Category: Climate chaos

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When does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?   
Murray Bookchin

Throughout my career, I have been impressed with the importance of integrity – whether it was growing up as a Boy Scout, working in one of my first jobs as a university janitor, or being a leader in a Fortune 500 company 
Rex Tillerson

The story of Exon, and their program of denial
Bill McKibben
Extract, lightly edited

The fossil-fuel industry’s contribution to the code of denial has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.

As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times have revealed, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before James Hansen testified to Congress. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius, and as much as ten degrees Celsius at the poles.

Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2 detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the LA Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they used his NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. Had Exxon and its peers passed on what they knew to the public, geological history would look very different today. The problem of climate change would not be solved, but the crisis would, most likely, now be receding. In 1989, an international ban on chlorine-containing man-made chemicals that had been eroding the earth’s ozone layer went into effect. Last month, researchers reported that the ozone layer was on track to fully heal by 2060. But that was a relatively easy fight, because the chemicals in question were not central to the world’s economy, and the manufacturers had readily available substitutes to sell. In the case of global warming, the culprit is fossil fuel, the most lucrative commodity on earth, and the companies responsible took a different tack.

A document uncovered by the LA Times showed that, a month after Hansen’s testimony, in 1988, an unnamed Exxon “public affairs manager” issued an internal memo recommending that the company “emphasize the uncertainty” in the scientific data about climate change. Within a few years, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Amoco, and others had joined the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate business participation in the international policy debate” on global warming. The GCC coördinated with the National Coal Association and the American Petroleum Institute on a campaign, via letters and telephone calls, to prevent a tax on fossil fuels, and produced a video in which the agency insisted that more carbon dioxide would “end world hunger” by promoting plant growth. With such efforts, it gunned up opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the first global initiative to address climate change.

In October, 1997, two months before Kyoto, Lee Raymond, Exxon’s president and CEO, who had overseen the science department that in the nineteen-eighties produced the findings about climate change, gave a speech in Beijing to the World Petroleum Congress, in which he maintained that the earth was actually cooling. The idea that cutting fossil-fuel emissions could have an effect on the climate, he said, defied common sense. “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now, or twenty years from now,” he went on. Exxon’s own scientists had already shown each of these premises to be wrong.

On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control. I hope this visit from your king has brightened your outlook on things.”

He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the CEO of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The strategy of muddling the public’s impression of climate science has proved highly effective. In 2017, polls found that almost ninety per cent of Americans did not know that there was a scientific consensus on global warming. Raymond retired in 2006, after the company posted the biggest corporate profits in history, and his final annual salary was four hundred million dollars. His successor, Rex Tillerson, signed a five-hundred-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic, and in 2012 was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship. In 2016, Tillerson, at his last shareholder meeting before he briefly joined the Trump Administration as Secretary of State, said, “The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”

It’s by no means clear whether Exxon’s deception and obfuscation are illegal. The company has long maintained that it “has tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.” The First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, although, in October, New York State Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. What is certain is that the industry’s campaign cost us the efforts of the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight.

Exxon’s behaviour is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.

Fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities, often led by Koch-linked groups, have put up fierce resistance to change. In Kansas, Koch allies helped turn mandated targets for renewable energy into voluntary commitments. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s administration prohibited state land officials from talking about climate change. In North Carolina, the state legislature, in conjunction with real-estate interests, effectively banned policymakers from using scientific estimates of sea-level rise in the coastal-planning process. Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity, the most important Koch front group, waged a campaign against new bus routes and light-rail service in Tennessee, invoking human liberty. “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose public transit,” a spokeswoman for the group explained. In Florida, an anti-renewable-subsidy ballot measure invoked the “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice.”

Such efforts help explain why, in 2017, the growth of American residential solar installations came to a halt even before March, 2018, when President Trump imposed a thirty-per-cent tariff on solar panels, and why the number of solar jobs fell in the US for the first time since the industry’s great expansion began, a decade earlier. In February, at the Department of Energy, Rick Perry—who once skipped his own arraignment on two felony charges, which were eventually dismissed, in order to attend a Koch brothers event—issued a new projection in which he announced that the US would go on emitting carbon at current levels through 2050; this means that our nation would use up all the planet’s remaining carbon budget if we plan on meeting the 1.5-degree target. Skepticism about the scientific consensus, Perry told the media in 2017, is a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.”

