Published at Knitting Nanas and Fossil Fool Site
Take few minutes to answer 13 questions,
in the CASSE NSW environment / economy survey.
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.
Dust-storms, drought, fire-storms, and failure of inland river flows are global heating tipping points that bring an end to dry-land farming in Australia.
It is nearly the end of 2019, and organisations that collect the emissions statistics already have enough data to predict the general result.
Such as reported by the Scientific American online - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-emissions-will-break-another-record-in-2019/
Claims that the impact of "only a few degrees" of average heating will be tolerable, are very often found among the paid beneficiaries of the Coal, Oil and Gas industries, their flunkies, mistaken economists, and the Australian Government, and writers for the Murdoch Press. These people constitute the real driving "forcing" of global heating.
With global heating impacts coming down hard, it is time to get deadly serious about cutting down Australian Coal and Gas
Thank you all for your support this year.
This is the official invitation for all, to the ParraCAN AGM for this year.
ParraCAN Annual general meeting will be on the 28th November, 2019, at the Migrant Resource Centre, Level 4, 1 Horwood Place, Parramatta.
The meeting will start at 6:30pm. After reports from the Convenor and Treasurer, we have are privileged to have as a Guest Speaker, Taylor Clarke.
William E. Rees, very distinguished ecological economist, in various blog articles, goes by the evidence. The huge scale of our fossil fuel economy, and its continued growth, are the processes that are killing all. Our capacity for self-delusion is our only unlimited resource. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity.
The increased number and severity of bush fires are being experienced all around the world. They are part of global heating , causing climate changes everywhere. Advancing record hot years, year after year, take their toll on country. 2019 is vying for second hottest year ever, and July 2019 already beat global records as the hottest month ever. The ABC article linked here, covers the Australia predicament, and mentions the helplessness of California to control its fires. The management of these growing extremes, obviously deserves a re-think.
Global heating is predicted to cause the expansion of the circulation of huge tropical air mass circulation, one each side of the equator, called "Hadley Cells". Along with the misbehaviour of each "polar vortex", this rearranges global weather systems. The Hadley Cell air masses rise at the equator, and descend at approximately 30 degrees north or south of the equator, plus or minus seasonal variation due to earth's axial tilt of 23.5 degrees. My closest region of descent corresponds to northern NSW. As they descend these masses of air becomes warm, and the regions of descent correspond to dry and desert regions on continents. Global heating is predicted to add a few degrees of latitude to their desert-making regions of descent, which by 2100, reaches to the Central Coast region of NSW.
The possibilities of agricultural futures in middle Australia, are going to be worsened, and the existing vegetation systems and soils are going to be stripped by intense fires. In themselves, these are positive feedbacks to global heating, through emissions and land system change. As for NSW coal exports, any added provisioning of more and cheaper coal to the rest of the world, especially Asia, is going to accelerate our global heating causation.
I just wonder how often the Liberal and Labor Parties of Australia, and politicians in other fossil fuel governments, have been listening to the money-lubricated reassurances of fossil fuel lobbyists, to the extent that they can politically dismiss all Climate Change concerns as alarmism without disturbance to their personal equanimity.
This is the current situation in Australia. Any lobbyist can select and quote the results that supposed distinguished neoclassical economists have published, which have bogus models to imply there isn't much to worry about with a few degrees of global heating. Economics doesn't have nearly the same methodology rigour as climate science.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - (H. K. Menchen) Politicians and many voters love the clear and simple parts, while even experts may have trouble figuring out why a simple answer is wrong. I should say in predicaments that are complex and wicked, almost any simplification is wrong.
Ideas from neoliberal economics are closest to the hearts of politicians, so they will tend to trust economic models with slight of obfuscation before hard climate science. Nordhaus has even said that from his models, allowing 4 degrees of warming would be about optimum, for economies, given the costs of mitigation. Certainly, CEO's of fossil fuel companies operating in Australia have business plans that imply 3 or 4 degrees of warming. If only the thought of catastrophic climate change could stop them. The neoclassical economists have a simple denial cure for that.
They drastically understate the impact of climate change, and when the productive system starts to fall apart, and we need a political system that can cope with that, it won't be one using dollar bills, it will be one using bullets.
Parramatta Climate Action Network - ParraCAN, has empathy for those impacted from this terrible season of widespread intense fires. We have no empathy for politicians that publicly deny causal factors of global heating and Australian fossil fuel exports, in order to promote their social groups vested interests in more Coal Mining.
