You know something is rotten....

...when your federal environment minister says something like this:

"What we need to do as a world is keep mining coal."

- Ian Campbell - Australian Federal Minister for the Environment

John Howard should give Ian Campbell a new portfolio. Perhaps Minister for Fossil Fuels would be a better title than Minister for the Environment.

Campbell was responding to a recent court decision that ruled that new coal mines would be required to include information in their environmental impact statement about the amount of CO2 released by the coal that they mine, as usual he came out with all guns firing to support big business.

Nuclear energy is NOT the answer to Climate Change

Our prime minister is trying to tell us that nuclear power will combat global warming.

John Howard is lying.

He is attempting to justify increased mining in order to export more uranium and turn Australia into an "energy super power".

In the paper "Nuclear Power : the energy balance" by J.W. Storm and P. Smith (2005), the authors calculate that with high quality ores, the CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is about one half to one third of an equivalent sized gas-fired power station. For low quality ores (less than 0.02% of U₃O₈ per tonne of ore), the CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is EQUAL TO that produced by the equivalent sized gas-fired power station.

Futhermore it will take at least 15 years to get a viable nuclear power industry off the ground. We need action NOW.

Nuclear energy is NOT the answer to climate change, it is just another method of increasing development and giving more public money to big business.

The fundamental solution to reducing the effects of climate change is simple.

We need to reduce consumption and increase efficiency... unfortunatley for big corporations there is not alot of money to be made in this process.

If you would like to read more about the false economies of nuclear power please read this article.

Thanks to Dave Kimble for his article that provided most of the links above.