Opinions

This Op Ed was published on Crikey’s ‘Rooted’ blog on Tuesday, giving rise to the War-And-Peace-Epic 11,000 word comment war I’ve included below for shits and giggles.

Don’t be fooled, Mantle are in it for the money

Few could accuse Mantle Mining company director Ian Kraemer of lacking rhetorical ambition. Attending a public meeting in Bacchus Marsh last week to explain his plan to turn local farmlands into a brown coal mine, Kraemer was keen to talk up his environmental credibility. ‘Brown coal’, he told locals present, ‘has the ability to be the saviour of the planet’.

Now, given brown coal’s status as one of the world’s most polluting fossil fuels, this seems an odd statement. Yet Kraemer is adamant it can be defended. Mantle, he says, plans to use a special technique developed by another company, Exergen, to remove moisture from the coal, thereby reducing its greenhouse emissions by up to 40%. Given that countries such as China and India are likely to use brown coal for some time to come, he argues, it makes good environmental sense to help them to burn it in a cleaner way.

But can we trust Kraemer’s reasoning here? To begin, let’s examine the claim that Exergen’s coal-drying technology will reduce greenhouse emissions from burning brown coal by up to 40%. A quick review of the company’s very own promotional material shows how deceitful that figure really is. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was published in Adbusters #91, the  ’I, Revolution’ issue. Right at the back. But that’s cool, because I read magazines back-to-front. Don’t know why, just do.

It’s late. Maybe 2, or 3am, and I’m scanning my email inbox for anything important I might have missed. Eventually I notice a message that lists the names of two famous activists – Bill Mckibben and Naomi Klein – in its subject header.

The email is a ‘call to action’ soliciting support for Tim DeCristopher, a climate change activist who faces 10 years in jail after disrupting an auction of oil and gas leases in Utah.

I’m interested in this, and not just because of the facts – that by his fake bidding, DeCristopher prevented the Bush administration selling off 14 parcels of land for fossil fuel extraction – and is being prosecuted despite the new US administration ruling that the land had been inappropriate for sale. I’m actually interested largely because I’ve recently been thinking a lot about jail, and wondering about what role it might play in the peoples movement for just action on climate change. So I want to know more about Tim DeCristopher.

On his website (www.bidder70.org) there is a video of DeCristopher speaking at a climate rally in Salt Lake City last October. An athletic-looking 26-year-old with a shaved head and intense eyes, he speaks loudly and succinctly, like a charismatic churchman in full swing. At times he even breaks into gospel song.

There is more than a hint of spirituality in his speech, too. He tells the crowd of his personal awakening – that every day since his action, despite knowing he may soon be behind bars, he has walked a little taller, and felt a little more free. He also offers them a form of salvation, promising that it will be the social struggle for a safe climate and sustainable future that will make us the truly noble beings we were meant to be. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an opinion piece published online in ‘The Punch’ during CJF about the famed ‘hip-pocket reflex’ of Australian voters and the danger it entails for us all in the face of climate change and political jostling.

Australia, congratulations. We now boast a brand new opposition leader from the far-Right, who proudly declared, say, eight or nine times in a single interview on Tuesday that he would not support climate change legislation, terming it a ‘big new tax’ on the Australian people.So here we have the new political tactic of our Right- simple, snappy, and to the point- “that other lot want to TAX you!”

This tactic is nothing new, of course. Ben Chifley once observed that the Australian public ‘votes from the hip-pocket reflex’. The Right is simply banking that this is still the case.  Shrewd.

Never mind that such a reflex, if the Western world cannot overcome it, will almost certainly destroy our planet. Never mind that. A ‘big new tax’? That’’s bad. No need for that. No sir.

And so, here, my friends, is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, excitedly limbering itself up for what looms as its greatest triumph. The Right wants power. Fossil fuel companies want profits. Voters don’t want taxes. And meanwhile, (according to the scientists, at least) climate disaster looms. So cue the violins. This will be a tragedy to impress even the ancient Greeks.

At the heart of this potential tragedy, however, is not fiction, but a simple truth. And this truth is one that the West are going to have to confront very soon if the project of civilization begun by its Grecian forefathers is going to stand a chance of continuation.

This truth is, folks, that we are obscenely spoiled. Read the rest of this entry »

The following blog was published in The Punch, an Australian online opinion forum, during CJF.

Let’s be frank. Australia’s response to climate change so far is a disgrace. It is well understood, by even Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong, that the emissions reduction targets of the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) are scientifically inadequate to effectively respond to climate change.

