Gov’t fiddling while Australia faces global burning

William P. Hall on August 24, 2023

Labor Gov’t slashes vital Antarctic research by $25 M while promoting fossil fuel production/export and gifting $200 million to Aussie sport despite the desperate need to understand how unprecedented Antarctic ice and oceanic conditions relate to the climate crisis.

Anthony Albanese and the federal Labor government are supposedly concerned to keep Australians safe. Yet, if you listen to what they say,

  • It is necessary to save money by cutting $25 m from Antarctic research into why such a record shattering low amount of sea ice has formed this winter — a phenomenon that seems to place the whole of the human species at risk of near term extinction if we fail to understand and mitigate the risk. See what the science journal Nature says about this: (16 Aug 2923) Australia’s Antarctic budget cuts a ‘terrible blow for science’
  • It is more important to spend $200 m in voters’ tax dollars on cake and fairy floss (for girls sports) because the Matildas came 4th in the contest for the World Cup (see more below).
  • It is more important to cater to whims of fossil fuel with subsidies the Australia Institute estimates to be worth $57.1 bn over the forward estimates (see more below).
  • It is more important to grovel to America and the UK by spending $268bn to $368bn over the next ~30 years ($10 bn per year!) for delivery of 8 nuclear subs able to project our ‘power’ around the world in the by and by (the majority of these costs would also go overseas) when we could build 20 air-independent subs, a huge kit of other defensive weapons & related infrastructure, with $hundreds of billions left over (see more below).

I would call this government malfeasance of the highest order!

NO SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY SHOULD EVER AGAIN BE GIVEN THE MAJORITY POWER TO GOVERN FOR ITS OWN BENEFIT !

A couple of news items and some basic data on our only planet may make the claim of malfeasance more real.

Incredibly low sea-ice extent around Antarctica. Since early May (i.e., for more than 3½ months!) there has been an all-time record low for the month of the year since records began in 1979. Sigma (σ) is a measure of the probability of observing a deviation of that amount from the average of all measures for that day, assuming the deviations are randomly distributed. -5σ is about one chance in 3.5 million, -6σ is about one chance in 500 million! – and we have seen these extremes day after day after day!!

News Corp, 2 Aug 2023

Vital research interrupted as Australian Antarctic Division faces budget woes

As many as 56 Antarctic research projects could be cancelled, delayed or restricted, said an email sent from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) to its staff.

The email stated that the division was facing budget constraints and would need to locate $25 million in savings in order to deliver the planned projects, which include studies into the diminishing sea ice, declining penguin populations, and the “cleaner Antarctica program”, an initiative designed to remedy damage caused by human activity such as oil spills.

Further information from anonymous insiders confirmed that two of Australia’s Antarctic research stations would not be fully staffed during the upcoming summer season, when scientific research at the south pole is usually at its peak.

The announcement comes at a crucial time for scientists, many of whom say this research is more important than ever.

Just last week, it was reported that Antarctic sea ice levels are at a record low, with ice that is normally recovered over the winter being absent – an event that would naturally occur only once every 7.5 million years. [this assumes that the variation is random, but clearly, this record is not random as the deviation has lasted for months, and many other climate indicators are also going crazy at the same time for similarly long periods]

…

“It couldn’t be any more catastrophic to hear at the moment, considering we’re seeing these incredible changes, particularly the sea ice right now. We’re seeing so little sea ice relative to what we normally see this time of year.”

“If there’s a gap in data collection, it’s catastrophic for our understanding. If we have data up to a certain date, and then we have a gap for three years, five years, and then we start the data set again, it doesn’t make it useless. But it makes it really hard for us to get that understanding that we need.” [Especially when we need that information right now!]

Read the complete article….
Global Sea Surface Temperature at an all time high since records began in 1981 — and still rising compared to previous high records for day of the year. ClimateReanalyzer. Grey lines – Global average SST variation for each year from 1981 to 2021. Dotted line – global average SST, dashed line – 2σ above the average, Red line – global average SST variation for 2022. Note: for legibility, the image only shows temperatures from March 1 to Sept 17.
Sea Ice Thickness: Given that only a thin veneer of sea-ice is left over the Arctic Ocean with 3-4 weeks of melting time left, it seems possible that there may be “blue ocean” at the North Pole this year.

