Aussies: NSW Politicians, keeping ICAC in business

[Free Northman Reborn]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Australia's interior doesn't just need water to grow stuff. Most of Australia has very low fertility soil, so if you want to grow useful stuff you also need to truck in a shitload of fertiliser, on a regular basis.

And of course a lot of Australia's interior doesn't burn, because there's nothing there to burn. Most of the wildfires are coastal, because those areas get rain and thus there's more lush vegetation there to build up a nice base of kindling on the ground.

Aussie has a lot of sunshine and cloudless days. If you want to do some big engineering project how about solar electricity? Aussie could probably be 100% weaned off fossil fuel electricity in 10 years with mega solar energy projects. Elon Musk thinks China could be 100% solar with a 50x bigger population and less sun (I think he's dreaming, but he might be right). So Aussie should be able to get there quicker and easier than China.

We have the technology to do this, we just need the political will.

I have family over there who are safe for now. The scale is mindblowing. This is the first time I recall large parts of New Zealand have been blanketed in smoke haze from Australian bushfires. But despite the devastation and suffering, somehow this does not appear to be a wake up call for those who need to wake the hell up.

Absolutely agree on the solar angle. Elon tweeted that a solar farm covering a 100 mile by 100 mile corner of Texas could power the entire US.

In Australia this makes even more sense. But it has to be coupled with massive battery storage to ensure around the clock power availability. 

EDIT

To be clear, while this is a good idea in its own right, it won’t impact the bushfire threat at all, given the previously stated fact that Australia’s emissions make almost no difference to global warming.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Absolutely agree on the solar angle. Elon tweeted that a solar farm covering a 100 mile by 100 mile corner of Texas could power the entire US.

In Australia this makes even more sense. But it has to be coupled with massive battery storage to ensure around the clock power availability. 

EDIT

To be clear, while this is a good idea in its own right, it won’t impact the bushfire threat at all, given the previously stated fact that Australia’s emissions make almost no difference to global warming.

Australia cutting emissions makes a helluva lot more moral and political difference than continuing down the denial, do nothing and head in the sand path does. But hope for the best and prepare for the worst and all that, countries like Aussie should be moral leaders in cutting emissions while still taking mitigation steps against worst case, or even less than ideal case, situations. As the Arab saying goes, trust in God but tie your camel.

Small and medium countries have to show moral leadership by cutting emissions even though it won't be enough without the likes of US and China playing ball.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

You'd think having this disaster showing the cost of just a single year of +1.5C would spur some political will to start future proofing our economy, its not like there aren't massive economic benefits (completely separate from avoiding the costs of inaction) in being one of the first countries to have mass affordable renewable energy.

But our political class is so fucking bought by fossil fuel industries and fear of a few thousand miners that will lose their jobs when the super mines are entirely automated anyway.

The interesting thing is that the right wing govts have nothing really to lose by being the ones to bring in climate change reforms. It's not like the left is going to cry about the potential loss of mining jobs as a vote grabbing strategy. And while the fossil industry might donate less to the right wing parties, they won't be throwing money at the left. So the only question is how big is the complete and utter denial segment of the electorate, and how many seats does that mean possibly giving up to far right groups?

[Raja]

On 1/6/2020 at 3:10 AM, Impmk2 said:

Edit: My 6am reading comprehension is pretty terrible. You were looking for a website with analysis, not a run down. Not too sure if there's a good one exclusively covering Australian politics? I mostly look at the Australian ABC, and the conversation which has good opinion pieces from a variety of experts. 

That's totally okay, as someone who knows zilch about Australian politics, I didn't mind the run down. And thanks for the link!

[Paxter]

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The interesting thing is that the right wing govts have nothing really to lose by being the ones to bring in climate change reforms. It's not like the left is going to cry about the potential loss of mining jobs as a vote grabbing strategy. And while the fossil industry might donate less to the right wing parties, they won't be throwing money at the left. So the only question is how big is the complete and utter denial segment of the electorate, and how many seats does that mean possibly giving up to far right groups?

I’m not sure that’s true when you’re facing razor-thin majorities in the lower house and a barely workable Senate. Sometimes Australian voters get the shitty policies they deserve.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Good god, the numbers I just heard were jarring. It’s now estimated that 500,000,000 animals have died because of the fires, and this is made worse by the fact 80% of species found in Australia are unique to the continent. And the fires may continue for months.

