In a nation that espouses freedom and democracy the statistics on recurring social problems are horrendous. This is America.   America gathers these statistics while many nations do not.  Also there are many parts of the world were the situation is worse. However, it is worth a moment’s contemplation on some of the harsh realities many people face.

• 27,000 Americans commit suicide.
• 5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.
• 26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
• 23,000 are murdered.
• 85,000 are wounded by firearms.
• 38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
• 13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
• 135,000 children take guns to school.
• 5,500,000 people are arrested for all offences [not including traffic violations].
• 125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
• 473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are non-smokers.
• 6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
• 5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
• 1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have ‘huffed’ toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
• 31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy users.
• 37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous. 2,000,000 non-hospitalised persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as ‘chemical straitjackets’.
• 5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
• 200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
• 600 to 1,000 are lobotomised, mostly women.
• 25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
• 6,800,000 turn to non-medical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counsellors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counselling in their lifetimes.
• 1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
• 2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
• 180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
• 14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
• 45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
• 1,800,000 sustain non-fatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
• 126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
• 2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
• 5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
• 30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukaemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
• 1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from white families.
• 150,000 children are reported missing.
• 50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. 
• 900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labour in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labour laws.
• 2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
• 700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
• 5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of whom suffer permanent work incapacity
•  Alcoholism is on the rise.
• 16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
• 160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
• 280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
• 255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the ‘deinstitutionalized’ are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
• 3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions. 2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome. 10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air we breathe. 40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
• 1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
• 1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
• 1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.

• 1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease.
• 950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control drugs for ‘hyperactivity’ every year–with side effects like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
• 4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.
• 4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000 children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
• 40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.
• 7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed show signs of stress and emotional depression.
• 6,000,000 are in ‘contingent’ jobs, or jobs structured to last only temporarily. About 60 percent of these would prefer permanent employment.
• 15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time ‘contract’ workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.
• 3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work.
• 80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of Labour as below a ‘comfortable adequacy’; 35,000,000 of these live below the poverty level.
• 12,000,000 of those at poverty’s rock bottom suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of the year.
• 2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in makeshift shelters.
• 160,000,000+ are members of households that are in debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities.[1]

 

 

 

 

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[1] [Parenti 2010].

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Well I’m proud to be a coal miner’s daughter I remember well the well where I drew water

the work we done was hard at night we’d sleep cause we were tired I never thought of ever leaving butcher holler
Well a lot of things have changed since way back then and its so good to be back home again

not much left but the floor nothing lives here anymore except the memories of a coal miner’s daughter

Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter Lyrics http://www.metrolyrics.com/coal-miners-daughter-lyrics-loretta-lynn.html

 

        Thousands of coal miners die each year, some from accidents many more die from coal related illnesses, pneumoconiosis [CWP] [sometimes called black lung disease], progressive massive fibrosis, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and accelerated loss of lung function[1].  Awareness of coal burning emissions and global warming has lifted, but coal causes considerable health and environmental damage before it is used for power generation. Fossil fuels are dirty and dangerous. Disturbance of coal in all its forms liberates toxic heavy metals, carcinogens and radioactive elements that spread mass contamination.  Open cut mining leads to wind-blown particles, which when uncontained can cause cancers and neurological diseases.  Coal is a very poisonous substance.   

 

      Coal is mined in 70 different countries. Amongst the worst offenders are the United States [US], Canada, China, New Zealand [NZ], Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom [UK] and Australia.

 

      Australia continues to have one of the highest rates of asthma per capita in the western world, affecting 14-16% of children and 10-12% of adults and areas like the New South Wales [NSW] Hunter Valley have some of the highest rates of asthma within Australia. 40 per cent of 9 to 15-years-olds in the region have suffered from asthma at some stage[2].  In the US there are currently about 42,000 underground coal miners at risk of contracting coal related illnesses. In the past ten years, over 10,000 American miners have died from CWP[3].   Australia’s records in relation to the health risks associated with coal are sketchy and tend to be lost in the correlation of other sectors, but significant health related clusters occur.   In the Hunter Valley town of Singleton five residents around a single block have been struck with brain tumours, but the reports of a cancer cluster due to coal have been played down[4].     However, there are well documented and historical examples of work-related cancer clusters in the medical literature. A notable example being   scrotal cancer among chimney sweeps in 18th century[5] and workers in the US who are exposed to the same heavy metals and chemicals contained in coal[6]. With the federal government’s determination to push ahead with major new coal projects across every state coal is set to become the new asbestos in Australia’s health related issues.

       Queensland intends doubling its coal exports by 2030 with an estimated 460 million tonnes of CO2 per annum into the atmosphere significantly adding to the loss of arable lands, protected species and poor health.   These projects will be accompanied by massive infrastructure for coal transportation and export. Newcastle in NSW is already home to the biggest coal exporting facility in the world.   Likewise, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales are all set for massive expansions in coal and coal related products.      

