Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle

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3 August, The Guardian, Senate inquiry recommends national standards on windfarm noise levels. Independent committee will set noise levels and states that refuse to adopt them barred from receiving renewable energy certificates under proposal. An independent scientific committee should be created to set national standards on the level of sound emitted by windfarms, the final report of a Senate inquiry into turbines has recommended. States that refuse to adopt the national limits should be barred from receiving renewable energy certificates, it said. The independent expert scientific committee on industrial sound should report back to state and federal health ministers on the health effects of proposed windfarms, the report by the select committee on wind turbines said. If the project poses a risk, it should not be accredited. The report was tabled in the Senate on Monday, and urges the federal government to put a cap on renewable energy certificates of five years…. “If the government follows through on the recommendations in the majority report it will just cement Australia’s place as a global climate pariah with regional communities and the environment paying the price.” The final report also recommends that the national health and medical research council should research the ill health effects of wind turbines, a syndrome for which no evidence has been found. “The committee believes there is an urgent need to put in place a central point of expert scientific advice on the risks of wind turbines to human health,” the report said. The Australian Medical Association refused to front the inquiry and has said that “there is no accepted physiological mechanism where sub-audible infrasound could cause health effects”. The report criticised the AMA’s decision not to give evidence, and hammered the research council for taking the advice of “Big Wind”. Read More here

26 June 2015, The Guardian, Minimal sound and almost no fury: life in the shadow of Australia’s windfarm ‘hell’: As the political cacophony about ‘noisy, visually awful’ wind turbines reaches fever pitch, Calla Wahlquist visits the farmers who host one of the southern hemisphere’s largest windfarms and finds them stubbornly unperturbed. Read More here

 

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31 July 2015, Renew Economy, Investors have lost their shirts on Peabody; now taxpayers are in the line of fire: The U.S. coal sector is in financial distress, a fact that’s been apparent for some time now and is made more evident with this week’s second-quarter earnings report from Peabody Energy. Peabody continues to tank for the main reasons many other major coal producers continue to tank: It made too many top-of-the-cycle, multibillion-dollar debt-funded acquisitions and its executives have continued to pretend that they can’t see the oversupply in a seaborne coal market that is in structural decline. Meanwhile, Alpha Natural Resources has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, Arch Coal is fighting to stay in play, and Walter Energy filed for bankruptcy this month. Some key detail from the latest numbers on Peabody, the biggest non-government-owned coal producer in the world: Read More here

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30 July 2015, The Guardian, World Bank rejects energy industry notion that coal can cure poverty, World Bank’s climate change envoy: ‘We need to wean ourselves off coal’. Bank has stopped funding new coal projects except in ‘rare circumstances’: The World Bank said coal was no cure for global poverty on Wednesday, rejecting a main industry argument for building new fossil fuel projects in developing countries. In a rebuff to coal, oil and gas companies, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank climate change envoy, said continued use of coal was exacting a heavy cost on some of the world’s poorest countries, in local health impacts as well as climate change, which is imposing even graver consequences on the developing world. “In general globally we need to wean ourselves off coal,” Kyte told an event in Washington hosted by the New Republic and the Center for American Progress. “There is a huge social cost to coal and a huge social cost to fossil fuels … if you want to be able to breathe clean air.” Coal, oil and gas companies have pushed back against efforts to fight climate change by arguing fossil fuels are a cure to “energy poverty”, which is holding back developing countries. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest privately held coal company, went so far as to claim that coal would have prevented the spread of the Ebola virus. However, Kyte said that when it came to lifting countries out of poverty, coal was part of the problem – and not part of a broader solution. Read More here

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29 July 2015, The Guardian, Tony Abbott wrong on coal being ‘good for humanity’, Oxfam report finds: Report says Australia must embrace renewables and coal exacts an ‘enormous toll’ on health, drives climate change and is ineffective in delivering electricity to world’s poor. Tony Abbott is mistaken in claiming coal is “good for humanity”, with the fossil fuel causing numerous health problems and ineffective in delivering electricity to the world’s poor compared with renewables, a new Oxfam report has found. The Powering Up Against Poverty study argues the Australian government’s continued embrace of coal exports is out of step with an international shift towards clean energy and would do little to help the one in seven of the world’s population who do not have electricity to light their homes or cook food. Abbott has said coal, a major export commodity for Australia, is the “foundation of prosperity” for the foreseeable future. The prime minister, along with the mining industry, has said the fossil fuel will raise living standards in developing countries while bolstering Australia’s economy. Read More here