Green vandals lay waste with ‘environmental flows’

Bureaucrats in the NSW government and Snowy Hydro utility are threatening lives and damaging properties in the Murrumbidgee region, by releasing 5,000 megalitres per day of “environmental flows” into the already swollen Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers.

Snowy Hydro is causing downstream flood damage, because under its licence it is obliged to return as environmental flows water held back for electricity generation during drought years, as soon as the water is available—its current obligation reportedly amounts to about 500,000 megalitres, which it is fulfilling at the rate of 4,000-5,000 ML/day into already flooded rivers!

Snowy Hydro CEO Terry Charlton told Dr Jennifer Marohasy today that Snowy Hydro has repeatedly asked the NSW government to change this aspect of its licence. “The NSW government appears unable to make any decisions,” said Mr Charlton. “The situation is ridiculous. We are frustrated. Late last week we pulled back on the water releases but this potentially puts us in contravention of our water licence.”

Far from incompetence, it is in fact vandalism, perpetrated by bureaucracies that have been increasingly infiltrated by the radical green ideology since it was first unleashed on Australia in 1963 when Prince Philip started the Australian Conservation Foundation, to push the British oligarchical invention of “conservationism” that is hostile to people, and in fact seeks to achieve a forced-reduction in the human population. This current act of vandalism is another example of green policies endangering the community, such as the laws against land clearing and controlled burns, which, in the case of Victoria’s Black Saturday 2009 bushfires, cost 173 people their lives.

The typical bureaucrat excuse of “unintended consequences” won’t fly, because the locals are quick to warn them. For example, National Irrigators’ Council chief executive Danny O’Brien noted in a submission to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority released yesterday that MDBA targets for proposed environmental flows for the Lower Goulburn floodplain in Victoria, would require the same amount of water that flowed through in September, which at that time flooded Shepparton and caused $2 million of flood damage!

“Environmental flows” are intended to bolster the fraud, that there is a shortage of water, which is the fraud that underpins the scam of private water trading:

• Snowy Hydro is releasing these unnecessary environmental flows at a time when the major storage of the Snowy system, Lake Eucumbene, is only 27 per cent full. Instead of letting the present abundance of water recharge the whole system, which will then provide a reliable water supply for many years, environmental flows are used to keep the storages depleted.
• Similarly, Melbourne’s major water storage, the Thomson Reservoir, is only 36 per cent full, even after the incredible rainfalls, because water is regularly released for environmental flows. In the extreme drought year of 2006, the total downstream releases from Thomson Reservoir, 84,000 ML was greater than the total inflows of 73,500 ML into the Reservoir!
• The Bureau of Meteorology has statistically “revised” a century of rainfall figures for the Murray-Darling Basin, to force the figures into line with the fraudulent climate alarmists’ claim that climate change has caused a decrease in rainfall in recent decades (see graphs).

The CEC has just exposed this whole Royal green agenda in its latest New Citizen newspaper, and is distributing 400,000 copies around Australia.