Insane Gov’t stops replacing of burnt community hall

William P. Hall on February 24, 2022

COALition Gov’t bureaucracy blocks grant to cover costs to replace Sarsfield (Vic) Community Centre incinerated in Black Summer

by Jedda Costa, 21/02/2022 in ABC News (Gippsland)
Bushfire-ravaged Sarsfield misses out on recovery grant due to ABN issue

The bushfire ravaged town of Sarsfield in eastern Victoria’s Gippsland region has missed out on a $3.6 million recovery grant to build a new community hall at a recreation reserve.

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

Climate vs Covid: Humbuggery distracts from the climate emergency

William P. Hall on January 24, 2022

Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency

It is reasonable to fear Covid. It is a nasty pandemic disease, it will make a significant fraction of the world’s population too sick to work for a few days. However, even if we did nothing to manage it, a very small number (no more that 5% and probably less than 1%) of people might die from it. Where the scope of human history is concerned, this is insignificant. Who remembers the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu? that was at least as lethal, and people still die from flu today. Also, humans have faced much worse pandemics before (e.g., the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages), and we will probably have worse ones in the future. That is the nature of life on Earth. We keep on trucking.

What is wrong is that we are allowing Captain Humbug, his troop of COALition puppets and like-minded fellow travelers in the social and news media to blind and distract us (i.e., don’t look up!) from seeing and paying attention to the vastly more fearsome reality of the rapidly escalating climate emergency. Although the climate emergency is developing on a timescale of years rather than months, good science and risk management show that it is likely to be vastly more deadly than Covid. Those paying attention to the environment can see and fear that global warming is already passing some important tipping points where natural positive feedbacks from the environment will cause Earth’s Climate System to ‘flip’ over to its Hothouse Hell state.

However, looking over the history of the last three COALition Governments, it has been increasingly clear that the common thread has been to deny, distract and disrupt any real action to resolve the climate emergency by government or citizens. By contrast, it is equally evident that the COALition puppets have always been working to subsidize, protect, put the interests of the special interests of their patrons and masters in the fossil fuel and related industries first, above any actions in the favor of citizens that might in any way harm their patrons. In this, Scotty from Marketing has always been up front with his line of humbug, lies, disinformation, and distraction to keep citizens from looking over the curtain of blather to see what is really happening. This is exquisitely demonstrated by the man himself, in the famous episode of marketing coal to his colleagues.

The puppets show and tell — 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 [then] Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – From **That Lump of Coal** by Professor Clive Hamilton in The Conversation (15-02-2017)

Michelle Grattan’s article in The Conversation reviews some of the signs of growing chaos amongst the Humbug troop of puppets, clowns, backstabbers, liars, fools, and suspected grafters. Captain Humbug is hoping to con the Australian people that Covid is the only thing that matters and that his team will manage it best.

Lukas Coch/AAP

Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison’s ministerial team looks far from match-fit

Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation

It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.
“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.
People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.
Read the full article….

Here I have shown several ways the morally corrupt LNP COALition Government helped by tame media has created a blinding cloud of humbug and bulldust. Helped by distractions Government hyperinflation of real concerns about Covid and playing the Djoker, few people have noticed that virtually nothing has been done or even planned to stop or even reduce carbon emissions. Nor have many people taken any real notice of the fearsome possibility that our inaction on the climate emergency may be committing the global biosphere and our own families and history to near term mass extinction. These circumstances have given fossil fuel gluttons a free pass to continue pumping their greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to continue forcing GHG concentrations and global temperatures ever higher when we should all be working flat out to stop emissions and start working to reverse the global warming process.

We need to replace the LNP and other fossil fuel puppets NOW with sensible people who have committed to putting action on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to give you information from a variety of sources to help you to rank the candidates in YOUR electorate on their likely performance relating to the climate emergency if elected to a ‘green’ tinged Parliament. Red lights for COALition and those whose preferences are likely to go to the COALition; green lights for those who have publicly committed themselves to placing the climate first if elected and Greens because of their official policy; and amber lights for those who we think can be trusted to work with or join a green tinged coalition if Labor fails to gain a majority. Currently we include the Labor Party as a whole in the amber category because their policy is still very ambivalent about shutting down the fossil fuel industry.

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

Climate vs Covid: Humbuggery distracts from the climate emergency

William P. Hall on January 24, 2022

Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency

Lukas Coch/AAP

Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison’s ministerial team looks far from match-fit

Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation

It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.
“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.
People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.
Read the full article….

