In response to the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Treasurer Josh Frydenberg rushed to Sky News to repeat the platitude that technology, not taxes would overcome threats from global warming. Before a Canberra press conference, a smirking Prime Minister claimed Australia would reach targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions because this country always achieves its goals.

 

The selfishness of the Australian government is as alarming as the conclusions of the IPCC Report.

Morrison and Frydenberg, aided by a swaggering Angus Taylor, were playing from a Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Julius Caesar playbook. The famous Russian novelist once explained, “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar asked, “Why need we any spur but our own cause?”

Selfishness as a policy is the reverse of struggles for a common good for Australian citizens, animals and the environment, let alone for the survival, not just the well being, of planet earth. Irrespective of acknowledgement of the significance of renewable energy through solar and wind power, the Australian government’s assurances about technological fixes are the centrepiece of selfishness.

Negativity towards taxes is the government’s response to the limited time left to address climate catastrophes. The policy – technology not taxes on carbon – says there’s no need to change the ways we think and live.

Once Covid is suppressed: continue to burn coal, oil and gas, export such products, have your ute ready for the weekend, be excited about increasing house prices, don’t bother too much about preserving water, privatise to promote corporate  interests, destroy forests, mouth respect for agriculture but frack as much as you like.

To develop a robust economy we’ve always flogged and destroyed precious resources, so why stop now?

Even the climate disaster Report from scientists representing 195 countries does not dent the Prime Minister’s boy in the playground response “It wasn’t me sir, it was those others over there.”

In his familiar egoism, ‘Why should we act before other countries do,’ the Prime Minister diverts attention from Australia’s failings by his usual ‘J’Accuse’ about China polluting more than the rest of the OECD countries put together.

Professor Will Steffens, an inaugural Director of the ANU’s Global Climate Change Institute warns, “Unless the world slashes climate emissions by 50% by 2030, it faces ‘an impossible situation’”. Nevertheless, the Australian government repeats their goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent probably by 2050. They are more than satisfied with what they’re doing. The party room says so.

Just as the Prime Minister boasts about athletes’ gold medal successes in the Olympics, the country learns that in measures to assess greenhouse gas emissions and changes in energy use, a Climate Change Performance Index places Australia 54th out of 60 countries. No worries mate, our swimmers did well in the pool.

On almost every conceivable issue affecting humanity, the Opposition leader offers no comfort, only fifty cents each way. When the world needs vision of a country altruistic in its own interests and enthusiastic in international partnerships to foster survival, Albanese searches for centrist policies. To offend the least number of voters, he searches for a middle ground.

In response to IPCC forecasts let alone the catastrophes currently ravaging Europe, North America and Siberia, there is no middle ground. A different way of living means collective human rights are synonymous with planet survival. Ecocide – wilful, long term damage to the environment – is a crime against humanity.

In Australia, a smidgeon of hope lies in evidence of a mismatch between public attitudes and heads in coal mines blindness of political leaders. The Australia Institute reports that only 12 per cent of Australians want economic recovery by gas compared to investment in renewables. 74 per cent want to transition from coal mining to other industries.

Journalists quizzing the Prime Minister could ask for a touch of humility to correct false claims about Australia’s responses to climate change.

Crafting economically and socially just policies for people, animals and the planet is challenging but imperative.

Decades of living as though the planet’s resources were infinite have guaranteed a cruel legacy to future generations. We should not need the IPCC Report to teach that destructive selfishness must end.

 

Read More: https://johnmenadue.com/climate-urgency-australias-selfishness/

 

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It is expected that heavy rainfall will ease on Thursday, five days after it started. The region is no stranger to summer flooding; last year at least five were killed when flash floods swept through northern Turkey. 

By contrast, Turkish authorities on the southern coast have been battling forest fires throughout the summer. At least nine have died in the fires, which have also occurred across other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/531875-turkey-floods-deaths-emergency/

 

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MEANWHILE, IN PETROLEUM PUMPING COUNTRY...

 

The 13-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its OPEC+ partners, which include other major oil producers such as Russia, agreed to reduce crude oil production last year in the wake of last year's dramatic economic downturn associated with the Covid crisis. Last month, OPEC+ agreed to begin gradually boosting output.

Washington has stressed to the world's major oil producing nations that the production cuts agreed to last year should be scrapped as nations begin to recover and their demand for energy grows, President Joe Biden has said.