More people in Australia are now forced to suffer and flee from catastrophic fires. We trust those impacted will get support to somehow rebuild their homes and lives. "States of emergency" have been declared. Our seasonal fire risks has been made worse by recent prolonged periods of drought. More drought is only one of many predicted impacts of global heating, caused by the growth of fossil fuelled industrial civilisation. Severity of episodic droughts in Australia has been made worse by recent rapid increases in its average land surface temperatures, now over 1 degree C. The global land surface temperature has been rising an average of about 0.17 C per decade since 1981, and recent earth system changes appear to favour acceleration of temperature rise.
Our warmer climate is due to rise in our surrounding sea surface temperatures, which are direct evidence of the global heating of the massive volumes of water in our oceans. The conservative sides of politics must know, somewhere deep in the back of their minds, that the ultimate cause of our growing environmental predicaments is the extraordinary global growth of human industrial activities over the past three centuries.
Conservative politicians still react with anger at any person in politics who mentions these facts. This is despite decades of reality-linked, painstaking catalogues of proven scientific observations. It is the airing of the drawn facts and conclusions they object to, not the persons. Some partial explanations of relevance are that conservative politics in Australia is largely funded and advised by representatives of Coal Mining Industries, and are hostile to any opposition to coal mining. The social circles of conservative politics receives large benefits from mining industry and its controlling financial interests. It is no surprise that their public statements consist of what they have been told by their mining lobby groups and conservative politics promotes the growth of all mining industries.
This sort of trend is well evidenced in Australia, and other fossil fuel exporting nations, and is part of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democratic government, which happens with growing wealth and power inequalities of society. It is an emergent part of the distribution of behaviour of human social groups, which are hard to control for. There is nothing personal-political implied here. We are just playing our customary social economic roles, but we a playing these games inside a doomed global system.
Earth Systems in Collapse : Haywire Earth Gallery
Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament… The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected… It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity… Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic “hothouse Earth,” well beyond the control of humans… These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.
BioScience Free Article : https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806
Press Release from Parramatta Climate Action Network
Parramatta Climate Action Network is completely opposed to the NSW government raising the dam wall. Taking action on climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, eg closing coal fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy and storage and not opening anymore coal mines, is a much better solution to climate change than trying to stop effects such as flooding after climate change gets a whole lot worse. Raising the dam wall will inundate the Southern Blue Mountains World Heritage listed National Park and will also destroy some of the remaining Gundungarra sacred sites.
Annie Nielsen
Convenor - Parramatta Climate Action Network (ParraCAN)
And Secretary - Reconciliation for Western Sydney
I thought Australia already had fallen apart under climate change, but here is Ross Garnaut to hydrate our wilted political will.
Greenhouse gas emissions are global. It matters not where they are produced and who produced them, but that they are produced in excess, and have global impacts. We have an imaginary and minuscule remaining budget for adding to global greenhouse gases. Except that our political parties as ruled by Australian Energy Oligarchs plainly deny this.
Included in our implicatory denial scope are the the public statements of the political elite in Australia. We still have climate-morons still leading parties, such Mr Anthony Albanese, and Mr Scott Morrison. The Australian Labor Party still wishes Coal to have longer term future. We have the terminal climate idiocy of the NSW state government. These are typical examples of our only good for good-times political parties. The good-times parties are over.
As for the Australian Liberal Party, it appointed Angus Taylor, a known ideological clown and coal disciple, as the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, as if the fossil-fool burning party can just keep on roaring away. Australian government is in full duplicity mode as it promotes the growth of already huge amounts of exported emissions, and fails on domestic emissions. Everyone is pretending that economic growth parties can be allowed to continue, by the lack of specific condemnation.
As noted in a recent Fossil Fool Bulletin, and rather sheepishly reported in media, the NSW Coal Oligarchy has sold its soul on doing the will of Coal Mine Applicants that fund both the Liberal and Labor Political Parties in NSW and the Federal Governments. NSW Coal Oligarchy is outraged that global emissions are in scope when considering new coal mines, and want their dictatorship to legislate global heating impacts away.
No public consultation on this dictatorial move was considered. It was an immediate political reaction to the decision of the Independent Planning Commision, to deny the KEPCO Bylong project, and I have no doubt that some very rich self-important corporate people, were extremely irate, because they had been promised otherwise, by the implications of certain parties accepting large money donations. Now we are going to have a real confrontation.
The "Indepedent Planning Commision" is under threat because it has dared to use such exported emissions as indicative of global heating impacts, and no politician ever liked a commission that became too independent.
