We’ve argued previously that Scotty from Marketing has become a past master at distracting us from effective action against climate change to protect his patrons in the fossil fuel industry
‘Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters’ says Scott Morrison; protestors in Lismore believe they have identified a root cause. Photograph: Yaya Stempler/The Guardian
by Jeff Sparrow, 16/03/2022 in The Guardian/Opinion
Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis? As floods follow fires, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – or, for that matter, to the water. Environmentalists once saw abstraction as the biggest obstacle to climate action. How, they wondered, could one focus the public on the distant future? Today, we confront the opposite problem, with the very immediacy of the crisis generating a strange paralysis.
“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.
The devastating floods in Queensland and New South Wales highlight, yet again, Australia’s failure to plan for natural disasters. As we’re seeing now in heartbreaking detail, everyday Australians bear the enormous cost of this inaction. It’s too soon to say whether the current floods are directly linked to climate change. But we know such disasters are becoming more frequent and severe as the climate heats up. In 2019, Australia ranked last out of 54 nations on its strategy to cope with climate change.
Featured Image: The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021) projects that ten year extreme weather events will become more common compared to the pre-industrial era. Based on data from Fig. SPM.6 of: Climate Change 2021 / The Physical Science Basis / Working Group I contribution to the WGI Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change / Summary for Policymakers. IPCC.ch SPM-23. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (9 August 2021). Source states: ● Hot temperature extremes over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of extreme temperature event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Heavy precipitation over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of heavy 1-day precipitation event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Agricultural & ecological droughts in drying regions – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of an agricultural and ecological drought event that occurred once in 10 years on average across drying regions in a climate without human influence. / Date: 29/20/2019 / Author: Femkemilene / Licensing: Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Even the very conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says billions of people will suffer direct harm from ongoing global warming. Are they getting the message?
Although their science is impeccable, I have explained in detail that the IPCC is constrained by governmental foundations and scientific reticence to understate and downplay the dramatically stark nature of the impacts accelerating global warming is having and will have on human populations and Earth’s biosphere.
Nevertheless, even the IPCC warns that half of all humanity can expect serious impacts from the crisis, including a billion people face coastal inundation from rising sea levels (to say nothing of those already caught up in riverine and flash flooding from extreme weather. And then there are the mass dieoffs of trees, corals, and other land and marine organisms that are already beginning, to say nothing of large areas of land becoming unsuitable for agriculture due to droughts, excessive temperatures, fires and too frequent flooding.
“Children aged ten or younger in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100, and a five-fold increase under 3°C warming. Such increases in exposure would not be experienced by a person aged 55 in the year 2020 in their remaining lifetime under any warming scenario”.
“With ongoing global warming, today’s children in South and Southeast Asia will witness increased losses in coastal settlements and infrastructure due to flooding caused by unavoidable sea level rise, with very high losses in East Asian cities. By mid-century, more than a billion people living in low-lying coastal cities and settlements globally are projected to be at risk from coastal-specific climate hazards. Many of those will be forced to move to higher ground, which will increase competition for land and the probability of conflict and forced relocation.”
“Climate change will impact water quality and availability for hygiene, food production and ecosystems due to floods and droughts. Globally, 800 million to 3 billion people are projected to experience chronic water scarcity due to droughts at 2°C warming, and up to approximately 4 billion at 4°C warming, considering the effects of climate change alone, with present-day population.”
“Depending on future policies and climate and adaptation actions taken, the number of people suffering from hunger in 2050 will range from 8 million to up to 80 million people, with most severely affected populations concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America. Under a high vulnerability-high warming scenario, up to 183 million additional people are projected to become undernourished in low-income countries due to climate change by 2050.”
And this is a highly conservative reading of the likely consequences of continued warming….
What do people and their governments need to do in response to the warnings? As emphasized in the Guardian article and IPCC Report, far too little effort has been made up to now either to mitigate or adapt to the climate changes being driven by global warming. To avoid the most extreme consequences (e.g., global mass extinction – not discussed anywhere in the Report due to government suppression and scientific reticence) much greater effort must be devoted to stopping human carbon emissions and implementation of major mitigation projects.
The third part of the IPCC AR6 report, on mitigation is due for release next month, will explore the kinds of strategies that need to be implemented to mitigate the most immediate effects. Part 4, to be released in October will provide information for discussion by policymakers at COP 27.
