Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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Even handed climate politics

November 13, 2019

In Australia we are in the midst of horrendous early bush fires, driven by drought and high temperatures…. They may be the most widespread we have had. It is estimated by the Rural Fire Services that 300 homes may have been lost There is political dispute as well: should we talk about climate change at this moment?

We have a classic example of the “both sides are equally bad” meme, being used to excuse and support the political Righteous in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. To give more context the SMH is frequently denounced by the Murdoch Empire and the Right wing Coalition government as rabidly leftist.

The papers’ chief political correspondent, David Crowe, wrote that: “A crisis is supposed to bring out the best in Australians. For too many of our politicians, it only brings out the worst…. [the fires] should jolt politicians out of their tired games about who is to blame for the emergency.”

He mentions Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack ranting about “inner-city raving lunatics” who talk about climate change, but mentions “McCormack’s defenders say he was provoked by the Greens” – so its not really Mr McCormack’s fault.

He glibs over Barnaby Joyce saying two people died because they were Greens, and excuses him because later in the day he was tired from fighting a fire at his parent’s farm.

He then castigates Jordon Steele-John, a Green, for saying “You [the Coalition] are no better than a bunch of arsonists – borderline arsonists, and you should be ashamed…. Your selfishness and your ignorance have known no bounds for decades, and now our communities are paying the price.” (Crowe only uses parts of this statement, so the above came from another article and, according to some people, Steele-John was speaking in a parliamentary debate in which public money was being offered for new Coal power stations. I have not yet been able to check this as there is so much indignation about this statement.)

Crowe strangely does not remark that Greens and others have been frustrated by years of inaction and insult, only to see their predictions coming true, and still the government refuses to do more or less anything but insult people, stir up anger and then call for calm…

Crowe is then lined up to say that the PM Scott Morrison “rightly argued for a collective calm in the political rhetoric, while NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian adopted a no-nonsense approach to questions about the fires and climate change.” Ms Berejiklian was not quite that no-nonsense if you read her comments – she too did not want to talk about climate change, or what to do about it, either and suggested it was appropriate to shut up and help people, as if helping and discussing were impossible at the same time.

So, according to the “both sides are equally bad” meme, Right and Left are equally bad but the Right is much better…. Nice move.

Crowe keeps up the pressure on Steele-John writing…. “Using the fires to call for an end to coal mining is as cynical as any of the politics from the major parties. And anyone who accepts the science on climate change should also accept the science that says shutting down the Australian coal industry on its own would make no substantial change to future bushfire risk.”

Of course it must be “cynical” to propose that something should be done when the right still proposes nothing except penalising protests against companies who promote climate change.

However, it is true that due to the delays of the political righteous in Australia and the US stopping burning coal will no longer make things better.

However anyone who accepts the science should know that not stopping coal will make things much, much worse in the long run.

Strange that the idea must be crushed by this even handed approach……

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Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

November 9, 2019

Continuing the series from the previous post….

Of these two political and economic movements (Neoliberalism and Developmentalism), Developmentalism is the oldest, but has since the 1980s been blended with Neoliberalism. As powerful movements and ideas, they can form obstacles to transition.

Developmentalism

Developmentalism can be argued to have its origin in the UK with coal-powered industrialisation and mass steel manufacture, which formed a reinforcing positive feedback loop; steel manufacture helped implement industrialization and also increased military capacity to allow plunder of resources from colonies. Industrialization helped increase demand for steel. Fossil fuel energy was cheap with a high Energy Return on Energy Input. This loop provided a model for the ‘development’ of other countries, partially to protect themselves from possible British incursion.

While the UK’s development was developed alongside and with capitalism, capitalism was not essential for development, as was shown by developmentalism elsewhere. The earliest deliberate developmentalism was probably in Bismark’s Germany, followed by Meiji Japan, neither of which were capitalist in any orthodox sense. Japan rapidly became a major military power defeating both Russia and China. Revolutionary Russia also pursued developmentalism, and after the second world war developmentalism took off in the ex-colonial world becoming the more or less universal model for progress, or movement into the future, and flourished in many formally different economic systems.

During the 1980s, but especially with the collapse of European Communism, and the birth of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, developmentalism became more strongly tied to international capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism. We can call this ‘neoliberal developmentalism’.

Neoliberalism 1

As I have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism is the set of policies whose holders argue in favour of liberty in free markets, but who (if having to make a choice), nearly always support established corporate plutocracy and appear to aim to destroy all political threats to that plutocracy.

Developmentalism and ecology

Developmentalism was built on fossil fuel use, and economic growth through cheap pollution and cheap ecological destruction. It also often involved large scale sacrifice of poorer people, who were generally considered backward and expendable in the quest for national greatness. Sometimes it is said that in the future succesful development will mean less poisoning, destruction and sacrifice, but the beautiful future may be continually postponed, as it was with communism.

Developmentalism was also often ruthlessly competative in relationship to other states and the pursuit of cheap resources. Developing countries often blame developed countries for their poverty, and this may well be historically true, as their resources were often taken elsewhere for little benefit to their Nation. Many developing countries also argue that they have the right to catch up with the developed world, through the methods the developed world used in the past. It is their turn to pollute and destroy. If this idea is criticised, then it usually becomes seen an attempt to keep them poverty ridden and to preserve the developed world’s power.

Developmentalism is related to neoliberal capitalism via the idea that you have to have continuing economic growth to have social progress, and that social progress is measured in consumerism and accumulated possessions. However, after a point neoliberalism is about the wealthy accumulating possessions, it does not mind other people loosing possessions if that is a consequence of its policy. Both the developing and developed world have developed hierarchies which tend to be plutocratic – development tends to benefit some more than others.

After the 1980s with the birth of neoliberal developmentalism, the idea of State supported welfare and development for the people was largely destroyed as developing States could not borrow money without ‘cutting back’ on what was decreed to be ‘non-essential’ spending. The amount of environmental destruction, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions also rocketed from that period onwards, despite the knowledge of the dangers of climate change and ecological destruction. The market became a governing trope of development, as it was of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism 2: The theory of Free Markets

In theory, ‘free markets’ are mechanisms of efficiently allocating resources and reducing all needs and values to price, or messages about price.

Theory does not always work, because large-scale markets are nearly always political systems rather than natural or impersonal systems.

