Newsletter March 2026, from Parramatta Climate Action Network. 

This newsletter of March 2026 brings a few words about important upcoming events. Climate Action Week Sydney is nearly upon us. This will be a unique happening. No where else in the world is such a thing happening at the same time. Sydney has held this annually for a number of years. This newsletter includes links to this years full events program.

Also in this newsletter are some links to articles that look at some fundamental difficulties of our climate and energy predicaments. And the last question that we should ask is always : "And then what?"

This Climate action week, has many events organized by a lot of people and groups in Sydney. Its contributions from your community. This is in itself so good to know. Around the world there are many people and groups that are trying to communicate and bring about changes in diverse ways. People are trying to opt out of industrial civilization, and bring down its "productivity".  Change is necessary for ourselves and for our economic and governance systems that are trapped in forceful denial, even as they are spectacularly failing their own self-definitions.

Real climate action is going to ultimately need much more than a week, as global change is acting on us. Predicted outcomes are looking dire. This century will take us past 3 degrees C of warming and beyond, according to well qualified experts.  The rate of warming has added at least  0.4 degrees C in less than a decade.  Our industrial systems are beset by climate consequences and "Limits to growth". When are the people going to take better actions, and what actions are necessary?

Circumstances do force us to give up the freedoms and comforts of taking no action, because our global systems are still organized entirely around fossil fuel extraction. This includes the governance of Australia.

Too many facts to ignore have been detailed many times over in climate and biology studies. Change is now on coming faster and hotter. If paying attention to reality is a religion, we are in a state of absolute disobedience.

Are we ready for the blow-backs of this future? Of course not. We have only had, at least 50 plus years, equal to two generations, since 1970, which is about where a definite global warming trend is statistically tracked back to our baseline. Limits To Growth was published in 1972, and strongly predicted systems collapse in the first half of this century, from resources exhaustion and pollution buildup (like GHG).

Mainstream Economists, the high priests of status quo and wealth inequality, flocked like vultures, to deny LTG.

In 1978 James Hansen reported to USA Congress that the global warming was real and progressing. Mobil-Exxon had by then already done its internal studies and predictions, all scientifically solid, and thereafter started its denial campaigns.

The United Nations slowly got its act together, and by 1992 did a big showing for its Framework convention on Climate Change.  Thereby followed negotations for the now good as dead "Kyoto Protocol", in which nationalist interests, especially Australia, did their best to sabotage the frameworks ambitions. 

And the principle status quo and wealth achievers and controllers of humanity have been trying to deny and downplay it since, and keep growing our emissions  with our economies.  As Kevin Andersen repeats frequently,  leaders continue their party and spread the hope that some future generation with miracle technology will save the day. Its "kick the can down the road time again".

The political processes and media of those at the top of wealth status-power tree, which is all derived from financial control from the fossil fuelled economy owners, will oppose realistic restrictions on this system of energy and power unto their last dying breaths.

So all national governments, particularly western,  are hopelessly enmeshed in the sources of their own power, especially in any form of money-driven democracy.

This is not to say that attempts at "energy transition" don't benefit those who get to buy and use these industrial products. Governments recognize this and fund some of it. But "energy transition" should mean diminishing Carbon emissions, and mean less fossil fuel extractions, but these have been increasing steadily. The ratio of green house emissions to fossil fuel extraction quality and quantity is also increasing, as much as we are willing to pay ever more for it.

The possibility of global human behavioural changes, and abandonment of the sinking ship of industrial civilization, is being left to local communities and individuals to seek other ways. 

Many Sydney events that have been organized as Climate Action Week (CAW) which is officially from March 9th to March 15th. Many events have been registered. As the CAW about web page says "Climate Action Week Sydney is a series of community-led events across Sydney from all aspects of the climate action ecosystem". Brilliant.

CAW, "by the community; for the climate",  is designed to get people together to present, listen, and talk with each other about this life changing aspect of our human predicament. There are many ways to get involved. Why isn't this happening everywhere?

On the full program page, each day has a long scrolled page of events, throughout the day, with some on at the same time. No one can manage to go to them all. To pick a day, click on the calendar control on the top right, and the day's events will appear in time order.

For instance, on Sunday 15th, organized for local and social, there is a picnic event in Parramatta's Prince Alfred Park,  involving Climate Action Week and ParraCAN, official time is from 12 to 2 pm. Click on this individual event box, and you will be taken to this Picnic registration page.

