If you reckon Donald Horne was wrong when, in The Lucky Country, he described Australians as being run by second-rate people who share it’s luck, think about our gas policies and weep. That we keep delivering the election results we do suggests that we are second-rate people too. Successive governments in thrall to the fossil fools have betrayed, and continue to betray, our interests.
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From: Maelor Himbury <M.Himbury@acfonline.org.au>
Date: 3 June 2024 at 8:59:51 AM GMT+10
To: Undisclosed recipients:;
Subject: Daily Links Jun 3
Date: 3 June 2024 at 8:59:51 AM GMT+10
To: Undisclosed recipients:;
Subject: Daily Links Jun 3
Post of the Day
Frank Jotzo et al
To support its climate agenda, the Albanese government is building new institutions. One of the most important will be the Net Zero Economy Authority. The proposed laws to create this authority are currently before the Senate.
On This Day
Ecological Observance
Climate Change
With elections affecting half the world’s population this year, campaigners offer their views on the chances of real change
On first day of predicted intense Atlantic hurricane season, Nature Conservancy urges action and warns against misinformation
Negative scientific and press reports on the efficacy of carbon credit projects has led to a ‘direct pullback in buyer investment’
Governments attending UN climate talks in Bonn from June 3 to June 13, 2024, should push for rights-respecting and ambitious climate action, Human Rights Watch said today.
Chris Uhlmann
To the zealots, the questioning of renewables policy has become evidence of the crime of climate change denial itself.
Liz Hanna
Delhi is reeling from the most extreme heatwave India has ever seen. While the record-breaking maximum recorded temperature of 52.9°C has been called into question by India’s Meteorological Department, it’s entirely possible. The city has been sweltering, with top temperatures ranging from 45.2°C to 49.1°C, at the limit of human endurance.
National
The program developed by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology allows farmers to better understand the risks of the climate crisis, study found
Across Australia, huge numbers of consumers are slowly waking up to the presence of mysterious new power charges on their bills.
The fossils of prehistoric megafauna, which have been perfectly preserved for hundreds of thousands of years, give scientists an insight into how climate change affects species.
Australia’s wind “drought” broken in spectacular style by a new record output. But modelling shows scaled up renewables would still have met most demand.
Joëlle Gergis
In a new Quarterly Essay, Joëlle Gergis says that while Rome wasn’t built in a day, the Albanese government’s lack of action on climate change does not reflect the urgency of the crisis
Melanie Davern et al
Less than 1% of the 12 million Australians who travelled to work on Census Day in 2021 rode a bicycle to get there.
Jennifer Koplin and Desalegn Markos Shifti
Vitamin D levels, sanitation, diet and migration patterns are all thought to play a role. But there are trials under way to develop new strategies to prevent food allergies
Clive Hamilton, George Wilkenfeld
Our net-zero efforts won’t cut it; we need a strategy that best serves us as the world heats up.
Jennifer Rayner
The dead cat strategy is a political move deployed at times of great desperation. You’re a party leader engaged in a policy argument you can’t win, where the facts and public opinion are against you.
Canberra Times editorial
Like many addictions, the one involving fashion – the urge to be constantly wearing something new – is hard to explain to those not in its grip.
Michael Lester and Michael Keating
Is Australia’s new industrial policy a way forward to a competitive, innovative, and sustainable future in which the benefits of new technologies such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence are widely shared throughout society? Or a reversion to past failed attempts to protect local industry, pick winners at taxpayers’ expense, lag in innovation and productivity
Mark Ogge
According to the Australian Government’s Future Gas Strategy, gas is “critical” to the nation’s economy.
Bianca Nogrady
The decision to extend the life of Eraring’s power station is a sign of desperation as ageing fossil fuel plants contribute to gaps in supply amid a shortage of renewables.
John Hewson
“One of Australia’s most frustrating failures as a nation has been a limited capacity to value-add. This country has the world’s third-largest population of sheep – behind China and India – but much of the Australian wool-clothing we wear is imported, such as men’s suits from Italy.”