Of all the environmental reversals made by the Trump Administration, the most devastating was its decision, last year, to withdraw from the Paris accords, making the US, the largest single historical source of carbon, the only nation not engaged in international efforts to control it. As the Washington Post reported, the withdrawal was the result of a collaborative venture. Among the anti-government ideologues and fossil-fuel lobbyists responsible was Myron Ebell, who was at Trump’s side in the Rose Garden during the withdrawal announcement, and who, at Frontiers of Freedom, had helped run a “complex influence campaign” in support of the tobacco industry. Ebell is a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded in 1984 to advance “the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty,” and which funds the Cooler Heads Coalition, “an informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” of which Ebell is the chairman. Also instrumental were the Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. After Trump’s election, these groups sent a letter reminding him of his campaign pledge to pull America out. The CEI ran a TV spot: “Mr. President, don’t listen to the swamp. Keep your promise.” And, despite the objections of most of his advisers, he did. The coalition had used its power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed up. As a result, the particular politics of one country for one half-century will have changed the geological history of the earth.

We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and coördination on a global scale. The chances of that look slim. In Russia, the second-largest petrostate after the US, Vladimir Putin believes that “climate change could be tied to some global cycles on Earth or even of planetary significance.” Saudi Arabia, the third-largest petrostate, tried to water down the recent IPCC report. Jair Bolsonaro, the newly elected President of Brazil, has vowed to institute policies that would dramatically accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest. Importantly, a carbon tax would, at this late stage, have little impact on the outcome.
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The $4bn takeover of the Sydney Morning Herald will shrink the major sources of Australian news from five to four – Channel Nine, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media and the ABC
      Lenore Taylor

Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Facts are stern things
John Curtin

The hypocrisy, arrogance, and hubris of a family that has sought to turn the Presidency into another Trump franchise. You can’t do that in that position unless you think that you are bulletproof, and you don’t really give a damn what people think
John Cassidy

The growth-bug, if it becomes an addiction, is itself a disease. Out of control, it is a cancer, which can destroy the organism.
Eric Zuesse

Imagine two 18-year-olds, one in China, one in the US. Who has a better chance at upward mobility? Not too long ago, the answer might have been the teenager in the US But China has risen so quickly that, today, a young person’s chances of improving their living situation vastly exceeds those in the U.S. Here’s why, by the numbers:
800 million: The number of people in China that have been lifted out of poverty since 1990. That’s two and a half times the US population.
500 percent: The average per capita income growth in China between 1980 and 2014.
$12,000: China’s economic output per capita. A decade ago, it was $3,500.
1/4: The share of the world’s middle class that was in China in 2016.
29: China’s score on the Gini coefficient, a worldwide measure of inequality, where a lower score represents a more equal economy. The U.S. scores 37.
Despite that progress, 40 percent of China’s population still lives on less than $5.50 a day.
NY Times

Either Brexit agreement will leave the UK economically weakened, with no say in EU rules  must follow and years of uncertainty for business, or a no-deal Brexit I know as minister of transport will inflict untold damage on our nation. To present the nation with a choice between two deeply unattractive outcomes, vassalage and chaos, is a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis
Jo Johnson

It takes a lot less money to defend a homeland, than to prepare to attack another country – or to police an empire that stretches across the entire planet
John Rachel

I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
And they’re going to hear from me.  
Leonard Cohen

Extinction Rebellion Shuts Down London Bridges to Save Mother Earth
The day of revolt leads to mass arrests in the UK as protestors argue too many still don’t “recognise the seriousness of our existential crisis” and almost nobody is doing enough to end humanity’s reckless assault on planet’s living systems. Mass arrests on Saturday as thousands of people and members of the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ movement—for “the first time in living memory”—shut down the five main bridges of central London in the name of saving the planet, and those who live upon it, from destructive over-consumption, runaway greenhouse gas emissions, and the ongoing failure of global leaders to address the intensifying threats.