Peak Oil: Peak Everything!

     Cheap oil has gone.  We are reaching the peak in global oil and natural gas production.  The global static lifetime of conventional oil is approximately 40 years, natural gas 60 years[7].    Coal is the only fossil fuel in plentiful supply now, but coal, like all other fossil fuels is harmful to people and the planet.   

        Coal mining in Australia is controversial because the burning of   coal contributes to climate change, sea level rise and the other effects of global warming.   Victoria’s Hazlewood power facility is one of the dirtiest coal fired power stations in the industrialised world emitting around 17 millions tonnes of CO2 every year[8]. However, closing   Hazlewood power station and others like it might help cut emissions, but it will not save the planet from the many other hazardous processes involving coal.   Further, while saving the world from increasing carbon emissions is a must, who really stands to benefit?  De-commissioning coal fired power stations is undoubtedly a good move, replacing them with coal carbon sequestration [CCS], otherwise called clean coal; or other forms of fossil fuel is not a move for the environment.  There is nothing clean or green about gas, oil or coal.    

      In Australia coal is mined in every state and territory.  It is used to generate electricity and is exported. 75% of the coal mined in Australia is   mostly destined for eastern Asia.  Coal also provides about 85% of Australia’s electricity production.  In fiscal year 2008/09, 487 million tonnes of coal was mined, and 261 million tonnes exported. Australia is the world’s leading coal exporter[9]. The burning of coal produces 42.1% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, not counting export coal, based on 2004 GHG inventory[10].    The proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [CPRS] which followed the draft report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review put a price on carbon, but this was very dependent on cleaning up the coal industry, but you can’t clean-up a dirty dangerous industry.

The Carbon Capture and Storage [CCS] Solution.

      In 2008 and 2009 the buzz-phrase in Canberra was ‘carbon capture [sequestration] and storage’ [CCS] otherwise known as ‘clean coal’. In the context of peak oil and climate change clean coal was to become the basis of all the required fuels and fertilisers and it would reduce emissions. In October, 2008, the Victorian Government passed Australia’s first stand alone legislation enabling permanent onshore storage of C02s.  The Act came into effect in January 2010.  

      The coal sequestration process involves burning the coal and capturing the CO2s before they escape into the atmosphere, they are then stored in old mine holes or in aquifers.  CO2s can also be pumped into the cavities at high pressure to push the gas and oil out.  The cavity is then sealed for CO2 storage.  In Victoria the Gippsland and Otway Basins have been earmarked for storage   CCS is called a new technology, but it’s not new.

        In 2006 United States presidential candidate Al Gore came to Australia to promote his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a film about climate change.  The then Opposition Leader Kim Beazley attended the launch at Fox Studios in Sydney while several MPs watched a special screening at Parliament House in Canberra.  Mr. Gore was touring the world selling his message on the need to act against climate change.  He publicly condemned Australia and the United States as the only countries who had not signed the Kyoto protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions,and believed they should do more to protect the environment.    The then Australian Prime Minister John Howard was not convinced, he said, it would cost the nation jobs.  Not so, argued Al Gore if Australia adopted the clean coal technologies, which was mentioned right at the end of his movie. 

     When Kevin Rudd gained office he thought CCS was the best answer to capping emissions.   In 2009/10 the Australian Federal Government allocated $2.425 billion in its annual Budget towards industrial scale carbon capture and storage projects [CCS].  They also set up a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute to drive the dissemination of CCS technology around the world[11].  It appeared Kevin Rudd wanted Australia to be the centre of CCS and Gippsland to be its hub[12].    The prototype to be used was the Sleipner CO2 project in the North Sea, which had been injecting about 1 million tonnes of CO2 into a sea bed saline aquifer since 1996. It was a model that is held up by all governments as being safe, but seemingly the project was abandoned in 2008 because of an incomplete understanding of the geology of the site.  In May 2008 it was found to be leaking[13]. 

       Saline aquifers have been used for storage of chemical waste in a few cases. However, there is very little known about the risks associated with storing in aquifers and a lot depends on what is being stored in them and any potential contact with other elements.  In 1986 a large leakage of naturally sequestered carbon dioxide rose from Lake Nyos in Cameroon and asphyxiated 1,700 people[14]. While the carbon had been sequestered naturally, it raised concerns about the possible dangers involved in sequestering carbon and storing it in areas of salinity.  

