#ThisCantWait NSW Environment minister, Matt Kean and the NSW government have committed to half emissions by 2030. -- Crikey -- SEP 29, 2021
So far so good, for real climate targets, 2 australian state/territories out of 8, only 6 more to go. Just forget about the current federal government, which is going to hell on climate policy.

This is a major political embarrassment for the the fossil fuel money-tied politics in Australia. Foreign coal and gas mining companies control key members of the australian federal government and national media.

When will the Murdoch mining-run media empire adopt and promote the ambitious climate targets that are necessary? When will the Daily Telegraph change its vitriolic spots and sack its climate-derisory columnist Andrew Bolt? The NSW ALP federal member for more coal in NSW, Joel Fitzgibbon, although now retiring, was megaphoned by the Murdoch media, to say that NSW should "stick to knitting". Who are these "under-whelming minority" of Australians that stop real climate policy in Australia?

Crikey blames Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals supporters for the federal government not supporting a 2050 net-zero position. Because this will require that emission reduction work starts right now. A focused corrupting power of mining money and media support  backs the politics of climate inaction in both the Federal and Queensland governments. A decade of wasted time leaves us with poisoned and weakened public institutions. Australia is unprepared for rapidly worsening global heating, as can be seen by woeful responses to extreme bushfire and weather conditions.

"The Morrison government is being held back by a handful of Nationals MPs and senators, a sub-faction within a sub-faction of government voted for by an overwhelming minority of Australians."
"In Queensland, which has about two-thirds of Australia’s coal, the Liberal National Party is far more aggressively pro-mining and anti-climate science, and has historically been a big beneficiary of mining sector donations."

Even with a humanistic accounting regime and the needed changes to make the necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the cost of achieving the goals of averting catastrophic climate change will be high. - Systemic Disorder

The price of not seriously addressing global warming will be vastly greater than any economic costs we can impose on each other. How can systems blinkered by narrow self-interest save themselves?

Somebody ought to tell the farmers, and the Nationals party, that having more forested landscape increases the amounts of local rain.
On a dry, drought afflicted continent, you might think these facts would mean something.
Past civilisations generally collapsed after their forests were cut down as once fertile lands turn into desert.
Politicians are handed good plans of how to fix our deforestation habits, but politics thinks it knows better.
Global warming requires forest growth and increase, not land clearing. 

"One path leads to suffering and ruin. The other to a safe and vital future. But you must leave fossil fuels behind" -- Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Robert Hunziker says of the publication that shows global heating rate doubling over the last fourteen years - "If this one report does not turn heads and create a sense of panic to get off fossil fuels, as soon as yesterday, then nothing will ever move the needle to fix the planet’s broken climate system."

and

"Frankly, the world is getting what it deserves and what it has failed to recognize in spite of the world’s top scientists’ warnings, a lot of heat!"

The ABC web site here has an animated info-graphic about why Australia needs to be acting very seriously right now on global climate mitigation. The date 2050 only has a chance of working if we all start reducing emissions now. Our government continually tries to ignore this simple principle, and so the only conclusion I have is has harmful intentions. The carbon budget limits are fuzzier, more uncertain and more dangerous than the simple graphics can show.

By extracting and burning more carbon every year, we are mostly likely to overshoot our climate targets much sooner. Australian climate policy is currently a race to spend and profit from a bigger portion of the global carbon budget. The very fact of being told their is a global limit, has only encouraged fossil fuel mining corporations, to try and use up the most first. Every improvement in efficiency, every substitution by renewable energy, has become an economic excuse to have more energy, do more things, make more stuff and still burn more fossil energy as well. The brakes to fossil fuel machines need to even more strongly applied now.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) isn't very forwards on global climate mitigation, as net zero by 2050 is not early enough and thorough enough. Net carbon removal from the atmosphere needs happen. What year the world is likely to go past two degrees depends on who is talking, but it is well within this half-century.

There are many problems to come, including our existing "locked-in" warming overhang to continue decades. By 2035 or earlier, the Arctic Summer Ice will be all gone, weather systems even more altered, and 2 degrees average warming is likely to have been surpassed. The IEA says that new fossil fuel development needs to stop now, and that is a minimum requirement for net zero by 2050, the old target year for politicians who won't be around then.

