Suspicions Adani Altered Lab Report While Appealing Fine For Abbot Point Coal Spill

The Guardian - Amy Remeikis | Michael Slezak

Original report said to have showed more pollution flowed into sensitive Caley valley wetlands than company had alleged


Adani submitted an altered laboratory report while appealing a fine for contamination of sensitive wetlands on the Queensland coast near the Great Barrier Reef, the Guardian understands.
While appealing a $12,000 fine for spilling coal-laden water on to the beach at Abbot Point after Cyclone Debbie, Adani submitted a report detailing the nature of the spill.
But the Guardian understands that while investigating the incident, the Department of Environment discovered the original lab report containing results left off the version Adani submitted. The original report found worse pollution than had earlier been alleged.
It’s believed departmental officers noticed a difference between documents provided by Adani through its Abbot Point Bulkcoal operation and those obtained directly from the laboratory responsible for testing the level of coal contamination in discharge water.
Adani would not comment, beyond an Abbot Point Bulkcoal spokesman saying the company “provided sampling results to the regulator following Tropical Cyclone Debbie in accordance with the requirements of its environmental authority”.
The discrepancies were discovered during the Department of Environment’s preparations to defend itself against an appeal by Adani, which is disputing a finding it polluted waters off Queensland’s north coast.
The Abbot Point Bulkcoal Pty Ltd, run by Adani, was issued a penalty notice in July 2017 following an investigation into whether it exceeded allowable discharge levels after Cyclone Debbie in March 2017.
The company was authorised to release up to 100 milligrams per litre of coal-laden water, known as “suspended solids”, by the Queensland authorities, to help the site cope with the natural disaster.
It advised the environmental department in April that up to eight times the allowable amount, 806 milligrams per litre of suspended solids, had been released, which left the company facing a potential multimillion-dollar fine.
The company was fined $12,000 in August last year for breaching its temporary allowance. However, the Guardian understands further investigation by the department, just before the November 2017 Queensland election, found a lab report submitted by Adani appeared to have been modified.
A copy of the original laboratory report is understood to include a column not included in the document provided by Adani, which showed an even higher reading of 834mg/l of coal-laden water had been released.
When approached by the Guardian, a spokesman for the Queensland environment minister, Leeanne Enoch, would only say “any matters relating to court proceedings require expert legal consideration”.
“It would be inappropriate to publicly discuss such matters,” he said. “The Palaszczuk government takes the upholding of environmental protections very seriously, and will continue working to ensure our environmental laws protect our communities and outstanding natural assets.”
The revelations put further pressure on Labor as it re-examines its position on the Adani Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland.
It is not the first time Adani has been accused of inappropriate behaviour.
In August 2017, the Guardian published documents from India’s directorate of revenue intelligence (DRI), which was investigating Adani Group for allegedly fraudulently siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from loans into overseas tax havens.
Also, the chief executive of the Australian arm of Adani has been linked to a mining pollution case in Africa.
Jeyakumar Janakaraj held senior roles at a miner that pleaded guilty to criminal charges over the poisoning of a river in Zambia before taking up his role heading Adani’s Australian operations.
In 2016 the Australian government decided not to take action against Adani for its failure to declare Janakaraj’s involvement in the Zambia company.


Fact v fiction: Adani's Carmichael coal mine – video explainer

Links

• Labor weighs Adani options as Canavan says Australia needs to 'get these jobs going'
• Adani coalmine won't get federal rail funding, Liberal minister says
• Batman byelection: Adani casts long shadow over former Labor stronghold
• Big Surge In Opposition To Adani, New Polling Reveals
• Shorten Hails Cheap Wind And Solar, But Will He Stop Adani?
• Adani Parts Ways With Mining Services Company Downer Over Proposed Carmichael Mine
• Qld Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk Seeks To Veto Adani Loan
• Another Blow For Adani As Chinese Backers Pull Out
• NSW Coal Mines In The Pipeline Are 'Bigger Than Adani', Lock The Gate Says
• Queensland Election: How Adani Helped Undo The LNP's Push To Regain Power
• Why Climate Change Is A Key Issue In The Queensland Election
• Palaszczuk Says She Will Veto Federal Adani Loan As She Accuses LNP Of 'Smear'
• Adani Coal Mine 'Devastating' For Australia
• Jobs Bonanza? The Adani Project Is More Like A Railway To Nowhere
• Runoff pollution from Cyclone Debbie flooding sweeps into Great Barrier Reef
• Adani’s coalmine, the climate trigger and other ways Labor could kill off the project