     Al Gore’s  An Inconvenient Truth was nothing more than a sales pitch for   Al Gore’s corporation Generation Investment Management [GIM], which was set to make billions for its chief executives from the so called clean coal industries.   In fact, when all potential gains were made public Al Gore and his partner David Blood, [ex Goldman Sachs Assets Manager,] got dubbed with the label Blood and Gore.  Nonetheless, it was a nifty scheme described by the Newsbusters Org., this way:

• First, Gore sets up a company that will invest in other companies that will benefit from global warming alarmism

               ·  Second, Gore gets some Hollywood types to fund and produce a movie designed to scare the c-c-carbon out of the population

               ·  Third, Gore travels the world promoting this movie, while pushing the view that a cataclysm is imminent if the world doesn’t immediately act

 

 ·  Fourth, an adoring media falls for the con hook, line, and sinker. Rather than debunking the flaws in the theories, the media promote every word of it while advancing the concept that Gore’s views represent those of an overwhelming majority of scientists

 

• Fifth, scared governments and citizens across the globe invest in alternative energy programs driving up the shares of companies Gore’s group has already invested in

 

• Sixth, Gore and his cronies make billions as they laugh all the way to the bank at the stupidity of their fellow citizens[15]

 

    The scam completely undermined some of the real work done by genuine environment groups and added to the scepticism on climate change.  It also significantly contributed to the Australian government’s decision to expand coal mining putting whole communities at risk. 

 

The Key Players.

      Goldman Sachs and Enron were key players in the global financial crisis, but Enron was also a pioneer in the climate-change industry.  Almost two decades before President Barack Obama made ‘cap-and-trade’ for carbon emissions a desired policy, Enron had a natural-gas pipeline company and was a lucrative trader in energy commodities. Enron planned to make millions in a cap-and-trade program for emissions. What really got the whole plan going was the United States government’s Clean Air Act. After the legislation was passed Enron’s stock price rose and Enron became the major player in the United States government’s $20-billion a year emissions commodity market[16].

    Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as President and Vice-President in 1993 and Enron started lobbying to develop a trading system for carbon emissions.  They lobbied both the Clinton administration and Congress. Money from Enron-funded research found its way into political circles to advocate a looming global catastrophe if carbon   emissions were not capped[17].

 

       Enron then pushed the policies of some environmental groups to make them selves look legitimate.   Between 1994 and 1996, the Enron Foundation donated $1-million to the Nature Conservancy and its Climate Change Project, a leader in global warming reform.    Other entities associated with Enron donated $1.5-million to environmental groups seeking to cap emissions.    Enron’s Corporate Executive Kenneth Lay became a member of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development.  Following Kyoto Enron was able to improve its credentials with many ‘green’ groups including Greenpeace, WWF [World Wildlife Fund] and more.

     The same companies contributing to the CO2 emissions are also   advocates for solutions to climate change. Creating a problem and then fixing it replicates the boom-bust cycle with much to be made from the   recovery.  But what is really at stake here?    Not only did Goldman Sachs [and others] contribute to a global economic collapse, it appears they were party to the starvation of some of the world’s poorest people.  Goldman Sachs focused on reducing emissions by investing heavily in coal, wind and biofuels, but  developing world countries have claimed that biofuels have driven up the price of crops and created mass hunger. 

     At the end of 2006, we started to see a rise in food prices across the globe, hardest hit were the poorer nations.  ‘Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent…  200 million people, mostly children suffered malnutrition or starvation’. There were riots in more than 30 countries, then, by 2008, the prices just dropped back again. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions”.   Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the supply and demand for food itself.  After deregulation, food was subject to artificial markets – or market contracts based on future crops – otherwise known as derivatives.   It was the speculators who drove the food prices up until the collapse in 2008, when food prices in the developing world appeared to return to normal [18].  However, creating, so called, green energy has put the issue of food security back on the agenda, this time it’s not biofuels but fossil fuels.

Reducing the Carbon Footprint.

         On Thursday 21, Jan 2010  Energy Minister Peter Batchelor  rolled out details of a twenty-nine million dollar plan to cut Victoria’s carbon footprint with  a one million dollar study into retro-fitting Loy Yang Power Station with new carbon capture technology. But CEO Ian Nethercote admitted large scale reductions in emissions were still a long way off. “It’s not going to change things tomorrow, this is one that has got some long term activity associated with it,” said Loy Yang Power, CEO, Ian Nethercote[19].  It was an understatement.  Further, what the Minister didn’t tell the people was, never mind about the carbon footprint, Victoria has an urgent power problem.   

 Collapse at Victoria’s Yallourn Mine. 

       On 14^th November, 2007 there was a major collapse at the   Yallourn’s open cut coal mine, which lies in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland.  It undermined the facility’s full operation for three months and reduced the power station’s generation output by more than two thirds. Water from the Latrobe River breached the northern slopes of the mine, causing a major subsidence with six million cubic metres of material shifting 250 metres into the mine pit. It was five metres long and approximately 80 metres high.   It flooded the mine with approximately two gigalitres of water and collapsed an internal road.   The mining warden described the failure as ‘very large’[20].  Victoria’s major brown coal seam runs from Gippsland through to the Otways, but brown coal is very unstable.

       In 2009 the South Gippsland area experienced a number of earth tremors along the fault lines with one quake, measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale; it struck about 5km northwest of Korumburra in what was once a coal mining town. This quake was 17km underground and shook the 63-storey Rialto Towers in Melbourne. This was followed by a number of smaller tremors.   

