Big Oil feasting on what was the world’s most powerful nation and hope for the future

Beware Australians, under our LNP COALition puppet government we’re also on the menu to be barbecued by feasting special interests — but we still have a chance to change it

With this the article linked here, an American FB friend, Hieronymus Bosch, reminds/warns us Australians just how perilous our freedoms may be if we leave the fossil fuel industry’s LNP COALition puppets in charge of our government for any longer. Aside from controlling or at least disabling Congress, Trump and his puppet followers have also managed to replace/control a majority of the Supreme and Federal Court judges such that now, even with a sort of progressive President, the mighty USA is now little better than China or Russia where the practice of real democracy is concerned.

As demonstrated here, the fossil fuel special interests main aim seems to be to preserve their gluttonous but eventually nihilistic quest to prevent any action anywhere against global warming so they can continue unhindered their quest to turn fossil carbon into an ever increasing volume of greenhouse gases. We can already see that these sill growing emissions are forcing global temperatures higher into the zone that will virtually guarantee Earth’s next global mass extinction, even though such an extinction will almost certainly include their human bodies along with the rest of humanity.

At least til now Australia’s federal and state Electoral Commissions and Courts seem to be intact enough that we can still claim to be a functional democracy where the people retain the power to change the government if they feel the need to do so. However, if we don’t remove the COALition puppets from government in our upcoming Federal Election we may soon end up like Americans – essentially powerless to elect people who will work to protect our futures rather than feeding the burning appetites of the gluttonous special interests of the fossil fuel industries and other exploiters of our resources.
See how Vote Climate One and our Traffic Light Voting Guide can help you to remove or prevent special interest puppets in your electorates who want to destroy our futures. With a new government of people who can be counted on to put acting on climate change as their first order of business in office, we may have a chance that our species will have a possible future in a reasonably intact biosphere on our only planet.

Regarding the article that follows, Hieronymus said, “Living in an undemocratic and crashing empire [i.e., my original home country] where corporations have all the money and power. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked, but DAMN. … Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”“.

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment
Exxon, headquartered in Houston, argues that lawsuits filed by out-of-state politicians infringe on the sovereignty of Texas. Photograph: Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Chris McGreal in The Guardian, Tue 18 Jan 2022

ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.

The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.

Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.

Read more…

Posted by William P. Hall

Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'. Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry. After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology. In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne. In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract. Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'. Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe. As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.