The collapse of the coal industry in the USA is leaving behind a mess of mining damage without even the legislated promised funds to attempt some form of rehabilitation. Insurance backers are likened to a collapsing house of cards.

The head of Australia's consumer watchdog has slammed the gas industry, accusing it of misleading governments into approving massive gas export projects that have led to soaring power prices, killing off companies and jobs.

He said the Federal Government should be "a bit sceptical" about what companies said."Often self-interest dominates what companies tell governments," Mr Sims said.

"A lot of scepticism" could happen if both big parties didn't take large donations from mining corporations. ALP and LNP are too easily persuaded by lobbyists from foreign corporate wealth looters, for which our government hands over large investment and operational subsidies, and rubber stamp "approval status" for financial backing. Australia receives little back in taxes on profit, because costs of energy extraction are high, and global prices are low. Australia gets ruined land and water in return. The world gets global heating.

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!

To the most hostile and fearful politicians of Australia,

The targeting of Mr Moselmane by police raids, for having expressed China appreciation sentiments, has been timed perfectly just before peak pre-poll voting period for the tight Eden-Monaro by-election. The media mud is likely to stick a while longer after failure of the spooks to disprove innocence, whilst the perpetrators will never be accused of lack of national security vigilance

From the SMH article. 

The state government is banking on global coal demand defying the Paris climate goals of slashing carbon emissions, predicting instead only a marginal cut in consumption of the fossil fuel by mid-century.
According to the government's new Strategic Statement on Coal Exploration and Mining, to be released on Wednesday, the appetite for thermal coal burnt in power stations will only ease about one-tenth from just over 1 billion tonnes a year to about 900 million by 2050.

Deputy Premier and resources minister John Barilaro said the resilience of the coal industry has "never been more important" given the state's need to bounce back from drought, bushfires and now the COVID-19 crisis.

So the thought that carrying on with business as usual, exporting as much coal as usual, will put an end to all our pretensions of industrial civilisation, has never stuck in the minds of our Coal-Politician government. To them, the resilience of the coal industry has "never been more important", to the detriment of everything else.  The good news is that more policies of this kind will ensure that "forever" will be a much shorter time, and a bigger waste. Unfortunately the wealthy political class are in a state of wishful dreaming. The more we struggle to achieve growth and prosperity, the less prosperity and usable planet there is per person, excepting for those few in the self-important Ownership class of course, until just before the final collapse. The rate of rise in energy cost of Energy, is dependent on how fast we are using it up. The faster we go, the greater we exceed the waste processing speed limits that Nature has set down for us. De-growth which amounts to energy usage reduction and rationing is finally self-imposed upon us.

Apologies to Alfred Tennyson "The Charge of the Light Brigade".

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.

Thank you to the insurance companies Liberty Mutual and HDI/Talanx. News by email was read today, 12th June 2020, that "Liberty Mutual" has categorically ruled out further insurance of Adani's coal project in Queensland. HDI/Talanx sent "Market Forces" at letter stating that they had "terminated the insurance cover for this project" and "have even excluded the Carmichael project from insurance coverage for significant suppliers." Thank you to many activists that supplied the ongoing social pressure who are still campaigning hard.

Now all we need is the Gas and Coal coalitions of conniving politicians in the Australian Federal Government, and State governments to be denied reserve bank and global finance and bonds for funding for their reckless promotions of new coal and gas projects in Australia. They are meeting and plotting with their culpable lobbyists everyday in the halls and desktops of money and power. The economic downtown has been deemed the perfect time for emergency powers and corporate ambush of democracy. Coalitions of conniving political units powered by fossil fuelled wealth are still plotting systemic ecosystems destruction. We need a loud and commensurate opposition, not a bunch of willing political collaborators.

Growth of large scale coal mining, and all fossil fuel powered economic development, is incompatible with global heating mitigation, as greenhouse gas emissions need to be falling rapidly now.  No more to "OLD ENERGY".

Queensland now has "human rights" legislation. It remains to be seen how this legislation stands up in court against the huge money weight of vested interests.

Thank you to these young Queenslanders who are taking on Clive Palmers coal company

In a landmark case, 25 young people aged 13 to 30 are mounting a legal challenge to the massive, Clive Palmer-owned Galilee Basin coal project. This will be the first time human rights arguments are used in a climate change case in Australia.
Palmer’s proposed Waratah Coal mine in the Galilee Basin will dwarf Adani’s operation, extracting four times as much coal per year.

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.

The road to climate hell is paved with good intentions that use bad ideas, and we are nearly there now.  Fossil fuel companies tell us that burning methane gas is step towards climate mitigation, also known as a bridge, or label it a transition fuel.  There is no climate science research that supports such an assertion. It remains such an easy lie. Australian politicians love oversimplified lies. These are politically useful myths and misleading signs on the road to hell.

Even energy minister Angus Taylor can smugly say his lines. "Australian exports of gas help our neighbours reduce their carbon emissions".  But how much help is that? More Australian water and land is to be sacrificed to toxic fracking gas fields so that its overseas neighbours (customers) will be able burn more gas to reduce their carbon emissions for us? It doesn't even make sense. What a big fat smug lies we get to tell ourselves. As if a country ranked as a fossil fuel addict can talk about its good climate intentions.

Abundant gas could be great for any number of things, but it is not going to solve the climate change problem - Haewon McJeon, for Scientific American

NSW nature conservation has an important petition, against a new climate-stupid government idea, put up by wooden-heads logging industry.

Forest derived biomass (FDB) harms the climate, harms forests, harms people and harms the clean energy transition. Any engagement with burning trees for energy would be a gross misdirection of government subsidies and an assault on the climate.
 . . . The Australian community does not want to lose more to fire than we already have. There is no social licence for further destruction of our forests!

There is already little doubt, among climate activists around the world, that all the important decisions of Australian government are made under the strong influence of the fossil fools industry, head-quartered in Canberra as the (Foreign) Minerals Council of Australia. This has been true since the 1990s.

This has been proved again, to be more than ever before, with a release of a simple report that shows the make up of the National Corvid-19 Coordination Commission is heavily stacked by fossil fuel industry "king-makers". Several are well known Australian Fossil Fuel agents and middle men from the global corporate gas industry giants. Some of the others are "not known" yet. Some have big share holdings. Their main repeated demands of government politicians, have no direct relations to national management of this Corona virus epidemic.

Our governments more often than not go along with the demands. See their wish-list. This makes the Corvid Commission itself, evidence of a virulent and deadly infestation inside our government. Democracy in Australia appears now to be having difficulty breathing. It should be put under intensive care, and the outcome could be fatal.

This is the sort of headline never to be seen in the Daily Telegraph. A newly formed Commission for the Human Future, which is made up of Australian scientists, academics and leaders, have tabled the top 10 threats we face as a global community. The question as to if they can be "easily fixed", and the rest of the headline in the New Daily online, "and how we overcome them", could be glib press corporate media speak, which is so ubiquitous these days. Advertising Media speak is as old as humanity, Edward Bernays didn't invent it, but glamorised it as a professional art form. Reassurances so as not to scare off  readership too early. If these threats are so easy to fix, why are they in the top ten? Pandemic disease outbreak, just one of them, seems to be very bad right now. Now all we need to fix the others is for our governments to absolutely heed and action the other nine.

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.