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Confusion in Australian Energy Policy….

February 10, 2020

This is a two part post. News from the last week helps capture the total confusion and incoherence of Australian energy policy. The first post discusses the incoherences and the second discusses the consequences of those incoherences.

Firstly, Australian electricity prices are falling. This is supposed to be of great concern to the Coalition government, which campaigns heavily on the idea of cheap electricity, and of blaming renewables, or a repealed carbon price, for any price increases…

However the reason the prices appear to be coming down is because of renewables…

In its Quarterly Energy Dynamics report for the fourth quarter of 2019, the Australian Energy Market Operator says spot wholesale electricity prices averaged $A72/megawatt hour (MWh), marking a 19 per cent fall from Q4 2018, and the lowest prices since Q4 2016….

The market operator said that a “key driver” of this fall in spot prices was increased supply from wind farms and solar farms, whose combined output increased by a massive 39 per cent compared to Q4 2018.

The largest fall in price occurred in the renewable rich state of South Australia, “where the average price for the quarter was $68/MWh”

The Energy Security Board, which reports to the Council of Australian Governments is expecting further price reductions:

Looking forward a downward trend in retail prices is noted. Over the period to 2021-22 a decrease in prices of 7.1% (about $97) is expected. A decrease in wholesale prices is the main driver and this decrease is in turn driven by new low-cost renewable generation entering the system.

ESB Health of the National Electricity Market Media Release

There were also a large number of coal outages in 2019 – we have old coal power stations which are unreliable in the heat – so much for the stability of coal power. The system used to collapse quite regularly when the generators where young as well, as many older people can tell you. What is worrying about the breakdowns is not the breakdowns of the old lignite fired power stations, but of the most recent and biggest power station, built in 2007, Kogan Creek. These collapses, and other factors, lead the AEMO to say:

black coal-fired generation around the country decreased by 1,061MW on average compared to Q4 2018, its lowest quarterly level since Q4 2016

So more black coal is not needed all the time, even now. Gas can also be problematic. RenewEconomy reports:

Origin [a major electricity provider] has been hit by a long-term outage at its Mortlake gas generator in Victoria, and at its Eraring coal generator in NSW. These outages alone slashed $44 million from its first half earnings, while a 7 per cent slump in volumes due to the growth of rooftop solar and expired business contracts cut profits by $46 million, and price controls in Victoria and federally cost another $55 million.

Renew Economy 20 Feb 2020

This apparently cost Origin $170 million in electricity earnings, an overall drop of 11% for second half of 2019.

There was so much renewable energy around, that not only did it reduce profits for some corporations, but prices were occasionally negative and some renewable sources were told to curtail production.

[R]enewable energy curtailment across the National Electricity Market – the main grid covering the eastern states – increased to 6 per cent of total output in Q4 2019, the highest amount on record.

With typical realism, former minister Matt Canavan (who left the ministry to support Barnaby Joyce’s leadership bid) declared that “Renewables are the dole bludgers of the energy system, they only turn up to work when they want to“. The reality is that they have to sometimes be laid off to keep the coal energy industry in business. He continued to argue that Australia apparently needs coal for our remaining manufacturing. Supporting manufacturing has not been something the Coalition has been that interested in for a while.

As the article quoted above states, it is close to “impossible to name a single federal Coalition MP that recognises the potential of wind and solar”, even with the latest research from the CSIRO and AEMO stating that renewables with storage are cheaper than coal, and far cheaper than nuclear. Some other research suggests storage and “dispatchability” could potentially no longer be a problem; a report from the ANU states that there are around 22,000 potential pumped hydro storage sites in Australia, and Professor Blakers from the ANU Research School of Engineering says:

“Australia needs only a tiny fraction of these sites for pumped hydro storage – about 450 GWh of storage – to support a 100 per cent renewable electricity system…”

There are large scale plans to sell renewable energy generated in Australia to Singapore, or to generate hydrogen gas and export it instead of methane (especially in South Australia), but the Federal government appears to ignore these ideas, or realities. Coal is still its god, and needs taxpayer support. So it is not surprising that:

The Australian Coalition government has announced a new $4 million grant to pursue a new 1GW coal fired generator in north Queensland in one of the first acts of the new pro-coal resources minister Keith Pitt.

Taxpayers’ money is being given to Shine Energy to conduct a feasibility study for a proposed 1GW HELE coal plant at Collinsville in Queensland.

Let’s ignore the probability that Northern Queensland already has more energy than it needs.

“The problem is it makes little commercial sense to build more generation in Queensland at the moment. The state is in oversupply. Queensland’s 13GW of conventional generation has been augmented over the last decade by more than 5GW of new rooftop solar and large-scale renewables. There’s more on the way”.

Australian Financial Review

Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute commented:

there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that marginal electorates are the cheapest or best places to build new power stations. …

The former resources minister Matt Canavan even pulled out the schoolyard defence of ‘they started it’, arguing on Twitter that: “I see some are saying that we should not help coal-fired power stations provide jobs because we should leave it to the market. Well if that’s the view be consistent and argue against the billions we give to renewables every year!”….

First, no federal government has spent billions per year on subsidies for renewables. None. While it’s true that the government mandates that minimum amounts of renewable energy are supplied to the grid, such obligations don’t cost the budget a cent.

Australian Financial Review 24 Feb 2020

Denniss also points out that:

Only one coal-fired power station is being built anywhere in Western Europe, North America or Australia; a German plant that is nine years overdue. Even in Trump’s America, no coal-fired power stations are under construction.

as above

What this grant to Shine shows is that nobody is prepared to even look at building coal power in Australia without subsidy. Just as Adani is constantly demanding subsidy for its coal mine (free water, royalty holidays, train lines, apart from straight money gifts), and this mine is unlikely to benefit any Australians at all, and likely to damage a few.

We now know:

The only physical trace of Shine Energy, which wants to build a $2bn coal-fired power station in north Queensland, is a small post office box next to an Asian grocer at a suburban Brisbane shopping complex…. 

Company documents show Shine Energy is worth a nominal $1,000 on paper. It has no registered financial obligations, and no physical office at its listed address.

On its website, Shine describes its business as providing “renewable energy solutions”, but the company could offer no evidence that it or its directors…. has ever previously worked on an energy generation project.

The Guardian 29 Feb 2020

Superficially, this looks like a strange company to entrust with the task.

The PM justified all of this by saying “We listen to all Australians and we listen to Australians right across the country, not just those in the inner city.” I suspect they only listen to Australians who sponsor them, or agree with them, after all “60% of a sample of 1,083 voters believes Australia should be doing more” and 64% of another poll see climate change as the prime critical threat to Australia, and most of them think we should act even if it involves significant costs. Quite a few people, including Coalition voters, think their lack of climate policy is problematic.

And of course this spending on coal is being justified as it will “help drive down prices for businesses and their customers.” The Prime Minister apparently said: “we won’t be bullied into higher taxes and higher electricity prices.” Barnaby Joyce argued that the government needs to ensure that “the poor people can get affordable power, and that we can get dignity in people’s lives.”

However, prices are already going down without coal, and coal emissions will have disastrous effects on poorer people in fire and flood zones – they won’t be able to afford the insurance hikes. No one in the Coalition seems at all concerned about the cost to the ecology in terms of climate change. The future costs of the loss of agriculture, loss of water and through storm, flood and fire damage appears completely opaque to them. It does not count. Effectively fossil fuels are being subsidised by ignoring the costs that will fall on ordinary people and the economy in general.

We already have problems of too much energy for the market, subsidised coal will not solve that problem, and if it is more costly to build, then without even more taxpayer subsidy, it will cost more and pollute more, and take more water and damage climate even more. Coal is a loose/loose situation.

And then we learn that:

Renewable Energy Partners has been given $2 million in funds from the Coalition government to advance a feasibility study into a project that would combine 1.5GW of pumped hydro, with seven hours storage, along with up to 1.3GW of solar PV, 800MW of wind energy and a 200MW hydrogen electrolyser, fuelled by the green energy sources.

The CEO states:

“Our initial studies have already shown that our site is well suited for solar generation, the topography is ideal for the construction of a large-scale wind farm and a recent study by the Australian Energy Market Operator has confirmed the need for a large pumped hydro facilities in North Queensland, the Urannah Renewable Hub is the battery of the north,” 

There is no evidence of coherency in this policy. The government could strongly point out that they are trying to find the best system, by linking or comparing the projects, but they don’t and probably can’t.

The government has also apparently started leaking that it would prefer to “favour technology over taxation” because, according to the PM:

“currently no one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs, won’t put up your electricity prices, and won’t impact negatively on jobs in the economies of rural and regional Australia.” 

PM Transcript 18 Feb 2020

We have seen electricity prices seem to be coming down and the CSIRO working with other people such as the National Bank and other businesses (so this is not some ‘crazy’ left wing report) have argued:

Australia faces a Slow Decline if it takes no action on the most significant economic, social and environmental challenges. But, if these challenges are tackled head on, Australia can look forward to a positive Outlook Vision. This could mean higher GDP per capita, ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, strong economic growth and energy affordability, and more liveable major cities

CSIRO Australian National Outlook 2019

They go on to suggest that this could lead to 2.75–2.8% annual growth in GDP (ok there are possible problems with this, but from the Coalition’s point of view this is good), 90% wages growth by 2060, and $42–84 billion increase in returns to landholders (Executive Summary p.9). This is much better than the option of failing to “adequately address the global and domestic issues, resulting in declining economic, social and environmental outcomes.” So the Prime Minister can’t really say that nobody has told him that going renewable would be good for the economy and the country.

