Stop Adani Day of Action – SA – Sat 7 Oct

Join AYCC and CLEAN and 350.org

On October 7th, Australia will see the BIGGEST ever Day of Action to#StopAdani! The federal government is currently considering giving a $1billion loan of taxpayer money to the Adani company’s dangerous coal mine. This project would destroy the Great Barrier Reef and wreck the climate, and does not have the consent of the Wangan & Jagalingou people, the traditional owners of the land.

In Adelaide, we’re hosting a community gathering where South Australians will come together to publicly show that we want the government to step up and rule out funding Adani.
We will meet on Henley beach, where students and community members will have created a stunning art installation, bringing the Great Barrier Reef rightto our own shores. This family friendly event will involve face-painting, kites and an opportunity to show the media how much the Australian community wants to #StopAdani

WHO: Everyone fired up to #StopAdani – no matter where you’re from!

WHAT: Art installation, face-painting, kites, a huge media photo opportunity

BRING: Friends, family, signs, sun protection

WEAR: Red – the #StopAdani colour!

WHEN: Saturday 7th October, 12-1pm

WHERE: Henley Beach Jetty, Seaview Rd, Henley Beach SA, 5022 (we will meet near the jetty- look for red shirts and stop adani signs!)

Please share the Facebook Event

RALLY! Don’t Dump on SA – call for organising group members

YES! We’re still against a Nuclear Waste Dump and we want to demonstrate that there is a large section of the community, people from all walks of life, who still care about this issue.

Are you interested in contributing to the work of putting on a  ‘no dump’ rally? Regular fortnightly meetings for this group will commence this Monday 27th September at 5:30-7pm at The Joinery.

Westgate Tunnel hearings nothing but concerns

Since I started as the FoE & PTNT Sustainable Cities campaigner I have been continually shocked as I learn more about the Transurban $5.5 billion mega-toll road proposed for Melbourne’s West.

What started as a much needed proposal to get noisy, poisonous trucks off the residential streets of Melbourne’s inner West has now morphed into a crazy plan to lock the West into a car dependent future. Titled a tunnel, it actually consists of a 12-lane toll way, short tunnel, 3 giant bridges across the Maribyrnong River, then an 18-lane double-decker road leading to spaghetti interchanges and flyovers.

For the last few weeks, I have joined concerned residents from the west at the environmental effects (EES) hearings of the project.

Here, with the lawyers and the bureaucrats, ordinary citizens are trying to digest the 10,000 pages of environmental effects information in an insultingly short time. Many of the representatives are volunteers – residents and community groups that don’t have dedicated employees or professional experts to untangle the volume of information within the documents.

As Rosa McKenna from Better West – Spotswood South Kingsville Residents Group says “the government and Transurban are trying to push this project though, but we know it is wrong for so many reasons: shifting truck traffic onto other inner west streets in Hobsons Bay, with the health and safety implications, and locking us into decades more of road based infrastructure”.

Underground Coal Gasification too costly and too unreliable

This week The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) 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.

“Efforts to gasify coal for power generation have been major failures, technologically and financially,” writes David Schlissel, the author of the report and IEEFA’s director of Resource Planning Analysis. “Both Kemper and Edwardsport have been economic disasters for consumers and investors alike, and a number of important and painful lessons have emerged from Kemper and Edwardsport.”

To Christians arguing ‘no’ on marriage equality: the Bible is not decisive

Just in case you were wondering about claims of biblical support:

“We need to put all this in perspective. These are six verses out of more than 31,000 verses or roughly 0.016% of the text. In contrast, the Bible contains more than 2,000 verses about money (and related issues of greed, wealth, loans, and property), and more than 100 specifically on one’s obligation to care for widows.

In other words, monitoring and proscribing human (homo)sexual activity is not a particular concern of the Bible when compared to the overarching demand for justice, economic equality, and the fair treatment of foreigners and strangers. For certain Christian groups to make this the decisive Christian issue is simply a misreading of biblical values.”
— Robyn J Whitaker, Lecturer in Biblical Studies, after analysing verses in the bible dealing with sex, writing in the conversation about the same sex marriage issue.