Carbon Capture and Storage, nothing but an inadequate fig leaf for obscene government endorsed corporate practices. Direct Air Capture may play a useful climate role in a few decades. Banks still lending trillions to fossil fuel companies.
Category: Climate
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Are Australia’s climate–security risks too hot to handle?
The Australian government is keen to talk about defence, big submarines, China and national security. And renewable energy, big batteries, electric cars and big hydrogen. But put the two together — security and climate — and an odd thing happens. (more…)
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The USA and Australia fail on climate change
Nearly two years ago relief was expressed that the USA had emerged under President Biden to offer world leadership on climate change. Sadly this leadership has been a disappointment and today both the US and other high emitters such as Australia are not on track to meet the challenge. (more…)
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Environment: How good are we at capturing carbon?
Effective carbon capture is needed to stay under 2oC but need does not guarantee supply. A national park in Wales is regenerating culturally and ecologically. Helping you to know your cirrocumulus from your altostratus.
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Environment: climate change colonialism
Wealthy developed countries worsen the climate and debt crises of poor countries and trample on the rights of their Indigenous peoples.
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Environment: Rich people are melting Arctic sea ice
Rich countries and rich people have incredibly high greenhouse gas emissions. Arctic sea ice is shrinking. Tasmanian government plans to make fish farms more environmentally destructive.
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Environment: Energy transition’s progress is AC. Needs to be DC
China leads the world in building both coal and renewable infrastructure. Ten leading drivers of climate action are ineffective at keeping warming below 2oC. More and more species exposed to extinction as temperatures rise.
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Labor’s conflicted climate change policies
There is something but not much to celebrate over the safeguard compromise. It may well ensure we reduce our emissions by 43%. But the Labor government’s continued permissive attitude to new fossil fuel projects is in blatant disregard of the IPCC’s pathway to a 1.5C limit on global warming. (more…)
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The government has a duty to be transparent about all security risks
The overblown rhetoric on imminent war with China has been justified as the need for the Australian people to be fully informed of threats to the nation. But the same rationale has not been applied to the security threat of climate change, a far greater risk the response to which will be far more costly and extensive. (more…)
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Environment: Climate change, chickens or cats: choose our poison
Climate change is causing more flash floods in dry areas and increasing methane emissions from wetlands. Cats continue to destroy Australian wildlife. Chicken and salmon farming pollute their local environments.
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Environment: Rapidly closing window of opportunity to achieve a safe, sustainable future
New IPCC report documents a threatening climate-present and a bleak climate-future. Alcoa failing to rehabilitate the lands it has destroyed once mining stops. Shortage of integrity not gas behind our gas problems.
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Environment: Trees good. Plastics bad. Why don’t governments turn it around?
Trees are good for the climate and human health. Plastics are bad for the environment and bird health. Where are the good governments when you need them?
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Environment: Labor safeguards our fossil fuel climate wreckers
Australia’s Safeguard Mechanism gets a government greenwash while international efforts to control Scope 3 emissions increase. Pygmy chameleons and eagle-owls are fighting for survival in different ways. Please stop eating shark and Tassie farmed salmon.
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A desperate race to avoid locking in the pathway to human extinction
We are in a desperate race to avoid locking in a pathway to human extinction. This requires brutal honesty on the threats we face. Climate change, not China, Russia or the US, is the greatest threat the world faces; it will only be overcome with unprecedented global co-operation.
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Environment: does bad news about the environment create doom loops?
We are losing trees and insects at alarming rates and Australia’s land and sea temperatures continue to rise. But does too much bad news create ‘Doom Loops’?
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Environment: humans must care for our travelling companions: earth’s animals, plants and ecosystems
Indigenous owned forests in the Amazon absorb carbon; non-Indigenous forests produce carbon. Chicken and pig factories are bad for the animals and bad for the climate. (more…)
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Preventing civilisation collapse: Australia should lead the way
Can we avoid, what a growing number of researchers and writers, consider, will be the likely collapse of human civilisation in the not-too-distant future, if we do not quickly and radically change direction? (more…)
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Sunblock for Planet Earth
How best to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: stop burning coal, eat less meat or block out the sun? The first and second look preferable to the third to me. (more…)
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Environment: Young people unimpressed by boomers’ environmental and social neglect
All countries are failing to look after their environments and their people. Long haul flights will continue to generate most CO2. The world’s youth are not happy.
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Environment: Life scientists endorse civil disobedience
Australia’s oceans, Greenland’s Ice Sheet and Antarctica’s sea ice are all feeling the heat. One million species are on the edge of extinction. No wonder life scientists are taking to the streets.
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Environment: It’s a wonderful world …
… as Louis Armstrong famously croaked. Well, perhaps: The temperature’s going up. The rich are getting richer. Wetlands are disappearing. Gas is officially green.
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Environment: Guterres: ‘the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact’
Tell it like it is, António: ‘climate disaster, death sentence, insanity, inconsistent with human survival’. Thank goodness for chocolate and birds. (more…)
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Devastation and blindness in our High Country
One can only hope that the day is not too far away when “I was only doing my job” will be no more a defence against climate crimes than it is against war crimes.
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Not a voice but a shout
Many have argued that our civilisation may collapse before the end of this century. In contrast Aboriginal people have survived in this country for at least 50,000 years.
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Best of 2022: NSW police ‘Strike Force Guard III’ formed to silence threats to fossil fuel driven political order
In NSW a special task force, Strike Force Guard III, has been established to target environmental groups in a concerted state attempt to silence anyone they view as a threat to the prevailing fossil-fuel driven political order. Conditions imposed on activists are now more severe than those meted out to some perpetrators of domestic violence or members of bikie gangs. (more…)
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Australia needs much more solar and wind power, but where are the best sites? We mapped them all
Renewable energy’s share of Australia’s main electricity grid has more than doubled from 16% to 35% in five years, and the federal government wants this figure to reach 82% by 2030. (more…)
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Is China Australia’s biggest security threat?
No, it’s catastrophic climate change. Avoiding that threat needs co-operation with countries like China, not conflict. Australia’s challenge is to get our priorities right and be a constructive player in addressing the existential climate threat that all nations face.
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Environment: melodrama and tragedy worthy of the great storytellers
Hard times lie ahead. Are the Great Expectations of renewable energy, ocean-based removal of CO2 and protein from microbes justified? (more…)
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We are facing the most dangerous crisis humanity has seen
Last Tuesday, I was released on bail pending appeal in March. While my sentence is outrageous – as are the anti-democratic laws that allowed it to happen – I urge you not to lose sight of the reason I was jailed. Our way of life is under threat from the greatest, most dangerous crisis humanity has ever seen. Each of you must act now. (more…)
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High stakes in the climate diaspora
Weeks and months after devastating floods hit many regional centres across NSW and Victoria, there emerged a fresh crop of mycelium-like symbols, otherwise known as ‘for sale’ signs. Pitched on lawns in front of stud-exposed and newly renovated houses, or on empty blocks of land. These commercial hoardings have become the grim tell-tale signs of the climate diaspora. (more…)