A question about climate change/global warming.

The Prime Minister is still (secretly) on holiday in (probably) Hawaii, but footage was dug up earlier in the week of him criticising the police chief of Melbourne for pausing to have dinner on one single day of bushfires in 2010.

At protests outside his official residence (he's using one near his personal home and church, not living in the same city/state as the government) yesterday, ten-year-old schoolgirls were threatened with force by police. Police were using "move on" powers conferred in 1998, when a minister responsible declared in parliament that they would never be applied to protestors.

The Acting Prime Minister told the protestors... well, told reporters elsewhere - that they are "wasting your time" and should "Go and donate your time to Meals on Wheels and something like that."

― insecurity bear (sic), Friday, December 20, 2019 1:46 PM (two weeks ago)

Incidentally, Meals On Wheels have requested the government to increase their funding from $40 million to $80 million, so that users of the service are paying only for the ingredients. 40% of elderly Australians are either malnourished or estimated as being at risk.

In four months since the request, the Acting Prime Minister's suggestion that 10-year-old schoolgirls cook and drive the meals, or take over as social care visitors, is the most substantive response to the funding proposal.

― insecurity bear (sic), Friday, December 20, 2019 8:20 PM (two weeks ago)

"And we’ve had these smoke hazes before. We’ve had bushfires before. We’ve had droughts before.

"... Well, a lot of people, yes, believe the science. A lot of people do. But there are some who do say that, again, climate change is not causing all of these fires."

'The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, tells Radio National that it is “pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies” and “inner-city raving lunatics” like Richard Di Natale and Adam Bandt from the Australian Greens that are “trying to get a political point score” for raising the link between climate crisis, drought and the devastating bushfires.'

Wagga Wagga councillor Vanessa Keenan posted a letter to the deputy prime minister, her local MP, on Facebook after surviving the NSW bushfires. It is reproduced here in full, by permission

In December, while Australia's delegates were teaming up with Brazil to torpedo the international climate policy meeting in Madrid, Kelly addressed the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association and urged them "words to the effect of ‘make sure you burn as much oil and gas as you can over summer, put your roast in a gas fired oven, fill up your gas bottles, and fly from one end of the country to the other.’"

On Sunday, four months into the fires and a month after Kelly's appeal, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association formally boasted that Australia has been hailed by the international fossil fuel industry as the world's largest exporter of Liquefied Natural Gas.

Morrison on Kangaroo Island:

Morrison:
"Well thankfully we've had no loss of life".

Local:
"Two. We've lost two."

Morrison:
"Two. Yes two, that's quite right. I was thinking about firefighters firstly."

In a statement, the Lang family said Dick and Clayton were returning to the family property on Kangaroo Island after fighting a nearby fire for two days.

“We are devastated to have lost two beloved members of our family - Dick Lang and his youngest son Clayton Lang - in such terrible circumstances,” it read.

“‘Desert Dick’ Lang, 78, was a pioneering bush pilot and safari operator who opened up the outback to countless travellers from Australia and overseas. He first offered 4WD adventures in 1965, later adding aircraft trips to all corners of Australia and other countries, from Papua New Guinea to Africa.

“Clayton, 43, was one of Adelaide’s leading plastic and reconstructive surgeons, specialising in hand surgery.”

“We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the CFS volunteers, police and members of the Kangaroo Island community who are doing so much to help all those on the Island affected by these catastrophic fires.”

Surely he wouldn't triple down on that, would he?

Oh.

“It hasn't been your finest week has it?” @mjrowland68 asks Prime Minister @ScottMorrisonMP. #abc730 #auspol pic.twitter.com/tJZ8GgfsXt

— abc730 (@abc730) January 9, 2020

'these fires were started' is an... interesting way to frame wildfires

If you own a bunch of mines and announce you’ve donated $70 million to fire recovery charities created your own tax write-off fund that may have $60 million in administration costs, even the non-commercial media will put your claim that it’s mostly arson in the headline.

Pardon my cynicism: turns out $50 million of that 70 is going to a right-wing think tank that he runs. Dude is worth $6.84 billion.

i was just rereading ursula k. leguin's the dispossessed and there's a section where a character from future earth describes the planet along the lines of 'there's half a billion of us left from a peak of nine billion, all the forests are dead, the air and the earth is grey, and it's always hot' and i was like... well, yeah

and at least that motherfucker got to go and live in space, a respite i doubt any of us will get to enjoy

oh dear god

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENyOAySU8AAQUVJ?format=jpg&name=large

whoever did that should check photos of charred dead animals and repaint

In heaven you get your ideal body.

