On Saturday the 12th of October, members of Energy Justice Victoria (EJV) launched the Fossil Frontlines Community Tour with its first stop: a visit to Seaspray hosted by Gasfield Free Seaspray.

Seaspray is a small Victorian coastal town on the southern end of beautiful Ninety Mile Beach, around 32 kilometres south of Sale. A member of the Lock the Gate Alliance, Gasfield Free Seaspray was integral to the statewide campaign from 2011 to 2017 that gained the historic fracking ban from the VIC Labor government.

The Seaspray community, with so many others across the state, fought hard to see unconventional gas drilling (fracking) banned permanently for the benefit of water quality, tourism and farming in the area. The campaign also saw a temporary moratorium placed on onshore conventional gas exploration.

This moratorium will expire and be reassessed in June 2020.

(Photo credit to Stephen Issell)

Victorians know that we are facing a time of climate and ecological crisis. 

Winter has only just finished and we are already getting warnings of a horror bushfire season, with farming communities in the grip of severe drought.

But whilst Premier Andrews has taken commendable action on climate in the past, there is a huge hole in his government’s climate action. 

The announcement from ExxonMobil that it is planning to sell all its assets is enormous news for Gippsland.

The offshore oil and gas industry has been a creator of jobs and economic activity for decades and the sale will send shock waves through the region.

However, it is hard to imagine any company wanting to buy oil and gas fields that are clearly in steep decline.

The well-known and much-loved Quit Coal Victoria collective from Friends of the Earth Melbourne has decided to rename itself as the Energy Justice Victoria collective. We love our supporters and know many people are passionate about Quit Coal Victoria’s work, and so we wanted to explain to everyone why we are renaming ourselves and why we are so excited about it!

Golden Beach is an idyllic section of Ninety Mile Beach. It boasts a pristine coastline, where whales can be seen from the sand in migrating season. The beaches have plentiful fish, native birds and the skeletal remains of an 1897 shipwreck.

But there is a cloud hanging over this lovely place.

A publicly funded State Government project, called CarbonNet, has earmarked the area for waste-carbon injection.