[felice]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

And the fires may continue for months.

And after that there's next summer to look forward to

[The Anti-Targ]

2 hours ago, felice said:

And after that there's next summer to look forward to

At least there won't be sufficient regrowth in these areas to re-burn there for a very long time. I do wonder what Australia's ancient natural history is with large scale bushfire cycles. Given the nature of the place these sorts of events including of this scale may have happened in pre-historic / pre-human times. This scale of fire might not be unprecedented, but it might be a once in several millennia event.

Just thinking about the smoke haze over New Zealand and wondering about how much organic matter has permanently left Australia? A continent that is already not very fertile throwing tonnes of ash from some of its most fertile land into the air and it floating out into the Tasman sea, over New Zealand and further afield.

7 hours ago, Paxter said:

I’m not sure that’s true when you’re facing razor-thin majorities in the lower house and a barely workable Senate. Sometimes Australian voters get the shitty policies they deserve.

Sure, but who are they going to lose the seats to? Unlikely they will lose seats to the left if they are implementing god climate change policy, so the far right may pick up seats and force a hung parliament, but who are they going to go with if not the Lib-Nats? And if they won't go with anyone the Lib-Nats could try to operate as a minority govt assuming they are the biggest party in the lower house.

[Paxter]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Sure, but who are they going to lose the seats to? Unlikely they will lose seats to the left if they are implementing god climate change policy, so the far right may pick up seats and force a hung parliament, but who are they going to go with if not the Lib-Nats? And if they won't go with anyone the Lib-Nats could try to operate as a minority govt assuming they are the biggest party in the lower house.

The centre-right in Australia is terrified of losing ground on the right. Why do you think they dumped MT when they realised that he was not in favour in QLD? They are not interested in sharing power.

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

At least there won't be sufficient regrowth in these areas to re-burn there for a very long time. I do wonder what Australia's ancient natural history is with large scale bushfire cycles. Given the nature of the place these sorts of events including of this scale may have happened in pre-historic / pre-human times. This scale of fire might not be unprecedented, but it might be a once in several millennia event.

Sadly not true, although I guess becoming more true. These fire conditions have been so bad that areas which previously would have been safe, which includes relatively recent regrowth, are actually burning again. That's having the knock on effect of discovering that the vegetation which has adapted to the burn/spread seeds/regrow cycle don't recover fast enough for this rate of burning. They need about 10 years between burns and some of them have now had 3 within 5 and they're not looking good at all.

As for previous cycles - Australia has had humans living here for a very very long time, and they have been involved in the burning cycles for tens of thousands of years, so all the "recent" evidence of fire activity is human influenced. I'm not sure how well they can try identify what happened prior to Indigenous settlement, you'd probably need ice core samples from NZ glaciers to look for other periods that may have been such a large fire to deposit a layer of ash there? But I have no idea how old the NZ glaciers even are. 

 

[HexMachina]

I’ve seen a few articles that some of these fires were started deliberately by arsonists. However the sources are all highly dubious - the Sun, the Mail, etc. So i am naturally doubtful of the truth of such claims. Can anyone offer some insight please?

[Paxter]

Growing up in bushfire-prone Perth, we just took arson for granted as one of the sources of fires. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at least some of the most recent fires were deliberately lit.

[karaddin]

3 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

I’ve seen a few articles that some of these fires were started deliberately by arsonists. However the sources are all highly dubious - the Sun, the Mail, etc. So i am naturally doubtful of the truth of such claims. Can anyone offer some insight please?

Follow your instincts Padawan, they do you justice.

Yes there is some arson, there is always some arson. The flip side of that of course is that there has always been arson but its never done this before. The conditions are apocalyptically primed for fires which makes it much easier for them to race out of control and take on a life of their own. The arson angle is the line that the climate deniers have taken and is 1000% propaganda. That and blaming the Greens for the lack of hazard reduction burning despite the fact that a) there is hazard reduction burning whenever it can be done safely and b) the reason less of it is happening is the shrinking window due to the conditions getting so much more dangerous. This was covered this morning by the NSW Fire Commissioner and I'm happy to link a video from him on here.

