“At the end of the day, I look after my own interests.”
~ Mario Mancusso, butcher, Newmarket Quality Meats, Flemington, Melbourne, on 29 March 2018
Down under, maybe not surprisingly, things are often turned upside-down. In particular the truth. During the last few days, however, Australian media has suddenly been full of remorseful men talking about honesty, moral, and that “Australia needs to get back to its core values” after players were caught red-handed tampering with a cricket ball at a match in South Africa.
We can thank Australian cricket sport for exposing to the nation and to the world the troubling and despicable value-crisis which unfolds not just on Australian cricket grounds, but in all sectors and corners of the Australian society – and for, in this way, clarifying to everyone that this is an unsustainable practice that needs to change.
In case of the dispute over ball-tampering, the crisis quickly turned into a 20 million dollar blow to the Australian cricket team because of sponsors signing out. “We do not condone cheating in sport,” one of the cricket team’s sponsors said.
Human story
“What began as a sport story is now very much a human story” commented SBS’s correspondent in South Africa, Sally Sara, on national live tv on 29 March 2018.
We probably haven’t seen the end of that tale yet, but as if this cheating scandal wasn’t enough, a few minutes later in the same SBS World News program, we then learned about an Australian woman and former cricketer who stands accused of a cash scam because she has been faking terminal cancer in order to raise $45,000 – which she then used to travel overseas. Cricket Australia was involved in these fundraising efforts.
What wasn’t mentioned or reflected on in the news, but which needs to be understood, is that what happened to the Australian cricket team with sponsors walking out is not as unusual an event in Australia as it may seem.
Similar stories are reported in the media almost on a daily basis. And even more circulate on a mouth to mouth basis. I’ve written numerous blogposts on the topic, where I document how, in this country, cheating has become socially acceptable and behind closed doors it is even glorified – as long as you manage get away with it without being caught.
But when this culture of cheating plays out at a much larger scale in the Australian business, real estate and energy sectors, as well as on the political arena, it has consequences – just like the cricket team now feels the economic consequences of their mistaken judgement. Due to this nation’s value-crisis, international business opportunities evaporate and investors look elsewhere.
In case of what this value-crisis will mean – the low levels of moral and high levels of self-interest among members of the Australian banking and business communities, institutions and parliaments – it is like a boomerang which has been thrown up in the air and soon is about to return. It will hit the Australian economy as hard and shockingly as the national cricket team was hit this week.
Scruple-less liars and truth-tamperers have managed to fool the Australian business community to believe that their ‘upside-down tales’ – the myths provided by spin doctors funded by fossil fuel and mining lobby groups – will help protect their businesses.
In reality it is the other way around: These tales are fertilised by self-interest and the national, epidemic culture that glorifies lying, cheating, polluting-as-long-as-it-creates-a-profit, increasingly taints Australia’s international reputation and threatens the prosperity of Australians’ trading with the rest of the world.
Climate change is one of the most serious threats we face, but Australia is not helping with solving that problem. As a whole, the Australians are polluting the world’s atmosphere more and more each year, and even though the effects of climate change are hitting Australia and its Great Barrier Reef hard already – with extreme weather events, bushfires, water shortage, sea level rise, acidification of the ocean, and so on – the Australian government keeps doing the opposite of helping with solving the problem.
Last week Australia’s resources minister “unashamedly” spruiked the boundless potential and perceived upside of Australia’s coal mining, export – and burning – sectors, saying that to meet demand, Australia would need to produce more coal that it ever has.
The Australian carbon emissions are rising because of deliberate poor governance, but underneath the surface, there are a number of other reasons closely linked to that, and one of the most important factors is not politics, but culture. Australia’s problems with the culture of bullying, the culture of cheating and the culture of polluting are much more connected with each other than is generally recognised.
For anyone who’d like to do business or to invest in Australia, these are issues of highest importance.
[CLIMATIC ROOT TREATMENT] is a series of blogposts seeking to uncover and understand the deeper roots of society’s problems with taking appropriate action on the climate emergency, and to explore the advantages we could see once the action sets in.
