Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
[…] Source link […]
Exceptional… polluters.
James, Saul Griffith was on ABC radio calling for similar targets and time line as per your series, for 2030.
Then I read…
“G20 Per Capita Coal Power Emissions 2023
“Australia and South Korea retain their positions as G20’s top polluters.
…
“However, despite these noteworthy declines in Australia and South Korea, their coal power emissions per capita remain much higher than the world average.
“Among the G20, per capita coal power emissions in Australia remains the highest as it continues to rely on coal, which made up 48% of the country’s electricity generation (130.9 TWh) in 2022. Australia is also falling short of its 2030 goal to achieve 82% share of renewables in power generation by 2030.
“In addition, the vast resource of coal has made Australia an enabler for other countries in becoming polluters as they rank second in the world as largest coal exporter after Indonesia.”
…
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/g20-per-capita-coal-power-emissions-2023/
A ‘war’ footing IS needed.
KT2: – “A ‘war’ footing IS needed.”
Where are the effective leaders to drive change?
Documentary filmmaker Johan Gabrielson has worked with Tim Flannery in a search for the one ingredient currently missing – good climate leadership.
Launching with a national Q&A event on Sunday, 17 September 2023, at 25+ cinemas around the country, Professor Tim Flannery, Dr Saul Griffith and Kavita Naidu will participate in the live-streamed Q&A moderated by actor and climate advocate Yael Stone. You can also request a screening in your local cinema, or register to host a community screening later in 2023.
See the trailer and book tickets at:
https://climatechangersmovie.com/
Thanks Geoff. “Where are the effective leaders to drive change?”
Hiding at the Vatican? Talk about pulling power..
I’ve tried to think if a person which Australian’s may be swayed from crowd to mob. Unfortunately not Tim Flannery. And nor Saul, even though both acceptable to me. Any single human who may have The Pope’s pulling power as seen here…
‘Former Polish president Walesa tells youths to reject socialism”
…
“Asked about his central role in communism’s collapse, he was humble. “Up to the moment of the election of Pope John Paul II, I was organizing people to fight the communists. Over 20 years, I was able to organize just 10 people. And among those 10 … I had two [secret police] agents. But when … John Paul II became the pope, out of the blue I had 10 million people.” When the pope came to Poland in 1979, Walesa said, even members of the secret police attended the pope’s Masses and gatherings with the Polish people. “We knew many of them, we were looking at them. We learned that they were not real communists; they were radishes — red on the outside and white inside. So, we stopped being afraid of them.”
“Without the pope,” he said, “communism would have lasted much longer. … The Holy Father actually [sped] up the process of the collapse of communism … [and] played an important role in making that last moment of communism bloodless and nonviolent.” …
From; “Former Polish president Walesa tells youths to reject socialism”
By Marc A. Thiessen
August 16, 2023
hwashingtonpost dot com
/opinions/2023/08/16/walesa-socialism-ukraine-legacy/
ymmv.
People are misconstruing what is going wrong. It is not about leadership or lack thereof. It is not about a lack of resources. The problem is a lack of ethics and care by the ruling elites. The rich and the politicians just don’t care about anyone but themselves. Our system of permitting owners of capital to rule over government decisions produces this. They do rule. They buy the government of the day and almost all government decisions, laws and regulations favor the owners of capital.
The rest of the population (probably 90% at least) are being abandoned to their fate. Those who rule this system don’t give a sh** about you, me, the environment or subject matter experts in their fields from health care to economics to everything else. They don’t care. They aren’t listening. Words are wind.
Ikonoclast: – “The rich and the politicians just don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
Then why do they bother having progeny? Are they effectively sadists?
I’d suggest money will have no value when civilisation collapses.
Published at John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations blog on 5 Sep 2023 was a piece by Ian Dunlop headlined Breaking the suicidal impasse, that IMO provided a sobering assessment, beginning with:
And concluding with:
https://johnmenadue.com/breaking-the-suicidal-impasse/
“Mass community pressure is needed now to support them (independents and minor parties) in breaking this suicidal impasse, create genuine leaders prepared to act in the public interest, and to seize the opportunity for Australia to take global leadership in promoting international climate mobilisation.” – Ian Dunlop.
