COALition continues funding fossil fuel patrons while neglecting/cutting 21st Century green/ renewable growth industry sector. Who benefits?
Renewable energy generates 1.6 times the electricity used by Australian households, with 2021 the fifth year in a row of record new capacity. Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images / from the article
Australia’s boom in rooftop solar and large-scale renewables is fading as investors lose confidence, with the lack of coordination by the Morrison government partly to blame, according to the Clean Energy Council.
The warning comes as the industry marked its latest record year for household solar, wind and solar farms, and big batteries. Renewable energy’s share of the electricity supply reached 32.5%, doubling since 2017, the council said in its annual report.
Budget papers show Morrison government plans to cut climate spending if it wins election: Reduction in spending across clean energy agencies represents a 35% annual cut over four years.
By Adam Morton, 29/03/2022 in The Guardian
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Budget papers show Morrison government plans to cut climate spending if it wins election: Reduction in spending across clean energy agencies represents a 35% annual cut over four years.
By Adam Morton, 29/03/2022 in The Guardian
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Liberal senator, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, demoted to unwinnable place on NSW Liberal ticket, hangs out Capt. Humbug’s dirty laundry
Liberal senator calls Australian PM Scott Morrison a ‘bully’, with ‘no moral compass’ – video, Source, ParlView 29/03/2022 in the Guardian
Editor’s comment: Clearly Fierravanti-Wells is a scorned and angry woman with a meat cleaver. Nevertheless, I think she is speaking truth here. This was a close packed formal statement to National Parliament taking 9:45 minutes! She seems to have the evidence to back up her comments.
Is she describing people and a government we can count on to keep Australians safe in the face of the escalating climate emergency?
Vote Climate One‘s Traffic Light Voting System ranks ALL candidates in all electorates on their commitment to prioritize action on climate change if elected. Green light candidates have publicly committed to do this in an easy to use way. Climate Sentinel News works to provide evidence based reporting of facts and opinions about what is at stake in the upcoming election.
Our climate is heading towards Apocalypse. Four factors will probably end humanity if runaway global warming is not stopped by climate action
Thanks to 100 years of extracting burning fossil fuels, the human population has expanded to exploit and control the resources of essentially the entire surface of our planet.
We live on the surface of a sphere of finite size with a fixed surface area, but population growth is almost always exponential (i.e., growth is by multiplication from one generation to the next, rather than addition) — until all the resources are used up. This situation is called ecological overshoot when resources are consumed faster than our world can replace them.
As long as people try to carry on with business as usual the situation gets worse and worse until populations begin to collapse from system breakdown, starvation and disorder in what can become an Apocalypse when the four horsemen come out to play. These situations have occurred locally throughout human history (e.g., in the 14th Century when the Black Death overcame Europe), but now we face a situation that is even more dire.
Not only have we over stretched our limited resources, but the greenhouse gas emissions from our 100-year long frenzy to burn millions of years accumulation of fossil organic carbon has so changed the composition of our planet’s atmosphere that so more solar energy is captured to significantly raise the average temperature of the whole world. In turn, this extra heat has caused changes in the polar regions to capture still more heat — we are now crossing tipping points that lead towards runaway global warming and mass extinction. See my series of posts about David Spratt’s articles on this topic in Climate Code Red for an array of evidence that these tipping points are real.
David Shearman’s article in the political news blog, “The Hill”, featured here, shows a remarkably clear understanding of the ecological aspects of the current apocalyptic crisis I have outlined above. We need to stop the Apocalypse NOW by stopping runaway global warming.
Climate change and loss of biodiversity are the terrible twins working together to threaten human existence. Unfortunately, their wicked problems are accompanied by two equally important drivers of calamity —population and economic growth. These four horsemen gallop in unison and must be considered together.
Stop the Apocalypse? In theory I would say, “Yes we can!”
If it took a much smaller (there were only 3 billion when I was born), and more ignorant population of humans more than 100 years of the industrial revolution using relatively primitive technology to stuff up our atmosphere. If it isn’t already too late….. Given our present population of 8 billion; vastly greater understanding of physics, geology, biology and many other kinds of science; combined with our vastly advanced and powerful technologies we should be able to work out how to recapture our excess emissions and safely put them back into the ground so the Earth can begin to cool.
However, as Shearman’s article shows, society will have to assemble, organize and mobilize a monumentally large and coordinated “global war effort” to have any hope of doing what is needed to avoid total mass extinction and ensure our species’ survival into the future.
In Australia our present LNP COALition Government has made it clear that they will do everything they can to keep shoveling Australian coal on the fire to support and further extend economic growth and business as usual until the very end. Our first step in organizing the war effort to escape the horsemen of the apocalypse must be to replace these puppets of the fossil fuel special interests headed up by Scotty from Marketing.
In Scotty’s own words in one of his pet mediums – something to think about:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is supportive of Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.
If that wasn’t enough, here’s a choice of some of Scotty’s thinking about stopping the Apocalypse
We need to turn away from the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse on the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!
