Red, Green, and Blue

The leader of one of Australia’s most influential unions has said that green jobs is a ‘dopey term’. Tony Maher went on to suggest that many of the environmental campaigns run in his country are ‘judgemental nonsense’ and that industries like coal and steel will have more impact on both prosperity and the creation of a low carbon future than people realised. As an example, he claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes would require vast amounts of steel and that this steel should be produced in Australia by Australian workers.

Union fights for blue-collar jobs, not green-tinged ones

Maher is President of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, a constellation of workers that might look odd in many other parts of the world where ‘green’ industries like Forestry have separated themselves from extractive industries by putting logging in with extraction and keeping woodland husbandry and tree surgery in with farming.  For over ten years, Tony Maher has spoken on behalf of the union, which states in its publicity material that it is the principal union for both brown and black coal mining. Brown coal is relatively recent in origin and falls between peat, which is still largely vegetable in structure, and bituminous coal. It is often known as lignite.

Many people feel that brown coal should not be extracted because it should be kept as a reserve for the distance future when it may have developed further and become more like bituminous coal or black coal, which is more consolidated, deep black in colour and burns more readily with greater fuel efficiency.

Union leader says more coal, not less, will be burned in 2050

It’s not surprising that a union leader representing coal minders should object to ‘green jobs’ but Maher went much further than simply protesting against the removal of blue-collar industries, he added that he thought that by mid 2050 the planet would be using twice as much coal as at present and that the recent protest at Hazelwood power station was ‘just silly’.

Hazelwood Protestors Get Direct

‘Switch Off Hazelwood’ the campaigning group that organised the protests claims a successful weekend’s protesting, with more than 300 people turning up over 12 and 13 September, to use such direct action tactics as the Bikezilla (a number of bicycles welded together to form a giant bike, which was impounded by police), the Ministry of Energy, Resources and Silly Walks, the wombat warriors and forming a giant windmill with their bodies.  The police say 18 people were arrested, the action group says it was 22 individuals who were arrested and then released on bail.

While protestors said that removing Hazelwood could be the first step to creating an employment-rich, renewable energy manufacturing region, Maher’s comments suggest that the opposition to renewable energy is entrenched in the old blue-collar industrial regions as a threat to well paid jobs, as well as being perceived as a threat to lifestyle. Maher added that Australia produced some of the best-quality coking coal in the world, which was used to make premium quality steel and that it was ‘silly’ to raise objections to industries that created a large amount of Australia’s exports.

Switch off Hazelwood: Starring the Wombat Warriors courtesy of Sean Bedlam at youtube

Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, criticised many forestry projects this week.

She was giving the keynote address at the second World Agroforestry Conference in Nairobi and her concern was that imported tree species often became invasive and when they did so, two things happened. Either the trees took over the ecosystem and then, when they were felled, left nothing behind, or they damaged elements of the environment that were essential to local people and wildlife. She used the example of eucalypts, which are often planted in African agroforestry programmes and said, ‘they [the trees] are over promoted for commercial reasons. These trees are good for beauty but consume a lot of water when they are planted along rivers, wetlands and water shed areas.’ Maathai fears that such plantings cause havoc in Kenya’s complex biodiversity. Read the rest of this entry »

Americans of a certain age grew up with a very common stock political caricature as part of our culture: he (invariably a man) was a Southern Gentleman with a quick wit and syrupy drawl, never without his vested suit and pocket watch, and—at least in popular satire—always with one hand cradling a well-chomped cigar and the other out for a bribe. To some extent, he was epitomized by Boss Hog. But, that was then.

Today, one political caricature resonates in American pop culture like no other, and he is the Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby. Rarely if ever has an animated character drawn so many of traits, mannerisms and context from one living person so directly. Mayor Quimby is Senator Edward Kennedy, making the late Liberal Lion from Massachusetts the most well-known and widely-recognized political figure in generations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Freshman congressman Tom Perriello, a Democrat representing the 5th district of Virginia, had a hard decision to make in voting for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). His hard fought seat and freshman status left him vulnerable to Republican attacks vehemently opposed to the bill, yet he voted for the legislation nonetheless, believing it the right thing to do.

The decision to do so was made even harder after he received five letters from local constituency groups, including a Hispanic advocacy group and a local chapter of the NAACP, opposing the legislation. Or so he at first thought. According to an investigation by DailyProgress, it turns out those letters weren’t what they appeared to be and were in fact forged by Washington DC-area lobbyists.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you spent last week celebrating Apollo 11’s fortieth anniversary cut off from the world in your backyard model of the lunar module, you are no doubt familiar with the story of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest two weeks ago, the “race in America” sturm and drang that surrounded the story last week, and the headline-grabbing role President Obama stumbled into at the end of his prime time presser.