       The Department of Primary Industries’ [DPI] investigated the Yallourn collapse and issued a Regulatory Impact Statement with a view to amending the Mineral Resources Regulations. In the statement they wrote

It is difficult to explicitly mandate safety outcomes to be achieved by regulation…The benefit society receives from the practice of mining is inseparable from the risks it creates…Brown coal in particular creates high risks…Collapse of land on which public infrastructure [i.e. road bridges, railway] exists resulting in deaths and injuries[21].

     The DPI gave Lake Concordia at Nachterstedt, Germany as its example of a coal related collapse. 

      On the 18^th July 2009, at Lake Concordia, three people were killed when several houses slid into a man made lake that was on the site of a former brown coal mine. Approximately a 350 metre stretch of shoreline and approximately one million cubic tonnes of soil collapsed. Further failures were expected to occur and residents were evacuated[22]. The DPI in its document on the Yallourn collapse appeared to allude to the possibility of further failures, and the difficulties in dealing with these failures via regulation.  

     It appears Melbourne’s power supply is at serious risk and the government has failed to bring CCS online.  They have turned now to gasification.  The problem here is you have to inject something [usually oxygen] into the coal seam at high pressure to release the gas, a process that can cause land collapse, but it’s said to create fewer emissions.

Pollution, Solution and CCS.

     For those who believe capping emission is just about saving the planet from global warming and drought, or helping the developing world’s poor, think again!    Capping emissions is about creating jobs, growth and reinventing capitalism.   Green industries will create green jobs.  But what is a green job?  How much of the clean green fossil fuels discourse is just spin!    The Australian Institute [TAI] report Green jobs: what are they and do we need them?, estimates that the importing of offset permits under the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [CPRS]  would have cost the creation of 114,000 jobs in the construction and maintenance of renewable energy[23].  TAI has also rightly noted that people engaged in the wind turbine industries are considered green, but does this make the steel and mining industries also green?  TAI noted that if one follows this logic   ‘people who clean up the environment can be defined as having green jobs’ If this is so, ‘BP’s oil spill off the gulf of Mexico will have been responsible for a massive increase in green-job creation in the US’[24].   It makes you wonder about going green.

 

Chris James

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1]International Agency for Research on Cancer  http://www.inchem.org/documents/iarc/vol68/coal.html Accessed 14th July, 2010

[2]Up to 40% of Hunter children have had asthma   http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/06/2892234.htm  Accessed 14^th July, 2010

[3] Coalworker’s pneumoconiosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker’s_pneumoconiosis Accessed 14th July, 2010

[4]Health Study Denied Despite Cancer Clusters. Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/health-study-denied-despite-cancer-cluster-20100411-s0w6.html  Accessed 14^th July, 2010

[5] A Chimney Sweep’s Job Is Not Easy, http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Nick-Messe-7582/Chicago-gutter-replacement-98296.php Accessed 14th July, 2010

[6]National Disease Clusters Alliance  http://clusteralliance.org/2008/05/04/eight-cancer-clusters-discovered-in-delaware/  Accessed 14^th July 2010

[7] Architecture 2030 Org.  http://www.architecture2030.org/current_situation/stop_coal.html   Accessed 14^th July 2010

[8] Climate Action Centre.Org in  Friends of the Earth Chain Reaction #107 November 2009 p17.

[9] Coal in Australia   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia Accessed 14th July 2010

[10] ibid

[11] Minerals Council of Australia [Victorian Branch]  Vision 2020. 2009:4-5.

[12] ibid

[13] Greenpeace   Sleipner CO2 project in the North Sea   http://static.greenpeace.org/int/pdf/081201BRUtsira.pdf  Accessed 14^th July 2010

[14]Lake Nyos  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos Accessed 14th July 2010

[15]Newsbusters Org.  http://newsbusters.org/node/11149  Accessed 2^nd July 2010

[16] National Post.Com 30^th May 2009. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/30/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx    Accessed 2^nd July 2010

[17] ibid

[18]How Goldman Sachs caused a silent mass murder http://www.alternet.org/story/147414/how_goldman_sachs_caused_a_%27silent_mass_murder%2C%27_gambling_on_starvation_in_the_developing_world?page=entire Accessed 14^th July2010

 

[19]Clean Coal Projects  http://www.wintv.com.au/gippsland/news/item/22261 Accessed 12th July 2010

[20] Department of Primary Industries  Regulatory Impact Statement Amendments to the Mineral Resources Development Regulations May 2010 p21.

