Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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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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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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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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Bushfire regeneration and transhumanism

January 21, 2020

Earlier I wrote a post about the possible difficulties for the regeneration of the bush.

I’m now interested in the continuing idea that the bush will regenerate without problems, without any human help. This idea seems quite common, but often hides a disregard for what is currently present, or for creatural suffering.

For example, one person wrote:

The bush will always recover. It always does.

Now that appears to be a non-problematic statement, even if it might be false, but it is problematic for a number of reasons we can observe in what I’ll call ‘denier’ literature. It implies no change, but when pressed it appears lack of change is not what is meant. The sentence comes from a disregard for any kind of change in ‘nature’. It becomes transhuman, or post-human, in the sense that humans are rendered irrelevant spectators; they are just another unimportant species which could cheerfully go extinct. Humans do not matter, and have no effect on anything, and it is merely a conceit to say they do. However, it can appear that support for human irrelevance is accompanied by an apparent horror of change in economics or power relations.

My response to this was much as I wrote in the previous post:

If the fire was too hot in some places, then it could destroy seeds, so the bush won’t regenerate. It could have killed the insects so there is no pollination, and it could have killed the birds so there is no seed distribution, animals will not dig up the soil… We shall have to see. It is, in any case, unlikely the rainforests will regenerate quickly.

The response was:

This has never been seen in the history of earth. Although it could be possible. The earth always regenerates. If not exactly as before but as new species emerge. Never doubt the amazing ability of nature to re-emerge. Otherwise mamals like us would still be scurrying in fear in our burrow.

There is an initial comforting suggestion that nature will go on and recover (as such failure is apparently unseen “in the history of the earth”), but in the end the suggestion implies that the person is really arguing that humans cannot kill life on earth. The latter point is probably true, but it is not even vaguely the same as the former. “Recover” usually means return to something like what it was previously, not become something completely different, even apparently dead or wiped out.

By talking of evolution (and conflating it with progress), and life in general, the suggestion avoids creatural suffering; effectively creatures are just being wiped by natural forces, and there is nothing to worry about or be concerned about. Some other creatures may be impelled to progress and crawl out of their burrow. Being sad at animals and humans being burnt to death, or ecologies being destroyed, is clearly silly, from this transcendent point of view.

So the person recognises the reality that Earth does not always regenerate in ways that are happy for humans or other creatures, or in ways which are similar to what was before. We can add, that this has happened many times in the history of humanity, and civilisations have seemed to collapse as a result of the changes. Failure to recover has been seen many times, even in the short span of human history. So they are contradicting themselves, apparently in order to be comforting, distant and uninvolved.

Failure to recover, can be how deserts form; humans change the environment, say through intensive agriculture, and an unintended consequence is that the land does not regenerate, and people can no longer live there. Perhaps that is helped by wider climatic and ecological changes which are being ignored, I don’t know. However, deserts have been supposedly expanding for quite some time now, and are likely to expand in Australia. One possible sign of this is that after the fires there have been massive dust storms as top soil has blown away.

Evolution is, in current human terms, more or less irrelevant. New species can take tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of years, or longer, to emerge, although colonising species can move in and produce long term change to previous ecologies pretty immediately. Evolutionary frameworks, when used in a certain way, appear to be yet another mode of distancing oneself from what is going on.

To repeat: in human time-frames, destruction is quite possible, and neither the flora nor the fauna may recover. The change could come with an extinction of species, that might otherwise not have occurred for considerable amounts of time

The arguers response to this, is to assume that wanting the world to be safe for humans (and as many other creatures as possible) is human arrogance. We can destroy what we will and it does not matter because everything changes, and hey no individual species is of any import.

Nature does not aim to please our arrogant species. It will regenerate in ways that best suit the new environment. Simple. We may find it tragic, but that is purely subjective. The very notion that we somehow know what is best for nature is dangerous at least.

If this is the case, which is probably correct, then saying the flora and fauna will recover is misleading, because it may not.

It is much more accurate to say, the old ecology could possibly be destroyed, and a new ecology may eventuate. This may be bad for a whole heap of plants and creatures, and good for some others. Change happens. There is no straightforward recovery. But this is not what is being said on the surface – and it is odd that it is not being said, because it is not difficult to say, and this silence implies some other rhetoric is in play.