The PM continues his argument by suggesting that:

There’s a lot of people at the moment wanting us to put more taxes on people to solve problems. I don’t believe higher taxes are the solution to our problems. 

PM Transcript 18 Feb 2020

He does not say who these people are, but another commentator in the not leftwing Australian Financial Review remarks:

far from being mutually exclusive, technology and a carbon price can be complementary in driving down emissions. …

without a market-based carbon price to incentivise lower emissions technology and private sector research and development, the government will resort to heavy-handed interventions to try to spur new emissions-reduction technology. It’s remarkable that on climate and energy policies, a Liberal government favours big government picking winners instead of market principles.

Australian Financial Review 22 Feb 2020

In a later speech the Prime Minister seems to assume that:

“hazard reduction for keeping people safe as, frankly, as important as emissions reduction when it comes to addressing these climate issues…. And, you know, rural and regional Australia is tough. They’re resilient. And it’s a great place to be.”

PM Transcript 17 Feb 2020

You almost certainly cannot reduce the hazard from 3-4 degree temperature rises and and sea level rises, enough to keep people safe.

Then we hear there are:

Record levels of investment in renewable technologies, beating our Kyoto emissions reduction target by 411 million tonnes. 

PM Transcript 17 Feb 2020 b

Ignoring the Kyoto accounting trick [2] [3] [4] [5] and its effects, in this statement, the government, with Labor support, are running down the finances of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which helps fund the establishment of renewable energy systems and research into renewable energy. ARENA expects to exhaust its funds by the end of the year. This is simultaneous boasting of spending on renewables and inhibiting that spending. It is not coherent. Unless of course, by technology, they do not mean renewables, or greenhouse gas free technologies.

Indeed we have to assume that incoherency is the standard response of Australian politicians when faced with climate change. The Labor deputy leader responded to all this, by saying:

“I absolutely support coal mining jobs and coal miners, and the role that that plays within our economy, and it will continue to play a role for a long time to come,… [we should] acknowledge the significant role that coal miners play and the communities play within our economy” [but] “A Labor government is not going to put a cent into subsidising coal-fired power. And that is the practical question as to whether or not it happens”

Yes look after the workers, but don’t poison the planet. This is not a difficult idea; the climate movement has been talking about “just transitions” for a long time. A few days after this, Labor leader Anthony Albanese said, in response to questions about coal fired energy plants:

You may as well ask me if I support unicorns…. I don’t think there’s a place for coal-fired power plants in Australia, full stop… The truth is no private sector operation will touch a new coal-fired power plant with a barge pole

Canberra Times

However,

Business and industry groups are urging the government to commit to zero carbon emissions by 2050…. Mr Albanese refused to give a clear answer when pressed on whether Labor supported their calls, saying his party would cement their climate policies closer to the next federal election in 2022.

same as above

Later Mr Albanese objected to the proposal to give Shine Energy taxpayer’s money, saying:

“they are using $4m of taxpayers funds to give to a private operation that has no record of building a new power station anywhere”

However, he went on to support the Adani mine saying:

“It’s a good thing those jobs have been created. I support jobs regardless of where they are [and, he supports] and the economic activity that will arise from them…..Our priority is jobs and jobs here in Queensland, and we make no apologies for that.”

The Guardian

As I have argued on several occasions there are not that many jobs in the Adani mine, and there are severe disputes about the economic flow on benefits, especially granted the royalty holidays, taxpayer subsidies and risk of destroying water flows. It might be cheaper just to use the subsidies to start new local industries in Queensland to provide real jobs.

Late last year Albanese also said:

“the proposal that we immediately stop exporting coal would damage our economy and would not have any environmental benefit”.

Brisbane Times

Nobody I am aware of, is arguing that we “immediately stop exporting coal,” so this is not a real point, but lots of people are arguing that we should not open new coal mines or expand the coal exports. This is because, climate change is a global systemic problem. It does not matter where the fossil fuels are burnt, they affect, and worsen, Australia’s climate, causing job losses in other parts of the country.

In an interview on the ABC’s Insiders, after the policy speech, Albanese agreed there was still likely to be coal mining and export in Australia after 2050. “[The target is] net, that’s the point.” He said that exported coal was not counted in Australia’s greenhouse gas budget. “You don’t measure the emissions where the original product comes from.” This avoidance of responsibility is despite him recognising the targets are economy wide, and not cutting back emissions affects the world.

If Labor supports the mining and burning of coal, they do not have an effective climate policy, they (at best) only have a ‘get Australia out of coal fired energy policy’.

Conservative Independent Zali Steggall has proposed legislation which would enforced zero net emissions by 2050, and give a series of targets on the way, but Albanese appears not to be keen to support her move, giving the excuse that the Government would not allow debate, leaving his climate change spokesman Mark Butler to try and say they would engage with the possibility of supporting the proposed legislation. Later Albanese said:

the world must achieve net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050…. [so that] the amount of pollution released into the atmosphere is no greater than the amount we absorb which can occur through agriculture, forestry and other means.

Speech: Leadership in a New Climate 21 Feb 2020

Nothing in this speech, or in what he has said elsewhere, gives any interim targets to get to “net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050”. This indicates little planning, or expectation of planning, and the apparent refusal to take on Steggall’s interim targets suggest this lack, is part of the policy.

He continued:

We pride ourselves on always pulling our weight. And we have seen climate change be a factor in our devastating bushfires. We could see it, smell it, even touch it. Our amazing continent is particularly vulnerable. So we have a lot to lose. But the good news is we also have a lot to gain. Action on climate change will mean more jobs, lower emissions and lower energy prices….in recent months we had some foreshadowing of the costs of inaction.

Speech: Leadership in a New Climate 21 Feb 2020

So, we are told both that action on climate must be sacrificed for jobs and produces jobs. And that we can sell climate change elsewhere and suffer here, and not suffer here. Labor is not coherent either.

One problem with neoliberalism, and Australian politics is primarily neoliberal, is that because it only recognises the virtues of profit, and preferably profit by established companies, it looks like corruption. Neoliberals will always support established corporate power and give it handouts, but they don’t have to be bought, they just do it anyway.

Then I guess there is the problem of existential crisis, and the difficulty of recognising that we cannot do what we have previously done, as it will harm us. This may well be affecting politicians and many high level business people, and if so then that leaves us in a storm without a rudder, clinging to what worked in the past and destroys us now.

The next post discusses the consequences of this confusion

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Problems with Shale Oil in the US

February 9, 2020

This is a summary of a series of blog posts by another writer. He is trying to sell you ‘precious metals’ as a hedge against economic collapse, but his analysis of a coming crisis in US shale oil production seems highly plausible…

He suggests that activity in the world’s economy has been driven by cheap energy availability, and this has largely been provided by cheap US shale oil.

Nowadays, it appears that Peak Mainstream oil is already here. Each year the world needs to replace 3 million barrels per day of supply no longer provided from mature and declining oil fields at the same time as meeting growth in demand for oil. Any growth in contemporary world oil consumption was allowed by the US shale.

However, the decline in US shale oil production is even more dramatic than that for mature mainstream oil wells. The top 4 U.S. shale oil fields have suffered a 44% decline in their rate of production in less than a year, between Dec 2018 to Oct 2019.

It will take a massive amount of investment spending and thousands of new wells to offset these losses in production from shale oil, and keep the output stable. As the easily available shale oil has by now been taken (as businesses generally go for the easy targets first), it is probable that new shale oil will also require a lot more energy to retrieve. The ratio of Energy Return to Energy Input (EREI) will be much lower, so overall energy availability will be lower.

The spending and oil output is almost certainly ungeneratable, and unsustainable, in any kind of financial system. This situation is made worse as the author has argued elsewhere, because shale oil has largely survived on borrowed money, with investors hoping for long term stable production which has not eventuated. There will likely be large scale losses of this borrowed money, which could start a general financial collapse.

Lack of production also means that oil based energy collapse is extremely likely, and this will probably reinforce the financial collapse.

It is also likely to make the necessary transition into renewables harder, although it might ‘help’ through unplanned and catastrophic degrowth.

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Barnaby Joyce on Climate Technologies

February 7, 2020

Barnaby Joyce commented in writing about climate policy after he failed to win Nationals leadership. The cause of the challenge probably had something to do with the current leader recognising that more should be done about reducing global emissions. His comments demonstrate how people can avoid climate change through technological fantasy. Mr. Joyce wrote:

If you want a macro climate policy to show the world our leadership on reducing carbon emissions then we must bring in nuclear power

Will he suggest a nuclear reactor for New England? He could even put it on his property, given that he is facing extended droughts, which don’t have anything to do with climate change of course.

But probably not and there is no water for cooling anyway. I sometimes get a bit tired of Right wing politicians boosting nuclear power solely as a tool to hit the ‘irrational’ Left with. They never actually agitate for Nuclear power in their local areas, or push for it in Parliament, even when they have the numbers to get it passed easily, or paid for – assuming anyone wanted to build it. It’s just a piece of rhetoric. Nuclear power is expensive and requires taxpayer subsidies, such as fixed high energy prices, to be economic, as with Hinkley Point in the UK.

The Vice-Chair of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group states:

The WNISR2019 paints a picture of an international nuclear industry with substantial challenges. Remarkably, over the past two years, the largest historic nuclear builder Westinghouse and its French counterpart AREVA went bankrupt. Trend indicators in the report suggest that the nuclear industry may have reached its historic maxima: nuclear power generation peaked in 2006, the number of reactors in operation in 2002, the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix in 1996, the number of reactors under construction in 1979, construction starts in 1976. As of mid-2019, there is one unit less in operation than in 1989….