[21] Ibid p32

[22]  Ibid p33

 

[23]TAI Green jobs what are they and do we need them?   Policy Brief No. 15

July 2010

  https://www.tai.org.au/index.php?q=node%2F19&pubid=766&act=display Accessed 14^th July 2010

[24]  TAI Under the Radar Dog Whistle Politics in Australia Josh Fear. Discussion Paper No. 96 Sept. 2007.  https://www.tai.org.au/index.php?q=node/19&pubid=427&act=display Accessed 14^th July 2010

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Published on Thursday, November 5, 2009 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

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DO YOU WANT TO KNOW IF YOU’RE EATING GM FOOD? If so, you only have until 20th November to ask the Food Labelling Review Panel to LABEL ALL GM FOOD. Even a short email will help: FoodLabellingReview@health.gov.au. Think about it… have you noticed any GM food labels? Currently although up to 70% of processed food contains GM ingredients (1) almost none legally require labelling. (2) Here are 3 things you might like to know about GM food: Doctors specialising in environmental medicine say there is a link between GM foods and illness (3). They state “several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption”. They include: allergy; gastrointestinal, liver and kidney changes; immune dysregulation; dysregulation of insulin and cholesterol response; accelerated ageing and reduced fertility. GM food is not independently tested – Our food regulators, FSANZ, do not test the food. They say “It is the responsibility of companies that have developed GM foods to demonstrate the safety of that food and to supply FSANZ with the raw data from scientific studies to prove this.” (4) FSANZ also expect “the developer ….. to monitor for existing and emerging risks that may be associated with its product and notify regulatory authorities whenever new information is uncovered.” (5) This is like asking tobacco companies to check that smoking is safe. There aren’t any GM crops with health benefits, high yields, salt or drought tolerance. Most crops are genetically modified either to create their own poisons to kill insects or to survive when sprayed with weedkiller. (6) WE NEED YOUR HELP!: At the moment, unless you eat organic, you don’t have much choice about GM foods, which are increasingly being used in our food in Australia. Please: Tell the Food Labelling Review Panel to LABEL ALL GM FOOD – currently oils, sugars and starches from GM crops; products from animals fed GM food; GM additives, processing aids and flavourings; and food from street vendors, takeaways and restaurants do not need to be labelled. If you want more information check out: Current GM labelling Standards (7) Eating in the dark – report on our food regulator Food Standards Australia New Zealand (8) Review Terms of Reference (9) If you are concerned about nanoparticles (tiny manufactured particles some of which have similarities to asbestos) in food ask for those to be labelled too. (10) Spread the word! – Forward on this email, ask your friends to visit this page of the Madge Website: www.madge.org.au/labelling-review-20112009.php or Twitter this link. Madge Website: www.madge.org.au Contact us: info@madge.org.au Follow Madge on Twitter Sign up to receive MADGE updates on food References http://www.agbioforum.org/v5n3/v5n3a06-phillips.htm http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/thecode/foodstandardscode/standard152foodprodu4248.cfm http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html American Academy of Environmental Medicine http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodmatters/gmfoods/index.cfm http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodmatters/gmfoods/frequentlyaskedquest3862.cfm http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodmatters/gmfoods/gmcurrentapplication1030.cfm http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/thecode/foodstandardscode/standard152foodprodu4248.cfm http://www.greenpeace.org/australia/resources/reports/GE/rep-eatindark-211008 http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/newsroom/mediareleases/mediareleases2009/23october2009jointcommuniqueaustraliaandnewzealandfoodregulationministerialcouncil/att2reviewoffoodlabe4490.cfm http://www.foe.org.au/nano-tech/media/news-items/front-page-news-feed-1/96-of-public-want-tests-on-potentially-toxic-food-additives-poll-says/?searchterm=None

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 2 Nov 2009

A Green Light For Guerilla Gardeners

By Sue Jackson

 Guerrilla gardens might not have ‘owners’ but they sure have defenders, as Yarra Council discovered when it tried to wipe the gardens out. Sue Jackson tells the story

At its regular monthly meeting in August, Melbourne’s Yarra Council won itself a green star for forward thinking. Instead of razing local unauthorised street gardens as it had threatened to shortly before the meeting, it did a complete about-face, voting unanimously to become a champion of such initiatives instead.

Yarra, like quite a few other municipalities, is increasingly becoming dotted with community-initiated gardens. These include registered, secure community gardens that councils approve and support, but there are also others — guerilla gardens located in places like planter boxes in the street or on abandoned public land, which are established without prior council approval. As their survival relies on councils turning a blind eye, the future of each individual garden of this type is always precarious.

Guerilla gardeners live with this knowledge, but tend to push it to the back of their minds. At least that had been the case for me and my fellow renegades at Windmill Foodgarden @ Tramstop 22 in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill — right up until the axe fell in early August. The story of what happened next — the spontaneous campaign which overturned a silly decision so successfully that enemies of guerrilla gardens are now its friends — might be useful to anyone else out there trying to bring change on this issue at a local level.