What every one should know by now. Growth of any economic kind is cooking our climate faster, and will eventually exterminate most species. Even so called "green growth". The only way to really back down to a state of sustaining higher forms of life on this planet is global economic degrowth. The report authors do not explicitly say this, but every other option is already debunked.
The validity of the green growth discourse relies on the assumption of an absolute, permanent, global, large and fast enough decoupling of economic growth from all critical environmental pressures. The literature reviewed clearly shows that there is no empirical evidence for such a decoupling currently happening. This is the case for materials, energy, water, greenhouse gases, land, water pollutants, and biodiversity loss for which decoupling is either only relative, and/or observed only temporarily, and/or only locally. In most cases, decoupling is relative. When absolute decoupling occurs, it is observed only during rather short periods of time, concerning only certain resources or forms of impact, for specific locations, and with very small rates of mitigation.
Reports like this must really scare Capitalists and Growthist Policial Parties. Pay attention, especially you, Senator Malcolm Roberts. "There is no Empirical Evidence for decoupling".
UN chief Antonio Guterres said countries in Asia needed to be on "the front line" of the fight by introducing carbon pricing and reforming energy policies.
Australia is the world's biggest coal exporter, with most Australian coal being sent to Asia.
What gets burned in Asia, heats climate everywhere.
Something like 300 million people will be at risk of regular coastal flooding by 2050.
New renewable energy provides cheaper energy than new coal-fired power stations.
I must be sufficiently whacked out to publish today, since our local Australian Political Lignites of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton are giving protester opposition to Mining Oligarchy a public media whacking. No other real effective political opposition to the global ecocidal mining oligarchy exists in Australia, so the filthy rich mining oligarchy need protection from protesters, in case words about global heating reach their ears.
The mining oligarchy are obviously nervous about their global share prices, and must have told the Prime Minister to go out and show some authority. The Prime Minister spoke in Brisbane in the wake of anti-mining protesters clashing with police outside a mining conference in Melbourne.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-01/scott-morrison-environmental-groups-targeting-businesses-boycott/11660698
Right now the NSW Forestry Corporation is about to vaporise a forest for industrial logging and I urgently need you to spread the word. Kalang Forest on the north coast is home to endangered spotted-tail quolls and a nationally significant population of koalas. We can’t let the Forestry Corporation wipe out this forest.
Forests are an essential part of our water and carbon cycles. Forests store water and keep streams flowing in dry times. Evapo-transpiration from forests pulls in new rain clouds inland from the oceans. The process is called a "biotic pump". Without paths of forests for sky water to follow, our inland areas gets drier still.
There are not enough of these ecosystems left in Australia. Check out the NCC website to help.
I was listening to parts of the Australian Federal Parliament house of representatives session on radio, 22nd October 2019. It was like trying to make sense of the inmates of a lunatic asylum, given the actual predicaments that Australian Fossil Fool Civilisation now faces.
There were a couple of sane adults in the room, but everyone else seems to be acting in a delusion bubble, according to the major party lines that they pitch.
The Hansard of 22nd October 2019, already in draft late this evening, shows the intent of this government, and main opposition party. A search for the key word "emergency" in the PDF text indicates how far away government politicians are from reality, and are more interested in mouthing the holy mantras of economic growth, and emissions export growth, despite a massive climate emergency petition, disruptions in the streets, ongoing worse droughts, and signs of real fossil fool economic collapse.
Report released by The Australia Institute finds that Australia mines about 57 tonnes of CO2 potential per person each year, about 10 times the global average, and exports 7 per cent of the world's fossil fuel CO2 potential. Australia is a vast coal and gas exporter. (https://www.tai.org.au/content/high-carbon-land-down-under-quantifying-co2-australia-s-fossil-fuel-mining-and-exports)
If Queensland alone were a country, it would be the world's second biggest coal exporter. Yet the Queensland budget shows coal royalties will bring in less money over the next few years than will come from motorists through rego and other duties. 99 percent of the state's workers do not work in coal mining, and the former deputy leader of the Nationals even admitted Adani's mine might create only 100 ongoing jobs. (https://www.tai.org.au/content/australia-can-no-longer-dodge-responsibility-its-fossil-fuel-exports)
My conclusion: Australia is failing its obligations to decarbonise in line with the Paris Agreement, while foreign owners are dictating policy to politicians, to boost carbon exports. That's business as usual.
Australians from school age up, organised and achieved huge crowd turnouts for rallies and marches in centres across Australia, on Friday 20th September. Officially it was called a school-strike for climate, in honor of school student Greta Thumberg, who began to do this herself, on a Friday. Everyone was encouraged to make this one big.
