In recent virtual meetings of local activist groups, I heard cautions against publishing anything that compares, or contrasts the new viral epidemic, and economic shutdown responses to it, with our ever present global heating emergency. We are not even supposed to mention the latter, but are asked to spend more time building our resilience and social support networks. We are supposed to wait until things are back to normal. I know I am going to be very bad at heeding both admonitions. This was very effective reverse psychology. I throw my caution to the wind.

There some dangers in continuing to harp on our dangers of our very real growing long emergency, during this initial time of immediate danger, shutdown and global panic.  It must be really annoying for some, to be told, that this sort of gradual economic shutdown is a great and good start towards a big decline in global GDP and linked greenhouse gas emissions. Panic buying shouts belief. This is the only real possible and necessary response to our long emergency. And we have only a short number years left in which to accomplish this in a permanent way. The faster this gets done, the better off future climate conditions will be for all of us. Talk of getting back to where we were with economic growth as normal is crazy money talk. We see fossil fuel extraction industry desperadoes that are still trying to "go for broke" in expanding production as part of our genocidal madness.

I am a busy tech user, in writing, programming, and using the systems of devices that enable the internet and global communications. This article tells us that our global ITC - information technology and communications, has unsustainable and toxic costs, including long term contributions to global heating.

Why worry about global heating? The people and politicians of fossil fuel culture already think they live on planet B.

Most of us assume we will not live to regret it. We are living in our future's past, apparently without care, as our emotions and personality skills are most suited to stone-age survival. We are very easily hijacked, by as much as a little bit of sugar, that gives dopamine nuerochemical hits of pleasure in our brains.

Sugar production was an early driver for the first highly exploitive systems of capitalism. "Sugar daddies" or lobbyists, are the basis of social and political seduction, the selective reinforcement of our memory and desire. These are today provided by the petro-chemical and fossil-fuel industries. We are controlled by cultures of medieval religions and regulated by tribal national authority, to support our social sense of omniscience and belonging.  We now employ god-like technologies powered by fossil fuels that wipe out every part of nature that doesn't return a capitalist profit.

Unlike the climate emergency, coronavirus left us with no time for politics, so that consideration of science evidence and practicality of public health management was allowed to temporarily take over our management policy. The sunshine of reality has been allowed to peak through our curtains of culture.

Most obviously there is no immense, and immensely powerful corporate cartel invested in denying the problem or delaying a response. No analogue of the fossil fuel lobby exists to pour billions of dollars into pseudo think tanks or captive political parties to maintain the value of their investment in a virus that may soon kill millions of people around the world.

The Morrison government's plan to use so-called Kyoto "carryover credits" towards Australia's Paris carbon emissions reduction pledge effectively halves the country's promised cut, the government's climate change agency said, in its Special Review of Australia's Climate Goals.

To even cut emissions,  Australian government would need halt foreign corporate plans to increase Australian gas exports. Local emissions from this already ruin our emissions reduction target.

For our existential threats from global heating, a minimum of 50% reduction is needed over 10 years, requiring changes and planning far beyond, as if for a permanent viral pandemic. We need government that takes our global climate emergency seriously rather than just being a marketing department for cheat and bleat on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.

Please, do not say that global climate is always changing. We are heating our planet with greenhouse gases. Nature will not stop it until we do. Fossil fools civilisation is a terminal condition.

"Scheme" is the right word. The coal scheme for Indian billionaire Adani is another instance of Australian state and federal governments coal favouritism, letting Adani get away with dodging tricky legal hurdles. Adani gets the sorts of favours from government ministers that tend to be associated with corruption.
In the larger scheme of favour exchange, Clive Palmer admits his $83 million dollar spend on advertising in Queensland and elsewhere, give enough preferences to get the LNP coalition into government.  Now the Federal government LNP owes Clive a really big time favour, and Clive wants the Galilee coal projects to go ahead, because his own coal mining lease project is next in the Galilee Basin pipeline. This appears to be a  clear case of rank corruption, stinky dead ten days cat on your front doorstep variety, obvious, of the highest magnitude and involving the highest levels of Australian government.