And that platypus at first looked like a small mammal drinking a cup of tea.

Don't these photos and videos and deaths initiate any kind of conversation? You can say a lot about the media here but I reckon we'd have that if this was going on.

This essay was published before the May election. It's good.

It sounds unreal to say that News Corp is not a media organisation. It sounds outré to say that it is instead a political propaganda entity of a kind perhaps not seen since the 19th century, one that has climbed to its pedestal through regulatory capture, governmental favours and menace, and is now applying its energies to the promotion of white nationalism, even as white nationalists commit scores of murders.

It defends a child rapist and demeans his victims. It degrades and cows the national broadcaster until it threatens its function, and occasionally its existence. It undermines the rule of law. It does everything it can to impinge on climate change action, just as the ramifications of climate change begin to bite. Who has the better predictive record: climate scientists or boosters of the Iraq War? Now dwell for a moment on News’s relative treatment of each. We are stuck listening to the megaphoned opinions of the wrong people, who have been rewarded rather than penalised for their failure.

News Corp is not merely biased against Labor and in favour of the Liberals. This underestimates the international nature of the franchise. It is a series of multi-platform metastases that endanger minorities – sexual, racial and religious – all over the world.

Thanks for that ^ good stuff

otm

i guess everyone got a little burned out on worrying about news corp being the bringer of the apocalypse a few years ago, just because it's not even a prediction or theory, it is just what happened. but every once in a while it's worth pointing at it and acknowledging how COMPLETELY FUCK UP it is, and how obvious of a problem it is, and how many people rely on it anyway.

let us acknowledge how COMPLETELY FUCK UP it is

everyone

And that platypus at first looked like a small mammal drinking a cup of tea.

One of the monsters from Critters, maybe.

Since I posted that link this morning:

A senior News Corp employee has accused the company of “misinformation” and diverting attention from climate change during the bushfire crisis in an explosive all-staff email addressed to executive chairman Michael Miller.

The email accuses News Corp papers, including the Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, of misrepresenting facts and spreading misinformation to focus on arson as the cause of the bushfires, rather than climate change.

The email was penned by a senior member of News Corp’s commercial arm in response to an all-staff email from Miller detailing the leave arrangements available to staff and announcing other bushfire-related initiatives.

News Corp bosses globally deleted it from employee inboxes.

Norway is about to start production of oil from the Johan Sverdrup N. Sea field that holds about 2.7bn barrels of oil. Justified in terms of new low carbon electric powered extraction technology it locks in oil production for another 50 years. https://t.co/vjwKnLSBmW pic.twitter.com/soOwyrqHw7

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) January 10, 2020

fuck off Norway.

Justified in terms of new low carbon electric powered extraction technology

i'm clawing the flesh off my skull

*muffled screaming*

That's 431kg/barrel CO2 from the new field vs 448kg CO2 industry average. 4% less CO2... hardly "low carbon". Wish journalists like @rmilneNordic were critically numerate rather than writing advertorials.

— Si Kulzanworx (@Cyclestrian) January 10, 2020

guessing that norway stands to benefit from climate change in the short to medium term?

t/s: leaving oil in the ground and releasing no extra co2 into the environment vs extracting that oil using a very slightly less destructive process and then burning it to hasten the pace of our ongoing apocalypse

yeah let's do the latter, good thinking norway

The Saturday edition of Murdoch's "reputable" national broadsheet The Australian has run one editorial today saying climate change is real, and their official accounts and columnists are aggressively plugging it as proof that their ex-employees, current employees, the Guardian, the New York Times and much of Australian twitter are therefore engaged in a conspiracy by having said they've been denialists for the last 40 years.

are lachlan etc any better than rupert or has it gone beyond such pittances

James is better but has had his independence broken many times over the decades since Rawkus

Elisabeth is less ideologically-motivated but has had the whip laid down a few times

Lachlan is not likely to be functionally better, though possibly less effective long-term, but will be in charge and following the same agendas for the next decade or two

(Also today: The Australian has reprinted an essay by the founder of Quillette, from Quillette, blaming the Greens for stopping every goverment in the last 11 years from enacting climate-forward policy.)

In more Liberal (tory) Party fundraising hypocrisy, the Minister For Fascism, who's given himself more spying powers than any governmental agency has ever held in Australia, and recently spent $100 million reopening one single concentration camp to hold one single family, is asking people to donate to the Red Cross, rather than coming up with any way for the government to contribute to relief funds or firefighters.

