The Coal Industry has Manipulated and Controlled Australia through the Liberal National Party and Murdoch NewsFork for decades, and looks forwards to ruining it while it profits.
Even aiming to stay within the global warming range of 1.5 to 2 degrees C, the earth systems are pushed on a path that takes us to the kind of climate of 3 million years ago, Pliocene or even 50 million years ago, the Miocene. The Holocene, which nutured our civilizations, is over forever.
Right now, to avoid the extreme, conditions of the Miocene, not compatible with human civilization at all, and insure that only Pliocene conditions are reached, a rapid, global exponential decarbonization is required
David Suzuki points out, that a recent climate science paper says there remains only a 5 percent chance of staying below 2 degrees this Century, and we have actually more chance of reaching 6 degrees of warming (10%), than staying below 2 C. So we'ed better get on with it, as a global apex species, because even 2 degrees is not favourable to the long term survival biosphere apex species such as ourselves. Australia is especially singled out for its rigged corporate games in government..
Everything politicians think they know is most certainly wrong for the real world. Global governments fixation on mutual traded, competitive, exponential, fossil fueled growth. This is the worst possible, long term option ever. There is no wriggle out of contract consequences - Making a Hell of Earth. So what is the cause of this collective insanity? Rapid extinction is nature's unthinking plan for a species that collectively destroys its foundational environment.
The Global Carbon Project, which collects and analyses our global carbon behaviour, shows that nearly everybody is misbehaving.
Growth in global carbon emissions in 2018 looks to be around 2%, which is exactly tied to the rate of economic growth (by GDP)
Growth in Gas was the worst at 3.0%, and almost certainly involves a growth in total methane leakage. It is not provable that the rise in global carbon emissions with GDP has produced a similar rise in global well-being.
New record high of carbon dioxide emissions of 37 billion tonnes for 2018, says we are going to fail very badly.
Humanity are still trying to collectively have infinite growth on this finite planet. Here in Australia, our Prime Madman Scott Morrison, keeps defiantly shouting his "Strong Economy" slogan, in the tones of "Resistance is useless", while Australia burns hotter. After Albert Einstein, we could say that only one thing is infinite, and that is human collective stupidity.
Absent any serious form of global self-control, human global demolition will be future choked by several possible natural "Limits to Growth". Given our massed social and technical ingenuity, we might even manage to have several at once. We might escape the global decline in essential heavy fuel oil supply to power our global big machines, or spend all our energies against the inexorable rise in new climate disasters. This is probably already out of our control, as we struggle to keep creating new limits by growing our ongoing demolition of biodiversity and natural sustainability.
If enough people demand it, governments could declare a climate emergency tomorrow, and we could all get on with the job of fixing it.
Many Climate Activists know enough terrible facts about Gas vs Coal already. Not just inconvenient such as like an individual death sentence. I have previously seen and linked-in presentations of future effects of "Gas - Transition" studies done quite some years ago. Anybody who looks can find them, and there are more references in the online report found on the "Price of Oil" website. Hint: the word "price" here refers to life, not money.
None of this yet seems to have cut any ice with capitalist corporation friendly parties in Australia like the LNP or ALP. Or with the Murdoch NewsFork media. LNP seems to be the Australian Coal Party, the ALP by actions identified itself as the Australian Gas Fracking Party. All charging directly into climate hell, as if they ruled some imaginary planet B.
The invisible limits to global growth wall have been hit, according to a number of writers and sites online. Extra nervousness happens in every stock price slide. Maybe the fast trading computer algorithms are programmed to stop them going all the way down, by creating "recoveries".
Investor advice sites are using the "wall" metaphor more often now. Doesn't "Wall St" rule the world with its words?
The climate indulgents in Australia most certainly include the protagonists and the parts of Queensland misled over the benefits of opening the worlds biggest coal pits in the Galilee Basin, starting with the Adani Carmichael Mine. This was heavily promoted by the Murdoch Media. It includes the self-indulgent Mr Clive Palmer, who helped to keep the current coal-indulgent LNP government in power with his big $60 million spends on advertising and electoral candidate recruitment, when he owes more than that to the Australia Tax department. Here we have two of the worlds most self-indulgent billionaires, able to get away with stealing money and telling lies, who assaulted the public with as much dis-information and spin as public-subsidised fossil fuel money can buy. The new government hasn't got a new mandate, its just got a repurchase agreement from 3 ongoing owners - Murdoch, Palmer, and Coal.