This Picture Book About Climate Change Won’t Freak Your Kids Out

The Verge - Alessandra Potenza

Instead of highlighting the bleak stuff, author Megan Herbert focuses on the solutions

Illustration by Megan Herbert

Megan Herbert knows how hard it is to talk to children about climate change; she has a five-year-old son. “Some of those images and some of those ideas can really be too much for a kid to take onboard,” says Herbert, a writer and illustrator. “You have to make the conversation something that’s not overwhelming.”
So, instead of highlighting the bleak stuff — the melting ice, the rising sea levels, the more extreme weather — she focuses on the solutions: the small steps anyone can take to try to solve the problem. To help other parents to do same, she’s releasing a picture book that she illustrated and co-wrote with climatologist Michael Mann.

“You have to make the conversation something that’s not overwhelming."

The book, titled The Tantrum That Saved The World, tells the story of a girl named Sophia, whose life is disrupted when a polar bear, a Kiribati family flooded by the rising seas, a bee swarm, a fisherman, and others knock on her door seeking help. Annoyed at first, Sophia then realizes she has to help, so she organizes rallies to sway more people — and policymakers — to act on climate change. It’s a sweet story, and Herbert says she designed the protagonist to be racially ambiguous. Although Sophia is fair-skinned, she could be South American or mixed race, so any child can identify with her. “I wanted to keep that as vague as possible,” she says.

The picture book, which was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, comes with a glossary of climate change terms at the end, such as coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and ice sheet. It also has a section that explains what’s going on with polar bears, bees, and the people who live in low-lying islands that are already going under because of rising sea levels. It’s for kids as young as four, but also as old as 11, she says.

Illustration by Megan Herbert

The story, Herbert says, is an allegory. Though no Bengal tigers or pink flamingos will ever knock on anyone’s door asking for help, “we’re leaving this problem on the doorstep of the children that we’re bringing into the world now,” she says. And Herbert wanted to empower children — and adults — to be part of the solution. The book comes with a poster listing things kids and parents can do to make a difference: turn off unnecessary lights, ride your bike or take public transport instead of driving, avoid using disposable plastic items like plastic bags and water bottles, buy second-hand stuff, and shop locally.
Herbert says it took six months of brainstorming before settling on the current story. Some initial story ideas weren’t very relatable to children; others were just too bleak. “The worst thing to do is, ‘Here’s this horrible problem. The end,’” Herbert tells The Verge. “You can’t give information to adults or children that makes them feel powerless and overwhelmed, and then not give them any sort of feeling that they can do something about this.” That’s where the “World Saving Action Plan” poster comes in. Herbert hopes readers will hang it in the living room so that the whole family — especially children — can take little steps that will help solve climate change.

Illustration by Megan Herbert

 That’s how she approaches the problem with her own son: when they go grocery shopping, for instance, they don’t have a list of stuff they need. Instead, they look for the locally grown produce that’s not wrapped in plastic or served on styrofoam trays, and then they figure out together how to cook the food they found. It’s basically a game, Herbert says. “People are so daunted with the idea of changing everything at once, that they just don’t do anything,” she says. But “if you’re doing one little change a week, if you’re changing two or three habits over a month, if everyone is doing that, it actually makes a big difference.”
About 20,000 copies of the book are currently being printed in the UK and will ship to Kickstarter backers next month. In the meantime, the hardcover can be preordered for about $28 online.

Links

• The Tantrum That Saved The World
• Climate Change Predictions Can Be Scary For Kids. What Can You Say?
• Aussie Kids Are Worried About Our Planet, And They Want To Take Action
• Climate Policy Must Protect Children’s Rights, UN Panel Hears
• Book Week: 8 Classic Kids' Books About The Environment
• Dear Prime Minister, Our Kids Are Trusting Us On Climate Change
• With Kids For Climate Action, Strength ‘Is Going To Come From Numbers’ 

Great Barrier Reef In 'Deep Trouble' As Climate, Other Threats Mount: Official

Fairfax -  Peter Hannam

The Great Barrier Reef is in "deep trouble" as climate change and other threats mount, hindering the ability of corals to rebound from natural events, a senior scientist with the reef's Marine Park Authority said.
Unprecedented back-to-back mass coral bleachings resulted in 29 per cent of the shallow water corals dying in the summer of 2015-16 and a further 20 per cent last summer, David Wachenfeld, director of recovery at the authority, said.