These three CICE charts are a product of the US Naval Research Lab’s GOFS 3.1 Global Ocean Forecasting System. See also Wikipedia: Measurement of sea ice. Other products for both poles provide similar ocean graphics for Sea Surface Salinity (SSS); Sea Surface Height (SSH) – as the ocean warms, it expands so the surfaces of warmer volumes will rise above mean sea-level; and CICE Speed and Drift. They also provide GIF animations of the last 30 days variation for all plots, and daily plots back to 2014. Except for the ice-related products, all of these measures are provided for global oceans and subregions.

Like most Australians, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been inspired by the Matildas’ World Cup performance Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/FIFA/Getty Images / From the article.

Tony Sheppherd, 19 Aug 2023 in The Guardian

Albanese government to pledge $200m for women’s sport after Matildas inspire Australia

In the wake of the Matildas’ World Cup performance, the government will unveil new funding and changes to TV bidding rights for sporting fixtures.

The Albanese government will promise $200m to improve women’s sporting facilities and equipment after the Matildas’ historic Women’s World Cup run sparked an unprecedented outpouring of support for women’s football.

As the Matildas prepare for their third-place playoff against Sweden in Brisbane on Saturday, the government will declare the national team had “changed sport forever”, while unveiling a new funding package and flagging moves to make more major events available on free-to-air television.

…

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will announce a new grants program, called Play Our Way, with money available for all sports. The government expects soccer will need a significant amount, given clubs have seen a “mind-boggling increase in interest” in the wake of the World Cup.

The grant guidelines have not been completed, but the government said the money would go to “promote equal access, build more suitable facilities, and support grassroots initiatives to get women and girls to engage, stay, and participate in sport throughout their lives”.

[The total budget for the Antarctic Division is around $800 million…; The ANKUS Submarine Project will cost between $268bn to $368bn between now and the mid 2050s – assuming society doesn’t collapse from ‘global boiling’ and precipitate global mass extinction before then.]

Read the complete article….
Cumulative area burned in Canada by year estimated from satellite detected hotspots since measurements began in 2003. Natural Resources Canada. Black line is 2023. As at 23 Aug 2023 14,664,278 ha had burned (off the scale of the automatically generated chart) — 3 x larger area compared to the previous largest burn, 4,524,137, recorded for the whole of 2014. Note also that in previous years very little burning occurred after mid August. In other words 1.47 % of the total land area of Canada has burned so far this year, with no indication that the burning will be stopping any time soon.
Sea Ice Concentration: Where thin ice still exists, most of that is fairly broken up with 30% or more of the surface within the pixel apparently open water.
Sea Surface Temperature: Warmish sea water, 2-4+ °C comes up to the edge of the thin ice, and even seems to be detected within the edge of the mapped extent (>15% concentration)

Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere jet streams from ClimateReanalyzer’s Today’s Weather Maps. Normally each hemisphere has two circumferential jet streams: Polar and Sub Tropical. In the Northern Hemisphere the winds are mostly too slow to be considered as jet streams at all (> 60 kts) and essentially completely chaotic. This accounts for the frequent, long-lived, mostly motionless, and extreme heat domes promoting unprecedented flash droughts, wildfires, and floods. In the Southern Hemisphere, the winds are of jetstream strength, but again they seem somewhat confused and chaotic which may be associated with the extreme anomalies in sea ice.

What do these measures signify?

On its own, any one of the unprecedented deviations from ‘normal’ climate behavior over the last 40 years or more shown the the graphics above would be scary/remarkable. The fact that several different global measures are more or less simultaneously show similar degrees of (or even growing!) deviation over several months should be sounding emergency warning sirens around the world.

Reports posted to all Australian parliamentarians last month (available via VoteClimateOne.Org) provide more detail and explanation of these and other climate measures documenting the accelerating crisis: Cover Letter – 5 July 2023 and Australian MPs: Act Now! Later may be too late. These, in turn, link to still more recent data on Climate Sentinel News: Global Climate Change Now and an unedited collection of links to the latest news during August to date — Aug 2023 Climate extremes.

As explained, the nature, extent and duration of the deviations scream out that the complexly dynamical global climate system has been ‘forced’ by increasingly high global average temperatures out the semi-stable glacial-interglacial cycle where it is now beginning to fall (i.e., run away) towards climate apocalypse, collapse and global mass extinction in a much hotter ‘hothouse Earth’ state. The current rate of change in climate indicators is far faster than anything that can be reconstructed for even the worst of them all – the End Permian that also seemed to be driven by runaway warming as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions. As explained in the documents cited in the previous paragraph, if we cannot mobilize effective action quickly enough to halt and reverse the global warming, our climate system seems to be crossing several tipping points that will drive us ever faster down the road to our extinction in Hothouse Hell. If we continue our present ‘business as usual’ attitudes of supporting the fossil fuel industry and gaslighting emergency actions to manage the climate crisis, and the climate trends seen in the last few months continue at the present pace, society may well collapse before 2050 with probable extinction of our species by 2100.

