Category: Freedom of speech, movement, rights

View Email Online                          Send to Friends                          Subscribe to Newsletter23 October 2018

This isn’t about the future, it’s about right now. What is the matter with these people? Either they really don’t know, or they are so corrupt that they pretend they don’t know. That’s the real story. Because the planet is facing profound dangers and we’re all at risk, our governments need to act. And they promised they would, but right now they’re not.
      Jeffrey Sachs

World acknowledges unprecedented climate challenge, so what should a Labor federal government do?
Code Red

Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”

On 9 October, a stunning editorial was published in the UK. “The Guardian view on climate change: a global emergency” opened with the sentence: “Climate change is an existential threat to the human race.” A year ago, that would have been extraordinary, but no longer. (An existential risk is one that poses permanent adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or curtail its potential.)

In many ways, the recent IPCC report on 1.5°C was too conservative, overestimating the time till we hit 1.5°C, and failing to account for crucial feedbacks in the climate system. Yet the report’s evidence was that 2°C of warming would be catastrophic. The current Paris commitments are a path to 3.4°C of warming, and closer to 5°C when the full range of feedbacks are included.

But even an understatement of the evidence leads to radical conclusions. In response to the report’s release, there was a certain shock and awe, for example by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone (“What’s Another Way to Say ‘We’re F-cked’?”) and David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine (“UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That”).    

“We face a direct existential threat” on climate for “the emergency we face”,  UN Secretary General António Guterres had told a New York audience on 10 September 2018, a month before the report was published.

Some Australian politicians have endorsed a climate emergency statement, and an Australian Senate report released in May this year recognised that: “(climate change is) a current and existential national security risk”. “It has never been clearer that we have a climate emergency on our hands,” Environment Victoria CEO Mark Wakeham wrote recently. “This is a climate emergency,” said Karin Nansen, chair of Friends of the Earth International.

None of this is new. Back in 2007, then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said of Antarctica and climate warming: “This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action.” “We respond well to an emergency, but global warming is an emergency too,” The Age in January 2011.

“We are now at a tipping point that threatens to flip the world into a full blown climate emergency,” wrote Tony de Brum, Marshall Islands political leader, Kelly Rigg and Mary Robinson, former President Republic of Ireland, in The Guardian in November 2013.

In July 2016,  President ACF Geoff Cousins, CEO Greenpeace Australia David Ritter, GetUp National Director Paul Oosting and 20 others endorsed a statement in The Age which started: “The Earth is already too hot. It’s time to declare a climate emergency.”  Last year, Naomi Klein declared: “We are living in a climate emergency of shocking proportions we never expected so soon.”

We have reached crunch time. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the speed and scale of transformative action needed to keep warming to 1.5°C, said the new IPCC report.  “Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences,” wrote Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuberr, in a foreword to the recent report What Lies Beneath.

Climate Councillor and lead author of the recent “hothouse Earth” paper, Prof. Will Steffen, said in August that getting greenhouse gas emissions down fast has to be the primary target of policy  and economics, with something “like wartime footing”.  An emergency response, akin to a wartime footing in terms of the size and scale of the response, is now absolutely necessary. And the reason is simple, as Prof. Steffen explained recently:

I think the dominant linear, deterministic framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher levels of temperature rise …model projections using models that don’t include these [feedback] processes become less useful at higher temperature levels. Or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are making a big mistake when we think we can “park” the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2C – and expect it to stay there… Even at the current level of warming of about 1C above pre-industrial, we may have already crossed a tipping point for one of the feedback processes (Arctic summer sea ice), and we see instabilities in others – permafrost melting, Amazon forest dieback, boreal forest dieback and weakening of land and ocean physiological carbon sinks. And we emphasise that these processes are not linear and often have built-in feedback processes that generate tipping point behaviour. For example, for melting permafrost, the chemical process that decomposes the peat generates heat itself, which leads to further melting and so on.

The characteristics of an emergency response were described in a recent Breakthrough guide, How to explain emergency mode climate action.In particular, the guide emphasises two essential starting points: 

• Risk assessment: An emergency response starts by fully assessing all the risks and potential damage, especially the “high-end” and existential risks which would be devastating for human societies. Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the increased likelihood of very large climate impacts are to be adequately dealt with.
•  Frank conversation: Emergency mode is a whole-of-society effort which requires an aware and motivated population. In most cases it also requires political bipartisanship. A full and frank discussion of the threat, the response and what that means for the society is critical is building and maintaining active commitment across the community.


So what should an incoming federal Labor government do? Here are six steps that could be taken straight away, without legislation.

1. Commission an inter-agency national climate risk assessment, in the manner of the National Climate Assessment in the United States, to report within six months.  A full climate assessment for Australia which incorporates the high-end risks has never been done. It’s almost a decade since the Rudd government initiated an assessment of sea-level rise impacts, for example, and that is now way out of date and understates the likely impacts, leaving communities in the dark and infrastructure vulnerable.