While the idea that whatever happens after human induced destruction is ok, may be extremely dangerous, it could be comforting to the destroyers. Perhaps this is a quietist response to the recognition that humans (including ourselves) are destroying the world?

So, it may not be surprising, when it turns out the person does deny human induced fires, and posits that the bushfires are a purely natural process (which they are of course).

However, this position obscures the role of humans in the fires, and the politics of that role. Not only climate change or accident was responsible. Humans lit some fires. The government cut back on fire fighting services, refused to listen to advice that the coming season could be bad, especially given the drought, made no preparations etc. So the fires were partly human induced, even if we posit that there was no human induced climate change.

This is a post-humanism which acts to excuse human actions, by making everything equally ‘natural’ and humans irrelevant, while pretending that

  • All is well, and normality is not threatened,
  • They have a modest non-interfering model that represents humans as not the dominant species, as opposed to those who would try and direct the actions of nature.

When you push, it appears that they think that altering our destructive tendencies in economic and political behaviour is bad. For them, going along with our economy is natural and apparently not directing the actions of nature. Perhaps the economy is considered more ‘natural’ and immoveable than the Earth itself? Planning mitigation or amelioration, or the politics which might lead to such actions is defined as conceit. We are not to try and disrupt corporate power.

Doing nothing to oppose the routine pollution, and destruction, of ecologies by business and governments is accepting a plan to interfere with natural processes, and to prefer profit for some over survival for all. And perhaps that is the intention.

First: say everything will recover. The earth always regenerates

Second: if pressed, admit ecologies will change and creatures and plants will become extinct.

Third: suggest that any actions or thinking taken to prevent this extinction and harmful change, are conceit and we should quieten down and accept our insignificance, and accept the flow.

Fourth: do not worry about the ecological consequences of corporate and government action, because it does not matter in the long run. Humans are irrelevant after all, and we could have no effect either way. Let it, and the social power relations, continue. Let us submit to fate, or rise above the earth, rather than become political or active.

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Siemans and Adani

January 12, 2020

German company Siemens has decided to support the Adani Carmichael mine, by providing a signaling system for the necessary rail line. Their justification seem more about fulfilling their recently signed contract, than preserving a functional ecology, or discovering the problems with business deals in advance.

This is their email to those who wrote to them objecting to their support for Adani.

Dear all,

We just finished our extraordinary Siemens Managing Board Meeting. We evaluated all options and concluded: We need to fulfil our contractual obligations. Also, we will establish an effective Sustainability Board to better manage environmental care in the future. Read here the reasons for the decision. (sie.ag/2FoFpAt).

Sincerely,
Joe Kaeser

Lets look at the website:

Siemens starts by denying there is any evidence connecting “this project” with the bush fires. Of course not. The project is not running yet; it can have nothing to do with the current bushfires. However, burning more coal makes climate driven bushfires more likely and probably worse. This project will add massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, and consume massive amounts of water. If Australia has more seasons like the current one, we will continue to lose bush, agriculture and water. The mine will not make things better. Increased Greenhouse gas emissions probably spur on the unprecedented fires that have burnt throughout the world this year. Human induced climate change is not just a problem for Australia.

Siemens has “pledged carbon neutrality by 2030”. This is probably a good thing, but it is a bit weird to try and reach carbon neutrality by increasing other people’s lack of carbon neutrality. You cannot become carbon neutral by furthering carbon intensity. This is as absurd as the Australian government’s argument that carbon emissions from burning our coal, are not our problem, if other people buy it and burn it. Greenhouse gas emissions anywhere affect the whole world’s lack of carbon neutrality.

Siemens says correctly that the project is approved, and it is true that Australian governments have approved, and indeed made it as easy as possible, for example, gifting it infinite amounts of water in drought conditions. That cannot be argued. However, it is not unambiguously true that the local Aboriginal people are all in favour, or the Queensland government may not have had to rescind land rights claims to the area..

As we might expect, Matthew Canavan wrote to Siemens in support of the project, in a letter dated December 18, 2019, saying:

The Australian people clearly voted to support Adani at the federal election in May 2019, especially in regional Queensland. It would be an insult to the working people of Australia and the growing needs of India to bow to the pressure of anti-Adani protestors.

