Tuesday 18th of March 2025
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

office of national intelligence assessment of climate-related security risks......

The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues.

The absurdity was on full display in a front-page story last weekend, when The Saturday Paper reported that the government gave a secret briefing on 9 December last year to a number of Teal and independent members of parliament on the contents of the Office of National Intelligence assessment of climate-related security risks — one which the government has classified and refused to release in a declassified form for two years.

 

Government refuses to articulate ‘frankly terrifying’ security risks    By David Spratt

 

In fact, Pearls and Irritations broke the story on 15 January: “Just before Christmas, a number of independent MPs and senators received a confidential briefing on the report from ONI. This means they are not able to discuss what they learned.”

Senator David Pocock was at the secret briefing, which was in effect the selective leaking by a government of an intelligence report it had classified. The briefing occurred after Pocock, the Greens and the Teals had consistently pressed the government on the ONI assessment which was delivered in December 2022 and immediately locked in a bottom drawer after it was seen by members of the security committee of Cabinet.

The independents have consistently said that as parliamentarians it was not possible for them to do their job and oversee the government’s security and climate agenda if the key information on the nature of those risks was deliberately being withheld from them. This was in sharp contrast to the government’s preferred narrative of China as the number one climate threat, which ministers were only too willing to constantly articulate in public, often without a great deal of substance.

The (private) response from Cabinet ministers to the ONI report was shock and awe, and alarm that they had not heard anything like this before. Clearly they had not been listening to the expert analysis from within parts of the global security and defence community. In 2021, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group had clearly spelt out the dangers in their Missing In Action report, which, among other things, was the genesis of the ONI assessment.

The picture the ONI report likely painted was described in these pages back in May 2023: Are Australia’s climate–security risks too hot to handle? I understand that the selected briefing in December was generally consistent with that analysis.

Pocock says that: “After hustling the government for the last few years, they gave crossbenchers a private briefing on it and it’s frankly terrifying, what our national security agencies are telling us is coming, and the government is not acting… I think it is actually negligence from both of them… We’re woefully underprepared for what’s coming… It’s no surprise that the government has been sitting on this report from the Office of National Intelligence.”

Three questions deserve answers.

First, why was a declassified version of the ONI report not released, as happened with the Defence Security Review? The clearest answer is that the risks ONI described — “terrifying” according to Senator Pocock and others — would make the government’s policy of expanding coal and gas production look absurd. Indeed, there is clear evidence that the government’s climate narrative has been to talk about the “good news” economic story and not talk about “bad news” impacts. The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group has documented how the government has treated climate-related security risks as “Too hot to handle”.

Second, why were some parliamentarians, but not the Greens who had also campaigned strongly for the release of the ONI report, given a secret briefing? Some participants in the meeting were under the impression that they could not even acknowledge the briefing had occurred. Why not outer cabinet ministers who are still in the dark, or members of the foreign affairs, defence and security committees of Parliament? The only explanation that makes sense is that the government was playing politics and trying to build bridges with those it might need to form a minority government in the next parliament, at a time when polling for Labor was at its lowest point.

Third, what does this selective leaking mean for the ONI report’s classified status? Well, it is now badly compromised. It would be reasonable for the rest of the parliament to go berserk at the government if they are not also briefed. Otherwise the charge of playing politics with security would stand.

And the biggest reason to release a version of the report has nothing to do with politics. It is about humanity’s future. Leading scientists, Western security analysts and global leaders agree that climate now represents an existential (civilisation-ending) threat. Properly understanding that threat and acting upon it should be the highest priority for Parliament. But as previously reported in Pearls and Irritations, work on the government’s domestically-focused Australian Government’s National Climate Risk Assessment has been stalled and/or the project has been sunk.

Two climate and security reports by this government: one has failed to appear and the other locked up and then selectively leaked for political advantage.

https://johnmenadue.com/government-refuses-to-articulate-frankly-terrifying-security-risks/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

net zero.....

 

Environment: The folly of focusing on net zero    By Peter Sainsbury

 

Governments and corporations have been tricking the public by focusing emissions reduction attention on net, rather than real, zero. Reducing methane emissions would reduce global warming quickly and cheaply. Bring back our swamps.

 

Climate bureaucracy salad

You are perhaps aware that Australia has a Climate Change Authority, if only because our federal Labor Government boldly appointed Matt Keen, ex-NSW Liberal treasurer and environment minister, as its chair last year. The CCA’s role is to “provide expert advice to the Australian Government on climate change policy”.

But did you know that we also have a Net Zero Economy Authority? No, neither did I, but we do. It was established by the government in December 2024. The Authority is “central to the government’s vision for a Future Made In Australia [and] promotes a just net zero economic transition for Australia, its regions, industries, workers and communities”.

