Australian Politics
‘There’s no safe level’: Carcinogens found in tap water across Australia
Not PFOS again! This scare is like Global Warming: No facts will dent belief in it.
The WHO study referred to was just a meta-analysis, which is very vunerable to manipulation, but even its conclusion was very weak. It found that PFOS is "possibly carcinogenic to humans". Note the "POSSIBLY". It was no basis for any action at all. It was actually an exoneration of PFOS. No matter how hard they tried, they could find no evidence against it
Tap water across parts of Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Victoria, Queensland and the tourist havens of Rottnest and Norfolk islands has been found to contain contaminants that US authorities now warn are likely to be carcinogenic, with “no safe level of exposure”.
Experts say widespread testing of Australia’s drinking water must be an urgent priority after the US Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic policy shift in April found there was no safe level of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water and they were likely to cause cancer.
The World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has gone a step further, concluding in December that PFOA is carcinogenic to humans.
Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith, a toxic chemicals campaigner who has served on United Nations expert committees, slammed it as a “national disgrace” that PFOA is now permitted in Australia’s tap water at 140 times the maximum level the US will allow.
This masthead has analysed publicly available data which indicates the chemicals have been found in the drinking water of up to 1.8 million Australians since 2010, including in the Sydney suburbs of North Richmond, Quakers Hill, Liverpool, Blacktown, Emu Plains and Campbelltown, along with the NSW regional centres of Newcastle, Bathurst, Wagga Wagga, Lithgow, Gundagai and Yass.
The pollutants have also been detected in tap water in Canberra, the inner Melbourne suburb of Footscray, inner-city Adelaide, the Queensland regional centres of Cairns and Gladstone, Kingborough in greater Hobart and locations across Darwin and the Northern Territory.
The most comprehensive data comes from a federally funded University of Queensland study published in 2011, which sampled 34 locations across the country.
Various water providers have carried out their own localised surveillance in recent years, which confirms the chemicals are still turning up in some of the same locations they were first found in 2011, in some instances at even higher concentrations.
However, this masthead wasn’t able to locate any further widespread studies of Australian tap water funded by Commonwealth agencies since the 2011 study.
During the past decade, the federal government has been defending class actions over its use of the chemicals in firefighting foam and denying they cause “important” health effects.
It reached the first of settlements with 11 communities collectively worth $366 million in the weeks after the Federal Court’s expert umpire concluded there was good evidence the chemicals potentially cause harmful health effects, including cancer.
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Travellers reluctant to pay for greener flights despite desire for sustainability
Travellers are proving reluctant passengers of the airline industry’s sustainability drive with those opting to offset flights actually falling in recent years.
After exceeding 10 per cent pre Covid, Qantas was now seeing around 6 or 7 per cent of guests choosing to offset, while Webjet had noticed that customers “talk the talk” but don’t necessarily “walk the walk”.
“When we originally looked at a program around sustainability for our travellers we surveyed our quite significant database of 2 million people and circa 30 to 40 per cent said they would regularly use the offset,” said Webjet managing director John Guscic.
“But in practical application, it’s less than 10 per cent ticking the box.”
Inflationary pressures were considered a factor in the drop off recorded by Qantas according to chief sustainability officer Andrew Parker who said there was still much passion for the decarbonisation journey.
“In terms of consumers there is still a lot to do,” Mr Parker told the Australian on the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association in Dubai.
“We can’t just be asking for customers to pay for sustainable aviation fuel, pay for offsets, we want to look at a model where you have a range of options.”
Despite the cool response from customers to date, airlines remained convinced that sustainability was extremely important to travellers.
International Air Transport Association director general Willie Walsh said the idea people want to fly in an “unsustainable fashion” was simply not correct.
“All the research that we do says that people want the airline industry to address its environmental footprint and we have to,” Mr Walsh said.
“And anybody who thinks you can transition to net zero in any industry without cost is misguided or misleading people. There’s going to be a cost and there’s going to be a consumer cost.”
It has been estimated that cost could push up airfares significantly, particularly in the early stages due to low levels of sustainable aviation fuel production.
Considered the only realistic path for airlines towards net zero at this stage, SAF (Sustainable aviation fuel) production in 2024 will amount to a mere 0.53 per cent of the industry’s fuel needs, or 1.9 billion litres.
To help drive production in Australia — which was rich in feedstock but yet to make any SAF — Qantas was investing in a north Queensland-based refinery using alcohol-to-jet technology.
Mr Parker said it was unusual for airlines to become investors in the production of fuel but they felt they had to.
“We need big fuel companies producing (SAF) albeit at a price that is digestible but we want small to medium-sized producers as well so we’ve got a competitive industry,” he said.
“We think Australia can produce SAF and a lot of it, which is one of the reasons Qantas has set a target of 10 per cent SAF usage by 2030.”
At the same time, Qantas was firmly in favour of the federal government imposing a mandate of 5 per cent SAF for airlines operating within and into Australia.
Virgin Australia recognised the potential role a SAF mandate could play but warned of economic consequences, particularly for “value carriers” like themselves.
“Increases in fuel prices would likely result in airlines having to raise airfares, with value carriers being less effective at doing so due to the price sensitivity of their customer base,” said Virgin Australia’s submission to the aviation green paper.
“This has the potential to reduce or limit competition.”
In the meantime it was indisputable that the cost of air travel would climb as more countries imposed SAF mandates on airlines as high as 10 per cent by 2030.
“Some consumers felt this could be done at no cost but there is a cost associated in the same way as when oil prices go up, ticket prices go up,” said Mr Walsh.
“The idea the airlines can absorb that additional cost given the net margins of 3 per cent in the industry, it’s just not going to be possible.”