Oddly an election is never about a single issue, and even if people had simply voted for the Adani mine, they were voting based on known false job estimates, and official lack of consideration about what the mine is likely to mean for all the East Coast, south of the mine. It is correct that Labor never challenged those figures, or proposed different sources of jobs, and has backed the mine since the election, but this does not change the facts.

We might point out to Mr. Canavan that having their homes burn or dying in the fires, because of lack of government preparation, or concern, could be considered a much more severe insult to the working people of Australia.

The web site continues:

Siemens has signed the contract on December 10th, 2019.

This means they signed the contract in full awareness of the problems, and before receiving Mr Canavan’s letter. It is not as if they signed years ago. The recent signing implies they either could not have really cared about the problems, or cared to bother to inform themselves of the problems.

There were competitors who have been competing. Thus, whether or not Siemens provides the signaling, the project will still go ahead.

This reminds me of a film about the artist Banksy I saw recently in which people stole his street art to sell it, because someone else would probably steal it if they didn’t. The argument seems to be that we can commit crimes if there is a likelihood someone else will do it, if we don’t, or they will do it before we can.

Siemens then claim they have “embedded long-term sustainability-related targets in their management-incentive schemes,” and elsewhere in their defense “we will for the first time in Siemens history establish a Sustainability Committee”. This is slightly contradictory, but may mean they currently have a commitment to carbon neutrality without any consideration of sustainability.

Only being a credible partner whose word counts also ensures that we can remain an effective partner for a greener future. In this case, there is a legally binding and enforceable fiduciary responsibility to carry out this train signaling contract.

Sorry but being aware of the problems, and acting on that awareness, and not signing contracts without consideration of the problems is the only way that you will become (not remain) a participant in a greener future. Being prepared to break a contract when you discover it is morally wrong, despite the probable consequences, is the only way anyone can remain ethical. Everything else is about profit at the expense of a greener future.

Joe Kaeser’s final act of generosity is to promise to make plans to “support the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure in the areas impacted by the terrible wildfires”. Yes many building companies will be doing that to make profit out of the disaster (and there is nothing wrong with that). However, this will not stop our global ecological problem. Companies must refuse to make profit out of destructive activities in the first place, and not place contractual obligations before ecological stability.

An edited version of this piece was accepted for John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations web blog

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CO2 and Drawdown technology

January 11, 2020

There is lots of new drawdown technology, which claims to be able to make plastic and fuel out of CO2 extracted from either the air, from coal power, from cow farts and so on. I’m not being sarcastic about the cow farts, that is apparently a real claim (although I doubt it is functional).

The argument seems to be that as this tech exists, and people seem to keep demanding new electricity, we can happily extend, or increase, the use of fossil fuels and be ok with any ‘temporary’ increase in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

To me there seem to be a number of problems with this approach.

1) We seem to be perilously close to massive tipping points. This is vitally important:

  • If we get a run of summers like the one we have just had in Australia (and there is no reason to assume that we will not, as the trend for average temperatures has been increasing steadily over the last 20 years), then, we will have little surviving natural bush, we will have no place for the bush fauna, and we will lose a large number of our farmers, for economic and fertility reasons. We have almost certainly lost some normally non-inflammable rainforest forever.
  • The fires have come close to increasing Australia’s carbon emissions to 175% of normal.
  • The fires have significantly reduced our natural extraction of CO2. We hope that regrowth will compensate, but regrowth could be problematic and slow (See previous post).
  • Rivers and creeks will continue to breakdown and dry up. The water supply situation will get worse. Fish and other fresh water creatures will continue to die. Local food supplies for people outback will decline.
  • It is highly probable, that large numbers of Aboriginal people (and other outback based people), will no longer be able to live on their land, or maintain their ways of life.
  • Other countries are likely to follow a similar course. Australia is just more sensitive to global warming than most other places, we are a country of erratic weather, droughts, floods and storms.
  • The permafrost is melting elsewhere in the world, due to global heating. There is thought to be a large amount of methane and other green house gases stored in the permafrost. If so, there will come a time when this gas starts to leak. Some reports suggest this is already happening. When it does, climate turmoil will accelerate even more rapidly than it is doing. It is extremely likely that the resulting weather changes will affect the world disastrously.
  • There are other effects which will accelerate as well, but you probably already know this.