 

"We also made clear to OPEC, the major oil exporting nations of the world, that the production cuts made during the pandemic should be reversed as the global economy recovers in order to lower prices for consumers," Biden said, delivering remarks on his 'Build Back Better' agenda in Washington on Wednesday.

The president spoke about putting pressure on OPEC while addressing his administration's strategy of "taking action" on gas prices, suggesting that although fuel prices "are lower than they were earlier in this decade...they're still high enough to create a pinch on working families."

Biden also indicated that his director of the national economic council had asked the chair of the federal trade commission "to use every available tool to monitor the US gasoline market" for any potential "illegal conduct that might be contributing to price increases at the pump while the price of oil is going down."

Earlier in the day, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan issued a statement in which he said that high gas prices, "if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery," and indicated that crude prices are higher now than they were before the start of the coronavirus-associated crisis.

"While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough," Sullivan suggested.

"Although we are not a party to OPEC, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private," the NSA added. Sullivan noted that Washington was now "engaging with relevant OPEC+ members on the importance of competitive markets in setting prices." He did not mention specifically which countries US officials were speaking to.

Earlier Wednesday, a source from an unnamed nation's OPEC+ delegation told Sputnikthat the oil-producing bloc had not yet discussed Washington's demands for increased output, but added that consultations on the matter would not be ruled out.

Agreement on Cuts to Last Through 2022

 

Last month, OPEC+ formally agreed to keep the oil production cut deal reached in the spring of 2020 in place until the end of 2022, allowing for production to be increased by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) every month starting in August until the currently agreed upon total of 5.8 million bpd in cuts is exhausted. OPEC+ officials plan to meet in December to "assess market developments and participating countries' performance," and have also agreed to continue monthly meetings to "assess market conditions" and production adjustments.

 

OPEC (which includes Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela) and its ten major oil-producing partners constituting OPEC+ (Russia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Sudan and South Sudan) began cooperating in determining crude oil demand in 2016, ostensibly in a bid to stabilize both prices and output.

In early 2020, Saudi Arabia began a brief crude price war against other producers after its efforts to ram through a major cut in output was rejected by other OPEC+ partners, chiefly Russia. The conflict led to a historic glut which saw demand drop through the floor and futures temporarily dip into negative territory, but was resolved after producers reached a compromise solution on necessary cuts in April 2020. The United States, which is not a member of OPEC+, thanked Russia and Saudi Arabia for coming to an agreement, and helped the oil producing-bloc bring a reluctant Mexico into the agreement on cuts.

Crude prices began a gradual recovery late last year.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/202108111083583510-us-has-made-clear-to-opec-that-decision-on-reduced-oil-output-must-be-reconsidered-biden-says/

 

So, do you mean that the Biden's Green New Deal needs more petroleum? I know. Read from top. Even US presidents are idiots...

 

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Former ABC news director Max Uechtritz was just one of the big names to slam the public broadcaster for inviting Nationals senator Matt Canavan on Q+A and giving him a platform to say the report from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is “fear porn” and Covid lockdowns are harmful.

 

.@David_Speers and @ErinVincent1, you’re discussing the most important climate science update in almost a decade on #QandA tonight… but where is the climate scientist? @ABCTV @QandA #Auspol #IPCC#WhereIsTheClimateScientist

— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) August 12, 2021

 

 

While Canavan said he agreed with the overall findings of the report, he took aim at one of the report’s authors for comments that he said were “more like spin than science”.

“You saw the spin over the past week as they drip-fed the fear porn about this, rather than just release the science,” Canavan said to Q+A fill-in host David Speers.

Prof Peter Doherty and climate scientists including Prof Nerilie Abram questioned the choice, as did commentators John Birmingham, Jane Caro and former Q+A star guest, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

 

I'm not the only former Director of ABC News and Current Affairs who thinks this was a serious error by #qanda. 

With the public desperate for rational, credible debate/info the program should not pander to fringe lunacy. Any counterpose excuse doesn't pass intellectual muster

— Max Uechtritz (@plesbilongmi) August 12, 2021

 

But the ABC stood behind its choice. “The Australian electorate gives Matt Canavan a platform,” an ABC News spokesperson told Weekly Beast. “He’s a multiple-times duly elected representative of Queensland in the Senate, and the former federal resources minister, and he has a significant voice on policy in this country. Hearing his views and having the opportunity to publicly scrutinise and debate them is the democratic process in action. And that is what Q+A is all about.”

