A question about climate change/global warming.

As of the election last year, the IMF estimated government subsidies to fossil fuel companies to be $29 billion in Australia, or 2.3% of GDP.

The operators of a coal-fired electric power station notified the New South Wales government in 2015 of their intention to close in 2022. At this stage it had been operating at half-capacity for two years, due to its age. Even the local member, frothing coal lobbyistenthusiast, said at the time "it's 45 years old. It's clapped out. It's now the most inefficient and dirtiest power generation in the country".

Said operators have refused goverment entreaties to put any money into repairing it ahead of the closure. After five years prep time to shift to other means of supply, the government has now planned to spend $300 million to keep the station burning coal (but only outputting half the power it should) for another six years.

https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/6623434/federal-government-slammed-over-300-million-liddell-extension-proposal/

"Liddell is a dud and should shut by its use-by date in 2023, or even sooner," Nature Conservation Council campaigns director Brad Smith said.

"If the government is going to spend $300 million on energy, it should invest in pumped hydro and batteries, not extending the life of a dirty old clunker like Liddell. Keeping the station open would be an obscene waste of taxpayers' money."

The leaked report found keeping Liddell open would make the grid more unstable and add significantly to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

"Instead of obsessing about coal," Mr Smith said, "there are 21 storage projects that are ready to roll in NSW that the Federal Government should expedite funding for."

Here's Exactly How a Trump 2020 Win Would Spark a Nightmare Climate Scenario

The Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm, calculated in December that for humankind to keep warming below 2 degrees, we need to reduce emissions a colossal one-third from current levels by 2030. They identified five crucial things that could get us globally on track toward closing that gap: the European Union adopting a Green New Deal, Brazil halting its destruction of the Amazon Rainforest, China’s economic growth and the emissions it produces slowing to a more sustainable rate, and demand for electricity in India growing only moderately and being met mainly by renewables. The fifth one is Trump losing in 2020.

A re-elected Trump would keep dismantling environmental rules —he's slashed 95 in total so far— that limit fossil fuel companies or other polluters of the atmosphere. And he would make the damage much harder to reverse by continuing to stack the courts with conservative judges who tend to rule on the side of greenhouse gas-spewing corporations.

There already aren’t many years left to reduce emissions on the scale necessary to avoid further devastation. Trump's second term would at the very least be more wasted time. If the U.S. is to have any hope of meeting the 1.5 degrees goal, its emissions need to be reduced 40 or 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. But the Trump administration has wiped out Barack Obama–era emissions standards for cars and trucks, allowed oil and gas producers to release all the methane they want and engaged in many other acts of climate destruction. This would leave only six years to close a massive gap after the end of a second Trump term, after which U.S. emissions cuts might only hit 12 to 19 percent, according to the Rhodium group. And that estimate is based only on existing Trump rollbacks.

This seems extremely bad

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

“But that is not the main point,” said Tinsley-Marshall. “I think it’s pretty clear that something pretty catastrophic is going on.”

Ten years of why are bees disappearing? articles are now giving way to climate change probably articles, too

We can use AI to train drones to pollinate, right?

Yeah, I've definitely noticed the bugsplat thing – used to have to wash the car after a London-Glasgow trip, now it's basically clean.

global warming's terrifying new moth

Maybe bugs are evolving to stay away from highways?

ftr this shit (insect numbers crashing) absolutely terrifies me, beyond most things

xp: It's everywhere, even protected parks/wilderness.

Hallmann et al, 2017. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PloS one, 12(10), p.e0185809.

:(

Detailed visual piece on the spread of the Australian fires, the role of climate change, and the future

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-19/australia-bushfires-how-heat-and-drought-created-a-tinderbox/11976134

(Open on desktop and let it load - intensive illustration using satellite imagery.)

Tom Beer is often referred to as the ‘godfather’ of bushfire and climate science in Australia. In 1988, he released the first research on the effects of climate change on bushfires in Australia.

While researching in 1987, when climate science was in its infancy, Dr Beer attempted to find a year where the temperature had varied more than 3.5 degrees above the average so that he could study what happened in that year as a model for the future. He was unable to find one.

“Even finding a year that was 1 degree warmer was impossible,” he says.

And according to Dr Beer, the 2019 fires may already be the new normal, even if the world limits emissions under the Paris Agreement.

“Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement is more or less, in terms of bushfires, what you’re seeing this year. If we get up to 3 degrees, then the fires are going to get worse.”

