23/12/2020

(AU) Woodside Faces Challenge Over Burrup Hub LNG Plans Amid Pollution And Rock Art Fears

 ABC News - David Weber

The challenge centres on approvals to process gas taken from the Browse and Scarborough fields. (Supplied: Woodside Energy)


Key Points
  • A judicial review of the approvals is needed, the Conservation Council says
  • It says a full environmental impact assessment has not been done
  • The WA Government and Woodside have been contacted for comment
Conservationists are seeking to overturn approvals for Woodside's proposed Burrup Hub LNG expansion in WA, warning it could unleash billions of tonnes of carbon pollution and endanger ancient rock art.

The Conservation Council WA is targeting the approvals to process gas from the Scarborough and Browse fields at the Burrup in the WA Supreme Court.

The Council's executive director Piers Verstegen said there had not been a proper public assessment.

"It was a great surprise to find out that approvals had been given for parts of this project without any environmental impact assessment, without assessing the carbon pollution and without assessing the impacts on the Murujuga rock art which is proposed for world heritage listing," he said.

The rock art at the Burrup is estimated to be tens of thousands of years old.

An example of the ancient rock art of the Burrup Peninsula depicting emus and eggs. (ABC North West: Sonia Feng)
Mr Verstegen said Aboriginal heritage values were at stake.

He said it seemed that approvals were enabled by retrospectively changing the description of the role of existing facilities.

The Council has called for a judicial review.

"Under West Australia's environmental laws, it's a requirement that projects which impact on the environment like this are subject to full environmental impact assessment before approvals are given," Mr Verstegen said.

"And we believe that hasn't been undertaken in this case.

"These approvals were issued by the EPA and the State Government without public consultation, without any assessment of the environmental impacts of six billion tonnes of carbon pollution from processing this gas, so we are now proceeding to court to ensure West Australia's environmental laws are upheld."

Woodside will 'vigorously' defend position, says gas better than fossil fuels

Mr Verstegen said the carbon pollution from the project roughly equalled about four times the amount of pollution of the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland.

He said such projects were "unacceptable" in terms of environmental impacts.

Piers Verstegen (right) with Environmental Defenders Office managing lawyer Tim Macknay, who is helping the legal challenge. (ABC News: Jon Sambell)
"What we know is LNG exported from Australia is not a clean fuel," he said.

Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman said the company has complied with regulatory requirements and environmental processes.
"We intend to vigorously defend our position," he said via a statement.
"The CCWA is resorting to a legal challenge a year and a half after the approvals were granted.

"We strongly support the State Government's and the EPA processes."

Mr Coleman said the legal action would cost taxpayers money, and flew in the face of the EPA's assessment.

He also said the Council's figures were "highly misleading" because using gas instead of fossil fuels reduced carbon emissions.

Woodside said a consultants' report which had been reviewed by CSIRO found that for every tonne of carbon emissions from the proposed Burrup Hub projects over 2026-2040, four tonnes of emissions could be avoided globally.

The WA Environment Minister's office responded with a statement saying the Government was aware of the Conservation Council's application for judicial review.

It said as the matter was before the courts, it was not appropriate to provide further comment.

Links
at No comments:

(AU) News Corp Has Caused Massive Climate Delay, But Its Grip On Power Is Slipping

RenewEconomy - 


It’s no secret that News Corp, the massive global media force headed by the recently-vaccinated Rupert Murdoch isn’t particularly fond of climate action.

Its record over the past decade on obfuscating the science of climate change through a blend of straight mis-reporting and columnist noise is simply too big to even begin to summarise.

From Lomborg to Shellenberger, from Plimer to Abbott, it’s a gargantuan portfolio of simple, effective and unmistakably unique climate and energy focused misinformation.
A variety of editorials published in The Australian

Something significant has changed over the past couple of years. The social breathing room for the manifestation of old-school climate change denial has eroded, somewhat.

When News Corp’s denialism flagship, The Australian, published an unintentionally hilarious opinion piece by climate denier Ian Plimer claiming that “There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black”, it drew an equally funny response from climate scientists who had basically lost any need to be polite in their response.

“It uses nonsense logic, is clueless about the science, and says things which are wrong. Some of these false statements have been obviously wrong for years”, one NASA scientist told Climate Feedback. You can feel a decade’s worth of exasperation in those words. That this was published right at the cusp of Australia’s historic and climate-intensified bushfire season shifts it from kind of funny to actually quite horrific.