Note: In the cited documents above I suggested one of the tipping points being crossed was stoppage of Earth’s ‘thermohaline circulation‘ in the North Atlantic. At least I have found solid evidence showing that it is still working — even though hot water is covering the ocean surface — the depressed sea level and actual whirlpools E of Newfoundland and S of Greenland show deeper cool salty water is still being sucked down the usual plug-hole to the bottom of the ocean: last 30 days GIF of Sea Surface Height.

Is doom now inevitable or are there good reasons to think we can still climb out of the hole to a sustainable future? YES! Stainability is possible, but only if we act fast enough and hard enough!

Even if we have the threshold to runaway greenhouse, I remain optimistic enough to think if we act fast and hard enough we can still manage to find a survivable future. My reason is based on historical experience. I’m old enough to remember the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Consider the history that led up to this:  It took something on the order of 150 years of work using steampunk technology starting with mining coal with picks and shovels to reach our current crisis point. However in the same 150 years our scientific understanding, technological prowess, and overall knowledge has grown exponentially over that same time with a doubling time of 2-5 years (see Homo habilis to Homo destructor ― How the rise of tool-making apes can destroy the world). 

America’s mobilization for WWII shows what humans can do in an emergency situation if they work together. Until Dec 7 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans were isolationist deniers of the reality of Axis aggression (not unlike Trumpist ‘MAGA’). By 8 May 1945 Germany had been expunged and on 6 Aug. 1945 the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and then Nagasaki a few days later) overwhelmed Japan. In 1941 nuclear fission was a wacky idea proposed by some academics. In 4 years nuclear science was developed, the Manhattan Project was conceived, several different kinds of production infrastructure (Hanford, Oak Ridge Facility, Savanna River (a bit after the War), Los Alamos, etc…) were designed and built, atom bombs were designed, built, tested, and used. In the area of engineering and logistics, an average of 5 highly capable destroyers were built each month for 32 months and an average of 3 Liberty Ships every 2 days between 1941 and 1945. were able to be assembled and launched each week. The United Nations was formed, etc.. Equally prodigious challenges were met in many other areas that completely changed world history. Yes, conscription, coercion, rationing, etc. was required – but the global challenge was met and the common danger vanquished….

Today, we have massively more knowledge and prowess than we did in the early 1940’s. Humans can do remarkable things if people and governments unite and work together to fight the common danger. There is no greater danger than the near term extinction of our entire species and most of the rest of Earth’s biosphere!

In other words, there is no time left for the slow process of electing climate activists to replace sitting puppets in our parliaments.

We need a government fit and able enough to declare the emergency and lead an emergency mobilization to research and manage the climate crisis. If we are to gain effective government coordination and support we have no choice but to change the minds of the parliamentarians we have now.

Measuring Labor’s prioritization of the climate emergency relative to supporting the fossil fuel industry and crazy defence projects

A good measure of our government’s national priorities is the amount of our tax money being allocated to supporting various kinds of activities, and how these amounts change over time.

Australians are paying increasingly high costs due to more frequent, extensive, and severe weather and fire events associated with the accelerating rate of global warming driving climate change. One would think our government would give high priority to understanding what causes the extremes in hopes that we can better prepare for and/or mitigate the ever worsening catastrophes caused by the climate extremes. There are good reasons for thinking that positive feedbacks from ‘polar amplification‘ play a major role in driving the crescendo of climate catastrophes. This winter’s shockingly low rate of sea ice formation around Antarctica that might happen once in 500,000,000 (FIVE HUNDRED MILLION) years through random variation given the observed variations over the last 40 years. (Earth’s land animals emerged from the water less than 500 million years ago.) Clearly the missing winter sea ice is associated with the other similarly improbable climate extremes noted above for this year. Clearly we need to understand scientifically what has caused this year’s anomaly and how it relates to the other extreme variations…….. Yet, because the Government is cutting their funding, the Australian Antarctic “division [is] facing budget constraints and [needs] to locate $25 million in savings in order to deliver the planned projects, which include studies into the diminishing sea ice, …”, etc. Clearly, our government has little interest in supporting Antarctic research critical for understanding climate change.