Mr Parker said it was the only way forward for an industry that was so critical to Australia.
“We don’t have a train to Singapore, so you have to maximise the opportunity to protect aviation and give it a strong future,” he said.
“You don’t want the European flight shaming to impact aviation in our part of the world so that means SAF is the majority of the answer.”
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Renewable energy subsidies undermine our economy
Rubbishy spending reduces both the capital and income that is available for more constructive purposes
Australia has seen a 20-year downward trend in productivity. Many other nations have seen similar trends and the cause is common: burgeoning growth of government squeezing out productive investment and an unrelenting surge in regulations, especially and notably so in Australia, covering fossil fuel both in its extraction and in its domestic use.
The Productivity Commission depicts the generally downward trend in productivity since the mid-1990s, punctuated by a mini recovery that petered out about a decade ago. In 2022-23 productivity actually fell by 3.7 per cent and remains below its 2021-22 level.
Australia has greater natural wealth per head of population than anywhere else in the world. With good government focused on protecting property rights, ensuring law and order, we would have the highest living standards in the world.
The fact that we are falling short – and increasingly so – of our potential is due entirely to government. The Commonwealth, over the past few decades, has increased its share of the nation’s spending from under 20 per cent to over 26 per cent of GDP and has run up half a trillion dollars of debt. We have seen similar increases from state governments – increases that have actually been accompanied by reduced service provision as a result of many former roles having been privatised.
An additional drag on real growth is regulation – the Institute of Public Affairs reports that the number of regulatory restrictions in federal law has increased by 88 per cent since 2005. Regulations have been exacerbated by judicial activism facilitating a well-financed green anti-development movement in preventing, delaying and seriously adding to costs and to investor confidence. Impediments to coal development are seen in all states. For gas, premium anticipated returns are now required for projects. This is a corollary of the travails like the dozen years it has taken Santos to get its Narrabri through a labyrinthian regulatory approvals system and the Victorian government’s layered moratorium on gas exploration.
The dominance of mining in national investment, especially in the last 20 years, is evident, as is its collapse over the past 10 years.
Disturbingly, the age of the national capital stock has also increased over the past decade – in the case of manufacturing from 11 to 13 years; for mining from 7 to 10 years and for agriculture from 12 to 14 years. It can be of no consolation that the age of capital has not increased in the electricity, gas, and water sectors since a major component of that sector’s new capital is wind/solar electricity, which is highly subsidised and displaces far more productive coal generation, making apparent investment actual disinvestment.
Complementing the assault on mining are the progressively growing regulations that subsidise renewable energy.
These regulations commenced with an obligation that retailers ensure ‘2 per cent of additional’ electricity to be provided by renewables, comprising wind and solar that then, as now, are both high cost and unreliable. Although no longer tabulated in the budget papers, the aggregate level of subsidy can be derived from published material. This shows from just a few hundred million dollars a year, the support for renewables is now over $15 billion a year.
The latest budget announced an upgrade in this support with $22.7 billion for Labor’s ‘Future Made in Australia’ agenda, much of which the Opposition has said it will retain.
These subsidies are, unlike other government direct spending and regulatory measures, actually designed to destroy one supply source, coal, and replace it with renewables. The increase in these subsidies bells the cat in claims that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity.
The subsidies have brought about a displacement of coal generation, which now provides about 56 per cent of electricity compared with 77 per cent historically. While initially bringing downward price pressures, the subsidies, in forcing coal generators’ closure and sub-optimal operations, have resulted in the ex-generator electricity price rising from under $40 per megawatt hour in 2015 to over $100 today. In addition, the diffuse and intermittent nature of wind and solar requires massive expenditures on duplicating back-up plant, batteries and a threefold expansion of the transmission network. And governments are now subsidising coal generators to prevent them closing ‘prematurely’ and thereby threatening the entire network.
This increased cost of electricity is already driving out businesses, especially the energy-intensive industries which have been the backbone of the nation’s productivity. And Barnaby Joyce asks, ‘Name me one global manufacturer who wants to move to Australia – just one. They’re all running for the door – aluminium, steel, plastics, oil refining, manufacturing, even food processing now with Cadbury.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/renewable-energy-subsidies-undermine-our-economy/
*********************************************Workers call on home affairs boss to fix mismanaged border force unit
The Community and Public Sector Union has requested Home Affairs secretary Stephanie Foster intervene in the Australian Border Force’s mismanagement of the National Marine Unit.
On Monday, this masthead revealed a man who helped 39 asylum seekers reach the mainland in February was deported without charge.
The joint media investigation also revealed long-running issues with Border Force’s Cape-class patrol fleet. One vessel, the Cape York, caught on fire and was out of action at the same time as the Indonesian people smuggler’s boatload reached the West Australian shore.
National secretary of the CPSU Melissa Donnelly said the union has repeatedly raised workplace health and safety issues with the Australian Border Force which has been repeatedly ignored:
The media investigation into the Marine Unit shone a light on our union’s uphill battle with border force in our mission to make our members safe at work,” she said.
The CPSU should immediately be permitted to participate in the Marine Workplace Health and Safety Committee, which we have so far been denied access to.
I have written to the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, requesting she step in and protect our members.
I have outlined in that letter, issues including workplace health and safety, the proliferation of outsourcing and a lack of workforce planning.
On matters of outsourcing and workplace health and safety, there is no doubt in my mind that the introduction of a profit motive into the maintenance of Cape Class vessels has compromised these vessels and the safety of the mariners aboard them.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related. I hope she recovers soon from her encounter with Guillain-Barré syndrome
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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