People are risking their liberty in defence of the living world in large numbers. It is only when we are prepared to take action that people begin to recognise the seriousness of our existential crisis.
      George Monbiot

The ‘social contract’ has been broken … [and] it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself
      Gail Bradbrook, Extinction Rebellion organizer

We have tried marching, and lobbying, and signing petitions. Nothing has brought about the change that is needed.
      Tiana Jacout

The laws of physics, not to mention social and economic forces, tell us that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet. Please read this article so you can disabuse yourself of any notion that industrial-scope capitalism dependent on endless growth can persist ….. whether with or without renewable energy. Please distribute this article.
The Limits of Renewable Energy and the Case for Degrowth
Between 1990 and 2015, the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix (including nuclear energy in this particular calculation based on data from the BP Statistical Review) declined from 88% to 86% — a marginal decrease of 1% per decade. And more recently, in spite of the significant growth of renewables, in actual quantities, the share of petroleum and gas increased twice as much as renewable electricity 2011 – 2016.
What accounts for the gap between what people perceive as a rapid transition to renewable energy and the reality of quite meagre progress? Part of the explanation lies with the use of relative data expressed as percentages: it’s easy to report big percentage increases when you’re talking about small numbers. Then there’s also the problem of media hype: boasting about achievements while remaining mum about failures. There is a real selection bias for success stories. Another typical media strategy is to publish forecasts of objectives to be achieved at some point in the distant future, which recede from memory as the day of reckoning approaches — no one is likely to recall dated, overly optimistic predictions.
The public discourse on renewables is intended to be reassuring, to bolster confidence in the State and industry, and in the belief that the market system will take us to where we need to go. It shores up the status quo.Our smart devices will become the new and  massive surveillance network
In Britain there’s one surveillance camera for every 11 people, illustrating the rapid rise of the surveillance state in industrialised Western democracies. Elsewhere, security services and local law enforcement authorities are   warming to the idea of using more devices to surveil the general population. With facial recognition technology growing so compact and efficient they’ll soon be cataloging the face and identity of everyone who passes a police officer or checkpoint on the street. Smart devices in our homes will begin to pry into our personal lives; invasive technology is only going to get more advanced, necessitating that it will become easier to establish a surveillance network just about anywhere. Even our homes won’t be safe sooner rather than later; Amazon recently filed for a patent to detect user illnesses by analysing the emotional state of a voice, illustrating the awesome and infiltrative potential these smart devices have. The digital technology of your phone is already sufficient to record and send every conversation (even if switched off) to an unknown “Listener”. The Stasi has arrived in a new form!The fire in Paradise: From natural disaster to social catastrophe
The victims in Paradise were older and poorer than the rest of California. The median age was 50, and the median household income $20,000 a year less than for the state as a whole. As far as the government response has been concerned, their lives and continued survival are a matter of indifference. Aside from a handful of shelters—where a norovirus outbreak sent at least 25 survivors to the hospital—and a pittance in FEMA supplies, those fleeing Paradise have had to rely on friends, family and charity. The Camp Fire joins the long list of disasters over the past few years, including Hurricanes Michael (60 dead), Florence (53 dead) and Maria (3,057 dead) in the US. It comes four months after the Attica wildfires in Greece, which killed 99. In each case, natural events have been compounded by crumbling infrastructure and inadequate emergency planning to create social catastrophes.

The abnormal has become the new normal
The wildfire ravaging California is now the deadliest in state history. This isn’t the new normal, it’s the new abnormal, and we need to talk about causes and remedies.

