Old_Notes – Page 17 – Friends of the Earth Adelaide

ICAN wins Nobel peace Prize

roman October 20, 2017

Congratulations to ICAN, the group behind the recent treaty to ban nuclear weapons, for winning this year’s nobel peace prize.

ICAN Asia-Pacific director Tim Wright said the group was elated by the honour and hoped it would mount pressure on countries to join the movement to end the human destruction caused by nuclear weapons.

“We hope this will only boost our campaign and put pressure on countries who haven’t signed the treaty yet, including Australia,” he said.

“The Australian government, not only failed to participate in negotiations, but it actually tried very hard to stop the talks from taking place. We’re calling on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to change Australia’s opposition to the treaty and sign just as our neighbours in south-east Asia and the Pacific have done.”

“If there is any time to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons, the time is surely now. This is a very dangerous moment in time and there is a very real risk that the situation could spiral out of control. We need to act now before these weapons are ever used again.”

— comments by Tim Wright in The Age

Nuclear, Old_Notes, Weapons proliferation

Nuclear Power’s Deepening Crisis

roman October 20, 2017

More disastrous news for the nuclear power industry. In 2017 alone:
– clear signs of a major nuclear slow-down in China – the last remaining hope for the industry.
– the US nuclear power industry is in the middle of a full-blown crisis
– a seriously anti-nuclear government has been elected in South Korea
– Taiwan has reaffirmed a nuclear phase-out by 2025
– the South African nuclear power program was ruled illegal by the High Court and probably won’t be revived
– Switzerland voted in a referendum to phase out nuclear power (while all of Germany’s reactors will be closed by the end of 2022 and all of Belgium’s will be closed by the end of 2025).
– huge problems in the UK and France
– India’s nuclear power program is going nowhere and the government has implicitly acknowledged that plans for French EPR reactors and US AP1000 reactors will likely be shelved
– Japan’s nuclear power program remains in a miserable state
– Russia’s Rosatom has acknowledged that the pipeline for new reactors is fast drying up
Meanwhile, the growth of renewables has been spectacular and will grow even faster over the coming years. Renewables will be producing 3 times as much electricity as nuclear power by 2022.

Jim Green, FoE Australia’s anti-nuclear campaigner, goes into more detail in this recent article for online opinion.

Clean Futures, Old_Notes

New Report shows Underground Coal Gasification too costly and too unreliable

roman October 20, 2017

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) recently published a report describing how coal-to-gasification technology for electricity-generation purposes remains commercially unviable.

The report — “Using Coal Gasification to Generate Electricity: A Multibillion-Dollar Failure” —concludes that two long-running marquee American Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), projects, Duke Energy’s Edwardsport plant in Indiana and Southern Company’s Kemper plant in Mississippi, prove the case against such investments.

Read More

Clean Futures, Old_Notes

Civil society rejects GMOs at Food and Agriculture Organization meeting

roman October 20, 2017

Civil society representatives firmly rejected genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a means of addressing world food security at a recent Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Malaysia. The event was funded by the pro-GM US, Canadian and Australian Governments.

Civil society representatives from the Global South rejected the premise of the event that improved access to agricultural biotechnologies are needed to help defeat hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the Asia-Pacific region.

The focus of the discussion was supposed to be on sustainable food systems for small farmers – not on increasing yields to generate more money from small pieces of land. However, the majority of the supposed ‘solutions’ presented at the meeting were GMOs – including many new GM techniques still at proof of concept stage that have not been subject to any kind of safety assessment.

Attack on Environment groups

roman July 7, 2017

Cam Walker, FoE Australia writes:

The environment movement is under attack (again) and we need your help to see off the Federal government’s latest attempt to limit our work.

The long-running campaign kicked off by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and enthusiastically endorsed by conservative MPs, the right-wing media, and coal industry, is seeking to strip environmental groups of their tax deductible donation status that was. (Read history of the attacks here)

Tax deductible donations make up more than 90 percent of FoE Australia’s income.

If the government finally succeeds in removing our DGR status, it will be the end of Friends of the Earth in its current form. This will be equally true for any environmental group which has staff and engages in advocacy and protest.

The Australian Treasury has announced a review of Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status organisations, with environmental groups selected for extra special attention.

Wrapped up in a fairly benign looking ‘review’ of the management of charities are some long running items from the conservative’s agenda, in particular:

To limit the advocacy of environmental groups by forcing them to spend up 50 percent of their income on tree planting etc, and,
To ‘sanction’ or remove the tax status of groups that ‘promote’ illegal activity – and by this they mean protesting. There is even a bizarre recommendation that groups be punished even if ‘people not connected formally with organisation’ are engaged with illegal action like being arrested at a protest.

The right wing has tried this several times and each time with YOUR support we have staved off these ideologically driven attacks.

Environmentalism is much more than just planting trees — especially in the age of climate change and with the widely held understanding that our economic system that is driving the ecological destruction. … Read more >>

Old_Notes