Summary: We cannot afford to increase the amounts of Greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere.

If we increase GHG emissions we are heading for destruction. It is that simple.

We need to lower emissions now and we need drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere now. Technological drawdown is a great idea in principle. Whether it is currently useful is another issue.

2) Historically, drawdown technology has not eventuated, but the promise of drawdown technology has been used to increase GHG emissions: “Soon we will be able to extract all this, and fossil fuels will be clean!”

In Australia, the government has given the fossil fuel industry significant amounts of money to build this technology.

  • The coal industry largely used the money for dinners and promotion of coal. No vaguely working extraction and drawdown technology emerged. Naturally they did not have to pay the money spent on parties and promotion back.
  • Some gas companies did some work, but this was primarily to use extracted CO2 to push more gas out of wells. The successes in extraction, or storage, were minor, or significantly less than the increased emissions, arising from the use of the field.
  • No commercially useful long term, non-propaganda, successes were reported, or implemented outside the test sites.

3) It is possible that the empty promises of drawdown tech are not essential to the talk about it any more. We may even have working tech. If so, the basic conditions for acceptable working tech are:

  • If it is making fuel, then the total amount of energy consumed is considerably less than the amount of energy emitted (ie it has an Energy Return on Energy Input greater than 1).
  • If making plastic or any other substance, then it has to have significantly less emissions than the normal production of the substances, and it has to be economically competitive with recycling and normal production. If it is massively more expensive, then it will not be deployed, or be deployed as a novelty, or demonstration of capacity to be discontinued when the costs do not come down.
  • If we are storing the extracted CO2, then we have to be able to test the stored CO2 for escape into the atmosphere. If such tests are impossible then storage should not be undertaken. Theory of success is not enough.
  • If extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere, then the technology has to be able to deal with the small amounts of CO2 in real atmospheres and again not be dependent, in any way, on GHG emitting sources of energy.
  • It should be competitive with reforestation, regenerative agriculture, or education of women, over the long term, otherwise let’s use an existing (simpler) working technology.
  • Technical data and the results of experiment has to be freely available. In most of the sites dealing with the new tech, the technical data seems to be mainly hype, based on assumptions of success. They rarely tell you current data. Sometimes there is no technical data at all. This may not be the case about every product, but it is common enough that we cannot assume it is not the case in advance.
  • Independent testing is needed before we risk the technology’s use for GHG reduction.

Summary: We cannot assume, without thorough investigation, that the hype about drawdown technology is accurate, and the technology is ready for commercial or effective layout now rather than in some distant future.

4) Given these issues, if we are to increase the amount of fossil fuels we use, for whatever reason, then we need to be sure that:

  • We reduce the use of other fossil fuels so that the amount of GHG emissions does not increase.
  • If the drawdown technology is being used to extract new fossil fuels, or otherwise unviable fossil fuels, then the total levels of emission (including those from burning the fossil fuels extracted) has to be zero or less; otherwise we are increasing emissions.
  • Drawdown tech has to be installed, thoroughly tested, and shown to be viable, before any new emissions get released. AND we measure the drawdown accurately, and make sure there is no escape.
  • We increase the fossil fuel emissions by less than we are actually drawing down through tech now, so the emissions trend really is downwards.
  • We do not increase the fossil fuel energy supply, or GHG emissions, to power the drawdown technology.

If drawdown technology is ready and functional, then these conditions should seem fairly straightforward. If these conditions seem onerous, then the drawdown technology is not ready, and we need to stop increasing GHG emissions now. The easiest way to stop increasing emissions is to stop increasing fossil fuel based power.

5) We should spend the limited amounts of money, and energy available, primarily refining technology we already have that works to reduce emissions now. If that includes drawdown tech that meets the criteria above, then great.

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Bushfire Regeneration

January 11, 2020

We are having incredibly intense and widespread bushfires in Australia. Figures suggest that the fires have been much bigger than those in the Amazon, earlier in the year. Some sources say the area of land burnt is equal to 10.7 million hectares which is 26 million acres, 107,000 square km, or 41,000 square miles. I’ve seen maps comparing the size of the areas burnt to Ireland or Belgium. The fires are still burning and not yet over. [Figures a few weeks later suggest burning of over 17 million hectares, when we include the Northern Territory. Over a billion animals may have died. More than 700 species may now be extinct.]