In 2018, ten nuclear countries generated more power with renewable than with fission energy. In spite of its ambitious nuclear program, China produced more power from wind alone than from nuclear plants. In India, in the fiscal year to March 2019, not only wind, but for the first time solar out-generated nuclear, and new solar is now competitive with existing coal plants in the market. In the European Union, renewables accounted for 95 percent of all new electricity generating capacity added in the past year

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019

While nuclear appears generally safe, the possibility of catastrophic accident exists. Although people argue over exactly how severe Chernobyl [1], [2] and Fukushima were, their problems continue.

At the moment, it is only in fantasy that nuclear is the fuel of the future. If you want nuclear then commit to building it, and be prepared to fight for it, but don’t ignore the problems, or its apparent decline.

Mr. Joyce also argues that we need:

…development of the most efficient coal power technology that uses the least units of coal for the greatest output of power. Wanting to develop the most efficient coal fired power technology in the world is not disavowing the realities of climate change it is actually something that could be provided to substantially curtail emissions.

Emissions would be better curtailed by not emitting them, or by committing to not emitting them, rather than by cutting them by small fractions, and committing to emitting for longer than we would do otherwise.

The figures for improved coal “high efficiency, low emissions (HELE) technologies such as supercritical coal, ultra-supercritical coal or integrated gasification combined cycle” are not that impressive, according to Alan Finkel’s Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market, from 2017. It compares the emissions for (page 203):

  • Subcritical brown coal which emits 1,140 kg CO2-e/ MWh
  • Subcritical black coal which emits 940 kg CO2-e/ MWh,
  • Supercritical black coal (HELE) which emits 860 kg CO2-e/ MWh,
  • Ultra-supercritical brown coal which emits 845 kg CO2-e/ MWh
  • Ultra-supercritical black coal (HELE) which emits 700 kg CO2-e/ MWh

The best of these, is not a huge improvement; it is of the order of 75% of normal at the best.

However, despite the fact that the new coal is still heavily polluting, the main problem here, as with nuclear energy, is that nobody in Australia seems to be interested in developing the “most efficient coal fired power technology in the world”. We hurled money at the coal industry to develop useful carbon capture and storage and they did close to nothing. Well, as the Coalition said at the time, they spent the money on a few dinners, but that’s about all.

Sadly unless evidence is provided otherwise we have to assume that clean efficient coal is not going to happen. It is also unlikely to happen because coal energy is not competitive anyway. No one will build coal fired energy in Australia without government subsidies. And that is for bog-standard coal fired energy, which can be built easily. If the builders are going to develop new efficient forms of coal based energy that will take money, research and time. It will, in other words, be likely to cost more, and be even less competitive.

Then we have the problem of coal taking away water supplies in a period which is likely to feature longer and harsher droughts. Adani for example, has been promised unlimited ground water. I’m not sure why our governments are encouraging this, but they are. If Renewables polluted, and took, this much water, it is extremely likely that Mr. Joyce would notice.

Even if we were to talk about gas, as with the current efforts to force more gas drilling, we still have emissions, we still have leaks, and we still risk water contamination.

We have to recognise that the public acceptance of wind towers on the hill in front of their veranda is gone, and the public dissonance on that issue is as strong as any other environmental subject. We have to understand that there is no sure thing in a political debate.  If wind towers are a moral good and environmentally inoffensive why can’t we have them just off the beach at Bondi so we can feel good about ourselves while going for a surf? It would cause a riot.

This again is a rhetorical fantasy, aimed at separating country people from city people. Choice is rarely offered in development. No one has offered us wind turbines on Bondi Beach. I’ve no idea whether there would be enough wind there, or whether they would be buildable there, but why not? Why not give the Inner West a choice between Wind turbines and the Westconnex tollroad? We don’t get the choice; we have to have a toll way which makes walking to some places difficult, that kills people with pollution and unfiltered exhaust stacks. We have to have people’s homes shattered by vibration. We have to have people thrown out of their houses, without enough compensation to buy back into the area. We have to have cars rat-running our streets. We have to have constant infrasound. We have to pay extra to travel, and the fees will constantly rise faster than wages. If we are talking about appearance, so far Westconnex is a lot less attractive than a group of Wind turbines, and has involved massive tree-felling. It would be nice to have the choice. Cities may be privileged but residents rarely get a choice between developments. And he must know that.

With more imagination, we could think about encouraging the installation of ‘vertical’ or ‘helix’ wind turbines on the rooves of office buildings. These don’t take up much space, don’t need sunlight and add to the free electricity of the building. Sure they don’t make as much power as standard turbines, but they fit in and could help diminish emissions. We also do have, and could have more, solar farms on rooftops for the same purpose.

If we had the right legislation, then people with an energy farm on their rooftops could sell directly to other people. At the moment, this seems more or less forbidden (in NSW at any rate), and it is obstructive to the development of renewables, and obstructive to development of a market for energy. Even local councils can’t use the roof of one building to provide power for another of their buildings, even if its across the road. They have to sell their power to the grid operator, and then buy it back from the grid operator at the standard price, not the cheaper price of their own generation. For some reason, this does not appear to be noticed by governments, and certainly is not up for debate.

He states that “We have to understand that there is no sure thing in a political debate,” yet he apparently knows some things so well that he can be certain that wind turbines at Bondi would cause a riot. Who by? Why would the government, or his party, take any more notice of them than they take of farmers protesting against coal mines and coal seam gas? The statements are pure rhetoric with no actual references to reality.

Do you want a 3000 hectare solar farm next door to you? Lots of glass and aluminium neatly in rows pointing at the sun. I am not sure others will want to buy that view off you when you go to sell your house!

Would Mr Joyce like to live next to a coal fired power station, or a coal mine? I don’t know. Perhaps he would, as he likes them so much, and there is no accounting for taste. It would clearly be hypocritical for him not to welcome them to his neighbourhood.

Again, why is the issue of pollution from coal, highways and massive building developments, just discounted as a problem in these fantasies? Will people who now have highways running past their front doors not be bothered by that, or not loose property value, because of that. At least solar panels are quiet, and don’t poison you. His statements are ingenuous at best.

The weather has determined the political climate and everyone is manipulating the recent calamitous events to push their own particular barrow.

It would certainly appear he is. Anything to avoid the issue of why the Government ignored the warnings about the likelihood of intense fires, and cut back funding for fire fighters etc (I admit that was not Joyce’s doing, but its his Coalition that refused to listen and cut the funds). There is also the issue of why, after years of the Coalition running away from climate change, we ordinary people have to adapt to the consequences, so they can continue to sell fossil fuels and make it worse.

Whether there is unanimity of people’s political views on the fire ground or feeding stock in drought as to what we can do to change the weather is as unlikely as to unanimity to their favourite song.

That is true of economic policy as well, but he does not seem to have much hesitation in pushing the neoliberal line, even though many of us think the song is total crap. Sometimes politicians simply have to do the right thing for the future, and in this case, however frightening, that means taking on the fossil fuel industry and the mining industry.

When politicians do stand behind a global climate policy the only certainty is that it will be the policy that has the least direct effect on them. Wind farms are for your backyard not mine, zero emission nuclear is for France, only support banning coal mines if the coal mines aren’t in your electorate, and try not to get caught on a sticky question of what replaces our nation’s largest export. There is a desire for intermittent power generation such as solar but an inability to afford the pump hydro to make it dispatchable. Simple answers are generally wrong.

We will wait for him to agitate for Nuclear power for New England. We will wait for him to challenge the mining industry and support farmers faced with dust and water problems because of that industry. We will wait for his party to suggest spending money on pumped hydro or other cheaper storage systems, rather than money (or blackmail) for coal and gas.

The simple answer, if you want to ignore climate change and its consequences, is more coal and more coal exports. But “Simple answers are generally wrong.” Mr. Joyce’s answers depend on fantasies that mining and burning fossil fuels has no cost, and that it is easy for Australians to adapt to their consequences of those costs. Consequently, he does not offer any solution for our problems at all. None, except blaming other people. He just wants to ignore the problem and keep on as he has always done.

He apparently does not realise that the trajectory we are on, is extremely likely to mean more drought, so we cannot afford to pollute water by mining, or lose water through mining, or through processing the products of mining. The water used in mines, should be charged for, at least at the rates farmers pay, and should be cleaned up after use.

The current trajectory of water depletion is likely to mean that many country towns will collapse through lack of water, through dying farms and through prolonged heat that humans cannot bear easily. Renewables might help to give the towns some way of existing. That requires some forethought, about extending the grid and so on, but these are things that can be done easily, as opposed to somehow make coal burning happen with much lower emissions, or nuclear power appear without political will.

So 2020 has started with quite some colour politically and tragedy nationally. The art form of politics will be the cogent response that the parliament can show the Australian people in two years time.

We have not seen a vaguely cogent response from Parliament as yet, and it is not sounding like we will get one, other than a cogent cover up of rorting, and false documents, and a series of fantasies about technologies with no harm.

See also what he did at Christmas….

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Current Republican Election Strategy and Climate

February 5, 2020

Apparent Republican strategy for the US elections, based on what has happened so far.

1) Both sides are equally bad.

Therefore, it is not really that bad if the Republicans win, because after all the Democrats are equally bad. Whether you are a old-style Conservative Republican, or Leftish, and Trump wins, well the other side would be as bad as he is. So be happy.

Unfortunately, while the ‘other side’ may not be perfect, they are not as corrupt as Trump. They are not encouraging destruction of people’s lives and environment. They are not in favour of people dying because they are poor. They don’t encourage poisoning by manufacture. They are not destroying established procedure and convention.

