The Victorian Coalition plans to sell the Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable market if it wins the November state election.

The sale of the government-owned 67-hectare site at Epping, just off the Hume Freeway in the city's north, would be a key budget-balancing measure.

Meanwhile, Labor has ruled out a sale, meaning the market's future will be decided by the election.

The operations at Australian oil and gas giant, Woodside's $12.5 billion Scarborough project in Western Australia have stopped after Greenpeace staged a protest at a floating platform.

On Sunday, the company said it had to pause work at a Scarborough floating production unit off the coast of WA. Two activists from the environmental advocacy group slept overnight on the semi-submersible unit, located about 375 km off the state's northwest coast, in a protest that started on Saturday.

Re Australia, where the two biggest states have state elections coming up and energy costs is one of the issues.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/43895228

A total of 12 fossil fuel and anti-renewables groups spent $1.2 million on Meta ads specifically mentioning energy.

In response just six renewable energy companies and one lobby group put ads on Meta platforms, but they spent just 1 per cent of the amount that the 12 kicked in over the same period.

There's tables in the article showing who is spending what on Facebook ads before the Vic and NSW state elections - Australian Energy Producers, Shell, and Minerals Council of Australia (including their astroturfing subsidiary Hands Off Our Fuel) are the biggest spenders.

Re Australia, where the two biggest states have state elections coming up and energy costs is one of the issues.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/43895228

A total of 12 fossil fuel and anti-renewables groups spent $1.2 million on Meta ads specifically mentioning energy.

In response just six renewable energy companies and one lobby group put ads on Meta platforms, but they spent just 1 per cent of the amount that the 12 kicked in over the same period.

There's tables in the article showing who is spending what on Facebook ads before the Vic and NSW state elections - Australian Energy Producers, Shell, and Minerals Council of Australia (including their astroturfing subsidiary Hands Off Our Fuel) are the biggest spenders.

A total of 12 fossil fuel and anti-renewables groups spent $1.2 million on Meta ads specifically mentioning energy.

In response just six renewable energy companies and one lobby group put ads on Meta platforms, but they spent just 1 per cent of the amount that the 12 kicked in over the same period.

There's tables in the article showing who is spending what on Facebook ads before the Vic and NSW state elections - Australian Energy Producers, Shell, and Minerals Council of Australia (including their astroturfing subsidiary Hands Off Our Fuel) are the biggest spenders.

The protest, organised by Across Victoria Alliance, brought around 300 CFA volunteers, farmers, One Nation and National party supporters, and a variety of renewable energy opponents into Melbourne on the sunny Friday morning.

Speakers, mainly men standing inside a large delivery truck, used Trumpian language to play up city-country divisions and went hard on militaristic calls for a war on transmission lines, renewable energy and data centres.

I'm disappointed that so many farmers and CFA (Country Fire Authority volunteers) who are going the be the most affected by climate change fronting this anti-renewables rally.

The protest, organised by Across Victoria Alliance, brought around 300 CFA volunteers, farmers, One Nation and National party supporters, and a variety of renewable energy opponents into Melbourne on the sunny Friday morning.

Speakers, mainly men standing inside a large delivery truck, used Trumpian language to play up city-country divisions and went hard on militaristic calls for a war on transmission lines, renewable energy and data centres.

I'm disappointed that so many farmers and CFA who are going the be the most affected by climate change fronting this anti-renewables rally.

A news article about Merri-bek Tech, a North-Melbourne community-hosting initiative, and discussing other digital sovereignty efforts including EU initiatives.

A news article about Merri-bek Tech, a local Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) community-hosting initiative, and discussing other digital sovereignty efforts including EU initiatives.

The Mortlake Community Alliance is suing the 400 megawatt (MW) Mt Fyans wind project and planning minister Sonya Kilkenny in the state’s Supreme Court, alleging errors in the decision that led to a planning permit being issued last year.

The group is promising that if this suit is successful, it will then sue public servants involved in the decisions “such as James Todd, Inka Veltheim and present and past DELWP/DEECA/DTP Secretaries,” according to a form letter intended for other wind farm developers ...

It wants members to send a form letter to developers of other wind projects they don’t like, to “strongly suggest” they stop all work until the court action is finished.

Source is OpenElectricity.org.au - you can view more (or less) details on the chart at that link.

Notes:

• Loads: Area below the zero line is Loads (exports and power stored in batteries or pumped hydro).
• Curtailment: The white-hatched area above Solar shows renewable generation which was curtailed (switched off or just unused) due to excess generation which could not be stored.
• Battery Charging cost is due to batteries charging in the middle of the day when wholesale prices are negative.

Bryn’s disability and gastrointestinal problems mean that he has been tube-fed since infancy.