“The [fossil fuel] industry thinks we are all fools, so all I can say is dig deep, find the facts, knowledge is power.”
~ Damian Marchant from Frack Free Moriac
Time for the @TurnbullMalcolm apology. “Really sorry for putting coal before Australia’s best interest, sorry for ignoring science and stealing your children’s future”#ClimateChange #auspol #TheDrum #QandA #StopAdani @mattjcan @JoshFrydenberg @StevenCiobo pic.twitter.com/vVKZ8V7uPB
— John Pratt (@Jackthelad1947) March 31, 2018
In the mainstream media, Australians rarely hear anything about climate change. This time around – in March 2018, when two bushfires, a cyclone and a flooding event hit Australia during the same weekend – the two words were mentioned, all of a sudden, not because of the extreme weather-related events, but because a Greens politician had dared to link the bush fires to climate change in a speech in the Australian parliament.
The speech was instantly condemned as “hypocritical and a fraud” by a senior member of the Government.
This is custom in upside-down country: Australian bullies and fraudsters know how easily words can be twisted and how effective it is when you want to derail a conversation or confuse your audience: just use the same words as your opponent and throw them straight back in their face.
If you are a fraud, for instance, speak loudly about the opponent being a fraud. If something is unsustainable, such as coal mining for instance, just say the opposite: that coal mining is sustainable, creates jobs, saves emissions and is good for humanity… – and when you are a minister of the government, chances are that a lot of Australians will listen and believe you.
“Whether it’s a flood or fire or a drought or a storm, you can’t attribute any particular event to climate change,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was quoted as saying by Channel 9 News after the seaside town of Tathra had been ravaged by a fierce bushfire, destroying 70 homes.
He said this well knowing that scientific data from the Bureau of Meteorology under his own governmental administration document a very different picture. Any primary school student can see it, when you take a look at the dire graphs that the bureau has published. Scientists have no problem either with establishing and proving that there is an indisputable link between bushfires and climate change, as it was also explained by a meteorologist in the Four Corners documentary ‘Weather Alert’.
The Australian government, however, pretends to know nothing of this, primarily because of its intimate relationship with the fossil fuel industry. Over the past decade, 180 individuals have moved between positions in the fossil fuel and/or mining industries and senior positions in government, or vice versa.
These are documented cases of career corruption, whereas allegations that mining companies transfer millions of dollars to the Liberal party’s offshore accounts in order to buy influence, are just that, allegations, yet without disclosure of the total figures being transferred.
So this is a government which apparently is prepared to do anything it can to turn things upside-down in an attempt to make voters believe that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t a real problem, and that coal “will be in our energy mix for a very long time,” as Turnbull has formulated it.
Minister Canavan informed his listeners last week that Australia is a country “that gets so much from the coal industry”. Certainly, we can assume his family does, as his brother John Canavan is the Director of Mergers and Acquisitions for the coal giant Peabody Energy – a company which according to the Stop Adani Aliiance has been funding climate denial groups.
All sorts of excuses have been invented so that the fossil fuel industry can be allowed to continue to pollute free of change and so that the country’s carbon emissions can keep rising year by year, at a time when everyone knows the opposite should be happening: they should be falling, not rising.
Upside-down country in a nutshell. Shamefully Australian.
“How are we ever going to become a nation when we keep lying and deceiving each other?”
~ Professor Len Collard, University of WA in ABC Landline
“We should be thinking of …the smart ways to respond to climate change. Thinking about what we can do to continue economic growth and lower carbon emissions. Not locking ourselves into this narrow view that it must be renewables, or something else, not coal and not oil and not gas.”
~ Matt Canavan, Australia’s resources minister
The classical anti-action argument
One excuse that gets repeated again and again by members of the Australian government is that “Australia is such a small country anyway”. Effective measures to reduce climate-destructive carbon pollution are deemed pointless on the grounds that it will have an minimal impact on global climate change. Whatever Australia decides to do with its emissions, it will not even change one percent of the global problem.
This argument is used so often that it must be because some people think it sounds like a convincing argument.
However, from a business perspective, it needs to be called out as an absolutely catastrophic argument. The Australian carbon mismanagement and misbehaviour is being ranked the worst on the entire planet, and this is being noticed by the international community.
