Fossil fuel governments go to Rabid Virulence
There is already little doubt, among climate activists around the world, that all the important decisions of the Australian government are made under the strong influence of the fossil fools industry, head-quartered in Canberra as the (Foreign) Minerals Council of Australia. This has been true since the 1990s. This has been regardless of which of two main groups of political public relations machinery and state political branding wins an election. States are now nothing much more than fossil fuel political power control and management apparatus. I presume, going by our repeated complete failures to slow our climate extinction process, that this is world wide affliction.
This has been proved again, to be more than ever before, with a release of a simple report that shows the make up of the National Corvid-19 Coordination Commission is heavily stacked by fossil fuel industry “king-makers”. These are well known Australian Fossil Fuel agents and middle men, all working for global corporate gas industry giants. Some of the others are “not known” yet. Some have big share holdings. Their main repeated demands of government politicians, have no direct relations to national management of this Corona virus epidemic.
Our governments more often than not go along with the demands. See their wish-list. This makes the Corvid Commission itself, evidence of a virulent and deadly infestation inside our government. Big fossil fuel business is a virus that has infiltrated the globe, and taken over the entire metabolism of our planet, changed global culture and ways of thinking. The fossil fuel virus has promoted massive prolonged exponential growth, and system dependency, to serve interests of wealth and power accumulation around the industrial designed frameworks of state governments.
Fossil fuel virus has taken over all production and labour ideologies, from socialism to capitalism, from left to right. So much so that political alignment revolves entirely around fossil fuel policy like a magnet, more than anything else, and other directions amount to no more than the colour of team jerseys and personality types. Fossil fuel virus has devalued the worth of all of nature, in its insane takeover strategies of maximum reproduction and growth. Today our fossil fuelled military superpowers are still vying to build up more terrible weapons to destroy each others weapons and populations. Fossil fuel industries have a direct plug into all global state governments, including USA, Russia, India and China. Australia is subject to pressure of “fossil fuel extraction” by at least 3 of these, and so our government has to please lots of fossil fuel masters with big guns, and possibility of trade sanctions.
Democracy in Australia appears now to be having difficulty breathing. It should be put under intensive care, and the outcome could be fatal. Most of the brains of government political classes have already been entirely reprogrammed by the fossil fuel virus, into unwitting obedience states where they do not realise that they are agents of their own destruction. Infection removes higher forms of systems thinking, awareness of mortality, and boosts egos. This is why we are all fossil fool morons plugged into the notions of forever growth.
Fossil fools full control
The fossil fuel disease is predicted to run its growth course, until all economic resources are consumed. All land and ocean biosphere life at end of consumption, will have been completely “eaten and burned out”. Civilisation will disappear, consumed by itself at the very end, followed by a extinction wipe-outs from feedback enhanced global heating with effects lasting a few million years. More likely than not, no human descended species will be around afterwards to learn some hard facts about skills in global systems self-management. Scientific knowledge alone will not save us, because politics infected with with fossil fuel virus trumps science, if it doesn’t manage to abolish it altogether.
In the meantime, the number of Australians likely to go hungry with food insufficiency is increasing. Australia has inadequate social welfare supports for those not considered “long term employable”. So many are deemed not to fall into the category of “JobKeeper and JobSeeker”, for income supplements that are slated to end soon. Food — supply charities were already struggling with a much increased demand for meals, according to the analysis provided in the FoodBank Australia 2019 report. Overall 21% of Australians, or one in five people, experienced food insecurity in 2019. Some of this increase includes people in rural areas, from consequences of drought and bushfires. Without adequate food, the mental and physical health of a large part of Australian population starts to break down. Without food sufficiency, we are more likely to fail further challenges with further stressors and viral infection. This was before the pandemic shutdowns have thrown many more that were in marginal employment, onto the unemployed scrap heap. Food, rather than authoritarian measures, is the best way to keep order.
This makes for a dangerous political situation. Too many of the commission members have no expertise or interest in making sure that Australians stay healthy during the this time of Corona — Virus behaviour adjustments. Just what about being corporate lynch-pins for foreign gas mining interests does qualify them to be decision managers for the medical, social and economic interests of ordinary Australians? Did we vote for them? Yes, they are on both “sides” of politics.
It is well known that the global Coal and Gas industries are already being hit with a step decline in global demand, now hit by corona virus shutdowns. Electricity demand has dropped. Global demand for goods and services has dropped. Transport and service sectors of the economy have been shut down. The demands of Coal and Gas rulers of Australia and their involvement in government and pandemic management are nothing else but the desire to look after their own special interests. Why should new projects be approved, and environmental protections slashed? Both the global markets and global climate change emergency are saying no to more dirty fossil fuels. The “bent-over-backwards” rule over our governments is demanding that foreign Gas and Coal interests come first/ Australia’s real long therm national interests, and the society, health and well being of all Australians are being placed a distant last. This is nothing less than naked opportunism of our ruling Fossil-Fuelocracy. This is tyranny.