Also everyone on the deal is protected by a massive SEP of public media blindness field - It must be another Somebody Else's Problem, with no federal ICAC and apparently no charges or laws broken. Wait, there was a law broken. Why wasn't the environment water trigger legislation invoked? And so the ACF is taking the federal government to court, based on Australia law.

Adani's water scheme, labelled the North Galilee Water Scheme (NGWS), is a pipeline allowed to take water, 12.5 billion litres yearly, from the Suttor River for its coal mine to wash coal and suppress dust. This is supposed to be during periods of high flows. To store most of that for the rest of the year, it will fill a dam capacity up to 10 billion litres. The Suttor is part of the river system that feeds into the Lake Dalyrymple, behind the Burdekin Dam. The water flows down the Suttor are highly variable and seasonal. Some years will have a season of extreme rainful with floods. The rest of the time, and with years in drought its flows will be down to almost nothing.

Coal fired power stations are not worth building, given comparative costs of running them, and global heating. National Party and One Nation supporters, please note this message.

Our "too many coal politicians" government of Australia can only carry on as if all is well on the climate front. They wear a black hole of wilful climate ignorance. They are walking voids of climate know-nothing, surrounded by a refractive blackness of coal. With such magical cloaks of climate invisibility, global heating cannot be seen when looking outside. Like Scott Morrison, they prefer to gaze in rapt worship of black lumps of coal, than look at any other part of the world around them. Nothing can be said to them about a climate emergency, without it disappearing down a memory hole.

The climate invisibility cloak isn't actually made of coal, but made from oodles of slush money going overseas, that comes from selling coal.

Greens MP Adam Bandt has introduced the Climate Emergency Declaration bill into federal parliament. 
Who in the ranks of the government dare to publicly acknowledge the extent of our climate systems emergency?
Which of our government representatives, will take a peek out from underneath their blankets of fears, threats and silence, vote against their governments conformity to vested interests, and support this bill?

There are but a few Liberal MPs that have signed on to the Parliamentary Friends of Climate Action Group, and publicly said that our government needs to do more. Sadly there seems to be no more than about six of them. 

Our green house gases, and global temperature are still rising. Ian Macindoe describes likely consequences by 2040 and later on by 2100. Rapid change is ahead, and not for the better.

Giles Parkinson gets stuck into Scott Morrison, "leader" of the LNP, who members only seem able to parrot the sales delusions spun by fossil fossil lobbyists.

Australia can’t afford to be led by someone so blind to what’s going on around him.

The  crusty old Australian constitution has Section 44, which is used to ensure that members of parliament do not have divided loyalty away from the good of Australia, towards a foreign power. At the time it was drawn up, international mining corporations with billion dollar budgets did not exist.

Corporate multinational budgets are bigger than the governments of many smaller nations. The purchase of Australia ministerial decisions by foreign corporations is an ongoing process that is allowed to proceed unchallenged and unchecked, and seems to be a major cause of failures and reversals of Australian climate policy for decades.

Politics, especially when our leaders utilise the media, is almost indistinguishable from marketing. Denial by marketing becomes all inclusive. Sticking to the marketing sales line, means denial of climate emergency, denial of technology change, and denial of total systems change.

World economic forum site article - "Zero by 2050: How the world's economy has planned to battle climate change" states the bare facts of what needs to be done to avoid a complete global climate systems collapse of civilisation. Several nations have already set their target sights. The costs of growth business as usual should now be unthinkable, and business as usual growth projections are now the unrealistic ones.

Transformation yes, growth no. Some nations and regions have set good plans in motion already. Some others are still lagging. It is question of change now or be destroyed in the future by climate crisis. The first reductions are the easiest and fastest. There are also direct benefits of transformation.

