Monthly Archives: July 2015

PLEA Network

13 July 2015, New York Times, Unraveling the Relationship Between Climate Change and Health: Is climate change a serious threat to human health? Simple logic would suggest the answer is yes, a point that the Obama administration is using to build support for the president’s effort to make climate change a centerpiece of his final months in office. A White House report listed deepening risks. Asthma will worsen, heat-related deaths will rise, and the number and traveling range of insects carrying diseases once confined to the tropics will increase. But the bullet points convey a certainty that many scientists say does not yet exist. Scientists agree that evidence is growing that warmer weather is having an effect on health, but they say it is only one part of an immensely complex set of forces that are influencing health. For example, scientists note that global travel and trade, not climate change, brought the first cases of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne tropical disease, to Florida. Read more here

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13 July 2015, Climate News Network, Record torrential rainfall linked to warming climate: Scientists show that devastating increases in extreme rainfall over the last 30 years fit in with global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases. If you think you’re getting an unusually hard soaking more often when you go out in the rain, you’re probably right. A team of scientists in Germany says record-breaking heavy rainfall has been increasing strikingly in the last 30 years as global temperatures increase. Before 1980, they say, the explanation was fluctuations in natural variability. But since then they have detected a clear upward trend in downpours that is consistent with a warming world. The scientists, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), report in the journal Climatic Change that this increase is to be expected with rising global temperatures, caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Read More here

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13 July 2025, 350.org: New information confirms what we suspected all along — the Commonwealth Bank has been helping Indian mining giant Adani with its plans to dig up vast stores of coal from the Galilee Basin and ship that coal across our precious Great Barrier Reef. This comes after months of CommBank refusing to comment on its involvement in this ridiculous project and shutting out the concerns of the community and its own customers. As CommBank gives Adani a helping hand, 11 of the world’s largest banks have backed away from this climate and reef disaster for good. Whilst it’s undeniable that CommBank has its fingerprints on this climate bomb, it’s also undeniable that Galilee coal is simply unburnable and unbankable. According to the former QLD Treasury department, this project is financially unviable. According to the climate science, Galilee coal can never be safely burned. This makes it all the more outrageous that Australia’s oldest and largest bank would even consider touching it.  Go here to Tell CommBank’s CEO Ian Narev that the case for canning this climate catastrophe has never been clearer – tell him to get his Bank out of Adani’s Galilee coal project today!

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13 July 2015, The Guardian, Abbott government extends renewable energy investment ban to solar power. Clean Energy Finance Corporation banned from investing in small-scale solar projects in move industry claims is ‘revenge politics’ that will strangle the sector: A directive banning the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) from investing in existing wind technology will also apply to small-scale solar projects, a move that will effectively throttle the industry, the Australian Solar Council said. The federal government on Sunday confirmed that the $10bn CEFC will no longer invest in wind power, instead focussing on “emerging technologies”.

“It is our policy to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation because we think that if the projects stack up economically, there’s no reason why they can’t be supported in the usual way,” Abbott told reporters in Darwin. “But while the CEFC exists, what we believe it should be doing is investing in new and emerging technologies – certainly not existing windfarms. “This is a government which supports renewables, but obviously we want to support renewables at the same time as reducing the upward pressure on power prices,” the prime minister said. “We want to keep power prices as low as possible, consistent with a strong renewables sector.”