ABC online link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-13/coronavirus-recovery-to-push-australia-towards-gas-future/12239978
For some real paranoia about the powers and intentions of Australian State Apparatchiks, see https://www.theage.com.au/national/new-asio-law-one-more-step-towards-a-totalitarian-state-20200513-p54smi.html This will allow a wholesale state crackdown on those school climate strikers, because they annoy the authoritarian types.
There are deeper biological implications and drives in government plans to “lock people out from their means of biological health and survival”. Deliberate food deprivation within species groups has been identified by biologists as an instinctive population downsizing mechanism. Who can say that homo sapiens do not instinctively employ this, on their own nations, even as rationalised by neoliberal political agenda?
This is the message I get in full from the Australian government. Don’t work? We don’t care if you are not eating enough. Overseas student? — Go home. So you are Australian? — get a job. Conventional real full-time career jobs continue to decline rapidly. They were a creation of the post world war II “great acceleration” , powered by oil resources. Now we follow the succeeding drivers of climate emergency and civilization collapse. With such rapid systems change that we are having, contingent on vast external system changes, a different approach of organising society to satisfy biological needs is required.
We all need food
Thus each potential group member is governed by the population-system’s homeostatic size-controlling mechanism, even when, as commonly happens in the case of recruitment, this means the exclusion of an individual from food even in the midst of apparent plenty, or its exclusion from reproduction when others are breeding. — from “Too smart for our own good” — Craig Dilworth.
The 2019 food bank report notes that women are more likely to experience food insecurity than men. “More than one in four Australian women (27%) have experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months. This compares to 18% of men.”
For governments that are so-called worried about mental health due to social isolation since the start of global corona virus pandemic, insufficient food has strong associations with feelings of anxiety, depression and a real reduction of available biological energy. Good food is good medicine. The USA is currently failing on both counts for the majority of its population. This will defeat its empire, much more than global state power rivalry. The social and mental fabric of the USA has turned gangrenous.
Hungry people think differently, as memory and trained thinking requires energy. They will then be more likely to be critically ignorant, soft targets for manipulation by media and politics. Government policy finds it easiest to allow submission by starvation, which apart from deportation, and systemic violence, is the ultimate hold of a state over its people.
Fossil fool governments may not be directly planning to steal the food from peoples plates, but without sufficient compensatory actions, this is inevitable direct result of any system changes, which privilege some and not others, without compensation for people’s absolute needs.
Food exclusion and insecurity is a political power arrangement, assisted by government planned social inequality, such as unequal welfare rationing, and is not due to actual unmanageable food scarcity at this time.
Money spent on welfare, as duly noted by modern monetary theorists, would be spent on food, and would circulate through our economy, and ultimately reward the food producers that feed us, including our hard-up rural economic sectors. It might even encourage more sustainable local food production efforts, which do require regular investments of material and labour. Starving people of money to buy food, results in less investment in food production, less return to food businesses, and loss of food systems resilience, which will eventually lead to real food shortages for all. As climate systems leave comfort zones far behind, and fossil fuel energy supplies fail, global civilisation will be left with nothing to consume but itself.
Do we really know our choice any better now?
Green painted economic platforms are becoming more than just hype now, as the economic costs and stakes of continued fossil fuel infection directly threaten the continuity of global human civilisation. The economic evidence is that a major collapse of the direct fossil fuel economy is already necessary to have a civilisation compatible world.
We will end up with a much reduced total energy consumption level. To keep some parts of our electrical, digital technology and internet going, requires having a great deal more renewable energy and storage infrastructure. This technology still requires much bigger government commitments in physical investments. The direct advantage of collapse of our direct fossil fuel economy now, is that more resources are available for longer to build infrastructure of a greener economy. The important question is , can we please try to manage and arrange to keep everyone well fed as these changes happen? Can we afford not to change?
Richard Heinberg has capture some of the predicament of this, in his review comments of the Jeff Gibbs film — “Planet of the Humans”. He indicates that our change of course is necessary and is by no means an easy one.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-04-27/review-planet-of-the-humans/
The long term return on investments , in terms of emissions, employment, sustainability and health, and climate future, greatly favours devoting the last of our burnable fossil fuels and mineral resources to use mostly on renewable energy sources. A crash of fossil fuel consumption, buys climate safety-time, and frees up more future resources as reserves for supporting renewable energy infrastructure. This strategy of action also requires forgoing the tremendous waste of resources used up in our historically stupid antics of global power conflict, in which all humans lose.
Unfortunately the global village idiots of governments are betting on international conflict escalations, and banging their biggest frying pans about who is responsible for the virus, and talking up escalation risks. A hunt for witches that started this ensues, and any action that was taken is used as evidence of guilt. Conflict is well known and fast way to collapse civilisation. Too bad that states at war prioritise the extraction of fossil fuels, and have developed a taste for greater adoption of emergency powers, which makes conflict escalation right now a priority for fossil fuel interests.