2. Start an honest conversation with Australians about the risks and opportunities and what really needs to be done. People are hanging out for some honest climate leadership, across the country. Exit polling for the Wentworth by-election identified an unrequited desire for climate change action.

3. Enhance the government’s capacity to protect the Australian people by properly managing climate risks. The extreme risks to humanity from climate system change justify strong precautionary management. A reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required, especially for a national climate risk assessment, and then in policymaking.

4. Hit the start button for the White Paper on climate change and human and national security, as recommended by the Labor-chaired Senate inquiry on this issue which reported in mid-2018. Australia’s near region is “Disaster alley” for climate change which, at its most fundamental level, means more extreme and unliveable climate conditions, threats to the water and food security of billions of people, and growing human insecurity.
5. Acknowledge that Australia must “choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences” (Schellnhuber) and commit to unprecedented action. Whilst acknowledging that “there is no documented historical precedent” (IPCC) for what needs to be done in terms of scale, the government can state clearly that getting greenhouse  gas emissions down fast has to be the primary target of policy and economics, with something “like wartime footing” (Steffen).

6. Announce an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects. Allowing new fossil fuel infrastructure which locks in two-to-four decades of additional emissions is completely contrary to deciding to take unprecedented action.  It’s one or the other. Allowing Adani to proceed would be a clearcut statement by the Shorten government that it doesn’t get the “unprecedented” challenge, but rather is part of the problem. 

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View Email Online                          Subscribe to Newsletter29 September 2018

The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic experiment. We play Russian roulette with climate and no one knows what lies in the active chamber
      Wallace Broecker

People are angry. They feel that nobody is listening to their pain. One result is that in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to achieve and hold on to power
      Bernie Sanders

27% of forest loss is due to expanding agriculture
26% for forestry products, paper, wood chips
23% from wildfires
24% from expanding agriculture
1% from urbanisation (as nearby forests already lost).
      Rachel Fritts

Donald Trump slashed US corporate tax rates from 35 to 21 per cent, driving record share buybacks and CEO bonuses at the expense of wage growth for the rest of us
     Wayne Swan

Make no mistake, this new PM stood by the last one just like he stood by the one before. Like Brutus stood by Caesar.
        Joe Aston, Myriam Robin

Israel made a huge blunder when its jets allowed for a Russian surveillance plane to be used as cover, leading to the loss of 15 Russian servicemen’s lives. Russia had allowed them to freely target any threat to Israel without any real resistance. Now, Israel’s pilots will have a lot more to deal with when carrying out missions. But Israel’s real bitter pill is that the Russian jet incident has given a huge boost to Iran, both within Syria and in the region.
      Martin Jay

Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
      Wendell Berry

The People v. The State
None of these investments are government projects. They come from business decisions that are driving solar onwards and upwards, irrespective of the short-sighted fantasy coal-driven attitudes of our pollies.
Queensland: as another 16 solar projects queue to join grid
13 large scale solar farms have been built or are under construction in an “unprecedented wave” of renewable energy investment. This had already brought $1.3 billion in investment and almost 1,500 construction jobs to Queensland, and more than 650MW of renewable energy to the grid. And the good news is there’s more to come, with another 16 solar projects on the way bringing $3.4 billion dollars and 2600 jobs to regional and rural locations right across the state.   Read more

Tesla big battery defies skeptics, sends industry bananas over performance
Critics said it couldn’t be done. Batteries can’t be that big. They can’t be built that quick. They won’t work. Ten months on from its installation, the Tesla big battery has emphatically proven its worth – faster, quicker, more accurate, more reliable and more flexible than even the market operator thought possible. More importantly, it has given a glimpse of the future, how a grid can be effectively managed with a very high share of wind and solar – not just faster, but also cleaner, smarter and more reliable than the dumb and ageing fossil fuel grid we now depend on, and which has become victim to endless market rorting from the industry incumbents. So much so that it may turn out to be the best value investment that the South Australia Labor government ever made, although their political opponents may be reluctant to admit it.    Read moreWhile economic growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit
We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news. So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year? The answer is, growth.
There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.     Read more  Hydrogen-powered trains are now running in Germany
Hydrogen fuel cells generate electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and their only byproduct is water. That makes the cells a promising energy source that produces zero emissions and very little noise. Though they remain pricey, hydrogen fuel cells have advantages over batteries. Instead of recharging, for instance, you can just refuel them like you would a gas or diesel engine. And because train schedules are predictable, it’s easier to build refueling infrastructure.     Read moreItaly’s latest gift to electric vehicles: cute, zippy and barely a car
By the end of the year, the first of 8,000 Microlino ultra-compact vehicles will be unleashed onto European roads.The tiny 450kg vehicle is officially classed as a ‘quadricycle’ under European law. One thing is sure though, once the zippy microcar is released – with a top limited speed of 90km/hr and 0-50km/hr in 5 seconds – it could be the perfect antidote for tight peak hour jams. PIC    Read more