Even if it’s maximum reduction target of 25% by 2020 is implemented, and other nations make similar efforts, atmospheric greenhouse gasses will still overshoot a safe level, very likely pushing us past tipping points that lock into place disastrous runaway climate change.

And once we take into account our world-beating per-capita emissions, combined with our chart-topping standard of living, our nation’s token efforts on climate change become simply impossible to justify. We know this, so let’s not harp on it. As Australians concerned about the future of our nation, we need to accept the reality that our nation is nowhere near implementing responsible climate policies.

But we also need to ask ourselves, whose fault is this, really? Because there are a range of views.

Is it the government, for prioritising political safety over an adequate response to climate change?

Or is it perhaps the opposition, for entertaining bizarre climate-denialist theories and lowering the bar for what can be done?

Or, last but not least, is it our perennial whipping boys ‘big business’ – for prioritising profits over the good of the planet and its people?

Well, yes. And yes. And yes. But there is another culprit here, one who all to often escapes the blame for the environmental sins of our nation, and one who has even more pull over national policies than any of the aforementioned groups.

It is us. The people. This is a fact all too easily forgotten, and frequently left out of discussions of the issue. The reason that Australia has shameful climate policies is that Australians have allowed it to. We can wring our hands and condemn politicians and big business all we like (and boy don’t we love to do this), but the cold hard fact remains: with sufficient public demand, government policy is what we the people say it is. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon reading Clive Hamilton’s ‘Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change’, a stark and frankly depressing review of recent scientific appraisals of humanity’s ability to avoid catastrophic climate change, I was immediately struck by one thought: ‘something is missing here’.

In his essay, Hamilton relates projected future greenhouse emissions scenarios from the recent work of Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows at the United Kingdom’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and soberly notes that even when the researchers used the most optimistic projections of future emissions reductions, they still predict that humanity will far overshoot the mark for stabilising greenhouse gasses at a safe level. In fact, on their projections, the entire concept of stabilising greenhouse gasses at a safe level begins to look somewhat like a pathetic joke.

Yet before we all throw in the towel, accept that our climate is done for and buy as much land and weaponry in Tasmania as we can, we need to ask of these figures: are they really based on the ‘most optimistic’ scenarios?

I believe they are not.  I believe that there is something immensely important missing from their calculations.

I’ll try to explain.

Climate science tells of natural ‘slow feedback mechanisms’ at work within the climate system, which act to amplify global warming. An example is the melting ice poles. As they melt, they begin to reflect less light back into space, causing further warming, which causes further melting, and so on in a vicious cycle. Another is the ‘permafrost’. This is frozen soil which, when thawed by warming temperatures, releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, causing further warming, which then thaws more permafrost, and while these are only two of many, by now you should be getting the picture. Read the rest of this entry »

As one of the organizers of what many consider to be quite an extreme action, I have often been confronted with the opinion that extreme actions ‘alienate the mainstream’, and by so doing harm the formation of a broad-based social movement. In fact, the truth may be quite the opposite.

Studies* into the psychology of responses to emergency alarms note that humans, by our nature, do not respond to warning signals by immediately taking emergency action. Instead, we look for cues, often in the actions of others, to determine our response. It often takes numerous warnings, plus the sight of others taking actions compatible with the presence of an emergency, before people will respond to an emergency situation. For example, if a person hears a fire alarm in a shopping centre, they will not immediately run for the exit. Instead, they will look around to see the way others are reacting before deciding how to respond.

We can see this tendency at work in the way society is reacting to the climate crisis. Despite warnings being sounded, people are by and large still not responding in an emergency manner. Instead, many are looking around and seeing their families and neighbours continuing with life-as-usual, and are receiving confusing messages from the media. To make an apt analogy, people are in the shopping centre and are hearing an alarm, but many of the cues around them are telling them to keep on shopping.

The lesson here for climate activists is a relatively simple one. In order to shift our societies at large from business as usual into the emergency response mode that is needed to adequately confront the climate crisis, we need to constantly provide people with evidence that we are in a drastically urgent situation that requires them to respond accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

In recent times, it seems to have become accepted as gospel within the Australian climate movement that our message must move to a promotion of ‘green jobs’. Australians, we are told, are convinced that climate change is real, and that something must be done about it. Yet within the current recession, voters are thinking first and foremost about job security, so we must focus our media messaging upon breaking the ‘jobs versus the environment’ frame, and convince Australians that a clean energy revolution would create vast new fields of employment. Having done this, the argument goes, the public will finally be fully onside.