Climate scientists have told us for more than a decade that getting atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalents back below 350 parts per million (ppm) is required to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1ºC above pre-industrial levels.
Unfortunately, the CO2 equivalent level is now something like 500 ppm, which is ~410 for carbon dioxide (CO2) plus the greenhouse gas effects of other human additions are included - methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (NOx), FluoroCarbons(FCx). As these continue to rise, it must be obvious now that we have yet to reach peak human global warming acceleration.
This accounts for setting of new temperature records every year, as oceans and weather systems are pushed by high rates of warming, locked in for decades to come.
The sour relationships that exist between the Australian Political Parties are about money. The current LNP have extreme fear of the Greens, because sensible energy and climate policies will put a stop to their ongoing scams with billionaires and foreign coal and gas corporations. That is why they call the Greens - "Extremists", but seek preferences from the billionaire Clive Palmer's titanic political advertising vehicle, and the right-wing klutz in One Nation.
The Australian Carbon Price - How much does Australian climate inaction cost?
Australian politicians are really cheap - On average for 150 members of Federal Parliament , over 10 years, about $75 million direct party donations.
That works out to be only $50,000 per year per politician.
How do we know we homo sapiens have taken too much?
Dundas Area Neighbourhood Centre,
21 Sturt St, Telopea
Thursday 9 May 6:30pm for a 7pm Start
As ALP & LNP both propose to push open the gates of climate hell further with their plans to expand coal, oil and gas mining in Australia, climate records have been shown to reveal effects of growing human climate agency in drought over the entire 20th century. Meanwhile 2019 started with the hottest 4 months ever for Australia, and drought grips the south-east. The big parties propose to solve our problems of climate change by increasing the rate of destruction of our bio-shell, which is sure to kill off humans faster in our future.
With leaders like this, it looks like our bio-shell will soon have limited time left for homo sapiens.
Having a token climate policy, has been a major recurring political strategy of ALP and LNP, in order to stop leakage of votes to the Australian Greens. Each election the token policies have gotten weaker. Each election the price is lower to sell Australian resources to the extremely rich fossil fuel miners clique of the world, and the party members fail to honour their parliamentary oaths. Both major parties support big plans to expand coal and gas exports, with public subsidies, that overwhelm the token fundings of local mitigation. The bumpkins of the National Party are happy to sell out their farming voters to future droughts and economic collapse.
I watched the "Leadership" debate live on 7-NEWS from Western Australia on free-to-air digital on April 29, 2019.
I already expected to like Bill Shorten much more than Scott Morrison, having experienced the last 6 years of LNP government, and I did find Bill Shorten most compelling in giving a case for a change of government. Scott was bluster, and he identified border security and budget surplus management as big achievements.
Spending on damage clean up of extreme weather events is becoming hard to assess. If it wasn't insured, it might not be measured. Insurance premiums are rising, and the incomes of people that might need it are falling. It depends on who does the measuring and what does get measured. Damage to subsistence livelihoods in third world nations won't be measured in the same way. Global Carbon Debt is a future related concept. It is hard to price medium term extreme consequences of Ocean warming and acidity, such as reduction of Oxygen production by phyto-plankton, or ongoing global mass extinction, or unlivable climates in global mid-latitude regions such as Australia. These are the carbon debts we will be made to pay later, with severe consequences, if not with money. Bankruptcy is not the only price.
If global carbon debt is priced at $6 trillion dollars extra each year, and CO2 emissions are roughly 40 billion tonnes a year, then the current carbon "price" equivalent is $150.00 per tonne. Existing carbon price schemes have been aggregated by OECD and amount to no more than 14 euros per tonne. Big emitting countries tend to have zero effective carbon price.
It is obvious that the wealth ownership schemes of the Transnational Capitalist Class are not interested in a meaningful price for carbon emissions from all economic activity. It is obvious that most global economic activities would never be able to pay a full carbon price. The conclusion should be that global carbon emissions need to be rapidly reduced, because they cost more than we could ever possibly afford. Present and future carbon damage is "practically unfixable". Especially when the value of money is still strongly related to the price of fossil fuel energy.
