CANWin’s first street stall was held in Mittagong on Saturday the 25th August.
We are holding these every couple of weeks in different towns in the Shire to provide basic information to the public on climate change and they also serve to recruit new members.
Mittagong is a difficult venue particularly because the new shopping development has greatly reduced the number of people in the main street. Despite this, our first day was quite successful with 8 people registering with Sandra for our newsletter and two new confirmed financial members.
Nina D’Arcy has done a great job organising Council approvals and our roster. The first stall was attended by Sandra Menteith, Jeremy Hynes and Rob Parker. Jeremy showed great skills in meeting with people and has a very engaging manner.
Our selection of handouts has been greatly boosted by our own research group who have contributed ten different papers on subjects such a Greenpower, solar hot water and carbon trading.
Whether you are rostered on or not, members are encouraged to come along on Saturday mornings because these events are fun and are just a good outing. We generally grab a coffee and have a good yarn.
Our next stall will be at Moss Vale on the 8th September somewhere between IGA Tuckerbag and the newsagent and it will be run by Bob Thomas, Sheila Ring and backed up by Amanda Lambess.

From Rob Parker

parker Events, General

I’m throwing in local manufacturing as a topic for discussion in the ‘B’ list. 47 years ago manufacturing was almost 30% of GDP in Australia. That figure has fallen to 13% over the last four and a half decades – almost 9% below equivalent levels for other OECD countries. This sharp drop in our manufacturing base was blamed on poor local demand (ie our population base was too small to support any reasonable manufacturing operation, or so the argument went) and our higher wage structure compared to our asian neighbours (we were prepared to pay our workers a living wage).

Much of our manufacturing has been moved offshore, because, according to the highly paid CEO’s of most of our public companies (why isn’t anybody concerned about the high wage structure of our public company executives??), the costs of manufacturing in asian countries such as China are so much lower. This (supposedly) makes our manufactured goods cheaper.

The reality is that, if you examine the resulting effects on the Australian economy, we end up with a chronic current account deficit (that’s an overdraft to you and me). Why does that matter? It matters because, every time the economy strengthens we increase spending on manufactured goods, and because those goods now have to come from overseas we have to sell our dollar to buy the overseas currency to pay for them. That puts downward pressure on the Australian dollar and (by default) upward pressure on interest rates. This is part of the reason why interest rates in Australia are chronically higher than in many other OECD countries.

So what has all this got to do with climate change? Well, for a start, higher interest rates means it is harder to raise capital for investment in new technologies and research and development – so vital for the development of new industries like renewables. The reluctance to base manufacturing in Australia means that whenever we want to buy consumer goods they have to have travelled from China or other asian countries, and therefore have significantly increased carbon footprints. Our ability to produce low cost community based manufactured products or equipment is impaired because we have lost the necessary expertise.

The only way that overseas manufacturing makes sense is if:

1. You don’t count the environmental cost of transporting the goods
2. You want to boost your profit margin by manufacturing goods in countries where workers have no rights and work in conditions and for pay levels that we would find immoral (how is it that we still manage to justify it to ourselves when we buy these goods?)3. You are a CEO or shareholder and want increased profits and dividends regardless of the cost to the environment and our children’s futures

We have also not considered the effect on local communities of manufacturing jobs disappearing from our shores. Manufacturing provided manual, technical and administrative jobs for young people in a broad spread of urban and rural communities. With their disappearance went many of the rural and regional jobs, with a consequence that many were forced to the cities in search of service industry jobs (the new government and business focus). This has lead to more commuter oriented lifestyles with even higher emissions.

However, now our call centres are being relocated to India – if our future is not in manufacturing and not in service industries then where will our children work for a living?

Local manufacturing means local jobs, closer communities, less commuting and lower emissions. A win – win situation.

andrew General

After the last committee meeting on Sunday – a record four hours duration – some of us came away feeling very drained. The central issue of the meeting was Canwin’s inability to voice its support the climate protection bill because we have not (as a group) debated and agreed our joint position on several important issues raised within the bill.

The meeting also raised two other very important issues – are we a group that will only make decisions by consensus? – and will we avoid all conflict (between group members) to the extent that action on any important issues becomes impossible for fear of offending or isolating one section of our diverse community of members.

Integrity is obviously a hard thing to sacrifice on the altar of the ‘greater good’. And who decides what ‘good’ is anyway? Perhaps if the issues here weren’t so politically sensitive, and this wasn’t an election year, we might have more time for endless debate and discussion. But it is an election year and the realists amongst us know that this is the only time that politicians will listen to the man in the street. If we really care about getting a useful message out into our community, then we need to ACT – firstly to make our own message clear (that means debating the ‘B’ list now) – secondly to DO what we all claimed to want when we first came together as Canwin.