Agriculture is now the major driver of permanent forest loss
Over the past decade-and-a-half, industrial agriculture has caused almost one-third of global forest loss–all of which is permanent. Deforestation rates have nevertheless not declined in the last decade-and-a-half. This study relies on satellite data–which has become invaluable for watchdog groups and governments trying to visually map and track deforestation around the world. But what’s not usually reflected in these visual maps is precisely what’s causing the loss. Using a new analytical model the University of Arkansas-led researchers were able to bring in this new dimension, and to show that compared to all other causes, industrial agriculture and ranching was responsible for the largest portion of permanent forest loss between 2001 and 2015 – 27%. In Indonesia and Malaysia especially, deforestation has gone up, and the fine-grained analysis identified palm oil plantations–an ingredient used in the making of countless products, from margarine to lipstick–as the most prominent driver of forest decline in these parts.     Read moreBye bye bugs? Scientists fear non-pest insects are declining
Bugs are the little things that run the world. Last year, a study that found an 82% mid-summer decline in the number and weight of bugs captured in traps in 63 nature preserves in Germany compared with 27 years earlier. Scientists say similar comparisons can’t be done elsewhere because similar bug counts weren’t done decades ago. “We don’t know how much we’re losing if we don’t know how much we have,”  In Greenland there has been an 80% drop in numbers since 1996.     Read moreGene drive halts malaria mosquitoes
Researchers seeking a way to eradicate malaria-transmitting mosquitoes have created a gene drive that can wipe out an entire population of the insects in the lab. Female mosquitoes with one copy of a tweaked doublesex gene passed it on to almost all of their offspring, rapidly spreading the genetic modification. Females who inherited two copies of the gene were unable to reproduce, eventually leading to no more baby mozzies.     Read more

No bees means less food, all for the sake of profit. Pollinators support 35% of global agriculture in the production of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide. With close on 8 billion people,14% or whom are hungry today, how do these criminals get away with it?
Monsanto’s global weedkiller harms honeybees
Glyphosate – the most used pesticide ever – damages the good bacteria in honeybee guts, making them more prone to deadly infections. The abundances of dominant gut microbiota  are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment, and young worker bees exposed to glyphosate died more often when later exposed to a common bacterium. Honeybee larvae grew more slowly and died more often when exposed to glyphosate. An earlier study showed the exposure of adult bees to the herbicide at levels found in fields impairs the cognitive capacities needed for a successful return to the hive.     Read moreGlyphosate Poisons Crops and Soil
Two senior scientists have investigated the ecological impacts of glyphosate warn of “dire consequences for agriculture – rendering soils infertile, crops non-productive, and plants less nutritious. The widespread use of glyphosate can “significantly increase the severity of various plants diseases, impair plant defence to pathogens and diseases, and immobilise soil and plant nutrients rendering them unavailable for plant use.” Further, glyphosate stimulates the growth of fungi and enhances the virulence of pathogens such as Fusarium and render soils infertile, crops non-productive, and plants less nutritious.     Read moreMonsanto: We WONNNN!!!!
This subpoena was terrifying and would have had Avaaz spend months and hundreds of thousands of euros digging up and handing over to Monsanto everything anyone on our team ever said or wrote about them for YEARS. Including even the email addresses and identities of our members who had sent messages to officials about Monsanto! Even worse, lawyers told us that courts in New York tend to AUTOMATICALLY GRANT requests like this! Because usually, more info means more justice. But then our community got involved. Over 200,000 of us donated, and we hired the best lawyer in the business — Andrew Celli, who has taken on cases like this before and won. He and his team worked with the Avaaz team to write a ridiculously great takedown of the Monsanto subpoena. It’s long and legalistic, but if you speak that language, it’s a thing of beauty — you can read it here. Monsanto flew in a top lawyer, a man who’s defended everything from asbestos to lead and arsenic. But between our briefs, and the powerful oral arguments, the judge was convinced, and took the incredibly RARE step of throwing out the ENTIRE subpoena!!! Normally they just narrow the scope of the subpoena to something more reasonable, but the judge couldn’t find anything reasonable in Monsanto’s claims about Avaaz!     Read moreAutonomous weapons and the army of none
In classic Turing computation, a machine is programmed to follow explicit rules keyed in by humans. For example, a rule might stipulate (in a programming language not English) that “if you see a human wearing an enemy uniform and carrying a weapon, shoot.” Suppose the machine’s sensors detect an object that is human shaped, wearing a uniform, and carrying a rifle. It therefore ‘makes a decision’ by following the human-defined rule and triggered by what it senses in the environment. In this case, does it make sense to say that the machine actually made the decision? Or would it make more sense to say that the human who put the rule in the machine made the decision at installation and that it was then mechanically executed by the machine? The latter interpretation surely makes more sense. The machine is simply following a programmed rule without any feelings of doubt, conscience, or guilt, just as it would had it been programmed to record a television broadcast. It is possible to claim that a machine ‘decides’ insofar as cognition is installed in the machine. But the human who inputs the rules that determine a particular action under a particular set of circumstances is the one who really decides. The install time decision by the human involves an authentic, evaluative, and deliberative choice. The execution by the machine does not.      Read more