A wildfire in January in Bastrop State Park in Texas in the south-western US. Photograph: Jay Janner/AP / via the Guardian
The point I am trying to make with this post is that if the IPCC says our future is filled with dire consequences if we fail to act now to stop and begin reversing global warming, our future is very likely to be even a lot worse than forecasted in the full 3675 page document. My assessment of the vast array of evidence around climate change based on a long professional career as an evolutionary biologist and complex systems analyst is that global warming is approaching a point of no return beyond which nothing humans can do will stop Earth’s climate system from runaway heating to its ‘Hothouse Hell’ state, as explained by Steffen et al, 2018 in their Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This risk is both real, and very large if warming is not stopped.
Unfortunately most governments have done very little to slow global warming by actually stopping greenhouse gas emissions or to mitigate the kinds of dangers described in the IPCC AR6 pt. II report. Some are just incompetent, but most seem to be well trained puppets of already super-wealthy special interests of fossil fuel industry who put protecting the special interests continued profits above any serious actions that might curtail them, as is all too evident where both the American and Australian governments are concerned.
“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian
I have said what follows before, and I’ll probably say it many more times – because it is important!
We need to turn away from the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!
It seems to have 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.
Help give them the bright future they hope for off the road to Hell!
Featured image: Climate emergency – The oceans are risking. Melbourne was part of the global climate strike on March 15, 2019, drawing an enormous crowd estimated at 40,000 people, the vast majority school students. After welcome to country and some speeches at the Old Treasury Building the march wound it’s way through CBD streets, down Collins Street and up Bourke street, then down to Treasury Gardens. It was a highly energetic march with the roar of chanting calling for coal, don’t dig it, and for climate action now. . Attribution: Takver from Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/The_oceans_are_rising_and_so_are_we.Climate_emergency–Melbourne_climate_strike–IMG_4246%2833509327348%29.jpg/1200px-The_oceans_are_rising_and_so_are_we.Climate_emergency–Melbourne_climate_strike–IMG_4246%2833509327348%29.jpg?20190416115510
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Big Oil in the US hopes to pump a lot more oil for the EU to burn while the EU works to expand renewables
Inside Climate News explores what Russia’s oil and gas industries might have to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how this involvement may affect people around the world and their industries and governments — especially where action on the climate emergency is concerned.
Putin’s war machine is fueled by Russian oil and gas. He turns the money from selling these resources into a powerful military capability to project his ego across the world. As did Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya.
The oil and gas industry makes up as much as one-fifth of Russia’s Gross Domestic Product, which is relatively small, less than half the size of the GDP of the United Kingdom, even though it has more than double the population. Oil and gas accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s exports and 30 percent of federal budget revenue, giving Putin a large pot of money for which he is not accountable to citizen taxpayers.
From the article:
A convoy of Russian military vehicles is seen as the vehicles move towards border in Donbas region of eastern Ukraine on Feb. 23, 2022 in Russian border city Rostov. Credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images via Inside Climate News
In addition to the immediate events of driving fuel prices through the roof, the US petrochemical industry is taking advantage of the situation to expand their export infrastructure in hopes to lock in future supply contracts (and the associated carbon emissions) for years to come. Putin has done them a great favor by creating marvelous new opportunities for their businesses.
As explained in the article Putin’s War has a range of other effects on the American fossil fuel industry. What is not discussed in this article, is that the war is also providing additional incentives to replace fossil fuel power generation with renewable energy resources.
Rather than subsidizing still further expansion of the carbon emissions that are killing Earth’s biosphere, we should take advantage of the price differential between the increasingly costly production and transport of fossil fuels with the rapidly reducing costs of harvesting freely available renewable energy resources to totally eliminate requirements for burning fossil carbon.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has committed to mining coal, saying developing economies need Australian coal to grow, after a major report found Australia must keep 95% of its coal reserves in the ground to keep global heating below 1.5C. ‘We will keep mining the resources that we’re able to sell on the world market.’ [Presumably this also applies to gas in the “gas led recovery”.] Though he added: ‘We obviously anticipate that over time world demand for these things may be declining’. Morrison was also asked about news the British government gave up demands Australia make emissions cuts as part of its trade deal.’Well, it was about trade. It wasn’t a climate agreement,’ he said. / Guardian Australia 09/09/2022
To do this most effectively we need to replace our puppet governments and their fellow travelers working for the benefit of fossil fuel industries by electing intelligent and ethical people who are publicly committed to putting action against the climate crisis as their number one priority in Parliament. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to provide you with information about candidates you can use to help you determine your preferences and quickly apply then on your ballot paper when you vote.
Featured image: Russian military weapons destroyed and seized by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. / Uploaded a work by Міністерство внутрішніх справ України from https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=324376199718036&set=pcb.324376259718030 / licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license / Attribution: Mvs.gov.ua
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
After a long history of helping Putin, the Western oil giants are only now leaving Russia. Perversely this may benefit China.
Thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several fossil fuel giants are severing long-standing relationships with Russia and its oligarchs, which would seem to put the brakes on the further growth of fossil fuel production in Russia. Foreign Policy reviews the sordid history of these these and similar associations in the past, and considers their likely impacts on the climate emergency, autocrats and their oligarchs, and the fossil fuel special interests.
For example, BP has owned 19.75% of Russia’s Rosneft, supplier of the fuel being used to invade the Ukraine. It’s divestment only executed after the invasion started, has knocked the bottom out of the Russian oil market and may delay key development projects. It should stop financing and technology transfers Rosneft needs for its future growth.
Despite people being shocked by BP’s Russian involvement, Foreign Policy notes that this goes back to before 2014 when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea – and was clearly favorable to BP’s bottom line – let alone Putin and his cronies.
In fact, Western oil companies often partner with autocratic, corrupt and repressive governments, e.g., in Africa, Arabia, and in the Americas to the detriment of almost everyone else as described in the Foreign Policy article:
Working pumpjacks are seen in the Montebello Oil Field in Montebello, California, on February 23, 2022. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images / via FP
The profits from these associations, make big oil even more powerful and damaging to the environment than they would otherwise be. One wonders how much Big Oil has contributed to the Australian COALition Government’s love and support of the fossil fuel industry in our country? The political context and implications are crystal clear.
For years as Scotty says below in his own words, our LNP COALition puppet Government has been supporting the mindlessly greedy fossil fuel special interests in preference to ordinary people. Both the industry and the puppets work first, to deny the science that shows us the world is warming at an accelerating rate from the continued burning of fossil carbon; and secondly, to fill our thought space with endlessly distracting humbug and blather so we won’t pay attention to what they are doing. Burning fossil fuel clearly comes first before acting on the climate emergency!
Do something about this. Vote Climate One! our Traffic Light Voting System will help you easily use our preferential voting system.
Featured image: oil refinery plant Yaroslavnefteorgsintez in Yaroslavl town, Russia. Русский: нефтеперерабатывающий завод, вечер / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en / via Wikimedia Commons / Author Svtk44
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
IPCC’s Sixth Assessment WG2 Report looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities
On February 28 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) officially launched the second of three parts of their Sixth Assessment Report, produced by Working Group II: responsible to assess the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of humans and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements. It considers the vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of these natural and human systems to adapt to climate change to reduce climate-associated risks and provide options for creating a sustainable future for all through an equitable and integrated approach to mitigation and adaptation efforts at all scales. In other words, it provides a route map to global warming on the road to hell
To test my assumption that the Report softens the actual reality, I have thoroughly scanned all 3,675 pages of the full report for all uses of “human” and “extinction” using Acrobat X’s powerful search function. The word “extinction” is used 322 times in the full document, and “human” and “extinction” are found within 10 words of one another 33 times. However, “human extinction” is used only once — and this in the title of a reference not discussed from this point of view in the text. Most of the other hits relate to human or climate change induced extinctions of other species, while authors have carefully avoided extending the logic to humans.
Nevertheless, the bleeding obvious conclusion from the vast amount of data presented in the report is that if governments and people do not succeed in stopping the ongoing global warming there is a very high risk of near-term human extinction.
Also, the news items on the unprecedented/NB4 flooding over the last week of a substantial portion of Australia’s east coast underlines the already horrific impacts on Australian citizens from the increasing rate of global warming. The Guardian article below ties the flooding to the situation described in the IPCC Report. Bloomberg Green’s news item on the Report is typical of hundreds more news items around the world. As long as our planet continues to warm, more and more energy is available to drive extreme weather events. What in the past may have been one in 500 year events are beginning to happen again only 5 years into the future. This is when each climate catastrophe causes even more disruption before recovery from the previous ones are still far from complete. This is when the total collapse of human civilization begins, and the risk of global mass extinction becomes very real.
Flooding in the town of Lismore, New South Wales. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found catastrophic flooding is becoming more likely due to global warming. Photograph: Reuters
Catastrophic flooding on the scale of the disaster hitting Queensland and New South Wales is becoming more likely as the planet heats due to greenhouse gas emissions, climate scientists have warned.
In Australia, it said extreme events exacerbated by emissions – heatwaves, droughts, floods, storms and fires – were causing death, injury and financial and emotional stress. Their impacts were “cascading and compounding” across nature, society and the economy.
The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.
