All articles
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Cooking the climate: Wrecking the reef
Everything about the Galilee Basin is epic. Its name, its size and sparse beauty, the enormous amount of coal buried just under the soil and the scale of mining being proposed to dig it up. But eclipsing all of this are the epic consequences if this coal is dug up and burnt – and that…
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Mega mine, mega catastrophe
When Minister Burke described the environmental assessment of Gina Rinehart’s controversial Alpha Coal Project as “shambolic”, he wasn’t joking. But now he has given his own rubber stamp to the project, revealing the profound failure of the regulatory system in Australia. Blogpost by John Hepburn The project is big by global standards, with a 30…
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The Risk Of Cashing In On The Reef
Last Friday financial analysts across India opened their copy of the Financial Times and saw a full-page advertisement asking if they were going to “sink your profits on the Great Barrier Reef”. The ad was an investor alert suggesting the GVK/Gina Rinehart Alpha mine proposed for the Galilee Basin in Queensland may be a riskier…
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Standing up in a crowd
2012 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The book, perhaps for the first time, put a very public spotlight on the devastating impact of chemical pesticides on the environment, particularly the aerial spraying of DDT in agriculture. Blogpost by Ben Pearson, orginally posted on ABC Environment Carson’s book…
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Macken Sense: Jobs
When I was a kid in primary school we had a teacher who used to give every week a theme, like Book Week, or Family Week, Animal Week and of course Religious Martyr Week – it was a Catholic thing. If she were still around today she would have to have made this week Job…
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Macken Sense: Mark Twain
When Mark Twain reminded his readers that there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics, he was actually describing the joy of arranging his figures, an occupation that “beguiled” Twain. And why wouldn’t it? Twain was smart enough to know that numbers – and their arrangement – carried enormous power. In a…
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Macken sense: It’s time for Martin
If the Prime Minister is fair dinkum about creating a clean economy future and developing a diverse and robust economy that will carry us through the gloom following the boom she needs to move the Minister for Resources, Energy & Tourism, Martin Ferguson, out of his portfolio and separate the Energy and Tourism portfolios. Of…
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Meet Jarren, our awesome activist in Brissie
National Volunteers Week is on the 14 – 20 May. Greenpeace Australia Pacific is lucky to currently have 22 volunteers working in our Sydney, Suva and Port Moresby offices and the Sydney Warehouse, over 75 people working as Community Activists in their local neighbourhoods and a great team of Armchair Activists. We’d like to take…
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Macken sense: I got it totally wrong…
Let me be the first one to admit that I got it wrong – seriously wrong. In last week’s post I said that I was willing to bet my house on this prediction, “… over the next six months the State and Federal governments are going to be working hand-in-glove to eradicate as much environmental…
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Macken sense: I’m not psychic but…
The mining industry has a problem – farmland, the environment and the pesky Great Barrier Reef just keeps getting in the way of their vast new coal mines and mining infrastructure. Not for much longer. Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, told a National Energy Conference in Brisbane this week what the source of…