A similar multi-media piece on the health effects of days / months of living in smoke:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2020/feb/20/the-toxic-air-we-breathe-the-health-crisis-from-australias-bushfires

“We’re all currently living in a big experiment,” says Donna Green, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales’ climate change research centre.

“We know it will be bad, we just don’t know how bad.”

In Sydney and Canberra, hospitals were pushed to breaking point.

David Caldicott, an emergency department doctor and senior clinical lecturer at the Australian National University, describes smoke-filled rooms, a jump in emergency respiratory cases and “many anxious parents with kids with asthma”.

The smoke that blanketed the city was so bad that it caused MRI scanners to stop working.

“Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement is more or less, in terms of bushfires, what you’re seeing this year. If we get up to 3 degrees, then the fires are going to get worse.”

this is some exemplary scientist deadpan here

Pyrenees having a totally normal one pic.twitter.com/pUJZRwdzkV

— Elisha Sessions 🆒 (@elishasessions) February 20, 2020

the weather in France has been so fucked this winter

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-reef-building-coral-disaster-traits-akin.html

Morrison and the LNP government have announced that they will be defunding and closing the Bushfire and Natural Hazard Cooperative Research Centre established under the previous Labor government, a few days after the centre published a report on a conference analysis re: Are we ready for cascading extreme weather hazards beyond our experience?.

The conference was held immediately before six months of cascading extreme weather hazards.

LNP: the Bureau of Meteorology is a hoax

January 6 2020: Morrison announces

Bushfire recovery will take priority over the budget surplus in a mammoth federal program starting with a $2 billion fund that could surge in size over the next few years to rebuild after the summer crisis.

Cash payments are being promised immediately to help families, employers and local councils to recover from the bushfires, with the outlays expected to trim the budget surplus this year by $500 million.

March 2 2020: the government admits that this fund does not exist at all, let alone that it could surge in size, and argue that this doesn't matter because it was always notional. When a senator explains that "notional" means "imaginary," they withdraw the statement and ask for time to look up the word and submit another meaning in writing later.

(5 farmers have been issued loans.)



January 19 2020: the goverment announces that $76 million will be taken from the $2 billion fund in order to protect and restore the tourism industry in the wake of the bushfires (if they ever end).

(https://www.sbs.com.au/news/federal-government-rolls-out-76-million-tourism-package-in-wake-of-bushfires)

March 5 2020: the tourism industry is told there will be no financial support to help them weather impact of the coronavirus, which is already three times larger than the impact of the bushfires.

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/tourism-industry-calls-for-coronavirus-support-in-addition-to-bushfire-package)

I worry that your posts itt are causing me to overappreciate other government's responses!

hey, they can respond when it's urgent: before entering parliament, the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction set up a fake company in the Cayman Islands to "protect internationally significant wetlands from dying" by selling water to the government, and three years ago the government paid this one company (started in a tax haven by a government minister) $80 million dollars for water that does not exist.

This week, as the wetlands are still endangered, they're looking into giving it another $2 million for water.

Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.

https://www.ftm.nl/dutch-multinationals-funded-climate-sceptic

The Netherlands' leading climate denier died in 2008, and was an inveterate hoarder archivist. Researchers going through his SIXTEEN METER HIGH stack of papers have found detailed records on how Shell, Bayer and other corps paid him €500K over nine years to undermine public belief in climate change, and humanity’s role in it.

The Managing director of Shell, Huub Van Engelshoven, personally commissioned him from 1989.

Böttcher used the money to set up an international network of climate sceptics. He produced multiple reports, books and opinion pieces. In these he wrote, for instance, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and that CO2 is not dangerous, quite the opposite: it’s ‘good for plants’.

The doubt created led, among other things, to a lack of political support for regulatory measures with regard to CO2 reduction during the 1990s.

His 24 sponsors finally stopped funding him in 1998, when they concluded that the signing of the Kyoto Protocol had created a tipping point at which flat denial was no longer viable.

Doctorow: "We know who his political allies were: the VVD party. When the Netherlands' dikes fail and the country begins to drown, these politicians might still be running for office."

There are still multiple contained and uncontained fires in the state of Victoria, Australia, including a peat fire.

The Labor premier of Victoria has today lifted a moratorium on onshore gas exploration, with drilling and extraction to begin from July 2021.

sneaked that one out, the fucker.

Meanwhile Zalli Stegall has paused her climate change bill.

multiple contained and uncontained fires in the state of Victoria, Australia

Although the last of the fires in neighbouring New South Wales was extinguished after a fortnight of torrential rain suppressed most of them, and another two weeks of effort by firefighters on the reduced blazes. Thus ending 240 days of uncontrolled fires in the state. Maybe the rain will also have softened up the ground for the fracking that got licensed a few months ago?

