Blogs & Ecology

Gen Coel neighborhood of Heerlen, Image credit: France24, Remko Scheepens

We recently published a post about a mine heat project just beginning. (See:- Yellowknife To Re-Purpose Gold Mine For Heat Extraction.) Like, wind mills, it turns out, Holland is already on top of this idea,using it as a basis for community redevelopment.

"The "Mine Water Project" in the south-western Limburg province went into operation last month, heating some 350 homes and businesses in a newly built neighbourhood in Heerlen (pictured)."...

Talk about seeing light at the end of the tunnel! The Bush Administration still has a couple of months to wreak havoc on the environment -- and I don't doubt that they'll do just that -- but a decision yesterday in response to legal action by the Sierra Club gave me...well, hope....

Yesterday the Rudd Government demonstrated very clearly where its climate and energy priorities lie - not with the proven renewable energy solutions, but with the geosequestration pipe-dream that Al Gore has recently called "too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate".

As you can imagine, I am very excited about the election results. I completely agree with my colleague Cathy Duvall, the Sierra Club Political Director, who said that "'New Energy for America' trumped 'Drill, baby, drill'" and that "During his campaign, Barack Obama spoke of investing in clean energy to create jobs, secure energy independence, and fight global warming - and Americans clearly approved that message."

And now that we've celebrated the results, it's time to talk about what we will be doing during the new Obama Administration.

Risk Of Acid Rain In Europe

Writing for TreeHugger does bring some unpleasant surprises. Last year I was astounded to learn that the US State of Utah gets 93% of its electricity from coal burning power plants. (See Coal Released Mercury Ruins Fishing and Duck Hunting.) How could it be any worse? Poland and surrounding central European nations, it seems, have the record for extreme coal dependency.

Trust In The Speculator Class Eroded
We've all read about the world's financial system collapsing, putting livelihoods, corporations, and national economies at severe risk and completely changing the dynamic of the US Presidential election: all triggered by "derivatives" trading schemes enabled by the US Congress, with the concurrence of several US Presidents.

Cut to the carbon chase. The very people that caused the banking system melt down - promoting and utilizing unregulated systems - are salivating at getting their little trading fingers into the carbon cap and trade business. And that's a problem.

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the responses to the Treasury’s ETS modelling
released yesterday is how, all of a sudden, a pile of big coal’s
biggest fans are agreeing with us that coal with geosequestration isn’t
going to come cheap!

Malcolm Turnbull, for example, told the media yesterday
that “The cost of carbon capture and storage is probably the biggest
single assumption in this whole analysis… There is no full-blown
demonstration plant employing carbon capture and storage so estimates
of its costs are speculative.”

This is a speech I delivered to the Sydney Institute last night. You can also listen to it here [forthcoming].

Sydney Institute, October 27th 2008.

Green Politics, the Balance of Power and the Green New Deal.

Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about Green Politics, Balance of Power and the twin global meltdowns of climate and finance. There has never been a more critical time to be a Green and there has never been a time when the philosophy and experience of Green politics - based on forty years of environmental, social justice, peace and democracy campaigning - has been more important. The decisions that will be made in the next five years are crucial for the future of life on Earth.

So that was estimates.

One of the few advantages of being new to this job is appreciating it's strangeness with fresh eyes. Three times a year, while the Senate is in recess, an intriguing and largely overlooked ritual takes place in the airy committee rooms of Parliament House in Canberra. Senior public servants, heads of departments and a highly qualified army of advisers and minders converge for five days of cross-examination in front of the Senate's eight standing committees.

photo: Vattenfall

The coal industry wants to buy your love.

Having sponsored nearly every debate in the presidential primaries, the coal industry is stepping up its $40 million election advertising bombardment starting today with an ad blitz of the upcoming general election debates.

The Sierra Club's national coal campaign director, Bruce Nilles, just let me know that his team will be watching the debates like a hawk, keeping an eye out for "bogus coal moments" and ferreting out their attempts to spread misinformation.

This article by Christine Milne was published in New Matilda on 24 September

In one of those perfect ironies, Prime Minister Rudd's announcement of his $100 million push to make Australia the global coal hub last Friday came on the same day that yet another so-called "clean coal" project, Santos' Fairview operation in Queensland, was scrapped.

The Fairview collapse "was to do with getting the funding balance right", according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for "we want more money from governments", tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.