EnergyNewsPremium.net - On the record: FLNG fracas on the cards: In fact, every engagement by Shell’s Australian boss, Ann Pickard, is accompanied by at least 10 journalists asking whether FLNG could be the way to go on the Browse project. Pickard and Woodside chief Peter Coleman’s standard line is that the joint venture is locked into retention lease conditions to progress the project to a “certain decision point”.
Shell and Woodside’s rumoured move to take the Browse development offshore has certainly caused a lot of hand-wringing in Perth, with Premier Colin Barnett finding himself in the rather uncomfortable position of promoting a line of thinking put forward by the unions.
Photo Damian Kelly
ACTION OF THE DAY
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A score of ANZ Banking Group machines sprawled across six capital cities were plastered with "out of order" signs on Sunday after campaigners launched their latest bid to draw attention to the bank's funding of the coal industry.
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Somethings gotta give.
ReplyDelete....
Will dissent at the top force China to reconsider growth to save the environment?
There are many hypothetical scenarios to be played out when trying to answer the sustainability question.
Yet I could not have said - amongst all this analysing, writing, talking and the sending of cables back to HQ - that air pollution would have featured very heavily. Until now.
A dramatic revolt from the floor of the Great Hall of the People has surely thrown the environment into the mix.
On the second last day of China's annual session of parliament came the time to rubber stamp the new ministers and also the make up of various committees. When the vote came to tick off the new Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Committee, 850 delegates voted "no" and 120 abstained from a total of just under 3000.
For two days at the end of the National People's Congress Beijing was shrouded in a thick blanket of smog and, in the midst of it, a third of this country's senior Communist Party delegates from across the country were prepared to publicly humiliate the government and the Party over the handling of air pollution policy.
If this doesn't show the depth of concern here about the disastrous state of China's environment, I'm not sure what does.
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This time round, most of the dissenters went one step further than merely abstaining and, when the pollution committee vote results were announced, there was an audible "Wooooo" around the Great Hall as if people could not believe the size of the dissent.
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Yet, even if the Chinese authorities are prepared to enforce environmental laws "with an iron fist", to think that this will help cleanse China's fetid air is to assume that the problem is being caused by a group of rogue emitters when surely he must know that this is problem caused by the sheer volume of cars, factories and coal fired power stations just doing what they do.
China's leaders can talk tough on pollution but it’s not easing the considerable discontent here about the quality of air, water and even soil.
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Cost of Environmental Damage in China Growing Rapidly Amid Industrialization
BEIJING — The cost of environmental degradation in China was about $230 billion in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — three times that in 2004, in local currency terms, an official Chinese news report said this week.
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And the costs could be even higher than the ministry’s estimate, he said. The $230 billion figure is incomplete because the researchers did not have a full set of data. Making such calculations is “notoriously difficult,” Mr. Thornton said.
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Chinese state-owned enterprises in the oil and power industries have consistently blocked efforts by pro-environment government officials to impose policies that would alleviate the pollution.
There have also been constant concerns over water and soil pollution. The discovery of at least 16,000 dead pigs in rivers that supply drinking water to Shanghai has ignited alarm there. This week, China Central Television reported that farmers in a village in Henan Province were using wastewater from a paper mill to grow wheat. But one farmer said they would not dare to eat the wheat themselves. It is sold outside the village, perhaps ending up in cities, while the farmers grow their own wheat with well water.
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A Deutsche Bank report released last month said the current growth policies would lead to a continuing steep decline of the environment for the next decade, especially given the expected coal consumption and boom in automobile sales.