For most of his life, the costs of Bryn’s food and feeding system have been covered by the Queensland children’s hospital but, as the process of transitioning him out of paediatric care begins, his mother, Shelley McRae, is worried changes to the NDIS mean she will be left to find an extra $50,000 a year to keep him alive.

cross-posted from Solarpunk: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49987772

The team used alginate to make materials they call soft dendritic colloids (SDCs). These are particles with hierarchical branches that give them a fuzzy appearance under a microscope and, much like gecko feet, create a large surface area that boosts van der Waals forces and makes the material really sticky. Velev says a single SDC particle can capture more than a thousand polymer particles from a suspension (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2025, DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202423494).

Epic fail for a battery powered kids toy to set itself on fire.

Summary: During the planning process, projects in NSW are automatically referred to an independent planning review if there are 50 “unique” submissions that object to the project, even if the objections are gibberish from the other side of the country. Anti-renewables Facebook groups keep weaponizing this by lodging cut-and-paste conspiracy-theory-filled objections to delay wind/solar/battery projects.

This is a recent example: Huge 10-hour battery attracts big wad of long distance objections, joins federal green queue (emphasis mine):

The NSW planning application is for 10-hours of storage, possibly to build in added redundancy, or more flexibility, and it turns out that some people who live in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and hundreds of kilometres away in other parts of NSW are annoyed.

The project attracted 74 objections, of which just one was truly local, a man who lives 650m down the road from the battery and solar projects developments and was worried about road use, and noise and air quality.

As is now common, most of the objections to the project were anonymous and, apart from the local man’s worries, repeated the same stale, and occasionally unhinged comments that are regularly copy-pasted into the submissions process.

These include concerns about foreign ownership, that “ruin-abulls” (sic) create a fire risk that could release toxic chemicals, and of Chinese Communist Party control of the energy sector.

A group called Save Our Surroundings Redbank Plains, a suburb outside Brisbane, objected on the grounds that it is an “evil, poisonous and treacherous plan that’s designed to rip off Australian people, contaminate our land/water /biodiversity/the public and enable our greatest enemy to control and harm us.”

In NSW, any project that gets more than 50 objections has to be sent to another independent planning committee, even if the objections are conspiracy theory BS from someone 500km away.

Why are cookers from the other side of the country allowed to stall projects like this? NIMBYism is one thing but these drongos are mostly from other states entirely.

Some older examples:

• 815 MW Bullawah wind farm and 718 MWh battery - Out of 84 submissions, 0 within 5km, 39 were from over 100km away including 5 from Queensland and 5 from Victoria.
• Dinawan 1.2 GW wind farm - 89 submissions, 7 within 5km, 64 from more than 100km away.
• Steel River Battery Energy Storage System - 3 submissions in support from people within 50 km of the project, 61 submissions objecting, all further than 50 km from the project, inlcuing 17 from Victoria and 6 from Queensland and 1 from Tasmania..
• Hume North battery - 72 objections, including nine from special interests groups, with 63 of these from people or groups located 100 kms or more away, or interstate. More than half objected to the very idea of replacing fossil fuels with renewables and storage.
• Deniliquin 480 MWh battery - zero objections within 50km, 66 from more than 50 kms away, and 26 from interstate.

That last one goes into some details about the content of the objections too:

Several objectors think the battery is actually a wind farm, and others think it is a solar project.

One is concerned about its impact on the catchment of the Keiwa River, which is 250 kms away, located in another state and on the other side of the Murray River. Maybe they had been encouraged to complain about another project, and forgot to change it for this one.

“Soon, we’ll all be in the dark thanks to delusional Global Boiling cultists!” said one.

It's been in the news here before but didn't see an actual plot or other visual representation.

Data from here (in Norwegian). Chart made with maplotlib/pywaffle.

Why Idle Off Matters

Idling pollutes the air wherever it happens, but near schools and childcare centres it’s especially harmful, because children are right there, walking, playing, and breathing in exhaust at close range.

Children are most at risk:

• Kids’ lungs are still developing, and they breathe more air relative to their body size than adults.
• Short-term exposure to traffic pollution can trigger asthma attacks and respiratory irritation, while repeated exposure can affect lung, heart, and brain development.
• An idling car can produce concentrated pollutants that linger at breathing height — leaving an engine running near a child can be equivalent to smoking a cigarette around them.

I first read about the campaign from this article: “You smell it:” Fumes from idling SUVs queuing at school are killing our children.

The anti-idling project at the Clovelly school started with an audit finding that roughly 50 per cent of cars remain running while waiting. Conducted during temperate autumn months, the findings suggest idling can be habitual rather than a necessity for air conditioners or heaters.

In Australia, air pollution was attributed to 1.3 per cent of the total disease burden and linked to more than 3200 deaths in 2018.

More details from Melbourne University

The data dashboard at the bottom of the page has lots of details including statistics based on regions, fuel/powertrain type, market segment, etc. You can look up individual car models on page 9 and see how their emissions and mass compare to others.