Big or successful players in the market nearly always attempt to structure the market in their favour. Wealth grants access to all other forms of power such as violence, communicative, informational, legal, ethical, organisational, religious and so on. If there is no State, then successful players will found one to protect their interests and property. If there is a State they will collaborate with others to take it over to further protect their interests and property.

Everything that diminishes profit, especially profit for established power, is to be attacked as a corruption of the market and therefore immoral and to be suppressed. If people protest at not having food, or at being poisoned by industry, they are clearly immoral and not working hard enough. Political movements which oppose the plutocracy or its consequences may have their means of operation closed down, or find it difficult to communicate their ideas accurately through the corporate owned media. The market ends up being patterned by these politics.

For example, neoliberal free markets always seem to allow employers to team up to keep wages down, as that increases profit, and render Union action difficult as that impedes the market.

While these actions may not always have the desired consequences, the market, at best, becomes efficient in delivering profits, but only rarely in delivering other values. Thus people without money are unlikely to have food, or good food, delivered to them. Indeed those people may well be sacrificed to efficiently feed others who have both more than enough food and more disposable wealth, and hence who make more profits for the sellers.

Through these processes, there is an ongoing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, increased by the power relations of plutocracy.

In plutocracies, it is normal to think that the poor are clearly stupid or not worth while, rather than they have lost a political battle, or been unfortunate.

Neoliberalism and ecology

If it is profitable to transfer the costs of ecological destruction onto the less powerful, and less wealthy, public then it will be done as with other costs. The cost and consequences of destruction will not be factored into the process, and this will give greater profit.

Even, leaving the natural world in a state in which it can regenerate becomes counted as a cost. If it is cheaper to destroy and move on, most businesses will do this, especially the more mobile wealth becomes. For example, I was told yesterday that on some Pacific Islands, overseas fishing companies bought fishing rights to sea cucumbers (which are extremely valuable given the prices I saw in some shops). They took all the sea cucumbers they could, threw the smallest onto the beach to die, and moved on, leaving the area more or less empty. They had no ties to the place, or to the regeneration of local ecologies. The whole ecology of the islands could collapse as a result of this profit taking, but only the Islanders suffer in the short term.

Likewise spewing poison is good for business as it is cheaper than preventing it. Neoliberal governments will support or even encourage powerful pollutors, if they are established members of the plutocracy, as President Trump is demonstrating nearly every day. These pollutors and destroyers have wealth and can buy both government support and politicians in general. They can pay for campaigns and propaganda. They can promise easy well paid jobs in their industry, and those people who were politicians and are now in the industry demonstrate the benefits of this position and are persuasive. Within neoliberalism, with wealth as the prime marker of success, the destructive business people are also considered virtuous and superior people, so the destruction they produce must also be virtuous.

In this situation, objecting to cheap ecological destruction, or proposing ways of preventing such destruction becomes seen as an attack on the powerful and on morality of the system in general.

One of my friends who studies neoliberalism, seems to be coming to the view that neoliberalism’s first political success came about in the 1970s through opposing the idea of Limits to Growth, and supporting ideas of capitalist expansion through endless technological innovation and creativity. This movement assumes that (within capitalism) desired, or needed, technological innovation will always occur, and be implemented, with no dangerous unintended consequences. This seems unlikely to always be true, and to be primarily based in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It was also probably more attractive to voters than voluntary austerity. It allowed the continuance of ‘development’.

If this is the case, then neoliberals (rather than Conservatives) have been implicated in anti-ecological thinking from the begining.

The UK and Germany actually have Conservative parts in the mainstream Right, and they seem relatively happy with moving from coal into renewables – so we are not talking about every form of capitalism being equally destructive.

In Australia, neoliberalism is reinforced by the learnt dependence of the official economy on resources exports – whether agricultural or mineral, both of which have tended to destroy or strain Australian ecologies. Most Australians think mining is much more important to the economy than it is, expecially after all the subsidies and royalty and tax evasions are factored in. This visions of success implies that destruction is probably acceptable. Australia is big after all, and most people never see the sites of destruction, even if they have large scale consequences.

These processes have lead to a power imbalance in Australia, in which the mining sector calls the shots, and boasts of its power to remove prime ministers. It not only creates loyalty, but also terror.

Renewables, less cheap pollution, less cheap destruction of ecologies, less poisoning, are threats to established ways of ‘developing’, and to be hindered, even if they are ‘economically’ preferable, or succesful in the market.

In this situation, it is perfectly natural that other forms of economy, or activities which could potentially restructure the economy and disrupt the plutocracy, should be stiffled by any means available. In this case, this includes increasing regulation on renewable energy, suggesting that more subsidies will be given to new fossil fuel power, and increasing penalties for protesting against those supporting, or profiting from, fossil fuels.

In Australia, Labor is rarely much better than the Coalition in this space, as the fuss after the last election has clearly shown. It is being said that they failed because they did not support coal or the aspirations of voters to succeed in plutocracy, and they vaguely supported unacceptable ‘progressive’ politics.

Neoliberalism as immortality project

This constant favouring of established wealth, leads to the situation in which people with wealth think they will be largely immune to problems if they maintain their wealth (and by implication shuffle the problems onto poorer people).

At the best it seems to be thought that wealthy people are so much smarter than everyone else, that they can deal with the problems, and this success with problems might trickle down to everyone else. Thus wealth has to be protected.

These factors make the plutocracy even more inward looking. Rather than observing the crumbling world, the wealthy are incentivised to start extracting more from their companies and the taxpayers, to keep them safe. They become even more prone to fantasy and to ignore realities.

Conclusion

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism constitute the major forms of policy dominating world governance, and visions of the future.

In the English speaking world neoliberalism dominates. We have more totalitarian neoliberals (Republicans, Liberals, Nationals) and more humanitarian neoliberals (Democrats, Labour etc).

In the rest of the world, developmentalism can occasionally dominate over neoliberalism (ie in China), but the idea of economic expansion and a degree of emulation of the supposed economic success of the ‘West’ remains a primary aim.

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism both establish and protect ecological destruction for wealth generation and are among the main social obstacles to a transition to renewables.

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Problems of Transition 06: Climate Change and Failing US ‘infrastructure’

November 8, 2019

The US is an example of the general case. Infrastructure tends to be failing, and climate change makes this worse. The costs and effects of failing infrastructure could make transition to a more resilient ‘sustainable’ society, even more difficult.