Everyone knows that bushfires are part of the natural cycle in Australia. Some plants need the fires to re-germinate and so on.

My question, because I don’t know the answer, is a simple one. Is it possible to have a fire so intense and widespread that it destroys this capacity for regeneration and new plant growth?

It seems reasonable to assume that if the temperature is too great for too long, seed pods and buried seeds could be killed, or just burnt up. Trees whose canopies might be normally expected to survive the fires, are burnt and their seeds along with them.

Ash can also seem to harden into a solid which covers the soil, and may protect it from blown in seeds, and remove the circulation of molecules between air and soil. I’ve seen this form of ash in fire zones before.

Birds spread seeds through their excreta. If most of the birds die in the fire (and I think they may have, because normally in bush fires the city is colonised by bush birds and I have not seen this happen this year), then this cannot happen.

Animals also spread seeds, and disturb the earth and the ash cover. They eat excess seeds thinning the forest and clear the leaf litter and lower the fuel load, by burrying it in the soil. Normally the soil in Australian forests is turned over, made soft, permeated by water (when available) and made full of nutrients by the activities of small mammals.

these mammals punch above their weight. A digging mammal can shift around 1.8-3.6 tonnes of soil per kilogram of body mass in a year. A woylie – a bettong from Western Australia – creates between 20 and 100 diggings per night while foraging, while a southern brown bandicoot can excavate over 3.9 tonnes of soil per year.

Fleming 2013

The loss of these mammals to intense fire, or to an influx of feral predators (before or after the fires), is likely to slow, or event prevent forest regeneration. Certainly these animals will take a long time to breed to normal levels in a hostile low nutrition environment.

Insects, native bees and so on, which can normally keep out of the fires, may not have been able to. In which case pollination is not going to happen, and any surviving plants will not reproduce. Certainly they will not reproduce rapidly. Termites, ants and so on which are vital to the ecology, as they decompose fallen timber, may also not survive, and take a long time to recolonise the burnt areas. It is possible for termite mounds to bake solid.

Fertile soil is composed of dead things, plus micro-organisms (plus rock dust etc). It is the micro-organisms that generally make it ‘work’, without those micro-organisms it is just dirt and dead things. The system of micro-organisms is generally quite complex. If they die in the heat, then the soil can be less fertile, more like a desert. I’ve no idea what it takes for bush soil to support larger forms of life, but it could be affected by severe enough fire.

Ecologies are systems, and all the parts of the ecology have a part to play in maintaining (and sometimes disrupting) that ecology. If a whole section of the ecology is dead, then regeneration may be far more difficult, as the system is no longer working in the same way.

This level of disruption of the bush breeding cycle, or resilience cycle, may mean that invasive species, at the margins of the bush, may get a massive hold on bush fire zones, before anything else can grow back, and Australia’s ecology could change for ever.

Changes in climate, if they continue (and there is no reason to assume they will not), will alter the potential and dynamics of ecologies. We may not be able to replace what we have lost. Other arrangements of flora and fauna could be encouraged by the new weather patterns and, if so, then everything will be different.

If any of this is so, then I suspect it may be dangerous to just leave the areas to regenerate by themselves. As a friend of mine said we might have to aim “at creating pockets of sustainability for the bush and wildlife,” so life forms can spread out from these pockets to produce the bush we used to know.

Hazzard reduction burning, even traditional burning, by itself, without a working ecology of other creatures will likely disrupt the process of regeneration, and may even produce greater hazards.

I don’t know.

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Thunbergs are go! 06

January 5, 2020

I’ve just been sent another document about Greta Thunberg, arguing against “this teenager who had the audacity to reprimand others!!! – rather hypocritical of her!”

I should probably begin by stating that I do not know why a teenager should not reprimand adults. How many people never complained about adult politics when they were young? Are adults sacred or something? What on earth is hypocritical about criticizing other people, their actions or ideas? Is it hypocritical to criticize a teenage girl for accepting help?

Anyway, the author makes a number of points against Thunberg, but one problem is that, in the version of the post I have seen, they give absolutely no evidence for their assertions at all, so let’s just see if the arguments hang together.