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

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

William P. Hall on January 19, 2022

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…

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

Our puppet governments organize banquets where their piggy patrons with special interests can feed on our roasting environment

William P. Hall on January 18, 2022

If Howard and I are right, we have already passed several tipping points triggering positive feedbacks that will cause global warming to increase exponentially towards a point-of-no return where global mass extinction (including humans) is almost inevitable (he links the same science articles I use in this context). To avoid this end we need to turn the barbecue around to roast the pigs and their wooden-headed puppets first.

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

Do you really want to your Government to give a free pass for fossil fuel special interest ripoffs to take multiple billions of revenue essentially tax free?

William P. Hall on January 17, 2022

Who Benefits? Who gets cooked? I think the pigs win snouts down!

If you want unambiguous evidence that at least some of our governments protect the interests of their puppet masters in the fossil fuel industry long before they consider the citizens who vote for them. This example would certainly seem to represent a colossal special interest ripoff at the state level; and surely it should be within the bounds of the Federal Government’s regulation of overseas trade to prevent such arrogant giveaways. Voters mustn’t forget that they have the power to remove complicit parties and individuals by electing responsible people who will prioritize fighting climate change over promoting the interests of puppet masters and patrons who often are not even Australian citizens.

Woodside's Pluto LNG plant at Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia.

WA’s offshore gasfields pay almost no royalties and stoke carbon emissions, report finds

Peter Hannam in the Guardian
Mon 17 Jan 2022

Australia Institute report finds state received only $430m of its revenue from industry that generated $27bn in exports last year

Australia’s giant offshore gasfields are paying almost no royalties, create few jobs and are a large and rising source of greenhouse gases, according to a new report from the Australia Institute.
The “Gas-fired robbery” report, released Monday, finds Western Australia receives only a tiny fraction of its revenue from an industry that generated $27bn in WA exports last year.
…
The $430m that ended up in the state’s coffers was a mere 1% of budget revenue, or half as much as it collected from motor vehicle registrations. By contrast, the iron-ore industry tipped $7.8bn into the 2019/20 budget, more than 18 times as much as gas.
“Oil and gas companies like Woodside and Chevron are being given this valuable and finite resource virtually for free, making huge profits from its sale, creating few jobs and returning almost nothing to everyday West Australians,” said Mark Ogge, principal adviser at the Australia Institute’s Climate & Energy Program, and author of the report.
Read the complete article….

If you want to clean out the piggery, use Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide to cast your ballot for someone who will try to protect your future on this fragile planet by putting solving the climate crisis as their first interest in Parliament, and to ensure that any preferences that flow from your vote WON’T flow to a pig.

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

Case study and dissection of a fossil-fuel puppet politician holding a government to ransom

William P. Hall on January 16, 2022

America’s Joe Manchin illustrates shows how damaging a puppet can be when a balance of power can be exploited

Although America’s Congressional electoral system differs substantially from Australia’s, the role super-wealthy special interests play in controlling both governments is similar. Geoff Goodell’s article in Mother Jones explores the impact a single special-interest puppet politician can have where he/she can exploit a balance of power. It is even worse when a whole government in power is riddled with with such puppets as is the case in Australia now.

Manchin’s Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew

The senator from West Virginia is bought and paid for by Big Coal. With his help the dying industry is pulling one final heist — and the entire planet may pay the price.
By Jeff Goodell
January 10, 2022
RollingStone

…

At this point in human evolution, burning coal for power is one of the stupidest things humans do. Coal plants are engines of destruction, not progress. Thanks to the rapid evolution of clean energy, there are many better, cheaper, cleaner ways to power our lives. The only reason anyone still burns coal today is because of the enormous political power and inertia that the industry has acquired since the 19th century. In America, that power and inertia is embodied in the cruel and cartoonish character of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who, paradoxically, may have more control over the trajectory of the climate crisis than any other person on the planet right now. Kidus Girma, a 26-year-old Sunrise Movement activist who helped organize protests against Manchin this past fall, calls him “the final villain.”
Manchin’s influence comes from the fact that in an evenly divided Senate, he is the swing vote that can make or break legislation. He presents himself as a pragmatic man from a hardscrabble state who is always trying to do the right thing. He values good manners and civility, and sometimes seems to be channeling the folksy charm of another famous West Virginian, test pilot Chuck Yeager, who was immortalized in The Right Stuff.
The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million. More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin’s business operations “a grift.” To Canter, Manchin’s corruption is even more offensive than Donald Trump’s. “With Trump, the corruption was discretionary — you could choose to pay thousands of dollars to host an event at Mar-a-Lago or not,” Canter tells me. In contrast, Manchin is effectively taking money right out of the pockets of West Virginians when they pay their electric bills. They have no say in it. “It’s one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.”

