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Baroness Thatcher and the Moment of Climate Retreat

February 28, 2020

All Baroness Thatcher’s realism had gone by the publication of the 2002 book Statescraft, which she reportedly recognised was her last book. She was, sadly, becoming increasingly fragile and unwell. However, there is little mark of this fragility on the writing style or the forcefulness of her arguments.

This section of my exposition, includes more comment on the Baroness’ arguments than previously. This is because they need to be challenged, and because they seem incompatible with the positions she took while PM.

The section, “Hot Air and Global Warming” comes in a chapter defending capitalism from its critics.

Her main focus in the surrounding section is on refuting prophecies of doom:

the better things are and the greater the reason for optimism, the louder the voices prophesying doom seem to become… taking the longer perspective, global gloom is out of place… Was there ever an age when children had better prospects, all things considered, than those born into the world today?
p.444

She argues capitalism and liberty are responsible for this success. We might wonder if capitalism and liberty are always, and indelibly, joined even by pointing at British History (certainly the path is not straightforward, and has a lot to do with the militancy of the working and middle classes, and their suspicion of capitalism), but she argues:

We should be very wary indeed of turning aside from the path that has made us rich and free, simply because some group of experts or a collection of NGOs advise it
p.445

She argues Malthus, who suggested that the direction of humanity was towards mass death because population always increased faster than food supply, was simply wrong. This is despite her earlier warnings about population increase as being a problem, and the obvious fact that certain levels of human population (200 billion??) may be unsupportable by the planet in nearly all circumstances. Indeed population increase in non-western countries seems to have become one method the contemporary right has developed to blame climate change on other people.

Thatcher argues that people like Malthus, underrate “mankind’s ability, given the right framework to invent and adapt” (p.447) Indeed, but it is still theoretically possible that there may be times in which the speed of the problem-increase overwhelms people’s invention and adaptation. TThere is no guarantee we have not reached, or will never reach, that point. We may not have, but that is a hope not a certainty. In her words the “right framework” may not be present or even possible.

She generalises her response to Malthus to the problem seers of today:

Today’s doomsters have broadened their attack. It is not just population growth by economic growth… that they dislike…. Many of the gloomiest warning were associated with a group of international experts calling themselves the Club of Rome
p.447

This pessimism was supposedly a dominant force in the years leading up to the 1980s. This may be something of an exaggeration: if it was dominant, surely people would have done more to face the problems?

Only when Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office did we hear an alternative, optimistic message – that our free-enterprise democratic system had the moral, intellectual and practical resources to overcome any challenge.
p.448

Again this is a hope, not a certainty. It is not proven for ever, and cannot be proven in advance. And why should our “moral, intellectual and practical resources” not include Government policy and direction? After all, neoliberals seem to recognise the rights of governments to direct people to keep the neoliberal system going, all the time.

She rightly emphasises that cutbacks, through policy, are not the only methods:

we are constantly assailed by warnings that we cannot go on consuming. But we hardly seem to reflect upon the extraordinary way in which we get more and more out of less and less…. Less farmland is producing more food. There has been a dramatic fall in the number of famines.
p.448

there are, of course, still natural disasters. But it is by scientific and technological advance that we predict them, plan for them and cope with them. That advance occurs in free-enterprise capitalist societies, not in sclerotic socialist ones
p.448

So government planning for disaster is not impossible, and we can use science to predict such possibilities.

Before opening her section on global warming she remarks:

We should, therefore:
Recall how wrong the doomsters have been and take comfort from the fact.
Learn the lesson that as long as a free political system, a free society and a free economy are maintained, the ingenuity of mankind is boundless
p.449

That human ingenuity has been very great, does not mean that it is “boundless”, can solve all problems through uncoordinated profit driven action, that such profit driven actions can solve the problems in the time available to avoid mass suffering, or that these actions will not have unintended consequences, which require more action to remedy.

The section on global warming opens with a long footnote refering to various books and articles which she has read on the matter and which have persuaded her. Non of these writings are by climate scientists, or from scientific publishers, or scientific journals. They are all from corporately sponsored neoliberal think tanks, such as the Reason Public Policy Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Centre for the New Europe, and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

These are ‘research’ establishments, who’s results and opinions can be predicted in advance. They largely appear to say what their sponsors require. It could be suggested that these documents serve primarily propaganda purposes, and aim to oppose ‘action on climate change’ to ‘capitalism’, and suggest any planned climate action must represent dictatorial socialism. They do this to defend the established corporate profit of their sponsors. It is, perhaps surprising, that the Baroness decided to listen to them, rather than to scientists in the field. But, these neoliberal thinkers are her primary in-group, and if it was possible to stop her identifying with scientists and get her to completely identify with neoliberalism then that would make science less persuasive to her.

