Parramatta Climate Action Network - ParraCAN,  has empathy for those impacted from this terrible season of widespread intense fires. We have no empathy for politicians that publicly deny causal factors of global heating and Australian fossil fuel exports, in order to promote their social groups vested interests in more Coal Mining.

More people in Australia are now forced to suffer and flee from catastrophic fires. We trust those impacted will get support to somehow rebuild their homes and lives. "States of emergency" have been declared. Our seasonal fire risks has been made worse by recent prolonged periods of drought. More drought is only one of many predicted impacts of global heating, caused by the growth of fossil fuelled industrial civilisation. Severity of episodic droughts in Australia has been made worse by recent rapid increases in its average land surface temperatures, now over 1 degree C. The global land surface temperature has been rising an average of about 0.17 C per decade since 1981, and recent earth system changes appear to favour acceleration of temperature rise.

(See https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature)

(See https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/ecosystems-report/)

(See https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/australias-emissions-go-up-and-up/)

Our warmer climate is due to the rise in our surrounding sea surface temperatures, which are direct evidence of the global heating of the massive volumes of water in our oceans. The conservative sides of politics must know, somewhere deep in the back of their minds, that the ultimate cause of our growing environmental predicaments is the extraordinary global growth of human industrial activities over the past three centuries.

Conservative politicians still react with anger at any person in politics who mentions these facts. This is despite decades of reality-linked, painstaking catalogues of proven scientific observations.  It is the airing of the drawn facts and conclusions they object to, not the persons. Some partial explanations of relevance are that conservative politics in Australia is largely funded and advised by representatives of Coal Mining Industries, and are hostile to any opposition to coal mining. The social circles of conservative politics receives large benefits from mining industry and its controlling financial interests. It is no surprise that their public statements consist of what they have been told by their mining lobby groups and conservative politics promotes the growth of all mining industries.

This sort of trend is well evidenced in Australia, and other fossil fuel exporting nations, and is part of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democratic government, which happens with growing wealth and power inequalities of society. It is an emergent part of the distribution of behaviour of human social groups, which are hard to control for. There is nothing personal-political implied here. We are just playing our customary social economic roles, but we a playing these games inside a doomed global system.

Consequently, such inconvenient facts, are suppressed, because they are contrary to social power structure, and are also such direct reminders of our long term species extinct-ability, our personal mortality, and those who are the minority that are still making off with the bulk of short term benefits. Expressing thoughts about the temporal nature and future of our current situation are not allowed by the conservative public narrative. It is normally unthinkable by too many.

Global ocean heating is due to our rapid and ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels for energy. Previous episodes in earth history shows that global heating threatens the stability of this planets biosphere systems, and also viability of any form of human civilisation, with the demise of many life systems that it needs to exploit. The large volumes of Australian fossil fuel exports are already a major and growing threat to the process of global mass extinctions.

Our halls of power of national and state governments, have long been stacked and controlled by beneficiaries of fossil fuel related economic activities. They look after their own interests. They still fear and oppose the simple ideas that mining extraction rates need to rapidly slow down, and that customers and consumers of fossil fuel products must be encouraged to rapidly find alternative energy sources, curtail their energy requirements, reduce their total consumption and aim for an overall global economic contraction. It surely has to occur that these few centuries of economic growth must come to an end.

Our global predicaments and their consequences cannot possibly be escaped using the reality denial based thinking and behaviours that have brought them about. ParraCAN joins the many other groups in calling for our national governments right now need to stop playing their political and economic games for their own social group benefits, and to acknowledge the implications of this global climate emergency.

ParraCAN acknowledges that the most direct implication is that society must soon endure, share and adapt to the consequences of large but controlled global economic contraction, in order to avoid driving our earth systems into life-hostile conditions from which it will not be possible to have anywhere to flee. The cutting and rationing of Australian fossil fuel exports must be forced to play a major role in global economic contraction, and in reducing the greenhouse gas drivers of global heating.