The "respectable" arson narrative is that its just regular arson, the batshit conspiracy theory is that its climate activists doing it to try force policy. I expect the batshit variant to be pushed by supposedly reputable news organisations shortly, but they're very much already pushing the arson and the Greens are to blame angles. Most of the fires start on their own, or are secondary fires started by already burning ones - these things are burning hot enough to melt aluminium 

 

Send up millions of embers that start new fires if they land anywhere with fuel, and create their own thunderstorm systems which cause further fires with lightning strikes. The thunderstorm thing is supposed to be rare but you can see a bunch of them happening towards the end of this video when the smoke basically starts bubbling.

 

[HexMachina]

15 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Follow your instincts Padawan, they do you justice.

Yes there is some arson, there is always some arson. The flip side of that of course is that there has always been arson but its never done this before. The conditions are apocalyptically primed for fires which makes it much easier for them to race out of control and take on a life of their own. The arson angle is the line that the climate deniers have taken and is 1000% propaganda. That and blaming the Greens for the lack of hazard reduction burning despite the fact that a) there is hazard reduction burning whenever it can be done safely and b) the reason less of it is happening is the shrinking window due to the conditions getting so much more dangerous. This was covered this morning by the NSW Fire Commissioner and I'm happy to link a video from him on here.

The "respectable" arson narrative is that its just regular arson, the batshit conspiracy theory is that its climate activists doing it to try force policy. I expect the batshit variant to be pushed by supposedly reputable news organisations shortly, but they're very much already pushing the arson and the Greens are to blame angles. Most of the fires start on their own, or are secondary fires started by already burning ones - these things are burning hot enough to melt aluminium 

 

Send up millions of embers that start new fires if they land anywhere with fuel, and create their own thunderstorm systems which cause further fires with lightning strikes. The thunderstorm thing is supposed to be rare but you can see a bunch of them happening towards the end of this video when the smoke basically starts bubbling.

 

Thank you, that’s really informative and i suspected the headlines from those sources would, speaking generously, not be the full story. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Edit: Never mind.

[The Drunkard]

On 1/7/2020 at 4:33 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

The interesting thing is that the right wing govts have nothing really to lose by being the ones to bring in climate change reforms. It's not like the left is going to cry about the potential loss of mining jobs as a vote grabbing strategy. And while the fossil industry might donate less to the right wing parties, they won't be throwing money at the left. So the only question is how big is the complete and utter denial segment of the electorate, and how many seats does that mean possibly giving up to far right groups?

I think they do. It's one less front on which to wage the culture war. The amount of people I speak to that rail against the Greens, the ALP, the supposedly ever-growing number of arsonists and whoever else other than the people responsible is larger than I would've expected. If the LNP starts implementing Greens/ALP or adjacent policies they've lost that edge.

On 1/8/2020 at 9:38 AM, HelenaExMachina said:

I’ve seen a few articles that some of these fires were started deliberately by arsonists. However the sources are all highly dubious - the Sun, the Mail, etc. So i am naturally doubtful of the truth of such claims. Can anyone offer some insight please?

Many probably were. In previous years there's almost been a majority of fires that were deliberately lit or suspicious in nature, with the bulk of the rest being man-made but accidental (like due to trains, tools, campfires, kids, etc.). The discussion should be about the severity of the bushfires in future and our ability to respond given we'll never be able to prevent them beginning, which is all going to be about the effects of climate change and the cost of inaction, but the LNP and their rags don't want to talk about that. 

[The Anti-Targ]

55 minutes ago, The Drunkard said:

I think they do. It's one less front on which to wage the culture war. The amount of people I speak to that rail against the Greens, the ALP, the supposedly ever-growing number of arsonists and whoever else other than the people responsible is larger than I would've expected. If the LNP starts implementing Greens/ALP or adjacent policies they've lost that edge.

Many probably were. In previous years there's almost been a majority of fires that were deliberately lit or suspicious in nature, with the bulk of the rest being man-made but accidental (like due to trains, tools, campfires, kids, etc.). The discussion should be about the severity of the bushfires in future and our ability to respond given we'll never be able to prevent them beginning, which is all going to be about the effects of climate change and the cost of inaction, but the LNP and their rags don't want to talk about that. 

The thing is, right of centre parties have historically implemented progressive policies that left of centre parties would be reactively and harshly criticised by the right of centre party if the left parties tried to implement them while in power. And they rely 1) on the left parties saying "they are not going far enough", and 2) the tendency of the mainstream support base to fall into line and repeat the party talking points. The political right hates minimum wage, yet right wing govts increase the minimum wage (where is already exists) almost as much as left wing parties. The political right hates state schools and public hospitals. But, where they already exist, the vast majority of right wing govts continue to increase funding, of those state institutions. Right wing govts have also implemented environmental legislation in the past and implemented and continued to support conservation policies. Right wing governments have come around to same sex marriage.

