30,000 March in Melbourne Calling for Climate Change Action : Melbourne Indymedia

Walk Against Warming is part of an International Weekend of protest calling on governments to act now on climate change. According to numbers from the organisers on the http://www.walkagainstwarming.org website 30,000 marched in Melbourne and a massive 50,000 in Sydney.

Watching the ABC news tonight - no numbers were given for Melbourne and the Sydney crowd was cited at being around 10-12,000 - 40,000 less than organisers estimates. The ABC also run reports of the rally AFTER a beat up story about the impending report on the nuclear industry citing that we should be having nuclear power within 15 years. In other words the mainstream press is seeking to bury a massive show of public support for real action on Climate Change now and support for renewables as it doesnt fit in with their pro-coal and nuclear agenda.

Congratulations to all that attended - it would be great if someone could post a first hand account and some photos fo the Melbourne rally.

Will post fuller report as soon as I can; in the meantime, here is a shot that may help to give an idea of numbers. It was taken while the Counterfeit Gypsies were playing and people were still streaming down from Swanston Street.

Vic Greens abandon Indigenous people

The Victorian Greens have put on their suits and they are marching towards their seats in the Vic Parliament. But there is a price...

... The price is that they must prove their loyalty to the system, and in particular to the colonialist history of Australia.

What better way to do this than to completely abandon their Indigenous policy in time for the Vic elections?

Well done realist Greens! Nothing is as important as those comfy Parliament Seats!

I hope you enjoy them, because they are very expensive...

http://www.vic.greens.org.au/about-the-greens/policy/policy-documents/

More than 22,000 protesters converged on central London as part of global protests calling for urgent action from world leaders to tackle climate change, police and organisers say.

It's horribly compressed, but may give an idea. Taken from path between grassy bank and sandy area in front of stage, while Counterfeit Gypsies were playing.

45 secs, 954 KB. Windows .wmv format

walk against warming
by susan charles rankin kulin nation Sunday November 05, 2006 at 05:18 PM

And how many indigenous nations were invited to talk on their knowledge of climate change by the organisers of the walk except to maybe do a tokenistic welcome to country if that happened at all.
my oh my.now what are we going to going to do next mmm let me see maybe we can fill the murray river up again hey
Sorry but we have gone too far already to fix anything up.
Our old people told us that in time to come creator spirit and mother was going to take control of the worlds situation,and now it is in creator spirit and mother earths hands hey they are the ones in control of nature in the long run not no scientists or green peace or greenies or environmentalists they cant recreate life when its going to naturally shift and change and evolve other wise we had better have a bloody good plan up our long sleeves of denial.So now we can just cop the consequences of the wrath of nature.
We keep telling people that we the human race are one day going to go too far and this is what has happened but no one listened to us now we are laughing because we know of where to go and what to do to survive earths climatic shifts and changes while she purges and cleanses her self as we have always done in the past hey.its called the dreaming where we are safe from all the elements of nature while it does it,s job it is a natural process of evolving to the next new earth or world.
And the choice is yours to believe us or not just like it always was a choice but one day you might look around and there wont be one thing left standing upon the top of the earth hey because it will have all been purged and cleansed getting ready for the new earth that we are already dreaming and while we are dreaming the new earth or world creator spirit and mother earth through nature will be creating it again then we come out of our dreaming we have a whole new earth sound silly sound insane sound just too simple eh well its the simple things that confounds even the most highly intellectual minds in the world as it is the simple things in life that these kinds of people just cannot understand hahaha and they have the cheek to call us simpletons at least we will survive the wrath of nature.
Oh mate i am so sorry for the human race who choose not to believe us.
How many years through out the time has it been in between the different ages is it that mother earth through nature just naturally shifts and changes or evolves if you like is it 20'000 years or so well according to history it must be drawing close to that time again hey and thank mother earth for that or else there would be nothing left of any thing.
But because our people are loving and forgiving people who know that we are all part of the creation if people want to come unite with us then they too will be led to safety by mother earth and creator spirit through nature as we done this before from stone age dinasour age and ice age right through to the next age.
When my great granny told me of what is yet to come through nature itself at that time i never believed that it was going to be in my time but this is why the old people told us because they knew that it was going to be in our time.

There's 4 min.25 sec video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McGNqcm0_aM

Great to see so many thousands of Australians indulging in one of our Prime Minister’s favourite pastimes – walking – in response to a pressing issue the same glorious leader continues to try to hide from – the pending global climate meltdown. The large crowds around the country further demonstrate just how out of touch our political 'leaders' are.

Whereas ‘the mob’, as Howard would undoubtedly call us, clearly have an appetite for immediate action, the pollies have made it clear that, when it comes to the tough calls, they don’t plan to budge for the next few decades.
Aside from some differences in how they tinker around the edges (Howard likes nuclear, Beazley likes Kyoto, but neither of these are going to make much of a difference) both of the big (old) political parties are presenting the same false hopes, while ignoring genuine respones to climate change. As far as I can see, neither of the dinosaur (big + old) political parties seem to understand the parameters of the challenge facing the planet.

In particular, both of the fossil (big + old + dinosaur) parties exhibit the same myopic obsession with the fantasy of clean coal, a set of theories demanding $billions of investment and decades of patient crossed-fingers.
Both fossil parties are blindly ignoring the reality; that proposals for more efficient use of coal (ie. more gigawatts per unit carbon emissions) simply offer to spread the same level of pollution over a longer period, through massive investments that further entrench and prolong the fossil fuel industries.