 

An absolute insult to intelligence - I won't be watching #QandA and I presume many others will feel similarly

— Colette Garnaut (@ColetteGarnaut) August 10, 2021  

 

This is the justification which author Tim Dunlop has previously criticised. He says “the bad show”, as it is sometimes referred to, is “predicated on getting as extreme views as they can on the show rather than informed views and letting people go at it”.

“The [ABC] argument always seems to be the people are elected or they are important in some way to the conversation,” Dunlop said.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/13/matt-canavan-and-the-bad-show-abc-defends-qa-panellist-pick

 

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The same caper re Matt Cavanan should apply to Claire Harvey in regard to Assange:... She should be barred from appearing on the ABC, Drum or whatever shows... It seems she either wants him to die in a UK or a US prison for impersonating a journalist (!) and peddles falsehoods about Assange...

 

harvey

 

 

 

drum

 

An outspoken Coalition senator has been blasted by senior colleagues after a tone-deaf tweet about the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan.

The Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday, declaring the war in Afghanistan over after insurgents took control of the presidential palace, US-led forces departed and Western nations scrambled to remove their citizens.

President Ashraf Ghani fled the country as the Islamist militants entered the city, saying he wanted to avoid bloodshed, while hundreds of Afghans desperate to leave flooded Kabul airport.

 

There are grave fears for the safety of hundreds of Afghans who helped allied forces, including Australia, over the two-decade combat effort and who remain stuck in the embattled country.

On Monday, Cabinet’s national security committee met to assess the situation, with Australian air force planes expected to be deployed to Kabul.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to comment on whether the Taliban’s lightning advance through Afghanistan had upended rescue plans.

But Queensland LNP senator Matt Canavan was less reticent, storking anger among his colleagues with a social media post on Monday.

“Does anyone know whether the Taliban will sign up for net zero,” he tweeted.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2021/08/16/matt-canavan-afghan-tweet/

 

The Taliban might stop heroin trafficking, mind you, which may not be a bad thing...

 

Read from top.

 

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BY Jack Waterford

 

One could always rent the Nationals. A generation ago the process was called “churching the old whore”, but now you can buy them freehold...

 

Many of the Nationals’ representatives, from Joyce down, would give no better service if they were actually openly on the payroll.  The hydrocarbon energy lobbies are of course, as much international as they are Australian-owned and controlled.

 

The scripts that their servants and propagandists use are international ones, with only a tiny bow to supposed Australian national interests. Most of the industries involved are not large employers of Australians, nor are they known for tender concerns for the rights or expectations of local communities or economies. But the international scripts from the lobbies seem often to pretend both that local interests are the primary ones being served, and that their local champions, such as National Party politicians are the ones keeping them honest.

Joyce and the Nationals are not to be swayed by rational calls about Australia’s reputation, economic arguments about higher costs of exports, or emotional calls about the nature of the society, the economy and the environment that young Australians will inherit. They know all of these arguments through and through. They have heard them repeatedly. If they occasionally misstate, or over-simplify them, it is not because they are confused, but because they have learnt the skills of obfuscation, false and circular arguments, the introduction of red herrings and phoney considerations. They have also rehearsed phrases used by Scott Morrison — another firm obstacle to climate change action — about how Australia will determine its policies from the point of view of Australia’s interests, and not be bossed and bullied by foreigners and aliens, whether they are right or not.

Barnaby Joyce, who on a good day can raise incoherence to levels never achieved by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, sometimes appears to be laughing to himself as he dodges a point, or takes a wrong turning to completely avoid the point. For him not getting trapped by the media or anyone else trying to catch him out gives him pleasure. He glories in seeming to outwit an interviewer, particularly an earnest one, and pretends to do it in the same way that a rural yokel can sometimes make a fool of a city sophisticate. The sunburn, the skin cancers and the Sheik from Scrubby Creek mannerisms belie a top private school education, a PhD in political craft and rat-cunning enough to outwit almost all of his enemies, in and out of the party.

For Joyce, it is not really a game, in the sense that the interests for whom he operates quite seriously want him to prevent anything happening. 