I think the thing that is stopping the political ight from really acting on climate change is that too many who are at the top are either of the totally deluded denier type, or they still have doubt believing that there really is legitimate debate among the scientific community about whether human activity is causing climate change. So despite the shit that is happening before their eyes (in the case of Australia right now) they are not actually willing to really believe that burning oil, coal etc is a lot to blame for the scale of this thing.

[Jeor]

The political problem with the right is that too many of them are neck-deep with industry ties.

While there are a few very vocal climate change deniers in the Coalition, I don't think by any means they're representative of the caucus or rank and file. My take is that their opposition to environmental and climate change policies is not based on the science (despite what some of the vocal crazies say) but based on their version of political pragmatism.

Conservative governments don't have a huge majority, so every little advantage matters - and with the recent federal election we saw how Queensland swung to the Coalition and essentially delivered them government (obviously Shorten's unpopularity and the scare campaign on Labor policies were a big part of it too). But the federal election result only served to reinforce the narrative that the Coalition has something to gain by inaction on climate change.

Probably the best middle road for them would be to boost investment in renewable energy (solar power being the obvious one in Australia, as noted by previous posters - but the coal industry will push back and has a few Liberals in their pocket), and to push lots of very publicly visible grassroots initiatives. If the Coalition wants to get on the front foot with the environment, they need to help people be more environmentally-conscious. Some of it veers into state government rather than federal.

But on the back of these bushfires, you would think the public would be very amenable to things such as permanent (though maybe lesser) water restrictions, bans on certain plastic (NSW has already stopped plastic bags in supermarkets), support for electric cars, more energy-efficient appliances, etc. General advice and promotion of energy-saving, water-saving and rubbish-saving strategies. It probably wouldn't cost the government very much (monetarily or politically) but it would start mobilising the population. Let's face it - the government isn't going to be able to fix things while everyone sits back (much as a lazy section of the population would want it to), but it does need to lead and incentivise people to do the right thing.

[karaddin]

I dropped this in the US Politics but its just as relevant to the conversation going on in here at the moment. This twitter thread earlier in the week from Adam Liaw (who I only knew as a Chef, but is also apparently a lawyer and clearly on the intelligent and well educated end of things) establishes a lot of the geopolitical and economic pressures that resist action on climate change. There is a bunch in it that I didn't know, or conclusions I'd failed to make, but a very short summary of one of the main takeaways is this:

The US has spent more than 100 years establishing itself with dominant access to fossil fuels as a strategic advantage over potential rivals, such as China. If the world actually transitions to renewable energy, that colossal investment from the global hegemon goes up in smoke (or fails to go up in smoke as the case may be) and allows China to take a giant leap forward catching up. This also explains why China seems much more interested in developing renewables, its in their strategic interests rather than it being the opposite like it is for the US.

[My added interpretations] As a nation heavily allied with the US, Australia is both heavily influenced by American politics - both directly from being its ally and indirectly by unpleasant right wing extremists trying to import their culture war - and thus there are some heavy pressures to align with their interests despite our clear excellent position for pioneering renewables and denial of how badly climate change will fuck us.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1213949476391374848.html

That thread also explains why there would be so much focus on Iran at this exact moment in time, when China is closing the gap and is close to gaining major advantages from renewables, but needs fossil fuels still to get over the hump. Iran is one of the keys in China's oil supply. I don't think that explains Trump, but I think it explains some of the people around him that want to do it though.

[Paxter]

I know it's a very minor story in the scheme of things, but I'm quite pleased that Bernardi's 13-year political career is now over. His party's struggles to gain traction in SA and beyond (even after combining forces with Family First) really bring home the point that, at least outside of QLD, there is no electoral appetite in Australia for a more pure form of conservative politics. This is quite distinct from Europe, where fringe right-wing parties have gained a lot of support in recent years. 

On the downside, the supposedly centre-right Governments we have seen since 2013 have tapped in to Bernard-style policies a lot more than I would like. Ironically, Bernardi's biggest impact may have been on the party he so dramatically (and mischievously) abandoned.