So what will Panama bring, with its natural themed meaning, to the next round of UN climate negotiations starting on Saturday?
READ MORESeptember, 2011
The worrying decline of science education
“When the end of the mining boom comes, where will Australia be?” asked Suzanne Cory, the president of the Australian Academy of Science, in a National Press Club address today slamming Australia’s lack of investment in science education.
READ MOREDavid Karoly: our planet has a fever — is geoengineering a safe treatment?
Professor David Karoly, climate scientist at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, writes: It is beyond reasonable doubt that the global climate has warmed over the last fifty years. Our climate is getting hotter — it is developing a fever. This is a symptom of the underlying cause. It also beyond reasonable [...]
READ MORESinking the Top End dams and food bowl plan
Andrew Campbell, director of the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods (RIEL) at Charles Darwin University, writes: Here we go again. The Coalition proposal to dam rivers in northern Australia to create a massive food bowl has been floated before, as have various schemes for harvesting water from what is perceived to be the over-watered [...]
READ MOREWielding power the Rinehart way
Graham Readfearn writes: It was one of those “drop your bacon sandwich at the audacity” kind of stories — the sort of revelation that shows what power and influence in a democracy really means. Australia’s wealthiest individual, Hancock Prospecting chairman Gina Rinehart, loaded up a couple of federal MPs onto her private jet and flew them [...]
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On the hunt for the mysterious Orange-bellied Parrot, Australia’s most endangered bird
Writer and birdwatcher Debbie Lustig writes: There’s one thing you can be sure of with critically endangered species: they’re bloody hard to find. Two Sundays ago, amid grim commemorations of 9/11, around 100 volunteers went about their own, solemn business in Birds Australia’s orange-bellied parrot survey. Across three states, we searched for this country’s most [...]
READ MORETaking the wind out of Baillieu’s clean energy credentials
Tom Dreyfus writes: Recently a series of reforms seriously diminished Victoria’s capacity to protect its natural environment and respond to the transitional challenge of cleaner energy production. As each one was announced, the signal to investors and manufacturers strengthened: Victoria will no longer support the renewable energy sector. So while the state’s major newspapers were [...]
READ MOREGreen groups fight everything but criticism against them
Throughout 2011, Australia’s best-funded environment organisations have been united in support of the Labor government’s push to establish a carbon price. Not everyone, it seems, thinks this is a good thing.
READ MOREIs brown coal really the planet’s saviour?
“Brown coal”, Mantle Mining company director Ian Kraemer told locals at a Bacchus Marsh public meeting, “has the ability to be the saviour of the planet”.
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