Who said it was for no reason? I am sure it is much cheaper to drop it in the area specific instead of much farther out to sea like at the edge of the continental shelf.
The point about not dumping it directly on coral or seagrass misses that silt moves easily, up to 80km and this is within 25km of the actual reef. See the problem?
That might make sense, except that this mob have never given a shit about the environment. Under 12 years of Howardâs rule was there one decent piece of environmental legislation that wouldnât have happened quicker under Labor?
Not only that, but the cost in both fuel and carbon emissions to move the material out further. Last I heard, the dumping spot was actually about 15 miles away from the edge of the reef, not the actual reef itself. This combined with the fact that when weâre dealing with volumes the size of the ocean 3Mm^3 isnât that much volume at all (considering that the reef is 344,000 km^2 in area).
Also I trust the WWF about as far as I can throw them. They do have a tendency to try and twist facts and manipulate headlines so they get more press and try to throw fervor over events they donât like or go against their political or ideological agenda.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the reef needs to be protected, and I personally would not want to see a coal shipping port expanded, but that port is being expanded regardless of my opinion. At this point Iâd rather them dump it closer inland than bardging it long distances and spewing all that carbon in the air.
The best part is that all of this is so they can export coal, which will of course screw over the reef even moreâŚ
Not really, because this article doesnât document those numbers. Iâm not a marine biologist, so I donât know how far silt travels. Iâll just have to assume you know what youâre talking about, but the article undermined its entire premise in the last paragraph. As a result, it doesnât sound like itâs making a strong case - it sounds like scaremongering.
I hate it when industry distorts facts to imply that pollution is good and healthy - but I also hate it when environmentalists distort facts to imply that the sky is falling. I suppose exaggeration is good for fundraising, but Iâm the type that thinks facts make better policy.
Because carting it somewhere else would raise their costs, and cut into their profit margins
All I know is what I read on this topic as well. Other articles provide a little more discussion of the issue and provided me with the 80km number, I am sure it comes from one of the environmental groups opposed to the dumping. However, to me, I see environmentally oriented groups and scientistâs information turning out to be correct much more than industry pronouncements of safety to the environment.
At the risk of looking like I support our new Liberal government (which I actually detest), I think there are a couple of words missing from the headline. The spoil is actually being dumped in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which is bigger than the reef itself. Not that I approve of this either. The current government is full of idiots and arseholes.
A fine tradition that will be upheld in seats of power everywhere.
Itâs a pity that as a Journeyman Journalist, there isnât a bit more background research done on this. This is âsandâ being spread on a sandy area, not on coral⌠From an editorial in the australian newspaper âŚ
NICK CATER THE AUSTRALIAN FEBRUARY 04, 2014 12:00AM
A NON SEQUITUR is a figure of speech that signals when an environmental activist has lost the argument.
âWould we throw three million cubic metres of rubbish around the foot of the Sydney Opera House?â asks Greenpeaceâs Louise Matthiesson in an article on the ABCâs The Drum website.
Clearly Matthiesson has not had the pleasure of wading knee-deep through detritus on Bennelong Point at first light on New Yearâs Day or she would know the answer to her question.
Experience tells us, however, that Matthiesson is not trying to elicit facts, but to avoid them.
Her claim that Environment Minister Greg Hunt has approved âa coal-driving, coal-shipping superhighwayâ through the Great Barrier Reef has a ring of implausibility.
Indeed, upon examination, the story is somewhat less rip-roaring. After 16 environmental inquiries North Queensland Ports Authority has been given permission to increase capacity at Abbot Point to export coal from the Galilee Basin.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has approved the dredging of three million tonnes of sand and will allow it to be deposited 25km northeast, 40m below the surface. The deposit will be spread over 40ha of silty seabed, which amounts to 0.0001 per cent of the entire marine park.
Nevertheless, Fridayâs announcement sent the catastrophists berserk.
âThe Abbott government is hell-bent on turning Australia into a reckless charco-state,â wrote Alexander White in The Guardian.