The first thing to understand is that US infrastructure (which includes roads, bridges, dams, airports, sea ports, drinking water, power lines, pipelines, waste storage, inland waterways, levees etc) is falling apart at the moment. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been pointing this out for years.

In their most recent “report card”, issued in 2017, the ASCE estimated that the US needs to spend about $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the problem. They say this is a serious problem, requiring serious spending, and it is not going to get better ‘naturally’. As no one is getting ready to spend anything like that, the situation will continue to get worse, more costly to fix, and harder to fix. Patch up jobs merely mask the problem.

What climate change adds to this situation, is that it appears to be bringing more extreme weather events. This puts more pressure on infrastructure.

For example, dams and levees will have to survive more frequent, rapid and severe flooding and storm surges. Such storms are also likely to affect drinking water (also affected by mining and fracking, and possible lowered testing standards as money is taken away from Government based Environmental supervision). Storms in other countries such as Australia (I’m not a US resident, so I’m not up to date with US events) have already caused blackouts, through knocking down power lines; the more decayed the infrastructure, the more they will be knocked down. Roads and bridges also tend to get swept away by severe events. Research has already shown that gas pipelines are leaking badly – oil pipelines breaks are more visible and thus tend to get fixed – but more severe storms will increase both the rate of leakage and possible fire danger.

Rising sea levels, which now appear locked in as Antarctica starts to melt, will affect ports, and anything built on low lying land. This often includes oil refineries, and major cities that have grown around ports. Storms and storm surges are likely to increase along US coasts, especially down south as we seem to be seeing already in the Gulf of Mexico, and off-Florida. Whether people have been lucky so far, or whether the storms will generally avoid the coastline we will see with time. Relatively, small increases in water levels can drastically increase the damage from storm surges on low lying land, or up waste water pipes that dump into the sea.

Increased heat and drought, in some parts of the country, will increase wildfires, and we seem to have already seen this in California and in many other parts of the world – again Australia leads the way. Droughts also bring threats to food supplies and farm profitability. This can be compounded by privatized water supplies, which take water from rivers and deliver it to wealthy businesses – not all infrastructure is necessarily beneficial to everyone. Humans do not work well in runs of extreme heat (anything over 40 degrees centigrade), especially if they are already not well, and this will put extra strain on hospitals, not to mention families and incomes.

Changes in permafrost conditions in the Northern US, may weaken foundations, leading to built item collapse….

Furthermore, most of the US’s infrastructure (and everyone else’s) has been designed with the assumption that climate will remain stable. It is not designed for resilience under changing weather conditions. Even if it had been designed with this change in mind, it is extremely hard to predict what local conditions will become – climate is a complex system, and while we can predict trends we cannot predict specific events.

The US Fourth National Climate Assessment suggests that the US government “must act aggressively to adapt to current impacts and mitigate future catastrophes…to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades” and “climate change is expected to cause substantial losses to infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.”

It is highly probable that increasing destructive stresses on failing infrastructure will have harmful results.

The most obvious result is massive economic disruption, and disruption of transmission of vital supplies, such as water, food and energy. Modern Western cities are not designed to be self-sustaining; if they are cut off from supplies then living conditions will rapidly become difficult for most people. Places like Cuba where cities have been built around much smaller supplies of petrol, and less elaborate infrastructure, may be more resilient, but they are likely to be greatly affected by weather. Effects will not be uniform.

However, the cost of repairing this extra damage will add to the cost of repairing infrastructure in general, and add to financial stress and debt in government.

The extra cost of repair will probably take money away from transition to a more resilient, less polluting system. It could perhaps inspire such changes, as the old system falls down, but that depends on whether established power relations actively strive to stop transition and demand more of what their wealth has been built around. Current political behavior, does not suggest optimism.

Insurance companies are getting worried, and it will be getting harder to insure property in particular locations, and infrastructure is part of what makes a location, and adds to, or diminishes its vulnerability. “Insurers have warned that climate change could make cover for ordinary people unaffordable after the world’s largest reinsurance firm blamed global warming for $24bn (£18bn) of losses in the Californian wildfires”. This will increase the precariousness of life, for ordinary people, and add to their difficulties of making ends meet, especially under the likely new normality of extreme weather events.

You might want to see whether your own costs are increasing, or your local area is becoming uninsurable.

There is another form of ‘infrastructure’ which is often ignored in discussions of failing infrastructure. This is the natural ecology. The natural ecology provides many services we need vitally, but do not notice because they have been provided freely of human action (even if some of them have been charged for). These services include: oxygen supply, waste removal, drinkable water, food supply, and so on. Continual pollution, poisoning and destruction of this infrastructure in the name of development and profit, diminishes the ability of the natural infrastructure to deliver its services, which adds further stress to social life, and increases the likelihood of extra costs and disaster.

Climate change is a consequence of the destruction of this wider infrastructure, and adds to the destruction in a positive feedback loop. Again, the situation will not get better by itself.

Conclusion

Infrastructure (both human-built and natural) is falling apart in the first place, and not designed to face the added climate stresses we are all facing. It is likely to slowly crash, and the results of the crash may not be protected, or coverable, by insurance.

Refusing to consider the problem, which is what most governments are doing, because of the costs, will not make it better. Declining tax revenues (largely because of corporate tax evasion, taking profits overseas, and tax cuts for the wealthy) do not make dealing with the problem easier.

On the other hand, some governments seem to be actively trying to make the situation worse, by lessening restrictions on ecologically damaging behavior by corporations, and encouraging fossil fuel use and pollution.

Those governments are not acting in your best interests whether you ‘believe’ in climate change or not. Political action is required for survival.

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Thunberg’s are Go! 04

September 28, 2019

The third example of the anti-Thunberg argument comes from Amanda Vanstone. An ex-minister in the Coaltion government. Often thought of as a moderate. This should be the place were we can find a way into discussion about the issues. Sadly, it is not.

She begins.

It’s a measure of where we’ve come to in public debate that I have thought more than twice about writing this piece. The days of civilised debate, of accepting different opinions seem to be disappearing.

None of us likes being yelled at or chastised for our views. The pleasure of exchanging opinions, exploring them and in the process better understanding or modifying our own is one of the hallmarks of a free society.