Australia has become that naughty kid in the global class room that no one wants to play with. And that’s bad for Australian business.
The climate-neglecting attitude of the Australian government is likely to soon have an massive impact on our ability to do business with the rest of the world.
The Australian business and farming community is gradually beginning to realise this.
Manufactured, distorted and misguided claims and lies have been circulated for years. Taking action on climate change is “nonsense and hysteria”, renewable energy is “expensive and unreliable”, a carbon tax is “hurting business”, while coal is “good for humanity” and the Adani mine is “creating thousands of jobs”…
Up til now, the political leaders and media personalities who carry forward such lies and mistruths have been the same people and parties on the blue side of politics who claim to be defending the interests of the Australian business community. But little by little, one by one, businesses in this country are beginning to wake up to the realisation that they have been deceived. The ongoing protection of the coal, gas and oil industry actually now represents a direct threat and a danger to their economy, their prosperity and their livelihood.
“For Australian business, business as usual is no longer an option.”
~ Quote from ‘Weather Alert’, broadcasted on ABC’s Four Corners, still viewable on ABC iView
ABC’s ‘Weather Alert’ documentary by Michael Brissenden was the kind of investigation into climate change which has been missed on national Australian tv for a long time. Brissenden decided to talk with the business community which experiences that global warming is a reality. In the documentary we hear that “the next three decades are about how we adapt to it and go beyond net zero emissions so we can attempt to reverse the damage already done.”
Weeks later, in a tweet commenting on another tweet about Malcolm Turnbull’s climate denial, a former Geelong mayor, councillor and member of the Liberal party labelled the push for transitioning away from coal, oil and gas – in the light of the bushfires and the climate crisis – as “nonsense and hysteria”.
“Infinitesimal impact, so stop the nonsense”
“We can close down Australia completely and it would have an infinitesimal impact on global climate change, so please stop the nonsense and hysteria.”
~ Dr Stretch Kontelj
This would be my response to your call for stopping “the nonsense”, Stretch:
Dear Dr Kontelj,
You obviously still live in yesterday’s world where people thought that transitioning to renewable energy sources and taking action on climate change would be the equivalent of ‘closing Australia down’ or ‘moving back into the caves’.
Today we live in a world where businesses have understood that their customers actually prefer a world that is safe and clean, rather than the one that you and your mates are offering us with yesterday’s technologies: one which is in a global crisis from pollution and climate disruptions. These businesses therefore have decided to ‘go 100%’ – meaning: to go all the way out the clean, green and climate-safe and zero carbon tangent.
Why do you think Apple chooses to build it next billion-dollar data centre in little Denmark, and not, for instance, in Australia? That’s because Denmark has understood that non-polluting energy sources are the future and has invested in a modern electricity system which is able to deliver 100% clean and climate-safe electricity to Apple’s new data centre.
“Every time America has set clear rules and better standards for our air, our water and our children’s health, the warnings of the cynics have been wrong. They warned that doing something about the smog choking our cities and acid rain poisoning our lakes would kill business. It didn’t. Our air got cleaner, acid rain was cut dramatically, and our economy kept growing.”
~ Barack Obama, former American president
On TheRE100.org you can read about the increasing number of companies who are now following the leadership of computer and Internet giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Adobe, Ebay – as well as UBS, Bloomberg, Nestlé, IKEA, Unilever, the world’s largest toy company LEGO, Denmark’s largest brewery, Carlsberg, and largest bank, Danske Bank – and even BMW and General Motors – who are all committed to ‘go 100%’.
Last year, Sydney Morning Herald reported how investors worth $20 trillion are making a urgent call for climate change action:
“While the private sector can provide the investment required to build a secure, affordable and low emissions global energy system, we urge the G7 to set strong policy signals which provide the investment certainty needed to drive trillions of dollars into new clean energy investment opportunities,” Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) in Australia, told the newspaper. IGCC suggested a carbon price to do that, but a simple ban on any new climate-damaging projects would also do the trick.