Some indication of who our Australian state and federal governments are supporting big-time (along with many other countries) is their apparent patrons in the fossil fuel industry (mostly comprised of overseas multinational companies).

Global fossil fuel subsidies reach $5.2 trillion, and $29 billion in Australia
$57.1b: Record Breaking Fossil Fuel Subsidies Following Climate Election

By comparison, it is interesting to see how concerned Federal Labor is to support action to protect citizens from the increasing catastrophic and existential threats from climate climate change driven by global warming.

The Federal Budget: what’s in it for climate

According to the numbers the Climate Council has provided, their steps towards climate action amount to $3,621,600,000 for some very fuzzily defined categories — $3.62 bn compared to $29 – $57 bn (depending on who you follow) in pretty definite subsidies and supports for the mostly overseas fossil fuel industry.

What do they get in return for this money? In FY2022 [1], fossil fuel companies donated $2 million to the ALP, Liberal and National parties. Not a lot, but it helps them with ‘winning the election’ costs. Total revenue from the industry is around $20 bn (still less than the subsidies!)

And then there is government management of the potentially existential cost of the climate emergency versus abject kowtowing to ‘his master’s voice’ via AUKUS

Rex Patrick, ex submariner in Oberon and Collins Class subs, sonar and electronic technologies expert, defence contractor, author for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Federal Senator from South Australia, is what I would consider to be a qualified expert on naval technology. In one X-tweet Mr Patrick demonstrates just how mindlessly stupid allocating $368 bn to AUKUS would be — even for the purpose of acquiring military kit to defend ourselves from other nations:

Instead of 8 nuclear subs that may (or may not) be delivered for the currently estimated cost sometime by the Americans and UK able to project Australian power (for whose benefit?) to the other side of the planet, the same budget would supply 20 air-independent (= very quiet!) subs to protect Australian interests around our shores and in adjacent waters (e.g., Indonesian Archipelago) and a huge kit of additional defence hardware that could mostly be manufactured within the Australian economy — leaving $200 BILLION FOR MEASURES TO KEEP AUSTRALIANS SAFE FROM CLIMATE CATASTROPHE.

What is it about Australian governments in majority power that makes them so eager to work for the interests of (mostly overseas) special interest patrons rather than for the safety and well-being of Australian citizens who have voted to put them in power? To reiterate:

We need a government fit and able enough to declare the emergency and lead an emergency mobilization to research and manage the climate crisis. If we are to gain effective government coordination and support we have no choice but to change the minds of the parliamentarians we have now.

The only way this will happen is if they can be convinced that voters will remove them from Parliament at the earliest possible opportunity if the don’t. They only way they will be convinced they will be voted out is if enough voters flood their mail boxes, in trays, and phone lines with demands for climate action — or else! And, I’m pretty sure there are enough members of climate and environment action groups that if we all sent our emails, posts, phone calls, and even personal visits to electoral offices to deliver this message, that action will be taken.

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

I’ve asked for years. Why won’t we save ourselves?

William P. Hall on November 7, 2022

For 45 years we have known that fossil fuel emissions caused global warming that could kill us — and have done nothing effective to stop them. Why?

In today’s Conversation three social scientists explore this conundrum that is both horrifies and fascinates them to consider. We’ve known the dangers. “Why do we condemn today’s children and future generations to live on a dangerous and hostile planet?” Their article tries to answer the question.

How long can fossil fuel hegemony continue as weather events become more extreme? Marcus Kauffman/Unsplash, CC BY / from the article

by Christopher Wright, Daniel Nyberg, & Vanessa Bowden, 7/11/2022 in The Conversation

A technologically advanced society is choosing to destroy itself. It’s both fascinating and horrifying to watch

We’ve had decades to act.

Like watching a slow-motion train crash, the world’s leading climate scientists have for decades warned of the dangers of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Political and corporate leaders knew of the threat more than a decade before it was key public knowledge. Back in 1977 [follow this link – it is important!], United States President Jimmy Carter was briefed on the possibility of catastrophic climate change. That same year, internal memos at one of the world’s largest oil companies [ditto] made it clear that continued burning of fossil fuels would dramatically heat the planet.

So why, in the 45 years since, has there been so little action in response? Why do we condemn today’s children and future generations to live on a dangerous and hostile planet?