Indeed, we are at the crisis juncture right now. We are at this suicidal impasse because the current self-serving elites, owners, CEOs, upper managers and political leaders – in order of their power – completely oppose all real solutions and are locking us into inevitable, unmitigated catastrophe.
The oligarchs and corporations with their oligopoly on the power of capital are telling our governments and political leaders exactly what to do. Our current political leaders are venal and greedy: easily corrupted morally if not legally (for they make laws to favor and exempt themselves from many sorts of control and scrutiny).
Australia’s and the world’s food production will very likely begin collapsing by 2030. Catastrophic climate change will plunge global food production into crisis.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-impact-on-crops-expected-within-10-years-nasa-study-finds/
Personally, I expect Australia’s food production to plummet to no more than half of its current level over the next two decades. Australia will be hit very hard by mega-droughts, mega-bushfires and mega-floods. By 2040 we may well be struggling to effectively feed 30 million people. So our food experts may well be close to net zero by then. Of course, I fully expect food production / trade oligarchs to blithely export food for higher profits if they can even if some Australians starve. There is nothing in their behavior to suggest they would not do this unless forcibly stopped by a government responsive to the people, not the oligarchs.
It seems the Australian road death toll is apparently on the increase (compared with previous recent years).
Per the BITRE road deaths dashboard:
Annual Total: 12-months ended data current to Jul 2023:
Jul 2014: 1,151
Jul 2015: 1,171
Jul 2016: 1,282
Jul 2017: 1,220
Jul 2018: 1,199
Jul 2019: 1,184
Jul 2020: 1,102
Jul 2021: 1,147
Jul 2022: 1,138
Jul 2023: 1,234
The change on previous 12-months by jurisdiction:
NT: _ _-47.7%, 44 down to 23 (to Jul 2023)
TAS: _ -28.6%, 45 down to 35
ACT: _ -21.4%, 14 down to 11
QLD: _ _+0.4%, 281 up to 282
VIC: _ +13.2%, 243 up to 275
WA: _ +16.7%, 150 up to 175
NSW: +21.0%, 276 up to 334
SA: _ _+22.2%, 81 up to 99
https://www.officeofroadsafety.gov.au/data-hub/fatalities-data
Meanwhile, per covidlive:
Cumulative confirmed deaths in Australia:
01 Aug 2022: 11,864
04 Aug 2023: 22,391
10,527 deaths in 368 days, or an average 28.6 deaths per day.
Cumulative confirmed deaths in NSW:
01 Aug 2022: 4,165
04 Aug 2023: 7,548
3,383 deaths in 368 days, or an average 9.2 deaths per day.
The NSW Government has an ongoing campaign for “Towards Zero” road deaths, including:
Data indicates COVID-19 is far more deadlier than road trauma in NSW – roughly an order of magnitude more. Isn’t “Towards Zero” equally applicable for reducing COVID morbidity, illness and deaths?
James Wimberley says:September 4, 2023 at 8:09 pm “Climate dictatorship, comment 8 and last
“Conclusion
Annual avg –
A$? 143bn
Share 2022 GDP
? 9.2%
Total 7 years
A$ ? 1,430 bn
2023/09/04/monday-message-board-612/#comment-263917
Looks like they only heard you James, at approx $400m over 10 years, not $1.47bn over 7 years.
“$100bn of government strategic public-interest capital investment into an Australian Renewables Industry Package and value-adding critical minerals industry development is needed to crowd in $200-300bn of private capital”
Above from:
“REPORT | An Australian response to the US IRA
“Tim Buckley of CEF and Climate and Capital Forum founder Blair Palese argue that $100bn of government strategic public-interest capital investment into an Australian Renewables Industry Package and value-adding critical minerals industry development is needed to crowd in $200-300bn of private capital. This would be an appropriately ambitious response to the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), commensurate with Australia’s massive domestic and export opportunity.
Click to access CEF_Australian-Response-to-the-US-IRA-11-September-2023.docx-3.pdf
And as with housing, where are the tradies and engineers?
