Added comment: The authors seem to take the IPCC’s complacent assumptions that reaching zero emissions will be enough to solve the climate crisis. There are strong reasons for thinking the situation is actually far more serious – multiply emphasizing their conclusion that the Canadian Parliament must recognize the need to mount a global war effort if our species is to survive.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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.
Covid-19 total deaths per 100,000 population in each country from WikiMedia Commons. Updated shades and values for 15 Jan using Our World in Data. The maximum value, 555 per 100,000 is a death rate of 0.555%.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Help us leave our only planet in a fit state to give our offspring a bright future!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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.
Covid-19 total deaths per 100,000 population in each country from WikiMedia Commons. Updated shades and values for 15 Jan using Our World in Data. The maximum value, 555 per 100,000 is a death rate of 0.555%.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Help us leave our only planet in a fit state to give our offspring a bright future!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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.
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.
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.
Whether the media frenzy over the deportation of the world’s no. one tennis star and notorious anti-vaxer happened by good luck or was designed by the Australian COALition Government’s gang of fossil fuel puppets and clowns, it has and will serve for many days as a marvelous distraction to obscure the climate emergency from voters attention. The two-year long Government humbug and media blather about how we faced utterly horrible dangers from Covid has worked very well to divert attention from mobilizing any effective action against the genuinely existential climate emergency. Playing the Djoker Card only makes that more effective.
‘While the decision was almost a certainty, the government’s handling of the circumstances around it was not pretty.’ Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
After inexplicably failing to foresee the problem, Scott Morrison was left with only one solution: play the border security card.
Scott Morrison kept Novak Djokovic waiting nine days for the ultimate and inevitable decision to tear up his visa, no doubt ensuring the Serb suffered further for causing trouble the government struggled to handle.
The Djokovic visa snub was released in time for the main TV news bulletins on Friday and, they had hoped, late enough to limit the tennis champ’s lawyers chances of getting a judge to re-hear his case.
While that hope proved unfounded, the government believes a court could only examine the probity of immigration minister Alex Hawke’s use of his power to withdraw a visa, not whether Djokovic deserved to be punted.
However, the damage to Australian tourism and Australian sport caused by a single, stubborn tennis player and a hesitant federal government could require a formal inquiry to sort out.
The government might further explain how Djokovic obtained a visa in the first place, and Tennis Australia might tell sport fans why it welcomed a player – admittedly the best in the world – without insisting he comply with vaccination requirements, or without closely examining his claim for an exemption.
The long wait for Hawke’s announcement was an indication the government wanted to get the visa matter right, something it might have considered more rigorously several weeks ago when the Djokovic problem poked over the horizon.
Morrison has had to juggle complex factors involving big sport, inflamed diplomatic contacts, and his self-burnished record as being untiringly vigilant on Australian borders. [My emphasis]
Again, I ask the question, is this just the COALition’s cack-handed ineptitude or a Scotty crafted distraction to obscure the climate emergency to protect his fossil-fuel patrons?
As an evolutionary biologist, population and molecular biology (i.e., the basis of virology) are major components in my qualification. I am completely confident that at its worst, even with no quarantining and treatment, the Covid pandemic would have killed no more (and probably substantially less) than 5% of humanity, representing only a small blip in human history (comparable to the Spanish Flu 100 years ago). By contrast, global warming genuinely threatens mass extinction of most of Earth’s complex life, including humans. This is a truly existential emergency triggered by the greenhouse gas emissions from burning of hundreds of thousands to millions of years accumulation of fossil carbon that fueled the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago and continues today. Yet the continual emission of government blather and humbug over minor but titillating events and factoids as further amplified by fossil fuel friendly shock jocks consumes so much of the media’s available bandwidth that only the most extreme weather events ever come close to making headlines. There is almost total silence about how these events relate to the bigger picture.
For a hint of the bigger picture of the existentially real emergency we face see:
Take an objective look at the Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison led LNP COALition Governments’ years of denial, lies, fake news, misrepresentations and overall humbug in relation to global warming and the climate emergency it is causing…. Can there be any doubt that the principal interests they are serving are the special ones in the fossil fuel and related industries? The government puppets and clowns have never expressed major concerns relating to the horrific consequences Australian citizens have and are facing as a consequence of the accelerating increases in temperatures and climate extremes. If any concerns have been expressed, none have resulted in substantive actions to control and reduce the damages being caused by the industry’s carbon emissions and other activities. In fact, the puppets work hard impede and prevent action on climate change and to subsidize and protect the industry from citizen-led actions.