2) Tell Democrats if we can’t have Bernie or Tulsi we might as well have Trump.

There is certainly no reason to vote for someone else who might have a chance of defeating Trump. Remember, both sides are equally bad, and stay pure.

3) Criticise Democrats more than Republicans.

This reminds people of how bad the Democrats are, and skates over how bad the Republicans are. If people criticised both equally then people might come to realise both sides are not equally bad.

4) Discuss Foreign Policy Endlessly.

Because on this issue both sides are closest to being equally bad, and you can berate the Democrats endlessly about warmongering. People can also ignore Republican warmongering, despite the fact that the last 15 years of US wars were started by the President Bush and his allies against all the evidence, and because they wanted a war against Iraq before they were elected and long before 9/11 which was their excuse. Forget also that the media at that time ran extensively with the “if you oppose the war you are anti-American” and pretend Trump was opposed to the War before it started…. 

5) Repeat the idea that Democrats are warmongers.

While telling Righteous audiences, you are spending more on the military than anyone has ever done, and that you support ‘our troops’, and US military strength and the other side does not. Never mention that most spending on the military goes to corporate players who object to government support for unworthy poorer people.

6) Support free markets.

Economic problems are always the fault of the Governments interfering with the free market, not because of the ‘free market’ itself, or the ways that corporations take over both markets and politicians, for their own benefit. Keep those corporate donations coming.

7) Tell Right Audiences the Democrats are unreconstructed Communists and Socialists, while telling Left Audiences the Democrats are Pro-Capitalist Neoliberals.

No one will notice the contradiction.

8) Persuade people that Trump is a victim of the ‘Deep State.’

As many people are suspicious of the State and business, this has wide appeal, and it distracts from Republican tactics in the impeachment. Don’t point out how Trump is enforcing parts of the Deep State to make them stronger and more corrupt, and to destroy any checks on his power.

9) Use the State to suppress dissent, and stack electoral procedures.

Exclude people from voting, if you think they may not vote for you. Make it hard for people you think won’t vote for you to vote. Define climate protestors and anti-fascists as terrorists. Have them under constant surveillance. Make sure the voting machines can be hacked and don’t have a non-electronic back up. Complain the other side is equally bad. Complain the Russians are supporting the Democrats, but don’t check Russian activities, because they are not supporting Democrats.

10) Climate is irrelevant

Don’t ever point out that if we don’t do something about climate change now, we are probably stuffed. We cannot wait another 5 years to start action, or to stop making it worse. Compared to Trump, all Democrats have a climate change policy. More to the point, non of them have a “make climate change worse” policy like Trump. Pretend fossil fuels generate jobs, and any Climate policy would be an impingement on people’s declining liberty.

Summary

Alarm people about irrelevancies, and don’t ever talk about their real worries or the likely corporate causes of those worries, and pretend to the Left there is no real difference to the two sides, and to the Right the Democrats are really socialist.

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Q&A on the Bushfires

February 4, 2020

An important TV discussion. If the owners want it taken down, then please ask….

See the original unabridged version at:

https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-03-02/11906192

HAMISH MACDONALD Compere
Let me bring in Michael Mann here. Was there sufficient warning to government in Australia, in your view, that something very different was going to happen this summer, enough perhaps to prompt them to act earlier than they did?

MICHAEL MANN, US Climate scientist
There are climate scientists who were telling us that because of the behaviour of something called the Indian Ocean Dipole – some of you may have heard about this – we can actually predict something about what’s likely to happen. It impacts the monsoon, rainfall patterns. It’s part of why it was so dry, why the winter was dry and the summer has been dry. So, yes, we knew this was coming. One would expect that policymakers should have used that information, used the information provided by the great scientists here in Australia…..

VICTOR STEFFENSON Indigenous fire expert
there’s been incredible awareness of Indigenous fire management for the general public of Australia – but not only in Australia, but the world. That is looking in now, that we need to have change. And we need change right across the board. This is not dissecting the problems with our environment or the disasters that we’re having now and going, “Well, it’s all about not managing the country. Oh, no, it’s not about climate change.” It’s everything above. It’s all about all of it.
And we need the scientists to help us to reduce the emissions and we need to get communities and people out on country and learning about the environment and reconnecting with landscapes again, just the way Aboriginal people have done for thousands of years…..

MICHAEL MANN
Look, Australia, this is a message to the rest of the world. Climate change has arrived. Dangerous climate change has arrived now. How bad are we willing to let it get?….

JIM MOLAN Coalition senator – ex-military
I certainly accept that the climate is changing. It has changed and it will change. And what it’s producing is hotter and drier weather and a hotter and drier country…. As to whether it is human-induced climate change, my mind is open. But this is… not the key question. The key question is, what are you going to do about it?

Michael might say that the science is settled. And I respect, very much respect, scientific opinion, but every day across my desk comes enough information for me to say that there are other opinions.

HAMISH MACDONALD
So what is that information? What’s the actual information you have?

JIM MOLAN
Oh, I see so much that… You know, I’m a very practical man, Hamish. I’m going to get out there and do things, which… You see, the one thing that…

HAMISH MACDONALD
Sorry, but… Could you answer the question…

JIM MOLAN
Hang on, wait till I answer. The one thing that I agree with, Hamish…

HAMISH MACDONALD
What’s the information… No, what’s the information?

JIM MOLAN
The one thing that I agree with Michael is that climate change, and our policies in relation to climate change, are designed to mitigate the risk. It’s very difficult to mitigate the risk. You can go back and look for the last 100 years how or why it started. If we can’t mitigate risk, then we’ve got to adapt. And that’s the key to what we’re doing. And we are adapting.

HAMISH MACDONALD
Senator, I’m sorry, but you haven’t answered the question, which is, you said you get information across your desk every day which leads you to doubt, or be open-minded about the science.

JIM MOLAN
Yes, I am open-minded about it.

HAMISH MACDONALD
What is that information?

JIM MOLAN
It’s a range of information, which goes… It’s a range of…

HAMISH MACDONALD
I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this. What is the evidence that you are relying on?

JIM MOLAN
I’m not relying on evidence, Hamish. I am saying…

MICHAEL MANN
You said it. You said it. You said it.

JIM MOLAN
But this is why my mind is open. I would love to be convinced one way or the other. But to be prudent, what the government is doing is it’s got a climate… an emissions reduction policy. And it is a good policy. And it will mitigate risk to the maximum that it can. And where risk cannot be mitigated, it will adapt. And that’s what we’ve got to work on, is the adaption.

MICHAEL MANN
Come on now, mate.

JIM MOLAN
And he’s an American.

MICHAEL MANN
Now, you know, you should keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. When it comes to this issue, when it comes to human-caused climate change, it’s literally the consensus of the world’s scientists that it’s caused by human activity. Now, you sometimes hear the talking point from contrarians, from the Murdoch media… that maybe it’s natural. Natural factors would be pushing us in the opposite direction right now.

JIM MOLAN
And we’re into name-calling already, Michael. Well done.

MICHAEL MANN
Well, no, I didn’t call you names…. I just made a point about open-mindedness….

Scepticism is an important thing in science. But there has to be scepticism on both sides. It can’t be one-sided scepticism, where you’re literally…

JIM MOLAN
Oh, absolutely agree.

MICHAEL MANN
…rejecting the overwhelming evidence, based on the flimsiest of ideas that you can’t even define…..

KRISTY McBAIN Mayor of Bega (which was affected by the fires)
Can I just bring it back to Serena’s question?…. Serena’s question was, is this the new norm? Jeez, I hope not. Serena lives in Brogo, a heavily timbered area in the Bega Valley. Her parents… And she’s got a number of brothers and sisters. She is a smart, intelligent, capable young woman, who is now the school captain of Bega High. And we have fabulous schoolkids right across the Bega Valley. Her point is, what is going to change into the future for us?
And what I see constantly is this generational debate or a political partisan debate on climate change. Most people I speak to are over it. They don’t care what one says and what the other one doesn’t say or, “The sky is blue,” “No, it’s pale blue.” Nobody cares. It’s now about what are the actions going to be? How do we mitigate? How do we adapt? How do we make ourselves resilient as communities to it?…

Melissa, your question earlier, about you being affected, your business being affected, everybody up and down the east coast can relate to you. Because we have evacuated 90,000 tourists from an area. There are flame-impacted businesses and there are flame-impacted farms and there are flame-impacted industries but there is not one person that isn’t affected by this disaster that’s unfolded.

ANDREW CONSTANCE NSW MP for Bega
…. God, I’m hoping that they can be unified in a response to how we get through this. So, to Serena’s point about this being the new norm, we can’t afford for this to be the new norm. Nobody can….

We can’t sort of have royal commissions and commissions of inquiry if we’re not engaging with those within community to understand exactly whether there is enough fire trucks in that community,… in our lane, there’s five homes that have been flattened by the fires, and one of them was a mate of mine, Steven Hillier, who… Three beautiful girls. He came home at five o’clock having fought fires in other communities to find his house gone. And Steven, to his credit, he threw his chooks in the front of the ute, we had a beer, and then he went and told Mandy. But guess what he did the next day – straight back out fighting fires. And so many of those RFS volunteers who did that, who did lose everything, did exactly that. So, I think there is a need to talk to those types of people within local communities to do that

KRISTY McBAIN
Yeah, look, over the darkest days of those fires, we had 40 hours of darkness. How do I explain to my kids that it’s actually 10:30 in the morning, and you should be out of bed and eating breakfast? And when I went there, they were all huddled around an iPad, and I said, “What are you doing?” And they were laughing, and they said, “Is it too early to be up?” And I had to say, “Oh, look, come on, I’ll make you breakfast,” and make a joke out of it, but it’s very difficult in those really, really dark days of the Bega Valley when there was 40 hours of darkness, or the skies were, you know, a red or a pink for days on end.