People lived in Australia’s desert 50,000 years ago, earlier than first thought
It shows that people occupied the sandy deserts of interior Australia very soon after settling the north of the continent more than 50,000 years ago. This is some of the earliest evidence of people living in deserts anywhere in the world. The First Australians adapted with ingenuity and flexibility as they quickly dispersed into every bioregion across the country. For instance, evidence for the earliest ground-edged axe use in the world comes from the Kimberley.     Read moreRising homelessness among older people
A recent report found that 18,600 people aged 55 and over were homeless around Australia on the night of the 2016 census—a 49% increase over the past decade. Often the plight of the homeless is hidden from public view. The crisis extends far beyond those living rough on the streets. Most commonly, the older people were living in boarding houses (27%) or staying temporarily in other households (24%). Older people are seen and treated by governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, as a burden unless they are able to pay for all aspects of their care and wellbeing. The fact that after working their entire lives, older workers are not guaranteed even a roof over their head is a consequence of a system based on profit    Read moreThe growing power of media mates
The news that billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes essentially war-gamed the ousting of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull should apall all Australians wanting media diversity and an open and transparent polity. But if you’re still not affronted by what reportedly happened between the two billionaires last month, consider this: if former federal treasurer Peter Costello joins the next Murdoch-Stokes confab in his role as boss of a merged Nine and Fairfax, we’ll pretty much have the entire Australian news media in on one conversation, and if they were of a mind, they could orchestrate entire election campaigns and key government strategies and policies. Does this sound democratic to you?    Read moreAs Debt Rises, the US Will Soon Spend More on Interest Than on the Military
Tax cuts, spending increases and higher interest rates could make it harder to respond to future recessions and deal with other needs. With less money coming in and more going toward interest, political leaders will find it harder to address pressing needs like fixing crumbling roads and bridges or to make emergency moves like pulling the economy out of future recessions. Within a decade, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on myriad other programs. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Gradually rising interest rates would have made borrowing more expensive even without additional debt. But the tax cuts passed late last year have created a deeper hole, with the deficit increasing faster than expected. A budget bill approved in February that raised spending by $300 billion over two years will add to the financial pressure.     Read moreWhen Will We Have Artificial Intelligence As Smart as a Human?
Artificial General Intelligence can think creatively, continue learning over time, and maybe even pass for conscious. the most obvious concern is when AI is used to hurt people. There are a lot of different applications where you can imagine that happening. We have to be really careful about letting that bad side get out. [Sorting out how to keep AI responsible is] a very tricky question; it has many more dimensions than just the scientific. That means all of society does need to be involved in answering it.     Read moreThe risks of a new Cold War between the US and China are real
there are good reasons to think a Cold War 2.0 might be a good deal closer than we realise. The US and China are plainly entering into a period of significant geopolitical rivalry. Each has ambitions that are mutually incompatible. Beijing wants a south-east Asian region in which it is not beholden to US primacy, while Washington wants to sustain its regional dominance. The two also find it extremely difficult to see the world from the other’s perspective. Washington does not seem able to grasp that even though Beijing benefited from US primacy in the region, it will not forever accept a price-taker’s position in the regional order. For its part, Beijing simply does not believe Washington’s claim that it wants China to achieve its potential, and that this can occur without meaningful changes to the current international order. When that is added to the nationalism that is a powerful political force in both countries, the prospects of a bleak geopolitical future seem very real. The trade war escalation is one of the most worrying developments. Not only does it signal a more turbulent and less dynamic period in the global economy, it represents the victory of nationalist politics over shared economic interests. More importantly, it may presage a return to a less integrated global economy.     Read moreA world on borrowed time 
Andrew Glikson
Current temperature trajectories are on par with or exceed the IPCC’s dangerous projections (Figure 1). Acting as the lungs of the biosphere, over tens of millions of years the atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich carbon-low composition, allowing the flourishing of mammals. The anthropogenic release to the atmosphere to date of more than 600 Gigaton of carbon (GtC) is reversing this trend, threatening to return the Earth to conditions which preceded the emergence of modern life forms, including humans. Climate projections for the mid to late 21st century by the IPCC (models A1B and A2)  indicate mean global temperatures rising to near 3 to 4 degrees Celsius above mean 1880-1920 temperatures. Concomitantly a transient cooling occurs in high latitude oceans due to flow of cold water from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. These developments would lead to un-inhabitability of large parts of the Earth and to a further rise in extreme weather events, not least from hurricanes around the Pacific Rim and Caribbean island chains. Tracking toward 500 ppm CO2 a shift is taking place in the state of the atmosphere away from the conditions which allowed farming some ~11,000 years ago and from conditions which allowed the emergence of Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago. In denial of the basic laws of physics, specifically of black body radiation (Stefan-Boltzmann, Kirchhoff and Planck laws), and their manifestation in the atmosphere-ocean-land system, world “leaders” and a complicit media are presiding over a rise of carbon emissions at a rate of 2 – 3 ppm CO2 per year, shifting the chemistry of the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate since at least 56 million years ago, when a hyperthermal catastrophe and mass extinction of species took place.