“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.
p.449

There is no reason to assume that while global action might provide a “marvelous excuse” for socialism, it could not also provide an equally marvelous excuse for encouraging transnational capitalism to work its supposed magic – unless one of the prime directives of neoliberalism is liberty for the transnational corporation from any form of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

She gives some examples of exaggeration.

President Clinton on a visit to China, which poses a serious strategic challenge to the US, confided to his host, President Jiang Zemin, that his greatest concern was the prospect that ‘your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles, they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for all.
p.450

While all Chinese driving petrol fueled cars does present a real problem, the actual remark seems unlikely and her source is an article in the American Spectator rather than any government record. But rather than dismiss recognition of the problem as foolish, we should wonder what the solution might be, or at least wonder how we might avoid the problem. Previous versions of Thatcher might have recognised this as a problem requiring governmental help to overcome.

She then refers to Al Gore saying:

‘I believe that our civilisation is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.’ And he warns: ‘Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilisation and our way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.’
p.450

This is possibly true. It looks more likely to be true now, than might have done then, but the statements are not that incompatible with statements in Thatcher’s own speeches. She was, at one stage, able to wonder if all economic activity was compatible with survival.

The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.
p.450

These comments do not seem that ridiculous, or to be dismissed on the word of some pro-corporate think tank, without further evidence.

She remarks she was active in the anti-chloroflurocarbons debate, and successful. But the greenhouse gas effect “was a more difficult issue, because the science was much less certain.” As we have seen, she had always recognised this uncertainty worked both ways. By 2000 the climate science was far more certain, but perhaps she had not read it, becoming more interested in defending neoliberal capitalism than in the science?

I was more sceptical of the arguments about global warming, though I considered that they should be taken very seriously…. there was, in fact, rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis…. By the end of my time as Prime Minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying…
p.451-2

That some “other side” is facing a problem by advancing their own arguments in their normal fashion does not seem an excuse to argue the problem is not real. It should give people an opportunity to present better policies, and to defeat that other side yet again.

the choice might appear to be between preservation of the climate and preservation of prosperity. This is, of course, how left-of-centre opinion wished and still wishes to portray it
p.451

“Might appear” is not the same as “must appear.” Does she have to accept this supposed left-of-centre opinion as the only possible approach? Again why not recognise the problem and present better arguments?

Personally, I’m inclined to wonder if the issue was not politicised by the neoliberal think tanks, who wanted it to seem like the political action of defending capitalism and capitalist ‘liberty’ was incompatible with the political action of dealing with climate change. If so, then they succeeded, but there may be no necessary incompatibility; that would have been a possible approach, if you were not primarily interested in preserving fossil fuel corporation profits.

She moves on to illustrate the bias of anti-global warming arguments and their anti-capitalism.

When President Bush anounced the US would not sign the Kyoto Protocol.

“The French Environment Minister said, ‘Mr Bush’s unilateral attitude is entirely provocative and irresponsible’.
[While the EU Environment commissioner] issued dark if unspecified threats against US business [and] Britain’s own Environment Minister.. described the American decision as ‘exceptionally serious’ [but ruled out sanctions].
p.452

Whether you believe in the perfections of capitalism, or not, these comments seem pretty mild. They didn’t involve much more than an expression of disappointment that the President of the world’s biggest economy was going to put the possible future of the world on hold and thereby disrupt the pretty minor global action and promises required by the Kyoto Protocol. There is nothing necessarily anti-capitalist, or unreasonable, about objecting to this.

Kyoto was an anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-American project
p.453

This is an assertion and no evidence is presented. The US was then the world’s biggest economy and, both at that moment and historically, was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Given this, it does have more responsibility than other relatively low emitters, and this means, that it has more actions to take and more wealth to take those actions. Kyoto is only anti-capitalist to the extent that neoliberalism supports capitalism without responsibility or honour.

in matters of public policy it is as important to recognise what we don’t know as what we do… The golden rule is: all government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven
p.453

We do not know for sure, it is not fully proven, that Capitalism can solve this problem. The passage of events since Statescraft was published implies it cannot, yet we still do not act. Previously Thatcher recognised that the results of global warming could be worse than predicted; we are by its very nature, going into uncharted territory and do not know exactly what is going to happen.