Or you’ve got smoke… My middle son is an asthmatic, carrying asthma puffers everywhere and making sure we had enough supplies when we knew we were going to be cut off… from every road access. It’s really hard as a parent to manage your kids through that. I hold hope that, after what we’ve been through over the last five, six, seven, eight months now, that genuine good debate will happen and the politicians and leaders of our country will come together in a consensus to actually move us forward, because if that doesn’t happen, then there’s probably going to be more days where we’re going to be grappling with red, dark skies, or 40 hours of darkness.
So, I hold hope that this starts… this is the start of a big conversation, good genuine debate where people aren’t in camps, that everybody comes to the table with an open mind, prepared to make sure that the future is much better.

 

 

 

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More than just ideas….

February 3, 2020

While changes in our ideas, and our systems of ideas, are essential for transition to a new ecological society; by themselves new ideas will not be enough. We need to build practices and institutions that will support, encourage and house those ideas. This post suggests some of what may be needed beyond the change in ideas.

New practices and institutions need:

a) Non-destructive economic power and self-sufficiency. While organisations can accept donations from other institutions, they cannot depend upon them, as that tends to direct efforts to keeping sponsors on side. Economic power and practice should be exemplary. That is, it should show people the way forward. It should demonstrate that economic activity does not have to involve ecological destruction and pollution, and that it can promote ecological health and regeneration. It should be attractive.

b) To develop cosmologies more useful and appealing than the ‘profit is the only good’ command of neoliberalism (‘interconnection’, ‘complexity’, ‘surprise’, ‘co-operation and competition’, are useful terms in this venture). Cosmologies should make neoliberal cosmologies seem obviously idiotic – which they are, so this is not hard.

Understandings and cosmologies always have to be tested through interaction with the world. We cannot understand things completely in advance of such interaction. We have to be prepared to modify our understanding to accord with our experience. We learn through experience. It is easy to be mislead by desires, hopes and the agreement of valued others. This contrasts with neoliberal understandings which are supposed to be certain, are imposed upon the world, and are held to be ‘true’ despite experience to the contrary.

Any cosmology will face problems, and these problems should not be suppressed, they need to be recognized and explored, and people be open to solutions, if possible. In a complex system, politics should be largely experimental.

c) Ethics is an important part of cosmology. It demonstrates how we think the universe works and should work. The ethics of the new ecological co-operation should probably promote freedom, equitability, and recognition of interdependence and the strength we gain from other beings (human and non-human). We may need to promote the idea of ethical complexity, and of ethical guidelines rather than rules in order to deal with the complexity of reality, and of our lack of complete predictivity. An Action can be good, but we need to check its results, rather than assume they are good in advance, and modify accordingly. Ethics needs to make clear what is wrong with the neoliberal establishment and its hangers on, more than it needs absolute agreement on anything. Ethical dispute is a sign of ethical awareness.

d) We need to be able to promulgate these ideas and help communication between interested people. We cannot expect the mainstream media to do this. We have to set up communication networks. The Right underground has done this, we can use what is useful and transform it – although we probably won’t get billionaires, or intelligence agencies, sinking money and activity into helping the project.

Communication always faces problems of interpretation and power (that is the message may not be intended to mean what I think it means). While it is sometimes difficult to determine if a disruptive message is informative or a troll, it is important to know about messages, as they are feedback and possibly useful. At the least they might tell you how you are perceived, or what you are being made to look like. It is however, impossible to listen to everything, and so people evaluate importance, so this is an intrinsic problem.

Hierarchy disrupts communication. The more punitive the hierarchy the more disruption. Hierarchies need to be kept gentle and shallow in terms of power.

People at the front line often know more about what is done and what should be done, than those co-ordinating actions elsewhere. This is the management paradox. This needs to be born in mind at all times.

e) The new institutions and practices need forms of organisation. Organisation is a form of power, and competence. However, this organisation does not have to be uniform, or hierarchical. Local groups can choose their modes of organization, furthering conviviality, and meeting objectives. The main point is that they can work together, and that we recognize the power of sociality. Successful groups are often groups which have social payoffs; support, care, friendships and so on. People look after each other. Psychological support will be needed for those challenging established patterns of behaviour.

We may not be able to specify the types of organisation that are needed in advance. We can follow guidelines, but we need to be aware that organisational  forms will be emergent; they will emerge as people learn and face problems, especially the problems generated by their own actions and organisation. Organisation should only rarely, if ever, be imposed from outside. Not all groups in the organisation of organisations needs to have the same focus, and that is fine.

Rather than specifying what the organisation should be, it may be more useful to say what should be avoided.

f) Cooperation is needed, but harmony and absolute agreement is not. Indeed, absolute agreement will not happen, unless you aim for dictatorship and support of an ideal over reality, and these will fail in the long term. Absolute agreement can prevent learning, and adaptation. Variety can promulgate evolutionary success. Friction can show creativity. The problem is getting the balance between cooperation and disharmony right. But disagreement is not an automatic sign of failure.

Sometimes sub-organisations may need to split off if the disagreement is strong enough. This is quite natural. With care, the organisations still may be able to talk to each other, carry out exchange, and come together for common purposes. These latter points are more important than the split.

g) The organisations should have a way of rewarding members’ effort through status, respect and sometimes responsibility, without letting status differentials become stultified hierarchies. Status achievement must be open, and not restricted to particular social categories. The organisations will need to be “societies organised against becoming mini-states” and with formal mechanisms for halting, or undermining, the accumulation of power by individuals or groups.

h) Hierarchies will develop, but they should be relatively shallow, and not protect those at the top from risk. Risk should be more or less equally distributed amongst the active. Although there is something to be said for higher status accruing risk. Your recognised ‘warriors’ are those who take risks, rather than who allocate risks to uninvolved others…

i) The aim is to win over ‘the enemy,’ as much as possible, rather than destroy them, while recognising that the enemy is more than likely willing to destroy you. The enemy is to some extent conceptual more than personal; it is the neoliberal death machine, which is wired into destruction. If this death machine can openly destroy the planet it depends upon for survival, it will have little problem with trying to destroy obstacles such as rebels.

j) If possible all these points should reinforce each other.

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Some suggestions from William E. Rees

February 2, 2020

 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

He suggests that there are eleven minimum actions we need to take to avoid crisis, or to face into it. Here they are with some commentary.

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reduce the human ecological footprint;

[The important thing here is the need to reduce the ecological footprint – which means the amount of ecological destruction, and pollution issued by each country and per head of global population, in its current mode of existence. This will end ‘material growth’ which is a rather vague term, implying the material is a problem.]

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/ consumption means less production/ consumption;

[We have to move back from consuming or destroying more per year than planet Earth can regenerate in a year. This also means ending ecologically destructive modes of gathering.

[For example, if trawlers damage the sea bottom when trawling for fish, they almost certainly lower the capacity of the sea, in that region, to regenerate fish. In current models of fishing, the large fishers move in, destroy the regenerative capacity and move on, as they have little connection to place. We should probably prevent such types of destructive fishing, and hand the activity back to small fishing fleets. This should lower the amount of food available in the present (which could be a dire problem) while increasing it in the future. One step is to make sure all the fish is consumed, or released if not suitable, rather than thrown back into the ocean dead.

[These first two moves, are the beginnings of “sustainable life styles”. Without these steps, particularly the second, we have no long term prospects outside of war and mass murder.]

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

[A complicated way of saying that we probably cannot replicate the energy characteristics of fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. We need to use less energy. As Williams states earlier, this probably cannot be done with large cities. Large cities are, so far, extremely energy intensive. They are quite possibly based on the availability of cheap and plentiful energy for food among other things.]

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

[Happiness does not depend on consumption, or on energy usage. However, cheap energy increases what people can do, so reducing energy consumption is likely to be seen as restrictive – it would eliminate whole industries (air flight based tourism etc). This would take adaptation and persuasion. It will be difficult.

[It may be particularly difficult as people are now used to having material prosperity taken from them and handed to the elites, although they may define, and perceive, elites differently. Avoiding this perception is going to be difficult. We either probably have to get the elites to go first and cut their lifestyles back, or ignore the elites altogether, or attack wealth elites for their role in the destruction. All these procedures have problems.]

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

[The more energy is available the more is wasted. However, wastage is sometimes part of profitability. We may need to force the prices of pollution upwards. At the moment, the price of pollution and the penalties for pollution are being reduced in the US. That this increase is not automatically seen as bad, shows the conceptual difficulties faced by our societies in dealing with our futures.]

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

[This will have to happen whatever we do. Even if we had the ability to pollute without limits, the contemporary economy is based on destroying jobs, and people have to be retrained for work and income, which is not always welcomed. Or we need to rethink work itself.]

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

[Carbon prices, based on the amount of pollution which can be issued, are probably the best methods. Not carbon trading which is unstable and gameable.

[However, allocating remaining carbon budget to countries will be difficult. Should Western countries like the US and Australia, be given any? They could be considered have overspent already. And yet we cannot cut down completely overnight without massive social disruption, and the likelihood of countries leaving the scheme. Nation States are usually competitive, and non-cooperative, by their history, so it will probably not be possible to allocate the budget in a way in which everyone will see as ‘fair,’ ‘just’ or ‘practicable’.]

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

[I can see vast arguments over what is ‘essential’ happening here, and these arguments being used to slow transitions, but it possibly has to happen]

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

[Yes. The problem is that without the global ties of trade there is more tendency for nationalist wars]

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The UN has failed Climate: What Next?