Victoria
Jon Seeley says his ad campaign aims to ‘provide a sensible balance to the one-sided misinformation which the Victorian Energy Minister continues to promulgate’.
Major infrastructure projects have blown way over budget in the past six months, with figures showing they are costing taxpayers an extra $83.6m a day.
New South Wales
Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, a registered charity, has treated more than 7000 creatures since it opened in October 2020.
George Khouzame was responsible for the Condell Park house that collapsed. His wife was found guilty of a huge illegal land clearing. Now he’s being prosecuted in relation to dumping waste that includes asbestos.
EPA says proposal to keep Hunter Valley Operations mines going to 2050 would release almost 30m tonnes of CO2
The future of the second stage of the Parramatta Light Rail has been locked in with more than $2 billion to be tipped into it over the next five years.
Wendy Bacon
We want a circular economy but to be sustainable, it should not expose the public – including children – to unacceptable health risks
ACT
Consultants are being paid more than $170,000 to review the fledgling ACT Integrity Commission, including workplace issues faced by the agency.
Queensland
Numbers of the Australian native fish have grown from 1,000 to 5,000 in eight years, and Queensland has now declared its habitat a special wildlife reserve
It’s taken a decade and more than 100 documents submitted to the federal court for First Nations peoples to win native title determinations over a large stretch of Queensland.
Courier Mail editorial
Queenslanders have a once-in-a-generation chance to extend a vote of confidence in public transport
South Australia
In South Australia, parts of the Coorong’s coast are undergoing “incredible rates of change” due to climate change. What does that mean for more urbanised parts of our coast?
A rain garden and new multi-use paths will be constructed under a proposal to upgrade two popular reserves in Adelaide’s south.
Tasmania
Tasmanian logging protestor Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta is due in court on Monday. But as an Aboriginal ‘non-Australian citizen’, he doesn’t recognise its jurisdiction
The state’s wind rush – trumpeted as key to the national renewables transition – is falling flat, with no new wind farms in almost four years and claims of excessive red tape.
Northern Territory
The number of brush-tailed and burrowing bettongs surveyed at Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary in central Australia has nearly doubled since last year.
Western Australia
Aurora chasers in south-western WA may have caused irreversible damage to an ecological site at Lake Clifton hosting 2,000-year-old examples of the Earth’s earliest life forms.
One coal town transitioning to renewables says it has not been consulted about Coalition’s nuclear plans, and is not interested.
Sustainability
Approach replaces sugar with mashed pulp and husk of cocoa pod and uses less land and water
Engineers have helped design a new method to make hydrogen gas from water using only solar power and agricultural waste such as manure or husks.
Team utilizes advanced statistical techniques to project the future groundwater depletion risk.
According to a new study published in Biology of Reproduction, a popular class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids are likely harmful to the ovaries of mice and potentially other mammals.
Gabriel Moens and John McRobert
In the transition to so-called ‘clean energy’, vast areas of land are being devastated and sterilised, destroying natural habitat and good farmland, covered with devices that will be junk within one or two decades.
Peter Sainsbury
Australia’s emissions reductions have stalled just when we need to be ramping up ambition and action. Concrete’s emissions set to be high for decades.
Nature Conservation
A decision from Unesco on giving the peat-rich Flow Country the same standing as the Great Barrier Reef is just weeks away
Birds became Holly Merker’s wellness companions during the toughest period of her life, so she started a global movement of people seeking out the mindfulness benefits of the practice.
Antibiotics prevent snails from forming new memories by disrupting their gut microbiome — the community of beneficial bacteria found in their guts.
Research finds higher particulate pollution after water diverted to San Diego
Faster decomposition could exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions, threaten biodiversity
Paul Malone
Two major Malaysian logging companies that have devastated Borneo’s forests have been granted “Forest Carbon Research Permits” in the first step to enable them to log old-growth forests and claim carbon credits.
Maelor Himbury | Library Volunteer
Australian Conservation Foundation | www.acf.org.au
1800 223 669
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