Wind, solar and pumped hydro energy storage can provide all the electrical energy we need, on demand, cheaply, quickly, with minimal carbon emissions. This is the message that will cut through the energy confusion. The clean energy debate is hampered by widespread lack of awareness of off-river pumped hydro energy storage. It is the third leg of the clean energy tripod. It uses mature technologies and there are abundant suitable sites. (more…)
Geoff Davies
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Barack Obama wants us to care about the oceans
What are the five most precious things in my life? (more…)
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They spit in our faces
The fossil fuel corporations and their enablers treat us with complete contempt. This is not very polite to say, I know, but they spit in our faces and laugh. (more…)
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Detaching Australia from the death grip of the United States
Our challenge now is to detach Australia from the death grip of the United States and to pursue an independent future, which we are quite capable of doing. To do so we will need not only to remove the old sycophantic parties but also to root out the US ‘security’ zealots from our own secretive security establishment. They will not go easily. (more…)
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To save the planet: Disable this global consumer-corporate machine
The global consumer-capitalist machine is well-programmed to consume the planet in its quest to produce ever-more stuff. Avoiding pollution is incompatible with its present functioning. If we want to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions we need to know how to get inside the machine and turn it off, or transform it. (more…)
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Universities: dead, buried and cremated?
In the late nineties, the management of the Australian National University was attacking its academic staff. That may seem a little strange, until I note that acolytes of Prime Minister John Howard were trying to impose Labour Market Flexibility. However the staff resisted, and even went on strike more than once. (more…)
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Artificial cleverness is polluting the essence of our humanity
Fakes, deep fakes, disinformation, lies and rumours pollute the internet, the legacy media and conversations. Some of these are not new, but their power is growing. Now we have a new contender, so-called artificial intelligence, interfering in our human experience, and the technutters proudly claim it will get a million times worse within a decade or two. We are degrading an essence of our humanity. Can we have any conception of what that might do to us? (more…)
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How Ronald Reagan started the ruination of the USA
The continuing descent of the United States into polarisation and violence is widely lamented. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marks the inflection when the descent began in earnest. (more…)
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The cut-through message: wind, solar and pumped hydro are all we need, and cheaper
Wind, solar and pumped hydro energy storage can provide all the electrical energy we need, on demand, cheaply, quickly, with minimal carbon emissions. This is the message that will cut through the energy confusion. The clean energy debate is hampered by widespread lack of awareness of off-river pumped hydro energy storage. It is the third leg of the clean energy tripod. It uses mature technologies and there are abundant suitable sites. (more…)
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Death machine: striking at the heart of the planetary problem
What is it going to take, asks climate activist Violet Coco, to stop the death machine, to save humanity and the living world? We first need to find the engine, the beating heart of this global materialist-consumerist-industrial civilisation. (more…)
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No Minister, high immigration will cost us $320 billion
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has chastised Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for proposing temporary cuts to permanent immigration numbers, claiming the 25% cut would cost ‘the budget’ tens of billions of dollars. But the far bigger costs of providing durable assets for immigrants are routinely overlooked, or mis-counted as a plus because they add to the GDP. (more…)
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Blinded by the light
Richard Flanagan has done us a favour. His recent book, Question 7, takes us back to the creation of atomic bombs, and to their use against people, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombs played an indirect but pivotal role in Flanagan’s family. They are directly pivotal in humanity’s story. After many decades of habituation to abstract talk of nuclear warfare, Flanagan reminds us of what a nuclear bomb does to people and why no more should ever be used. (more…)
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COP out: apocalypse next
Without a large and rapid change in politics, not much in evidence, it now seems unlikely we can avoid climate apocalypse. (more…)
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Labor losers
The emptiness of modern Labor is now on full display: maligning refugees, promoting fossil fuels, tinkering around the edge of social crisis, pandering to the wealthy, condoning mass murder, adopting policies of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. (more…)
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Pumped hydro storage: the neglected, stifled no-brainer
Pumped hydro storage is the ideal complement to wind and solar electricity generation: versatile, modest in scale, cost and build-time, little environmental disruption, mature component technologies, few toxic chemicals, durable. Yet it is consistently overlooked in mainstream discussion in favour of gas-fired power stations, batteries and the nuclear zombie. It is also shackled by out-of-date regulations, short-sighted financial criteria and the business models of privatised entities. (more…)
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This Labor Government is utterly inadequate
The old parties have completely lost touch with their origins and purposes. They are corrupted or captured by big money and captured by the United States’ toxic vision of the world. (more…)
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Freedom of the press barons?