Real markets are a mess of failure. Markets involve consequences of modern technologies with many "side-effects", and many of them are delayed. A small carbon tax is effective on funding transition alternatives if used wisely, with conscious choice. Market failures don't fix themselves just by adding a tax, but at least paying some small part of the price of carbon now, indicates a willingness to understand the long term costs of a choice, and make better choices.
The ALP is and nearly always has been, the Alternative Liberal Party, since both are conditioned by being mining wealth slaves from a mass-media consumer society, and rely on Australians being a majority society of lotus leaf eaters.
If the ALP actually cared about domestic gas prices, they would stop exporting LNG overseas, but they helped set this up.
Stranded assets are only the beginning. Global growth has gone off the rails, but has not hit the ditch yet. Five parallel linked categories of rapid collapse ready. - Financial, Commercial, Political, Social, Cultural, while we fail to give up our dreams based on fossil fuel energy slaves. "Externals" of Climate and Ecological collapse already half way.
As usual this is an Australian Election for "nobbled parties", much as we should be having a "climate election" by now. The race is already fixed into the traditional two mining parties contest, of one or the other mining party agents. The game, which started with the Australian parliament, is about control by mining wealth elites. The strategy is to sell the right electoral bribes to control the prize of the mining stranglehold on the Australian parliament. The rewards are paid out of boosts to foreign mining extraction, and mining includes fossil fuel extraction. Too many Australian political operators have been bought off. Party hierarchy, thinking and policy are structured, by offerings from the horde of trillions of dollars of foreign wealth-debt, siphoned into donations, favours and anointed pre-selections.
Fossil - fuel global wealth has all the debt-money and power of two hundred years of industrial revolution on its side. Its fossil fuel dependent national governments are fighting the need for extraction from fossil fuel reserves to be drastically slowed, to slow our path towards rapid climate destruction. Section 44 exclusions in the Australian constitution have nothing on this monsters global scale, which corrupts the entire society and parliament process.
There isn't any room for new fossil fuel energy sources in the global carbon budget for a safer climate. Renewable energy investment is the only way forwards. Developing NT gas is bad thinking, the costs go to Australia, the benefits go to foreign investors.
This appears to be cheaper, more versatile, location neutral, energy denser and more efficient than pumped hydro, or battery storage. No existing hydro storage required.
Energy Vault has developed a six-arm crane to lift 5,000 concrete blocks – weighing 35t in total – up and down a 33-storey building, which store gravitational potential energy when they are raised, and release it as they are lowered.
Civilization needs to be rapidly starved of fossil fuel energy supplies to avoid long-term climate catastrophe. This means ditching the infinite growth paradigm, and the endless rights of consumerism.
The Australian Labor Party, ALP want to seize funds for National infrastructure development, and apart from a calculating few hundreds of miliions into storage and renewables, want to invest billions into gas pipelines, as public subsidy of fossil fuel industry, to expedite extraction and export of new mines to give long-term flows of carbon emissions that cannot be burnt according to the global Carbon Law.
The processing and export of LNG already increases Australia's own greenhouse gas emissions, because of energy required. With only a decade or so of time left for global rapid emission reductions, investing in long term LNG trade dependency is a global suicide idea. It is another example of one bad idea after another, to appease the reactive right and climate change deniers.
LNG energy help keep the global financial system afloat for a bit longer, to fake growth of the the wealth of the richest corporations, going deep into debt, such that it takes a new $5 dollars of debt to get only $1 dollar of GDP growth. To the extent LNG investments won't pay off their debt, and will cause additional future climate costs, they are a suicidal investment.
Last 4 years of 2015-2018 were hottest 4 years ever. Production of accumulating greenhouse gases continues to rise.
We are, of course, talking about nothing short of the ultimate crime, but on any given day of our lives, you’d hardly notice that it was underway. Even for an old man like me, it’s a terrifying thing to watch humanity make a decision, however inchoate, to essentially commit suicide. In effect, there is now a suicide watch on Planet Earth. Let’s hope the kids can make a difference.
-- Tom Engelhardt
Tim Buckley from IEEFA shows us that renewables are the winners we have been waiting for.
In comparison, fossil fuels – thermal coal, natural gas, petroleum, petrol, oil and shale - are a finite source of dirty, heavily subsidised energy with additional ‘externalities’ that are extreme and almost entirely uncosted.
