyond, and what signatures we should be looking for of life and of habitable environments in the solar system,” said Kanik.

This experiment has its roots in a theory from Russell in 1989 that moderately warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean could have hatched life about 4 billion years ago. The ancient ocean at these vents contains carbon dioxide, which provides the supply of carbon that could be reassembled into organic molecules. In 2000, such a vent was discovered at the bottom of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The vent later showed signs of generating simple organic molecules.

The scientists have tagged isotopes of carbon dioxide and dissolved them in briny ocean-like water, creating a fizzy sample that would probably taste like salty soda. They made an alkaline solution by dissolving sodium hydroxide in water to simulate the fluids coming out of these kinds of hydrothermal vents. Scientists will alternately send the two solutions through a thin barrel of iron-magnesium-silica-volcanic-type rock that was synthesized by Shibuya, so it doesn’t have any of the existing life that would be found in actual ocean crust samples. A tunable diode laser — a twin of one presently operating on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover — is used to search for methane, ethane and other volatiles in the solution that flows out.

The experiment runs as close a simulation to the conditions of these hydrothermal vents as is feasible in a lab setting — at 100 times the pressure of Earth’s surface and at about 90 degrees Celsius (about 200 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists are alternating the fluid flows to simulate the circulation at the ocean floor.

Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is a partnership between NASA, 15 U.S. teams, and six international consortia. NAI’s goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research, train a new generation of astrobiology researchers, and share the excitement of astrobiology with learners of all ages. The NAI is part of NASA’s Astrobiology program, which supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere. For more information, visit http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/.

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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