The ‘disinformation’ (read: lies and bullshit) being propagated about the indigenous Voice to Parliament by the Murdoch media, among others, harms our society. It promotes division, celebrates and cultivates ignorance and bigotry, oppresses a minority and diminishes us all. Why do we tolerate such behaviour? (more…)
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Have the old parties fatally betrayed their origins?
It seems Liberal voters are figuring out that their party has been hijacked. Labor voters are slower off the mark, but Labor also bears little resemblance to its past. Political terminology lags even more, which obscures radical shifts in our political mainstream. (more…)
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An economy that shrinks quantity and grows quality
Recent debate on this site about economic growth and environmental protection highlights the very narrow and limiting framing of mainstream economics, and points to the far more positive prospect that is available to us if we can broaden our vision. (more…)
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It is critical that the housing bubble is safely deflated
Stratospheric housing prices are perhaps the most critical domestic issue in Australia. Not only are a collapse of the housing bubble and a recession now threatening, but homelessness and rent stress, unaddressed and exploited, can quickly fester into ugly politics. (more…)
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Dark Ostrich: the attack on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu
Academics generally do not like outsiders trampling through their patch. Angry people are prone to missing irony. Semantics can be tricky when translating between very different cultures. These three factors seem to explain a fair bit of the vehement critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu in the new book Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe.
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Forget empire and swaggies, we now need an anthem for all of us
Provoked by piss-weak, one-word Scotty and feisty Julian ‘Matilda’ Cribb, I offer my anthem words that come from a rather different place.
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Neoclassical economics III: a machine to destroy the world
The false nostrums of the pseudo-science of neoclassical economics have been used to create a system that promotes endlessly increasing consumption of resources and endless elaboration of technology. This system already operates far beyond the needs of people. Our survival requires that we rein in the machine and return to proven and durable, social and moral forms of organisation.
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Neoclassical economics II: pseudo-scholarship
Neoclassical economics is without scholarly integrity. It does not belong in universities. It certainly should not be the dominant source of policy advice to governments.
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Neoclassical economics I: farcical global warming analyses
Analyses of the economic effects of global warming by prominent economists are based on patently invalid arguments, profound ignorance of the global response to solar energy and basic misrepresentation of scientific sources. Their conclusion that the effects are minor is egregiously in error and use of their analyses to advise governments has placed the world in peril.
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Dear Labor
Has anyone among your parliamentary cohort noticed that neoliberalism is a failure? Has it occurred to anyone that promoting selfishness and making people insecure is a recipe for people to turn on each other and shred the social fabric? Does anyone think it might be time to stop being Liberal-lite? Time to champion the battlers and stop pandering to the fat cats? Time for a Labor party to remember why it was founded?
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GEOFF DAVIES. The betrayal, corruption and capture of the Liberal Party
The Liberal Party has strayed far from the vision propounded by its founder, Sir Robert Menzies, to the point of being captured by special interests. (more…)
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GEOFF DAVIES. The Independent path to effective democracy, and survival.
A way to break us out of the ossified and toxic parliamentary culture and the fearful stupor of the electorate. A way to restore fluid and functional governance. (more…)
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GEOFF DAVIES. A central dysfunction: house price inflation, stagnant economy
The problem with the housing bubble is not a shortage of housing, the problem is an excess of money. The solution is to restrict the amounts banks can loan. The solution is a credit squeeze. But it would have to be done carefully and the government would have to be willing to spend.