The corporate media’s recent focus on the global economic crisis has all but eclipsed a much greater crisis – global climate change and the general destruction of the world’s environment. But if the environment “goes bust”, the implications for humanity and millions of plant and animal species are well known and horrifying.

On July 14, federal environment minister Peter Garrett approved the construction of the Four Mile uranium mine, 550 km north of Adelaide.

While the UN was busy promoting its latest carbon trading scams and encouraging people to attend “celebrations” for World Environment Day, the people in the town of Bagua in northern Peru were fighting a life-and-death struggle to save their environment from corporate plunder – a struggle that achieved a partial victory.

I write in response to recent letters in the daily papers about fuel loads and control burning. These are only one small element of confronting the threat of firestorms. They are by themselves though not a lasting solution to the dry and hot climatic conditions we are experiencing and do not address the real problems we are facing.

Seventy million cubic metres – equivalent to at least one quarter of the UK’s natural gas consumption – is burnt every day in gas flaring in the oil wells of the Niger River delta. Gas flaring in Nigeria accounts for roughly half of sub-Saharan Africa’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

On April 23, the Senate select committee on climate policy heard what should have been taken as a striking ultimatum: To avoid catastrophic climate change, there must be an immediate moratorium on the construction of coal-fired power plants, and existing coal-fired plants need to be shut within 20 years.

The Australian government is playing “Russian roulette with the climate system, with most of the chambers loaded”, according to CSIRO climatologist James Risbey.

What nation is the most sustainable in the world? If you guessed Sweden or Denmark, you would be wrong. Instead, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has declared Cuba as the only country on the planet that is approaching sustainable development. Key to this designation is the island’s “energy revolution”, an energy conservation effort launched only two years ago.

Compact fluorescent light globes are as bright as incandescent globes but consume 75-80% less energy and last 5-10 years.

The draft legislation for the government’s planned greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading scheme (ETS), released on March 10, contained no real answers to the problem.

The approval by Ecuador’s parliament on January 29 of a new mining law sparked protests and civil disobedience throughout the country.

The official death toll from the Victorian bushfires was 210 by February 23. At least 7500 people have been left homeless by the fires, which began on February 7, after over 2000 houses were destroyed.

2008 was the 9th warmest year since measurements began in 1880, according to data published by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies on January 13. At 0.44oC warmer than the 1951-1980 average, it was also warmer than any year on record prior to 1998. The 10 warmest years on record have now all occurred since 1997.

The World Energy Outlook 2008, released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on November 12, makes an alarming prediction: Without new government policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and assuming current rates of growth in energy demand continue, global GHG emissions could rise 45% by 2030.

The rate of growth in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – 3% between 2006 and 2007 – has exceeded the “worst-case scenario” predictions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the September 26 Los Angeles Times reported.

The enthusiasm for nuclear power in sections of the ALP that was nurtured during the government of the previous prime minister, John Howard, has not been dampened.

As the Sun disappeared below the horizon of the North Pole on September 22 – ending the Northern hemisphere’s summer – it left behind the second-lowest minimum level of Arctic summer ice cover since satellite records began 29 years ago.

“We cannot continue to pour carbon pollution into the atmosphere as if there is no cost … Climate change threatens our food production, agriculture, and water supplies.” With this dire warning, the minister for climate change and water, Senator Penny Wong, released the federal government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme green paper on July 16.

Exactly 20 years after his June 23, 1988 testimony to the US Senate, which alerted the public that global warming was underway, Dr James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offered a sobering deadline – one year – to begin deffusing the “global warming time bomb”.

The latest news on climate change is not good.