What aims to strike at a root cause,  is a "Cost of Growth" film,  hosted by Sydney Degrowth, at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre close to Newtown railway station, on Thursday 12th March from 6:30pm. Our growth of technology and consumption is difficult to deny cause of our climate catastrophe, a behaviour needing a mass change. Do we think "Net-zero" , "Energy Transition", and EV's are enough and adequate for the scale of our problems? A lot more is going to have to happen.

Here is a link to the CAW full program.

If your event diary is already full for CAW, but you have time for reading, or YouTube watching, here are a few recent links.

Kevin Anderson 2024 -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipdwvvZ8Wu4

Climate: Where are we headed?

Kevin describes how we are failing. No nation wants or tries to give up our fossil fuel provided production and delivery systems that maintain our lifestyles.

Kevin Anderson 2026 - https://climateuncensored.com/a-velvet-or-violent-climate-revolution-which-will-we-choose/

A Velvet or Violent Climate Revolution: which will we choose?

Kevin Andersons climate outlook is pessimistic. I remember it being a little bit brighter.

Nations and corporations, governments, are fighting to access the remaining fossil fuel energy resources. We now again escalate into a rising global scale of warfare. Greenhouse Emissions still continue to to rise, we burn a higher proportion of the total extraction and processing to keep getting our supply. Our "tolerance" to this is a fatal process, and a true measure of our addiction.

This naturally delivers a smaller proportion of net energy profit. Our economies are more fossil fuel intensive but we enjoy less delivered energy and diminishing quantities of mined minerals. The benefits are distributed more unequally, leading to social deprivation and unrest.

Hence Australia digging and pumping up more and harder to get Coal and Gas, at the behest of industrial systems around world. This is a truely vain and futile effort to in order to prop up our energy intensive and financially driven civilization just a bit longer.

Every additional increment of industrial systems growth, and its size maintenance costs, also grows our impact size, our systems vulnerability and  adds to our accumulated biosphere damages.  We are turning up the heating on our planets Oceans. The only good thing is it accelerates the oncoming time of a total collapse of our energy systems, as we use them up faster. A wiser plan would be cut-backs and rationing. Nature responds to rates of flow.

Nate Hagens, has given our current policies of "economic" processing a name. He is spreading the term "Mordor Economy". The given all importance Economy consumes everything and spreads its waste products everywhere, as it moves faster towards its final non-productive state. I mentally wince every time I hear a politician talk about "productivity" and "efficiency", all of which gets obtained from machine powered production, and now its a race to the death of human jobs with massive "AI" data centers.

Explore that literary meme a bit further, we can imagine our current modern Techo - Industrial societies the equivalents of Orcs swarming in order demolishing our planet, and our human herds are the driven by the equivalent of Sauron and his minions, entrapped "rings" - powerful organized networks of Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital, in the thick of it for love of mutual favors,  technology, status, money and perks. 

A notable blogger on these uncomfortable matters, "The Honest Sorcerer" explores many aspects of this, including where are we going, in  "Beyond The Mordor Economy", extrapolating from past to future.

We are, as Nate Hagens would put it, already in some sort of a “Mordor Economy,” where we spend more and more energy just on getting the next batch of energy and other resources—sacrificing everything we hold dear in the process. Human well being. Nature. Our future. This path we are on, however, is not only unsustainable but puts us on an accelerated trajectory towards a radically simplified world economy. And while many people believe that we can still alter our course—or at least, that we could’ve changed direction 50 years ago—all this was “written” in the laws of physics. The question is thus not “how we stop this from happening” but what is beyond Mount Doom?

Too Long, Didn't Read (TL;DR). 

The conclusions of physics, predictive human sociology and common sense, is that "this civilization is becoming burnt toast". We should stop wasting our time on growing and maintaining it. Far better to be working on what comes after. Keep on questioning our values and priorities. Change is slow, but powerful when a lot of people take part.

Michael Rynn compiled this newsletter, with requested review from the Parracan workgroup.

This newsletter is using a trial business email newsletter@parracan.org.au   This is because the  subscriber list on MailChimp grew beyond the size allocated for a free service on the Parracan mailchimp account.

If you want or need to unsubscribe, send an email from your subscribed email with the subject "unsubscribe", and add any opinion you want to express.