William Rees is an ultra-distinguished ecological scientist, and an original researcher on human impacts on biosphere life. Eric Lee has cleaned up, and published a formatted transcript with slides, taken from Prof. Rees recent webinar presentation titled - "Will Modern Civilization be the Death of Us? Have Humans Become Obsolete?". It is presented here, because of the disinterest of mainstream media and conventional political narrative.

I present the text of the "Climate Emergency Forum" this week, the video is published on YouTube, State of the Climate 2024 - Earth in Crisis.  Discussion centered around the publication in the BioScience journal, available online -  "The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth".  This was published on 08th October 2024, by an author list of Climate Scientists in prestigious institutional paid positions, who are not known to be given to alarmist predictions without strong evidence. A number of factors suggest the earth's climate system warming resistance is collapsing. Terrestrial carbon sinks are not working as well as before. Well known climate tipping point processes are getting bigger. And of course human civilization continues to pump out more greenhouse gases every year.

David Suzuki stated in a 2017 blog post,  that "Environmentalism has failed.", and summarized major reasons for why.  Environmentalism is known to have been failing for a very long time, and you can search online for numerous opinions on this, including admissions of defeat.  This is asked particularly in the USA, where the political duopoly system excludes alternatives. Today, in 2023, their is still in every fossil-fuel powered national government an emphasis of economy over environment. State governments are officially styled as the principle law makers and regulation enforcers. But the political parties running them, regardless of election methods, and means of sustaining power, are subject to the powerful influence of the most pervasive and successful monetary-economic forces, namely the fossil fuel extraction and energy industries that make this Techno-Industrial Civilization - TIC,  possible. TIC is also failing, because our environment and resources are failing. Failing environmentalism appears to be built-in attribute of our TIC, and by extension our species.

The EDO in various states of Australia is fighting approvals for new Coal Mines and Fracking projects. Members of our governments and public service institutions behave as if they have been bought up to serve corporations, and have no decent regard for country, water, climate, people and biosphere. Short term money appears to be all that politicians care about. Here are  links to two upcoming legal court campaigns that need your funding help, that the EDO thinks are worth fighting, because our environments are worth defending.

This linked article by Alan Urban provides a comprehensive summary of reasons why our global food systems are rapidly failing, due to climate vulnerability, and harmful unsustainable agriculture technology.

All of which is the end-stage result of our overshoot of our biospheres systems capacity for regeneration. Insect species are rapidly declining in numbers, and so are all their species dependents, such birds and small mammals. The insect pests that feed on our crops are exceptions.

Why are the big nations now arming for war in haste? Why can't they wait for civilization to collapse? Why is Australian government now wanting to buy expensive, complex USA made, deadly weapons? The "Collapse of Everything" must be accelerating, and political denial has now built up into total panic, hidden by a wall of silence.

It has been reported that our planet's average energy imbalance - EEI - has increased over the last two decades. Climate models suggest that we are likely to experience this in coming years as a faster rise in average surface temperature anomaly, and increased rate of accumulation of heat in our oceans.

In late 2022, an Office of National Intelligence (ONI) initial climate risk assessment — an election promise of the Albanese government — was distributed to members of the federal cabinet. It addressed external but not domestic climate threats. Since then there has been no government response to, or public communication of, the assessment’s findings. - Renew Economy article by Ian Dunlop and Chris Barrie

There are plenty of commonly available publications about likely future climate impacts, and consequences to Australia. Just because our government refuses to acknowledge them with report releases and appropriate changes of policy, doesn't mean they do not already exist. Also non-release does allow a full and free speculation as to the reports real contents. Future generations are already over-shadowed by the presence of the hyperobject of our global climate bomb.

Some have calculated that the global carbon budget for 2 °C is already blown. Future emissions, cannot be reduced fast enough by any mechanism known to human civilization. Not even the decline rate of production of major global about  6% a year, meets the sort of global greenhouse gas reduction rates, that is required to avoid looming  tipping points that accelerate and worsen the blowbacks of global heating. Let us be absolutely honest and clear. There is no real "Safety Mechanism", just like there is no real Santa Claus, except for the delusions fostered on us by global capitalism, in particular the "dirty dozen" that profit from Australian Credulity.

All the Scope 1 emissions in Australia will be just the same no matter what carbon credit discounting scheme.  The order of magnitude times more emissions exported will be the same, uncounted in Australia, known as "Scope 3" emissions, without dubious "offsets". Atmosphere CO2 will continue to grow, and biosphere will continue to die.

Nevertheless, the Climate Council of Australia is gamely trying to intervene in the current political game of lets pretend it isn't happening, and ask that the Australian government do something to exert real responsible control, and not just be remote controlled by the global mining, finance and economic growth lobby. So you can sign the petition on their dirty dozen web page, like I did, so that it can probably die unheeded later on just like all the other climate petitions already dead and buried at the hands of this "Australian" parliament.

The latest climate news is really "Big Heat hits Antartica", with some of 26 positive feedback tipping points getting so close now, but that sort of news has never had any effect on systemic political and corporate denial, to produce net-zero zilch in effective mitigation policies for global heating, in order that the global filthy rich can stay fossil fuel powered, and keep their control till the very end. Global emissions continue to rise. Humanity seems entirely doomed to suffocate itself.

Here I compare the internal energy and evolution systems of life, with those external energy systems of our massive global fossil fuel powered civilization, which only a long lived, evolved planetary life systems like ours could have enabled. Our dependency on all biosphere life systems will ultimately kill our species.