Scott Morrison’s churlishness is always on show when some Australian achieves great success in any area when Morrison’s perceived political enemies lurk.
Category: Climate
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Sunday environmental round up.
The International Energy Agency recognises the climate emergency and plots a course to net zero, plus NGOs give world leaders advice on how to ensure Glasgow’s COP26 is a success. An Australian construction company tells a government inquiry that working for Adani is uninsurable. Stunning photo of Earth’s thin, life-preserving air-bag.
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The unreality of the pledge for “zero emissions by 2050”
Orwellian Doublespeak is a language which deliberately distorts the meaning of words, using contradictory weasel words allowing an assault on reality. In the present, in order to pacify public opinion, authorities are pledging “zero emissions by 2050” (or some other date), an empty promise undermined by current investments in mining hydrocarbons, by large scale export of oil, gas and coal, and by the amplifying feedbacks of greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere. Only intensive sequestration of greenhouse gases may potentially be capable of arresting global warming from reaching a calamitous level.
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AGL needs to quit coal for Australia to get to net-zero
This week conservative energy body, the International Energy Agency (IEA) outlined a global pathway towards net-zero by 2050. A growing number of businesses are joining every Australian state and territory in committing to net-zero emissions. In the face of this seismic shift, even certified coal-carrier Scott Morrison’s resistance is starting to waver.
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Coral Reef Forecast: grim but hope and action will ensure survival
Australia’s mish mash of climate policies are consistent with a 2.5 – 3.0°C rise in global average temperature compared to pre-industrial levels. That would wipe out all the world’s coral reefs, force half a billion people into food insecurity and destroy one of the seven natural wonders of the world. (more…)
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Climate change is an area of cooperation for China and the Five Eyes countries
Despite the deterioration in relations between the UK and China, they will continue to cooperate on climate change due to the force of circumstances because the UK is hosting the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change in Scotland in November – referred to as COP26.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Energy use is soaring in 2021 after COVID reduced demand in 2020. Renewables are approaching take-off in the USA, while the Australian government continues to load them with ballast. Call for health care services globally to reduce their large carbon footprint.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Vast foreign debts hobble the efforts of poor countries to pursue climate action. Ways to reduce the embodied carbon emissions in buildings. Traditional owners fight back against Adani. German court forces government to take stronger climate action.
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WTO and climate change – a clash of treaties
The emission reduction measures proposed by governments to meet their Paris Climate Agreement commitments will violate their legally binding WTO obligations. This clash of treaties will have deleterious consequences for both. (more…)
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Sunday environmental round up.
Geopolitics and climate change combine to damage lives and environments in Iraq, but moves to make ecocide a crime. APRA invites comments on its guidance for the financial sector on climate change, while Scotty used emissions per person to mislead the world.
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Capitalism, COVID, and Climate
The pandemic alliance between Big Pharma and governments foreshadows how the market-based capitalist system will fail to address global warming. Just finding low emissions technology is not an answer.
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The political problem of defining “flood prone”
The words ‘flood’ and prone’ are simple enough to comprehend, but when they are put next to each other in a sentence they can quickly become problematic. (more…)
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Debunking misinformation and climate change
It might be surprising given the scale of the problem, but there is an emerging consensus about the current status of the science of misinformation and its debunking in respect to climate change. (more…)
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Sunday environmental round up.
Sharan Burrow paints a picture of an inclusive future. Northern summers getting hotter but Australia’s environment deteriorates. Oil companies greenwashing activities exposed. Lessons from Germany about how to exit coal (if you want to, that is).
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Earth Day 2021: Australia falls further out of line with the world
It is entirely appropriate that President Biden launched his global climate summit on Earth Day 2021. Earth Day began in the US in 1970, triggered by massive pollution across the country, and the need to fundamentally change concepts of industrial development if society was to prosper, rapidly leading by the end of 1970, to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency, with bipartisan political support.
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Alarming inconsistency: NSW Government Ministers on development in flood-prone areas
The floods on the eastward-flowing rivers of New South Wales have abated, but when they were at their height there were some alarming differences between state government ministers on the important matter of development on the floodplains of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system.
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Sunday environmental round up.
‘Net-zero emissions’: is it just greenwashing for business-as-usual? Despite the COVID-induced global economic slowdown, deforestation and the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouses gases both increased in 2020. Limited bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef this summer.
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Sunday environmental round up, 11 April 2021
Factions of the Liberal and National parties continue their coal wars in NSW. Scientists in the USA recommend solar geoengineering research but a community backlash delays experiments in Sweden. Health workers hold up the Adani’s mine development.
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The importance of environmental water: is the national water initiative up to the job?
Momentous decisions are needed on water policy to ensure that life in Australia is sustainable when climate change is advancing and the natural environment is deteriorating rapidly. Is the National Water Initiative (NWI) capable of reform to ensure a sustainable future? (more…)
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Sunday environmental round up, 4 April 2021
Colonialism and racism’s longstanding and ongoing links to climate change. Six principles for decarbonising industry, VW on Tesla’s tail, and a new, free, online course on climate change.
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ALP climate policy: from the “great moral challenge” to conservative-lite
Deputy ALP leader Richard Marles, seem to studiously avoid any mention of the need for massive action order to avoid a rise towards +4 degree climate warming despite promoting science.
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Seriously ugly: here’s how Australia will look if the world heats by 3℃ this century
Imagine, for a moment, a different kind of Australia. One where bushfires on the catastrophic scale of Black Summer happen almost every year. One where 50℃ days in Sydney and Melbourne are common. Where storms and flooding have violently reshaped our coastlines, and unique ecosystems have been damaged beyond recognition – including the Great Barrier Reef, which no longer exists. (more…)
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The meaning of the word ‘floodplain’ – and the consequences of building on one
One of the great challenges of city building is building sustainably. Many of our towns and cities are built at least in part on floodplains, which are by definition problematic as places on which to build.
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Climate crisis solutions need to address the web of causes
Climate change has no single cause. It has resulted from the interconnected web of population, consumption, technology, and the political economy. The climate emergency requires us to recognise and grapple with this web sooner rather than later. (more…)
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Re-thinking flood mitigation and development, especially in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley
The rain has gone, the floods on the eastward-flowing rivers are receding in Queensland and New South Wales and the focus has shifted from response to recovery. But there’s another important matter which needs to be addressed mitigation, or the means by which we can reduce the impacts of future flooding. Let’s look at this in the context of attempts that have been and could be made to manage floodwater and ensure that flood peaks are kept as low as reasonably possible.
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Sunday environmental round up, 28 March 2021
Eight tips to save insects from catastrophic (for them and us) decline, followed by articles on a green COVID-recovery and the energy transition, including Do’s and Don’ts for subsidising hydrogen.
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Yes, Australia is a land of flooding rains. But climate change could be making it worse
Over the past three years, I’ve been working on the forthcoming report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’m a climate scientist who contributed to the chapter on global water cycle changes. It’s concerning to think some theoretical impacts described in this report may be coming to life – yet again – in Australia. (more…)
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Sunday environmental round up, 21 March 2021
Last chance to have a say on the review of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Increasing temperatures are changing the climate-defining currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Forests being lost to provide wood to burn for electricity and land for agriculture. Hotchpotch of rules govern single-use plastics across Australia.
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Beyond apocalypse fatigue
We can have economic growth without wrecking the planet, says economist Per Espen Stoknes.
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The powerful national upside of net zero emissions
Major countries and the private sector are embracing net zero as the growth opportunity of the future. With Australia increasingly isolated diplomatically and economically, Morrison is feeling the pressure.