The Australian Institute wants you to know, about what most Australian's know, and feel, about climate change.  It is in their latest annual "Climate of the Nation" report. It shows what Australian citizens would like have done, that would be meaningful climate action, and suggests that our political parties are way behind actual voter intentions on climate action, and politicians are not listening to climate voters at all.   How shall we get rid of these troublesome political parties who are so blinded by corporate ideology? Or is it hoped that publication of the extent of strong climate action memes will change their policies?

Part of the problem is how easy it is to fall into the corporate meme deception traps. There are many well documented examples, of "approval conditions" for mining projects, which usually turn out to be not worth their usage as toilet paper. Breach of these conditions tends not to be reported in sensationalist mainstream media, and by the time documentation is revealed, the original political zombies that approved the unlikely corporate artificial sweeteners, have used up their political shelf-life, and are well into paid retirement. Australia's national broadcaster is trying to keep up with all of this, so here a ABC web-site link, with some beautiful quotes from big mining fossil fuel corporations.

I recently read a telling article, published in medium, by Tim Baxter, "Gorgon carbon capture and storage project: The failure of the world's largest CCS facility". The CCS facility was a condition of approval, and it was supposed to dispose of, (relatively permanently)  underground saline reservoir,  most of the CO2 (~80%) that needed to be extracted from the gas, before it was shipped overseas as LNG. Otherwise this contaminant of around 14% of all mined gas, is blown into our atmosphere. No doubt Chevron has tried to have a good CCS, but this is one of its kind setup, that should have been expected to under-perform, from teething difficulty, analysis mistakes and costs.  The CCS processes have always been costly to run for each tonne of CO2 buried, as parasitic energy loads, so there should be no doubt that Chevron gains profit from missing its CCS targets by at least two-thirds.  And so the entire project is allowed to continue, while Chevron continues to profit by selling its polluting product overseas. Methane leakage and large scale carbon emissions are the conjoined end products of delivering LNG anywhere.

Here is a carefully sown, fossil fuel industry mind-numbing meme, that fossil fuel parrot-zombies have been trained to say  -

The oil and gas industry, for its part, argues that fossil fuels are not the problem so much as the emissions they cause.
- Fossil fuel propagandist.

Since we humans should not blame fossil fuels for their undeniable and very attractive intrinsic chemical properties, in order to feed our energy demands, we must instead blame the well-salaried proponents of MTIC and corporations, and their government accessory helpers, for their cancerous growth expansionism that requires mining and burning ever more fossil fuels. They really are the problem. Keep away from them. Now we will not have to work very hard to put that growth into reverse. Now that the energy support political winds have changed, how long will it take before some politicians are jumping up and down with speeches to claim credit for the achieved degrowth that will happen anyway?

The ABC web article reprints the corporate quotes, that CCS is a "must", must be part of every countries climate change toolkit, "It's not the only one of course but it is important to help a lot of economies to get to net zero." Sure.  I can already hear Sam Mitchell from "Collapse Chronicles" expressing his doubt in a big vocal "Yeyeeeesss". That, be assured, means Nah. How long have we been failing so badly at this for? For all my limited-activism life, it seems. Corporate faith and hope memes never die, but are sprouted anew by our compliant main stream media, and mouths of political idiots.

I liked Tim Baxter's form of gentle, "well, did you expect anything different?" hints in his article, of this latest expected failure of CCS. It reminds me of a radio news item I overheard while still half asleep one morning. It was reported supposedly intelligent women, who had been a "greens candidate" in her past, had been convinced by an online contact, that the contact was "in-love" with her, and he asked her help, for her to fly to Japan, and pick up suitcase to take back with her.  Unfortunately the suitcase contained a stash of hidden methamphetamine drugs. These were detected by routine airport scans, the women was arrested. After a long detention, the case was tried, the women was found guilty and sentenced, as "she was expected to have known enough to understand she was being duped, and was doing wrong". The sentence was reduced to six years, including time already served, from a possible ten years.

Humans generate their own memes to justify their actions, and worse, some bad memes are contagious.

There are no prison sentences, nor even a criminal offense specified in law, for politicians that allow themselves to be duped, with excuse memes, and approve new fossil fuel expansion projects.  Stealing from nature is easier than stealing from a baby, unless defensive nature protection exists. The current UN offers none.The quarreling nation-states cannot be expected to abide by any agreements, unless they are enforced by power, either externally applied or internally coerced.

As far as I know, resources ministers are still rewarded with comfortable political afterlives, and continue to work well for the industrial corporations they enable. Australia now has a National Anti-Corruption Commission, as was promised by the Australia Labor Party now in government. I have not heard of a single instance of real political or corporate punishment inflicted by this NACC.   The NACC would be outside its brief, in going after the high level delusional memes that our political systems allow, to push further growth of MTIC as it consumes this biosphere.