Our plot, established on an ex-nature strip next to a busy thoroughfare, had been flourishing for over a year. Locals regularly collected greens for their dinner and pulled weeds as they passed, the kitchen staff at the nearby Recreation pub fed the plants with their rinse water and neighbours organised working bees to keep the plot in shape.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that there are no security fences and the garden is open to all, it had never been vandalised. Instead it had developed into a small but beloved community hub, whose first birthday we had just celebrated in July. That day the guest of honour had been resplendent in violas, herbs, salad greens and veggies, with a stylish girdle of thigh-high fig branch fencing. Guests stood amidst the flapping flags in the icy winds, eating and drinking and talking food. But the birthday cake had barely been digested when out of the blue the directive arrived from the council.

We were told to either remove the garden ourselves within 30 days or council officers would pull it down. This notice, which was sent to all unauthorised street gardens in the City of Yarra, was ostensibly concerned about issues of “contamination” and “public risk”. It made no sense to us.

The creators of the Windmill Foodgarden were experienced food growers who knew what they were doing. One of their main motivations was the need for food security, and they put a lot of research, thought and effort into ensuring that their organic produce would always be in peak condition.

They used deep biodegradable trays for planting, which were dug into place and filled with certified clean soil. Since then the trays have regularly been topped up with compost. As an added security, only shallow-rooted plants are ever used, deliberately avoiding the risk of root interference with any pipes that might be laid beneath. The Council’s concern about contamination seemed misguided. As to risk, we were left guessing as to what they could have meant by that.

We wondered if there might have been concern over dangerous objects like syringes being tossed into the garden, but that had never happened. Besides, people always make a point of removing any rubbish at working bees and when they come to pick produce. And because the garden abuts the main road, only low-growing plants are used to make sure it doesn’t block visibility for motorists or pedestrians.

It was a no-brainer; and there was no way we were giving up our garden without a fight. But with less than a week until the council meeting, there was no time to lose.

The first step was to open up the lines of communication with the council, especially to reassure councilors that gardeners had taken measures to protect against contamination. Strategy-planning meetings were organised across the municipality — meetings to which councillors were invited. The town hall was blitzed with emails and phone calls and a petition was circulated.

When I received several prompt and conciliatory replies from councillors in response to my distressed protest email, I felt a twinge of guarded optimism. But the council’s original draconian stance was uppermost in our minds as we approached the meeting, and we were also anxious that only a handful of other protestors would turn up.

It was a thrill to find the council chamber packed. Clearly such a large public presence was exceptional, and extra chairs had to be brought in to accommodate the 60 or 70 gardeners attending. The council’s offer to bring forward the “Street Gardens” item on the agenda was the first gesture of good will — an attitude that was to characterise the whole meeting. All the participants who wanted to were given ample opportunity to speak to their submissions, and their wealth of experience was warmly acknowledged by the council. I was relieved and I must confess a bit disappointed that the battle we had expected was looking more and more unlikely to eventuate.

When the irrepressible Glenda Lindsay used her submission time to break into her calypso number “Eat de Street” and the councillors joined in the Mexican wave, it became obvious our prospects were looking good.

Soon after, the council conceded that only two “minor” complaints had been received about community gardens and there had been no reported cases of anyone becoming ill from eating street garden produce. Before we knew it, and with no opposition, the council had dropped its decision to destroy our gardens and instead voted unanimously to foster “creative gardening” across the municipality.

The audience went wild. No doubt this was partly due to the victory for our own individual gardens, but many of us were also thrilled by the whole experience of people power. With little lead time, a bunch of fired-up enthusiasts had managed to get the bureaucracy to do a complete about-turn, enabling us to save something precious to us. It doesn’t get better than that. And we can all sure do with some wins on the environment front.

As Rebecca Solnit, the inspiring San Francisco-based activist, concludes in her book Hope in the Dark: the Untold History of People Power, there is no point waiting for governments, be they local or otherwise, to initiate change.

She insists that it’s from the margins that new and radical ideas always emerge and get translated into action. And the margins are certainly where you’ll find guerilla gardeners. I’m sure Solnit would appreciate why we didn’t need our bikes and cars after the meeting — we all went home walking on air.

Although on occasion guerilla gardeners have received council support, this tends to be for individual gardens, especially famous ones like the Liz Christy Bowery Garden in New York, which was established way back in 1973. It is much more usual for local government to operate from a position of, at best, indifference, or at worst active opposition to unregistered street gardens.

Yarra council, by contrast, had the prescience to totally reverse its negative stance (with the help of some popular opposition to help them change their minds), and to come out in support not merely of a single garden but of guerilla gardens across the municipality.