Read the complete article….

Most of the articles in Vote Climate One’s Climate Sentinel News explore aspects of this conundrum. Our condensed answer to “What can be done?” is that we have to begin acting by changing our governments. We must evict the puppets of the fossil fuel industry who have largely worked to BLOCK effective action, and replace them with candidates who take the climate emergency and the need to act on it seriously.

In Australia, states probably have more capacity for effective climate action than the national government. Victoria’s upcoming state election should be an election focused on the only issue that really matters, climate.

The Victorian ballot is far too complicated and is deliberately designed to keep all the power in the hands of whichever major party is in the majority.

Vote Climate One emerged to help people cope easily with complex ballots to focus on electing the kinds of candidates who we think can be trusted to legislate and lead effective climate action. We do this in two major ways: using our Climate Lens help you assess who is pro climate vs those who are not; and using Climate Sentinel News’s searchlight to highlight and explain the facts that show why climate change is so dangerous and climate action is so important.

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

We don’t want majority governments!

William P. Hall on October 27, 2022

If single parties can pass legislation on their own, it’s hard to stop them from becoming puppets of obscenely wealthy special interests

The climate scientist, Bill McKibben in his Critical Years blog article, “Big Oil is addicted, but it’s killing the rest of us“, explains that fossil fuel industry is ‘addicted’ to the super-profits it can generate by continuing to increase its production of products and their lethal greenhouse gas emissions. The industry will do anything it can to stay in this business, including using its vast wealth to corrupt government.

The Sacramento working group of Third Act held a die-in this weekend outside the fossil-fueled Chase Bank. For them it was powerful guerilla theater; for millions around the world it is reality / From the article

By Bill McKibben, 26/10/2022 in The Crucial Years

Big Oil is addicted, but it’s killing the rest of us

A shocking new summary of fossil fuel’s assault on public health

Yesterday afternoon, the British medical journal The Lancet published a vast and remarkable assessment of the health impacts of climate change. (Produced in Britain, the Lancet is among the world’s most venerable journals—it’s where Joseph Lister published his plan for antiseptic surgery in 1867.) Assembled by a team of more than a hundred researchers, the report found that

“Because of the rapidly increasing temperatures, vulnerable populations (adults older than 65 years, and children younger than one year of age) were exposed to 3.7 billion more heatwave days in 2021 than annually in 1986–2005, and heat-related deaths increased by 68% between 2000–04 and 2017–21.”

and also that

“the number of months suitable for malaria transmission increased by 31.3% in the highland areas of the Americas and 13.8% in the highland areas of Africa from 1951–60 to 2012–21, and the likelihood of dengue transmission rose by 12% in the same period. The coexistence of dengue outbreaks with the COVID-19 pandemic led to aggravated pressure on health systems, misdiagnosis, and difficulties in management of both diseases in many regions of South America, Asia, and Africa.”…

…[T]he fossil fuel industry has spent decades blocking the way—a massive three-decade campaign of deceit, denial and disinformation; an ongoing lobbying effort against renewables that the industry boasts will get even more powerful if the GOP wins the midterms; endless support for rightwing lawmakers to make sure that lobbying will work.

I think the question I get asked the most may be: why do these vast oil companies not simply convert to energy companies? Why don’t Exxon and Chevron decide to own the renewable future, instead of investing at most a few percent of their research budgets on clean tech?

And the answer is, if you think about it, sadly logical. You can make some money putting solar panels on people’s roofs—there will be solar billionaires. But you can’t make Exxon money, because once the panel is up there, the sun delivers the energy for free every day when it rises above the horizon. From Exxon’s point of view, this is the stupidest business model ever: they made their fortune by selling you more energy, every week for your entire life. They are hooked.

Read the complete article….

Because the fossil fuel producers are hooked, they will use their immense financial power in any way they can to ensure that governments make life easier for them to feed their daily addictions for their ever growing fortunes. This is irrespective of how many people are killed and the biosphere is damaged in other ways. The craving for the daily fix is more important than any concern about the future of life on Earth.

Majority governments are easy pickings. Political parties are addicted to power and will do almost anything to stay in power. Fossil fuel interests can do a lot (‘ethically’ or unethically) to help a party to gain majority power or (especially) to stay in power. Climate Sentinel News has given many examples of how Fossil Fuel subverts governments to feed emission producing addiction. Here are three:

It is much harder to corrupt a minority government that depends on the cooperation of several independent (and often shifting) entities to pass legislation. Probably the most difficult government of all to corrupt is one where the balance of power is held by community independents ethically representing the community of voters that selected and elected them. Such independents will work for the interests of those who voted for them rather than a party line representing special interests of major patrons working to keep the party in power.

