Coal Protestival in Newcastle
Some young people in Australia, from a sane ecological perspective, have realized, that continuing our addiction to fossil fuels, is taking our biosphere rapidly towards a future where earth’s climate will be unfit for survival. It is burning Coal which started the growth of the cancer of modern techno-industrial civilization — MTIC , and this still has not peaked in its growth.
MTIC is the overshoot creation of homo colossus, a species which has turned human life culturally into a competitive growth war, by getting most of its energy as a detritivore, by using coal, and other fossil fuels, to allow the exploitation of all things on this planet. MTIC is now in terminal decline and cannot be saved. Maybe it can be briefly prolonged at ever piling up costs. Most of earth’s larger and slow reproducing species, including humans, are more than likely to go extinct as a result of this deliberately misunderstood and under-predicted future of a hot-house earth. If this is not enough we are also poisoning the biosphere in multiple other toxic ways.
By recognizing this, to our various degrees of understanding, many people of various “walks of life”, and ages, have gathered around Newcastle to take part in this organized “Protestival” over several days. It is a good representation of Australian Society, and part of the events purpose is to deepen and spread understanding of our predicaments, and prepare the grounds for taking a different path as MTIC is doomed to leave us.
During this time, the most water capable of participants, are doing a temporary blockade of passage of Coal Ships that need to cross the narrow entrance waters of the Newcastle harbor channel, just over this weekend. This is more than symbolic as far as the ports annual coal shipment and profit figures are concerned, and there were still official legal hurdles to overcome. Police officials opposed the granting of a permit for the event, and a time-limited permit was only just cleared after a disputed case through the law courts.
Below are some more pictures and a news-clip, from some ongoing posts of participants in this Rising-Tide event. (https://www.risingtide.org.au/). Early next week many participants will make a “Canberra Wave” at the national capital, and take part in many planned and surprise events. All credit to the work of organizers and volunteers for making this happen.
No one knows how this event is going to stop global systems exploiters taking their eyes off doing business as usual. But it at least demonstrates a possibility. Last years event did not, despite great and good publicity, since MTIC is still carrying on growth in extinction business as usual.
The words “Climate change”, are the politically correct euphemism for growth in human released green house gases heating oceans and atmosphere. This is warming our planet with a rapidity that unprecedented in this planets known history.
The important figure here is the rate of temperature rise. It is now going up an average of 0.4 degrees C “per decade”, and getting faster. Just the last few years has suddenly added another 0.2 degrees C to our average global temperature. This quickly takes us into MTIC collapse before 2050, and net-zero marketing, actually means net-zero total biosphere impact human beings, after surgical removal of their energy teeth.
Appointed climate scientists have said that known climate science models cannot fully explain this current acceleration of global heating. Our climate data is statistical, selected by availability, algorithms and models. No matter how complex are our computations, they are approximations to reality. For political understanding, which seems awfully rare these days, the direction and speed of change, and basic understanding of climate momentum, are all we really need to know in order to realize that we are cooking this biosphere into really big trouble.
Northern hemisphere permafrost is melting and releasing methane gas faster. Methane is a very potent GHG. Overall “carbon sinks” of this biosphere are no longer absorbing the greater amounts of carbon dioxide excess as they once did. We are now in a state of global “climate tipping” towards a hot-house earth. Global species extinction rates are set to rise, beyond those already pushed by the adverse non-climate impacts of MTIC.
If ever there has been a good time for a political panic, to push down hard on brakes to growth in fossil fuel burning, it is now. There is no way to avoid global MTI systems collapse. Using up our fossil fuel energy battery as fast as possible, with ever increasing inefficiency, is only going to speed up our global climate demise. Of course it seems our bio-killers in charge think this a good thing.
Obsessive political marketing of past climate global temperature thresholds of 1.5 or 2.0 degrees C has been a case of plain human stupidity. What matters is the global warming speed at which we are breaking through these global markers of global heating acceleration, but never really braking.