Figure 1. Current global warming at the IPCC fastest trajectories (IPCC models A2 and A1B):  [A] Land surface temperatures (red) and ocean temperatures (blue) for 1880-2020 (NASA); [B] Modeled temperature change for 2000-2100 (IPCC); [C] Modelled land and sea temperatures for 2055-2060 with 10 years doubling time for freshwater flux from the ice sheets (Hansen and Sato 2015; http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2015/20151012_IceMeltPredictions.pdf).

About 1980 when the dangerous rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases to 340 ppm CO2 was realized, it may have still been possible to attempt effective mitigation by means of (A) sharp reduction of carbon emissions, and (B) attempts at down-draw of CO2 through reforestation, soil improvement (biochar), CO2 capture using sea weed farming, CO2 reaction with basalt and other methods. This has not happened—instead, a plethora of economic and political panels formed, mostly to the exclusion of climate scientists, counting the costs of mitigation and adaptation, namely the price of the Earth.
With estimated carbon reserves in excess of 20,000 GtC (well over 20 times the CO2 content of the atmosphere), further emissions can take the atmosphere to >1000 ppm CO2, namely to Early Eocene (about 50 million years ago) or Mesozoic-like greenhouse Earth conditions, when large parts of the continents were inundated by the oceans.
As stated by the renown oceanographer Wallace Broecker in 1986, “The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic experiment. We play Russian roulette with climate and no one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun“.  Where WWII sacrificed millions in gas chambers, global warming threatens to destroy billions, on the strength of an “economic” Faustian Bargain.
Extreme greenhouse levels and high mean temperatures existed on Earth at several stages, but mostly the transitions between these states and cold or ice ages were gradual, allowing many species to adapt. By contrast, when climate changes were abrupt, such as due to asteroid impacts or global volcanic eruptions, many species could not adjust, with consequent mass extinctions. The extreme rate at which anthropogenic global warming is taking place means that only the hardiest species may survive, including grasses and insects and possibly species of birds, descendants of the fated dinosaurs. Human survivors may endure, as they have during the extreme climate upheavals of the glacial-interglacial cycles, which in some instances allowed them to outlast the most adverse conditions.
In perspective, once the Holocene inter-glacial climate stabilized about 11,000 years ago and excess food became available, humans were free to construct monuments for immorality and undertake atavistic orgies of death called war—ritual sacrifice of the young. Possessed by a conscious fear of death, craving omniscient and immortality, simultaneously creating and destroying, as women raise children and cultivate gardens and men go to war, the root factors which underlie the transformation of tribal warriors into button-pushing automatons remain manifest.
The battle between life-enhancing and death-inducing agents in nature, symbolized by the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trinity, has always existed. At present, some, in a world buzzing with witless twits and faceless books, some 73 years following the carnage of WWII, the rise of fascism can only lead to yet another world war, this time nuclear.
Further experiments with the Earth are underway. Once the Hadron Collider has been deemed to be ‘safe’, further science fiction-like experiments yet to be dreamt by ethics-free scientists may or may not result in a black hole. Little doubt exists however regarding the consequences of the continuing use of the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, as an open sewer for carbon gasses.
From the Romans to the third Reich, the barbarism of empires surpasses that of small marauding tribes. In the name of their gods, or freedom, or progress, or human rights, empires never cease to bomb peasants in their small fields. It is among the wretched of the Earth that true charity is common, where empathy is learnt through suffering.
Humans live in a perennial realm of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts. Existentialist philosophy offers a perspective into, and a way of coping with, what otherwise defies rational contemplation. Going through their black night of the soul, members of the species may be rewarded by the emergence of a conscious dignity devoid of illusion, grateful for the glimpse into nature for a fleeting moment: “Having pushed a boulder up the mountain all day, turning toward the setting sun, we must consider Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942).
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View Email Online                          Subscribe to Newsletter6 October 2018

As we stumble through a second consecutive season of record hurricanes and fires, more academics are approaching questions once reserved for doomsday cults. Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption?
      Jonathan Gosling

“Elites” aren’t accustomed to adversity, being challenged, or having their birthright entitlements questioned. They coast through their prep schools and Ivy League, and slide into their preordained adult lives without ever experiencing the daily struggles of working people. Their lives exist in a collective bubble, constantly protected from the harsh realities of life that most of us face.
      Hampton Institute

The discussion I’m inviting is about collective responses to reduce harm, rather than how a few people could tough it out to survive longer than others.
      Jem Bendell

