ONE of the country’s biggest property developers has been fined $200,000 by the NSW Land and Environment Court for unlawfully clearing 23 hectares of native vegetation.

Walker Corporation, which has more than $4 billion of developments under way across Australia, was given a record fine for a company under the Native Vegetation Act for clearing the land at a property near Wilton, south-west of Sydney, in 2006 and 2007.

The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) brought the case against Walker Corporation and persuaded the court the company cleared seven native species including black she-oak and narrow-leaved ironbark. (Read on …)

Australia appears to be locked into carbon taxation under a scheme that will directly slug the nation’s 500 biggest polluters, shut down its dirtiest coal-fired electricity generators and compensate business and millions of households for the ensuing rises in living costs.

Within four years the tax will be rolled into a carbon emissions trading scheme that Prime Minister Julia Gillard said would plug into a widening international market and which will almost certainly affect New Zealand.

Gillard and Prime Minister John Key have said the two nations’ emissions trading schemes should work as closely as possible together, and last month agreed to set up a senior officials group to determine how this could be achieved.

The new tax, announced yesterday by Gillard, Treasurer Wayne Swan and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, is now certain to pass through Parliament after Lower House endorsement by Greens MP Adam Bandt and independents Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Andrew Wilkie.

This gives Gillard the votes she needs to pass the legislation to the Senate, where the Greens hold the balance of power. (Read on …)

The Queensland government has laid charges against a mining company for allegedly contaminating groundwater with cancer-causing chemicals.

The state’s Department of Environment and Resource Management has laid charges against Cougar Energy after a gas well ruptured at a site south of Kingaroy where the company was trialling underground coal gasification.

DERM’s acting director-general Terry Wall said in a statement Cougar Energy has been charged with three counts of breaching conditions of its environmental authority under the Environmental Protection Act 1994. (Read on …)

Exeter Crown Court was told that records about the amount of effluent discharged into a stream from the company’s mill in Cullompton, Devon were falsified. The EA, which brought the prosecution, alleged that St Regis and the site’s technical manager Christopher Steer were involved in the deception.

The site, Higher Kings Mill, operates under a pollution prevention and control (PPC) permit. A condition of the permit is that St Regis monitors its own effluent treatment plant and reports the results to the EA. (Read on …)

Arrow Energy could be slapped with a $50,000 fine for failing to immediately report a gas leak in Queensland.

The state government has accused the company of showing contempt for strict rules governing such incidents.

It took Arrow two hours to alert authorities that gas and salty water were bursting from one of its coal seam gas wells on a farm west of Dalby.

The rupture happened on Sunday after workers uncapped it to install a pump for gas production. It was successfully capped on Monday.

Mining Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said that Arrow or its contractors could face a hefty fine of up to $50,000 if their response was found lacking.

‘‘The tardiness in reporting this matter is unacceptable and it shows contempt for the rules and no respect for the landholder or regulating authorities,’’ Mr Hinchliffe told parliament today.

In a separate incident, a diesel spill on Arrow’s Moranbah gas fields yesterday had been contained and contaminated soil would be removed, Mr Hinchliffe told parliament.

Queensland’s environment department says an alumina refinery owned by Rio Tinto has spilt sulphuric acid into a creek in central Queensland.

Rio Tinto notified the Department of Environment and Resource Management that the spill occurred at the Yarwun alumina refinery on Sunday during heavy rain.

DERM spokesman Joe Pappalardo said an unknown amount of the acid was released into Boat Creek when the site’s stormwater system overflowed in heavy rain.

Urgent inspections and water sampling has been done at Boat Creek and nearby Port Curtis, at Gladstone.

“Inspections by DERM officers … have found no evidence of environmental harm suggesting that the recent rain and high tides in Boat Creek have helped to dilute the acid and flush it through the system relatively quickly,” Mr Pappalardo said. (Read on …)

QUITO – An Ecuadorean judge ruled yesterday in an epic environmental case that Chevron was responsible for oil drilling contamination in a swathe of Ecuador’s northern jungle and ordered the oil giant to pay US$8.6 billion ($11.4 billion) in damages and cleanup costs.

The amount was far below the US$27.3 billion recommended by a court-appointed expert but appeared to be the highest damage award ever issued in an environmental lawsuit.

But whether the plaintiffs – including indigenous groups who say their hunting and fishing grounds in Amazon River headwaters were decimated by toxic wastewater that also raised the cancer rate – can collect remains to be seen. (Read on …)