“MacMaster said…
“If we don’t develop the engineering workforce to keep pace with demand, it means that it’s going take longer to reach our objectives and we all know that there is no time to waste anymore, especially when it comes to the energy transition.”
The brain drain
‘Engineers Australia says Australia is facing its “greatest-ever” engineering skills shortage and estimates the nation will need an extra 50,000 engineers over the next few years.
…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-13/drum-engineering-brain-drain-green-energy-renewables/102846152
It’s completely unhelpful and inaccurate to call what would be a democratically decided, state-led emergency program, a “dictatorship”. What have now is the dictatorship: a dictatorship of capital under corporate-oligarchic rule. This set-up runs our government. Our elected politicians are completely bought and compliant to the owners of capital. This corrupt and intrinsically undemocratic system is why we can’t get anything done: why the elites completely ignore all popular calls for action to save us, our civilization and the biosphere.
Engineers Australia are just another front for ponzi immigration.
Dr Robert Rohde, Lead Scientist at Berkeley Earth, posted a tweet late yesterday evening (Sep 13):
Berkeley Earth’s August 2023 Temperature Update, published 13 Sep 2023, concluded with:
I’d suggest the longer-term (multi-year) +1.5 °C threshold (relative to the 1850-1900 global mean temperature baseline) is on track to be breached well within this decade. That means places like Broome, Port Hedland and Kununurra likely start to experience lethal temperature/humidity conditions (35+ °C wet bulb) and mean annual temperatures (MATs) ≥ 29 °C. See Nature Sustainability article Quantifying the human cost of global warming by Timothy M Lenton et. al., published on 22 May 2023.
Ikonoclast: – “The rich and the politicians just don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
Geoff: – Then why do they bother having progeny? Are they effectively sadists?
I think for the wealthy wealth itself is seen as the ultimate insurance for them and their families against global catastrophes and therefore what grows that wealth is – always – the preferred choice. As long as they are wealthy they won’t be harmed by global warming. They think.
I don’t think they are notably more intelligent and far seeing for all that so many politicians fawn on them and want to give them what they (think) they want (didn’t Menzies have some unflattering things to say on that?), but that growing and maintaining wealth works with a set of simple rules – a kind of algorithm – that work on relatively short timescales, and includes such obvious things as buying low, selling high that underpins opposing union involvement and wage increases and corporate taxation but also includes playing politics, not as voters but via other means, including behind closed door transactions, to set the agenda to be voted on as much as decide it. Ikon isn’t wrong about corporate capture, aka corruption.
‘Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972
“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”
The Guardian [UK] (23 May 1992)
– wikiquote John_Kenneth_Galbraith
Is this what you are messaing…?
Remind you of anyone else?
JKG below almost reads like Newspeak….
“Slouching Towards Neofeudalism”
By Garrett Johnson
May 10, 2010
“In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society. It was a book far ahead of its time, and one of the first to use the term “neo-feudalism”. It dared to question traditional attitudes towards economics, and for that it was hated and shunned by wealthy conservatives.
JKG: “Inequality has been justified on many grounds, “principally noted for the absence of the most important reason, which is the simple unwillingness to give up what [the rich] have.” Equality has been argued to lead to uniformity and monotony (the rich sponsor the arts and education), redistribution has a musty association with godless communism, and the original Ricardian defense was that the present system was ultimately inevitable, and any attempt to change it would only lead to short-run inefficiency which would make everybody worse off.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slouching-towards-neofeud_b_568972
Up Tomorrow.
Cédric Durand.
And Yanis Varoufakis “and the impossibility of social democracy” in:
At the National Press Club Jacinta Price recommended a voice that represents all disadvantaged and marginalised people saying that it would address aboriginal problems amongst others and without the controversial need to divide people by race .Unfortunately ,although obviously disingenuous , I think she is correct .How odd that someone who had violin lessons as a child can credibly pretend to be a champion of the disadvantaged simply because of the color of her skin. Her social class is the determining factor here ,she is an ideological warrior for the capitalist class. She has said that the sharing and caring aspect of aboriginal culture is not compatible with modern Australian life so aborigines must forget that and fit in with the mainstream. This is one of her “unpalatable truths” .Two of the others are that aboriginal culture is conducive to domestic and sexual violence .If a white person said this they would be lynched in the public square.