Vanstone would have been much more persausive here if she had made this comment when the Right started its head kicking of everyone who disagreed with it, in the eighties, or perhaps if she had gently asked her old companion Tony Abbott to use a little politeness everynow and again. But its only nowadays that its a problem, when people speak back to the right in the same way that they are spoken to…. But we can perhaps hope that she is going to engage in discussion rather than abuse.

The Greta Thunberg circus has become a complete farce.

That is a really good example of exchanging opinions and exploring them. Beautifully done.

Then follows a passage about Thunberg travelling by emissions free boat is “first-world fake melodrama at its best”. Ok we have quickly gone past expecting civilised debate, and lack of being chastised, but its interesting, how the soon the idea can be discarded, after it is brought up.

We could get the idea from the generally virtue signalling right wing social injustice warriors (see what I did there?) that whatever Thunberg did to produce her message would have been inadequate – unless nobody had heard about it. Then it could be bypassed without comment. Travelled by plane, used Skype all of these would have shown her hypocracy because of the emissions involved, just as not producing emissions was not enough.

It’s a personal choice but I don’t think telling people they’ll never be forgiven, berating them with “how dare you”, does much to bring people on board.

Neither does the kind of language that Vanstone uses. However, Thunberg’s short message, less I believe than 500 words was to the point. If leaders do not do something, when the problem is as clear as it is, how can they be forgiven, or praised? They may want praise for ignoring the problems, but that does not mean they will get it from everybody. And the short speech has certainly provoked a lot of dismisal.

Usually it has the opposite effect. It’s just another sad example of serious and complex political issues being reduced to “I’m right and you’re an idiot”. That kind of discourse just pollutes the town square. It’s fractious and shuts others out. It is toxic to democratic debate.

Exactly what Vanstone is doing. She is so good at this.

The whole trip, the hype and the expense was one big media circus.

Cliche after cliche about why people should not listen to Thunberg. No dealing with her arguments, no civilised exchange. And of course no lack of chastisement. Tut!

Given the over-dramatisation of global warming by some, including Thunberg, we now have a generation of children worried about being burnt to a crisp.

Do we have any evidence presented that climate change effects are being Over-dramatised? No, not necessary clearly. Even if scientists keep saying that the effects are proceeding more rapidly than the official predictions. And should people be relaxed about their ecologies and futures being destroyed? Really? Tell that to farmers.

Out of all the 16-year-olds in the world, why is it that just one features in the media worldwide? There are other kids who care as much, are just as articulate, just as concerned. If you think the world focussing on this one young girl was just some happy accident you are plugged into a faulty socket.

Gently plugging into the conspiracy theory socket here. All this concern is media manipulation. Probably Soros lurks in the background, with his evil tendrils everywhere..

Hmm, we have just had right wing speakers, criticising and dimsissing all these intelligent, caring kids who went on strike, and often refusing to engage in polite discussion with them as well. So we don’t have to look at what happens to one 16-year-old to know what will happen, but we get the idea. Every concerned, caring kid has to worry about retaliation for being bold enough to suggest that people should do something.

I’ve seen the photo of her outside her school on her first climate strike. Posed to draw on the haunting concept of the lonely outsider who (surprise, surprise) becomes the involuntary hero. Who took that photo and, more importantly, why?

Yes it is deeply suspicious that in this age of everyone having mobile phone cameras that anyone (including her parents, teachers or school-friends) would take a photo of her. It must have been planned malevolance, that is the only possible explanation.

Now we have kids all over the world skipping school for the day to show how much they care.

Yes indeed we have another example of Vanstone engaging in civilised debate with all these “kids skipping school”. Evil disobedient creatures that they are.

I’d be more impressed if they gave up their free time to make their statement.

Plenty of them probably have, and have been ignored.

Even more impressive would be if they organised to collectively make a lasting statement by doing something useful. If everyone who skipped school had planted a tree in pre-agreed areas that needed revegetating, that would have made an impressive statement.

Yes they could have been praised and ignored. They could have been more quiet Australians who agree with the Government being ecologically destructive. They would have suggested that planting trees was enough, and we could just ignore the wholesale destruction going on. It would have been much more comfortable for those who don’t care.

If all the protesters focussed on a few areas, whole suburbs could be made better places in which to live. All it would take is commitment and elbow grease. Just skipping school gives you no skin in the game.

Yes, it would be nice if our government did even that much to lead by example, but hey the Coalition likes land-clearing, so we don’t expect leadership, and we are not disappointed. That everyone else should do something, is always a good argument.

Perhaps the Australian protesting kids could all decide to not own a car and to use public transport instead. At home they could not use air conditioning: my generation grew up without it.

Individually they could give up all devices, maybe bar a simple phone and use a shared family tablet or computer.

Careful, she is calling for the end of comsumerism.

Would these striking students be able to pass a simple test on the positive things both sides of politics have done in Australia? Don’t hold your breath.

Certainly it would be hard to pass a test on the positive things that the Coalition have done in the last 10 years, but note the spurious sign of even-handedness.

Everyone can and should play their part. More to the point is how globally we address this. The plain fact is that China and the US produce more than 40 per cent of world emissions followed by India and Russia. The top 15 countries produce more than 70 per cent of emissions. Unless these countries change their ways what we do will make little difference.

Indeed and Australia is one of the top 15 to 20 countries in terms of total CO2 emissions depending on your source (closer to the top if you factor in emissions from coal and gas exports) and is extremely close to the top in terms of emissions per capita. And its getting bigger. We can’t ignore Australia. But she seems to imply we can. Odd. Or is this another example of how it is really everyone else’s problem and we don’t have to do anything?

That’s not a reason to shrug our shoulders and walk away. Not at all. But it does provide some perspective. Did our school protesters think that Xi Jinping, or Modi or Putin gave a damn about their protest? Did they even think about that?

I don’t know, of course, I’m sure some people did think about it. But they did not expect Xi, Modi or Putin to listen. These people are not going to listen to people from Australia. But then Scott Morrison did decide to lecture China on its emissions, while increasing those in his domain. Did he expect China to listen? and he apparently decided not to lecture President Trump who is going out of his way to increase emissions. But Morrison and Trump’s efforts to make things worse will not be commented upon, in an article which is asking us to dismiss Thunberg and student strikers.