As a citizen of both countries (born in the USA, naturalized in Australia), I am distressed to se how completely both governments have been corrupted by obscenely wealthy special interests at the expense of the vast majority of their citizens. In the best of circumstances this would be bad. But now, our whole species realistically faces potential extinction from a climate emergency triggered by the fossil fuel industry’s many decades of greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than acting to protect their citizens from the emergency, to protect their masters, these puppet governments are impeding and even stopping effective action against the emergency.

The special interests use many tools beyond influencing/controlling our governments to deny, hide, misrepresent, and distract to keep people from from recognizing just how urgent the need for action on climate change is.

Australia is still nominally a democratic nation. In the upcoming Federal Election, we have the option to remove the LNP COALition puppets and their ‘independent’ fellow travelers from power. In their place we can elect candidates who can be trusted to act to solve the climate emergency as their first order of business in Parliament.

We are not telling anyone who they should vote for…. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide is designed to help you rank all the candidates on your electorate’s ballot to maximize the chance that if your first preference is not elected, at least someone else who supports climate action will be elected and to exclude exclude the possibility that your vote will flow to a special interest puppet if your first ranked candidate is not elected.

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

Australia is shaping up to be the villain of COP26 climate talks

William P. Hall on October 15, 2021

Australia is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world with its obstinate approach to the climate crisis. Leaders like US climate envoy John Kerry and COP26 President Alok Sharma have been focused recently on the climate challenge of China — but it’s Australia that’s emerging as the real pariah of the COP26 talks.

Of all the developed countries, Australia has the poorest standing on climate. It’s clear that Australia will just be absent, basically, from the talks,” Bas Eickhout, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told CNN.”

They were quite happy with the role the United States played until last year, and now of course they seem to be the last-man standing from the Western countries to block progress,” he said, referring to the US’ absence in global climate efforts during the Trump years.

Australia is shaping up to be the villain of COP26 climate talks – Angela Dewan, International Climate Editor, CNN, 13 Sept. 2021

It appears that lobbying fossil fuel companies have hijacked climate policy from the Australian people. Most Australians support more climate action from the government, according to a poll by the Lowy Institute in May. The poll found that 78% of Australians would support a net zero emissions target for 2050. Around the same number support the government subsidizing electric vehicles. And 63% support a ban on new coal mines opening in Australia. Yet of the world’s 176 new coal projects, 79 of them are in Australia, according to Fitch Solutions’ Global Mines Database.

…

Lucy Manne, the CEO of 350.org, which is an international organization with an Australian presence, accused the Morrison government of deliberately slowing down climate progress.

“This is extremely frustrating, and the government will only see the movement calling for action grow,” she said.”

The Morrison government risks Australia becoming not just a pariah state on the world stage, but also our economy falling behind. Australia has the potential to become a clean energy superpower and exporter, and the Australian public wants us to be a leader, not a laggard.“Angela Dewan, 13 Sept. 2021. Australia is shaping up to be the villain of COP26 climate talks . CNN World.

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

The Game of Mates… from Crickey

Mister Gec on October 1, 2021

Article By Kishor Napier-Raman First published on Sep 06, 2021

Lorraine Finlay has in the past asserted a number of positions that may place her at odds with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Yesterday the federal government quietly appointed Lorraine Finlay as the next human rights commissioner. She is a Murdoch University legal academic and human trafficking specialist with the Australian mission to ASEAN. Media releases from Attorney-General Michaelia Cash and the Australian Human Rights Commission both praised Finlay’s academic expertise and work in international human rights law. But they neglected to mention hers deep ties to the Liberal Party, as a former upper house candidate in Western Australia and president of the state’s Liberal women’s council. They also overlooked her years spent vocally taking positions that might put her at odds with the AHRC.