Cheaters
And what is Australia doing to stay up-to-date with the new demand for data, production and manufacturing environments that are powered 100% on renewable energy? In classic upside-down style, the Australian government has launched a new energy policy, the National Energy Guarantee, which is so anti-climate that even the energy companies are rebelling against it.
https://twitter.com/climatecouncil/status/980311314076782592
The way Australia allows its citizens and industries to pollute the air more and more, free of charge, is internationally unacceptable, as we all share the same atmosphere. It can only be a matter of time before we will see a headline saying something similar to ‘A shameful moment for Australian business’ – international investor community hits out… – as we recently saw Sydney Morning Herald run a headline which said: ‘A shameful moment for Australian sport’: Cricket sponsors hit out.
Divestment, boycott, setting up sanctions and trade barriers would be the next step. This has long been used as tools to isolate, discourage and educate rogue countries about what proper and civilised behaviour looks like in an international community.
The incredible amount of rubbish which is being ‘Manufactured in Australia’ is not okay, and while Australians fail to see it, apart from in a cricket game, many others around the world are noticing it. In countries like Denmark, people are well aware of that renewables are not “expensive” or “unreliable”, and that bike paths are not “sexist”, as it is claimed in Australian media.
In India, they know all too well that coal is not “good for humanity”.
South Australia’s new premier Steven Marshall made it his first promise to kill the Tesla plan for the world’s biggest “virtual power plant” that would install batteries in low income households for no cost. How can that be justified?
The topic of electricity bills are known in Australia to be loaded with political controversy – enough to create landslide voter changes at elections. A scare campaign about higher electricity prices has helped many liberal candidates to win an election, as it did for Marshall in South Australia.
“At the end of the day, I look after my own interests – and my interest is that I cannot sustain that sort of bills,” butcher Mario Mancusso of Newmarket Quality Meats in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington told viewers in an interview with ABC News on 29 March 2018.
The ABC-reporter, Danielle Bonica, was nodding and seemed pleased with Mancusso’s statement. Her segment was based on a report from the Australian Energy Regulator which found wholesale prices in Victoria were up 85 per cent on 2016.
Viewers were given the impression that this was because of the closure of one of the world’s dirtiest coal-fired power stations, Hazelwood, and that this closure was the ‘fault’ of the pro-renewables Victorian Labor government. In other words: the segment helped the misguided but constantly repeated election myth that if you vote Liberal, you will get lower electricity prices – and the climate? Who cares!
Openly admitting that you are only looking after your own interest is considered normal and fully understandable among the Australian mainstream.
“At the end of the day, I look after my own interests,” says Mancusso, but for some reason, he doesn’t see it as being in his own interest that Hazelwood’s closure has cut the state’s climate pollution by 10 per cent and that everyone will have to reduce their emissions, including butchers, in the low-carbon society the world has agreed to steer towards.
It left the viewer with a question whether it was politically motivated or just due to lack of insight that the reporter didn’t question or challenge this butcher’s ignorance and long-term self-damaging short-term ‘self-interest’.
Since Hazelwood closed, Victoria’s climate pollution has dropped by 12 million tonnes. This is possibly the largest single step ever taken in Australia to tackle global warming.
With the responsibility that ABC has Australia’s leader of public broadcasting, what could be Danielle Bonica’s and her editors’ reason for creating a report that solely looks at rising electricity prices without highlighting this important dimension of the discussion? We all have a responsibility to cut our emissions, individually as well as collectively, and that includes self-serving businessmen such as Mr Mario Mancusso.
Rather than serving specific party-political agendas, ABC should be the first ones to introduce Australians to ‘Carbon Reality’: the 23 tonnes per capita carbon pollution-crime we all shamefully are a part of in this country.
Australian carelessness
Within the Australian borders, I keep hearing all the stories about a different genre from the human book of misbehaving: bullying – both in schools, at work places, in Councils – resulting in suicides and serious disruptions in communities – along with all the many stories about road rage, where drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are in some kind of an open war against each other, not only shouting aggressive, dirty words after each other, but even targeting and hurting those who are weakest.
Add to that all the terrible stories of domestic violence against women, which is another aspect of the bullying syndrome.
