“It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimised by this manmade disaster are made whole”. These words of US President Obama on the ongoing catastrophe that is the Deepwater Horizon BP [...]

In 2007 the Labor Party was swept to power on a wave of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was in part based on their promise to take radical action on global warming – a promise that has gone unfulfilled.
The Rudd/Gillard government announced the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) with grand statements of leading the world. Rudd [...]

Located in the heart of the Latrobe Valley, Hazelwood power station supplies Victoria with up to 25% of its base load electricity. The plant remains the highest polluting power station in Australia, releasing 17 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. This is the equivalent of 1.4 million households!
Hazelwood first began operations in 1965 as [...]

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following the fatal explosion on the BP leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig has exceeded the Exxon Valdez catastrophe of 1989, when eleven million gallons of crude oil devastated the pristine Alaskan coastline.
A White House energy official described the Gulf of Mexico spill as the worst environmental disaster [...]

As the Copenhagen summit approached last December, Scientific American ran a striking cover story, A Plan for a Sustainable Future. This showed how wind, water and solar power could supply the entire world’s energy needs by 2030. (November 2009) Renewable energy is superabundant. Authors Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark Delucchi of the University [...]

SP Newsletter No.302
Scandals over the past few months have given rise to people’s concerns about the reliability of scientific evidence on climate change. Recent polls have also suggested that concern about the threat of global warming is weakening in Australia.
In November it was alleged that a series of hacked emails from the Climate Research [...]

SP Newsletter No.296
Recent opinion polls have shown that support for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) remains at just over 70%, despite 70% of respondents admitting they “don’t know enough” about Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).
This coincides with 76% of Australians being ‘concerned’ about climate change, with over half the population seeing it as a [...]

“a historic failure that will live in infamy”
The UN conference on climate change (Cop15), held in Copenhagen 7-18 December, was a fiasco. The Independent called it “a historic failure that will live in infamy”. After years of preparation, the representatives of 193 countries discussed and wrangled for two weeks. In the closing hours, leaders such [...]

SP Newsletter No.291
The Labor Party’s approach to climate change is about pretending to do something while in reality protecting the big polluters. It is a policy of spin instead of substance. At least the climate change deniers in the Coalition are honest!

SP Newsletter No.289
Climate change and drought are big issues for most Australians. Many are concerned about global warming and are looking for solutions. Unfortunately, instead of pinning the blame on big business, some people are blaming environmental problems on immigration and population increase.