However, Australia still is a democratic country where it should be possible to vote the COALition out of power in the upcoming Federal Election. We should be able to replace every last puppet and fellow traveler of the special interests with people who if they are elected are committed to put mobilization and action to resolve the climate emergency as their first priority of business.
Vote Climate One doesn’t tell you how to vote, but our Traffic Light Voting Guide shows who not to vote for and provides practical assistance in ranking all the candidates in each electorate to ensure your preferences don’t flow to the puppets, but rather towards people committed to solving the climate emergency. Also, if you really want to help, we invite you to become a Climate Hero.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The climate emergency is an existential crisis for humans. Bill McKibben explains why the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency even though we risk extinction by ignoring it.
We face an existential crisis of our own making. It threatens to exterminate the human species and most other complex life on our only planet. Yet, day after day, after day, …. the Australian daily press will print multiple pages with nothing but news about the ‘Covid crisis’. And this doesn’t include long articles on the travails of a multi-millionaire anti-vaxer tennis star not being allowed to play his usually tantrum punctuated game at the Australian Open.
At it’s worst, even if nothing is done to minimize its effects, Covid would only kill 1 to 5% of the population. The 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic (see Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics) killed about this many people. Similarly, 100 years later the Covid Pandemic would be hardly noticed as a minor ripple in human history. Even the Black Death around 1350 that may have killed 50% of all humans at the time had no particularly detrimental consequences on the success of our species.
Today, the ultra-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts utterly dire consequences for humanity and our biosphere if we don’t solve the climate crisis. If we fail here, there will be no human history at all, not just a minor blip! Yet the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency Surely, this is the crisis that the press should be covering every day.
Journalism is constructed around finding something new. (I think that’s why they’re called newspapers). Which is a problem when it comes to the climate crisis. In geological terms, we are speeding toward the abyss—we’re pouring carbon into the atmosphere hundreds and thousands of times faster than during the volcanic outpourings that marked the previous great extinction events in earth’s history. But in journalistic terms, it happens just a little too slowly to quite register—climate change today is pretty much the same as climate change yesterday and tomorrow. Over a decade or two it will profoundly change the planet, but a decade is not a unit that really registers for TV, much less Twitter. The climate crisis is at all times the most important thing happening on earth, by far, but there’s rarely a twenty-four-hour period when, by the standards we’re used to, it’s the most important thing happening that particular day. It is inexorable, and inexorability is hard for journalists to capture.
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And so, even though there’s finally skilled and deep coverage of the issue in some corners of the press (I think over the last five years the Times and the Post have done a better job of covering global warming than any other subject, with one remarkable reporting job after another), its scale—the fact that it threatens everything we know and hold dear—hasn’t sunk in. It requires repetition, constant reiteration of the same small set of facts: the planet is heating rapidly, cheap solar and windpower can slow it down, these are being blocked by vested interest. But repetition and constant reiteration are precisely what reporters and editors don’t like doing, hence the constant search for a “new angle.” I follow, for instance, the Twitter feed of Terry Hughes, the Australian marine scientist who has done more than anyone to chart the ongoing realtime destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. If journalism worked better, that destruction—over the course of a very few years, of the largest living structure on the planet—would be a compelling story. But instead, to his constant and correct exasperation, absurd updates about, say, 3-D printers producing new corals help take the edge off the tragedy. They get attention simply because they’re new; the mass death of an enormous ecosystem is the same story as before.
McKibben nails the issues where the 4th Estate (journalism) is concerned, but says nothing (here) about how the press’s selective inattention helps serve the special interests of the patrons and puppet-masters of the 2nd Estate (our government) over the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, here in Australia (and in many other areas of the world) we are cursed by the fact that many of our governing politicians are more concerned to support the selfish short-term special interests of their multi-billionaire patrons rather than the life-time interests of the people who elect them. By default, the press’s easy distraction by trivia, humbug, fake news, misrepresentation, and misdirection so easily created by the special interests and their government lackeys works to hide the real crisis that threatens our survival.
Stopping human greenhouse gas emissions on its own, will probably not be enough. To initiate actual cooling we will probably also have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely sequester it somewhere that it will not simply return to the atmosphere, and increase Earth’s ability to reflect excess solar energy away from the planet.
One of the few ways I can think of to remedy this situation is to take charge of the electoral process to purge our Parliament of puppets working for special interests and replace them with people we have good reasons to think will understand the real dangers that face us, take the climate emergency seriously as a first priority, and begin the work to mobilize society to begin effective actions to reverse global warming. In every electorate, Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you direct your votes away from the puppets and towards people our research suggests will put climate action first where their parliamentary actions are concerned.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