Meanwhile, in the next state up the coast, documents and video have leaked from the Indian-owned Adani mining company, revealing that their announced plans to export 10 million tonnes of coal at first, expanding to 27 million tonnes over time are a cover for plans to export 40 million tonnes at first, expanding to ONE HUNDRED MILLION TONNES, nearly double the limit to which they are regulated.

"Reminder that (the firefighters) are still volunteers, without breathing masks, taking unpaid time off work"

Except for the ones that are unemployed: they have had their benefits cut off because they have not been actively seeking work. (The dole has not been raised in 25 years, incidentally. Housing prices have roughly quadrupled in Sydney in that time.)

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Friday, January 3, 2020 9:20 AM (two months ago)

now that the firefighters can go back to applying for jobs and thus qualify for the dole, it was raised today: by 48c a day.

Scott Morrison has launched a high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission, to advise the government on appropriate actions to take. It comprises:

- Morrison's departmental secretary
- the Minister for Fascism's departmental secretary
- the head of the Finance Department
- the Managing Director of a Hong Kong-owned company that bought large parts of Australia's electricity supply when they were privatised, and operates gas and coal stations in three of Australia's five states
- the former CEO of Australia's national telecommunications agency, who oversaw it being privatised
- the 73-year-old former owner of a trucking company, who is worth $880 million
- one former elected member of Parliament

and is headed by a former mining magnate, who was in the news three weeks ago for the amount of insider trading he has done this year, buying up shares of a gas drilling and pipeling company of which he is deputy chairman.



Here is a list of the doctors, epidemiologists, nurses, scientists and hospital administrators on the commission:

Due to Coronavirus, the US Forest Service is "canceling prescribed burns across the West, potentially making the upcoming fire season worse."

cool cool cool

"The federal government is pushing for expansions of coal mines to keep people in work, amid expectations that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs due to the economic slump caused by COVID-19."

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/coal-mine-expansion-even-more-important-20200324-p54dcx

Their fucking answer for everything. How about employing them to install solar or mine any of the other things that are in the ground in Australia (Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Graphite ...)

Due to the coronavirus, Parliament is not sitting until August.

Therefore, opposition MPs are not able to question the government government on, today, approving ten years of logging native forests in Victoria, or yesterday approving coal mining underneath the Greater Sydney reservoir, which supplies water for the most populous region on the continent.

Fantastic.Great move. Well done Angus.

Energy Minister @AngusTaylorMP struggling to explain why buying currently cheap oil to meet IEA strategic reserve guidelines (which we never met before) makes sense despite proposing to keep it in facilities inconveniently placed on the other side of the planet in the US.

🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/HTXkWPkaoI

— Anthony Pesec - staying safe at home! (@anthonypesec) April 22, 2020

The Federal Government has succumbed to “well organised corruption and capture” by fossil fuel billionaires who are “a threat to life”, using the cover of the COVID-19 crisis to push dangerous, uneconomic projects and strip environmental protections.

The dickheads are circling.

Not that the media is a big threat to fossil fuel in normal times, but they are so absorbed by the pandemic right now that every barrier to corruption is down.

Which outlets do you think would normally be covering the above, that are distracted by the pandemic instead?

Scott Morrison has launched a high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission, to advise the government on appropriate actions to take. It comprises:

- Morrison's departmental secretary
- the Minister for Fascism's departmental secretary
- the head of the Finance Department
- the Managing Director of a Hong Kong-owned company that bought large parts of Australia's electricity supply when they were privatised, and operates gas and coal stations in three of Australia's five states
- the former CEO of Australia's national telecommunications agency, who oversaw it being privatised
- the 73-year-old former owner of a trucking company, who is worth $880 million
- one former elected member of Parliament

and is headed by a former mining magnate, who was in the news three weeks ago for the amount of insider trading he has done this year, buying up shares of a gas drilling and pipeling company of which he is deputy chairman.

Here is a list of the doctors, epidemiologists, nurses, scientists and hospital administrators on the commission:

― Dollarmite Is My Name (sic), Thursday, March 26, 2020 6:00 AM (one month ago)

Good news, everybody! Turns out that the high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission that is staffed almost entirely with fossil fuel millionaires or stooges and contains no doctors or scientists has determined that the best way to recover from COVID-19 is to sell and burn a fuckload more fossil fuels than we're already selling and burning!

high-paid

The head of the committee, who is the director and shareholder of an oil & gas company in his day job, is being paid $500,000 for six months work, plus private jet travel.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2020/13/2020/1589348161/notice

The other commissioners are being paid only $364,000 on top of their own day jobs.