Today this guy, who would become PM if yesterday's national Sack ScoMo rallies had any effect, has asked the Federal Police to investigate the ethnicity of a well-known Aboriginal author and professor who has spent the summer fighting fires. This is based on a beat-up by an entrepreneur who has called for the Attorney-General and Prime Minister to establish a national registry for authentically indigenous people, because she was only the joint winner of a literary prize worth $30,000.

Unrelatedly I'm sure, one of the only things that can stop foreign mining companies from being sold Australian land is if it is under native title.

endlessly impressive to me that -- not just, but especially the murdochs, kochs, etc. -- would rather the world burn than yield any slight portion

Rupert did not expect Morrison to get back in, btw - iirc he was reported as saying privately "I've made money under a Labor government before, I can do it again." The opposition leader had refused to meet with him, which Labor leaders will usually do even if they won't kowtow, but apparently the Melting Candle was astute enough to see that Morrison was an incompetent idiot earlier than the people who read his papers and watch his television.


But the Murdochs have actively campaigned against Labor on front pages since *checks notes* a mere 89 years ago, during the Great Depression.

He was influential in pushing Joseph Lyons to break away and form the United Australia Party, which then smashed Labor in the 1931 election. Lyons remained a loyal Murdoch deputy as Prime Minister, often visiting his Melbourne office and addressing his superior as ‘Sir’.

ethnicity of a well-known Aboriginal author and professor

Gee I wonder why he hasn’t gotten back to you. pic.twitter.com/8PHzCVdA40

— Dominic Kelly (@dominickelly_) January 10, 2020

BTW

“I KNEW PM SCOTT MORRISON AT UNI AND HE WAS A DICKHEAD”! Former Liberal Party insider spills beans on “zero talent weirdo”

After he was dumped as head of Tourism Australia ... with a $300,000 payout in his pocket, Morrison slowly but surely turned his eye to getting himself a cushy federal parliamentary seat so that he would no longer have to be a bureaucratic bovver boy at the whims of his political paymasters. ... But it didn’t go to plan, well not initially anyway.

He was smashed in the preselection by Michael Towke, an engineer from a Lebanese Christian background who was favoured by the party’s right faction. Morrison only received eight votes. Morrison – just like in the past few weeks – would need some help from the propaganda unit at News Corp.

Just four days after the preselection battle, Towke became the victim of a defamatory smear campaign led by News Corp’s gutter tabloid, The Daily Telegraph. Towke would end up suing News Corp, with an out-of-court settlement believed to be in the six figures being paid out by the media organisation.

However, the damage had been done. The NSW state executive of the Liberal Party – Morrison’s former fiefdom from a few years prior – refused to endorse Towke’s candidacy.

Australian (v Australian - Townsville) colleague of mine went camping with his family over christmas but had to evacuate when “Ah look, embers started landing on the tent, and then the campsite and farm and local town burned through. Grim”.

Which, yes, it sounds f’ing awful and dangerous, but i know it’s popular at christmas you do wonder at going camping during the worst bushfire season ever.

Out there before Christmas and there was ash on the sea - you could taste it when you went swimming, smoke alarms switched off across Sydney and a thick thick smog that obliterated the sun to a small red dot, like you were on an alien planet.

I realise Australians itt will probably have v first hand experiences here but as an outsider it was startling.

in other news, good thread analysing german energy production and consumption in relation to US and standard narrative of German nuclear/coal trade offs and green failures:

I guess, there is always space for another “Why are you closing your nuclear reactors Germany” story to rehash the same old points… It is unfortunate that angle gets that much airtime.

Here is what I wish we highlighted about the Energiewende. 👇
https://t.co/Z7suxux528

— Nikos Tsafos (@ntsafos) January 9, 2020

aggressively plugging it as proof that their ex-employees, current employees, the Guardian, the New York Times and much of Australian twitter are therefore engaged in a conspiracy by having said they've been denialists for the last 40 years.

https://i.imgur.com/rCdoN3N.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0XHyZ0b.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/DLHMI6Y.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/uIIxpKp.jpg

A dozen examples of rigorously

...debunked climate denialism from that one Murdoch paper:

There have been lots (understatement alert) examples of climate science denial at The Australian over the years. I have written about lots of them. A thread.

— Graham Readfearn (@readfearn) January 11, 2020

On climate change I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue. It's getting to where outright denial is becoming politically untenable and I'm convinced that they long ago mapped out their future strategy of morphing from 'it isn't happening' to 'it's too late to do anything about it/it doesn't matter what we do cause China and India'.

― viborg, Tuesday, December 10, 2019 6:53 AM

And here's a thread of Morrison on TV an hour ago explaining that this is the new normal, that the change we need to make is changing the law so the Army can seize and take over towns come to rescue people when they catch on fire and all the water has already been sold to China. No other change is possible.