Measured per capita on our pollution, Australia is rightfully regarded as one of the scumbags of the Earth. We are among, if not the most carbon-polluting people on the planet. 23 tonnes of CO2-e per person per year in Australia, on average, (not including our coal and gas export), while a Dane on average emits seven tonnes per year, and an Indian two tonnes.
In perfect line with your statement, Stretch Kontelj, Australians are making it very obvious to the world with our record-high air pollution-figures that we simply couldn’t care less about the blinking warning signs and the trail of death and destruction we leave behind us.
In Australia, we just want to live our lives of general luxury and mindless consumption, here and now, continuing to buy bigger cars and build bigger houses, continuing to burn more and more coal, oil and gas every year – in complete disregard for the kind of consequences this will have on other people in poorer nations and in the future – and in disregard of what all the accelerating upwards-pointing graphs – such as this one for heatwaves in Australia, for instance, which I think in many ways tells a lot about the kind of crisis we are in, will mean for ourselves in the years to come:
Accelerating – not linear
The problem here being, as an UN Arctic chief formulated it recently: ‘Climate change isn’t linear – it’s accelerating’.
Exponentially rising graphs climb slowly – almost invisibly slowly – for a very long time, until they suddenly take off. You can sense the tendency, and what will happen next, just by looking at the heatwave-graph from AEMO.
The link is explained further in an article by Dr Andrew Glikson, who is an Earth and Paleoclimate scientist at the Australian National University: What freak weather events have to do with Australia’s coal. Among many findings, Glikson refers to the Munich-Re Institute’s recordings of the global rise in meteorological events:
Here’s another one from Bureau of Meteorology, carving the general tendency out for us:
Sadly, we live in a time where almost any scientific, environmental or meteorological graph you look at these days has that same exponentional tendency of pointing towards a fast-approaching meltdown:
Impact: “infinitesimal”. Power of the exemplar: infinite
Australians are 0.3% of the world’s population, but we produce 1.8% of the world’s greenhouse gasses. “So what’s 1.5%?!,” say people like Stretch: Who cares? Please stop the nonsense and hysteria…
Stretch’s argument is allegedly that “it would have an infinitesimal impact on global climate change” if Australians were to step up to the challenge and help reduce humanity’s global emissions with 1.5%.
But again, dear Stretch, you are totally missing the point.
This effort is not only about which impact an emissions reduction of 1.5% would have on our planet. For your business and for Australians in general, two-three other things are much more important to take into consideration:
1) The black sheep factor – and what it means for business
Who wants to do business with Australians if our behaviour shows we are a bunch of ignorant, selfish greedy-guts? This is a moral question – a question about how we behave in ‘the global class room’.
An analogy: Imagine you are standing in a reception hall, where there is one piece of cake served for the 300 guests, one for each. You are mingling with the guests in search of one to do business with. Then you spot this Australian fellow who has taken six pieces of cakes on his plate – an obese greedy-gut who doesn’t give a damn that his bad behaviour means that there will be five others elsewhere in the room who – as a result of his bad behaviour – will be missing out on getting a piece of cake.
Behaviour affects business. Seriously. It does. And as the world is quickly coming to terms with that we have a collective responsibility to stop polluting the atmosphere, Australia is increasingly getting the reputation as the ‘dark sheep’ among western countries, the rogue nation, where people are cheaters, liers, bullies, and worst of all: being selfish and careless polluters. Who will want to do business with these immoral lowbillies from a remote island? Who would want to buy their goods?
Trump, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, German car manufacturers… it would seem like everyone’s into that cheating game at the time being – (more on the topic here and here), but you will be making a big mistake if you think that just because Trump has excelled in it, and until now has been getting away with it, it doesn’t all of a sudden make it okay to be cheating and playing dirty tricks. On the contrary, as the matter of fact. People are beginning to understand what has been going on, and they are responding with resistance against it.
That includes plain cheating at a much higher level, as Tim Buckley from Energy Finance Studies tweets about here – just as one example of many:
“Our politicians are captured”
“So @exxon milked $7.2bn of revenues in private foreign gains from natural resources in 2016 but chose to “report” taxable profits of just $38m claiming its domicile has nothing to do with how it structures its tax havens. Our politicians are captured!”
