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Another broken promise
FSANZ fails to ensure the safety of foods containing nanomaterials
Emerging technologies and corporate control
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National Academy of Sciences backs untested technologies in the face of climate inaction
What would a sane society say about a corporatised society that brings the planet to a point of collapse through economic and political systems based on endless exploitation, greed and growth and then desperately searches for ways to solve the problem using the same system? According to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions we are currently on track for 4°C warming by the end of the century. As Professor Schellnhuber, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) puts it “the difference between two and...
read moreDoomsday Clock edges closer to midnight as risks of emerging tech go unchecked
This year the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight, two minutes closer to catastrophe than in 2014. The members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board cited unchecked climate change, nuclear weapons and emerging technological threats such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence as the reasons we are teetering towards global catastrophe. According to the Bulletin “world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These...
read moreRegister suggests widespread unregulated use of nanomaterials in agriculture in Australia
The revelation that large quantities of nanomaterials are being used in agricultural chemicals in France has brought into serious question claims made by the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), that nanomaterials are currently not being used in agricultural chemicals in Australia. France is the first country globally to have adopted a mandatory register of nanomaterial use. Its 2013 statistics, released late in 2014, show that nearly 500,000 tonnes of nanomaterials were produced or imported into France in 2013....
read moreUS groups sue the EPA for failing to regulate nano-silver
While exasperation grows in Australia with regulators who don’t regulate, unfortunately it appears that regulatory paralysis is not a problem confined to Australia. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared silver a pesticide. In 2008 the International Center for Technology Assessment issued the EPA with a legal petition requesting that they also declare nano-silver a pesticide and begin to register and regulate the proliferating number of consumer products containing nano-silver. Although the EPA ultimately acknowledged that...
read moreGovernment’s deregulatory extremism puts public at risk
We are surrounded by regulation. Every moment of our waking and sleeping lives is populated with a vast regulatory network. There are thousands of regulations relating to our homes, our clothes, our foods, the way we drive, the places we work, the wages we receive, the super we contribute to, the environment we live in and depend on for life. Many of these regulations have saved lives and protected property and biodiversity. But regulation in the extreme free market orthodoxy of both the ALP and the Coalition is now by definition bad....
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And that could destroy life on Earth.