Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for December 10, 2008

Europe to Abandon Legally Binding Emission Targets

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According to EurActiv:  Despite “significant steps” taken to soften the impact of the European Union’s climate change goals on its industry, Italy yesterday (8 December) continued to maintain a tough negotiating line ahead of a decisive European Union (EU) summit on 11-12 December.

During separate meetings of foreign affairs and energy ministers in Brussels, the Italian government firmly restated its intention to obtain exemptions from the package for its energy-intensive industrial sectors such as paper, glass, steel and brick industries…

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Bunyips in Australian Rivers (Part 2)

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ACCORDING to Australian aboriginal mythology Bunyips are monsters that live in rivers.  According to Ron Pike, an Australian who has spent his life working with water from the Murrumbidgee River, much of what is being claimed about Australian rivers is as unreasonable as a belief in Bunyips: 

“The lack of flow volumes in the rivers of the Murray Darling Basin (MDBC) in recent years is not due to irrigation and over extraction.  The facts are that without the storages and the irrigation industries, conditions would have been considerably worse.   Throughout the MDB there is presently more wetland habitat than there would have been had there been no irrigation for the last several years.  It is also wrong to suggest that increasing stream flows by releasing extra water from storages, somehow benefits the environment.   It makes no appreciable difference to the  environment whether the Murrumbidgee at say Narrandera is running at 3,500 megalitres per day or 25,000 megalitres per day. The flows in both cases remain within the banks and do not, and cannot, water the floodplain or most wetlands.

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