Critical Times

Please Watch! New Video!

http://www.blip.tv/file/3946822

All the nuclear myths debunked in 30-minutes by Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear

In this compelling new 30-minute television interview, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear explodes the myths now being promulgated by those promoting nuclear power.

by Renfrey Clarke

Journalists at the ABC have come under strong pressure from the organisation’ s chairperson to alter their reporting of global warming, giving additional weight to the views of climate change deniers.

In a speech to 250 programmers, journalists and executives at the ABC’s Sydney headquarters on March 10, chairman Maurice Newman warned of “group-think” and “a collective censorious approach” in media reporting of climate change. The issue, he said, was one where “contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked.

by Renfrey Clarke

When a respected scientific journal carries a peer-reviewed article branding the key technology behind “clean coal” as “profoundly non-feasible” , you’d expect governments and coal corporations to react in some fashion.

After all, the proposed Waxman-Markey climate bill in the US reportedly promises “clean coal” a staggering US$60 billion in subsidies. Here in Australia, the Rudd government last year pledged to spend A$2.

by Renfrey Clarke

How to sum up the Liberal Party’s “direct action” scheme for global warming mitigation? Well, how about “a fraud wrapped in demagogy inside a delusion”?

The delusion is that the measures outlined in the scheme would represent a meaningful contribution by Australia to saving nature and humanity from climate change.

The demagogy lies in the decision by the Liberals to issue the policy even though many of them – if not most – remain unconvinced that global warming is even a problem. Opposition leader Tony Abbott assured a meeting in country Victoria last October that climate change was “absolute crap”.

by Renfrey Clarke

The target posed by James Hansen of stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 ppm is increasingly understood in conjunction with the need to keep cumulative emissions within a tight global “budget”. While the point at which budgeted emissions occur is not in theory crucial, in practice there is a need to ensure that emissions peak early and decline swiftly thereafter. Low or zero-emissions energy generating plant needs to be built out at an accelerated rate, with the time-frame seeming to exclude nuclear power.

Source: Vanguard

The fingerprints of US imperialism were all over the Copenhagen Conference, and the handwriting on the flimsy ‘Copenhagen Accord’ also matched that of the main environmental criminal.

Unwilling to accept any responsibility for its historic and current contributions to global climate warming, and determined to resist any restrictions or imposition of costs on its polluting industrial monopolies, US imperialism has, until recently, opposed any effective international action to deal with it. Unable to deny the science any longer, US imperialism was forced to participate in the UN process or lose all credibility.

Australia’s largest day of action on climate change

Saturday, 12 December, 11am

Victoria Square/Tarndanyangga to Rymill Park/Murwillaburka

Be a part of the biggest ever Walk Against Warming and join millions of Australians demanding action on climate change. Why is this year’s walk so important? It coincides with the critical United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where world leaders are gathering to decide what actions they will take for a safe climate. The Walk Against Warming is Australia’s contribution to the International Day of Action on Climate Change, as people gather en masse across the globe to have their voices heard.

by Renfrey Clarke

Climate change deniers, conservative politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists were all but incontinent with delight. Deluging the internet in mid-November were thousands of documents and private emails that had been exchanged over more than a decade by prominent climate scientists. The materials were posted anonymously after hackers penetrated the server of one of Britain’s main climate change research centres, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

by Renfrey Clarke

If the Weekend Australian devotes a whole broadsheet page to a proposed solution to global warming, the editors must want to inform the public on how best to combat climate change. Right?

Hardly. If the Weekend Australian cared about our climate, it wouldn’t draw its text from one of the strangest travesties of climate science ever to issue from a printing press.

Source: The ecosocialist

by Cam Walker

a community response to the recession – a Green ‘New Deal’ for Victoria?

This is a proposal for a collaborative and integrated response to the triple crunch of recession, climate change, and peak oil.

A recent poll (1) suggests that while Australians appreciate the bonuses they are getting from the federal government, they are not convinced that they are the way to find our way out of economic recession. Instead they believe that we should be investing in infrastructure.

by Renfrey Clarke

If combatting climate change is left up to the governments of the world’s wealthy nations, much of humanity is likely done for. That’s not the message that was supposed to emerge from the July summit meeting in Italy of leaders of the G8 group of countries – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US. But apply a little climate science, and such is the unmistakeable conclusion.

by Renfrey Clarke

From desert-fringe villages and Pacific atolls, global warming is predicted before long to set climate refugees on the move. But arguably, the first climate refugees to reach Australia’s major cities are arriving already. And the places from which they have come are not exotic – places like Mildura, Renmark and Griffith.

Source: Climate Emergency Network – South Australia

Dear Michelle and Barack,

We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the Earth that will be inherited by our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born.

Barack has spoken of ‘a planet in peril’ and noted that actions needed to stem climate change have other merits. However, the nature of the chosen actions will be of crucial importance.

Sharon beder
26 July 2008

Why do we put so much faith in the market to solve environmental problems? Why do we assume that increasing the cost of fossil fuel emissions will reduce their use rather than just increase everyone’s cost of living?

Petrol prices have doubled in the past few years, causing much pain to individual and company budgets. Yet petrol usage has not declined significantly. There has been no mass shift to public transport, no major decline in car sales, no flood of affordable hybrid and electric cars onto the market.

By Renfrey Clarke

Global warming, General Motors Corporation Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz argued to reporters in a closed-door meeting during January, was “a total crock of shit”.
Within hours the remark was on the internet, and spreading, as Lutz himself subsequently lamented, “like ragweed”.

By Renfrey Clarke

In May 2007, the federal ALP announced a target for greenhouse gas emission reductions which, if observed generally across the world’s major emitting countries, would give humanity virtually no chance of avoiding climate catastrophe.

Not surprisingly, Labor’s position – of calling for a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050, compared with 2000 levels – has met with sharp criticism from informed commentators. But this condemnation drew little publicity until February 21 this year, when Professor Ross Garnaut, charged by Labor with preparing recommendations for interim targets, issued a preliminary report calling for the 2050 target to be made much more stringent.

Al Gore brought 500,000 letters urging action on climate change
Former US Vice-President Al Gore made an emotional return to the US Congress to testify about global warming.
The winner of an Oscar for his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, told an overflow crowd that “our world faces a true planetary emergency”.

He said the US should freeze carbon dioxide emissions and push for a strong climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

NAIROBI: Australia ranks among the world’s worst countries in dealing with climate change, according to a report by environmentalists.
Australia lies 47th out of 56 industrialised or industrialising nations in an evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions and climate policy, said Germanwatch, a German environmental group. Last year it ranked 50th.

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent

AUSTRALIA has been identified by the Stern report as one of the most vulnerable countries in the developed world to the economic and social impacts of global warming.
While wealthy countries are better placed than poorer nations to cope with the massive changes to be wrought by climate change, that burden will not be spread evenly, the report warns, and Australia faces a tougher time than many northern nations.

The impacts will become more damaging from north to south, the report warns, citing more extreme weather changes, more severe bushfires, droughts and water shortages, damage to Australia’s tourism industry and the potential devastation of vast areas of farming.

Earth may be close to the warmest it has been in the last million years, especially in the part of the Pacific Ocean where potentially violent El Nino weather patterns are born.

James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, says this does not necessarily mean there will be more frequent El Ninos, which can disrupt normal weather around the world.

But he says it could well mean that these wild patterns will be stronger when they occur.