February 1, 2020

This post is based in two insightful posts by Richard Hames from 2012. [1], [2] I think it is important to summarise them. All the good bits are his, the rest of it is mine. The unsourced quotations come from the blogs just referred to.

We all know the assertion that

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

which was apparently written by someone from Alcoholics (or Narcotics) Anonymous in 1981. It was not Einstein. It is also not quite correct. If you practice a musical instrument you would hope you would get better at playing from doing the same thing over and over, indeed you learn through repetition. Anyway let’s change the cliche to “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, failing to improve every time, and expecting different results.” Not as neat perhaps, but it makes the point…

Pedantry aside, we have been hoping that UN sponsored Conference of the Parties would help us solve climate change and come to an agreement since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They haven’t. They have not delivered better results and, by now it should be clear, that even with increasing disruption from turbulent weather events, they probably won’t.

When something fails repeatedly that is part of its pattern and existence. And the pattern cannot be ignored, without retreating into some kind of inability to deal with reality, or simply wasting energy which could be better expended elsewhere.

So let us propose that the UN Conference of the Parties, nowadays, primarily exists as an excuse for those parties not acting ethically or responsibly. Parties can always use the UN to find someone to blame for their own failure, so as to deflect criticism from a task they never took up whole heartedly in the first place, or that they expected others to solve without them having to sacrifice anything significant.

Not everyone has to refuse to take the conference seriously, and use it as an excuse for not acting, but if enough do, then it will fail. Consensus, of any other kind than ‘it failed again’, is unlikely.

What is the primary dynamic behind this? Hames suggests the Nation State.

Nation States are geared to compete with other Nation States, and to defend themselves against other Nation States. This goes back a long way, but it was reinforced by Colonialism and Developmentalism. Colonialism basically showed the importance of superior military technology and organisation, steel manufacture and highly available cheap energy from coal. The British were leading the world in the mid to late 19th Century and other countries emulated their processes, both as a mode of gaining resources and enforced markets (from colonies), and as a mode of defending themselves from British (and then European) power and dominance. The leaders of the Communist Revolution in Russia saw the development of Russia in terms of survival; they had been attacked and just managed to defend themselves: electrification and the coal to power it, was vital. After World War I, the US slowly shifted into dominance using the same kind of techniques, and lack of concern about environmental destruction, even if they set aside areas to be protected.

With the decline of colonialism, most of the ex-colonial states, no matter what their political system, embraced development and the implied rivalry behind it. Part of this embrace means embracing ‘GDP’ growth driven by cheap fossil fuels.

The Nation State:

defends and protects those citizens who choose to live within its borders , in return for which its citizens compete with those in other states for resources, territory, influence and wealth.

Hence the difficulty of any state giving something up which will perhaps weaken them and empower others.

The problem the UN faces is that there can be no losers, other than generous or unconcerned losers, if they are to preserve unity.

Hence the targets they issue are aspirational, and they have no enforcement mechanisms. Few States will voluntarily give any sovereignty to the UN and their potential enemies. This is why we have the security council and the power of the historically most important States to veto anything. The less “important” states are already afraid of less sovereignty, so they also resist. Not only do the numbers of negotiators, and their lack of authority or responsibility, inhibit negotiation, but a significant percentage are driven by Nationalist and Developmentalist loyalties.

So far most of the desperation and loss of life produced by climate change has appeared in the poorer States, and this is ignored by States with most of the power and producing most of the pollution. Recently, we have learned the wealthy states are quite capable of ignoring massive destruction in their own territory, if they choose. So the pressure to do something declines, as the results of action gets worse.

As the targets are aspirational, they tend to be pleasing and “possible” rather than based in our changing knowledge of what is actually required. They also tend to be manipulable, and interpretable in different ways, rather than fixed or meaningful. As a result the emissions from planetary industries have not declined, although they may have declined in some countries.

The UN is not geared towards producing alarm, for fairly obvious reasons of trying to keep the peace and status quo, so its warnings tend to be couched in vague terms, its science tends to be tilted towards conservatism.

This, as Hames notes then translates into the language used in the proclamations of the COPs.

Any effective communication, such that conveys compelling ideas or provokes collective action, is deliberately avoided or understated. Almost all briefing documents, reports, pledges, commitments, protocols, conventions and records of the meeting, supposedly intended to expound and inform, are invariably bogged down by a babel of weasel words – ambiguous, tortuously verbose or deliberately vague. This results in a weird kind of bureaucratic etiquette where nothing meaningful is said. Indeed the art of drafting these documents is to avoid saying anything explicitly that could cause offence to anyone at all.

The prime way of imparting information at the COPs is through instructional documents written by experts, according to the above restraints. But instruction does not necessarily result in new learning nor lead to behavioural change. It may just get people’s backs up, and reinforce their resistance. The documents fail on all levels, but do so in order to avoid complete dismissal as politicised. Not that it works.

The aim of consensus becomes impossible, and the aim may inhibit action. It allows any ‘recalcitrant’ State to blame others. For example:

  • “If the US does not reduce its emissions to zero immediately, it is not fair to ask us to reduce emissions at all.”
  • “If the Chinese can’t reduce emissions, neither will we.”
  • “We are only a small country, and acting would destroy our economy. Others need to act first”
  • We cannot reduce emissions without sacrificing our people to poverty

You all know the excuses and the blame game.

The most obvious other problem is that climate change is an unintended consequence of what are supposed to be beneficial acts, working through complex systems.

Consequently Nation States can be particularly reluctant to give up what they consider to be beneficial acts for themselves, in order to benefit other people in general. The costs of giving up the supposedly beneficial acts are obvious, the benefits of giving them up are not. Especially the benefits of being amongst the first to give them up. Its obviously better to let other people give up first. And if everybody waits for everyone else to give up first, then very little will happen.

As I have suggested previously, Climate Justice merely bogs us down in this fairness paradox, while climate generosity may free us to act in our and other people’s best interests, without waiting.

Suggestions

So we may need to recognise:

  • The UN is not the place for climate action.
  • People competing for advantage and past benefit are unlikely to act. Ever.
  • Nation States cannot all reach agreement, because of their nature and history.
  • A treaty is currently impossible.
  • We need to be doing something else.

What has been successful are things like the climate cities movement, in which cities compete to become more climate resilient, and to ameliorate their affect on climate. Of course such cities have faced attack from their federal governments, because it makes the government’s inaction look a little odd. In Australia, for example, despite confusion at the federal and state level:

nearly 40 per cent of the surveyed local governments had made commitments to reach a zero emissions target by or before 2050 for their community emissions – that is those generated by residents, businesses and visitors. ….

The report also found that 58 per cent of assessed councils had set targets to bring their own operational emissions to zero by 2050.

One Step Off the Grid

These moves are also acts of generosity, because they doe not expect others to act first. It allows people to take responsibility for their emissions now.

While there are conferences outside the conference in which history and power relations are explored, these secondary conferences seem to be kept isolated from the main proceedings – perhaps because the nation state is less important, and the conferences are less driven by wealth and power. International NGOs have also participated in such acts.

However, in the model proposed, we start to ask what can people at these conferences do without waiting for their Nation States to act, or to recognise their acts, or waiting for other places to act..

The Nation State, and the UN, cannot save us, so we have to stop expecting them to do so. We have to take action at the local level, or wherever we can act, and start building new institutions which will express our collective interests and enable us to co-operate to build local solutions, and to oppose local pollutions.

This is not easy, but it is also not impossible.

We further need to understand the history and dynamics of our position. As Hame writes:

“You must know where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to get to,” to get there.

This knowledge seems more likely to happen at the local level or at the ‘secondary conference’ level than at the UN or the State level.

We also need a change in our psychology and our understanding of systems and complexity. In particular we need to attend to the notion that what we do may not just have the effects we are hoping for, we have to explore all its possible effects, and be prepared to change if our actions do not produce the results we expect.

Solutions to problems in complex systems cannot be worked out completely in advance, they must be discovered, at least in part, as we proceed, and that again is easier at the local level, where people have their senses and their direct concerns.

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Earth Climate Dreams Book Launch

January 26, 2020

Bonnie Bright and Jonathan Paul Marshall (eds) Earth, Climate, Dreams: Dialogues with Depth Psychologists in the Age of the Anthropocene. Depth Insights Press.

0997955023 and 9780997955026

From: Amazon.au ; Amazon.com ; Amazon.co.uk

Bookdepository ; Wordery ; Barnes and Noble

The book, as should be obvious, reports on what 13 Depth Psychologists have to say in response to the Anthropocene. It is a collection of interviews with people like Stephen Aizenstat, Jerome Bernstein, Veronica Goodchild, Jeff Kiehl, Susan Rowland, Robert Romanyshyn, Erel Shalit, and other important people, and finishes with a multi-logue between seven of the participants.

[For descriptions of the interviews, and some critical responses, see an earlier blog post]

These people are all major contemporary figures in Depth Psychology, as some of you will know.

I’m going approach this launch in three ways. Firstly I will talk about the background question of the book, then one of my problems with the book and, thirdly, what is great about the book, and why you should buy it.

The fundamental issue

The background issue is that in the West, and most likely elsewhere, we are facing what can be called an existential crisis. That is, we are coming to recognise that our whole modes of being, living in the world and preparing for our future, is undermining our capacity to exist in the world. If we keep on living, acting and thinking as we do, we face destruction generated by those ways of living and thinking. The Anthropocene (the world-systems changing effect of humanity) marks a problem for our whole existence, and undermines our future.