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.  California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history.
After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.
A period of contraction is setting in as we lose habitable parts of the earth.
Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage and killed forty-five people.
The effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines.
Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt.
As sea ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native villages from the waves.
In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?”
In Jakarta, a city with a population of ten million,  a rising Java Sea had flooded the streets., and in the first days of 2018, a nor’easter flooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars floated through the financial district.
In Louisiana, government officials were finalizing a plan to relocate thousands of people threatened by the rising Gulf. “Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a terrible, and emotional, reality to face”. Lithium and the Battle for Afghanistan’s Mineral Riches
More American Troops to Afghanistan, To Keep the Chinese Out? Unknown to the broader public, Afghanistan has significant oil, natural gas and strategic raw material resources, not to mention opium, a multibillion dollar industry which feeds America’s illegal heroin market. These mineral reserves include huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium, which is a strategic raw material used in the production of high tech batteries for laptops, cell phones and electric cars. The implication of Trump’s resolve is to plunder and steal Afghanistan’s mineral riches that could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” This resource has been known to both Russia and China since the 1970s.The reality of environmental protection
We are at a stage where we humans have wiped out 85% of wildlife and are facing the specter of extinction. It is true that my tiger jinx was broken in Ranthambore and in three days I saw twelve tigers. It is true that when I watch Blue Planet or Planet Earth, with Sir David Attenborough commenting on the glory of nature and the profusion of wildlife, I am carried away with the sheer beauty of what I see. But it is good to remember that the reality is far from this. Very far. Yes, I saw twelve tigers in Ranthambore, but tigers are so seriously endangered as to be close to becoming extinct in the wild in India. Our population pressure, total ignorance and apathy towards forests and wildlife, greed to make money at any costs and a political class that is innocent of any ethics, responsibility or knowledge, means that forests and wildlife continue to get short shrift. Every mining concession, highway or railway line tends to get precedence over the forest that it will either seriously endanger or completely destroy. It is no secret that tiger reserves which get a higher level of protection from reserve forests, were systematically de-tigered so that the status of the forest could be officially downgraded to reserve forest, in order to start mining for marble.

US Could Lose in War with China or Russia
A  bipartisan congressional panel highlights a new era of “Great Power competition” with Moscow and Beijing. The panel, run by a dozen former top Democratic and Republican officials, found that just as the US military faced budget cuts and diminishing military advantages, authoritarian nations like China and Russia are pursuing buildups aimed “at neutralising US strengths.. America’s military superiority – the hard-power backbone of its global influence and national security – has eroded to a dangerous degree.”Cities Will Soon Face Six Climate Disasters at Once
Before century’s end the frightening new normal could be cities and states facing multiple extreme climate events all at once.  New York, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro could soon face up to five catastrophic weather events in a single year—including wildfires, hurricanes, storm surges, and droughts. Florida has experienced more than 100 wildfires, drought, and the severely destructive Hurricane Michael in the past year—but with most news reports and climate researchers focusing on one disastrous weather event at a time, the current reality has been obscured. “A focus on one or few hazards may mask the impacts of other hazards, resulting in incomplete assessments of the consequences of climate change on humanity,” writes Camilo MoraHow did Trump react to the news that the Russian hypersonic nuclear missile Avangard was ready?
He announced that his country would withdraw from the INF Treaty. So, instead of making a plan to catch up and quickly developing hypersonic missiles, he intends to reassemble the US medium range nuclear missile arsenal.  Valentin Vasilescu observes that the US is no longer manufacturing motors for this type of missile and is using Russian motors for its Atlas V rockets. Conclusion: Trump has given Moscow yet another advantage.

US vice president beats war drums in Asia:
Pence issued an ultimatum to China: either accept a subservient, semi-colonial status, or confront the full force of US diplomatic, economic and ultimately military weight. Washington is insisting that Beijing abandon plans to develop hi-tech industries to compete with US companies, further open up to American corporate exploitation, bow to the “international rules-based system” determined by the US, and halt any efforts to counter increasingly aggressive anti-Chinese propaganda.

These 4,000-year-old termite mounds are visible from space
Some 200 million conical termite mounds rise from the ground in northeastern Brazil, each about 2 to 4 meters high and about 9 meters wide, visible on Google Earth. Researchers dated the soil from 11 of these mounds and found that the piles are up to about 4,000 years old, making them almost as ancient as the pyramids of Giza. The mounds are still inhabited by the termite species, Syntermes dirus, that first made them. The mounds themselves lack any definite internal architecture, but there are extensive networks of underground tunnels that the termites use to safely access fallen leaves on the forest floor.