âCoal versus coral,â proclaimed The Sydney Morning Heraldâs front page on Saturday.
In a press release with a picture that implied that it was a bad day for pandas, the World Wildlife Fund accused the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority of âenvironmental vandalismâ.
âOut-dated practices like dumping dredge spoil in reef waters must stop now,â it declared.
Dredge spoil - or sand, as we used to call it - is the stuff we put in childrenâs play pits. It has never been considered a threat to the reef in itself.
Two years ago, a comprehensive study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science concluded that storm damage had caused 48 per cent of the damage to the reef, 10 per cent was due to bleaching, and the crown of thorns starfish was responsible for the rest.
The sand on the seabed at Abbot Point is well within international limits for heavy metals and other contaminants as established by the London Convention and the Commonwealth Sea Dumping Act. Indeed it is considered clean enough to replenish beaches if there were any in the vicinity that needed bulking up.
The relocation of sand will be restricted to the period between March and June to protect the growth of seagrass in which dugongs like to wallow. Every imaginable precaution will be taken to avoid inconveniencing the green and flatback turtles, dolphins, leopard sharks and olive-headed sea snakes.
Depositing the sand offshore will avoid any disturbance to the Caley Valley wetlands close to the port. Naturally occurring acid sulphate soils can be kept â â â â â to avoid the chemical reaction that would occur if they were deposited on land.
The sediment that is damaging the reef is the nine million tonnes or so a year washed down from the Burdekin and Don catchments containing residual herbicides, pesticides and nutrients.
North Queensland Bulk Ports will be required to offset the sand dredged from Abbot Point by funding schemes to reduce the amount of contaminated fine sediment entering the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
It means the waters lapping the reef are likely to be purer once the development is complete than they are now. The environmental movement stubbornly refuses to recognise these measures, let alone enter into partnership with government and industry in an attempt to achieve even better agreements.
It remains locked in the thinking of the early 1970s, insisting that there can be no accommodation between industry and nature.
In the past 40 years countless billions of dollars have been directed into environmental science. Our knowledge of the impact of human activity on the environment and the mitigation techniques that can be employed has improved vastly.
Paradoxically, however, the environmental movement is seeking to restrict even further the limits beyond which developers cannot venture.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority was charged by Malcolm Fraserâs government with responsibility to set reasonable limits for human activity within its various zones. Its chief purpose was to stop Joh Bjelke-Petersenâs government issuing permits for drilling and coral mining.
It was never intended that mankind should be excluded altogether from an area larger than Victoria and Tasmania. Yet those are the rules the environmental movement now seeks to enforce.
In the end, this is not an argument about sand or coral. It is a campaign about coal, with Abbot Point caught in a proxy war between mainstream Australia and the eco-fundamentalists who see the extraction of fossil fuels as akin to murder.
Their rhetoric may be aimed at the Coalition government, but the previous federal Labor government was no less committed to the development of the Galilee Basin and other untapped reserves in Queensland.
To hear the counter argument made, one has to venture beyond the platforms of the major parties to the Greens or the websites run by the ABC. In a passionate opinion piece published recently, the ABCâs online environment editor, Sara Phillips, argues that the downstream effects of the coal passing through Abbot Point should have been included in the environmental impact study.
âSure the port is only the transit lounge for coal destined for faraway power stations, but it is a key link in the chain,â she writes. "The intertwining of the operations of this enlarged port and climate change are impossible to ignore.
âCoral bleaching may seem unrelated to the departure of a shipload of coal heading to China, but the connection is undeniable.â
Sentiments such as these cannot be appeased. It makes little difference if the dredged sand is dumped in a marine park, as landfill or on the Environment Ministerâs house.
The aim is not to stop the Abbot Point expansion; it is to shut the whole damn thing down.
Thanks for that article. I recognize the style all too well (I work in the oil & gas industry): the nice company provided a press release which was copied virtually verbatim. Iâm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle â WWF is akin to PETA when it comes to exaggeration and extremism â so itâs good to get the companyâs viewpoint as well, to have a sense of both ends of the continuum.
