Gas is part of Australia’s energy future, Labor has assured fossil fuel bosses.

A flagship carbon capture and storage project - CSS has been a dismal failure at the Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast. This is one of the largest gas projects in the world. Less than quarter of the CCS target was achieved. Anyway, most of the emissions are from burning the gas after it has been exported. Expensive and inefficient CCS has never and was never going solve this. Despite proven futility of CCS, the Australian government still invests hundreds of millions in CCS projects, as a fossil fuel industry subsidy, and calls them emission reduction "solutions", to give the lie that it global heating seriously. One of the Gorgon project owners is Chevron, has donated a total of $1.1 million over the past 10 years to political parties. To make up for CCS targets failure, Gorgon bought cheap some Australian carbon credits to meet its "CO2 targets". “The oil and gas industry are harvesting subsidies to prolong the life of their operations, not for emissions reduction.” - Analyst Bruce Robertson.

As Adani's bigest investor, BlackRock are enabling Adani to massively expand its coal operations and turbocharge the climate crisis. BlackRock have tried "engaging" with Adani, but that engagement has failed. 💍 💔 So now it's time for BlackRock to quit the engagement and just dump Adani!

Let's build up the pressure on BlackRock to end it. Watch and share this new video calling for the world's most anticipated break up.

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". 

Honest Government Ad.  Honestly, the Australia Public keep re-electing the same sort of government. So it must be the fault of the public.  IPCC mitigation report says rapid, immediate and permanent reductions in greenhouse gas production are required right now. Australia Federal governments keep feeding money and mining leases to foreign corporations. Its just as well that global oil supply has been in decline since 2018, and the rate of decline will increase to about 8% per year by 2025. Unfortunate for us, to replace all that missing energy with Gas and Coal will keep feeding our monster of a global heated world and make energy even more expensive. This is what big funders of our major political parties want, being all those foreign mining agents of the Minerals Council of Australia. Their happiness is our governments billion dollar sell out. It is your country, mined and fracked, cooked, burnt, fried and flooded. This ruin is helped by political betrayals for piles of foreign donations to Australian political parties.

Faced with the result that some Liberal State Governments may adopt some more elements of real climate and energy policies, the Dynamic Duo of Morrison - Taylor, or more likely their faceless lobbyists, have abolished all pretense of democratic pre-selection process in NSW to ensure only fossil fuel loyalists and "Yes"-men, who must be pre-purchased and vetted by the Minerals Council of Australia,  can be trusted as candidates, even for some no-hope marginal seats in the upcoming 2022 Federal Election.

The Conger ice shelf, which had an approximate surface area of 1,200 sq km, collapsed around 15 March, scientists said on Friday. East Antarctica saw unusually high temperatures last week, with Concordia station hitting a record temperature of -11.8C on 18 March, more than 40C warmer than seasonal norms. The record temperatures were the result of an atmospheric river that trapped heat over the continent. Taken from Guardian Article

Weather patterns are no longer what we older people remember. Nature is running out of places to absorb earths heat buildup. This collapse of the East Antarctica Conger Ice Shelf will not be pushed by the media of BAU as threat or interruption to the daily BAU of fossil fuel civilization. Australian Government policies, budgets and the abnormalities of voters zombie consciousness, will continue as usual. Just as if nature had left the Antarctic freezer door open, and a record river of heat was allowed to flow in. Maybe nature will close the door properly next year?

Link to article by Nafeez Ahmed, who writes - "Vladimir Putin’s aim is to sow chaos in Europe. That is why it’s particularly significant that this British national security  lobbying group funded by four giant oil and gas firms, several NATO members, along with the Russian Government, is warning that climate activists will turn to “violence”.

It seems to me [Michael Rynn] that climate activists are least violent and yet most empowered of all persons and institutions that have to live inside fossil fuelled states, and they are certainly most knowledgeable and fearful of the corporate police state and its protection of global exploitation. The article highlights how far Fossil fuel States will go to avoid "decarbonization", and risk future global heating.

Russia’s state revenues – and with them the oligarchic structures by which Putin rules Russia – depend on Russia’s carefully cultivated monopoly of the biggest fossil fuel commodities in the world. Russia is the world’s number one exporter of oil, gas and wheat produced using fossil fuel intensive industrial techniques.

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.

Join WSROC and The Hills Doctors Association for an overview of the latest research and resources on heat and health in Western Sydney.

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

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.