Those interests understand perfectly well that they will lose in the long term, in just the same way that the tobacco lobbies knew they were engaged primarily in fighting retreat. But every hour and year of delay in establishing effective programs of mitigation and adaptation is, for them, a matter of trillions of dollars. Which is one of the reason why so many of those dollars are invested in lobbying, in party donations, and in the placement of energy-lobby people in the higher councils of party machines and parliamentary caucuses. It’s also a reason why these lobbies spread their political bets, and why a high proportion of the coalition minder class, senior party cronies (and beneficiaries of government largesse)  and not a few individuals in the Liberal Party (and even the Labor Party) are deeply attentive to their interests.

There are, naturally, always some individuals who appear to mouth the lines without necessarily having been bought. The modern-day appetite, in politics as well as wider public life, for conspiracy theories, seriously nutty notions about imagined constitutional rights, health, religions, and the end of days is often enough by itself to explain the activities of the odd eccentric. But their presence still serves the purposes of helping frustrate change. It also provides cover for some politicians from whom better is expected, since inaction  can be explained or rationalised (as, for example, by Malcolm Turnbull) as desperately wanting to do something but unable to do it because the government would lose its majority.

A good many Liberals believe in the need for urgent climate-change action.  They are persuaded by the science. They are satisfied by the practical cases put forward about transition away to sustainable and renewable energy. They understand very well the moral case for urgent action, and honestly worry about the state of the environment modern-day Australians will bequeath to the next generations. They also understand that Australia’s international reputation and standing, as well as our status as a good international citizen, is being trashed, and this will, in the long and medium-term hurt Australia and Australians, economically as much as socially. Most understand perfectly well that it is a more urgent and critical problem than conquering Covid-19, important as that is.

Alas, most of these Liberals can hide behind the resistance of the Nationals, pretending that they would like to do more but can’t because decisive action is opposed by their stablemates and would threaten the coalition and the fate of a minority government. Or pretending, against all the evidence, that what has been done, or is proposed to be done, amounts to effective action, a worthy Australian contribution and one which will make a difference.

For Scott Morrison, it appears to be only a political problem. He has never subscribed to the rhetoric, and does not use it even when he is pretending to be doing something. He has never formally disputed the science, or the need to do something, but has always resisted any idea that Australia ought to take a lead, or even that it ought to be proactive in devising a new high-tech economy which takes advantage of renewable and sustainable energy to build a new and smarter economy. He consciously eschewed the opportunity, when splashing billions of pandemic cash about last year, to invest in a new energy economy — instead lending himself, and the Cabinet, to a paid lobby of  gas producers whose entirely disinterested advice was to give them extra billions. A man who thinks in empty and meaningless slogans has coined a new one about change coming from technology rather than taxes, as though we must sit around until a scientist with a patent arrives.

It is all of a one with the fact, as well as the impression, of a government entirely in the doldrums over the pandemic, seemingly unable to get fresh wind,  a break or a bit of luck. A government barely going through the motions of defending itself, or reforming itself, over the corrupt way in which it has been misappropriating money, with a prime minister content to make himself look silly with misleading circular arguments about rorting being OK because the minister thought it was. The question the government ought to be asking itself is how much longer it can stagger on in this way, and whether anything on the horizon — such as the expectation of supplies of fresh vaccines — promises a new energy in the ministry, a purpose in government, a reason for being there.

At its core is a question of leadership and fitness for office. The public, and the Liberal Party, have long tolerated a corrupted National Party focused on redistributing as much of the spoils of government to its own as possible. But the Liberals, and their leaders, were supposed to be above that. To be in office for an articulated purpose. To be accountable and transparent. To prefer the national interest to its own. To be focused especially on public safety and the public interest — which is what is threatened by climate change.

Scott Morrison is not doing that. He does not hold the hose, it’s not a race, and he’s not leading on climate change. Nor are the Liberals. Indeed Morrison gives every appearance of relishing the way in which the straight bat and the mangled sentences of the deputy prime minister require the lowest common denominator. His colleagues ought to be tearing his, or their own, hair out. Down the track they will not be able to explain their inaction, and their subservience to his judgment, as a mere matter of preferring loyalty ahead of duty.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/one-could-always-rent-the-nationals-a-generation-ago-the-process-was-called-churching-the-old-whore-but-now-you-can-buy-them-freehold/

 

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