Looking up what criticism there has been of the WWF, most of it seems to be about being too close to businesses that damage the environment, being insufficiently critical of them while lending a good name to greenwash their actions. PETA more or less calls them a scam. A few things condemned the odd exaggeration, but I didnât see anything notable painting them as habitual extremists. Where did you get this from?
Hang on, credit where itâs due; remember that one time they suddenly started giving a shit about an endangered species of parrot because a proposed wind farm threatened to kill one every thousand years or so?
Malcom Turnbull is the only Liberal MP of note I can think of who isnât plainly one or both of those.
I seem to remember when most of the bad guys were merely of Turnbullâs ilk, but thatâs probably just nostalgia talkingâŚ
Sentiments such as those held by The Australian and their readership, labouring under the misapprehension that thereâs something legitimate about business as usual, cannot be appeased.
Or rather, they can be temporarily appeased, so long as thereâs coal to dig up and flog off, and there remains someone with a civilisation and economy to sell it to.
But some of us are kinda sick of these rapists constantly getting their way. So donât be surprised when we start resorting to the sort of dirty tricks that fooled people into letting these scumbags get us into this mess in the first place.
The writingâs been on the wall for decades and these arsehole fuckwits stubbornly continue dragging us all to hell. So today itâs spin and propaganda, and tomorrow itâll be militant resistance and molotovs.
Anyone with half a brain flat-out refuses to appease a sociopath.
Well, what a weird response. Comments like âwhen we start resorting to dirty tricksâ. Say, what? You response to people that you perceive to be doing the âwrong thingâ is to âdo another wrong thingâ. Didnât your parents ever tell you about two wrongs not making a right.
But who is the âsociopathâ - surely the self-avowed anarchist is probably more likely to fit into that category.
Of course, the protagonist here, identifies as being a âbike mechanicâ from Melbourne - have you actually traveled anywhere near the location in question? Have you actually read the environmental submissions associated with this? Apparently such facts fall by the wayside, when indignation reigns.
Speaking of Bikes, I can remember years ago, in Townsville, a strident protestor against the Greenvale Nickel Mine (aand Yabula Refinery) - he was one of the âSole possessions were two changes of clothes and his racing bicycleâ types. He asked âJust what we do need nickel forâ. I pointed out, that one of the main things was to stop bicycles rusting (Pre carbon fibre days). That shut him up.
Maybe I should also mention on my profile Iâm a utilitarian. Exaggerating one deleterious aspect of coal-mining in order to push the public perception of the practice as a whole in the appropriate* direction seems pretty trifling next to parasitic corruption dominating an entire economy, at least in my book. Itâs bad to the extent that it backfires. Oh, and to the extent that it harms respect for truth, but hey, weâre in a never-ending war on terror, remember, and we all know who the first casualty was; this century, all public discourse is irretrievably tainted with bullshit.
*to our long-term survival
Oh, and if you imagine anarchists are more likely to be sociopathic, that betrays a rather superficial understanding of a significant chunk of political philosophy. You know all the really useful and surprising emergent properties of the worldwide web, right? You can give most of your thanks to the principle of anarchy. Think of it as bottom-up organisation as opposed to top-down. Now go and look at how the Universe works.
And you know who ends up running top-down systems? Sociopaths.
The challenge posed by anarchists: define âlegitimate authorityâ without making me laugh.
You need some Chomsky up ya.
Also, since youâre prepared to repeat ridiculous comments by folks you apparently think resemble me, perhaps youâd find this helpful - that is, if youâre not just oozing Boltian disingenuity.
You know, youâre right: I was thinking about how WWF is like PETA in that it alienates more people than it attracts, including people who technically agree with them 100%, and makes the issue they stand for look bad as a resultâŚand then I was thinking about PETA specifically, and chose words that described that organization specifically.
I think youâve captured the problems with WWF well.
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