Robots will wipe out humanity in few hundred years
      Martin Rees
 
People with dementia may be taken to a mock-up bus stop, where they sit and wait for a bus that never comes. At some point, when they are tired, and have forgotten what they are doing there, they are persuaded to go back
      Larissa MacFarquar – a parable

Australia’s transport sector adds 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gas per year. Transport is the second largest source of greenhouse gas pollution (after electricity), rising by around 2.5% each year and expected to double by 2050. Nearly 80% travel to work, etc.We have no greenhouse emissions standards for vehicles
      Climate Council

British tourists’ pets would face four days of quarantine, and flights could indeed be grounded despite claims to the contrary emanating from Whitehall. Somebody should’ve told them that beforehand
      Jean-Claude Juncker

Deep Adaptation to Climate Chaos
This analysis leads the author to conclude that climate-induced collapse is now inevitable. The measured changes in our current environment have outpaced even the worst predictions of the IPCC over the past decades. “The leading climate scientists are reporting a much worse situation than the IPCC.” The paper looks at peer reviewed journals and supplements that with the latest data direct from research institutes on climate. “The whole field of sustainable development research, policy and education, and sustainable business in particular, is based on the view that we can halt climate change and avert catastrophe. By returning to the science, I discovered that this view is no longer tenable.”    Important, if you have any doubts, read this

There is a 93 per cent chance that global warming will exceed 4C
Worst-case global warming predictions are the most accurate, say climate experts
Current predictions of climate change may significantly underestimate the speed and severity of global warming. Reappraisal of the models climate scientists use to determine future warming has revealed that less optimistic estimates are more realistic. Models of energy flow from Earth to space, as measured by satellites, suggest that the amount of sunlight reflected away from the planet by clouds will decrease as the world gets warmer, increasing the magnitude of climate change.      Read this

A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy
The purpose is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near term social collapse due to climate change by analysing recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic publications from research institutes. That synthesis leads to a conclusion there will be a near term collapse in society with serious ramifications in our lives. The Deep Adaptation Agenda with key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restoration are explained with the view that social collapse is now inevitable in the near term.     Read this

How to Adapt to the End of the World
Propelling the movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an accelerating rate. “The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war. We need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible.”     Read this

BP and Shell planning for catastrophic 5°C global warming despite publicly backing Paris climate agreement
They are planning for global temperatures to rise as much as 5°C during the next 30 years. [30 years!! Does that imply 2.5C in 15 years? You mean, I really can experience the end of my world before I die?  !!@!!] Companies are trying to ‘have their oil and drink it’ by committing to 2°C in public while planning for much higher temperature rises, and keeping shareholders in the dark about the risks from climate change. Neither company sets targets to reduce emissions and BP’s total investment in renewable and clean technologies has actually shrunk since 2005, and that’s despite the company’s public-facing image of being “beyond petroleum”.  Read thisOrigin Energy calculates that solar is cheaper than coal
“I have been in this game for so long … the one thing I have seen is just the cost of renewables really change the game. It is amazing what we have been seeing.” The cost of solar in the mid $40s/MWh and the cost of wind at the low $50s/MWh. That cost of solar is around half the average price of wholesale electricity this year.   Read this

In the ongoing battle between coal-produced power and renewables  – with the Coalition government on the side of the coal barons – only the now out-of-date regulations that limit what can be done on the grid with the new giant batteries – like the Tesla storage in South Australia – are preventing not only a secure supply but much cheaper prices. The government is trying to bully the suppliers to get the prices down (think elections) while doing nothing to enable the combination of wind+solar and big batteries that have now proven they can do the job. The national grid is the largest single industry in the country and is being run to support the existing coal+gas power system, and (from government directives) is not altering the rules to make a cheaper future possible. Two articles will give you more of the picture, complex as it is.  Read this and Read this.

Coal binge puts Paris climate targets further out of reach
The capacity of the world’s coal-fired power stations would increase by a third if all 1380 plants planned or under development are built, making it tougher to meet Paris climate goals. Plants will be built in 16 nations that do not currently generate electricity from coal, while 11 other countries now have just 600 megawatts of capacity or less. All up, the projects would add more than 672 gigawatts of capacity.   Read itA joyful flashmob staged in Spain
If you don’t know what a flashmob is, it is a gathering of people who have rehearsed some sort of innocent activity and spring it on the general public.   Watch this