“With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document “an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a “criminal” “abdication of leadership.”…
The UN Secretary General António Guterres says that the IPCC Report is “an atlas of growing human suffering and an indictment of a criminal abdication of leadership”. I provide evidence here that our political leaders are the abdicators
The handwriting has been on the wall for some 40-50 years the unrelenting of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels to drive our continued industrial development would increasingly warm our whole planet. As explored in a series of reports by Inside Climate News, Big Oil’s own research identified the problem, and the industry by ramping up a relentless campaign using tools originally developed by the tobacco industry to deny and misrepresent the reality, direct attention away from it, to recruit “scientists” to discredit the actual science, and to “encourage” politicians to introduce legislation to block research and actions that might lead to the elimination of carbon emissions.
What follows here is some very solid evidence in our “leaders” of just how effective the fossil fuel industry and its allies in the media; and its puppets and useful idiots in governments and the institutions have been in distracting and blocking Australians from taking any effective action towards solving the ever worsening climate emergency by stopping global warming.
This book by Maria Taylor — Published in 2004 by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia (freely available on-line) documents in detail based on contemporary press reports just how comprehensively successful the special interests have been in protecting and promoting the continued growth their of their industries at the expense of the continued survival of our species. This 230 page (free!) book should be required reading for anyone concerned about the survival of their families into the future in face of the oncoming crescendo of catastrophes the ongoing climate emergency is bringing us. On its own, this book is filled with compelling reasons why we must remove the present members of the LNP COALition government and their fellow travelers from Parliament that are driving us down the road to hell and replace them with rational people who are committed to putting action to solve the climate crisis at the top of their to-do lists if elected to Parliament.
Even if you have always voted for the LNP or one of their fellow traveling minor parties and have any questions about removing these puppets from office, listen to and think about what they told us in their own humbug and bulldust about how they are working keeping Australia’s fossil fuel interests (not the Australian citizens who voted for them) safe from the climate emergency.
Paving the road to hell in their own words….. Only a sampling
Tony Abbott sets tone for successive COALition governments
Tony Abbott 11/10/2017
Barnaby Joyce, ‘Blarney Bulldust, the man in the hat’ at work leading the fight against the climate emergency
Barnaby Joyce becomes deputy leader 22/06/2021
.@Barnaby_Joyce: Tell me what it costs! David Speers: I'm not in Government, you are. Joyce: Tell me how we do it.
Australia has been ranked last among 60 countries on climate change policy in the annual Climate Change Performance Index report. In the wake of the Black Summer bushfires, climatologist @MichaelEMann faced off with Barnaby Joyce on #60Mins over the government’s climate inaction. pic.twitter.com/ieSDJkUkt3
Scotty fighting the climate emergency during the worst of Black Summer
"I don't hold a hose, mate, and I don't sit in the control room." Scott Morrison on 2GB confirms he is returning from holiday due to the bushfire crisis in Australia. #auspol#MorrisonFirespic.twitter.com/IZZOO3rjYz
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared that coal will be used for decades to come, dismissing Boris Johnson's claim that the COP26 climate summit sounded a "death knell" on coal | @vanOnselenPpic.twitter.com/Pgobr35IEr
Why don’t they have a replacement for burning coal?
Gas-led recovery funds fossil fuel & distracts from labor intensive renewable energy
15/09/2022 – blather and humbuggery about advantages of expanding the gas industry with its associated fracking — completely neglecting any mention of the huge labor requirement from investments in sustainable energy infrastructure.
Morrison humbuggery at COP26 in Glasgow
Scott Morrison spurns criticism of Australia’s record on climate change during UN speech – video 26/09/2021 — Again, Morrison is notable for his lack attention on the principal issue at hand, the danger from global warming and the need to stop it. Rejection of criticism does not mean there is nothing to criticise!
What is the truth behind the COALition’s humbug, bulldust and blather – and how can you find it
In my many years of professional life in evolutionary biology and engineering knowledge management systems analysis and design I spent several years studying how to identify authentic reality amongst the clouds of human faith, true-belief, opinion and deliberate attempts to misrepresent and deny important facts of the world we are living in. Both as a scientist and from my employment in the defence engineering world I am fully aware that our lives may depend on recognizing and acting on real dangers in the world we live in. Ignoring them does not make them go away!
From 2013 to 2017 I gave several presentations around Melbourne explaining what I learned in this area. I provide links to them here in hopes that others can learn from them, and to show that my comments on how the COALition and its fellow travelers have worked to pave the road to hell by misrepresenting, distracting attention from, and actually blocking any concerted action to stop carbon emissions are based on a great deal more than just political disagreement.
Note: the first 6 documents describe my learning experiences and some of the lessons I drew from them. The last three speak most directly to sorting our way through today’s political humbug to find hints of reality.
