Monthly Archive

Is there anything better than a beautiful ocean, pizza, wine, and good company?

Enough to make you forget for a few hours the disturbing reality that awaits you on your return.

Only 1 percent of the China’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union…

…[the] worst-case situation now looks wildly optimistic. Last year, China burned the energy equivalent of 2.7 billion tons of coal, three-quarters of what the experts had said would be the maximum required in 2020. To put it another way, China now seems likely to need as much energy in 2010 as it thought it would need in 2020 under the most pessimistic assumptions

from the IHT.

I’m swamped with bad news, overloaded by newspapers and websites from around the world. In the last few days I’ve read that the methane stored in the permafrost has lost its permanence, the forests of British Columbia are now in a serious decline, March was frighteningly hot (in a La Nin~a year), emissions in 2007 were stunningly high, and much much else of interest.

Sometimes it’s so important to just leave ‘the world’ - this horrible beast that we’re creating, behind. In the words of James Lovelock, “enjoy life while you can“.

I was going to write about Anzac Day, but Deborah has already written, better than I think I would have.

If we truly want to honour the dead, then our resolve must be to make it stop. No more deaths of young men and young women in battle. That is the memorial that the ANZACs deserve.

It is also the memorial that my great-grandparents deserve. Not everyone supported the Great War, and then the Second World War, or wars before or since. Some were very much opposed, and willing to wear the consequences.

Never again.

I thought Zoolander was a parody?

Evidently not.

Incidentally, the song background song is Sixteen Tons, by Merle Travis. The song is about the bondage system companies imposed on miners, a system that wasn’t broken until after decades of bitter fighting between unions and companies (backed by the strong and violent arm of the state and the law).

Join the Climate Contingent
To Stop the Sell Off of Public Energy in NSW

Join the Climate Contingent for No Coal
At the rally organised by Unions NSW outside the NSW ALP Conference
Saturday May 3 at 9.30am
Convention Centre, Darling Harbour, Sydney

Iemma and Costa are selling off our climate future – planning to hand 37% of NSW’s greenhouse gas emissions to the private sector.

Facing massive opposition from the community and environmentalists, workers and unions, and with 650 of 800 Delegates to the NSW ALP Conference poised to oppose privatisation, Costa has pledged to forge ahead regardless.

Allowing private, profit-driven corporations to control NSW’s biggest source of domestic greenhouse pollution would be an unmitigated disaster for the climate. Iemma’s plan is designed to encourage private corporations to build a new baseload power station, significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Iemma and Costa are misleading the community and workers on the real cost of the sell-off of our energy: selling off public control of our climate future.

The privatisation of electricity in Victoria saw electricity prices skyrocket to an all time high, hundreds of jobs sent offshore, and kept the world’s most polluting coal-fired power stations in operation – an experience echoed across the world.

The NSW coal-fired power stations up for sale are among the most polluting in the world - the Eraring power station emits over 20 million tons of CO2 each year. Privatisation of such stations will ensure that we continue down the coal-fired path of climate change.

Private electricity retailers would have a financial imperative to increase demand for electricity, increasing our state’s greenhouse pollution. This is the exact opposite of what needs to happen. We need a moratorium on coal-fired power stations, and we need to start phasing them out. Phasing out coal, and cutting unsustainable energy demand, will not be driven by profit-motivated companies. It requires strong government intervention.

Environmentalists support the union movement’s mobilisation to fight the privatisation plans. We agree the plan threatens the rights of working people across NSW, and our right to affordable electricity. It is a major setback to efforts for serious action on climate change.

Join us on Saturday May 3, to hold Costa and Iemma to account.

If you have ideas, input, or want to join us, please contact
Holly Creenaune and Beck Pearse at Friends of the Earth Sydney - holly.creenaune@foe.org.au / 0417 682 541
beck.pearse@gmail.com / 0405 105 101

http://www.stoptheselloff.org.au/

P.S. In February, Costa even said he didn’t care if he was expelled from the ALP for pushing privatisation. Let’s send off our sell-out Treasurer with the public party he deserves! We’ll have a giant farewell card, streamers, as well as coal costumes, huge banners and more!

Get out your diaries, and write in the Farewell Party for Coal-Crazy Costa. Hope to see you in the Climate Contingent on May 3 at 9.30am outside the Convention Centre, Darling Harbour.

Camp for Climate Action, 10-15th July 2008, Newcastle Australia.

For Further information, email maire@clear.net.nz

I rarely agree with editorials in the New Zealand Herald, and rarer still is my need to blog about it*. But a recent comment by Parekura Horomia suggesting that 20,000 New Zealand children go to school hungry every day because they’re trying to stay “trim” made me as angry as I’ve ever been with the current New Zealand Labour-Coalition Government**.

I expect a Labour Government to have priorities, and to ignore issues that are close to my heart when they are inconvenient for them. Addressing climate change? Taking a stand on foreign human rights issues? Those things aren’t the core business of the Labour Party. But neglecting poor children?

From the Herald editorial:

As subsequent reports revealed, recent surveys show half of Maori households are sometimes, or often, running out of food. One in five Maori families is sometimes or often using food banks. Forty per cent of Pacific children go to school without breakfast…

These figures aren’t abstract. Children without food have slower physical and mental development, are more vulnerable to illness, struggle in school, and equally importantly, are hungry . Food is a human right. In a country as rich as New Zealand, this is especially so.

This isn’t the only news item of its kind that has struck me in the last week. Of a similar nature was the Government’s move to online Lotto, with a limit of $150 per week. Lotteries are a tax on the gullible, those who are looking for the hope of better things, and the poor are often both.

Instead of viewing comments from the Greens and Maori Party (who raised this particular issue) as issues to be addressed, the Government’s response is all too often to defend the indefensible. While there are things that the Government has done that I am proud of, these would have happened with much less difficulty had the the Government not been beholden to a pair of reactionary support parties, racist and right-wing respectively.

At this stage I don’t care whether the Labour Party forms the next government. Michael Cullen asked this weekend whether they have “the right to lead [...] for a fourth term”.

Yes, the National Party is worse…

Cullen tells us

To win this year’s election we have to do just one thing: to make sure the people understand the difference between Labour and National.

Give me a break. Is it wrong to want more than simply centrist-not-the-National-Party-Government?

I don’t want greater social inclusion - I want full social inclusion, and this means food for every hungry child, working family or not. I don’t want “meeting our Kyoto obligations” - I want the emission cuts necessary to avoid disastrous climate change, and shutting down our coal industry.

At the moment the Labour Party is stalled, caught between progressive and managerialist elements, and sandwiched by their support parties. I don’t see them going anywhere substantial in the next three years. Perhaps three years in opposition will iron some humility into them, and allow them to refocus on truly substantial*** changes to the structure of New Zealand. On the other hand, give them three years and perhaps they’ll spend the entire time complaining about National, and when returned to power use undoing National’s changes as their agenda for the first term, and soft 3rd way managerialism thereafter.

Spare me a Labour Government. I want change.

*although the editorial lingers on the issue for a while, only to segue into attacking the Government for its coalition partners.

**Yes, I’m an anarchist, and talking about other people who make decisions for us creeps me out. But I don’t think anarchists should completely disengage from these institutions of power.

***Of course, I mean substantial by the standards of political parties, rather than anything truly radical. Radical changes can only be effected outside parliament, by building systems for us and by us. Asher talks about this, and I still haven’t blogged an adequate response.