Right now , on May 16th, 2020, the Australian Ambassador, as a fossil fuel mouthpiece, has formerly written to accuse China of exporting corona virus around the world. The overwhelming evidence shows that national governments have extremely poor to absolutely no control over the transmission of infectious agents between humans, as long as human social connections exist. Questing for agents to blame, namely human beings, is just asking for trouble.
The Chinese government has been accused of creating the coronavirus pandemic thanks to its ‘gross negligence, obsessive secrecy and brazen dishonesty’ — https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8323913/China-accused-creating-pandemic-gross-negligence-obsessive-secrecy.html
Obsessive secrecy and brazen dishonesty? That sounds like every human institution I have ever known, particularly governments and fossil fuel corporations, which generally get away with it.
A chorus of Australian government fossil fool agitators are shouting out their witch claims. I really need need to hope that corona virus sticks around to menace all nations, to keep our excess production and consumption economies mostly pacified. It may not be long before fossil fool governments go rabid virulent and start biting each other.
We need to take opportunity for rethinking priorities of investment, as we invariably try to restart “business as usual” — to invest in costs to maintain our civilisation.
Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change?
I am sure the global coal, gas and oil companies don’t want anything like accelerated progress on climate change to happen, after a corona virus epidemic response —
Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz are recognisable names in this working paper dated 4th May 2020. Without our virus shutdown, fossil fool growth pressure would be irresistable.
This year, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will fall by more than in any other year on record. The percentage declines likely in 2020, however, would need to be repeated, year after year, to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/publications/wpapers/workingpaper20-02.pdf
Our time is up now
Global heating has gone far enough, to be hitting the threshold of several global tipping points, and only a global emergency response plan with drastic emissions cuts can slow its bulldozing of global civilisation. We cannot wait for for a gradual replacement of fossil fuels by green energy technology. Fossil fuel emissions must fall very fast now.
Here are references to three indications of what is already happening now, everywhere, based on current atmosphere greenhouse gas levels. These are indications of “End Times” for our species. The main Australian political parties and their fossil fuel mates are here to make sure that global end times happen as quickly as possible, while they make off to planet B or go to hell with their money.
1. The frequency of Wet Bulb Temperature events of human killing magnitude is rising and appearing in weather station data, in sub-tropical regions.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 — “The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance”
2. Tree physiology suggests that most of Australia’s existing and remaining forests and tree plantations will be killed by heat and drought over the next 40 years. They are already dying quicker now, as all habitats heat up beyond their heat and water stress capabilities. Tall trees are the most heat handicapped. Tree planting is still a good idea, but is not going to save us.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/261/tab-figures-data — “Hanging by a thread? Forests and drought” -
3. An astute back of the envelope calculation by a regular CounterPunch science contributor, shows we need to greatly lower our energy supply expectations, if we are to prolong our remaining species existence time in this Universe, and want to have more equal shares for all, and reduce conflicts. We should definitely stop the huge waste of energy and resources in military conflicts, because the duration and numbers of our final generations are likely to be limited anyway. What will be left to fight over? Who will be left to fight? We will have already killed our future. Extinction of all is becoming near — inevitable, and fighting over this makes it more likely. Soon we will be too hot, hungry and sick to fight much over anything.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/15/end-game-for-green-utopia/ — “End Game for Green Utopia”
End game bad news
We are now in condition of global climate check-mate threat. Above is two counts of peak temperatures rising to exceed physiological survival limits. Rising global average temperatures increase the frequency of mass killing heat events during a warm season, and the chances of staple grain crops failure. Our fossil fuel dependence today, means that the fast path to mitigation of deadly extinction climate, can only be the rapid abandonment of fossil fuel powered infrastructure.
The good news.
Fossil fuel industries are fully aware of a potential for states to heed so many signals about the need to change their investment direction, which is why they are now riding their political underlings very hard. Fossil fuel interests have always been about covering eyes, shouting in ears, and doing despicable acts of smothering and controlling political decisions. Such control is now extremely suspect.
How do we understand if and when a lift of economic shutdown is ordered, the reasons behind it come from the needs of fossil fuel industry to have more customers and consumption, and raise carbon emissions, or will it mark a real end to public health risks?
This is now most visible in Australian politics, to the extent that government response to a health emergency is allowed to be directly controlled by fossil fuel interests. Their desperation means they have dared to come right out into the open, where they can be seen, ridiculed and defeated, in full public view, along with those who habitually associate with them.
Fossil fool governments have the real global killing power. Large scale organised protests may soon need to defy fossil fuel virus lockdowns, and risk arrests and police violence, if necessary, to make a public point about real democracy, instead of being controlled by fossil fuel tyranny posing and misusing the authority given the NCCC. Our governments words and edicts are tainted from being under the thumbs of self-serving poisoners of civilisation and democracy.
https://euobserver.com/coronavirus/148282