Australia Videos & Australia News: Geography Videos // Current

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18 hours ago

Former England Captain Alec Stewart Gives His Thoughts Of The Ashes

There are many great things about the ashes: the rivalry, the wickets, the century’s, the passion and that ‘getting... more

TVC
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19 hours ago

Australian town bans bottled water sales

Residents of a rural Australian town hoping to protect the earth and their wallets have voted to ban the sale of bottled water, the first community in the country — and possibly the world — to take such a drastic step in the growing backlash against the industry.

Residents of Bundanoon cheered after their near-unanimous approval of the measure at a town meeting Wednesday. It was the second blow to Australia's beverage industry in one day: Hours earlier, the New South Wales state premier banned all state departments and agencies from buying bottled water, calling it a waste of money and natural resources.

"I have never seen 350 Australians in the same room all agreeing to something," said Jon Dee, who helped spearhead the "Bundy on Tap" campaign in Bundanoon, a town of 2,500 about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Sydney. "It's time for people to realize they're being conned by the bottled water industry."

First popularized in the 1980s as a convenient, healthy alternative to sugary drinks, bottled water today is often criticized as an environmental menace, with bottles cluttering landfills and requiring large amounts of energy to produce and transport.

Over the past few years, at least 60 cities in the United States and a handful of others in Canada and the United Kingdom have agreed to stop spending taxpayer dollars on bottled water, which is often consumed during city meetings, said Deborah Lapidus, organizer of Corporate Accountability International's "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign in the U.S.

But the Boston-based nonprofit corporate watchdog has never heard of a community banning the sale of bottled water, she said.

"I think what this town is doing is taking it one step further and recognizing that there's safe drinking water coming out of our taps," she said.

Bundanoon's battle against the bottle has been brewing for years, ever since a Sydney-based beverage company announced plans to build a water extraction plant in the town. Residents were furious over the prospect of an outsider taking their water, trucking it up to Sydney for processing and then selling it back to them. The town is still fighting the company's proposal in court.

Then in March, Huw Kingston, who owns the town's combination cafe and bike shop, had a thought: If the town was so against hosting a water bottling company, why not ban the end product?Residents of a rural Australian town hoping to protect the earth and their wallets have voted to ban the sale of bottled water,... more

ClipsFC
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20 hours ago

Australia town bans bottled water

The small Australian town of Bundanoon has become the first place in the country, and possibly the world, to ban the sale of... more

retro_Syl
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22 hours ago

Six dead in Tasmania's worst one-day toll in 20 years

SIX people have died in horrific crashes on Tasmania's roads in the worst one-day toll in 20 years. A head-on crash at... more

SilenceNoMore
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1 day ago

NO MORE BOTTLED WATER!!!, in this Australian town

A rural town in Australia has voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of bottled water over concerns about its environmental impact.... more

TrevTar
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1 day ago

Remains found in cave identified as heartbroken jilted bride

The remains of a woman found in a cave in Australia in 1981 have been identified as Audrey Mountford, who ran into the wild in... more

emmaboswood
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3 days ago

United Kingdom Talk Video Tuesday 7th July 2009

Tuesday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch or listen to the show here on CURRENT TV on Tues, Thurs &... more

ChrisReardon
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3 days ago

Zoo Welcomes Baby Elephant

Photographs of a baby elephant and his mother at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday, July 7, 2009. The as yet unnamed... more

ebindelglass
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7 days ago

China angry at Australia's Dalai Lama visit

The Chinese Government has reacted angrily to an Australian parliamentary delegation's visit to meet Tibet's spiritual... more

Siriuslyfun19212
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8 days ago

Skippy Actor Loses Court Profit Battle

A former star of the orginal Skippy the Bush Kangaroo TV show has recently lost a court battle over profits earned from the... more

Gregsalter
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10 days ago

How not to get Brits to go to Australia

If you're the Australian tourist board and you're trying to entice Brits to visit your country with a webcam that... more

richjm
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10 days ago

United Kingdom Talk Video Tuesday 30th June 2009

Tuesday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch or listen to the show here on CURRENT TV on Tues, Thurs &... more

ChrisReardon
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14 days ago

Number of Climate Change Doubters Swells

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Associated Press

Steve Fielding
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promisesSteve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the... more