It is unfortunate that so many still believe the marketing hype for a generalized “Green Transition”. This is sometimes justly derided as “hopium”. By such means of “renewable” energy harvesting technology, it allows us to belief we can save our high-energy lifestyle plague from its ongoing collapse. The facts and arguments against prolonged success are simple, and have already been well explained, but are hard to swallow for the believers in the progress of MTIC.
The transition isn’t real and will never be green, because all such technology is still made with energy, minerals and materials required from everywhere, all of which are still mined with dirty fossil fuels, which speeds up our global heating.
No transition is on the way, because of Jevon’s Paradox, plus our rapid net energy decline in fossil fuel supply, plus our biosphere is already in decline from human impacts that are independent of the existence of climate change.
Renewables enable us to waste more energy. We still increase fossil fuel mining, because of our insatiable energy hunger, required for continuous growth and maintenance of our current overshoot size. And their is a general human blindness to how energy works, and our overshoot total energy consumption. Ecological overshoot barely gets a mention, as it did not figure much at presentations at last years “Protestival”.
At best renewable energy technology prolongs the harm from MTIC, providing new temporary energy sources, to offset ongoing decline in net energy yield from fossil fuel mining. The absolute quantity of fossil fuel burning is still rising, but the complexity and energy cost of getting it is rising exponentially.
Renewable electricity, solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage, electric vehicles, all seem very “clean” once built and installed. As does most MTIC technology that creates products to sell with approval at consumer buying end-point. MTIC is heavily marketed. Product disposal downsides are not.
Living in MTIC, with its myriad energy slaves and devices, and powered services delivery, is a marketing dream. It shows the possibility of finally achieving a pleasant retirement environment, after decades of work and money slavery brings sufficient social status for humans. Pre- and Post- environmental impacts are not shown in the exchange contract. The marketing aim is isolate humans from the enjoyment of healthy natural ecosystems we once co-inhabited, and make us slaves of MTIC production systems. Not a free lunch at all, but a domestication enslavement process.
China, supposedly world leader in renewable energy systems creation, looks like it is trying very hard to achieve at best a “relative” transition, for a few decades. China has boosted the electrification of its energy economy to about 30%. China does have declining population demographics, which is the only direct way to get a real reduction in its total energy requirements, and move towards restoring an ecological balance of human species.
The money, time, and total energy and mineral resources that are required to significantly “transit” our MTIC off fossil fuel dependency, without giving up most of our energy slaves, have been totalled up. The total is far more than what can still be practically extracted as resources, or tolerated as wastes. The verdict is a green transition is physically impossible, and is a marketing tool used as a political excuse for not taking the real necessary climate actions. Action for ecological overshoot requires diminution of all the human population and consumption that depends on fossil fuel burning.
Simon Michaux has done a great deal of data gathering and number crunching, as a qualified kind of economic geologist. This has been published, is peer reviewed, and reveals the impossibility of a “green transition”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDwbygJMEyw) He is now researching some “maybe” possible methods to continue a restricted form of MTI as a “Purple Transition”. Areas of hopium to dig deeper into, include medium-sized thorium — powered nuclear energy reactors, and recycled iron powder to burn for vehicle internal combustion engines. Is this a real “clutching at techo-straws”? No one wants to MTIC to die, but all previous civilization systems did so. We are culturally and physiologically adapted to living long lives in the energy cocoons of MTIC. A Green Transition has become a deadly form of “bargaining” as we deny that MTIC is as mortal as we are.
Our future is biological, as we are still biological beings. Maybe some of our species can survive the present train-wreck messes of MTIC. We have a basic flaw, highlighted by many other doomer writings, that MTIC denizens would rather believe than know. Long term survival is by evolution of the fittest, with fitness best described as adaption to, and enhancement of, ones survival environment in balance with all supported fellow created beings. We can’t even live with ourselves in our serious global crowding distress. That is why our survival of our predicaments from breaking the basic evolutionary contract will be unlikely.
Meanwhile, conventional “developed, civilized” governments just pretend it isn’t happening. Climate conferences are naked fossil-fuel corporate marketing meet-ups. The best use of an intercontinental ballistic missile right now, would be to take out an entire greedy clique of fossil fuel global criminals that are meeting at the COP29 in Baku, where all action promises that are made, are made as already discounted.
