Can you place your trust in your nations carbon offsets? In Australia trust in politics is missing because the Liberal Party showed itself to be deathly afraid of creating a real federal ICAC. It failed to deliver any sort of investigative commission against corruption. Trust is absent because only money can buy political power in Australia. Trust is missing because the Prime Minister acts like a public relations guy for the Minerals Council of Australia, described in the juice media interview below as "coal - fondler in chief".
Reactions to a blockade of traffic in Sydney, proves just how much Government is "single minded" on business as usual. Nothing must interfere with keeping the fossil fuel export business going, as all of our governments are captured by foreign fossil fuel interests, paid by illusion of wealth which has captured the minds of politicians. There is evidence that we pay more in public subsidy than is returned by royalty payments on exports, but such facts are ignored.
Governments are especially allergic to protests by activist groups, and typically raises fines and punishments beyond those that are given to errant corporations. Profits now seem more important than having a future. "Blockade Australia" was formed in November last year in response to the climate crisis, aiming to “take resistance seriously and think about what kind of action will wield power relevant to the eyes of the Australian state”.
Hundreds of thousands of students join together in the global #ClimateStrike, to demand world leaders fight for #PeopleNotProfit! It is also soon followed federal government election in Australia, where politicians are going to be judged on their failures, as we face ongoing climate calamity. The Sydney event has been moved from The Domain to Kirribilli House, due to weather and other factors. There are many and varied Australian Regional events. Details and interest registration can be found through this link
These past few weeks in Eastern Australia are marked by very intense and prolonged rainfall, leading to record flooding events. Record intensity is the kind that insurance companies might have labelled of "1 in a 500" year event. How would they know? A new climate catastrophe happens somewhere near every year. Flooding from La Nina visits Eastern Australia every decade.
About this event
When: 6.30 - 8.30pm, Wednesday 16 February 2022
Where:
On 23rd December 2021, the Environmental Defenders Office, reported that the Federal Court ruled as unlawful the Government’s contracts that granted public money to frack in the Beetaloo Basin. The EDO had already set up a legal challenge to the granting of $21 million of public money for a private oil and gas company to do exploratory fracking in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin
I am impressed that the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) found itself with a few disappointments at the NSW Labor Party Conference. NSW is already going the way out in approving new coal and gas mining projects.
Like all fossil fuel addicts, the ALP can and has ticked a large number of boxes on restoring environment, circular economy, supporting sustainable industries, becoming a clean energy superpower. But it refuses to have any measures to prevent new coal and gas mining expansions. This undoes any and all good work that can possibly be achieved with "bright green-wash" measures. All of them are going to be undone by global heating.
The relative importance of green-wash, compared to the subsidies of coal oil and gas, is clearly measured by the size of the money flows allocated to each. Green-washing has relatively smaller costs, but a larger public relations impact, and just has to sound good. Some of them, like a truely "circular economy" will likely never be fully achieved, as we chew up our non-renewable resources and spread them as waste all over our planet.
I am advised that it is good social media practise not to point out the defects in bad posts, because that only feeds the trolls, and boosts the social media algorithms detection of interest from the most addicted ignorant. I would have followed this advice but then I would have to entirely ignore the "new" smoking "Australian Way" climate plan, to be presented at COP26 in Glasgow. This government needs to be sacked immediately.
you might be wondering what our government actually hopes to achieve by showing up in Glasgow? The short answer, as one of our Australian friends put it well, is “to get away with it”. That’s right, through the miracle of marketing, to get away with a plan to double down on fossil fuels and evade all responsibility for tackling the climate crisis. - Dr Simon Bradshaw – Director of Research (Projects) Australian Climate Council
Registration Link https://parracan.org/register/oct24 -- to get zoom link details.
Climate For Change - networked presentation online on October 24th 2021. Sunday at 3 - 6pm.
This "Climate for change" , using the latest Online "Climate for Change" movement, as facillitated by ParraCAN. It is to present our climate predicaments as a global problem. Sorry to say, but that makes all of us in Australia a global problem.
We need to subvert the conventional and social media tropes, that remove responsibility for carbon emissions from our government and society, and protect ourselves from climate denial propaganda. Global heating already changes how we live. It should be changing how we lobby and vote for our politicians.
We should not ever complaining about the use of models in predicting the future, especially by the sciences. Models are all really we have got. Models are us, models are consciousness. We have models in our heads and we use them all the time, especially when they are weighted by our feelings. Governments and politicians usually have their implicit simple models in mind as they make their legislation, even if it isn't made explicit. Governments and corporations keep secret models which they attempt never to reveal, hence not amenable to corrective feedback from other people. Secret models usually involves obscene projections of institutional growth and power or planned harm to others. Hence the extreme measures taken against whistle-blowers and unofficial leakers. Secrecy means bad intentions, and national insecurity.
Our bodies and brains contain computational models. Our brains have heuristics and symbolism. Our bodies are model-mapped in our brains, to make them useful. Models require information flows from reality, but can never be the external reality. The world does not exist inside our heads, only its representations of our senses in coded forms, including our language and visual processing. Our construction and updating of models from our birth is called "learning". Our internal models are always checked. Surprise is the shock we receive that leads us to update our internal models. The question is always which models are appropriate and useful, and which can be harmful. For models to be useful, a lot of external information has to be sifted and selected, chosen without bias to be coded into data. Data needs to processed in valid statistical ways to derive knowledge conclusions, and knowledge has to be integrated with other relevant experiential knowledge in order to choose actions wisely. We cannot safely regulate any part of reality for which we do not possess an accurate working model.