The No case has the law of entropy on its side – its alot easier to wreck things than build them up.
“From; “Former Polish president Walesa tells youths to reject socialism”
By Marc A. Thiessen”
That article almost feals like a violation of a honored historical figure. What is he supposed to say? “I don´t think those youth are in any danger of believing in or enduring the type of socialism i had to live with, your crazy people shifted the meaning of the word socialism to suddenly include any reasonable social democracy”. No that does not work with that type of life history or with what he probably considers a to some extend diplomatic role when giving interviews to the US press.
Nevermind the headline might have aswell been: “Walesa tells youth to reject populist demagogues”:
“you have to understand why [young people] are looking to the past. They’re going to the past because there are no clear answers, ideas for the future.” As a result, he said, “populist demagogues are leading the world, because it’s easier. But those who potentially have better solutions than demagogues and populists have to wake up.”
It looks like he does have quite a bit of personal experience in that regard. That awfull democracy and foreigners hating PIS is targetting Walesa in a dirt campaign since years.
Maybe people like Thiessen soon will receive a memo from Trump to get in line with the PIS view regarding Walesa.
Having been trauma aware now for 15 years, I agree with Ana Marie Cox asking “What if our entire national character is a trauma response?”.
A great question. And if the stats presented in this article are anything to go by, placing trauma, and responses to events, front and centre, would assist in keeping the connections to community and society strong, plus allow for a healthy response to events, compared to;
“unhealthy trauma responses don’t address the damage. They focus desperately on keeping the original event from ever happening again, to the exclusion of repairing wounds.”
We are “desperately on keeping the original event from ever happening again, to the exclusion of repairing wounds.”.
Didn’t. Work.
“The healthy response to trauma is to set things right again. You sew up the laceration, set the bone; bring the community together, make amends, apologize. In contrast, unhealthy trauma responses don’t address the damage. They focus desperately on keeping the original event from ever happening again, to the exclusion of repairing wounds.”
For example, King KT2 would have put a truth and reconciliation process up front, before The Voice. – to “bring the community together, make amends, apologize” and allow the traumatised and perpetrators a safe space to admit actions and effects and affects.
From:
“OVERWHELMED
By Ana Marie Cox
September 14, 2023
“We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized.The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response?
…
“State actions can change national narratives through making their stories more true, more complete. In Germany, acknowledging and tending to the memory of the Holocaust is threaded through policy, from laws regulating public speech to a network of museums and monuments, to ongoing reparations (Jews will receive $1.4 billion next year). The story is imprinted into everyday life: There are tens of thousands of “stumbling stones” bearing the names of victims and survivors embedded in sidewalks. Healing is ongoing, so we still don’t know exactly what trajectory Germany will follow, but consider what the country would be like if those things hadn’t been done.
[Consider attempting to have such a level of recognition, support and repatriation in contemporary Australia.]
“Researchers debate the “success” of truth and reconciliation commissions from South Africa to Canada; they are imperfect instruments. At present, they’re useless to us anyway. We’re missing the first half of the tool. Can we agree that any country that has enough public support to get a truth and reconciliation commission going is ahead of us?
“I believe that we won’t completely heal until we’ve fixed the structural flaws of capitalism. I would love to live in a world where capitalists cared about proving me wrong—a world in which “but what about your trauma?” made as much sense on a political debate stage as a question about the economy or education. But capitalism demands we remain traumatized; if we don’t feel some level of pain and emptiness, we’ll stop buying things we don’t need.
“What are some other actionable steps toward healing?
…
“Privilege does allow people to ignore the downstream effects of their trauma; privilege demands it. The Congress members who have disavowed the fear they clearly felt on January 6 (there are recordings of them displaying it!) have done so because the fear of losing power now frightens them more than the fear of losing their lives did then.”