She argues, referring to “some experts,” that the long term trend of warming is “not relevant to current concerns” (P.453). Presumably these are experts from the think tanks, not climate scientists. Again this case is not proven. However what Thatcher did not say is also significant, in terms of contemporary denial. She did not say that scientists were part of a conspiracy, that the science was being faked, or that the science itself was biased by leftist politics.

Secondly, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gase “so exclusive concentration on CO2… is bound to mislead.” (p.454)

This position is probably true. However, it means we should deal with all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. We should in fact return to Thatcher’s earlier position that there is a general systemic issue with ecological destruction and change. Climate change is not the only problem.

Third

There is now, as always, nothing that the liberal intelligentsia likes to believe more than that ‘we are all guilty’ But are we? The facts are unclear.
p.455

So what if this is true? And it is not proven. This does not change the problem. That the problem may harmonise with biases in some intelligensia (clearly she is not talking about the neoliberal think-tank intelligensia here) does not mean it is necessarily untrue. It does not mean we should stop research, stop looking at the latest research or try to mock research by real scientists, that you disagree with.

She remarks that the IPCC report “is a great deal more tentative than some alarmist assertions” (p.455). Previously she could admit that getting scientists to agree on a general proposition was difficult. The reports are likely to be tentative, by their nature.

Carbon dioxide levels have increase as a component of the atmosphere by nearly 30 per cent since the late eighteenth century, probably because of past deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. But in any one year most CO2 production is not related to human beings
p.455

The question is whether this issue of the smallness of yearly human production of CO2 is relevant. Essentially, she mentions the importance of the cumulative effect of emissions since the late eighteenth century to dismiss it.

In fact, less than 5 per cent of the carbon moving through the atmosphere stems directly from human sources – again mainly: burning fossil fuels and deforestation….
p.455-6

She previously understood that small persistant changes can have complex consequences. Now she apparently does not. Things become simple and linear.

“The more closely one examines specific proposals to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by emission controls alone, the more costly and economically damaging they become.
P.456

In that case, the sensible thing to do is to suggest better procedures. She has been prepared to engage in economic distortion and taxpayer subsidy when she considered it useful in the past, so why not now? Cost is never an excuse to do nothing. Surely we can rely on the ingenuity of capitalists to deal with the costs? Perhaps it will spur them into action?

The problem of acceptable costs, is acceptable to whom? Is people being driven from their homes by rising sea levels, drought or unbearable temperatures an acceptable cost of keeping profits high?

it will be be necessary to resolve many remaining uncertainties before risking action that makes the world poorer than it would otherwise be by restraining economic growth…
p.457

Apparently, for her, there is no imaginable paradigm in which capitalism could flourish without growth, and so we must be completely certain before acting against something which would likely cost economic growth. What would allow such certainty is not described.

Climate change doe not “mean the end of the world: and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism”

There is no reason it should – if pro-capitalists are prepared to engage with the problem, or with other people.

Once her allies suggested to her that her beloved free-enterprise capitalism was being challenged by ‘socialists’ because of the problem of climate change, the Baroness appears to have suffered a major failing of confidence. She was previously famed for not backing down when she thought she was right. Here she did.

Her back down was so complete that she did not advance the case that free-enterprise should be encouraged to face up to the problem, and she did not propose non-socialist measures to deal with the problem. When faced with socialist opposition to many of her actions as PM, she continued; she did not say, “oh well we can’t do anything”.

However, faced with the apparent choice proposed by the think tanks of either pro-capitalism or action on climate change, she collapsed and allied with her mentors and supporters.

Therefore her path brings up the issue of whether it is possible for neoliberalism to actually deal with climate change or other problems, at all. At one stage she could, but the more she listened to neoliberal think-tanks the more this became impossible.

Tags:climate change, complexity, Disinformation, neoliberalism, politics
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Communism, Dictatorship and Climate Change?

February 18, 2020

Some parts of the political Right argue that climate change is far less of a problem than Communism and consequent left-wing dictatorship. This might strike, non-righteous thinkers as a bit odd given that communism has passed into history. Cuba is tiny, and voted for a new constitution in February 2019. It has almost no influence. North Korea does not seem communist, in any form, other than name, and also has no influence – certainly I have never read a recent Western communist using North Korea as a positive blueprint for anything. China, which is the only possibly ‘communist’ country of influence, seems nowadays to manifest a form of authoritarian State based capitalism. When people want to praise Chinese progress they frequently say it is because of capitalism, when they want to condemn Chinese politics, they frequently blame communism.