The investigations of state-level anti-corruption have previously involved spectacular examples of politicians in high misdemeanors, so I assume that the federal NACC quietness implies its design to avoid public relations harm to the government.

Looking at its website, the NACC appears to be busy with many hundreds investigations of its referrals, mainly applying to salaried public servants. "The Commissioner identified the main areas in which we were seeing reports of corrupt conduct in the Commonwealth public sector as involving procurement, recruitment and promotion, and the public/private interface."  That interface is a legal minefield of ambiguity.

What can we do, that already requires change to our cocoons of life-style and media conditioning? Give up our life-style job dependency? So what if most of us think that the government is not doing enough to combat climate change? At least 70% do, says the report. To take serious action, requires attacking the banks, mining corporations, and the corporate powers that be.  Doing this alone, means to be politically thrown under the bus, or simply self-sacrifice to give up better paying job. The big money personal pay-offs come from stripping the earth, which is why it is still happening. We are truely animals that are conditioned by herd mentality with shared needs to believe in approved catechisms.

There is still only slow movement in the "transitional change" direction for the electricity grid, because its big, and costly. Some will benefit from the rollout of government subsidized home solar panels and battery installations. It works as quite a clever bribe to keep climate and cost anxious happy.

Any Australia government will point to a few of its successes, in order to draw attention away from its institutionalized failures. Aging and expensive Coal power stations are slowly being replaced by renewable energy sources in the power grid. Battery technology, improves, and is being bought and deployed at larger grid scales. All of these changes do nothing real about growth in the underlying problem, which is the size and scale of modern techno-industrial civilization - MTIC. New technology depends absolutely on fossil fuels powering the mining, production and transport infrastructure. The whole of MTIC depends on steadily consuming the biosphere, until systems collapse.

"Earth Overshoot" day, is steadily retreating to earlier in the calendar year.  This "Earth Overshoot" is an approximate measure of falling off our sustainability cliff.

Accelerating collapse in MTIC  is depletion rates - assured. Economic growth increases depletion rates. Guaranteed depletion also triggers further stupidity of resource conflict wars, between human organizations of almost every size scale. Future biosphere collapse is accelerating from global heating caused by the accumulated industrial boosts to atmosphere greenhouse gases. Human insanity increases with stress.

The current government promised help with "Cost of living" and current inflation rates. Only we cannot relate the cost of living crisis, to the result of perusing the growth goals of MTIC, even though these are in plain sight. High and rising costs of buying or renting a home in Australia, are a reflection of the rising costs of this global extractive civilization, that supports growing parasitic population of human dependents everywhere.

Try as we might, we cannot dare to slow-down the rates of the necessary global resource withdrawals that keep use with jobs that feed us. Slowdowns from depletion of one resource, only makes human groups try harder elsewhere, or move on to the next substitute, or escalate hostility into the next do-or-die war.

This political system of course will continue to adapt and ignore obvious adversity, until it dies from rising energy and pollution costs, as long as the  wealth and political beneficiaries are shielded from natural consequences.

We have here a meta-stable system of wealth growth for the system manipulators, and declining quality of food, jobs, accommodation, and entertainment provisions, with tight media and political systems denial, and will continue even as general well being of the masses declines until biosphere death. It doesn't matter that a majority of people of declining health and literacy understand that our jinxed fixes are doomed, as long as the masses allow it to continue unhindered.

This brings me to what seems to be a general law of MTIC for industrial products consumption. All the existing modes of energy production, coal, oil, gas, wood, plus all forms of "renewable" energy, all need and feed off each other. Mine corporations now hope develop and use renewable energy with battery powered big mining trucks. They all can be said to be symbiotic evolving, growing parts of MTIC. And therefore they all likely to collapse together. Everything industrial product and process is inter-connected, as much as every living thing in the biosphere is. Students of ecological economics, will know of course, for the exam question answer, is that the entire industrial sector economy is dependent on the biosphere for its products, and even on the general health of its plants, animals and human workers. But power and animal survival instincts take over rationality, and make sure that between our competitive tribal groups, we need to consume everything before some other group does. Industrial consumption and technology builds on what already exists, and new energy technologies of MTIC do not displace the old.

Since coal burning and steam engines were adopted at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the need to cut down trees, and destroy the ecosystems of forests, has not only continued, but MTIC needs greatly increased demand for wood. In an interview in a "Decouple" podcast, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a French historian of science and technology, gives some surprising examples of interdependency of industrial processes, including the need to cut-down ever more trees. His most recent book has been released in English "More and more and MORE".  It is also sub-titled "The energy transition will not happen". Because it has never happened before.

    Britain uses four times more wood to produce their energy now than in the 18th century. And just to produce 1.5% of their energy.