A Liberal stack

Finlay’s links to the WA Liberals go back a decade. Until 2018 she was president of the its women’s council, a position she’d held since at least 2011 when she was hosting twilight drinks with a then-shadow minister, Scott Morrison.As head of the council, Finlay worked hard to advance women’s representation in the party — by opposing gender-based quotas. She also helped stitch up preselection contests for older, male establishment figures over younger female candidates, even as senior figures such as Julie Bishop were crying out for better gender representation.Spend enough time as a party apparatchik, it seems, and you start getting touted as a possible candidate.

In 2015 there were rumours about her running for the federal seat of Canning (now held by Andrew Hastie). Two years later she ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals as an upper house candidate in the state election.More recently she’s popped up in reporting on the disastrous state of the WA party, as an enemy of “The Clan”, a group of influential Liberal power brokers with ties to former finance minister turned OECD supremo Mathias Cormann. Crikey asked Cash’s office whether Finlay’s Liberal links helped her land the appointment, and whether it was appropriate to pick someone so close to the party. We did not get a response.

The IPA’s pick in 2017, the Institute of Public Affairs, which has long called for a dramatic overhaul of the AHRC, listed Finlay as one of its favoured candidates for the commission. It cited Finlay’s co-authorship of No Offence Intended: Why 18C is Wrong, a book-length call to remove that section of the Racial Discrimination Act.Both the Abbott and Turnbull governments campaigned unsuccessfully to have the section — which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person based on their race, colour, ethnicity or nationality — repealed. It dragged the commission and its former president Gillian Triggs into a protracted culture war over freedom of speech. Finlay, meanwhile, has openly called — in her book and in articles — for 18C to be abolished. She has plenty of other views that put her at odds with the commission’s work.

The AHRC supports an Indigenous voice to Parliament. Finlay joined an IPA advertisement where she called that “political segregation”.The commission also does critical work on sexual harassment and sexual assault. On these, Finlay’s views are in line with the Sky News set. She believes moves to adopt an affirmative consent model on sexual assault laws — under way in NSW — would undermine due process and the presumption of innocence for alleged perpetrators. In fact, she’s been making this argument since 2018, when she appeared on a YouTube video with men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt. Finlay’s appointment is just the latest instance of the Coalition targeting and stacking the AHRC. In 2013, the Abbott government appointed former IPA policy director Tim Wilson, now a Liberal backbencher, as Human Rights Commissioner. Earlier that year, staff at the Institute had called for the Commission to be abolished. At the time, attorney-general George Brandis openly admitted ideology played a part in Wilson getting the gig. This time it hasn’t been quite so open.

Editors note: An earlier version of this article said Tim Wilson had called for the AHRC to be abolished during his time at the IPA. Wilson did not personally call for its abolition.

Kishor Napier-Raman from Crickey

Original Article on Crikey

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

What our COALition Government politicians need to think about before the COP-21 meeting in Glasgow

William P. Hall on September 15, 2021

Michelle Grattan in the Guardian says, “Multiple doctors’ organisations, led by the Australian Medical Association, and a major farm lobby have called on the federal government to boost Australia’s climate change ambition, as pressure mounts on Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to finalise a deal ahead of the Glasgow conference.”

Doctors and farmers turn up heat on Morrison ahead of Glasgow

Michelle Grattan in the Guardian (Aus.)
September 14, 2021

This pressure is still based on a dangerously ‘optimistic’ IPCC view of the ‘probable’ future. The IPCC view does not factor in the last two or three years of marked acceleration in NB4 extreme climate events or consider the likely consequences if the world is still warming past 2050 or 2100.

The recent crescendo of NB4 events, combined with a longer look into the future suggests that global warming is starting to ‘run away’ from our limited capacity to actually stop and reverse the warming. If we fail to do this, we are not just faced with some crop failures and an excessive number of heat-related deaths; but rather total collapse of our agricultural and social systems, and inevitable human extinction along with most other large and complex organisms sharing the planet with us.

We need immediate and sustained action to control and reverse global warming, and any politician not working to help achieve this should be immediately turfed out of office and replaced by someone who will work for us, rather than the fossil fuel special interests and their friends.

Our Vote Climate One guide provides a simple way for you to use our preferential voting system to vote for only those candidates who will support and work for immediate action on climate change. Our stoplight system doesn’t tell you who to vote for, but does flag those parties or individuals whose record suggests they are more likely to support the special interests and others trying to delay action than prioritize actions to deal with the existential climate emergency.

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