I attended the National Climate Emergency Summit 2020 at Melbourne Town Hall 14-15 February. ( #NCES2020 ) It is all about declaring a global climate emergency.

The summit was pre-sold out, and massively attended. All the main stage sessions were live streamed, so the total live audience, was much larger still. For later reference, I hope that recordings of the sessions will be soon be available online. The parallel break out sessions will be made available as podcasts.  I felt thoroughly brain smashed by 2 days of intense watching and listening, despite having a long interest in these issues.  It is only 2 days later of sleep recovery and processing that I feel able to start writing about it. There were many interesting themes and threads to follow.

The worth of the conference includes being able to see together so many people that have a common view our climate emergency and urgency. The people who still need to publicly recognise our dire global and national climate emergency were not at the conference.  What a wasted opportunity, as they could all have learned so much, since Australia urgently needs to set about reorganising our energy, economic, social and governance systems. We must cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50% over the next 10 years. Forget about our economy, as it will be stuffed if we don't do it.

For more explanation, find out what this planet was like, the last time carbon dioxide rose to hostile hot earth levels, at the time of the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Elites (survivors) might live somehow in enclaves around the polar oceans, and may need oxygen supplementation and CO2 scrubbing in their artificial habitats, as they go down the evolutionary drain.

For Australian governments, even their stretched promises of meeting 2030 emissions targets are outright lies, going by current policy settings.

Thermal Coal mines are stranded assets, and so are oil and gas reserves, according to our global carbon budget. But we are still firmly on the global heating path, which is moving closer and faster on towards global mass extinctions and industrial civilisation collapse.  The large foreign corporations still vested in economic growth, in Australia, have as their weapons the influence peddling of their industry associations, the "Minerals Councils", which are tightly linked to political parties both by donations and personnel. They are bent on retaining income from their invested capital, despite declining economic prospects. This is seriously detrimental for a viable future for Australian people.

. . . as investigative journalist Michael West’s website has exposed in its “Revolving Doors” project, the prime minister’s office is stacked full of ex–Minerals Council executives, such as John Kunkel and Brendan Pearson, hardened pro-coal warriors who will never budge. The Morrison government owes its very existence to a staggering $89 million advertising campaign by would-be Galilee Basin coalminer Clive Palmer, and other fossil-fuel donors contributed heavily. A federal ICAC – with teeth – cannot come soon enough.

Decades ago, the clean energy revolution and threat of global heating, promised to one day make the Coal Industry a dirty old relic. Now global heating is experienced as dangerous reality, and renewable energy is a cheaper option, the big banks know the Coal Industry to be the biggest near-term money loser, as this ABC article link shows.
Coal as profit losers before including also their system impacts, like climate change, as our all-time big market and political failures. Side effects for profits never have bothered our governments, and now the long term side-effects are national survival issues.

When will the political money-hog classes of Australia wake up too? Too bad Australia has a typical money power structure of democratic government. Promises of money generated by perceived mining opportunity has long dominated our governments. Prime Scott Morrison is still at it, with his talk of $70 billion dollar mining industry, that cannot be sacrificed for climate policy,  as if Coal Industry all there is to Australia. No, its just all there is for Scott Morrison and his mining mates.

We still have too many third-rate political dummy time-wasters in the ranks and leadership of the LNP and ALP, sponsored by deep infiltration and control by the Minerals Council of Australia. The process of energy transition off fossil fuels, is hampered by mates networks of vested money interests that still fail to understand their policies as national road-blocks. Your continent, your life.

Even the banks still not yet really letting go of money first philosophy. Costs of extraction rise, economic system affordability falls, Coal is now a capitalist loser.  Money systems have no sympathy. What else remains to be slain by the growing costs to global ecosystems, of providing energy,  water and myriads of stuff for our endless growth demands of global civilisation?

Mike Clarke, professor of zoology, La Trobe University, gives a short interview to RN Breakfast, and expresses concern that Australia flora and fauna will not fully recover from the impacts of the large scale devastating bush fires we have just had.