And did you know that the Australian Government is developing a Net Zero Plan that “will lay out and extend Australia’s action on climate change [and] guide our transition to the legislated target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050?” Again, me neither.

Finely dice the alphabet. Arrange small collections of the cubes into catchy sequences – a mix of upper- and lower-case characters provides interest. Season with vinaigrette bureaucratie and present on a bed of inertia leaves. Sprinkle with a fines herbes mix of hypocrisy and obfuscation, both thrive in Canberra all year round. Serve with crusty pain de bullshit. And there you have it, my soothing climate bureaucracy salad – enjoy. Serves millions. (Can be stored indefinitely on the shelf for re-use but beware, it’s likely to be binned by a new head chef.)

 

Net zero is not a climate hero

Anyway, enough of the federal government’s climate bureaucracy, what is really interesting are the repeated references to net zero and the NZEA’s definition of net zero:

“Net zero means balancing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that go into — and are removed from — the atmosphere. It simply means we stop adding to the problem of global warming. The goal is to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.’”

Apart from the poor sentence construction, there are several problems with net zero in general and with this definition in particular. For instance:

  • When the idea of net zero first appeared in 2018, it was intended for use as a global concept, a goal for all eight billion of us to strive towards. The whole idea of putting the emphasis on reaching net as opposed to real zero emissions is problematic in the first place, but it does have a skerrick of logic to it when applied globally and as intended.
  • The flimsy logic focuses attention on two considerations. First, CO2 is removed from the atmosphere through natural processes, for instance by plants, absorption by the oceans and weathering of rocks, as well as being naturally released into it. The two processes have been in rough balance since the last Ice Age. Second, some industries are genuinely difficult to completely decarbonise at present. After they’ve done all they can to reduce their emissions, the residual emissions, so the argument goes, should be balanced in the company’s CO2 ledger by ensuring that they arrange for an additional equivalent amount of CO2 to be absorbed from the atmosphere, for instance by planting more trees or restoring wetlands, thus “offsetting” their residual CO2 emissions.
  • The net zero idea and goal was rapidly adopted by many national and sub-national governments and private corporations because it allowed them to keep producing and/or exporting and/or burning fossil fuels while claiming to be fulfilling their responsibilities to limit global warming.
  • It was not the original intention for each individual nation, sub-national jurisdiction and company to strive for net zero. It is, however, very convenient for them, which explains its growing popularity in recent years. That popularity is now waning as governments and companies seek to curry favour with Trump but maybe that’s no bad thing as sub-global net-zero goals are counter-productive to the goal of controlling global warming.
  • If we have to use net zero, only the hardest to abate industries (e.g., cement, steel, shipping, fertilisers) should be using carbon offsets to balance their residual emissions and reach net zero, and only then in the short to medium term. The fossil fuel industry, whose activities are most responsible for climate change, should most certainly not be offsetting their emissions to keep themselves in business for as long as possible.
  • With exceptions for industrially and socially developing nations, individual nations should be progressing rapidly to real zero, not keeping their dirty industries alive by allowing them to offset their CO2 emissions and claim to be progressing towards net zero.
  • One problem with a country such as Australia using net zero emissions as its goal is that it completely sidesteps the responsibility we should carry for causing much of the global warming problem over the last 150 or so years. Industrialised, historically high emitters such as Australia should be going well beyond net zero to net negative emissions to allow developing countries some short-term leeway with their emissions that would help them develop economically, industrially and socially.
  • Australia’s dereliction of duty in this regard is (inadvertently?) exposed by the sentence, “It simply means we stop adding to the problem of global warming.” No mention of reducing or even eliminating the problem, just stop making it worse. And no mention of reducing real emissions.

Ken Russell wrote an excellent critique of net zero in P&I a few weeks ago. As he says, “Carbon offsetting is a poor alternative to stopping emissions at source and its use should be minimised. Disastrously, it is being extensively used in Australia and globally. It defies logic that companies whose core business is extracting fossil fuels, the opposite of decarbonisation, are being allowed to offset emissions. The objective [of phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible] appears to have become how to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without phasing out fossil fuels.”

Our federal government is hoping that their climate bureaucracy salad will either bore the population into disengagement or cause them to confuse busy-ness with actual achievement

 

The biography of methane

Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas and, like CO2, its concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, having doubled in the last 100 years.

Methane has been responsible for more than a third of the warming we’ve experienced in the last 250 years. This is despite its atmospheric concentration being about a twentieth that of CO2 and its atmospheric life lasting 1-2 decades rather than CO2’s thousands of years. The reason for this is that during those 20 years, methane is 84 times more effective than CO2 at trapping the sun’s energy.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-the-folly-of-focusing-on-net-zero/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.