Greta Thunberg seemed angered at the presence of President Trump arriving at the UN. She may have just been realising the missed opportunity to get more headlines by berating him.

Anyone who is concerned about emissions is likely to be angry about Trump’s continual efforts to boost them. But it was Trump and his followers who were snarky about Thunberg, not the other way around… The idea that Thunberg is realising a missed opportunity in that moment, is really showing how Vanstone’s mind works, not Thunberg’s. Thunberg could have run after him, if she had wanted, but she didn’t…. Absence of action is somehow proof of intent?

That’s what she does. People have grown tired of that trick.

Hopefully people will get tired of the trick of pretending to be interested in debate while slagging off at people who think there is a problem….

Its depressing. Were any of these three anti-Thunberg writers remotely interested in an opening for discussion? Not as far as I can see. They seemed to be just looking for excuses to put her down, and put concern about climate change down.

That is all.

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Thunbergs are Go! 03….

September 28, 2019

More writing against

This second post was forwarded to me, by an intelligent guy, he was just helping me to know what people thought.

This post is not from the wilder fringes of paranoia either. There are much more excessive examples.

She’s all over the news these days, but 16-year-old Greta Thunberg isn’t homegrown or grassroots. Her climate schtick is completely a product of George Soros and Company, which feeds Thunberg her lines

The right seems plagued with fantasy. Take the whole George Soros thing. After he retired, Soros made a couple of mistakes.

He wrote some abstract books about the complexities of the market, which implied that you could make money out of markets because they were not optimal – which contradicted rightist dogma. He made it clear, in more popular books, that the neoliberal revolution of looking after big business first, did not deliver what it promised for ordinary people and, as a ‘master of finance’, his words might have some influence so he had to be discredited. The Republicans reacted as usual with fantasy, innuendo, abuse, and assertion that markets were the best, and that anyone who thought otherwise was after your liberty. He also tried to help to support democracy in Eastern Europe and ran foul of the Russian State, with the usual consequences. He then supported help for civilians in Syria, and of course the Kremlin rounded on that pretty heavily accusing him of supporting ISIS and terrorism etc… Whole heaps of pretty obviously fabricated stories circulated. Why would Soros support Isis? he’s Jewish to start with, and it contradicts everything he has ever said or done…. but coherence, or plausibility, does not count to those who would discredit him.

Yes people even insist that Thunberg is his granddaughter or pet robot or something.

as she traipses around the world pretending to have come up with all this climate hysteria on her own.

Hmm I’ve never seen or heard anything from Thunberg which suggests that she pretends to have come up with “all this climate hysteria” on her own. Is this writer pretending to have come up with climate denial hysteria on their own? I doubt it, but perhaps they are? Perhaps they are trying to pretend to be a completely original and independent thinker? I don’t know. But I guess the statement is dimissive, so it might sound persuasive, if you were already inclined to dimiss Thunberg and global warming, and weren’t reading with that much attention..

In truth, Thunberg is never without her handler, Luisa-Marie Neubauer, a 23-year-old, far-left activist from Germany who’s the “Youth Ambassador” for an international lobbying and campaigning organization known as the “ONE Foundation,” which is funded by George Soros, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Bono, among other celebrity names.

Thunberg associates with a few people who have similar ideas!!! Oh wow. People like Alan Jones, or oil company executives, would never do that! They wouldn’t use the Atlas Network or anything. They have way too many principles for that.

“Far left” clearly means anyone who thinks the kind of argument being put forward in this anti-Thunberg email is silly.

Besides the fact that Thunberg herself comes from a family of freemasons, her mother supposedly having ties to Bavarian Illuminati founder Adam Weisshaupt,

Her family are supposedly freemasons. No evidence is given, but let’s assume its true even if the name dropping of Adam Weisshaupt, pretty much implies the writer has no evidence but lots of fantasy. The “supposedly” is neat, because if anyone can be bothered to show that it is bullshit then the writer can say it was only supposedly, they weren’t asserting it was true…..

But it is true that the founders of the US were nearly all freemasons. They must also be involved in this conspiracy as well!!!! They plotted all those years ago so that a Swedish teen would try and take on the oil and coal companies!! to instigate their plan for world communism and wealth redistribution!!!

Well it’s as rational.

Neubauer, her controller, works for a major globalist entity that’s working to implement Agenda 2030 in Germany via the Paris Climate Accord.

Her controller? Do we have any evidence for that? No? What is the Sinister “Agenda 2030”? It’s a UN plan for sustainable development involving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Must be evil. We want unsustainable development now!!! non of this survival crap. And Germans are in favour of cutting emissions. It’s A NAZI-COMMUNIST-FREEMASON-UN PLOT!!!!

Neubauer is also a member of Alliance 90, The Greens, and Green Youth, three communist organizations that are using the “threat” of climate change as a cover to push for sweeping policy changes all around the globe – changes that will, of course, eliminate freedom and liberty in order to “save the planet.”

We need freedom to destroy the planet, or we are not free??? Ok, that is a bit weird, but I guess these people have never heard the conservative saying that with freedom comes responsibility. And they assume that everyone opposing them can be described as communist – even those pro-capitalist people like Bill Gates who think climate change is likely to be true.

No matter how many times climate change is exposed as a total hoax, there’s still a contingency of the populace that believes it to be the gospel truth – especially when little girls appear all over the news to reprimand the world about the “science” behind it.

No matter how often climate change denialism is revealed to be a total hoax and the facts all wrong, a tiny number of denialists keep repeating their hoax as if nothing had changed. They appear all over the media, to reprimand or supress anyone for listening to scientists.

Whatever the case may be, it’s obvious that Thunberg isn’t coming up with the many scripts she reads before Congress, the media, and most recently the United Nations. Heck, she doesn’t even speak English as her first language, yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that Thunberg is able to come up with a nonstop flow of professional speeches to present on any given day?

And she is Swedish and speaks English competently – Must be Rosemary’s baby!!!! No teenager could speak English competently, even if most younger Swedes speak English, extremely well.

“So-called ‘climate change’ remains the greatest fraud being perpetrated on humanity,” wrote one commenter at The Gateway Pundit. “It is nothing more than a multi-trillion dollar taxation and wealth redistribution program scheme designed by the U.N. to destroy America by destroying capitalism.”