Too few global corporations and governments are paying heed to this. They are doing contrary actions to nix the Paris climate agreement of 2015 that so many nations signed, including Australia. Australian governments are still promoting a  "gas-led" climate apocalypse. To be rapidly followed by global emissions led global life demise. Actually, because Australian government doesn't talk about a "coal-led" recovery, I assume they have secretly accepted that the global coal industry must also rapidly decline.

Mike Meyers in this linked article has written some succinct and poetic imagery. His articles touch on the global predicaments that we all have trouble getting a handle on. Although it doesn't have quite the same grip as Yeats famous poem.

In this article "Minority Authoritarian Rule Must End", the point is, our reactionary governments, controlled by a few, keep applying same old solutions in a ritualistic manner to the huge problems all our previous old solutions have created. A better "Ministry for the Future" is required. More direct democracy. Of course it won't happen by itself. The violent planet destroying beastie won't die so easily. All you need to know is that governments are failing the future everywhere. The best of us need to step up.

The fossil fuel lobby and the Murdoch media continue to hold Australian governments and public demagoguery in their death grip. In their struggle to hide their irrelevance they lash out at the ABC. The LNP government dare not even admit it has serious problems. In the mean-time, opposition to the worst of government non-solutions needs to be stepped up. #StopAdani is "on the road" to build actions to rouse the public spirit, in places all over Australia, in their road-show. More joiners of direct actions welcome. Find an event near you on their web page.

Australian and Victorian Governments are determined stop the rollout of electric vehicles in Australia. Juice Media has some juicy points about this.

Australian governments are so charitable to foreign mining corporations, especially coal and gas. It seems to be a central plank of their existence, plus denying the dangers of global warming to the viability of Australian Society. A most recent update by the Australian Institute, shows the Australian Federal Government fossil fuel money scam continues. Direct cost to taxpayers was $10.3 billion from the budget year 2020-21.

“Coal, oil and gas companies in Australia give the impression that they are major contributors to the Australian economy, but our research shows that they are major recipients of government funds,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
This tax break not only funneled $1.5 billion to the coal and gas industries last year, but it made it cheaper for them to export fossil fuel to the rest of the world.

New South Wales is putting $100 million into ‘coal innovation’, but much of the research remains mysteriously unpublished, such as a cost benefit analysis of carbon capture and storage in the state.

Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen – and no one saw it coming. -- This Guardian article recaps disruption history of PV panels. Global warming safety requires rapid acceleration to abandon fossil fuels. Regular reduction of renewable energy costs is a feature of increased scale of manufacture.  The same thing could be have been achieved in Australia for CSP - Concentrated solar thermal with mirrors and heat storage, to achieve "base-line" grid power backup at night-time. Meanwhile the size and scope of big battery projects continues to expand.   The AEMO has contracted for a 300MW / 450 MWh , Lithium-ion Tesla battery near Geelong, Victoria.

BINOY KAMPMARK writes about the Australian Government harsh repression of journalistic exposure of some of their more shameful acts of State Government policy. Meanwhile, Australia continues to participate in the USA's ongoing Afghanistan War Lies. Now with a new $270 billion dollars for new defence hardware scams, which cannot keep up with all the lies, which won't protect anyone from a climate devastated future.

Attorney-General Christian Porter insists on prosecuting former ASIS officer Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, for daring to shame Australian government by exposing a blatant intentional wrong against a friendly country. And of course Australia's old partner in Crimes of Imperialism, United Kingdom is being by allowed by federal ALP and LNP parties to torture Julian Assange unto death by prosecution or extradition, which ever comes first. Prosecution of journalists demonstrates the continued desire of States to commit further heinous crimes.  States prove their own guilt by tossing the messengers into goal. Crimes of individuals are overpowered by ongoing crimes of nation - states, for which there are no laws, police, or prosecution, for the acts of  fossil-fool, stupid-wealth-crazy political classes.