Vote Climate One is working to provide Australian (and Victorian) voters with the information you need to elect representatives who will work for you rather than for the lethal addictions of the fossil fuel industry. See our Voting Guides – Vic for the upcoming Victorian State Election on 26 November 2022.

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

As bad as it is, IPCC Report likely understates reality

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Saudi Arabia, India, China, (Australia) and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings.

Students protest in Toulouse, France, on 25 March, about government inaction on climate change. Photograph: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock / from the article.

by Fiona Harvey, 02/24/2022 in The Guardian

Dire warning on climate change ‘is being ignored’ amid war and economic turmoil: The third segment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is being overshadowed, just like the previous one

…

Saudi Arabia, India, China and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings, the Observer understands. Some governments are anxious to avoid policy advice such as cutting subsidies to fossil fuels, even though these are widely espoused by leading authorities.This process of refinement – which has also been a complaint in the previous chapters of the IPCC assessment – is defended by some, as producing a document that all governments must “own”, as they have all had input. But many scientists are growing increasingly f

rustrated, as it produces a conservative and sometimes watered down document that many feel does not reflect the urgency and shocking nature of the threat.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: An earlier report streamed to a press conference at the Swiss Academy of Sciences in Bern last August. Photograph: Alessandro Della Valle/EPA / from the article.

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

US shows how lethal a fossil fuel puppet can be

Climate News Links on March 16, 2022

Although Joe Manchin claims to be a Democrat, because he holds a balance of power this wholly owned puppet can and does block most climate action

by Bill McKibben from The Crucial Years, 14/03/2022

The Senator from Fossil Fuel is ‘Beating Biden Badly’: Joe Manchin and the Case of the Closing Climate Window.

Featured Image: MRI scan showing Joe Manchin’s decision-making process. by John Deering | September 24, 2021 in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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

Putin’s fossil fuel led invasion of Ukraine hurts everyone

William P. Hall on March 8, 2022

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

by Marianne Lavelle 06/03/2022, in Inside Climate News

Whatever His Motives, Putin’s War in Ukraine Is Fueled by Oil and Gas: The U.S. oil industry is hoping to fill the immediate void with increased oil and gas exports, while the EU moves in the longer term to replace Russian gas with renewable energy

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.

Latest IPCC report shows we’re on road to Hell

William P. Hall on March 4, 2022

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

Even though the IPCC is heavily constrained by its political structure and its highly bureaucratic and conservative approach to science, this report predicts dire consequences for humans and the rest of our biosphere from the ongoing climate change (i.e., global warming). However, all readers of the report and the flood news items relating to it must understand and recognize that political censorship and scientific reticence is still very much alive and well in this report. The likely realities are probably a lot worse than reported here.

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

by Adam Morton, 28/02/2022 in The Guardian

Climate scientists warn global heating means Australia facing more catastrophic storms and floods: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says climate effects expected to be more severe than initially predicted

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.

The latest major assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found global warming caused by humans was causing dangerous and widespread disruption, with many effects expected to be more severe than predicted.

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.

Read the complete article….
From the article: Shepherds direct livestock away from an advancing wildfire in Turkey in August.Photographer: Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images

by Eric Roston and Leslie Kaufman, updated 1/03/2022 in Bloomberg Green

Global Warming Is Outrunning Efforts to Protect Human Life, Scientists Warn: A new UN report says countries must do more to safeguard billions from floods, droughts and other “compounding” hazards

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.”…

Read the complete article….

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.

Global Warming and Climate Change — what Australia knew and buried … then framed a new reality for the public

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

Scotty fighting the climate emergency during the worst of Black Summer

Scott Morrison 20/12/2019

Words are cheap – how are you going to do it???

Angus Taylor Minister for Energy and “Emissions Reduction”

19/08/2021 on Sky News
23/04/2021 on ABC’s 7:30 Report

Craig Kelly ex Liberal now Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party

Malcolm Roberts One Nation Qld.

07/02/220

Scotty supports fossil fuel above climate survival

“This is coal” 09/02/2017
09/09/2021 We’ll keep on mining coal
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.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
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.