It seems to taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.
In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.
Our young ones are walking into an unknown future. Give them hope and not the Ukraine.
Featured image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887. / Public domain: The author died in 1926, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 95 years or fewer.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Representatives of most nations of the world are now sign-off on the overview of IPCC’s Mitigation of Climate Change report due out April 4.
Current carbon-cutting commitments still put us on a catastrophic path toward 2.7C of warming by 2100. (From the article)
by Amélie Bottollier-Depois, 18/03/2022 in PhysOrg
UN report to lay out options to halt climate crisis: Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?
Two news items to ponder when next voting: Earth’s poles are shockingly hot, and the IPCC thinks we can do something about it
FILE – A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
by SETH BORENSTEIN, March 19, 2022 in AP News
Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal: Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent … has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe,…
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979….
What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said. And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
These sorts of temperatures in what are supposedly the coldest places on our planet is a strong indication that our house is on fire, and that we need to get very serious about working to put it out before we are all consumed by it!
Current carbon-cutting commitments still put us on a catastrophic path toward 2.7C of warming by 2100.
by Amélie Bottollier-Depois, 18/03/2022 in Phys Org/Earth/Environment
UN report to lay out options to halt climate crisis: Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?
The answer is set to arrive on April 4 after closed-door, virtual negotiations approve the summary of a phonebook-sized report detailing options for drawing down greenhouse gases and extracting them out of thin air.
“The science is crystal clear, the impacts are costly and mounting, but we still have some time to close the window and get ahead of the worst of them if we act now,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think tank E3G.
“This report will supply the answers as to what we need if we’re serious about getting there.”
Are we too late to put out the fire? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t think so…. at least not quite yet. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report: Climate Change 2021/2022 consists of three parts: Part I, published last year – The Physical Science Basis , details the scientific background; Part II, published this month – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, details the troubles we face if warming is not stopped; and Part III to be published early April details how we can respond. Bad news, but not yet a death sentence.
How sure are we that we face imminent threats from continued warming?
Aside from warnings issued by the IPCC and individual climate scientists, we only need to pay attention to the world around us and the NB4 weather catastrophes assaulting our communities to see that the climate is deteriorating before our eyes at an accelerating rate. Some observations will illustrate what I mean here.
Illustration produced with the aid of the publicly available Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph provided by NASA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.
This graph shows with remarkable clarity how much less ice cover there was on the Antarctic Ocean at the time of maximum melting, and how long that amount of ocean was ice-free and thus able to absorb solar heat that otherwise would have been reflected away from our planet. This heat will stay around slowing the rate of the winter freeze up and reduce the thickness of the ice cover so it melts away even faster in the following year than would otherwise be the case. Some of the heat will also speed melting of Antarctic glaciers from underneath. In other words, reducing the exent of the freezing provides positive feedback helping to drive global temperatures higher.
This graph shows air-temperature variation over essentially the whole of the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole from January through 20 March 2022. The scale is given in degrees Kelvin above Absolute Zero. Zero degrees Celsius is indicated by the blue line near the top of the graph. The green line shows the average mean temperature for each day of the year for the baseline reference years from 1958 to 2002. The red line shows this year’s mean temperatures for each day up to 20/03/2022. Every day this year the temperature has been at least 2 °C warmer than the reference temperature for the day. Recently, the whole area over the Arctic Ocean was 15 °C hotter than the reference temperature. At this temperature the Ice won’t be melting from the top, but it may be warm enough that warmish ocean waters under the ice may be doing some melting from he bottom. It also means that when spring comes the ice won’t be so cold, and will warm up to melting temperature earlier in the year.
And then there is yet more evidence from the last few days:
Extraordinary anomalies in #Antarctica lead to historic records today: -Vostok 3489m -17.7C,monthly record beaten by nearly 15C ! -Concordia 3234m -12.2C,highest Temp. on records and about 40C above average ! -Dome C II 3250m -10.1C -D-47 1560m -3.3C -Terra Nova Base 74S +7.0C pic.twitter.com/w6Ry4Dy4wz
— Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) March 18, 2022
Record heat in the Arctic is driving an early melt season and crushing 2022 sea-ice extent: current rank now #4. The Antarctic is even worse.
With everything going on in the world right now, the dual polar climate disasters of 2022 should be the top story. pic.twitter.com/qsi4OAob6L
And then there are the climate catastrophes in Australia that some of you will have experienced personally and lived through… and the rest of us will have seen on the TV news.
What does this news tell us we should do about a man who “won’t hold a hose” and has committed ‘his’ government to keep shoveling coal on the fire?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is supportive of Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.
Our home world’s climate system is telling us via the rising frequency of NB4 extreme climate events that she’s burning up and will become increasingly uninhabitable as her global temperature keeps rising at an accelerating rate. If the fires aren’t hosed down enough for the world to cool, our population will begin collapsing as rising temperatures and increasingly extreme and overlapping disasters lead to heat deaths, famines and disorder as ecosystems begin collapsing around us. The result will leave its record in geology as a global mass extinction event.