There is a growing record - sized petition, and email campaign, against both Australian and UK state institutions, to do something about the log jams in their eyes. ( https://www.assangecampaign.org.au/ )

That is with continued business as usual, at the rate of destruction of ecosystem habitats still happening. No one set out to systemically target Koala habitats. They just set out to keep making money by selling products made from chewed up native forests. Agricultural clearing, drought and bushfires and global heating have changed entire systems. Some species will never return to the same places, as they fail to tolerate growing extremes of heat and variable rainfall. Ecosystems evolve, and diversify locally. They are not planted for our convenience. If koala habitats are going fast, si are many other less  less iconic species. They will also be going away forever, along with the possibility of co-evolving for a long time. Even Australian's thin soils need time to be replaced on our ancient continental island.

Robert Hunziker writes again on our global multiple screaming ecosystem alarm bells, while our Industrial Civilisation sticks its collective heads deeper into the sands of denial. Some leaders are even using our intrinsic denial to counter the facts of our corona virus pandemic.  This cause an uncertain temporary dip effect on our global population growth, and ecosystem impacts. Our rebound of population growth and ecosystem exploitation is still to be feared.

... whilst climate change disrupts ecosystems on the fringes of civilization, [industrial] society comfortably exists in artificial complexities of cement, steel, glass, and wood within a vast chemically induced world that only recognizes the danger of collapsing ecosystems after it’s too late. Then, it is too late!

Record prolonged summer temperatures around the Arctic circle are melting the ground permafrost that lies below most of Siberia's infrastructure. ABC radio national inteviewed Samantha Burgess, from the Copernicus Climate Change Service in the UK. She emphasized that our climate predicament is dire, and we are really doing almost nothing about it, compared to actual mitigation requirements. We need to rapidly abandon our greenhouse gas emitting lifestyles. 

Verkhoyansk is in north-east Russia, has a new record maximum of + 38°C. It holds a global records for measured widest temperature range on Earth. Verkhoyansk winter temperatures fall towards -50°C. It is all about location, which is inland, with extreme seasonal variation of day length above the Arctic Circle. Even so, this new record is +17°C above the expected average temperature.  Siberia's forests are again burning from wildfires, one of several global heating positive feedbacks that likely to be getting worse, put on top of our own record accumulation of hydrosphere carbon-dioxide.  Our global weather systems are complex. Earth's weather systems have more heat energy to be redistributed. Our global heating changes are causing multiple systems-wide effects. 

Australia's next fire season will again be a new incremental roaster.

Published July 2019. Indicates that renewable energy investment is the only way now possible to get a reasonable return on investment of fossil fuels. Already beset by rising extraction costs and diminishing energy return,  price crashes, and drop in global affordability, fossil fuels look like they will soon not be able to pay for themselves. Global economic slowdowns due to corona virus, threaten the very large debt bubble that was propping up much fossil fuel extraction operations.

Summary :  Researchers have calculated the EROI for fossil fuels over a 16 year period and found that at the finished fuel stage, the ratios are much closer to those of renewable energy sources -- roughly 6:1, and potentially as low as 3:1 in the case of electricity.

Link was found in the article "Europe must prepare for life after oil" by Nafeez Ahmed.

Link to ACF petition, and campaign to push politicians for Australia to get off its coal addiction, and massively increase investment in renewable energy. 
Watch the video , or read this "The Conversation" article  to see why.

With Morrison now pursuing bilateral agreements with the states to open up more gas reserves, it is vitally important to interrogate the logic of gas as a transition fuel.
. . . in the 30-odd years since gas was first talked up as a transition fuel, humans have added more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they did in all of human history before that point. We are twice as far from stable global temperatures now as we were when the the concept of a transition fuel was born, and emissions are accelerating in the wrong direction.

Two years of worst ever seen dryness. Farms are shutting down.  Rural Australia is ravaged. Even Sydney has been dry. There is promise of an inch or so of rain in Sydney in the middle of this week, maybe the first serious rain for some months.

What about our fossil-fool governments? No doubt they will deny, their intentions ensure Australia will become a permanent, hot, drought crippled write-off, therefore only good for coal, oil, gas and resource mining, just the way the fossil - fools are making it it, and more of it. Ditto for the rest of the planet.

Fossil fool civilisation needs to collapse, along with our energy use lifestyle pretensions, before complete biosphere collapse and write-off, because that is all there is time left to do.