Gov’t gives fossil fuel free pass for excess emissions

William P. Hall on February 25, 2022

A fifth of Australia’s fossil fuel facilities emit more more GHGs than approved – with no penalties/costs applied for excess emissions

by Adam Morton, 24/02/2022 in The Guardian
A fifth of Australia’s fossil fuel facilities emit more greenhouse gas than originally estimated, report says: Australian Conservation Foundation says blowouts show government’s safeguard mechanism is ‘failing’ to control industrial emissions.

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

Old report: fossil fuel’s political donations and Government

William P. Hall on February 12, 2022

ACF tracking in 2020 shows huge fossil fuel political donations to influence our political parties.

Many of my posts here have noted that special interests in the fossil fuel and related industries have effectively turned many of our members of Parliament into puppets putting the interests of the industry ahead of the country’s citizens. I came across the Australian Conservation Foundation’s 12/02/2020 report, “Fossil fuel money distorting democracy” giving precise numbers showing how the fossil fuel political donations are used to distort our democracy away from the public interest, and towards their private profits. These have just been updated 01/02/2022 on-line in the report, “Fossil fuel industry donates big to major parties“.

“This data shows just how dark and opaque the financing of our politics is, with 38% of the money that funds Australia’s major parties having no identifiable source,” said the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Democracy Campaigner Jolene Elberth.

From the 2022 update

Cover page of the report.

Fossil fuel money distorting democracy

Key findings

• Donations from the fossil fuel industry are on the rise. Fossil fuel donations to the major parties peaked in the 2018-19 period. Overall, the industry donated a total of $1,894,024, excluding donations to the United Australia Party.

• The extractive industries are by far the largest donors from the coal, oil and gas sector, accounting for over half of the total donations to the major parties since 2015-16.

• There is a severe lack of transparency over money flowing to politicians from donations. We found that from 2015-2019 the major parties had close to $283 million in income from undisclosed sources. In the 2018-2019 fiscal year alone, the major parties received over $100,000,000 in income from undisclosed sources. This ‘dark money’ in the system is worsened by the extremely loose regulations on associated entities. In 2018-2019, associated entities disclosed just over one third of the income they received, while around 67% of money came from undisclosed sources. This money is often then donated to political parties, further obscuring the true source of
the donation.

Read the complete article….

What are fossil fuel’s political donations getting for their money?

The puppets show and tell
Captain Humbug (A.K.A. Scotty from Marketing) showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about behind his then PM, ““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.” – Picture from The Conversation (15-02-2017). See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”

There can be no doubt that Scotty from Marketing is going all out to promote the fossil fuel industry and protect their interests from any harm arising from actions to bring the climate emergency under control. Whether this the direct pay-back for fossil fuel’s political donations or not, I don’t know. But he has also made it abundantly clear that he is not leading Parliament or the people in fighting the fires of the climate emergency: From the official transcript dated 20/12/2019 from the PM’s own office, Scotty made it abundantly clear to John Stanley on 2GB Radio that HE doesn’t fight fires… “But I know Australians understand… that, you know, I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room. That’s the brave people who do that are doing that job. But I know that Australians would want me back at this time out of these fatalities. So I’ll happily come back [from his secret holiday in Hawaii] and do that.”

Sixteen year-old Greta tells us and everyone at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos how we and our governments should actually respond to the climate emergency:

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live. 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.

In other words, smell the smoke, see the 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. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything else 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 hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up and fight the fire…. so she can have some hope for her future.

To stop continued the puppet government’s continued smothering of effective action against the emergency their members need to be removed from Parliament and be replaced by rational people who have publicly committed themselves to putting acting on the climate emergency on the top of their agenda if elected.

Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use our country’s preferential voting system in your electorate to rank candidates to elect your personally favored pro-climate candidate and avoid voting for puppets or those who might pass their preferences on to a puppet. If enough people follow this guide, we should be able to elect a new government that will give our children and grand children a foreseeable and hopeful future.

Will you help us give our kids a hopeful future?
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Start fast to slow the rate of global warming by stopping “super emitters'” methane leaks

William P. Hall on February 7, 2022

by Brady Dennis, 03/02/2022 in The Washington Post Climate & Environment
Cracking down on methane ‘ultra emitters’ is a quick way to combat climate change, researchers find: Latest study underscores how satellites are exposing emission sources around the globe. ‘It’s a harbinger of what’s to come,’ one expert says.

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