1) “She is backed by a number of Swedish/Swiss venture/vulture capital funds focused to investing in green technologies.“

If true, so what? Denial is sponsored by large companies interested in preserving fossil fuels. There is massive amounts of evidence about this. Would you not expect other corporations to join in the discussions and throw money at it, as well?

2) “She was chosen from a number of young Swedish girls to represent their interests, trained and given information to start espousing.”

Again, no evidence and again, so what? Personally I would not choose someone on the Autistic/aspergers spectrum to train and manipulate because, knowing specialist teachers in this field, I know this is bloody hard and the results are highly unpredictable; she is likely to get annoyed and reveal all, for one. ‘People on the spectrum’ also tend to wind people up and annoy them, which Thunberg does. Lots of people tell me they don’t like her manner, or her tone, (again so what?). Not a good object choice for a conspiracy.

There is also no evidence that she could not find information herself. After all, its not that hard to find real scientific reports, or comments on those reports, no matter how difficult this seems for those commentators who prefer anonymous youtube videos.

3) She got an audience with the UN through a high powered marketing campaign, but “the 500 scientists, from around the world, who sent a letter to the UN did not gain an audience.“

This is perhaps the most significant point. The UN will not listen to scientists. The UN did have a panel of young people, and Thunberg was an obvious choice for that panel as she is well known, people would comment if she was not there. You don’t need a marketing campaign to do this.

4) “She slammed my generation and generations previously. We stole her childhood. A script written for her by the German marketing firm. Her childhood is like it is because of the sacrifice of a previous generation, many of whom lie buried in fields in Europe.“

Most of the generation who lie buried in the fields of Europe would be in their 80s and 90s if they were alive, which I think demonstrates the point here. This person is not reliable even for facts we all know. Most of the people in power are younger than mid sixties, they were not participants in the war. They may not have sacrificed particularly much.

No evidence is given that her speech was written by a marketing firm, and the idea of generational conflict is widely promoted by the media, probably in an effort to diffuse the idea of class conflict, or the conflict between the hyper-wealthy corporate sector and everyone else. So it is not inconceivable that she thought of the generation idea herself, without deliberate help.

Again people often complain about the emotional deadness of her speeches. They do not seem to have been written by marketeers who know more about humans and what is persuasive. Furthermore, she basically never gives ‘solutions’ which you would expect her to do if she was a passive tool of a conspiracy.

5) “She then gets used again by political leaders for photo op’s. Shame on our political leaders. The fact that she got face to face time should be abhorrent to countries.”

Sorry, but how is the fact she gets used for photo ops by some leaders her fault, or evidence of conspiracy? Some politicians abuse her and ignore her, is that similar evidence of something foul?

And why is it abhorrent that a relatively ordinary person gets face time with leaders and talks to them? Is it being claimed a person should be a billionaire, or a massive celebrity before any face to face contact, or that they should do it in secret because they represent some fossil fuel company?

6) “She leads schools protest march another photo op for greedy politicians, take part. Her ability to protest rests solely with the sacrifice of other generations.“

She occasionally participates in or inspires school marches which leads to greedy right wing politicians and media pundits calling her names, and abusing her pretty continually for the publicity it gives them. That is more realistic.

These right wingers, try to discredit the school (and other) protests by saying they are all organised by Thunberg and a few tech billionaires, and implying that there is no anger against their refusal to act on climate change from real people – its all manipulated, and we can keep on nannying fossil fuel companies and miners.

Again, so what if her ability to protest depends upon the sacrifice of previous generations? Isn’t that what the author is implying they sacrificed their lives for? Are we only supposed to protest in support of established power?

The author also berates her for travelling by yacht and for the crew taking planes back. This is a good point, but Thunberg does not control the crewing arrangements of yachts. That is the owner’s responsibility and planning. For what it is worth, Thunberg “has renounced at least one award and numerous speaking invitations to reduce her own carbon footprint” according to wiki. So go easy on the fact she travels.

Not a particularly coherent lot of criticisms, but it does show how threatening she can appear to be to some people.

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What could the ALP have done better

January 2, 2020

OK. Someone said to me, its easy enough to criticize Joel Fitzgibbon, but what do I have to say that is constructive? Here are seven points, where Labor seems to have failed, and some simple fixes.