Poverty in Britain: a social calamity
He visited Newcastle where he found people struggling to negotiate the benefits system and going hungry. He called it a ‘social calamity and an economic disaster’. The UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies. He found people struggling to cope within a benefits system designed to force people into work with built-in delays to payments. Many have been referred to food banks with some still going hungry.Shithole Countries: Made in the USA
The primary concern is the preservation of the new feudal mythology that they have created: that the world is a dangerous place, that they are the protectors, that the danger is omnipresent, eternal, and omnidirectional, comes from without, and comes from within. The mythology is constructed and presented through all media; journals, films, television, radio, music, advertising, books, the internet in all its variety. All available information systems are used to create and maintain scenarios and dramas to convince the people that they, the protectors, are the good and all others are the bad. We are bombarded with this message incessantly. In following much of American political leaders’ rhetoric or media coverage of the conflict, one is struck by the deliberate disregard of empirical facts, and the contempt for established legal constructs and precedents.Which planet is the media living on?
While extreme weather events are being reported almost daily on news bulletins, only rarely is it conveyed that these events constitute the manifestation of advanced global warming and a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere. Rarely do major ABC TV forums, such as The Drum, The Insiders, Q and A, Four-Corners, the 7.30 Report, Breakfast, Matter of Fact and other programs include climate scientists to discuss the trends and consequences of climate disruption, mitigation and adaptation. In a recent interview with the ex-PM on the ABC Q&A program, the climate has hardly been mentioned, yet on the 12th August 2010 he said “Now our response to climate change must be guided by science. The science tells us that we have already exceeded the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon dioxide. We are as humans conducting a massive science experiment with this planet. It’s the only planet we’ve got”.“Keep Tathra Cool, Climate Action Now”
Frustrated by inaction and squabbling on climate change 12 years after they first took a stand, the Tathra community has again come out en-mass to lead the discussion and advocate for the future. With Dr Matthew Nott, the founder of Clean Energy for Eternity directing the traffic, hundreds of people turned out on Lawrence Park on 30 September to create a human sign that spoke not just to the atmosphere above that could see it best but more so our political leaders. “It’s 2006 since we did our first human sign on Tathra Beach, today was bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. Today’s sign is born out of frustration, we did our sign in 2006 because we were frustrated by the lack of government action and now it’s even worse. Our country now has no strategy for reducing emissions – that’s outrageous.”

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Why don’t the Americans get it? The terrorists are already in their midst, already in their homes: the mad gun-wielding members of the NRA.
John James

The drive towards personal excellence fuelled by the system of private enterprise has an embedded need for exponential growth and seems incapable of protecting key resources such as air quality, fertile soil and clean water
Bruce Pascoe

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it
Frédéric Bastiat

British Columbia’s southern resident killer whale population is down to only 76 animals because human fishers have displaced the orcas from their favoured food, Chinook salmon, as we simultaneously displace the salmon from their spawning streams through hydro dams, pollution and urbanization.
William Rees

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them
Alfred Adler

The biggest crime scene on the planet is on the planet
Gavin Schmidt

The bellicose actions of the Trump Administration against trade with Iran is forcing major countries into cooperation that ultimately could spell the demise of the dollar hegemony, a hegemony that has allowed a debt-bloated US Government to finance global tyranny
Willian Engdahl

The EU resents and fears the consequences of the Trump administration’s reckless and provocative offensive against Iran. They resent it because Washington’s scuttling of the nuclear deal has pulled the rug from European capital’s plans to capture a leading position in Iran’s domestic market and exploit Iranian offers of massive oil and natural gas concessions. They fear it, because the US confrontation with Iran threatens to ignite a war that would invariably set the entire Mideast ablaze, triggering a new refugee crisis, a massive spike in oil prices and, last but not least, a re-partition of the region when the European powers lack the military means to independently determine the outcome.
Keith Jones

The US is now an Oligarchy
Economic elites and organised business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. “When the preferences of economic elites are catered for, the preferences of the average American have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. Though Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise, policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans. Therefore, America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”      Read more

Trump’s $2.1 trillion deal with the devil has failed
Ominous signs are already evident in sectors most sensitive to higher borrowing costs. The Freddie Mac rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has risen 100 basis points to 4.83% over the last year. Home sales have dropped by 21%. Average house prices have slipped 3.5%. This is remarkable given that the fiscal pedal is pushed to floor. The federal budget deficit is nearing 5% of GDP, at a time when full employment should restore balance.      Read details