So far, communists or left-dictatorships alone have made no real impact on global natural systems, so their legacy, however painful, has been short term.

However, climate change, assuming the predictions are correct (and the IPCC predictions have so far underestimated the rates of change), will be disastrous for the long term. You can see world wide firestorms already, record temperatures in the arctic and antarctic already, melting of land ice already (this will accelerate as the ice melts and with 68 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in the Antarctic ice will not stay frozen), and melting of the permafrost and the release of stored Greenhouse gases (which will make the situation even worse) already. We see no tendency for temperatures to return to ‘normal’, or for the system to be returning to any kind of stability. Indeed this January set quite startling temperature records. Global climate change is here already

We know the major causes of this problem, and that includes human burning of fossil fuels, and some human agricultural and building practices – and these practices happen in all kinds of political systems.

There is no sign these polluting practices are diminishing at the rates we need to diminish the threat of climate change.

Consequently it is pretty likely that we are going to see sea level rises of a couple of metres in a relatively short period of time in geological and historical terms (it is hard to predict when, but within a hundred years is certain, within 10–15 years is possible). These rises may end up being between 25–50 metre rises. It is extremely unlikely that governments will be able to deal with the flooding of coastal cities and the large-scale displacement of people that will result. The economy is likely to tank due to the losses, people are likely to starve while the financial elites try and save themselves.

We already know that the market (by itself) is unlikely to save us in time, as we have been pretty much leaving it to the market for the last 30 to 40 years. The market could quite possibly be more useful if it was not politically dominated and structured by fossil fuel companies and mining companies who are trying to prevent financial losses for themselves, through using disinformation and purchase of politicians and regulations. Crony capitalism is the natural form of capitalism, and it always values short term profit for the established elite over long term survival for everyone.

Normally we try to avoid possible disasters, even if we are not sure how and when they will arrive. The unusual thing (which shows the effect of corporate power) is that, with this probable disaster, we are trying to avoid dealing with it. We have politicised it to such an extent, that many people on one side of politics (not by any means all) refuse to acknowledge it and obstruct discussion and thinking about the problem – often by throwing around terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’.

As I have argued previously, neoliberalism tends towards authoritarian plutocracy. Capitalism can operate easily within a dictatorship which protects elite wealth from democratic processes such as climate action. So if we have to fear long-term destructive dictatorship it may well come from elite business operatives rather than from left-wing ‘communism.’

But even if these propositions are wrong, if we don’t act soon, then people will have a lot more to fear from climate change, while there is little to fear from communism.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
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Climate Emergency Summit 02: Action?

February 16, 2020

Part 1 of this discussion deals with the current state of the world and what the emergency looks like. We can now move on to what constitutes an adequate response.

The minimum actions seem to be something like the following. How they are organised is a political question which is vital, but open for discussion.

Firstly we need to stop all new fossil fuel mines and exploration. We almost certainly won’t do this, because of the power of fossil fuel companies and the (dis)information they disperse, and because some people cannot imagine life without fossil fuels, but it’s absolutely necessary. More fossil fuels will only make the situation worse.

This means no Adani mine, and no Clive Palmer mine. We apparently have plans for another 50-80 coal mines in Australia and even more new gas wells. This stops, Now. Personally I don’t think there should be any compensation for this. These companies were trying to profit from our destruction, so I have little pity for their loss, and we need all our resources to help the transition, but that is not my decision – that is part of the political process.

All existing fossil fuel mines need to be phased out over the next ten years. For the purposes of climate change, it is irrelevant whether these materials are burnt overseas or here. They have to be stopped.

We immediately start building, as public works, a grid that is capable of handling renewable energy and connecting new sources of energy to its markets. We also make it possible to directly transmit generated energy from a rooftop to another building without having to use the grid; this will make community energy developments much easier. The actual building of solar and wind farms can be left to companies or preferably communities, as there seems considerable will to build these.

