Puppet politics: Majority governments work for themselves

Labor puppets will work to benefit fossil fuel industries’ continued hyper-profitable exploitation come hothouse hell or high water flooding! How do we know this?

In the feature article here, Fake Reform: Jim Chalmers’ itsy-bitsy tax “hit” is a gift for foreign fossil fuel giants, Michael West Media compares the Australian experience with fossil fuel exploitation with the way Norway has managed their resources.

Gas giants are grinning too. Image: Jim Chalmers, AAP / from the article

Michael West – 07/05/2023, Michael West Media

Fake Reform: Jim Chalmers’ itsy-bitsy tax “hit” is a gift for foreign fossil fuel giants

Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are the itsy-bitsyest “reforms” about, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a fancy new bow. Michael West reports on how the Treasurer is merely returning a couple of billion in gas sector subsidies, and only for a while.

“Chalmers slaps $2.4bn tax hit on oil and gas,” cried Murdoch’s The Australian. “$2.4bn gas tax hit on energy giants,” declared the AFR. Santos chief Kevin Gallagher was nowhere to be heard with his “Soviet-style” scaremongering. Is Australia still going the way of Venezuela and Nigeria, Kevin? 

Not on your Nelly. The foreign gas giants are profiteering from Australia’s resources like there is no tomorrow, and paying pocket fluff in tax to boot. Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are itsy-bitsy, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a bright new bow, really just “up-fronting” a piddling amount of gas revenue for the next few years, a clawing back of subsidies for a while. 

You know it’s a fake “hit” when the fossil media talks it up as a “hit” but the gas lobbyists from APPEA say it gets “the balance right”. Reality is there is no balance, just ongoing pillage.

Clearly our Government is receiving or expecting to receive some kind of quid pro quo that they think will help them stay in power. Staying in power is clearly more important to the party that has the majority in government than doing whatever is necessary to stop and reverse the carbon emissions currently forcing us all down the road to hothouse hell and global mass extinction.

How else could the robber barons of the FF industries count on our Government helping them to rip off such extraordinary profits from their pillaging of so many Australian non-renewable resources?

In Michael West’s article also see the linked video, “Another year of record fossil fuel subsidies. What’s the scam?“, and the more detailed article, “A tale of two fossil superpowers: what Australia can learn from Norway“.

Following this theme a little further, see the news from Alberta, Canada, that is currently burning to a crisp. This gives some of the evidence demonstrating how FF puppetry works through its ‘influence’ on the media:

The stark reality is that the successful puppetry of the fossil fuel industry to protect and possibly even enhance next year’s earnings is driving us ever faster down the global warming road that leads to human oblivion in the 6th global mass extinction. Even if the heating doesn’t kill us directly, the die-offs of increasing numbers of keystone species, will cause whole ecosystems (including human agricultural systems) to collapse, taking our species along as well.

The weather causing the fires in Alberta today is a sign of the times:

Note: The normal progression of waves in the Jet Stream is from west to east. In this time series, the Jet Stream is so disordered that the eddy is actually moving the heat dome from east to west!

What we are seeing here is the operation of a positive feedback look driven by increasing global temperatures. As the Arctic grows warmer, temperature differences driving the jet streams diminish. This change allows the streams separating frigid polar air from much temperate zone air to slow and meander both far north and south of their normal paths. As demonstrated above, this is how the monster heat dome causing the Alberta fires formed. Amongst other things, slow overall warming accompanied by periodic heatwaves like this over most of the world’s boreal forests has allowed bark beetles, normally killed off every year by winter freezing, to proliferate to the point that they are killing vast numbers of trees. This increases the forests’ vulnerabilities to fires and the ferocity of the fires themselves. Not only does this turn the carbon content of the trees into greenhouse gases, but the fires are often hot enough to ignite the peaty soil to release that carbon as greenhouse gases as well.

The feedback loop is further extended as underlying permafrost exposed by burning off of the insulating layers of vegetation and peat begins to release the vast accumulations of greenhouse gases held as icy gas hydrates.

In sum, fossil fuel interests have convinced (1) our government to protect and even extend fossil fuel’s profits from producing and burning Earth’s carbon stores into energy and greenhouse gases, and (2) our press from advertising the facts of this pillage to the people whose futures will be destroyed by the consequent global warming.

Governments controlled by political parties in majority are easy targets for special interests, especially when the parties operate on the basis that the only issue that matters is to retain control of the government. They will represent the special interests of any person/group/industry they think can help them keep that control before the interests of the people in their electorates or people in general.

To mobilize and coordinate the necessary forces to turn off the downhill road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell, our governments need to work for us humans, not vested interests:

  1. we need to convince our elected and candidate representatives that we will absolutely not vote for them if they put a vested interest before our interests;
  2. that we need to elect enough independents from our own communities who will represent us to ensure that no major political party can form a majority government in its own right.

Item 2 ensures that community interests can veto legislation favoring special interests put up by the party in power.


Featured Image:

A protest against the US government’s decision to exit the Paris climate deal in 2017. ‘Ignorance-building strategies’ by fossil fuel companies have bred climate change scepticism among conservatives in the US and Australia. Photograph: Anthony Anex/EPA | from the Guardian article by Graham Readfearn (08/05/2018), “It’s all about vested interests’: untangling conspiracy, conservatism and climate scepticism“)

Posted by William P. Hall

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

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