Sandra Menteith has sent everyone the ‘B’ list topics. Please choose those dearest to your hearts and lets have a robust and honest debate – and then move forward and ACT!

andrew General

Bob has suggested that we start posting blogs so as to stimulate Canwin discussions on various apparently more controversial issues upon which we cannot, as yet, find consensus (the ‘b list’). Bob suggests we do this by posting suggested Federal policy points, as modelled in the points passed by majority at the last GM (the ‘a list’). Good idea. So I’d like to start with the nuclear fuel cycle. Here’s my suggested formula:

Phase out uranium mining and prohibit the establishment of the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle in Australia.

Clarification: It is a convenient myth to think one can just talk about nuclear power plants. These in fact cannot be separated from the whole nuclear fuel cycle: from uranium mining, via uranium enrichment, nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel reprocessing to nuclear waste disposal, nuclear transports between all these facilities and eventual plant de-commissioning. This whole nuclear fuel cycle creates a whole complex series of various forms of routine contamination and extreme danger. Here are just some of them.

• Uranium mining creates huge mountains of millions of tonnes of radioactive tailings which wind and water then spread into the environment for thousands of years.
• All nuclear facilities emit radioactive isotopes even under routine conditions. Routine radioactive emissions from uranium enrichment plants and fuel reprocessing plants are much higher than those from nuclear power plants.
• Even when routine emissions are considered ’small’, radioactive isotopes (e.g. cesium 137, strontium 90) must inevitably bio-accumulate up the food chains and contaminate food , breast milk etc., further adding to our toxic loads and those of our children, born and unborn, creating more terrible suffering of various kinds
• All nuclear facilities may undergo catastrophic accidents (e.g. Chelyabinsk, Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl), releasing volumes of radioactivity into the environment that may dwarf the radioactivity released in Hiroshima
• The Russian Academy of Sciences estimated the deaths from Chernobyl at 200,000
• All of these facilities are an inherent security risk in that they provide all terrorists or wartime enemies with dream targets with which to get maximum destruction with minimum means
• The ‘peaceful’ nuclear fuel cycle is inherently linked to the spread of nuclear weapons of mass destruction and the undermining of nuclear non-proliferation
• The nuclear waste issue has not been solved, and in fact cannot be since no toxic materials can ever be artificially kept from the environment for thousands of years without the possibility of any leaking
• The whole nuclear cycle could not work without massive inputs of fossil fuel to keep it going and thus contributes to climate chaos
• The nuclear fuel cycle contradicts every single one of the five basic precepts of ecological sustainability formally accepted by all levels of Australian government in 1993 (ecological integrity, intra-generational equity, inter-generational equity, internalisation of external costs , the precautionary principle)
• It is thus purely and simply unethical from beginning to end.

Add to this list the generally accepted fact that nuclear power cannot exist without massive taxpayer subsidies and not enough can be built quickly enough to make any substantial difference to reducing greenhouse gases within the timeframne needed (the next ten years), and the whole case for nuclear power crumbles into a heap.

To support nuclear power - even as a so-called ‘last resort’ – would be to unethically add wholesale radioactive contamination to an already ecologically devastated and over-heated world. No climate change group can support it without losing all ethical credibility.

Peter

peter General

At the special meeting at which the new policy document was ratified, members mentioned other points on which CANWin might express a position, but due to time limitations they were not able to be discussed. It was suggested that we use this blog page to accumulate a body of opinion on each of the issues, and call a another meeting in the near future to add some or all of them to the policy. I list the issues here, and suggest that one or more proponents of each one put words to a specific proposal in a separate blog, to which comments may be added. In this way, we might collect a series of proposals to bring to a meeting, the wording of which will have already been refined to some extent.

The issues:
1. Environmental refugees & health effects
2. Nuclear fuel cycle
3. Geosequestration
4. Population control
5. Local manufacturing base increase
6. Steady state economics
7. Emissions trading/taxation
8. Limit urbanisation
9. Energy for developing countries
10.Limits of renewable energy
11. Food security & GM food
12. Government support for I.T.E.R.
13. Labelliung of food miles

The Management Committee suggests that members of Canwin choose a maximum of six (6) topics for discussion in a meeting in early September.  As one member said, “This discussion will determine the future direction of Canwin. Any member who does not attend and participate in the discussion can have NO grounds for complaint about the policy or direction of Canwin from this time forward. This is democracy in action and are we not an action group?”

So let’s hear from you….

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