…
https://newrepublic.com/article/175311/america-polarized-traumatized-trump-violence
*
Because we are not getting enough lived experience truth…
“Truth-telling has been central to reconciliation since the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation began its work 30 years ago. As the Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation made clear:
“Our nation must have the courage to own the truth, to heal the wounds of its past so that we can move on together at peace with ourselves.”
https://www.reconciliation.org.au/our-work/truth-telling/
If these “Mussel proteins from byssal thread are structural components connecting soft mussel tissues to marine surfaces via an adhesive plaque in the distal end, while adhesive proteins from byssal plaque are responsible for mussel adhesion”
… we would be able to make tyres – hard plaque like at tread suface, to soft and flexible sides. A tyre.
This ‘adhesive’ use has been technically known since 2007 and tyres suggested around then. 16 years later – adhesives. Another 16 to sustainable tyres?
“Sustainably sourced components to generate high-strength adhesives
“… Here we present a sustainably sourced adhesive system, made from epoxidized soy oil, malic acid and tannic acid, with performance comparable to that of current industrial products. Joints can be cured under conditions ranging from use of a hair dryer for 5 min to an oven at 180 °C for 24 h. Adhesion between metal substrates up to around 18 MPa is achieved, and, in the best cases, performance exceeds that of a classic epoxy, the strongest modern adhesive. All components are biomass derived, low cost and already available in large quantities. Manufacturing at scale can be a simple matter of mixing and heating, suggesting that this new adhesive may contribute towards the sustainable bonding of materials.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06335-7
^2.
“Marine mussel adhesion: biochemistry, mechanisms, and biomimetics
…” Mussel proteins from byssal thread are structural components connecting soft mussel tissues to marine surfaces via an adhesive plaque in the distal end, while adhesive proteins from byssal plaque are responsible for mussel adhesion.”
…
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01694243.2012.697703
When Trump last won the presidency he assumed power as a lone actor .If he gets another try he will be supported by an extensive network of loyal and powerful allies and a broken Republican party right from the start . As was said about Stalin – he wasn’t as bad as the many little Stalin’s .
Why petroleum fuel prices are rising, per a graph tweeted by US petroleum geologist Art Berman on Sep 16:
“Why petroleum fuel prices are rising….”
There are two factors mentioned:
(a) reduction in crude production; and
(b) widening gap between crude prices and fuel prices.
These are not the same thing and (a) need not necessarily lead to (b). There is plain old wholesale and retail fuel price profiteering happening on top of the crude price movements. Demand for fuel tends to be inelastic. Translation? Refiners can charge what they like especially with their oligopoly power.
The trouble with standard economics [1] is that it is not a science. The economy is an “administered system” using this phrase in the sense of “administered prices”. In turn, I am using the term “administered prices” to mean the following:
“Administered prices are prices of goods set by the internal pricing structures of firms that take into account cost rather than through the market prices predicted by classical economics.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administered_prices#Sources
We can add that administered prices also take into account opportunities for profiteering especially in relation to inelastic demand.
In the current system, oligopolists administer the prices. In their fear of government power, people by default have handed power in our political economy system over to the corporations and conglomerates.
To reiterate, standard economics is not a science. The economy is an administered system, not a natural system. It has no fundamental laws at the market level nor anywhere internally as a formal system. There it has only administered rules, administered by human socio-political-technical formal systems. “Laws”, as in the fundamental laws of nature, either support or break into and break down this administered rule system. The administered rule system has rules, set up as axioms, and theorems derivable from the axioms. The only fundamental Laws it actually obeys are exogenous, from nature. It has no fundamental internal Laws.
For as long as we believe market forces are Laws (meaning fundamental laws like those from nature) we will delude ourselves and follow the invented rule system of market fundamentalism which is destroying the world.
Footnote 1: “Standard economics” we can take as “textbook economics” of the style of Greg Mankiw.
Ikonoclast; “These are not the same thing and (a) need not necessarily lead to (b).”
Per Art Berman’s blog post on 13 Oct 2022 headlined ENERGY AWARE #3: U.S. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND OTHER DUMB MEMES:
Per Art Berman’s blog post on 17 Nov 2022 headlined ENERGY AWARE #4: THE DEVIL IS IN THE DIESEL:
I’d suggest the reason diesel fuel prices are rising (relative to other fuels like gasoline/petrol) is because there’s an apparent global scarcity of the heavier grades of crude oils that are necessary for producing sufficient supplies of diesel fuels.