EARTH SHARE AUSTRALIA ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 18 - 16th November 2001
In this weeks newsletter we bring you our Links & Affiliated websites, a listing of many interesting websites or those affiliated with Earth Share Australia. And of course our regular environmental news: Australia on notice over greenhouse commitment , Australia Gas Association seeks upstream shake - up, UPDATE - German police mass to see nuclear convoy home.
This newsletter and past editions are also available online at: http://www.earthshare.org.au/environmental_news.htm
Australia on notice over greenhouse commitment
Australia has been placed on notice not to back-track during the current technical and legal discussions on the proposed international climate treaty. The two-week conference opened in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh on Tuesday. The talks will hammer out the legal language for rules governing how countries count, monitor, verify and report the emission of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere.
Three months ago, 178 countries accepted a political accord in Bonn on how to carry out the Kyoto Protocol's targets. But environmentalists say they are now worried several countries, including Australia, may try to undermine the accord by diluting the text being drafted in Marrakesh.
The conference president, Mohammed Elazghi, says cooperation is vital to head off future calamities. "I believe with what happened in the world on September 11, showed us that multilateral cooperation is very important," he said. "All humanity must react as one whole family to dangers of all kinds and climate change is not the least of the dangers facing humanity."
Source: ABC Online
Australia Gas Association seeks upstream shake - up
AUSTRALIA: November 15, 2001
MELBOURNE - The Australian Gas Association is pursuing a shake-up in upstream gas production competition rules as part of a campaign to lift the share of gas in the energy market.
The Australian Gas Association at its convention on Thursday will call for the federal government to revive a national energy review stalled by the November 10 election and focus on policy to lift the market share of gas.
Competition policy to date has mostly driven changes at the downstream delivery and retail end of the market.
"The field price represents about 80 percent of the delivered cost of gas to most energy-intensive customers," AGA chairman Ollie Clark said in a statement. "Enhanced upstream competition is needed to capture the full pricing and market choice benefits of competition in the gas chain. Reducing gas transmission and distribution charges was always merely playing at the margins."
The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics last month forecast gas would achieve a 23.9 percent share of the energy market by 2019/20, revising downward an earlier forecast of a 28 percent share by 2014/15. AGA executive director Bill Nagle said one of the issues which contributed to the revision was the relative cost of gas and coal-fired generation over the past few years, affecting the penetration of gas in the power market.
"It is entirely possible to get gas prices down by 50 cents to A$1.00 a gigajoule at the wellhead," he told Reuters. "If gas prices come down we will see quite an interesting battle for market share, but we are not expecting to replace brown and black coal baseload in New South Wales and Victoria." Electricity generation is dominated by coal-fired power, which is low cost but which emits high levels of greenhouse gasses and which is condemned by environmental groups.
Gas is promoted by the industry as a cleaner fuel which is currently more practical and economic for meeting large scale intermediate and peak load demand than many renewable fuels. The AGA has called for more active government support to bring new gas basins on line, boosting supply competition. Potential new supplies include multi-billion dollar projects to bring gas ashore from Papua New Guinea or the Timor Sea.
The AGA also wants policy requiring gas processing plant operators to open access to their plants to other producers, and requiring joint ventures partners to separately market their gas. Joint marketing arrangements for the Gippsland and Cooper Basin gas ventures expire around the middle of this decade.
The AGA also wants upstream acreage reform to ensure companies do not hold on to producing acreage without moving ahead with development.
Source: Planet Ark
UPDATE - German police mass to see nuclear convoy home
GERMANY: November 15, 2001
GORLEBEN, Germany - Six containers of nuclear waste finally reached a storage site in northern Germany yesterday after three days of protests and one of the largest peacetime security operations the country has seen.
A force of 15,000 German police sealed off roads in the early hours of Wednesday morning, removing the last few hundred demonstrators from sit-down protests along the planned route.
Police said they had detained around 300 people. A medical tent dealt with 93 injuries, from baton bruises to dog bites.
By first light on a misty morning, the containers had sneaked out of the railhead at Dannenberg. The shipment moved at a snail's pace along the 20 km (12 miles) road to the storage site at Gorleben, the final stop of a 1,500 km (930 mile) trip back from a reprocessing plant in northwestern France.
The containers had arrived in Dannenberg by rail late this week as helicopters circled overhead, police sirens wailed and protesters, held 500 metres (1,600 ft) from the track, blew whistles.
Dannenberg was packed with police vans, armoured personnel carriers and water cannon vehicles. Previous shipments have been hit by violence and disruption from Germany's anti-nuclear lobby. Police and protesters said fewer people than expected had joined the latest demonstration.
"Look at the way the police have limited people's movement, although I don't blame them. I think many of them would rather be on our side," said protester Detlet Puls, 51. The shipments to the Gorleben storage site have become a ritual confrontation between police and anti-nuclear activists. They resumed in March after a break of three years. The policing bill to protect the last shipment in March was around 50 million marks ($22.5 million).
"You can imagine it won't be any less this time," said a police spokesman. Nuclear power is a controversial issue in Germany, where government and industry agreed last year to gradually phase out all reactors by around 2025. The government has also been re-examining the safety of nuclear convoys and power plants in the wake of the September 11 suicide plane attacks on New York and Washington.
Source: Planet Ark
Links & Affiliated websites
a listing of many interesting websites or those affiliated with Earth Share Australia.
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