An “American” story of race and class, the arrest and aftermath narrative now seems to have settled comfortably into a hackneyed old gender stereotype; namely, that there is no better way for three “guys” to sort things out than over a beer. We know what the chatter will be about, and Cambridge’s local reports that it will be conducted over Blue Moon if Sergeant Crowley does the choosing, which leads me to ask:

What’s on the agenda for your beer with Obama?

I’ll post my top three items below, but I’m most interested in your comments. You can tell me what you would be drinking if you like, but I’m more interested in your talking points. What are the two or three key messages you would deliver to the White House on energy and environmental policy?

India’s Union Budget for financial year 2009-10 did not contain any provision for expenditure in promoting clean energy and mitigating adverse effects of climate change. The Indian Finance minister failed to provide any concrete figures that his government would spend in increasing clean energy systems and moving to efficient and cleaner industrial processes including power generation.

Last year the Indian Prime Minister unveiled a National Action Plan on Climate Change just before the crucial G8 Summit in Japan which outlined eight priorities of the Indian government to increase the use of renewable energy. The action plan did not, however, include how the government intends to achieve the goals it had set up. Green groups had been waiting for the government to announce strategy to achieve these goals but the finance minister did not allocate any funds for these goals. Read the rest of this entry »

India’s New and Renewable Energy Ministry has prepared a plan, which, if implemented as stated, will make the country one of the leading producer of solar energy globally by the year 2030. The proposal, yet to be approved, calls for $100 billion investment in solar energy over the next two decades to install 20,000 MW of solar energy.

The plan proposes that the government should give out $5 billion subsidies to the power utilities, every year for the next 20 years, which will then buy solar generated power from the solar power plants. The goal seems quite ambitious given the fact that the International Energy Agency predicts global solar energy generation to be 20,000 MW by the year 2020. The proposal comes after the announcement made by the Indian Prime Minister last year that solar energy would be the focus of the energy transformation in the country.

Solar energy gains importance from the fact that the coal fired power plants in India have been struggling to get coal supplies and there is lack of consistent gas supplies from other nations. Solar energy makes sense as it can be an alternative to connecting all the remote areas of the country to the grid. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it’s impossible to extract the thread of environmental protest from the complex strands of civil disaffection, or to analyse the motives or protestors and give them a single label. The G20 protests in London were a case in point, combining liberals, anarchists, nationalists, environmentalists and many others in a seething blend of international concern.  Read the rest of this entry »

This month, two conferences have been held on an issue that largely divides Europe from America and the rest of the world. In much of Europe, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are not used in food production and are not grown as crops. In pretty well the rest of the world, they are both widely grown and widely utilised. Why is there such a division?

Two conferences reveal the nature of the problem

Between 15—19 May, a Vatican organised ‘study week’ looked at ‘Transgenic Plants for Food Security in the Context of Development’ – a title that gives some idea of the expected outcome of a more pro-GMO stance, however there won’t be an official position statement on GMOs and both sides of the argument claim to have a degree of Papal support. In the no-to-GMO camp are quite a number of social justice activists who fear that native crops and native peoples could be dislodged by the cash-crop power of GMOs and they share an uneasy alliance with some bishops and theologians, whose view is that GMOs are both a threat to the environment and human health and a possible step on the path to usurping the role of God as Creator. On the opposite side are many agribusinesses, some other development campaigners and some other theologians, who see GMOs as the logical tool to destroy poverty, feed the hungry, and maintain stewardship of the environment.

Some watchers have said that several of the speakers at the conference have financial links to Monsanto, one of the world’s largest GMO producers. The counter-argument is that with GMOs being big agribusiness, it’s inevitable that most people working the field will have had funding or sponsorship from one of the very few companies at the top of the GMO tree.

Uganda seeks to change policy, and minds

And in Uganda, another conference is currently exploring  the production of GMO crops in Africa. The participants are looking at the gap between policy and research, and giving evidence on how investment in GM technology could benefit the continent. One claim being made at this event is that the widespread adoption of GMO agriculture could ‘significantly reduce’ the cost of food in developing countries by 2050. However, this could only be achieved if consumer preferences were changed, a transformation that has happened without protest in the USA and patchily and with massive protest, in much of Europe.

Vatican courtesy of David Paul Ohmer at Flickr under a creative commons licence

What makes a protest worthwhile? Does it have to change policy, or achieve the reversal of a specific decision? Recent protests in the environmental arena seem to have educative as well as practical purposes.  Read the rest of this entry »