For the most part, News Corp has benefited from the fact that there isn’t a particularly good way of tracking media campaigns in traditional media outlets.

Last week, advocacy organisation GetUp! released a detailed study they’d funded that attempted to reverse this, and get a grasp of the true scale of News Corp’s long-running misinformation campaign.

After collating every news, feature, opinion, letter and editorial items that discussed climate between April 2019 and March 2020, the team behind the study came up with a collection of eye-opening findings.

The organisation still promotes denialism. 45% of the analysed items rejected or doubted the science. Much of it is skewed towards commentary, and there’s a lot – 44% of all content is opinion, and of that, 65% denied science. 

Perhaps more significantly, most items expressing a position on climate action were negative, with the exception of business themed reporting, which was more positive. The ‘straight reporting’ sections tended to be more balanced, but overall, the skew is one of very significant hostility towards emissions reductions.

This large analysis, conducted by journalist Wendy Bacon and research manager Arunn Jegan, matches several other recent attempts to put a hard number of exactly what News Corp is doing here.

An analysis by ecologist and PhD candidate Phillip Erm published in January 2020 found that the letters page of The Australian is a particularly nasty zone of denialism.
Also earlier this year, a very detailed analysis from Monash university’s David Holmes (Director, Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub), examined both the Black Summer and Black Saturday bushfire seasons, in terms of media coverage.

For the Black Summer fires, “39% of articles related to climate change and the bushfires were published by News Corp. Of the overall accurate and in-depth coverage of climate change, News Corp made up 25%, while representing 59% of all denialist discussion of climate change”.

They also found that denialist narratives most commonly featured Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “in 12% of all denialist articles”. For the Black Saturday fires, “Despite accounting for 33% of the overall coverage of Black Saturday, News Corp articles made up 53% of all articles featuring climate denialism”.

The Black Summer fires were a particularly significant moment in terms of illustrating the modern function of climate misinformation.

The Australian, and several other News Corp publications, began spreading the theory that it was a cabal of arsonists intentionally sparking fires causing the abnormal and extreme fire conditions across Australia; retweeted by people by Donald Trump Junior to millions of followers.

Once the pattern was established, it was mimicked mid-year in California by Fox News, as similarly intense wildfires began spreading there, alongside rapidly spreading misinformation.

An analysis of satellite data paired with machine learning published this week found that, for Victoria, “82% of the fires can be attributed to lightning, 14% to accidents and 1% to burning off. Only 4% can be attributed to arson”. In NSW, an official report found that it was more like 0.09% of total fires.

One year on, what came of their efforts? Australia’s public views on climate remain just as strong. Business, civil society and state governments have all taken extra steps towards climate action.

The pushback is increasing, led partly by former Prime Ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd, both prodding the bear in their own ways, and both clearly a new weakness in their long-time foe.

Links
at No comments:

(UK) New Site Will Turn Plastic Waste Into Hydrogen

Environment Journal - Pippa Neill


Powerhouse Energy and Peel L&P Environmental are collaborating to develop 11 plastic to hydrogen facilities across the UK.

It is hoped that the new facilities will revolutionise the way that plastic waste is currently handled providing a comprehensive solution for some of the 4.9 million tonnes of plastic waste generated in the UK each year, preventing it ending up in landfill or the ocean.

Work has begun at one of the new hydrogen production sites, which is located near Elsmere Port in Cheshire.

As work progresses, Powerhouse Energy has appointed a number of senior engineers, application engineers and support staff, who will be based at University of Chester’s Thornton Science Park next to Protos.

Powerhouse will use their clean technology at a local level, providing a treatment solution for end of life plastic waste whilst producing clean hydrogen fuel.

Tim Yeo, chairman of Powerhouse Energy Group, said: "We welcome the commencement of activity at Protos with clearance of the site where the first commercial-scale plant will be built, which will help accelerate the UK’s clean energy transition.

"Powerhouse is getting down to business ahead of intense activity expected in 2021 as demand for our waste plastic to hydrogen technology gains rapid momentum.

"The company has strengthened the board and appointed a number of key experts to our operational team.

"I am looking forward to the next year as the opportunity for Powerhouse continues to grow and our clean energy technology can become part of the solution to air pollution and waste plastic."

Links
at No comments: