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
Crikey's Bernard Keane gets stuck into the Nationals, led by Barnaby Joyce, who are holding Australia's future Climate Policy up for ransom, to be paid up to Barnaby's backing fossil fuel interests. He says at least Pauline Hanson is a politician, while Barnaby Joyce is something else.
. . . Part of that normalisation reflects the persistent failure to understand what the National Party really is: it is, and always has been, a vehicle to exploit Australia’s parliamentary system to rort taxpayer funding in its own interests and those of the people who fund it — these days, fossil-fuel interests. It is not, by any conventional measure, a political party.
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.
The consensus is hardening. There is no climate techo-fix. We are the problems that need to be fixed. We have to let go of power.
Science recommends half a dozen most important global strategies we need to follow in order to thrive in our complex adaptive systems in which we are now creating our future. Ignore them at our peril. Especially if we realise that in reality, in our complex adaptive systems, having many different goals can be incompatible, as they can work against each other, at cross purposes, and lead to failure. Choosing systems compatible actions is very important, especially regarding human bulk social behaviour.
#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."
Why are all these people in boats?
Robert Hunziker writes about this scary summary of climate science predictions, found in this picture book of near-future climate collapse, a picture book report specially prepared for the "political leaders" going to COP26.
Really coming true climate monster stories to scare your children politicians with.
Their right to money over your right for a habitable planet.
Putting the fear of corporations into the heart of government
"Canada based TC Energy alone is now suing the U.S. government for USD 15 billion for revoking KXL’s pipeline permit, which was seen as a major climate victory."
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?
We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. - All climate science experts agree, there isn't any time left. Peter Kalmus, Jennifer Francis, Michael Mann, Holly Jean Buck say it is our prime emergency right now.
The global warming club of the G20 - China, Russia, Brazil and Australia, all have energy policies associated with future atmosphere over heating of 5° C. G20 nations as a whole are responsible for 85% of current rates of global carbon emissions. Negotiations are going badly, while global climate extremes are on a roll, striking somewhere new every week. Severe floods have struck Germany, China and England. Before was the heat waves and fires. The climate apocalypse isn't waiting for warming to reach 1.5°. And earth's energy imbalance which sets the rate of warming, has doubled in the last 15 years.
Heard about Beetaloo? Get used to hearing that word a lot. It will become as well-known as ‘Adani’ in the coming years. Here’s why.
The Liberals are climate criminals but Labor is backing them. In fact, Labor is no longer divided on climate: they have come down firmly on the side of coal and gas.
Over a decade of paying for oil and gas fracking industry in the USA, investors are waking up to their big losses. It was never going to pay. Not now, not ever. Australian investors in its foreign firms "gas-led" recovery should start paying attention. Who are these duped investors? Pension funds? It must be so easy to be careless in the use of other peoples money. The damages to life, local environment and future climate costs are cumulatively enormous, and will never be rectified by any amount of money. A decade of billions of investor money down the drain for fracking in the USA proves that the oil and gas frackers are the sweetest of talkers. At last, investors there are deciding not to lose any more money for drilling. A pity about our planet. We are not called "fossil fools" for nothing. When do Australian investors and government wake up?
Building sustainable communities is the antidote to fear of a changing climate.
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!"