Global warming is eroding the polar vortex that once insulated the frozen north.
The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia 35C above averages. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 – more than three times as in any previous year. “This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that suggests there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” said Michael Mann. “The Arctic has always been regarded as a bellwether because of the vicious circle that amplify human-caused warming in that particular region. And it is sending out a clear warning.” This is a displacement of what ought to be happening farther north. Some recent temperatures have been warmer than London and Zurich, which are thousands of miles to the south.      Read more

Summer weather is getting ‘stuck’ due to Arctic warming
Rising Arctic temperatures mean we face a future of ‘extreme extremes’ where sunny days become heatwaves and rain becomes floods, leading to “very extreme extremes”, which occur when abnormally high temperatures linger for an unusually prolonged period, turning sunny days into heat waves, tinder-dry conditions into wildfires, and rains into floods.      Read more

Comma tips.  See here

Efforts to Fight Climate Change Had a Tough Election Day
On Election Day, the House went to the Democrats, the Senate to the Republicans, and only two of seven climate-related measures on ballots across the country went in the planet’s favour. In Washington State, oil companies—led by BP America—spent more than thirty million dollars to defeat Initiative 1631, which would have established the country’s first-ever carbon fee. The proceeds that the state collected from its worst carbon polluters would have been put back into clean-energy infrastructure and other investments to adapt to the effects of climate change. Nevertheless the Democrats say “We will look to restore the environmental protections that have been gutted over the last two years.”      Read thisEarth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans
A virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, are leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. “These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information, and yet, somehow, they have developed defences that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive. More worryingly, as facts have multiplied, their defences against those facts have only grown more powerful. Our research shows it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen.”      Humerous or true?China’s ‘extraordinary’ ambitions: the futuristic city being built on reclaimed land
Colombo Port City is a project local politicians hope will spearhead the city’s bid to become a new Singapore-like economic hub in the Indian Ocean. China’s role in the project has also raised concerns in India, which is suspicious of Beijing’s intentions in the region. The project has strategic “implications, for by increasing Chinese leverage over Sri Lanka through debt-trap diplomacy, it promises to give China a strategic foothold in the Sri Lankan capital. Chinese projects can quickly acquire a strategic dimension.”      Read moreEurope and America clash over Washington’s economic war on Iran
Washington’s imposition of sweeping new sanctions on Iran—aimed at strangling its economy and precipitating “regime change” in Tehran—is roiling world politics. The US is embargoing all Iranian energy exports and freezing Iran out of the US-dominated world financial system to cripple the remainder of its trade and deny it access to machinery, spare parts and even basic foodstuffs and medicine. American imperialism is once again acting as a law unto itself. The sanctions are illegal under international law. It is tantamount to a declaration of war.    Read more

Putin to Trump: Thanks for Helping Make Russia Great Again!
I am writing to thank you, Donald the Great, for helping me make Russia great again. What you have done by unilaterally withdrawing from Iran nuclear deal and by re-imposing and adding more sanctions on Iran on November 5 was a blessing for us and I love it! And here is why. The resource-rich Iran still needs to feed and take care of its more than 80 million people. And I am there for them, right up the road on the Caspian Sea, that technically and for all practical purpose makes us neighbors. BTW & FYI, at my behest, we just signed a major agreement divvying it up with Iran and three other littoral states. Donald, I cannot thank you enough for pushing Iran deeper into my lap, which in the near future will become entirely a “client state” of Russia. Pretty soon I will be their largest supplier, trading partner, freight forwarder, middleman, salesman, banker, capital projects builder, and agent, all combined! But wait a minute: I have to be careful of your trade menace, the sneaky Xi Jinping who is my menace too! He undoubtedly will try to compete with me, as he dreams to corner Iran’s market by bartering for their discounted oil and selling them all sort of Chinese goods and services, as well as pushing for his new global initiative of building more “belts and roads”!      Read moreOcean shock
Reuters reveals the climate crisis beneath the waves. Driven by warming waters, marine life is on the move — and life on land is forever changed. Fish and other sea life are fleeing for their lives, seeking the even temperatures they need to breed and thrive.      Read here