We begin to reduce emissions in all fields (energy, transport, industry, building, agriculture etc) to zero by 2030. We start by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and by having a carbon price that rises every year in a predictable manner. We phase out ‘natural gas’ through renewably generated hydrogen and ammonia for transportation of the hydrogen. The hydrogen or ammonia can act as storage, along with weights, batteries etc. We mandate that all new buildings should have 7* energy efficiency by the end of this decade, exploring energy efficiency as best we can, and make sure regenerative agriculture becomes the norm. We may need to increase all taxes to raise money for action and research. At the minimum, no company should trade here and not pay tax on their local income.

People may say that being planned this is not going to deliver things as well as the market, but the market alone shows no signs of delivering what we need within the time frame in which we need it. The market is one of the factors which has generated the problem and it has failed to generate a solution. This does not mean we destroy the market, we just provide better parameters for it to function in. Parameters which are not determined by fossil fuel companies.

All the workers in these fields need to feel and perceive there is a progression to a new stable financially comparable and interesting employment. This will require more planning.

We need to engage in drawdown, not to offset burning fossil fuels, but to remove existing emissions from the air. Regenerative agriculture, biochar and massive tree replanting (that is not just planting the same tree over and over, but planting ecologically appropriate distributions of trees and bushes) might be useful here, as will be bans on land clearing and clear felling. We also need massive investment in research into carbon removal and reuse, as current tech is nowhere near adequate.

Drawdown, even to preindustrial levels, may not be sufficient. If the ice caps have melted enough then the world will be warmer and may not shift back into cooling fast enough. In which case we may need to do solar radiation management; that is cooling the earth by reflecting light back into space. This is dangerous with unintended consequences almost certain to arise. It requires worldwide co-ordination, and some plan to compensate those who end up worse off than previously. It is not to be contemplated before all other methods are found to fail and a time limit should be set for its use and slow withdrawal.

We almost certainly need to plan for migration inland resulting from sea level rises, and to protect coastal cities, towns and infrastructure where possible (nothing much is possible if we don’t prevent the 25 m rise). We almost certainly will need to have huge flexible and well equipped emergency services. And we will need to organise people to protect and tend changing eco-systems.

These requirements are truly massive in terms of preparation and expense (probably overwhelming) and we will not be able to protect everything. However the problem needs to be acknowledged, so we can do our best in advance, and it should create plenty of jobs.

The difficulties of such a project are enormous and possibly insurmountable. But the neoliberal elites from Keating onwards have derailed any attempts to solve these problems previously, and have politicised these problems in order to carry out their prime directive of making corporate power and hierarchy safe by destroying the power of ordinary people to affect their corporate overlords. In the long term, they have failed. In twenty to thirty years, without action of the kind discussed here, the whole economy will be falling apart and that includes the corporate sector, not to mention the billions who will suffer and die as a result of that refusal to act. If we had been able to start 30 years ago, we might not be needing this kind of ‘excessive’ action now.

This is not an exaggerated bid to gain action, it is a minimum bid for what is needed. Going still further would be better.

It is unlikely the State will go with these proposals, so we will have to work outside the State and build a new participatory democracy from the grass roots up. Some people will argue that the project violates their rights. But if we don’t have a working ecology, and a functional society, then no one will have rights. If we do nothing, we face dictatorship as the Corporate State tries to enforce its rule in a crumbling war torn world.

However if the best we are offered is 2050 targets (as, in Australia, with Zali Steggall’s Bill) then we should go with them, and press further. Anything serious is better than nothing. Even if it won’t work, it will get people thinking about what we need to do, and that might make the dangers clearer than if people keep running away from them in the hope that they personally will be special enough to escape the consequences.

This is a hard set of demands, which will not encourage unity. But it is extremely difficult to have unity with climate change deniers, after all they are seeking a unity in denial of the challenges and in flight from the challenges. However, as Zali Steggall said at the summit, as an athlete you live with failure: you have to be prepared to put it all on the line, and sometimes you will fail and sometimes it will be wonderful.

Part 3: The lack of political interest in the Emergency

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, Energy, politics
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More on Energy Policy: Consequences

February 11, 2020

The previous post discussed the incoherencies of Australian energy policy. This post discusses the consequences of that incoherence.

Two relatively straightforward consequences of this mess, are, that emissions reduction is failing, largely because of policy issues.