The existential crisis presents a problem at all levels of our being: it is a psychological problem, it is a sociological problem, it is an economic problem, it is a technological problem, it is a cultural problem, a problem for all our relationships to everything. Once recognised, it is both hard to ignore and disorienting, to put it mildly – approaching trauma might be more accurate.

This crisis is the starting point for the book, and the necessary starting point for almost any relevant discussion about the future. The conversations are conducted with Depth Psychologists, because Depth Psychology attempts to deal with the total span of human existence, which includes all that I have just mentioned, from psychology to the world. Depth psychologists are uniquely in a position to approach these issues from a non-specialist position, and to offer tools to help people work with the problems, from their experience of group and individual therapy, from symbolic work with art, literature, and dreams, and from their sense of the intertwining of individual and collective.

My issue

Let me begin discussion of this book by talking about one of the things I find slightly problematic about it, and show why it turns out not to be that problematic, and how it generates insight, when approached with fewer assumptions.

My problem in reading this book was that, sometimes, I thought people found it much too easy to talk as if ‘spirituality’ (whatever that is) was a solution to our problems.

As I argue in the introduction, some types of spirituality might help constitute our problem, and this has to be faced. It cannot be suppressed, and I don’t think anyone in the book would want to suppress this issue.

As a culture, we in this room, have a religious or spiritual history, and in that history people have primarily been taught to see the world as a prison, a testing ground, a den of sin and iniquity. We have been taught to see our human destiny as leading us somewhere else, not this Earth. We are heading for heaven or hell or, at best, the new World after the Day of Judgement. We are not fundamentally creatures of Earth, born with the earth and tied to the Earth. In that sense, the Earth has to be fought against and dismissed for our salvation. If you actually love the world, you are being distracted from your love of God who is not ‘material’; you are loving something inferior and fallen.

This form of spirituality constitutes a problem, it could well be part of the reason it is Christendom that has led the charge into ecological destruction as an unintended consequence of its otherworldly spirituality. If so, then implying that a move from ‘materiality’ to ‘spirituality’ is a solution to the problems of the Anthropocene, is not a solution. Spirituality is part of the problem. Rather than just ‘spirituality’ itself, we need a new psychological and spiritual orientation to the world and to our actions within it.

However, if you actually listen to what people in the book are talking about, and remove the assumption that you know what they talking about, then you can begin to see what they actually mean, and the kind of psychological orientation they are pointing towards, and how this is not just a matter for our consciousness, will power, or decision.

In our society, because of our (spiritual and other) heritage, ‘natural processes’ are largely seen as disposable or replaceable or, to use Heidegger’s term ‘to hand,’ as resources for our own use and mastery of. In our dominant ideology, natural processes only exist for us to exploit. If they cannot be exploited and turned into profit, then they have no value. Natural processes are not something we should have a relationship with. You can see this attitude everywhere, with things like the Westconnex tollway, where we chop down every tree, undermine housing foundations, dispossess people, and fill the air with smog and noise, while providing a tax on travel in Sydney. Or with mining under water tables, rampant landclearing, mining in agricultural regions and so on. Natural processes are, officially, a lifeless backdrop to be pillaged for profit. They have no other value. The world is to be subdued to consciousness and will. The world is secondary to what we can make of it.

Yet this is not humanly true at any deep level. It does not resonate with real human being. Almost every human I have ever met has some kind of relationship to other natural processes, whether living forms, place, or to their own part in the system. They might only notice the connection when the creature or plant or animal has gone, but that is part of our disconnection from reality. This relationship may be to individual animals (their pets, or the dog down the street), to specific trees they feel connected to, to landscape that may seem to be part of us, and so on. Even those people busy despoiling other people’s environments and landscape, can have deep feelings for their own.

This is not really strange, because we think with, and in, this world. We use objects in the world to think with, to feel with, to learn with. We cannot live outside the world. It shapes us. We cannot escape from it. Nature and ecology is part of us, we are part of it; we are plural and connected by our existence, in a living network beyond our understanding.

When we realise this, then instead of treating nature, or other people, as resource objects, we can approach this world with reverence and awe; with a sense of mystery, recognising that we do not fully comprehend it, that it is a being that is both independent of us and impinging upon us. It is us and not us.

We can approach the world with our full ‘psyches’ and, in this, recognition of ‘complexity’ and interconnectedness, are themes which keep recurring in the interviews.

Why use the term ‘psyche?’ Because when we use other terms like ‘psychology’, ‘mind’, or ‘soul’, we already think we know what we are talking about. But we don’t. We don’t consciously know how our minds function, as they function. At least I don’t. I don’t know how my mindbody functions, how one thought gets linked to, or progresses into, another, how language works, how brain action generates mouth and arm action, how my skin heals, my stomach digests, my lungs process air, and so on. Much, probably most of the important things in life, operate outside of our limited awareness, and necessarily so.

“Psyche” plunges us back into the unknown, the entangled complex, interconnected, mess which is reality. We are inextricably if vaguely linked; my psyche does not exist without your psyche. I did not invent the language or all the ideas I use. Interaction with and talking to other people and to world culture has shaped me, and I have presumably shaped some others for better or worse.

We are both collective and individual at the same time. Even a sense of heroic individualism is collective at its base; something we share with others. Our psyches are already alive and part of natural processes. Our full psyches include the land, spill out into the land, into other people, into the processes that are everywhere.

And a realistic view of our selves needs to include all of this material, our culture has generally defined as extraneous, to help us to successfully resist the notion of natural process as a thing to turn into resources to make profit out of. In this new mode, with new practices and ways of perceiving, we can begin to move towards rejecting the system of thought that is destroying the world that we live in. This destructive system no longer makes sense. It seems psychotically limited and self-destructive. That awareness opens a psychological, cultural and activist position. The more we become aware of unconscious process, the less we seem driven by them, and the more free we become.

Let us return to an earlier point. As already implied, there are many unconscious processes. We are not aware of most of what is happening, although we may be more aware than we consciously know. That lack of conscious awareness of how our minds work, and how our physiology works, and how mind and physiology connect at this moment, implies unconscious processes. Some of these happenings I will have perceived, but not made conscious, perhaps because my thought or culture focuses my attention elsewhere, perhaps because there is so much to perceive that I cannot hold it all in my awareness. Even if I perceived it all, I can’t understand everything that is happening, and affecting us, even in this room. Most of life’s ongoing processes are essentially and inevitably outside my consciousness, and therefore unconscious to me.

However, I can become more aware of what is happening or more sensitive to it. I can attempt to perceive reality in different ways. I can turn attention to my neglected or repressed perceptions and drives. Recognising this possibility and being open to the strange and the unknown is what Depth psychology is about. It is fundamental to the process of discovery.

This is why Depth Psychologists pay attention to dreams, which are in some ways messages from the unconscious and the world; from our unconscious perceptions, pattern detections, and ways that we symbolise the unknown. Dreams often require work to understand. It is not always easy, but it can become more so the more we take these fleeting images and stories seriously and treat them as beings themselves. Paying attention to these, and other, neglected processes (fantasies, spontaneous images, scribbles, slips of the tongue, senses of unease, neglected feelings, suppressed thoughts) becomes a way of getting, or admitting, more understanding and data. It starts a new process of being in the world. If we repress our bodies and our dreams, we are likely to repress our awareness of the world. The more we attend to them, the more likely we are to be able to perceive messages in natural processes which are now hidden to us. Our tools for learning can expand outwards…

This new attention can represent a complete change in how we regard ourselves and experience our role in, and on, Earth. We can call this change spiritual if we want to. We can analyse and live our lives from that point of view. We might even be able to see this realisation as having much in common with reports we have classed as mystical.

This awareness involves experience of paradoxes, similar paradoxes to those around reported experiences of God, We are part of the world but separate from it. It is greater than us but still within us. The depths can lead to the heights. We are double sided: our goodness might be cruelty; our aspirations can be unreal or unsatisfying. Reality is ultimately unsayable, but it is pointable too through images and word, and it can be experienced, if we are open to it as it is. This is a new way of being, which can be called spiritual if you wish, or not if it makes you uncomfortable.

So even in the bits I personally have problems with, the book is still full of insights. Full of ways of proceeding. You may have problems too, but encountering this book may help you ponder them and open you. That is why this book is important.

The Good Bits

Let us now turn to the unproblematic virtues of the book. Its chapters are edited and concentrated conversations. They are generally excellent conversations. The primary interviewer Bonnie Bright is really good at her work. She participates in conversations. She contributes to the conversations as process. She draws people out. She listens carefully, and gets people to explain when needed. You could not have a much better interviewer for dealing with issues which could otherwise be quite difficult.

Reading these conversations, you will learn something about a family of understandings of how psyche works, through the dynamics of imagery, metaphor and feeling, and the effect of the unintended consequences of particular modes of consciousness which repress things you need to know about. As I have implied, if you take this seriously and start some of the practices, then you might gain a new view of the world. You might find a way out of the existential crisis, or a way to flourish in that crisis.

Depth psychology is important, because its mode of being, continually deals with problems that the conscious ego cannot understand. This is especially useful for facing the paradoxes, complexities and dilemmas of the Anthropocene.

Topics vary throughout the book, apart from the obvious topics of climate change and ecological destruction, subjects discussed range from discussions of pilgrimage, the aspirations of Dr. Frankenstein and what that tells us about modern life, the collapse of Mayan civilisation, colony collapse disorder in bees and its metaphorical connection to culture collapse in humans, the ways that politics and psyche interacts, the driving cultural complexes of capitalism, systems theory, unconscious forces, communication with the world, and the uses of dreams to gain insight into the world and relate to the world.