El Nino alert with 70pc chance of hot and dry conditions
The Met has just upped the chance of an El Nino this year, meaning there is now three times the normal risk of the climate being hotter and dryer this year. It had been a slow boil.”This is absolutely not the outlook many people hoped to hear.”      Read more

David Attenborough has betrayed the living world he loves
It is not proselytising or alarmist to tell us the raw truth about what is happening to the world, however much it might discomfit us. For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse. The cameras reassure us that there are vast tracts of wilderness in which wildlife continues to thrive. They cultivate complacency, not action. You cannot do such a thing passively. Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict. They know – and many feel deeply uncomfortable about it – that they are telling a false story, creating a fairytale world that persuades us all is well, in the midst of an existential crisis.      Read the whole argumentWorld Bank ends its support for coal worldwide
The World Bank has abandoned the last coal project on its books, with its president publicly dumping the Kosovo e Re plant on Wednesday. “We are required by our by-laws to go with the lowest cost option and renewables have now come below the cost of coal. So without question, we are not going to [support the plant].     Read more

Spain to close most coalmines in €250m transition deal
By the end of the year after government and unions struck a deal that will mean €250m will be invested in mining regions over the next decade. Unions hailed the mining deal – which covers Spain’s privately owned pits – as a model agreement. It mixes early retirement schemes for miners over 48, with environmental restoration work in pit communities and re-skilling schemes for cutting-edge green industries.      Read more

A Day in Pompeii – Full-length animation
Fascinating.          Watch this

The psychosocial dimension of power: An emotional analysis of the Davos elite’s discourse on globalization
The central feature of the Davos elite culture of globalisation that emerged from this analysis is the lack of democracy in the decision-making processes, both at relational and organisational level. To change this entails recovering the sense of public good, conceived as pertaining to the collectivity, in contrast to the private good, referring to an exclusive possession, that deprives someone of something.      Read moreArctic Methane Catastrophe
55 million years ago it took less than 200 years for global temperature to rise about 10C. There was a critical level of C02, beyond which rapid and unstoppable temperature rise occurred.    Video worth warching

China’s ‘extraordinary’ ambitions: the futuristic city being built on reclaimed land
Colombo Port City, a project local politicians hope will spearhead the city’s bid to become a new Singapore-like economic hub in the Indian Ocean. China’s role in the project has also raised concerns in India, which is suspicious of Beijing’s intentions in the region. The project has strategic “implications, for by increasing Chinese leverage over Sri Lanka through debt-trap diplomacy, it promises to give China a strategic foothold in the Sri Lankan capital. Chinese projects can quickly acquire a strategic dimension.”     Read more

$2.7 billion deal opening Madagascar to Chinese fishing
Life on the coast of Madagascar is increasingly precarious. In recent decades, the overexploitation of marine life has made it difficult for hundreds of thousands of small-scale fishers to make a living. Two months ago, a little-known private Malagasy association signed a 10-year, $2.7 billion fishing deal — the largest in the country’s history — with a group of Chinese companies that plans to send 330 fishing vessels to Madagascar. The country’s fisheries minister said he learned about it in the newspaper. Local fishers are already struggling with foreign competition for Madagascar’s dwindling marine stocks. No draft of the deal has been made public and the association that signed it did not conduct an environmental impact assessment or any public consultation.      Not pleasant reading

A Theory of Human Thinking
“By connecting all these previous discoveries, we came to the assumption that the brain stores a mental map, regardless of whether we are thinking about a real space or the space between dimensions of our thoughts. Our train of thought can be considered a path though the spaces of our thoughts, along different mental dimensions. These processes are especially useful for making inferences about new objects or situations, even if we have never experienced them,” the neuroscientist continues. Using existing maps of cognitive spaces humans can anticipate how similar something new is to something they already know by putting it in relation to existing dimensions. If they’ve already experienced tigers, lions, or panthers, but have never seen a leopard, we would place the leopard in a similar position as the other big cats in our cognitive space. Based on our knowledge about the concept ‘big cat’, already stored in a mental map, we can adequately react to the encounter with the leopard. We can generalise to novel situations, which we constantly face, and infer how we should behave.”    This is my experience, too