[I]ndustry emissions (excluding electricity) have risen to 60% cent above 2005 levels behind increases in the Oil & Gas (621% increase), Road Transport (122%), Aviation (54%) and Mining (41%) sectors….
Emissions from the industrial sector will surpass electricity as Australia’s largest emitting sector in 2023-24, with companies free to increase their ‘emissions baselines’ under the government’s Safeguard Mechanism scheme.
RenewEconomy 12th Feb 2020 a

And, it appears that, in NSW, more expensive gas production is displacing cheaper coal and solar, due to internal market factors. As the reporters remark:

While more remains to be done to understand this in detail, prima facie this is yet another instance of the exercise of market power by the coal generation oligopoly in New South Wales.
RenewEconomy 12th Feb b

The incoherence of policy is also starting to bite into investment in Renewables, and it is quite possible it was intended that way, but it could have been an unexpected consequence of incoherence. Who can tell?

The level of new investment commitments in large-scale renewable energy projects has collapsed by more than 50 per cent according to new analysis by the Clean Energy Council which reveals a fall from 51 projects worth $10.7 billion in 2018 down to 28 projects worth $4.5 billion in 2019.
Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said mounting regulatory risks, under investment in transmission and policy uncertainty have contributed to increased risks for investors and resulted in a lowering in confidence and slow-down in investment commitment….
The top reasons for a decline in investor confidence was due to grid connection issues, a lack of strong national energy and climate policy and network congestions and constraints.
Clean Energy Council 30 Jan

As the Clean Energy Council suggests, one of the fundamental problems is lack of working electricity grid, which is certainly influenced by energy policy. As a consequence, The Australian Energy Market Operator has warned of long queues for connection. The gird in some parts of Australia is massively fragile. This may be resolved by the AEMO’s Integrated System Plan, but the earliest this is likely to be built is in 2026 or 2027. So it may take seven years before some new projects can connect to the grid. What this does for investment, should be clear to nearly everyone.

The CEO of AGL remarked that although battery technology was improving rapidly, was cheaper than pumped hydro and will compete with gas peaking plants, fewer renewable energy projects would go ahead because of the costs and economics of connection. “There is a struggle for new projects, there is a struggle to get on, and they are struggling to maintain forecast loss factors… A lot of renewable energy is getting choked.”

There are forces pushing renewable companies out of the market.

One of the biggest contractors and constructors of large-scale solar farms in Australia, the listed constructing giant Downer Group, has signaled a dramatic exit from the solar business, saying it is too hard.
[The CEO said:]
“Developers, contractors and bankers all struggle to come to terms with the risk of large power loss factors, grid stability problems, connection problems, and equipment performance issue”
RenewEconomy 12 Feb 2020

Other companies are also having problems with the complications of the rules around connection and moving out of the field.

“To say this is a significant blow to investors is a major understatement,” said David Shapero, managing director of the Australian arm of German renewable energy developer BayWa r.e., which has one solar farm in Victoria forced to operate at half capacity since September and a second that was due to come online in October but is lying idle. “In the end, we have invested around $300 million in two solar farms and we’re getting returns on half a solar farm.”
Australian Financial Review 24 Feb 2020

Mr Shapero continued, to indicate that inadequate and old regulations were the main problem:

“There is no doubt that AEMO understand the issues. They have very good leadership. But there’s also no doubt AEMO needs assistance from government, other regulators, and the industry to put in place immediate, small changes to the rules.
“These small changes will allow them to ensure such issues don’t occur in the first place, and give them much greater control to manage the transition.”
as above.

Senior economic journalist John Kehoe, who again is not left-wing, generalises the problem to almost the whole economy:

The uncertainty and unpredictable energy market regulatory interventions by the government are contributing to business investment falling to its weakest share of the economy since the early-1990s recession.
Australian Financial Review 22 Feb 2020

Meanwhile the NSW government and the Federal Government are planning to fast track evaluations of three projects under the federal Coalition’s Underwriting New Generation Investment program. This agreement includes:

extension of the Vales Point coal generator
ensuring sufficient coal supplies for the Mt Piper coal generator near Lithgow, to keep it going to 2042.
a gas plant in Port Kembla
pumped hydro scheme in the state’s North
work on the grid in exchange for more gas production.

They also are trying to keep the Liddell coal fired energy generator going beyond its planned 2023 closure date which would cost $300m for three years. It is now likely that it will cost more to keep the power station operating than can be recovered in operating profits. It is not clear who would be paying this money.

Vales point gives further information about how business works in NSW. In November 2015, the NSW Government sold Vales Point Power Station to Sunset Power International for $1 million – less than the price of many suburban houses. In 2017 the site was valued at $730 million. The company bought back the shareholdings and the investors received a great cash pay out.