I imagine it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to sign up for an Edible Street Gardens of Yarra walking tour. We can guarantee you a warm welcome at Windmill Foodgarden.

www.newmatilda.com

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PROTECT MELBOURNE’S WATER.  On November 1st, 2009, The state government’s logging agency, VicForests, will commence further logging in Melbournes water supply.  TAKE THE FRESHWATER CHALLENGE Setting the Stage Extract from Maude Barlow’s – Blue Covenant ; Imagine a world in twenty years in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic water services in the third world; or laws to protect source water and force industry and industrial agriculture to stop polluting and depleting water systems; or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversions which will have created huge new swathes of deserts. Desalination plants will ring the worlds coasts, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate controlled nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities, which will in turn sell it back to us at huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remaining uncontaminated parts of the planet, or sucked from clouds by corporate controlled machines, while the poor will die in increasing numbers from lack of water. The world is running out of available, clean freshwater at an exponentially dangerous rate just as the population is set to increase again. Three scenarios collude toward disaster: 1. The earth is running out of freshwater 2. People no longer have access to freshwater. By 2025 two thirds of the world’s population will face water scarcity. 3. A powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize every water opportunity. Buying, trading and draining. What does this mean for you? We live on the driest continent in the world. Our major rivers such as the Murray no longer reach the sea. Our government has known we are in water trouble for a long, long time but won’t break legal agreements that bind us to water loss. Their solutions such as desalination and pipelines will worsen climate change, ruin regional communities and damage ecosystems.  Since the 1890’s Victoria has protected its catchments against commercial timber exploitation in the understanding that intact catchments produce healthy, clean water. But in 1936 a deal was struck between Australian paper Mills and the Victorian Government to commence the commercial exploitation of our watersheds for pulp logs. This deal was sealed in a legislative agreement called the Wood Pulp Act. Today this act presides over the continued misuse of our watersheds. In the early nineties, a number of studies concluded that the economic and ecological values of our catchments providing water for communities are worth more intact than they are degraded or logged. The studies calculated population increase, risks and wood commodity rates and found that Melbournes catchments were not only producing the best water in the world, that the wood value was incomparable with water values on all fronts. But the governments ignored the findings again and again. The company that exploits our catchments for woodchips; VicForests, have run our watersheds wood values into debt almost every year since the commencement of their operations in 2004 – See Annual Report .  Any profits are marginal when compared to the unaccounted for hydrological and ecological debts remaining after logging. VicForests currently log catchments without paying royalty’s to the stakeholders (Victorian Taxpayers) which are worth the financial value of an average of $30 million per annum. Every year VicForests additionally receive more and more government grants to cover costs and risks. VicForests DO NOT PAY for the water they use to grow forests. They do not pay a licence right to log nor a royalty nor face litigation where a failure has been measured in their business practice such as the reduction of freshwater for 4 million Melburnians, coupe burns incinerating National Parks, replanting the wrong forests, opening the forests to feral animals or even contributing to the regional extinction of the critically, endangered Eastern Quoll.  Every year VicForests reduce the capacity of our watersheds to provide freshwater to Melbourne, selling the logs for as little as $8.50 per tonne under the Wood Pulp Act to Australian paper and then boast of its sustainability. The Victorian state of the forests report 2008 reveal that there is no data available for two thirds of the indicators designed to measure sustainable forest management. The head of Forests and Parks – Peter Appleford has stated that many of the indicators used to measure the sustainability of current forest management ‘would remain aspirational for the forseeable future’. But who really drives this? Australian Paper (Owned by Nippon Paper Group) :  This company has branded every sustainable claim they can on their paper. Currently imbued with the FSC stamp, Australian Paper’s (AP) Reflex brand reflects little of what the FSC hopes it can achieve in protecting social and environmental values. The bulk of the Reflex Paper brand is sourced from our water catchments. Australian Paper’s Maryvale Mill uses 20 billion litres to process the pulp, which is equal to a Maroondah dam every year or 3-6% of Melbourne’s domestic water usage. They don’t pay for the water used to grow their resource and eventually they pump dioxin- heavy water waste into the Bass straight.  