Now, if the coal lobby wants to dig itself out of its own grave, and invest their own wealth in hopes and theories of freeing coal of its carbon burden, then best of luck to them. I sincerely hope they succeed. But spending $billions of public funds on further fossil-oriented infrastructure, which locks us into many more decades of fossil consumption, is unacceptable.

The fantasy of cleaner coal presents too much of a drain on precious dollars and months, which must be strategicly applied to genuine solutions to the global climate challenge. Far better, I say, to invest in the proven technologies of energy efficiency and renewables. These inevitable solutions offer immediate results with greater certainty, and, as the Stern report describes, great economic potential for those nations bold enough to take a leading role in their emerging industries.

The predicted International Energy Agency's (IEA) endorsement of nuclear power as safe and necessary, revealed by the UK media last week, has been dismissed by Greenpeace as ‘fundamentally flawed’.

The IEA is due to release its annual World Energy Outlook report on meeting global energy demands overnight [Tuesday 7 November] in London.

The IEA report comes hot on the heels of the Prime Minister pre-empting his own Nuclear Taskforce last weekend by declaring nuclear power ‘clean and green’. The Nuclear Taskforce is not due to release its draft report for another two weeks.

Catherine Fitzpatrick, Greenpeace Australia Energy Campaigner said: “Nuclear will be far too slow to make impacts on greenhouse emissions and is far too dirty. Whereas renewables and energy efficiency can deliver quickly and cleanly.”

If the IEA does advocate nuclear power it will contradict its own earlier analysis, which concluded nuclear power would not play a significant role in future energy supplies unless nuclear waste disposal problems are solved, nuclear proliferation risks eliminated and public opposition to new nuclear plants overcome.

Shaun Burnie, Greenpeace International’s Energy Campaigner, said: “None of these issues have been resolved; in the case of waste and proliferation the problems and dangers have only got worse, and the public still does not want nuclear power.

“After over half a century and billions of dollars of investment, nuclear power still provides less than 3% of global energy supply, and 17% of global electricity.

“Even if the nuclear industry could significantly increase capacity, it would take decades, cost far more than the alternatives of renewables and efficiency, and still end up delivering a small percentage of global energy. That's not even to factor in the implications around nuclear waste, proliferation and health,” said Mr Burnie.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald /AC Nielsen poll found that only 17 per cent of Australians support nuclear power as a way of tackling global warming.

Greenpeace will be available to provide initial remarks and analysis of the IEA World Outlook 2006 after its release from 5am Wednesday 8 November 2006.

JOURNALIST:

What do you make of the Nielsen poll results today on climate change?

PRIME MINISTER:

I found the Nielsen poll results quite unsurprising, quite unsurprising. Of course people would say at the present time in the wake of all the publicity given to the Stern Report that more needs to be done – it’s a natural response to that sort of question. I didn’t find that surprising. I didn’t find the 50 per cent who thought solar was the answer surprising either because solar is a nice, easy, soft answer. There’s this vague idea in the community that solar doesn’t cost anything and it can solve the problem, it can’t, it can’t replace base load power generation by power stations. It’s a good idea to make a contribution at the margin, but in the end, if you look years ahead, there are only two ways of generating the electricity that this nation needs – either through the current methods of fossil fuel use or a combination of that in a cleaner form with nuclear power. Solar, wind, all
these other things can make a contribution at the margin but unless you want to have a windmill every few hundred feet starting at South Head and going down to Malabar – and I can imagine the residents of Sydney wanting that – you simply won’t be able to generate enough power from something like wind in order to take the load off the power that is generated by the use of coal and gas and in time, I believe, nuclear. Now this is going to be a long debate but I’m going to continue to argue reason. I can’t have a policy on something like this dictated by an opinion poll. I read what people say, I understand it, I’m sympathetic, but in the end I’ve got to call it as it is and calling it as it is means that I have to say that solar and wind will not replace conventional power stations.

"it can’t replace base load power generation by power stations. " - another lie by John Howard

This is a direct lie refuted by the CSIRO. Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) power stations with thermal energy storage has the capacity to provide both peak and base load power generation.

According to a CSIRO report summary as part of the Cooperative Research centre for Coal in Sustainable Develpment (http://www.ccsd.biz/) (the irony!), "CST technologies are capable of meeting the requirements of two major power markets: large scale dispatchable markets comprised of grid-connected peaking and base-load power, and rapidly expanding distributed markets including both on-grid and remote/off grid applications."

Cost of CST (trough) electricity in 2005 was estimated at $120US per Megawatt hour (MWh). Estimated cost in 2015 of CST (trough) is $40US /MWh.

Australia is well placed to quickly develop CST power stations with vast areas of higher insolation relatively close to the existing electricity grid. At the moment only prototype plants are in operation in Australia, but as the scale of plants and manufacture ramps up, costs of plant development will fall. CST is described in the CSIRO report as "the only renewable technology that can make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions". While presently more expensive than wind turbines and coal power stations, it is predicted that "it is by far the lowest cost option for solar electricity." Detailed studies "predict cost competitiveness with fossil-fuel plants in the future - including storage."

CST is a proven technology, with nine solar thermal power plants of the parabolic trough type generating 9000 GWh/y (1000MWh continuous) into the California electricity grid. The report states "there is considerable scope for obtaining cost reductions by scale-up of the technology."

References:
John Howard misleads Australians about base-load solar power
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/128508.php

Appendix I: Concentrating Solar Thermal - Cooperative Research centre for Coal in Sustainable Develpment (http://www.ccsd.biz/)