None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town Continue reading »
climate
“The evidence is compelling that human exceptionalism is a deeply-flawed construct – a grand cultural illusion – that has led modern techno-industrial societies into a potentially fatal ecological trap.” William Rees, Author, The Human Ecology of Overshoot. The long-standing, gender-dominant human cultural course has come to its final dark expression. The question now is, will Continue reading »
Doesn’t matter how much harm fossil fuels cause, governments have an ‘Everlasting Love’ for subsidising them, so no surprise that coal and oil consumption is increasing. The global love affair with electricity started in 1950. Fossil fuel subsidies keep increasing According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the optimal (or efficient) price of fossil Continue reading »
On assuming office, one of Prime Minister Albanese’s first actions was to task the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to review the security threats posed by climate change. The report was finalised in late 2022 but not made public. Accordingly, a “release the ONI report” campaign has dominated climate-security discourse over much of 2023. Foreign Continue reading »
“Climate breakdown has begun,” the UN’s Antonio Guterres has declared, after the world’s hottest three months on record.
The post Labor’s coal expansion fuels climate breakdown first appeared on Solidarity Online.
The UN International Day of Peace is next week, September 21st. It is a day for rekindling our noblest aspirations. Imagine even a day when the whole planet was at peace. A day when our most attractive power, our capacity to love, was all one could see. A day when not one person was killed Continue reading »
In May 1971, I published a full-page letter in The Australian addressed ‘To Those Who Shape Australia’s Destiny’. It was signed by 730 Australian scientists including Sir Mark Oliphant and Sir Macfarlane Burnett. The letter concluded with these words: “For biological and ecological reasons civilisation based on the present western technology cannot survive much longer. Continue reading »
Current articles on the government’s climate policies increasingly use words such as reckless, hypocrisy and betrayal referring to approval of coal mines. But it is even more difficult to find words to describe the gas industry’s infliction of pain on humanity by the approval of gas mines. It is a shock to many that coalmine Continue reading »
A good way to scare people is to suggest your chief security body has written something so frightening that you can’t possibly let anyone read anything about it. Or maybe your top spooks have just produced something that would embarrass the government greatly, and therefore it really must stay hidden. It’s more likely to be Continue reading »
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society” – Jiddu Krishnamurti It’s one of the most revealing ironies of our time, namely, the obsession with health and wellbeing while we, in wealthy nations, have never been so sick. Soul sick. There’s nothing new about this. James Hillman in Continue reading »