Stephen Hawking warned artificial intelligence could end mankind
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”     Read moreIn 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [….] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York.” And ten years later one oil executive in that audience told Congress “We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-combustion engines will have long since been controlled.”     Read more6 Months Before Brexit, Many in UK Fear ‘It’s Looking Very Grisly’
Northern Ireland has only one energy link to the mainland, so a no-deal Brexit could lead to rolling blackouts and steep price rises; and the energy system could collapse, forcing the military to redeploy generators from Afghanistan to the Irish Sea. With an eye toward the March 29 deadline, the government has appointed a minister to guarantee food supplies. Pharmaceutical companies are planning a six-week stockpile of lifesaving medications like insulin and considering flying planeloads of medicine into the country until imports resume. That is, if planes can still land in Britain — something thrown into doubt after the government admitted that aircraft could, in theory, be grounded by a sudden exit. In many ways, the country is in the same position it was on the morning after the 2016 referendum: without a clear plan. “We’re just rolling toward the cliff, and nobody out there is going to stop it,”    Read moreThe new normal? How climate change is making droughts worse
According to the most recent State of the Climate report, Australia has already warmed by 1C since 1910. Here, you can see the trend towards warmer years over the period:
This drought is different: it’s drier and hotter – and getting worse   Read more and ThisThe Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care
In order to keep a person safely inside their world, it was necessary to figure out the boundaries and contents of their world—who lived in it, what activities took place there, and in what era—so there would be as little dissonance as possible when the person used information from that past world to interpret the present. If there was someone missing from the present, for instance—because that person had moved away, or died—it was necessary to arrive at an explanation for this absence that the person with dementia would accept. If, for example, the person asked often where their son was, it was necessary to find out, by experimenting with answers and watching their reactions, how old they believed their son to be at that moment. If they believed him to be a small child, then telling them truthfully that he was out of town at a medical conference would cause bewilderment or suspicion; but if they believed their son to be a college student, telling them that he was playing in the garden would also be a mistake. Continuity was essential. Even a momentary glimpse of another reality that led patients to doubt their understanding of things could be horribly traumatic. With proper care, a person can live as good a life with dementia as without—in some ways and in some cases even better. Sometimes relationships between a person with dementia and their family grow more fulfilling and intimate as talking falls away.     Read moreChina Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Industry
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple, a major bank and government contractors, by compromising America’s technology supply chain. Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. The chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.   Read moreThe March to War with Iran – one has to ask on whose behalf?
A steady, coordinated drumbeat of anti-Iran activities. It began with the US withdrawal from the successful anti-nuclear deal that had reduced Iran’s nuclear program to a fraction of its former size, froze it for at least 15 years, and put it under the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. But Bolton saw it as an obstacle to a regime-change strategy. Trump, obsessed with demolishing all that President Barack Obama achieved, was only too happy to raze the agreement. The day Trump abandoned the accord, Bolton signaled that “what comes next” would be “a much broader resolution of the malign behavior that we see from Iran.” He quickly established an Iran Action Group to coordinate activities across agencies. The operation appears modeled on the White House Iraq Group created by the Bush administration to sell the public on the invasion of Iraq. It is not clear if Trump actually wants a war, but Bolton and Pompeo certainly seem to.   Read morePhotographer Sunil Sharma took this glistening shot of undulating patterns in the snow, captioned
“Life always finds a way”

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View Email Online                          Subscribe to Newsletter29 September 2018

Its a long weekend  – a special read just for you

Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take?…

They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?

‘This guy doesn’t know anything, and he doesn’t give a ……’
The inside story of Trump’s shambolic transition team

Chris Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.

Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.

And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.

Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.

By August, 130 people were showing up every day, and hundreds more working part-time, at Trump transition headquarters, on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The transition team made lists of likely candidates for all 500 jobs, plus other lists of informed people to roll into the various federal agencies the day after the election, to be briefed on whatever the federal agencies were doing. They gathered the names for these lists by travelling the country and talking to people: Republicans who had served in government, Trump’s closest advisers, recent occupants of the jobs that needed filling. Then they set about investigating any candidates for glaring flaws and embarrassing secrets and conflicts of interest. At the end of each week, Christie handed over binders, with lists of names of people who might do the jobs well, to Kushner, Donald Jr and the others. “They probed everything,” says a senior Trump transition official. “‘Who is this person?’ ‘Where did this person come from?’ They only ever rejected one person: Manafort’s secretary.”

In transition … Donald Trump and Chris Christie on 20 November 2016. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

Here Christie and Bannon parted ways. Neither thought it was a good idea to shut down the transition, but each had his own misgivings. Christie thought that Trump had little chance of running the government without a formal transition. Bannon wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal government; he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said: “What do you think Morning Joe will say if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe would say – or at least what Bannon thought it would say – was that Trump was closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any chance of being president.

Trump stopped hollering. For the first time he seemed to have listened.

“That makes sense,” he said.

With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the news, but that proved difficult. From time to time, Trump would see something in the paper about Christie’s fundraising and become upset all over again. The money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

At that moment in American history, if you could somehow organise the entire population into a single line, all 350 million people, ordered not by height or weight or age but by each citizen’s interest in the federal government, and Donald Trump loitered somewhere near one end of it, Max Stier would occupy the other.

By the autumn of 2016, Stier might have been the American with the greatest understanding of how the US government worked. Oddly, for an American of his age and status, he had romanticised public service since he was a child. He had gone through Yale in the mid-80s and Stanford law school in the early 90s without ever being tempted by money or anything else. He thought the US government was the single most important and interesting institution in the history of the planet and could not imagine doing anything but working to improve it. A few years out of law school he had met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Stier was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Stier persuaded Heyman to set aside $25m for him so that he might create an organisation to address the problem.