Morrison has previously argued, repeatedly, that our strategy for climate change is to "meet and beat" emissions targets. (He also strategises on meeting them by gutting targets at international conferences, and offshoring our emissions.)

Now:

The fires themselves are exacerbating global warming, too, with fire-induced thunderstorms pumping soot, ash and chemicals into the upper atmosphere. Satellite-based estimates of greenhouse-gas emissions from the fires show they may be contributing the equivalent of a typical year’s worth of Australia’s emissions from burning fossil fuels.

^ From a Washington Post story on how a new "megafire" (formed when two merely enormous fires joined, at the Snowy Mountains in NSW) is larger than New York City.

The estimate on animals killed has now been raised from half a billion to over a billion.

Murdoch paper, the herald sun has got bored with the fires, only two page on the fires and it’s all about recovery, nothing on the mega fires merging. Of course there’s the letters page a peta credlin in which, remarkably, there has been a simultaneous change in th language of the knuckle draggers from ‘back-burning’ and ‘management’ to ‘prescribed burning’. As I the state government hasn’t completed its ‘prescribed burning’.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for a newly woke Andre Bolt whenever he gets back from whatever seal clubbing holiday he is currently on.

"Police are now working on the premise arson is to blame for much of the devastation caused this bushfire season. A strike force will investigate whether blazes were deliberately lit, and bring those responsible to justice."

1.2 million hectares have burnt in Victoria so far. 385 of those (or 0.03%) have been officially attributed to suspicious circumstances.

(I can't find more current figures right now, but as of the beginning of December - a week before this thread revive - 10% of forest in NSW national parks had burnt, 20% of World Heritage-listed land in the Blue Mountains had burnt - before major fires, let alone a megafire, let alone coal seam fires, had even started in the area - and rainforests that have never caught fire in known history had burnt, destroying entire histories of biodiversity.)

One can only hope that some editors and ScoMo himself are arrested for waisting police time.

A dozen examples of rigorously debunked climate denialism from that one Murdoch paper

And a substantial thread specifically debunking the unsigned editorial from yesterday:

Okay. I can't help it. I'm sick. I'm addicted. I have to do a line-by-line breakdown of The @Australian's mind-blowing editorial.

Somebody help me. Rescue me from the abyss. Whisk me from oblivion, I am spent. This is so WILD. pic.twitter.com/bpTcVnWfAi

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) January 11, 2020

fuckin immigrants

The second-most liked comment on the editorial blames immigrants for accepting climate science??

Every single one of the top most-liked comments re-hash denialist tropes.

The Oz is reassuring itself here. It's a massive self-help therapy session, squeezing its eyes shut. pic.twitter.com/ia5ZQ3XMAe

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) January 11, 2020

The relentless spread of the #bushfires down the Australian east coast over the past four months #AustraliaFire #BushfireAustralia

(#DigitalEarthAU Hotspots data from Sep 3 2019 to today; full screen recommended) pic.twitter.com/50XLhMzTmh

— Dr Robbi Bishop-Taylor (@EarthObserved) January 7, 2020

Siemens:

Innovations that improve life. For business, for society and for each individual. This is Ingenuity for life.

Also Siemens:

"We heard a lot of protest about our involvement in a monstrous new coal mine that might straight-up destroy Australia, if not the entire biosphere, so we asked one LNP member what to do."

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

"Also, if we don't provide this infrastructure, another company will, so it literally makes no difference whatsoever whether we do or not. Suck our balls, planet."

"The government secretly abolished the native people's ability to control or live on their own land" = "the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples have 100% approved this foreign coal mine on their land!" - former Auschwitz contractors who used forced labour, today.

Bezos has announced that Amazon will donate $690,000 to bushfire relief in services, if agencies and government services switch their operations to AWS storage.

Metallica donated $750,000 in money. P!nk donated $500,000. An instagram sex worker raised $700,000 in donations in exchange for nude selfies.


Amazon paid $20 million tax on $2 billion revenue in Australia last year. Bezos personally donated $10,000,000 to an NRA-lobbying Super PAC in Septmber 2018.

jeff bezos start selling yr nude selfies on amazon marketplace u coward

why buy the pork when hackers gave away his hog for free

meanwhile, in the world of high finance

This headline is absolute bullshit and the article itself proves it.

Moreover, what a coincidence it is that the only concrete claim they make is that they’re getting out of coal when coal investments are down 75% since 2015 and insurers are no longer backing the industry. pic.twitter.com/SQEE8NfsSb

— David Weiner (@daweiner) January 14, 2020