Some of this must be due to the huge increase in scale (around eight to ten times growth in population, before considering consumption multipliers) of the entire global MTIC that has been enabled by the energy from fossil fuels. With Britains increased demand for coal, in the 19th century, came the need to cut down more forests for wood, to make the many mining pit props needed prevent collapse of newly accessed coal seams. With steam engines, and railways came the need for heavy wooden ties, or "sleepers" to stabilize every added length of the new iron railways. By the 19th century Britain was importing wood from several other nations to feed new requirements.

In fact Coal completely depends on an international Commerce of Timber. For Britain it was particularly clear that without all the Timber from the Baltic, from Portugal from France, they cannot have access to their Coal. It's a crucial issue during the first world war, during the second world war. It is really a very strategic resource. So I mean that you cannot have a history of the 20th century without Timber. It doesn't work at all. - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.

Mr Fressov continues on -- To make new steel, we need coal. All the infrastructure of oil from extraction to consumption is based on steel, and steel is completely dependent on coal. So the coal mines are stimulated by the consumption of oil. For the ICE transport powered global trading world, steel is needed for the cars, the tankers, the pipes. So all these need enormous amounts of coal. ... You cannot tell the story of the 20th century as a transition from oil to coal. It doesn't work at all.

Mr Fressov continues on -- Basically what I what I try to argue is that instead of having a story of transition we have a story of symbiotic expansion of energies. An example of that is the fact that if you take the oil industry in in the US in the 21st century it consumes more steel than the whole US economy in the 1900s, in the early 1900s. Just the oil industry, because there are so many pipes. There's pipes everywhere, and we're talking about millions of tons of pipes. Of course this steel for oil is expanding because oil is more difficult to get you need to drill deeper. The oil has more sulfur so it corrodes more. All the infrastructure which is made of steel. Pipelines of course are much bigger, larger, longer This is completely obvious when you look at the writing of the engineers that oil is not going to displace coal.  ----

I conclude this highlights the major problem of MTIC, that its problems are not in the kinds of technology used, but rather that MTIC uses too much of all kinds of technology. All kinds of technology require all kinds of resources. Taken from everywhere, MTIC consumes energy and products, to maintain its size, because it is simply far too big. This is what "overshoot" means. And "transition" in the future will need to mean some other kind of transition, requiring far less technology. The transition must be against the resistance we put up against collapse and change, and especially changing our ideas of who we are.

We are still coal fueled as much as oil fueled, and steel infrastructure production is the link between them. And building renewable technology by necessity requires the MTIC resources base of large quantities of oil, steel and coal, and their green house gas emissions. Renewable energy technology is only made possible by the existing underlying mining and energy infrastructure.

Reverse dependencies entangle all our energy and material resources. Mining coal and other minerals to new depths requires heavy diesel-oil powered machinery. Clear felling forests is done using minimal labor with help from steel chains, chain saws and bulldozers. Because of the many chemical, and plastics, and fuel types from the many varied lengths of separated hydrocarbons of oil, the global oil supply has become a master resource for getting or making just about everything else, directly or indirectly.

In Australia, where rich billionaires always demand to have and keep their big shares, of ownership, with its rewards and control for supplying the resources to keep MTIC going, it is extra important for them to deny their role in global heating, and this applies to their employed minions. I predict that Gina Reinhardt will continue to support her Institute of Public Affairs, her special media "think-tank of denial", as a good public relations ploy to deny her fortunes role in helping MTIC continue to expand to kill off the biosphere.

This should be OK, as billionaires only get to live once, and also the human species will only exist and go extinct once.

The IPA functions to select those useful characters, who have status to spread public confusion memes. Recently the IPA just give the volcano-of-lies geologist Ian Pilmer another go at promoting his latest book of easily swallowed, recycled climate change denial, "The Facts" , to be treasured as a litany of core pseudo-science beliefs.

The aims of Australian government, and the utterances of its public personas, are skillfully limited and guided by the interests of extreme wealthy classes, just like the USA. Wealthy fortunes are the real climate-forcing owners of Australia and its government. These employ time-proven, efficient drone troopers of political lobbyists, who swarm around with special access to parliamentary hive offices, far outnumbering the politicians.  The bank institutions also play their funding roles, as corporate AIs with programmed employees to seek the best monetary returns from interest on invested loans. Australian governments are large institutions whose main function is to keep its population quiescent, while achieving the maximum rates of bulk removal of coal, gas and minerals out of Australia, It is a vicious systems cycle of money inflation.  From those corporate thefts, Australia collects almost zero federal taxes and scant royalties are paid to state governments. These are the unwritten terms, with are sufficient to keep happy our corporate foreign investors that are holding the purse strings tied around politicians necks. Media control and ownership by corporations, self-inflicted by policy, keeps the Australian population and politicians in check, and the Murdoch propaganda, again with money under the table, is relentless.

