Clean Futures
Tell the Albanese government: it’s time for a national Energy Transition Authority!
Australia has traditionally relied on coal fired power stations to meet its energy needs. This is now rapidly changing, as renewable energy and storage becomes cheaper and older coal fired power stations become ever more expensive to run and less reliable.
Friends of the Earth has long argued for the need for a national Just Transition Authority
Now, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has issued a call for the Albanese government to establish an independent and properly resourced national Energy Transition Authority to manage an orderly and fair transition process for affected workers – including support for redeployment, skills and training, and secure job opportunities.
Friends of the Earth supports this call and encourages our members and supporters to sign the letter below, which will go to the prime minister Anthony Albanese.
You can find details on the ACTU proposal in their Secure Jobs for a Safer Climate report.
Tell the Albanese government: it’s time for a national Energy Transition Authority!
Send a letter
Tell the Government they should Dump the dump!
Email Decision Makers to Dump the Dump
The Federal Labor Government has inherited an abusive relationship from the Morrison Government. One where the Morrison Government was trying to impose its toxic nuclear waste onto the fertile lands of the Barngarla Traditional Owners and local farming community, without their consent. When the Traditional Owners spoke up, the government tried to silence them.
Now the Labor Government is facing a legal challenge, which if they choose to fight it, would undermine the Uluru Statement of the Heart and call into question the government’s commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
Instead, an inquiry should be initiated to advise on future options for radioactive waste management and to consider related matters such as the suitability of the National Radioactive Waste Management Act. The Act is viciously racist, and problematic in other ways, and needs to be repealed or heavily amended.
Urge the Labor decision makers to Dump the Dump and abandon the nuclear waste dump plans before this gets any more ugly.
Email Decision Makers here
The Workers on the Frontline of Climate Impacts
The Climate Impacts at Work report details that workers are already heavily impacted by climate change – from poorly ventilated kitchens, to accessible housing in heated-surburbia. Anna Langford writes for Chain Reaction #142.
In 2022, we’re already seeing how the impacts of the climate crisis are wreaking havoc on communities. And while a new band of tech billionaires are quick to make pronouncements about broad-sweeping fixes, tackling the climate crisis in a socially just way means putting workers’ rights at the core of solutions.
To ensure this happens, workers need to be a key part of the conversation about what solutions we will embrace to rapidly lower emissions and respond to the climate change impacts that are already locked in. But to open this conversation, we first need to ask the question: What does climate change look like for workers across Victoria?
In October 2021, Friends of the Earth launched the Climate Impacts at Work project with RMIT University and six Victorian unions. Its aim is to conduct pioneering research into the ways that climate impacts are already affecting workers in different industries.
While we may not be able to speak about every aspect of the climate crisis with the detail of those who study it, what we are equipped with are our own stories. With climate change already hitting us here and now, we can speak to it from experiences in our daily lives – like in our workplaces.
With this understanding, the Climate Impacts at Work survey has sought to draw out workers’ local knowledge of climate impacts, and gather their ideas for the climate solutions they want to see. The research will give a picture of how climate change on the ground looks different for transport workers compared with health workers, or for people in Northern Victoria compared with Gippsland or Melbourne.
Relief as ministers reset energy future
… Read more >>State and federal energy ministers were in a celebratory mood [last] Friday, hailing the most productive and consequential meeting that any of them can remember. And the relief felt throughout the industry was immense too. “It’s a complete reset,” said one industry leader. “It’s transformational,” said another.
The three big decisions taken at Friday’s lengthy meeting in Canberra reflect both the urgency to act and the frustration of a “lost decade” under the Coalition government, and they provide renewed hope that Australia’s green energy transition can, in fact, match the science rather than incumbent business plans.
Key among them […] is the decision to put environment and emissions reduction into the National Electricity Objective, more than two decades after it was dropped by the Howard government under pressure from the fossil fuel lobby.
This is a critically important move because it sweeps away the sham of the Coalition’s “technology neutral” approach – a complete nonsense if the goal is to cut emissions – and it will avoid a repeat of some of the frankly crazy decisions made by regulators and rule makers when the environment is ignored.
Federal energy minister Chris Bowen pointed to one of them on Sunday, the proposed replacement of two ageing diesel generators in Broken Hill with more diesel generators rather than storage, which he described as “bizarre, ridiculous …. silly and perverse.”
But the impacts went far beyond that and the lack on an environmental objective in key regulatory decisions hamstrung billion-dollar investments in transmission lines and other infrastructure.
“Finally they (the regulators and the rule makers) will accept the reality of climate …. so it is a big difference,” Bowen told the ABC Insiders program. “We’re sending a message to the world that we are open for investment, in renewables, in transmissions and storage.”