By JAMES WOODFORD
I hate to say it but there is one small way Opposition leader Tony Abbott is right. His two most repeated and quoted recent comments on the environment may sound like hyperbole but he is in fact absolutely correct.
Whether it be an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax the new measure will […]

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This week we had the spectacle of climate-denier-politicians Barney Joyce and Nicky Minchin (Nobel prize-winning scientists and philosophers that they aren’t) telling us everyone else with a doctorate and a brain is wrong and that they are right. Humans have nothing to do with climate change, they say. We actually don’t need to worry, our […]

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There’s news and there’s shipping news. The shipping news is the local stuff - strange comings and goings, unusual cargo and celebrities in odd places. Today Real Dirt, Fast begins with such a story.
We have a lot of echidnas down here at Cudbugga Forest but normally they are on their way across the paddocks, heading directly to […]

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They say people often look like their pets and that scientists sometimes look like the creatures they study. Overlooking his unruly beard, Dr Duck, more formally known as Professor Richard Kingsford from the University of NSW, is no exception.
Right now he is even behaving like a bird. Dr Duck is on a mass migration around the continent […]

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Right now our water tank here on the NSW south coast is perilously low, which is why I reckon the story of the week is the admission from NSW Premier Nathan Rees that in February Sydney nearly ran out of water. Excuse me? The biggest and most important city in the country nearly ran out […]

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Sometimes it is the little stories that shed light on the big ones. There is a lot of triple-bogey-sized news at the moment and most of it is economic - although, considering the economy (as someone once said) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, every economic story is really an environmental one.

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Now to the weather. Real Dirt has been writing about the environment for more than fifteen years and if there is one thing that is certain it is uncertainty. The biggest stories are nearly always the ones that no-one saw coming. But every now and then there is a weather map that looks […]

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This week Real Dirt, Fast offers up an amazing fact about rubbish: American airlines throw out enough aluminium cans every year to build 58 new 747 jets.
As the Sydney Morning Herald reported:
The Trash Landings report, by the Natural Resources Defence Council, also found US airlines disposed of 9000 tonnes of plastic a year, and enough […]

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Professor Garnaut’s final report on climate change came down this week just as the planet’s economy looked as though it was about to do some weird quantum thing and collapse down to a little black hole the size of a pea. Still those little black holes, as the scientists tell us, can be as heavy […]

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It’s not big environment news yet but it sure will be. What I am referring to is the unstoppable flood of bad money pouring into the swamps of economic disaster over in the United States. Right now whether the bailout goes ahead or not it feels like something very big and bad is brewing - what […]

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