No political party achieves office in Australia, without long-term funding and media support from the mafia of global finance-bets bank-money laundering schemes. Financial scheming is memic driving force of MTIC. It is the same in every nation-state, that needs to gobble up biosphere life, to feed the MTIC consumption machine, to keep up the "modernization" game, and even the "transition" version of that game. We are all interconnected in a competitive game of our global corrupt MTIC, with belief systems ruled by our stomachs and tribal identity.

The latest, but not a new stage of MTIC is the enhancement of the "total-war" game. This is a typical last ditch survival strategy of city-states. As real resources depletion, costs inflation, and pollution damages degrade our minds and hearts, governments turn to motivating their humans to destroy other human polities in order to keep up their own private benefits version of the biosphere kill game.

Maybe you can tell that I recently just finished reading the book "Exterminations", authored by Ugo Bardi. It was written and edited in order to be very easy to read, and as a result the narratives and ideas are very sobering, all the way to the end.  I am reminded how very much meme-manipulated into carrying out different kinds of  exterminations we all are. If only we had some memes that could spread that MTIC is the proper cause of all our evils, and our own human power-hungry competitive nations-states are its chief implementers, as many given examples from history show.

We are all "meme-infested" apes, to quote from Daniel Dennett. Here is a link to a criticism of another deadly meme , "Carbon Dioxide as Plant Food".  Too bad then, that too much CO2 is deadly for most biosphere life and global climate.

All the masses need is to be given, for any complex problem, embedded within a meme, a solution that is "simple, obvious and wrong", and the hidden condition is that the originator has authority to promote it and believes it will bring benefits.

Ugo writes that for most, if not all exterminations, only three simple conditions need to be true to bring it about. One, a target group is easily identified by difficult to hide public features, like appearance, language, accent, dress or other cultural features. All that is needed is they are "not us". Two is that the exterminators think they can gain by taking over the resources of the exterminated, who are known something worth stealing. Three is that the targets are believed to be easy pickings, because they seem to have no organized defense, so there is no means of  payback or blow-back, or protection by a powerful third party. Exterminations also depend on generating a "Madness of Crowds", with emotions activated to cripple rationality by "othering" memes.

Extermination is theft, simple murderous armed robbery, and most nation-states have done this since their formation. Later on, forgetting is easy, reminders can be denied, against the self-image of the nation state. No wonder the attitude of nation-states to the entire biosphere is the simple taking of easy targets, sources of wealth are easily identified, give personal and national rewards, ecocide and theft of nature is hardly ever punished.  But what an awful community of global nation-states, this has produced. In reality we have divided communities of lying, mistrustful, murderous nation-thieves, who plot and plunder, will kill first and talk later, while they create ever more deadly weapons, while their biosphere dies, and their planet cooks.

Federations, and empires, says Ugo, justify their existence by protecting all the minorities from other groups they have power over. And other forces work to try and break them up. Global inter-state cooperation requires a perception of fairness, and some honest rules based on the limits of a geophysical ecology. Unfortunately, we humans have evolved with all the old small minded, inter-tribal hostility instincts, with basic emotional mind controls and limits to understanding anything new that we didn't learn in early childhood. MTIC for 3 centuries, has ten thousand years of inter-tribal and city-state conflicts, exterminations, trying to work with group minds, that are the product of something like two hundred thousand years of small group social evolution.

Of course human societies are most likely to fail in managing current predicaments, with natural selection and consequences working with such limited biological and cultural materials.

The Australian branch of MTIC government is fully allied, with money under the table, with its exploiting partners in the USA and UK. This places it in a compromised position regards current genocide and wars being run to compete for power in the large Euro-Asian land mass. Resource access motivations, are cater to the competitions of global capital bribery forces, resource desires are a collective clamp-hold on all government policy for bargaining to own critical resources.

There is a vague underlying awareness,  that MTIC is doing wrong, and needs to change, because something really bad is about to happen. Some deep analysis of what is possible shows that to create a true industrial ecology, we will need to start recycling our piles of mining wastes, and rethink the scale and design of sustainable cities. Instead of each individual human industrial extraction and production one-way process must make a profit or die, regardless of irreversible depletion and pollution, we should instead only consider entire systems, with finite circularity in mind, including Gaian ecosystems, on our planetary scale. We should accept only the employment of those industrial systems and processes that are circular enough for long term sustainability. Only these can survive for the long-run anyway, and these are the conditions we should seek, if we wish to really survive as a technological species as well.

A recent "peak-oil" zoom chat, online, on you-tube, highlights some already gestating, creative ideas, which at least show that we may already have more options for the long-run than most people can currently imagine. From here to there will also involve some real creative destruction as well, to abandon our worst ways. We certainly need to use more reality acceptance with imaginative creativity than is currently being applied now by our political leaders.