~ Tim Buckley
2) The inspirational factor actually cuts emissions – elsewhere
If Australia managed to quickly reduce its share of global carbon pollution from 1.8% to 0.3%, it would, yes, have an “infinitesimal impact” on global climate change, but it would have a huge impact on our neighbours and nations around the world, who would see that they also would need to step up and get into the game. Denmark – which has a population similar to Victoria’s – has created an innovative cleantech industry which inspires and sets new standards to the world about what is possible, and has had a much larger impact on global emissions than what the Danes could have achieved by themselves.
I would add, as a third point, the issue of morality and proper values:
3) The fair share factor
It is not okay to be polluting the Commons – humanity’s common atmosphere, all living being’s common atmosphere – much more than what could be considered “our fair share”. If we are 0.3% of the world’s population, what gives us the right then to be creating more than 0.3% of the world’s climate-pollution?
Who do we think we are when we behave like that? An Australian’s average carbon footprint is three-four times bigger than what an average person in northern Europe emits. It is more than ten times bigger than that of an Indian citizen.
Arguments like the one Stretch tweeted have often been used by liberal politicians in the Australian parliament: “What difference will it make on the global situation if little Australia of 24 million people was to go to zero carbon emissions over night? Nada!”
In my ears, it sounds exactly the same as someone standing in public saying: “Yes I am an asshole, and I am proud of it. So let’s all be assholes – and f**k those poor and vulnerable bastards who will get hurt by our team’s misbehaviour. Burn, baby, burn!”
When we open up the Adani coal mine, as the Liberals and Labor are happily planning to do, over the next decades we will be adding up to eight billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to a ‘carbon budget’ which is already at its limit, and we will be sending a clear ‘f’-finger to the global community.
Showing what is possible and what is coming, and in stark contrast to what is happening in Australia, in the United Kingdom, the government has rejected plans for an opencast coal mine in Northumberland on the grounds that it would exacerbate climate change. This is the first time the UK government has rejected a planning application citing climate change as the reason.
The reality is that the current Australian government’s emissions-neglect and failure to respond properly to the atmospheric carbon crisis is damaging the reputation of all hardworking businesses in this country, small or large – and even those who might be actually doing something to reduce their carbon footprint. We are all being classified as selfish, rude and careless.
If anyone in the Australian business community still has aspirations to do business with the rest of the world, then this is an issue that needs to be urgently addressed and protected: our international image.
Last year, VolksWagen was caught cheating with diesel emissions. As this video explains, apparently it taught them a lesson and became a wake-up call for a complete transformation of their business model, saying goodbye to diesel engines all together.
In Australia, we have that capability too. If we want, we can learn from our mistakes, regain a set of proper values, and rise like the bird Phoenix from the ashes.
What do you think?
You can add a comment below. (The comment field closes after two weeks)
Level playing field. The business week by @jonkudelka @australian pic.twitter.com/k8zk5xcEKo
— Business Review (@aus_business) March 30, 2018
When someone in the Coalition party room meeting says the government should consider buying Liddell power station… again pic.twitter.com/zDZRT5f5mo
— rottnest wind turbine (@Rottoturbine) March 29, 2018
» MSM | Mamamia – 30 March 2018:
Comment: If you think ball-tampering is our national sporting shame, you haven’t met Matt Lodge.
Calculated elevation of selfishness as a national virtue
“Appalling as it was, the cricket cheating scandal is merely a symptom of a wider national sickness. There is something rotten in the Commonwealth of Australia. A culture of greed, selfishness, envy, cruelty and often criminal corruption is gnawing at the nation’s heart.”
~ Mike Carlton in the Saturday Paper
“Powerful, desperately sad and uncompromisingly truthful article…”
~ Fiona Armstrong, health and climate change communicator
» The Saturday Paper – 31 March 2018:
The land of the fair gone
A society less civilised
“More money-grubbing, rule-bending and tax avoiding are part of a society that’s becoming less civilised,” writes Ross Gittins, the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor:
The cricketers are not the only Aussies “yielding to the temptation to bend the rules in pursuit of a bigger bonus. What do you think the royal commission into banking misconduct is about?