The book argues strongly, in various different ways that we need to engage with our full range of psychological processes, and perceptions, to deal constructively with the changes and problems we are facing. We need to understand how the systems we participate within, condition our minds when we suppress awareness of what is happening. If we stay in the psychology of mind we are conditioned to have, then psychological inertia, denial or other processes of repression or projection of problems and hostility onto others are likely to win out. Even if we manage a revolution we will probably replicate the problems we have, plus we will project our guilt onto others, and solve our problems through revenge.

This book explores possible tools to move beyond these psychological limitations and barriers.

Depth psychology can prove useful in this quest, because it tends to focus on neglected aspects of life and assumes that our individual psychology is at least partly collective, and it works through encouraging creativity, imagination, art and symbol production for their own sake, irrespective of judgement or profit..

As well as enlightening, this process of approaching reality is potentially fun and enjoyable; it can also be pretty horrible too, but everyone has the possibility of life changing realisations for themselves and for everyone else. As we are collectively facing similar problems, solutions to personal problems, or the symbols around those solutions, can turn out to be effective solutions for collective problems…. especially when we are working in and with groups. Anyone has the potential to contribute to our collective solutions. You go in and bring the solution back out. It is a cyclic process.

The book tries discuss ways of opening what may be a new way of perceiving the world, and approaching the world, and the role of human psyches within the world, and the way we all could develop.

This is, simply, vital work….. That is why I hope that this book will reach a large audience, even if they disagree with it, it could start discussions.

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Climate change as religion?

January 26, 2020

One of the arguments put forward by quite a few people is that acceptance of climate change as being real is a religion. Thus Tony Abbott, ex Pm of Australia and authoritarian Catholic (he does not like the current pope), says:

If you think climate change is the most important thing, everything can be turned to proof. I think that to many it has almost a religious aspect to it.

A few years previously Abbott said

Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause. Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect…

so far, it’s climate change policy that’s doing harm; climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm.

Fox news host, David Web claims that

Climate change revision is the reformation of the new global warming cult. It’s the religion of the Left…  America the prosperous is the Satan.  Hey, every religion needs a Satan… [It helps] scaring the younger generations… They’re easy to frighten, just tell them their world is ending… but do all these climate strikers know what they’re protesting for? Seems the discussion is more often centered around [carbon dioxide] than the environment at large… Our environment is everything around us including and importantly, our economic environment.  We have to be able to afford the things we want to do,” 

We may have to be able to afford the consequences of doing the things ‘we’ want to do, as well. The economy depends on the ecology. Without a working ecology we will have severe problems. However, protecting the economy and its power structures from this ecological realisation, seems vital to this set of ideas. Perhaps it is the challenge to those structures that is the main problem for these people?

Sky News host James Morrow says climate change is “as much about a new materialist religion of globalism” than it is about anything else. 

These kind of statements seem to be a fairly standard rightist line – taken to imply that climate change is irrational dogma. Strangely they don’t make that implication about ‘real’ religion, but it indicates how they think.

However, if the act of accepting that climate change is real is a religion, then its not a comforting religion, or a religion that promises salvation. The religion gets even less comforting as time and resistance to action by the power elites continues.

The faith that is comforting is the joint faith that climate change is not happening and that what neoliberals call ‘free markets,’ working through the “invisible hand” of their God, will deliver liberty and prosperity and solutions to all problems. This faith forms what we might call the ‘Religion of Mammon’. With this religion we don’t have to do anything, or we can fight to keep emitting pollution and poison, and can thank their Lord that the corporate power elite have our best interests at heart, so we can be joyful when neoliberals give these masters of the universe even more power.

We might wonder if characterizing this ‘Religion of Mammon’ as a real religion is problematic? That might be so, if it were not for the well known Protestant “prosperity gospel” or “prosperity theology” which seems quite related to it. Prosperity preachers often seem to have a predatory relationship to their followers, in that they can sometimes claim the more a worshipper gives to the Church financially, the more they will receive from God. Worshippers should finance their private jets for the Lord’s work. In this religion poverty is a sin, and God’s favour is measured by wealth and success. Holding onto the faith that the economy will serve you well is central.

The prosperity religion fits well with neoliberalism and anti-welfare, while psychologically compensating for the effects of neoliberalism and its massively unequal distribution of wealth, and the struggle of ordinary people to move up, or even keep their jobs. It assumes you can worship both God and Mammon (because Mammon is God), and that a wealthy person can get through the eye of a needle as easily as anyone else, perhaps more easily as God is rewarding them. 

While I have not yet done the research, all the prominent prosperity evangelists I am aware of, seem unworried about climate change. Everything is in God’s hands; humans have no capacity to destroy the world without the consent of God. If climate change comes it is part of the end times and the faithful will be saved. For example, evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll stated that there was little need to look after the environment as Jesus was returning. He declared: “I know who made the environment… He’s coming back, and he’s going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV” (quoted in Veldman The Gospel of Climate Skepticism).

Australia’s Prime Minster has worked in marketing, and is an open follower of the Prosperity Gospel, attending the biggest Church preaching this kind of theology in Australia. It is unusual for Australian politicians to make a big public noise about their religion, so that marks it as special. He also appears to be unconcerned about climate change, and wishes to promote coal mining and coal energy for the benefit of the established economy. If Jesus is coming, then why bother trying to save the Earth? Saving the Earth, might even be going against God’s will and therefore be sinful.

In general, Mr. Morrison also seems quite comfortable with the conjoined Religion of Mammon. I certainly have never seen him criticise it at all, but if people can tell me where he does I will be interested.

Following on from these parallels, it seems fairly straightforward to assert the hypothesis that the prosperity gospel is both comforting, and supportive of the Religion of Mammon; it gives it backing and blends into more or less seamlessly.

The main, non religious, logic that backs the Religion of Mammon, is the idea that a consensus about the evidence from scientists who study the subject of climate change must be wrong, and that the lack of consensus from economists and social scientists about the evidence for benefits of neoliberal economics is irrelevant.

In both cases the Mammonist response is “sinister conspiracy,” and this seems to emphasise that faith in their doctrine comes first, before the evidence of the world.

With the Religion of Mammon life is easy. The correctness of science can be decided by whether it supports the elites of this religion’s favoured brand of corporate domination or not. If it does, it is real, and if it doesn’t, it must be imaginary. This position seems part of the way they try to make sure we all get ruled by their favoured big corporations and the few of the wealth elite, and never the people. Entrenched corporations must never be curtailed. They could well be the expression of divine will.

As David Web implies above, the most important part of our overall environment is the economic system, and that must not be altered. Any attempts to alter it can then be condemned as ‘socialist,’ because the neoliberals have spent 40 years telling us socialism is bad, and equals state communism. As he says “every religion needs a Satan.”

But if you think all climate scientists are socialists, you probably don’t know many scientists, or you think socialism is scientific – which I do not, although it is a better theory of life than neoliberalism, which would not be hard…

However, this politicization is unreal. The idea that the science of climate change is legitimate, is not exclusive to the left, there are quite a few people on the right who think it is worth taking note of, even though they get shouted down, and told they are not proper members of the Church of Mammon. A YouGov survey implies that only 15% of people in the US think climate is not changing or humans are not partly responsible for the change. A recent Pew Report claims that 67% of people in the US think the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of global climate change, and 77% think the US should be developing Renewable Energy in preference to expanding fossil fuels.

So there is a reasonable number on the political right who seem like they would support action, but then many Republicans do not seem keen on neoliberalism either, (or they protest against its effects), and many non prosperity gospel Christians are now facing up to climate change, and talking about the importance of not destroying God’s creation. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. The Religion of Mammon may be becoming more isolated, but that could make it stronger, as it clamps down on communication with sinners.

Perhaps because of the comfort provided by their religion, the Mammon elites do not seem interested in preparing for natural risks; this is a weakness which may affect support for them in the long run. They are capable of preparing for other risks, but not environmental ones. They even seem happy creating new risks as with releasing more poisons, such as coal ash and so on. This is odd. And the only explanation I can think of is that they feel they must support the corporate mining elite, or they are bought by that elite – so what if a few peasants get sick?

We are faced with the simple fact that because of their ideology, that Mammonists in Australia, cut back on fire prevention, refused to talk to worried fire chiefs, ignored all the warnings from scientists, ignored the severity of the drought, and hindered preparations… As a result the East coast burned, the worst it has apparently ever burned. Farms and forests gone. Rainforests that have not burnt in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years have burnt.

I guess they must be pleased that they ignored all the alarmists, and kept the faith with their comforting religion of free market denial, despite the fact it seems to be getting hotter every other year, and never returns to ‘normal.’

This is why they still want to violate their supposed ‘free market’ principles, and pour taxpayers’ money into coal energy and coal mines, because no private company will build coal power without subsidy, but it makes sure that taxpayers are subsidising the right people.

The system is self reinforcing, as it means that the reason for the solutions to climate change looking socialist is that, until recently, very few non-socialist types of solutions have been presented to the general public – other than leave it to the market, which it seems the Church of Mammon does not believe either. The question is whether those non-socialist solutions have been actively suppressed, or whether they have been ignored, with the aim of squeezing a bit more fossil fuel profit from the disaster. Of course it may be possible neoliberal theory is so inadequate it cannot deal with environmental disasters at all, and so its holders have to pretend it is not happening.

Oh, and on the other side of the business sector. The high employing tourism industry is estimated, by Australian Financial Review, to have lost about AU$4.5 billion, as a result of the fires. But they are mostly small business and so to be abandoned. The Religion of Mammon only respects the massively wealthy, as they clearly have the approval of their Lord.

 

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