Stier soon realised that to attract talented young people to government service, he would need to turn the government into a place that talented young people wanted to work. He would need to fix the US government. Partnership for Public Service, as Stier called his organisation, was not nearly as dull as its name. It trained civil servants to be business managers; it brokered new relationships across the federal government; it surveyed the federal workforce to identify specific management failures and success; and it lobbied Congress to fix deep structural problems. It was Stier who had persuaded Congress to pass the laws that made it so annoyingly difficult for Trump to avoid preparing to be president.

Anyway, from the point of view of a smart, talented person trying to decide whether to work for the US government, the single most glaring defect was the absence of an upside. The jobs were not well-paid compared with their equivalents in the private sector. And the only time government employees were recognised was if they screwed up – in which case they often became the wrong kind of famous. In 2002, Stier created an annual black tie, Oscars-like awards ceremony to celebrate people who had done extraordinary things in government.

Every year the Sammies – as Stier called them, in honour of his original patron – attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year, the list of achievements was mind-blowing. A guy in the energy department (Frazer Lockhart) organised the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in 60 years early and $30bn under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the US government. They just never got told.

Stier knew an astonishing number of them. He had detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

That was maybe Stier’s biggest challenge: explaining the value of this enterprise at the centre of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no control. He would explain that the federal government provided services that the private sector could not or would not: medical care for veterans, air traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines. He would explain that the federal government was an engine of opportunity: millions of American children, for instance, would have found it even harder than they did to make the most of their lives without the basic nutrition supplied by the federal government. When all else failed, he would explain the many places the US government stood between Americans and the things that might kill them. “The basic role of government is to keep us safe,” he would say.

The US government employed 2 million people, 70% of them one way or another in national security. It managed a portfolio of risks that no private person or corporation was able to manage. Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most were not: the risk, say, that some prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the Vietnam war. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government, might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.

Enter the presidential transition. A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen. Even before Stier created an organisation to fix the federal government, the haphazard nature of presidential transitions drove him nuts. “We have a legacy government that hasn’t kept up with the world we live in, largely because of disruptions from bad transitions,” he said. “People don’t understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.” The new people taking over the job of running the government were at best only partially informed, and often deeply suspicious, of whatever happened to be going on before they arrived. By the time they fully grasped the problems they were dealing with, it was time to go. “It’s Groundhog Day,” said Stier. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say: ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”

Most of the big problems inside the US government were of the practical management sort and had nothing to do with political ideology. A mundane but important example was how hard it was for any government agency to hire new people. Some agencies couldn’t hire anyone without 60 different people signing off on him. The George W Bush administration had begun to attack that particular mundane problem. The Obama administration, instead of running with the work done during the Bush years, had simply started all over again.

Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner on 11 January 2017. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Stier’s Partnership for Public Service had helped to push through three separate laws related to the transition. In 2010, Congress gave free office space and other resources to the nominees of the two major political parties immediately after the summer conventions. “The reason campaigns didn’t prepare is that they thought it would cost them politically: no one wanted to be seen measuring the drapes,” said Stier. “The idea was to give the nominees of the major political parties cover to do what they should do.” In 2011-2012, to enable the president to put people in jobs more quickly, Congress reduced the number of presidential appointments that required Senate confirmation from about 1,400 to roughly 1,200 – still more than 1,000 too many, in Stier’s view, but a start. Finally, in 2015, Congress required the sitting president to prepare in various ways to hand the government over to his or her successor. The person who had already taken the test was now required by law to help the person who may not have studied for it.

As the 2016 presidential election approached, Stier was about as hopeful as he had ever been that the US government would be handed from one leader to another with minimum stupidity. His partnership had worked with both the Clinton and the Trump campaigns. “Their work was good,” said Stier. He was disappointed with Obama in some ways. Obama had been slow to engage with the federal workforce. He had appointed some poor managers to run some agencies. The fiasco of the rollout of HealthCare.gov was not an accident but a byproduct of bad management. But Obama’s preparations to hand over the government had been superb: the Obama administration had created what amounted to the best course ever on the inner workings of the most powerful institution on earth. What could go wrong?

Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.

Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but also stepped down from his job.)

After meeting with Pence, Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children, Kushner and the other members of Trump’s inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn was a jobseeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of. Now he wanted to be named Trump’s national security adviser, which was maybe the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national security team inside the Trump transition – staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials – had thought that was an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name was not on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he would like to have.

Before Christie could intercede, Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie.

It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out.

Why? asked Christie, stunned.

We’re making a change.

“Okay, what are we changing?

You.

Why?

It’s really not important.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life. The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell reporters that Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.”

In the days after the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building.

It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”

They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team

This is an edited extract from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, published by Penguin on 2 October.

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