Marine scientist Taylor Simpkins holds up a crown of thorns starfish near the North Opal Reef off the coast of Port Douglas.  Photo: Jason South

Fortunately, "there's no prediction of substantial mass bleachings at this point" for this summer. Still, February - typically the worst month for heat stress on corals - "is going to be a slightly nervous month" for scientists, Dr Wachenfeld said.
The roughly 50-per cent death rate for the corals excludes damage done last March by Cyclone Debbie, which tore into the northern end of the southern section of the Great Barrier Reef - an area largely spared from the bleaching events.
While corals have a natural ability to bounce back, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather made recovery harder.
"[E]very time we get impacts on the reef, they are slightly or a lot worse than previous impacts," Dr Wachenfeld told Fairfax Media. "And the question is, as we keep seeing bigger impacts, will the reef continue to be as resilient as it has been in the past?"
How climate change will affect the Great Barrier Reef and other parts of Australia will feature at a week-long gathering of senior scientists in Sydney for the first Australian/New Zealand Climate Forum held in seven years.
Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and one of the speakers at the event, said scientists were in "uncharted territory" when it came to predicting how fast the reef can recover.

Bleaching over the previous two summer killed about half the shallow water corals on the Great Barrer Reef. Photo: AAP

"Normally, after a cyclone, it takes 10-15 years for the fastest-growing species to bounce back," Professor Hughes said.
"Optimistically, 50 per cent mortality after the two recent heatwaves means the glass is still half full," he said. "The survivors ... are tougher than the corals that died - there is about a billion of them, and they are reproducing."

'Still an amazing experience': Gliding over fields of coral at Rib Reef off Orpheus Island, North Queensland. Photo: James Vodicka 

Dr Wachenfeld said tackling other stressors on corals, including from nutrient run-off from farms and the latest big outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, were important local efforts to help corals rebound.
"That's the way to give the reef the best chance to survive the global threat of climate change," he said.
"The reef is still a dynamic, vibrant, awesome place," Dr Wachenfeld said. "But it's in deep trouble, and at the moment, it's not heading in the right direction."
Dr Wachenfeld said the authority didn't have expertise to judge impacts from particular projects, such the plans by Indian-owned miner Adani to develop the potentially massive Carmichael mine inland from the reef.
However, Professor Hughes said "there's no shortage of scientific evidence that a huge new coal mine in Queensland would have a detrimental effect on the [Reef], now more than ever as the corals struggle to recover".
"There's a long list of known impacts - the greenhouse gas emissions of course, but also coastal pollution from the port, dredging, the effects of ship noise and strikes on megafauna, anchor damage on seagrass beds, and the risk of ship grounding and introducing pest species in bilge water," he said.
"When the permit for the Adani mine was issued, we didn't fully understand just how vulnerable the GBR was to climate change. Now we do."
The Sydney gathering, organised jointly by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society and the Meteorological Society of New Zealand, will have many recent extreme weather events to consider.
These include the on-going Tasman Sea heatwave, with temperatures four or more degrees above average, and January's remarkable warmth in New Zealand. The country posted its largest departure from normal conditions for any month in 110 years of records.

IMAGE

Links

• $60 million 'rescue plan' for reef too little: critics
• 'Serious case of negligence': Scientists blast controls on coral-eating starfish
• 'Wasteful Stunt': Turnbull Government Accused Of Doing Too Little To Save Reef
• Great Barrier Reef: Rising Temperatures Turning Green Sea Turtles Female
• Great Barrier Reef Will Be Dead By 2100, Says David Attenborough's Blue Planet II
• Why Climate Change Is A Key Issue In The Queensland Election
• Warming Limit Of 1.2 Degrees Needed To Save Great Barrier Reef: Expert Panel
• While Corals Die Along The Great Barrier Reef, Humans Struggle To Adjust
• The Great Barrier Reef Isn’t Listed As ‘In Danger’ – But It’s Still In Big Trouble
• The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia's Climate Deadlock