Wow, A Commentator? Wonder what science they specialise in? Wonder who pays them? Yes let’s just say people who accept the science are hoodwinked, and those who accept propaganda are free thinkers. If we repeat it often enough, it must be true.

Let’s be real…. Climate change denial remains the greatest fraud being perpetrated on humanity. It is nothing more than a multi-trillion dollar taxation and wealth redistribution program scheme designed by the corporate elite to destroy America and the world by supporting big business and ecological destruction. I’m not supplying any evidence for this position either, but at least it’s plausible, because that is what it does….

The right often seems very weird. I suspect it is because they are supporting policies that spell destruction for most people, and have to promote culture wars, fiction and endless abuse, because that is all they have to get people on side.

I’ve always been interested in varieties of conspiracy theory, because I don’t think you can understand modern politics if you don’t consider it to be (more or less) central to mainstream righteous political discourse.  

It is important to realise what kind of (dis)information circulates as ‘fact’ amongst large amounts of the population, and how little it appears to connect with reality, and how many strands of imagination can be connected in a few words.

People, who I knew, in the centre and moderate left in the US did not even know what most people believed was fact about Hilary Clinton. To them, it seemed completely unbelievable that anyone could believe this kind of stuff, and yet it probably helped bring about Donald Trump. Trump’s real misdemeanours where not in the same league as those imagined about Clinton. Possibly Trump could not continue without the widespread tolerance of idea of the great left-wing conspiracy which firmly controls government bureaucracy, universities, business and media.

Once you understand the terms, the evil leftist conspiracy is even hinted at by respectable people like Amanda Vanstone who should be above using it, but is not, as we shall see in the next piece. Certainly her more outré readers would get the references and implications.

Those on the right who know this has to be rubbish, may tend to respond by thinking that all information is equally rubbish, and become cynical about ‘everything’. Nothing is true, nothing is accurate, there is nothing to do except just keep on keeping on. Climate change might be a hoax too – certainly if they don’t like the solutions which are proposed.

The “Info-wars” site and its like, seem almost mainstream nowadays amongst the right, but I can’t think of anything even remotely comparable on the left – apart from those very few supposedly Labor people who tell me the Greens deliberately set out to get Scott Morrison elected – but they seem to rouse more scorn than acceptance… They are not mainstream in the same kind of way.

Is it possible to discuss anything with people who proudly break all the procedures of logic and evidence? I’d like to think so, but how do we do it????

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The Australian Labor Party and Coal

September 26, 2019

Someone was telling me that the one thing you could bet on was that Labor supported renewables and did not support the Adani coal mine in Queensland.

However:

Before the election the Queensland Labor government apparently gave Adani unlimited water rights, for the mine. This looks like enthusiastic support at the cost of many people in Queensland, especially with the current drought.

Labor, did not have to run their recent election campaign by accepting the fictional job figures that Adani promoted out of court, but severely diminished in court, and they did not have to avoid proposing any alternative projects which would bring more employment in the area.

Labor did not have to ignore the possibility the Adani mine could damage the water table, and destroy farms all down central Qld and NSW. They could also have made it clear they were not happy with the mine.

Labor did not have to support fracking in the Northern Territory against the wishes of the Aboriginal landholders, to show how eager they were to support renewables.

After the election, Labor did not have to support and help pass two motions in the Senate saying how wonderful the Adani mine was.

After the election, the Queensland Labor government did not have to rush to approve the mine, nor did they have to strip away the right of aboriginal owners to object. Nor did they have to drop prosecutions against Adani for breaking environmental conditions. They could have moved slowly, rather than with avid enthusiasm.

After the election Hunter Valley Labor candidate Joel Fitzgibbon was saying that Labor should have made it clearer that they were not anti-coal, during the election. Nobody, corrected him, so we can assume they are happy for that to stand.

After the election, Queensland party president John Battams gave a speech saying “Queensland Labor supports the coal industry” which most people would take as support for Adani.

If this is not supporting the mine, what would they do to support it?

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Thunbergs are Go! 01

September 25, 2019

Someone on Facebook pointed out that Forbes was one of the few places that got Greta Thunberg’s message about the Green New Deal. However, Forbes smoothed over the problems quite noticeably, suggesting the problems were made by the ‘left’ being political….

The Forbes author (Jeff McMahon) wrote:

The climate crisis is a universal cause [not a political cause].

Conservatives need a way to get on board. It’s difficult for them to support a policy that evokes the New Deal. And conservative opposition will relegate the Green New Deal to the realm of fantasy at least until a cataclysm arrives like the one that inspired the original New Deal.

Fair enough one might think, especially given the propensity of leading politicians and academics for travel in limousines and planes, which the author remarks on, and the problems conservatives have with responsibility towards others which the New Deal idea invokes, and which the author does not remark on.

Anyway, in her speech, Thunberg apparently said:

The science doesn’t mainly speak of ‘great opportunities to create the society we always wanted’. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action….

This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.

So let’s be clear here, the Forbes argument is that a “green new deal” both cannot solve our problems, and politicises the problems alienating so-called ‘conservatives’….

The author is missing Thunberg’s implication that pursuing business opportunities as usual also cannot solve our problems, even if this pleases ‘conservatives.’

We might be pushed to wonder why is it that staying on the road to profit for some and destruction for most, cannot be described as political, while necessary change for survival is necessarily described as political? Perhaps the suggestion that preserving established power/wealth relations might have something to do with that, is too obvious….

However, a more important paradox is that people will not take the political action to move away from the situation we live in, if they don’t have a vision of where they are going. And it is hard to have a vision of where we are going that is not political.

To survive, we may need radical change. We probably need some form of ‘degrowth’. At the least, we probably need a change in capitalism, and ideas of ‘development’ – otherwise why would we not continue on as we are doing? Any change challenges what we have now.

Those who support the inequalities, destructiveness and comforts of the current system (and who usually call themselves ‘conservatives’), will probably never “get on board” and support doing anything useful about climate change because they are likely to see it as political, as it involves changing the arrangements we have now. The more change becomes necessary, the more they are likely to see it as politically inspired, and thus resist it….

So if action seeming to be political in conservative eyes, is to blame for us refusing to change, then we will never take positive action, because such action is inherently prone to being seen as political…

We can probably never take such people with us. So people who want to change, and who want to make change, have to go on without self proclaimed conservatives. Rather than asking for fairness, we might have to allow them to freeload, until they get the message.