The processes of this taxpayer-funded commission are not open to the public.

Report leaked.

Shocker: The report does not consider alternatives to gas, or mention climate change and the financial risk of investing in fossil fuel as emissions are cut

Fucking Taylor was on RN this morning saying ‘technology not taxation’ whilst this was leaking.

I am livid.

March 5 2020: the tourism industry is told there will be no financial support to help them weather impact of the coronavirus, which is already three times larger than the impact of the bushfires.

wonder if there's been any further economic impact from the coronavirus since then. probably not, right?

anyway, if there had been, at least there's a solid roadmap for recovery:

Good news, everybody! Turns out that the high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission that is staffed almost entirely with fossil fuel millionaires or stooges and contains no doctors or scientists has determined that the best way to recover from COVID-19 is to sell and burn a fuckload more fossil fuels than we're already selling and burning

that's a relief, now that we know how few new coal mines were approved during the first few months of the bushfires, when there was reason to be cautious. thank goodness the brakes can be taken off in the next quarter!

https://i.imgur.com/E4GHnHF.png

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.

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Thursday, January 9, 2020 9:31 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Phoah.

Should be block quote, apologies. Sauce.

100 climate scientists from 20 countries have returned from a sea journey concluding that we're seeing the final summers of ice in the Arctic.

The Arctic is rich in natural resources like fossil fuel and already under significant climate stress, warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The more the Arctic warms and melts, the more humans build industrial infrastructure, mine metals and produce oil and gas–emitting greenhouse gases that accelerate the warming and melting.

It would be interesting to conduct some psychological case studies of local residents of the area to see how they're coping with this. I suspect we might be able to find some of the same profiles in residents of Aus...

No mention of clathrates that I see though, which was some scientists were concerned about about ten years ago but I haven't seen it mentioned that much recently. Generally seems like thermokarst is a bigger concern, with the evidence clear to the eye at ground level.

If you're wondering "Do they sleep?" ...I don't, I don't sleep. Much, at least. (Not just this keeping me up, but in general. Gotta admit after yesterday reading through this whole thread which is like some tragic farce, it was a bit much as I was winding down for the evening. Can't imagine what it was like to live through that.)

I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue

A question about climate change/global warming.

A question about climate change/global warming.

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

Good news, everybody! Turns out that the high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission that is staffed almost entirely with fossil fuel millionaires or stooges and contains no doctors or scientists has determined that the best way to recover from COVID-19 is to sell and burn a fuckload more fossil fuels than we're already selling and burning!

Update: we don't even need to sell gas to solve COVID recovery, the government should just give money directly to the fossil fuel companies.

'A presentation on the final report of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission manufacturing taskforce, seen by The Age and The SMH, recommends "cutting red and green tape" to help the gas industry rapidly increase gas extraction and create up to 170,000 manufacturing jobs.'

The final report of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission’s manufacturing working group has called for a relaxation of gas industry regulations and calls for the Morrison government to consider more tax incentives for the construction of new projects.

One of the recommendations of the working group is that the federal government should “underwrite demand” for gas, agreeing to purchase gas in a situation where the market is oversupplied. This from an industry lobby that has constantly argued that there is a supply shortfall.

With gas companies recording a series of project delays and massive write-downs of the value of existing investments, which have already totalled almost $20 billion in Australia alone, Greenpeace Australia Pacific said that taxpayers shouldn’t be left to foot the bill.

“Whichever way you look at it, gas is an industry in decline, with billions of dollars in write-downs around the world due to the renewable energy boom. Wasting public money on the polluting industries of the past rather than the modern renewable technology of today is an abuse of public trust,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific campaigner Jonathan Moylan said.

Two months ago:
The processes of this taxpayer-funded commission are not open to the public.

Yesterday:

On Monday, prime minister Scott Morrison announced that he was reconstituting the National Covid Coordination Commission as a body that reports directly to the federal cabinet.

“The COVID Commission will work within government. It won’t be an external agency. It will work within government and can form part of the Cabinet deliberative processes, which is an important innovation,” Morrison said.

The change is likely to further reduce the transparency and public visibility of what the Commission is advising government, as cabinet deliberations are not released to the public and are generally exempt from freedom of information laws.