Even a 16 year-old school girl could see what we need to do:
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. Given that we are facing an existential crisis – this is the only issue that matters until the crisis is solved. Even the IPCC’s hyper-conservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact as noted above in his master’s voice, he doesn’t hold a hose, and is determined ‘to keep Australians burning coal as long as we possibly can’ and when they can’t burn that any more, burn more natural gas. And, as I have noted in previous posts, it seems that they actively work to prevent others from acting against the climate emergency because this might harm the profits of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry.
In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future.
Clearly, we need to replace the hoseless firebugs of the COALition with sensible people who are publicly committed to acting on the climate emergency or who can be counted on to vote this way because of party discipline.
Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian
We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters – reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species risks extinction no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship— and the risk continues to rise the longer we delay action.
William P. Hall
The climate emergency has two possible outcomes
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Risk runaway warming to a hothouse earth and extinction
RECOGNISE THE EMERGENCY
Mobilise to the max & work to become good stewards of our precious blue planet
There is no planet B
VOTE CLIMATE ONE to heal our planet
It is time for Australian citizens to reclaim our government from the puppets of the fossil fuel industry.
These humbugging puppets have been working for several years to keep their immensely rich patrons safe from any economic harm from actions to stop and reverse the global warming that has been changing our climate to allow ever more, and more deadly extreme weather events.
It is time for Australian citizens to replace the puppets in our Parliament with independent people or parties who are publicly committed to put action to fight the growing climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected. As our name states, Vote Climate One has been established to help you elect these kinds of people in your individual electorates.
Welcome to our updated and “election ready” site! Please check it out!
Traffic Light Voting, explains how our system will help ensure that your vote will count maximally towards electing ‘climate friendly’ representatives in your house and senate electorates.
Climate Heroes explains how you can help in a very big way to put our voting guide in everyone’s hands in your electorate and help us to make the guide as accurate as it possibly can be.
Political parties discusses the roles political parties have played in Australia to bring us to the present state of general inaction relative to the worsening climate emergency, and what we know about their stances relative to solving the emergency.
Electorates tells you what what we know about each candidate in each individual federal house and senate electorate, and shows you how we have ranked them in relation to their party or public stances on prioritizing action on the climate emergency.
Once the election is declared and the ballot papers laid out by the Electoral Commission, we will provide printable copies of the form so you can mark your preferences before you go to the polling booth to save you time when you are actually voting.
Climate Sentinel News is where we most differ from all other election-related web-sites. Here is where we present a curated collection of daily news items and scientific reports providing the concrete evidence relating to global warming and climate change that underlies our concerns for the futures of our families.
If you are unsure about the real importance of climate change and actions to control it, this information will keep you up to date with the latest scientific knowledge and continuing evidence from the daily news. This keeps telling us (1) we face real problems from climate change, and (2) that with the proper government, we may actually be able to make the world safer from it.
If you agree with us that we need a very different kind of government that can go beyond ‘business as usual’ there are some very positive things you can do to help spread the message
Basically our problem is that we are a purely volunteer outfit. Any funding we can raise goes to our Climate Heroes program to support posting and letter-boxing our paper Voting Guide in marginal electorates. However, the Web campaign is also critically important to reach possible swing voters in all electorates in hope that we may swing a few surprises here as well to remove some of the worst special interest puppets from their normally very safe seats.
The internet (Web) is truly remarkable in that social media has the power to circulate ‘interesting’ news to an exponentially growing market as fake news publishers all too frequently demonstrate. This doesn’t even have to be paid for if readers want to share the item.
We think VoteClimateOne’s Climate Sentinel News and/or our Traffic Light Voting System might be circulated in this same way. For example, if you find this post to be interesting enough to share with some of your friends, Google and other search engines will pick up on this interest and prioritize showing the post in other people’s search results over other, apparently less interesting stuff. There are some very simple things you can do in Facebook and Twitter to multiply this effect many times over.
For Facebook – when you receive a post from VoteClimateOne (like this one), (1) click the Like icon. (2) click the Share icon and then the Share now (Friends), write something in the comment saying why they should read the post and add some appropriate hash tags, e.g., #VoteClimateOne #AusPol #TellTheTruth #ScottyFromMarketing #WhereTheBloodyHellAreYou #AustraliaBurns #AustraliaFloods #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming. The presence of any one of these in YOUR comment to the item you are sharing will insure that this vote climate one post will be added to the posts indexed under that hash tag. And the more times this one post is shared by someone else also using the same hash tag, the closer this post will be to the top of the list someone sees when they do a search on the hash tag.
If everyone receiving a post from Vote Climate One shares only one post a day with all of their friends, within only a few days we will saturate the Web – especially if the hash tags are specifically Australian in context. Twitter works in very much the same way, but Paul Hosking, our Search Engine Optimization guru explains how this works in a video.