We need climate generosity not climate justice.

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Population and Technology?

September 21, 2019

Population creates pressures on land, water and food supplies, is it possible to solve these problems with improved technology?

Firstly, let us acknowledge that increasing population is a significant problem. Obviously you cannot have an infinte population of humans on the planet and expect anything to work. The planet probably could not survive a population of 20 billion humans whatever the technology.

This is the classic Malthusian problem, and one of the ways that we have solved that problem is through improved technology and improved agriculture. We now grow more food than ever before. Can we keep improving our yields? The answer is probably not. We will eventually reach peak phosphorus, and peak other nutrients. This will occur when we have, if I can put it crudely, shat and pissed most of the essential minerals into the sea, where they will be hard to access. This problem of removing nutrients from the country, and putting them into the seas has been known since mentioned by the nineteenth century scientist Justus von Liebig, and is the basis of John Bellamy Foster’s talk of Marx’s analysis of the “Metabolic rift”.

So there is a point in talking about how do we reduce population or slow population growth, and whether there is a role technology can play in helping us to deal with the effects of population growth.

We do know that increase of population radically slows, where women have a degree of freedom, ability to be self supporting and access to birth control. In other words, the more equitable and the less ‘patriarchal’ the society the better for population decrease. So there is a possible solution to the population problem, but it is not popular with significant forces in the world. These forces are usually religious, although sometimes nationalist politicians campaign for population growth possibly to get more canon fodder or to sponsor economic growth. It has been argued that one of the reasons for British social security is that working class men made unhealthy and weak soldiers – improving fertility was another conjoint solution.

If ‘patriarchy’ is the problem and we know a solution but seem reluctant to use it, then population increase is primarily a political problem, not a technical problem (once reliable birth control exists).

As far as I understand, the main problems today, which are intensified by population increase, involve distribution of food, allocation of living space, avoidance of warfare, growing lack of access to drinkable water, and the destruction of natural systems of waste disposal and regrowth.

Poorer, less powerful, people are being dispossessed from land, which is taken for mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, city expansion and so on. This destroys those people’s ability to be self-supporting, and often severs their connection with being attentive to, and looking after, natural systems. It often forces them into the cities. This, again, seems a political problem.

Some of the politics arises because businesses are given too much power to expand and to insist upon satisfying their drives, and natural processes are given a monetary value which, if paid, allows destruction. For example, water rights are sold by governments to private companies who then sell it to those who can pay the most, excluding many others who might need it more, but have less money. Emissions trading systems allow wealthy people to pollute. As said earlier, we also waste water and soil nutrients in coastal cities which pump it all into the ocean rather than back onto the land.

Likewise, in Australia, it has sometimes seemed that rather than belong to the people, coal belongs to the State which seems owned by coal miners, and hence people get displaced so that land can be destroyed for cheap coal, and, with it, potential food and water supplies. The possession by coal seems to be so extensive that it sometimes seems Australia spends more to get people to mine here, than we make from them in taxes or royalties.

We also have the problem of the huge ecological footprint of certain populations, and this footprint might be more senstibly distributed as well as cut – as I’ve said before, we simply can’t survive if everyone on the planet has the kind of footprint common in contemporary Australia…

All of these problems seem to be primarily political rather than technological.

That is, the questions are really about how do we persuade some people to have less, so that others can have more, and how do you prevent companies from engaging in destruction if it makes money? I don’t have any easy solutions to any of this at all.

On even simple fronts like energy, it seems everyone could be doing a lot better with the technology we have, rather than hoping for new tech – and this failure to act with what we have, is again a set of political, rather than purely technical, issues.

I’m dubious that even new tech can make that much difference, unless its completely unprecedented… which is a lot to pin our hopes on. However, without a change in politics, technology could simply make the processes worse; so that we destroy more land more quickly, strip soil of its nutrients with more efficiency, or create even more unequal distributions of wealth, nutrition, power and involvement.

But if the problems are more political than technological, then they can possibly be rectified with relative ease, once people start realising this and start to act.

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Predictions of Energy Change

September 16, 2019

This is my somewhat harsher version of the beginning of a coauthored and forthcoming book chapter. I particularly thank Tom Morton of UTS for much of the data and inspiration for what follows.

There is a lot of discussion as to whether or not the world has reached “peak demand” for fossil fuels as an energy source. Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases are generating climate change. This is not the only ecological crisis we face, but it is the one with the largest acknowledgement.

Large players in the fossil fuel industry seem eager to imply that world demand for coal and other fossil fuels are declining, but there is little evidence to imply that an energy transition to renewables is coming with the kind of speed we need.

For example, The BHP group states that coal will:

progressively lose competitiveness to renewables on a new build basis in the developed world and in China. In our view, the cross over point should have occurred in these major markets by the end of next decade on a conservative estimate. However, coal power is expected to retain competitiveness in India, where the coal fleet is only around 10 years old on average, and other populous, low income emerging markets, for a much longer time.

(Italics added)

BP are more optimistic still, stating that “renewables are the largest source of energy growth, gaining at an unprecedented rate” and “are set to penetrate the global energy system more quickly than any fuel previously in history.”

ExxonMobil describes a more complicated picture. While they suggest that coal use “likely peaked” in 2013 (p. 29), they suggest the immediate energy “switch” will be to gas (p. 33), which continues greenhouse gas emissions, if at a lesser rate (although this is not certain because of perpetual leakage). However, they also predict that:

global CO2 intensity of energy use remain[s] fairly constant, with increased coal use in some non-OECD countries offsetting improvements in the OECD countries (p. 39).

(Italics added)

They also predict that by 2040 the global energy mix will be:

  • 30% oil,
  • 26% gas,
  • 20% coal,
  • 8% biomass,
  • 7% nuclear,
  • 4% wind and solar, and
  • 4% hydro/geo/biofuels (p. 28).

It hardly needs to be emphasized that this implies that over 80% of a our fuel use will continue to emit greenhouse gases, even by 2040. The degree of transition to renewables will be trivial. Essentially, ExxonMobil predict a transition to a state which is not much different from today, as is shown by the IEA.

The IEA, claims, in its Key World Energy Statistics for 2017, that only 1.5% of world primary energy supply by fuel in 2016 was “geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat,” while 2.5% is hydro and 9.7% is biofuel (p. 6). That is, the proportion of our current energy usage in the world, which is renewable, non greenhouse gas emitting, could be said to be less than trivial!