“The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors”     
Plutarch

The past two years Trump has abandoned or threatened the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accord, the JCPOA with Iran, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the International Criminal Court, the Postal Union Treaty, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The liberal world order is under threat from its principal architect, the UDS.
Matthew Shannon

The cut in corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% has fed stock buybacks by US companies. Why would they invest into an ageing boom, in the midst of a global trade war? The mechanical consequence of a US consumption boom and a soaring dollar is to suck in imports, painting the current account deficit in Gothic colours.
      Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Climate change is impacting the Caribbean, with millions facing increasing food insecurity and decreasing freshwater availability as droughts become more likely across the region
Blaine Friedlander

Russia & China Invest in Infrastructure; US Spends on Military
China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is famous as an extension of their domestic infrastructure investments, but Russia is also investing heavily in infrastructure. Both countries need to do it in order to improve the future for their respective populations, and both Governments have avoided the Western development model of going heavily into debt in order to pay for creating and maintaining infrastructure. Both are, in fact, exceptionally low-debt Governments. China has a public debt/GDP of 17.7%, and Russia’s is 8.0%. For comparison, America’s is 93.6%. (Others are: Germany 85.8%, Spain 91.2%, Italy 122.6%, Greece 147.1%, India 54.2%, Pakistan 47.0%, and Brazil 55.0%.) The US isn’t going into public debt in order to finance building or maintenance of infrastructure, but instead to finance expansions of its military, which is already (and by far) the world’s largest (in terms of its costs, but not of its numbers of troops). A nation that spends over a trillion dollars a year on ‘national defence’ can’t have much left over to spend on things that ‘can wait’ — such as repairing its bridges, roads, etc. — and so those repairs do wait, while even more money, than before, becomes devoted to purchases of new weaponry.   Read more

Russia, India & Iran want to create alternative trade route to Suez Canal
The new shipment passage, North-South Transport Corridor, to connect the Indian Ocean with the Persian Gulf through Iran to Russia and Europe. The 7,200-kilometers long corridor will combine sea and rail routes.Currently, Indian logistics companies have to route shipments through China, Europe or Iran to get an access to Central Asian markets – long, time-consuming and inevitably expensive: with the Iranian route seen as the most viable.     Read the details

Apocalyptic Climate Reporting Completely Misses the Point
Reporting on the IPCC, and climate change more broadly, is unbalanced. It’s fixated on the predictions of climate science and the opinions of climate scientists, with cursory gestures to the social, economic, and political causes of the problem. Yet analysis of these causes is as important to climate scholarship as modelling ice-sheet dynamics and sea-level rise. Reductionist climate reporting misses this. Many references to policy are framed in terms of carbon pricing. This endorses the prevailing contempt in establishment circles for people’s capacity to govern themselves beyond the restrictions of market rule. Meanwhile, the IPCC report is overflowing with analyses showing that we can avoid runaway climate change, improve most people’s lives, and prioritise equality through a broad set of interventions.      Read morePopulation: The Multiplier of Everything Else
Conservative demographic projections show the world’s population growing by 2.5 billion people over the next four decades – a 40% increase. Many people are simply not aware of the scale and speed at which world population is expected to continue growing – by about 80 million annually. This is like adding a new Egypt every year. The total population is approaching 7 billion, seven times what it was in 1800. The cost in human suffering from unplanned and excessive childbearing is staggering: 500,000 women and girls die worldwide every year from pregnancy and childbirth. Most of the women who die are in their teens and early twenties, forced by their societies into bearing children too young and far too frequently. The lives of billions are being rendered increasingly desperate by being denied access to family-planning. The surge is not the result of rising birth rates, which have dropped since 1970, but primarily from declining death rates —the result of widespread vaccination, etc.      Read moreBlack-starting the grid after a power outage
Large blackouts can be quite devastating and it isn’t easy to restart the electric grid again. This is typically done by designated black start units of natural gas, coal, hydro, or nuclear power plants that can restart themselves using their own power with no help from the rest of the electrical grid.         Read more“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”         Blog source

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