We’ve become less Godfearing, more individualistic, more materialistic and more self-centred. We’ve become less community-minded, less committed to “solidarity” – where the strong go easy so as to help the poor do better – and less sympathetic to the battling of the battlers (except when we kid ourselves that we are battlers).
Politics has degenerated into an unending battle between interest groups, in which each seeks advantage at the expense of the rest. Much of the fighting is conducted by a thriving industry of lobbyists.
But don’t imagine the greed is limited to businesses and institutions. ”
» Sydney Morning Herald – 27 March 2018:
Cheating at cricket just one of the unthinkable things Aussies do now
By Ross Gittins
“Are we at a moment when we can process what has happened in the past? Similar to when Gandhi was explaining that “I stole it and it is mine” is not a real justification. And when human society understood that, it brought down the British Empire. But not only that, it brought down the whole concept of colonisation.”
~ John D. Liu
“How can you justify keeping coach Lehmann in his role when this type of cheating behaviour is blossoming on his watch?”
~ Unnamed commentator
“How can you justify keeping Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in his role when his type of climate-cheating behaviour is blossoming on his watch?”
~ Mik Aidt
Disappointing to see @TurnbullMalcolm not up-to-date on attribution science. Yes, we can't say climate change caused these events but we can look at how it's changing their intensity and frequency https://t.co/ZgkkkXkuh2
— Andrew King (@AndrewKingClim) March 19, 2018
the increase in the number of extreme heat days is indisputable.
the link between extreme heat days and catastrophic fires is indisputable.incredible that @CraigKellyMP and @mattjcan won't let @TurnbullMalcolm admit that climate change is here and means more & worse bushfires. pic.twitter.com/0AXoyeK9b9
— simon holmes à court (@simonahac) March 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/ReclaimAnglesea/status/979572909315309568
The Turnbull govt has no intention of reining in emissions and tackling climate change. Premier @DanielAndrewsMP, it's time for #VicClimateSolutions! #SpringSt pic.twitter.com/pfvTZUxK8T
— Act on Climate Vic (@ActOnClimateVic) March 28, 2018
'I'm beginning to wonder how many alarm bells need to go off before the world rises to the challenge' https://t.co/10OLrd1EhQ
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) March 30, 2018
“The strong majority support for phasing out coal power shows how far the community is ahead of the government on climate change,”#ActOnClimate #climatechange #KeepItInTheGround https://t.co/FaRE2FPaTb
— Paul Dawson (@PaulEDawson) March 30, 2018
Barking mad. Uses massive amount so water, drives climate change makes the north hotter, kills the reef & compromises fishing & agriculture . Why is coal more economically important than food production, human health & ecosystems that support tourism? https://t.co/JXDb8PiSCd
— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) March 30, 2018
.@mattjcan couldn't be clearer – the lack of taxes paid by the resources sector doesn't bother him #NPC pic.twitter.com/HjcuD54ZJ5
— Market Forces (@market_forces) March 28, 2018
https://twitter.com/TheAusInstitute/status/979159285169967104
Several key directors at Cambridge Analytica's parent company have direct connections to the fossil fuel industry:
One guy had: Shell, Noble Group, Eni, Esso, BP, Statoil, Tamoil, Total and Saras
Another: Libyan National Oil Company (LNOC), Iraqi State Oil Marketing Company https://t.co/RJXr2hPwNJ— Mark Anning (@1EarthMedia) March 30, 2018
A Taskforce for rural communities not coal miners!