This company buys wood at a legislated below market price, to the detriment of Melbourne’s water, taxpayers, plantation schemes, ecotourism, species survival and carbon storage. AP pays as little as $8.50 per tonne for wood trucked to the mill gate. The tax payer subsidises this whole process and the forests wear the debt perpetuating further deterioration in ecosystem health. Michael O’Connor CFMEU -ONE of the architects of current forestry policy , Mr O’Connor has been a prickly thorn in the side of ALP policy (but a boyfriend to our deputy leader) and strong arm in support of the Wood Pulp Agreement despite the fact that a pulplog driven logging program has dissolved the forest resource faster by emphasizing short rotation, low value wood supply over higher quality, larger sawlog, longer rotation. Mr O’Connor has pushed forests to be logged at a younger age for pulp logs to provide his power base; Australian Paper, resulting in more area to be logged to meet wood supply commitments and resulting in less future supply. The sawmills have paid the price with little or no ‘A’ grade forest left and very few locally owned mills surviving. In an excerpt from the Australian – on the Union, its politics and its voices: ‘Michael O’Connor is national secretary of the forestry and furnishing products division of the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union. He helped organise the loggers’ Parliament House blockade in 1995 over forest allocation and export-woodchip controls, which politically damaged prime minister Keating and, nearly a decade later, damaged aspirant Mark Latham on election eve. Yet O’Connor is now on the ALP national executive. The CFMEU’s 120,000 members bring it significant influence in preselecting Labor candidates in state and federal elections. The CFMEU supports Left politicians, but this description masks strong differences in world views among Left politicians.’ The seat of McMillan (LaTrobe Valley), home to Maryvale mill, is a marginal seat and home to Melbourne’s largest water supply – The Thomson Catchment. John Lenders (Treasurer): Charged with the management of VicForests, Lenders continues to do as his name suggests_ ‘Lenders’ the money on a non return basis to VicForests to log unsustainably, at no profit, so that the Japanese can make a profit for their shareholders on the sale of paper back to us that we subsidised initially. Premier Brumby: The man behind the bar. If Mr Brumby was serious about water, why would he trade our clean, freshwater for paper? Midway – You’ll be lucky to find anything on this company – but their major shareholder resides in a multi million dollar Toorak mansion. THE REAL COST OF A SHEET OF PAPER This summer, the Armstrong Catchment will be logged for pulplogs along with the high altitude wet rainforests of the Thomson catchment. These water and species rich mountain forests will be sold for woodchips to either Australian paper or be sold to Midway to be exported for woodchips.  Who Pays? Fire Affected Communities A business owner from Marysville said to me the other day that; “The forests of Marysville have come down on the back of log trucks faster than the walls of my home or business can be erected. I am no longer sure I want to reinvest” From February 8, the logistics for a massive salvage log of the catchments were incited and funded. The future tourism and sustainability of Marysville and other forest dependant towns like Healesville, Toolangi, Narbethong, Buxton, Kinglake and Warburton is being sacrificed to keep an artificially inflated business practice running for a hand full of cheaply paid bush jobs, some exorbitant city salaries and to keep a paper product like REFLEX on our shelves. Regrowth forests burn hotter than ecologically mature or undisturbed forests. Thinning forestry (now being conducted right across the Central Highlands) increases fuel loads and further exacerbate fire risk, a chance the Premier is willing to take to provide Australian paper with woodchips. Species Victoria’s faunal emblem; the Leadbeaters Possum, dependent on the loggable forests of Victoria, has been upgraded to critically endangered. 60% of Leadbeaters habitat resides in loggable forests. The Victorian governments State of the Forests Report reveals 23 forest dependent species are in real decline and 4 forest species are on the brink of extinction.  In summary, indicators are showing a MAJOR decline in forest dependant species. The Eastern Quoll has become extinct in forestry operation areas, where once they used to be so prolific they’d steal loggers lunches. Solution The Plantation sector, supported by investments made by Mums and Dads, needs to be harvested and sold. But because of the Wood Pulp ‘arrangement’, Australian Paper are buying wood two thirds cheaper than can be met by the plantation sector. This is because plantation forestry pays for EVERYTHING including land, water and risk. Brumby MUST  service this massive resource by providing train lines and transport subsidies in the same way they handed the money over to log our watersheds causing the breakdown in competition. And Australian Paper must demand it.  Pulpwood (woodchips) Sawnwood   Total Native Forest (2005)  1,252,759 m3 581,163   Plantation (projection 2010 – 2014)   1. Hardwood 5,715,000 73,000 2. Softwood 3,183,000 5,583,000   TOTAL  8,898,000  5,656,000   In Victoria by 2010, over 7 times more woodchips will be available in plantations, and almost 10 times more sawn timber available in plantations compared to native forests. Australian Government – Bureau of Rural Sciences, Australia’s Plantation Log Supply. Aug 2007. What can you do? Think twice before you buy REFLEX. You have the power as the consumer to send a message to Australian Paper that you don’t want their product if they continue to purchase wood from our watersheds. If your paper provider or place of work doesn’t stock an environmentally responsibly paper – write to their procurement officer or buyer and demand they stock a product that meets environmental standards: Here is a guide: http://www.wilderness.org.au/files/paper-brochure-email Companies like Mainstream Green sell enviro friendly papers. www.mainstreamgreen.com.au Write to these men and let them know your thoughts: Australian Paper’s CEO : jim.henneberry@australianpaper.com.au Write to the CFMEU : moconnor@cfmeuffpd.org.au  Mr John ‘Lenders’ our future: john.lenders@parliament.vic.gov.au  Take the Freshwater challenge: 16 Councils throughout Melbourne have committed to putting an end to catchment logging with. Lets get our catchments protected. Contact your council and ask them what they are doing to make freshwater our number one water. Ask your water provider how much of your water is ‘fresh’. Ask them what they think of logging in catchments. Let them know you value fresh water above manufactured water. Join us in the challenge to end the unsustainable and dangerous practice of catchment logging. Its time to stop the chop. Its in the interests of all of our futures, Sarah Rees Director, MyEnvironment.org.au

 

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 A global manifesto for a happier planet

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