1) Too many policies. We should have learnt from the Right by now. Have a strong central narrative, and do not give details. Return to the strong central narrative, whenever you are questioned about details. This is what sticks in peoples’ minds.

Labor did not have a strong central narrative. Partly because of points 2 and 3, below.

2) Too many policies that seemed incoherent. You are going to fight climate change and promote coal and fracking? This does not make sense. It means both those who support coal and support climate action, think you are half hearted, and probably lying about something. Choose one side or the other, preferably climate action. Point out there are few jobs in coal. Point out that the Adani mine will use, and pollute, lots of water in a drought. Point out the Adani mine will very likely damage the great Artesian Basin, and thus damage agriculture and jobs all down the East Coast. Point out that Adani have already polluted the Great Barrier Reef. Etc. Etc. Point out climate change is not just an inconvenience but deadly and that, yes, some sacrifices might be required to fight for our children. Put forward policies to guarantee good jobs in mining areas for miners and their children. Make it clear there are good jobs in Renewables under Labor, and that people will not be abandoned.

Job and income security is important, and is not threatened by going green, but it is threatened by climate change.

3) Don’t fight an election on policies no one understands. Franking credits? No tax rebates on tax not being paid? Great idea, but how many people understood what you were talking about? Almost nobody. The majority of people were easily convinced you were somehow likely to take their pensions away, or start taxing them harshly. This made the Coalition’s day. They could lie continually, and you had no defense, because hardly anybody knew what you were talking about, and those who did know where probably not going to vote Labor anyway. I still hear people, in the media, say that you wanted to abolish tax-free earnings on shares.

You did not need this policy. If you have policies like this, introduce them when you are in power, and have the time to explain them carefully, and see what happens.

4) It does not matter what you say, the Murdoch Empire will attack you. So don’t worry about it. Give up trying to please them. Go for a coherent and memorable message.

5) Moving to the Right will not save you. Even if you vote with the Coalition 100% of the time, the Murdoch Empire will still brand you as ravening socialists or Nazis, because they like confusing the two. Moving to the Right will only loose you votes, as people move to independents or Greens. Moving to the Right, also serves to confirm that the Right are right, so people might as well vote for a real committed Right-wing party, not you.

You even have an allegory for what will happen. Malcolm Turnbull, continually gave into his hard-right Murdoch inspired acolytes, and never won their acquiescence or support. He simply received stronger demands, and their contempt, until nobody knew what he stood for or even if he stood for anything. The Empire will always behave like this. Accept it, and steer around it.

Remember the Right are fundamentally wrong, and make this point repeatedly.

Move to the Left if you want, it will help distinguish you from the others.

6) Its ok to attack the Coalition – they will attack you. You let the Coalition get away with 7 years of incompetence, stupidity and corruption. You did not even try to remind people of the continual scandals and idiocies that they brought forth. This allowed them to pretend that they had been a good government. Their narrative won, because there was no counter narrative, and because they kept blaming everything wrong on Labor. They stayed with their strong coherent (lying) narrative that Labor were high taxing and economically incompetent, something reinforced by point 3. You cannot expect, like the Coalition can, that the media will remind readers of your opponents’ stupidities (see point 4 again), so you have to make the points yourself. Repeatedly. This is not being nasty, this is trying to save Australia from more of these people.

We now have Scott Morrison who is worse than Tony Abbott, unbelievable as that seems, partly because you refused to remind people of what the Coalition are like.

7) The Greens would like to be friends. But you keep hitting them. It is easy to think you hate the Greens more than the Coalition. This goes back to point 4 – the Murdoch Empire will attack you for being green no matter what you say. So you might as well say you are the ‘sensible Greens’ or something, and demonstrate it, but yes be open about it. You are probably more likely to ally with the Greens than One Nation; at least everyone, on your side of politics, would probably hope this is true. By attacking the Greens as much as you do, you either look small minded or hypocritical. No one on the Right will believe you are not Green allies, whatever you say, so get over it. The Greens are not your party, and they won’t always agree with you. Get over that as well. Be prepared to negotiate, which you were not in 2009.

Remember it was the CFMEU and Clive Palmer, not the Greens, who actively campaigned against you in Queensland.

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