Matt Canavan is forming a Government-funded ‘Resources Taskforce’ to ‘secure the future’ of mining in rural areas. We’re setting-up an Alternative Taskforce to secure the future of our rural communities. https://t.co/b6c2106EvK pic.twitter.com/XiQR1wrELJ— FarmersClimateAction (@farmingforever) March 29, 2018
According to Berkeley Earth, the winter we just finished was the warmest ever observed in the Arctic, with seasonal average temperature more than 4 C (7 F) above normal. pic.twitter.com/GQ09Wfojob
— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) March 28, 2018
Australian renewable energy projected to cost the same or be cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as 2020: https://t.co/O6q10ATVq5
— Kristina Keneally (@KKeneally) March 30, 2018
.@TurnbullMalcolm Your transformation into someone who is in substance a #climatechange denier appears close to complete when you assert that drawing attention to the link between dangerous bushfires and climate change is "politicising the issue" #auspol #ABCNews @RichardDiNatale
— Andrew Laird (@ReclaimAnglesea) March 20, 2018
Australia's greenhouse gas pollution levels have risen, yet again. https://t.co/Ob86NYycWC #auspol #climatechange pic.twitter.com/nxXhj20hGV
— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) March 18, 2018
We have to lift our game! for the third year in a row greenhouse gas emissions have gone up https://t.co/oc1URnTrNJ #climateaction #renewables pic.twitter.com/q9TxtvGk9u
— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) April 2, 2018
NSW minerals council lying to the public. the truth:
• AEMO‘s report confirms that AGL’s plan is sufficient
• SA hasn’t had a string of blackoutsstephen galilee, does truth matter?@NSWMC https://t.co/XTvUvljBic
— simon holmes à court (@simonahac) March 23, 2018
Well and truly running out of time. pic.twitter.com/diEZsiQOxW
— PeterBax (@BaxterPeterba) March 20, 2018
116 years ago, this glacier in Austria's Eastern Alps was postcard perfect. This is what it looks like now https://t.co/Kr3cVltSxj pic.twitter.com/Qg6n4ANkUb
— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) March 20, 2018
There is so much evidence of climate change, from air and sea temperatures to disappearing sea ice to changing migration patterns of birds. NASA the folks who put a person on the moon also study our changing planet and show evidence of melting sea ice#ActOnClimate #ClimateChange pic.twitter.com/9VnwbjF2Lq
— Paul Dawson (@PaulEDawson) March 18, 2018
Hard to see much of a long term future for any tropical reefs and the complex and extraordinary ecosystems they support. New coral bleaching outbreak in NT a worrying sign of our warming oceans https://t.co/poH4g7wamK via @ConversationEDU
— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) March 19, 2018
“We don’t have unlimited time,”
“Do we or don’t we care about our grandchildren? We’ve been stealing their future.”#ActOnClimate #ClimateChange https://t.co/x4UL0faYtq— Paul Dawson (@PaulEDawson) March 19, 2018
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“On Thursday the United Nations Word Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its annual report on the global climate—and it doesn’t make for comforting reading. According to 25th edition of the Statement on the State of the Global Climate, 2017 was the costliest year ever for extreme weather and climate events, while the past three years have been confirmed as the hottest on record. In addition, global sea levels continue to rise, ocean warming and acidification are on the increase and the extent of polar sea ice was well below the 1981-2010 average throughout 2017.”
» Newsweek – 22 March 2018:
UN: Last three years hottest since records began, extreme weather caused record-breaking damage in 2017 | VIDEO
American books on climate and justice
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Further reading
» The Guardian – 23 March 2018:
Minister cites climate change in rejection of opencast coal mine
“Sajid Javid says environmental impact of Northumberland plan outweighs economic benefits.”
» The Guardian – 24 March 2018:
‘We want to repower NSW’: thousands rally against coal in Sydney
“‘Time to Choose’ protest demands a fresh focus on renewable energy by the state government”
» The Guardian – 25 March 2018:
Hemmed in by big coal: ‘A bad feeling is constantly hanging over us’
“With seven coalmines and a gas company surrounding their cattle property, a Queensland family is battling to stay put”
» Miami Herald – 9 March 2018:
Why Miami is the first stop on a campaign to ask polluters to pay for climate action
We're here to provide Australians with a real banking alternative, a responsible one. Learn more at: https://t.co/qYVtpEoOi2 pic.twitter.com/6HHdMhYos0
— Bank Australia (@bankaust) February 26, 2018
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» More blogposts in the [CLIMATIC ROOT TREATMENT] series