Our puppet governments organize banquets where their piggy patrons with special interests can feed on our roasting environment
If the pigs’ feeding frenzy on Australia’s fossil carbon continues they will also roast in the end — there will be no winners at this barbecue
In my post yesterday, Peter Hannam in the Guardian described how the West Australian Government (with Federal LNP Government complicity) helps the offshore gas industry grow enormously wealthy by letting them drain our national resources virtually free, to leak and burn the gas that heats the barbecue we are roasting in.
Today, Nigel Howard in John Menadue‘s Pearls and Irritations, cries out for our society to acknowledge “the full appalling truth” that our species is headed for extinction, and to “act with the urgency and radicalism” that impending extinction of our species demands. Because the climate emergency is not being treated “like the real, global apocalyptic event that it is” … “we must “break through the complacency and ignorance of our populations, governments, corporations and institutions; internationally, nationally, at state, territory and local levels”.
From this preamble Howard details how Australian governments we have elected are using our taxes to help the mostly foreign-owned fossil fuel corporations rip off our natural resources at great expense to the environment and speed our slide towards global mass extinction. Read his article and to follow my posts here. In time I will document the scientific evidence that shows what Howard describes in this report is a valid account of the stark reality we and our offspring are facing in the next few decades as we continue to feed the fires that are cooking our world.
How can we turn the barbecue around so the pigs roast first?
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.
Our LNP COALition government currently led by Captain Humbug (the marketing man) and Barny Bulldust (the man with the hat), helped by some fellow traveling minor parties, ‘independents’, and even some members of Labor seem to work assiduously to protect and feed the gluttony of multibillionaire exploiters of Australian fossil fuel and other environmental resources. Many of the gluttons are multinationals, but some, e.g., Clive, Gina and Rupert are (or at least were) Australian citizens. Presumably helped by their already immense wealth, the special interests have turned many members of our governments (especially those of a CONservative shade) into puppets who seem to actively ignore citizens’ needs to protect and enhance their patrons/masters interests first in any decision the government makes. In aid of doing this and staying in power the puppets and their masters totally subvert reason and language with humbug, denials of reality, lies, fake news, empty promises, alternative facts, misrepresentation, and misdirection to CONvince voters that life is good and the future is rosy only as long as the humbuggers are kept in power.
However, scientifically verifiable facts show that climates around the world are deteriorating an an increasing pace with more and more NB4 weather extremes. Some areas of the globe are already becoming nearly uninhabitable. In many areas, the time between catastrophic climate events is shrinking so that repairs and recovery from one event are not finished before the next event comes along to add still more chaos and damage to the left over damage from the previous event(s). All of these effects follow from the ever increasing energy supplied by the continually increasing global average temperature. The facts that greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature are still accelerating upwards shows that nothing humans are doing is slowing the rate of increase. There is also increasing evidence that rising average temperatures are feeding back into increasing the rates of greenhouse gas emissions from warming soil, peat, permafrost, wildfires, wetlands, mangrove areas, sea-grass beds, dying kelp forests and coral reefs, and decomposing gas hydrates on continental shelves. Now that human greenhouse gas emissions have triggered the feedbacks, they have probably already increased past the point where temperatures will go on rising even if all human controlled emissions were stopped tomorrow.
Given that humans started the feedback process, I am optimistic enough to think we can still stop and reverse the warming process. If we start soon, mobilize a global wartime effort to recapture and sequester the majority of the carbon we released from burning fossil fuels, and work to increase Earth’s ability to reflect some of the solar heat it currently receives, this should do the job. However, nations like ours will never manage to coordinate and populate a major social enterprise like this as long as the people are conned by the resource gluttons and their puppets dominating the media and governments with distracting humbug, fakery, and denial; and actual disruption of attempts to act effectively.
Fortunately, Australia still maintains its independent electoral commission and agencies of democracy, so we have the power (if we choose to use it) to replace the humbuggers and bulldusters with people who understand and accept that reality demands that their first order of business in government has to be action on climate change. All this requires is to ignore the bulldust, smell the reality of the smoke from the increasingly frequent, more extensive and more ferocious wildfires, and use your ballot to rank candidates in your electorates in your order of preference from best (will do the job well) to worst (should be in jail rather than Parliament). The difficulty here is to understand who your order of preferences actually supports if your first choice doesn’t get the most votes.
To help you do this Vote Climate One does not tell you how to vote (as do most of the other parties for good or evil), but we have expended a lot of effort to establish for every candidate in each Federal electorate to what extent they can be counted on to put action on the climate emergency as their number one priority, and to explain on our web site how we made those decisions. Each candidate is tagged with a spotlight color: light green if they have committed to put action on the climate emergency first, amber if they can be counted on to side with green light people in a coalition government situation, and red if there is any evidence that they would vote for or help form a puppet government supporting the special interests exploiting Australian resources. Vote Climate One’s conclusions are condensed into a Traffic Light Voting Guide for each electorate that can help you set out your preferences so all the hard work is done before you walk into the voting booth. Then, all you have to do is copy your rankings from the worksheet to the ballot paper.
Ideally, the COALition will be reduced to bacon on the barbecue so the rest of us can get to work putting out the house fire….