The common factor in all the political interviews I linked above is that they humbug, avoid, minimize, distract from or even lie about the emerging dangers of global warming driven by fossil fuel emissions, while also emphasizing the need to continue or even expand support for fossil fuel industries such as coal and gas in order to maintain/protect employment and the Australian economy. Even more important is the total absence in all the humbug and blather of any comments that the lower cost for renewable energy and the investments to build and deploy the vast array of new generators, storage and distribution systems for renewable energy. These will do far more to increase employment and economic activity than anything that can possibly be done to support the dying fossil fuel industry. There is also no hint of the further economic activity that will be needed to mobilize global solutions to reduce warming by capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon.
Where some of the puppets are concerned, the strings tying them to the fossil fuel industry rather than the Australian voters are starkly obvious. Craig Kelly is tied to Clive Palmers billion dollar coal interests by Clive’s totally funded United Australia Party (how much has already been spent on the endless TV commercials and full-page newspaper ads?) Malcolm Roberts is practically wed to Pauleen Hanson who founded Pauleen Hanson’s One Nation party. Malcolm worked most of his life in the coal industry. Both Pauleen and Malcolm are currently Senators for Queensland in the Australian Parliament and totally committed to advancing the coal industry. It is less clear what so strongly motivates Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to promote growth of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of renewables, but there is no evidence that the continually growing evidence that fossil fuel emissions are having profoundly bad impacts on Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere as emphasized in the AR6 pt. 2 Report causes any concerns for these two.
We need to turn away from the road to 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.
Help give them the bright future they hope for off the road to Hell!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
‘Strategic Intelligence’ app relating to all kinds of transformational issues, esp. Climate Change has been created by World Economic Forum
WE Forum’s Strategic Intelligence maps provide logical maps to the complex tangle of relationships among facts, risks, threats, issues, tools and actions involved in working out how to transform an existing problem area into some kind of a solution. The maps don’t claim to show you how to solve the problem, but at least they give a fair idea of where you need to look for solutions and what they might involve.
Transformation Maps can help you explore and make sense of the connections between different economies, industries and global issues. It is a dynamic way of exploring the transformational forces that relate to a topic, such as Climate Change or Artificial Intelligence, co-curated with leading universities and international organizations.
The featured image shows the major domain of interest in the middle, e.g., Future of the Environment surrounded by a wheel of grouped topics (e.g., relating to Risks) that in turn link to individual issues (e.g., Arctic) that takes you to the Arctic Domain. Note – for each domain the right side of the page explains what the current group topic or Domain is about. Registration for public access gives you a lot for free. There are also paid monthly subscriptions that allow you to use the system as your own tool for tracking complex interactions.
There is one bias in the World Economic Forum’s approach here that may concern some Climate Sentinel News followers. As stated in their video, their aim is to further sustainable development. Arguably, given the state of ecological overshoot we are in, we should be far more concerned to down-size our impacts on our limited planetary resources rather than engage in further development. Nevertheless, other than reminding all to ‘consider the source’ and recognize that it is not the last word, I would not hesitate to recommend it as a useful tool for navigating the complexity of transformation.
The video explains the concept:
WE Forum also provide access to a vast array of current documentation relating to specific areas of interest through their Discover function:
What does this mean for Australian Voters and candidates?
What this WE Forum application shows is how complex and complicated the tasks are that we face in trying to transform the current global climate emergency into a foreseeable future extending beyond near-term mass extinction. In our Climate Sentinel blog posts I think I the evidence presented overwhelmingly documents that our current LNP Government of fossil fuel puppets, fools and knaves will not and could not cope with the complexity of interacting issues that have to be dealt with if the climate emergency is to be solved.
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In the upcoming Federal Election we must take advantage of the possibility to replace this tragic comedy routines of the LNP with sensible intelligent people able and willing to put dealing with the complexities of the climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected to Parliament. Our government needs to wake up, smell the smoke, and to have any hope of putting out the fire urgently mobilize whatever it takes to fight the emergency both locally and globally rather than working to protect the special interests feeding the fire. Even a child can see that doing anything else is rearranging the furniture as the house (our planet) is burning up.
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 type of candidates Vote Climate One hopes to see elected may actually want to use the WE Forum’s Strategic Intelligence app described here for help in working through the tangle mitigations and partial solutions that will be required to mitigate and put out the fires that are warming the globe. We have designed our Traffic Light Voting System to help you establish your preferences from first to last for the House and Senate candidates in your electorate based on how likely they are to help defeat the climate emergency. With good choices we may soon have at least an Australian government doing what it can to provide a path towards a bright future for our offspring rather than the end.
Our young ones walking an unknown future. Hopefully there will be something there for them to reach.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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