The shareholders are companies associated with Trevor St Baker who controls more than 25 per cent of ERM Power Limited, which purchases power from Vales Point, and which has contracts to supply the NSW Government with electricity. So the NSW government sells a station, used to provide it with power, at a bargain price and then buys power from it, making a fortune for those who invested. That seems like a sensible energy policy.

To make the power station cheap, the NSW government said it would close in 2021, but still sold it massively under the normal commercial rates. And now, the supposed closure date is being ignored, and it may be (according to the Daily Telegraph 14 Feb 2020 “Coal’s $11m turbo charge”) that at least $11m dollars of taxpayers’ money is being used to provide a turbine upgrade and high pressure heaters. This is how the free market works in practice.

This may also be more than government stupidity and policy incoherence, if it was, then why keep supporting the problem?

Nevertheless, the trends are clear. Have policy to make life difficult for investors in renewable energy, and life easy for investors in coal.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, politics
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Barnaby Joyce on Climate Technologies

February 7, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

The WNISR2019 paints a picture of an international nuclear industry with substantial challenges. Remarkably, over the past two years, the largest historic nuclear builder Westinghouse and its French counterpart AREVA went bankrupt. Trend indicators in the report suggest that the nuclear industry may have reached its historic maxima: nuclear power generation peaked in 2006, the number of reactors in operation in 2002, the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix in 1996, the number of reactors under construction in 1979, construction starts in 1976. As of mid-2019, there is one unit less in operation than in 1989….
In 2018, ten nuclear countries generated more power with renewable than with fission energy. In spite of its ambitious nuclear program, China produced more power from wind alone than from nuclear plants. In India, in the fiscal year to March 2019, not only wind, but for the first time solar out-generated nuclear, and new solar is now competitive with existing coal plants in the market. In the European Union, renewables accounted for 95 percent of all new electricity generating capacity added in the past year
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019

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

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

Mr. Joyce also argues that we need:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current Republican Election Strategy and Climate

February 5, 2020

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

1) Both sides are equally bad.

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

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

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

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

3) Criticise Democrats more than Republicans.

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

4) Discuss Foreign Policy Endlessly.

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

5) Repeat the idea that Democrats are warmongers.

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

6) Support free markets.

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

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

No one will notice the contradiction.

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

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

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

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

10) Climate is irrelevant

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

Summary

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

Tags:activism, climate change, Disinformation, politics
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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.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
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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.

Tags:climate change, complexity, development, Disinformation, ethics, Social change
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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.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation
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A brief comment on the US Democratic primaries

January 19, 2020

People seem to be noticing that Bernie Sanders is either getting a hard time in the media, or he seems to be being ignored, even in the supposedly left media.

This illustrates the proposition that there is no mainstream left-wing media in the US, whatever Fox and its friends declare. To reiterate a point: all mainstream US media is corporately owned, and depends on corporate advertising. It is necessarily corporately controlled and will rarely challenge the interests of its owners and sponsors.

If people can recognise there is no left wing media, then it becomes obvious the media will not treat Mr Sanders well. After all, they could not even bring themselves, in general, to treat Hilary Clinton particularly well, and they participated gleefully in spreading and repeating Republican slurs against her for thirty years. And Hilary Clinton was only a moderate threat to corporate power.

This hostility is nothing to do with the Democrat establishment. It is a fact of life over which they have no control.

From their point of view, the media hostility towards Sanders would become part of his campaign. The hostility is such that Democrats could well decide that it is not worth the risk, unless they were shown otherwise by massive voting for Sanders, and a massive grass roots campaign. People tell me he has the latter, but it may not be enough to get votes from Democrats in the primaries – we do not know yet.

While it seems probable that the media would be hostile and dismissive if Sanders won the nomination – we can guarantee that if he does not get the nomination, the media sphere will be full of stories about how he was betrayed, not by the media (which will not be mentioned), but by the Democrat establishment, so as to try and convince left-inclined people to vote for a third party candidate and put Trump back in, who will then continue his moves to destroy the ecology, destroy health care, destroy protest, destroy the constitution, make money for himself, and have a war.

On the other side, if Sanders wins the Presidency, then the hostile media may have given Sanders useful experience for dealing with a hostile congress and Senate, when the Reps get voted back in.

Tags:Disinformation, politics
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