We may also need to recall that we have been aware of the need for transition to low greenhouse gas emission energy, since the early 1980s, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change being signed in 1992, and this is the best we have done under the current system, and leaving it to private enterprise. (Because the market always knows what is best).

The change predicted and celebrated by ExxonMobil is hardly a transition, and hardly makes much of an impact on a situation which seems to becoming worse daily.

While recognising low utilisation today, the IEA is somewhat more optimistic in its prognosis: in Renewables 2018, it predicts that the share of renewables in meeting global energy demand is expected to grow by one-fifth to reach 12.4% in 2023. Renewables should have the fastest growth in the electricity sector, providing almost 30% of power demand in 2023, up from 24% in 2017. During this period, renewables are forecast to supply more than 70% of global electricity generation growth, led by solar PV and followed by wind, hydropower, and bioenergy. However:

30% of the growth in renewables consumption is expected to come from modern bioenergy… due to bioenergy’s considerable use in heat and its growing consumption… in transport. Other renewables make a negligible contribution to these two sectors [heat and transport], which together account for 80% of total energy consumption (IEA 2018: 3).

(Italics added)

Bioenergy is not clean. At best it consumes fertile land previously intended for agriculture, or leads to felling of old growth forests, thus dispossessing poorer farmers and forest dwellers and increasing the price of food. Biofuel is only of any conceivable use, if it replaces, and lowers, consumption of fossil fuels.

In another recent report the IEA adds:

Energy consumption worldwide grew by 2.3% in 2018, nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010… natural gas… emerged as the fuel of choice last year, accounting for nearly 45% of the increase in total energy demand. Demand for all fuels rose, with fossil fuels meeting nearly 70% of the growth for the second year running….

global energy-related CO2 emissions increased to 33.1 Gt CO2, up 1.7%….

The United States had the largest increase in oil and gas demand worldwide. Gas consumption jumped 10% from the previous year, the fastest increase since the beginning of IEA records in 1971. The annual increase in US demand last year was equivalent to the United Kingdom’s current gas consumption.

Growth in India was led by coal (for power generation) and oil (for transport), the first and second biggest contributors to energy demand growth, respectively.

(Italics added)

The IEA points out that the pace and scale of the global energy transition, “is not in line with climate targets”. This we can almost certainly agree with.

It is, however, in line with a future which maximises fossil fuel company profits and destroys normal life for most people. That is were the World’s current policies have led us.

Data like this, might make you think, that we need Revolution, even if the consequences of Revolution will almost certainly be painful and horrendous. However, while we may wonder if we have any time left to avoid looming disaster, let us try the relatively painless, if perhaps insufficient move, of encouraging high renewable targets, ending of fossil fuel exploration, mining and use, within the next ten years, even if it costs some taxpayers’ money and risks financial problems for some companies. The cost will probably be less than that of oil wars.

This may require us to also consider the necessity of “degrowth” which will be considered in a later post.

_______________________________

Addenda

A new report by the IEA (20 September 2019) states that:

After stalling last year, global capacity additions of renewable power are set to bounce back with double-digit growth in 2019, driven by solar PV’s strong performance, according to the International Energy Agency.

The IEA expects renewable capacity additions to grow by almost 12% this year, the fastest pace since 2015, to reach almost 200 GW, mostly thanks to solar PV and wind. Global solar PV additions are expected to increase by over 17%

However:

Renewable capacity additions need to grow by more than 300 GW on average each year between 2018 and 2030 to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Even with the “bounce back”, we are still not moving fast enough.

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The climate scientist hoax?

September 15, 2019

People frequently tell me, with an air of great authority, that climate scientists only believe in climate change because they gain personal benefit from it.

Thus many people claim that you simply put “climate change” into a research project, say about the nesting habits of squirrels, and lo and behold, the grant awarding offices will give you the money to research squirrels which you previously could not get. Its a sure money winner apparently.

They never say how they know these kinds of statement are true. I would doubt that many of those making these statements had ever put in a grant application to get money to research anything, and I doubt still more that these applications were suddenly accepted because they added a quick reference to climate change the next year.

They certainly never say who they got the grant money from.

They don’t seem to think about all the questions and work they would have to do to relate the squirrels (or whatever) to climate change, whether climate change affected the nesting habits in general and how, or whether any observed changes varied by place? Did climate change have an effect on forestation, and other parts of the ecology, or where the squirrels being affected more severely by human initiated deforestation, pollution, water loss to mines, or development, rather than climate change? What other fauna might be being affected by the same underlying factors, and how does that relate to the effects being noticed in squirrels?

Is there a long standing set of problems about the nesting habits of squirrels, or are they commenting on a set of known changes in squirrel nesting patterns? What does previous literature suggest and how are they reacting to it.

If you have written a grant, you will know that you have to do slightly more than use a few buzz words to get one, and indeed the buzz words may go against you. Various conservative governments have in my life time, decided not to award grants the Australian Research Council had approved, because they did not like the politics implied by the buzz words of the research.

Let us be clear: In reality, scientists seem to get more more or less no benefit at all from supporting climate change.

Not only will they not get special treatment in grant applications, but they can get silenced or sacked by Governments if they speak or give the politically wrong results. Experiments and data collections get shut down, or diverted elsewhere. They get attacked by journalists and internet trolls. They receive death threats, if they get noticed. They run the risk of their personal emails being subpoenaed by right wing think tanks looking for scandal. They have to fight against the almost bottomless funding of fossil fuel companies. They have to constantly refute material that has been refuted before. They have to face up to the massive disruption that is happening to the Earth, with the knowledge that effective action has been continually blocked for ‘economic’ reasons and special deals, and that in the US and Australia, effective action is completely improbable. They even have to watch as governments launch new permissions for business to pollute and destroy the environment, including vital water supplies. If they are biologists, they are looking at whole eco-systems collapsing or dying out, and they have an awareness of what is likely to come. Their favourite squirrels and everything that depends on them, might be dying out. This is depressing to put it mildly.

The only benefit I can think of is that scientists, and others who recognize climate change is real, get the sense that they are standing up for truth and reality. They are refusing to bow down to State and Corporate authority. And they get some support from other scientists, but that’s about it.

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