Tag Archives: conservation

Bag Gladstone

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Look every so often you come across something so mind-numbingly insane, so off-the-planet crazy, that you think you have wandered into a National Party conference by mistake, and in this case I probably have. Warning – some sporadic bad language may follow.

There was this state in Australia, see, a kind of a magical place. Had everything – mountains, sweeping plains, rich volcanic and alluvial soils, endless grasslands, tropical forests, more biodiversity than you could poke a shotgun at. You could run healthy cattle in huge numbers, and grow crops ranging from cool temperate grapes and vegetables to tropical fruits like bananas and mangoes.

And then, and then, it had a long coastline in tropical waters. Rainforest grew down to white sandy beaches, rivers fed by tropical rains flowed to the sea, mangroves grew in estuaries and on coasts. And the sea. Sparkling blue, warm, with astonishing diversity of marine life, especially since under the waters was the world’s biggest coral reef, and above the waters a chain of thousands of tropical islands. The seas provided abundant fish and crustaceans and molluscs, all healthy and unpolluted.

So people clamoured to buy the agricultural and marine food products from the state. And many more clamoured to visit the natural wonders of ocean, reef, forest and outback. Enjoying a lifestyle, if only briefly, found nowhere else on the planet, and looking in awe at the natural animal and plant wonders of sea and land.

Too good to be true? That’s what the developers and miners and corporations and their political friends thought. Queensland politicians. Bet you’d guessed that already. No point in distinguishing what kind of Qld politicians because it makes no difference at all.

Anyway these bastards got together and decided they didn’t want the state that had been provided to them by hundreds of millions of years of evolution and an incredibly lucky accident of geography. Decided they could care less about a lifestyle for its inhabitants that was the envy of the world, most of whom wanted to visit to sample it. Decided that although they and their friends had made millions out of showing off their lovely state and selling its excellent food products, this wasn’t good enough. Decided that if they wanted to make billions, and they did, they would need to start digging up and drilling for some rather nasty stuff that had lain underground for hundreds of millions of years. Dig it up quick, flog it off, get money. Simple equation.

Just two small flaws in this otherwise excellent cunning plan. Getting this ghastly stuff out from underground tended to pollute the farming country – soil, rivers, aquifers. And shipping it overseas meant shipping it down to the coast, into harbours, on to ships, and out through the amazing reef.

But none of the people who were going to become very rich, or their political enablers, gave, and here I resort to alliteration, a flying fuck about the flaws. In fact it seemed that the more damage they could cause the better – one in the eye for all those do-good hippies, and farmers and tourist operators and fishermen. Men? None of them real men. Not like miners and shippers and developers. Men so tough they were prepared to destroy a whole state and a 2000km long coral reef and millions of years of evolution and millions of years of ecosystem development just to prove their toughness. Only to be outdone in toughness by the politicians who thought the destruction wasn’t happening fast enough.

And here we are. Rich farming land being wrecked. Rivers, estuaries, bays being dredged, mangroves removed, ports enlarged, toxic waste dumped near reefs, massive increase in shipping, oil spills, animal collisions, dying fish and dugongs. From the south of the state through Gladstone (now focus of massive destruction) all the way up to Bathurst Bay (Bathurst Bay – if that doesn’t signal what is wrong nothing does). Ongoing and increasing damage to the marine ecosystem and the reef itself, already under great threat as climate change impacts the oceans through heat and acidity. Ongoing and increasing damage to terrestrial biodiversity, already under threat from rising temperatures and increasing storms through climate change.

But wait, there’s more. And this is the icing on the cake, the flag in the National Party lapel. This is the part that has me screaming at the tv “What the fuck do you people think you are doing? Yes Anna, that includes you.”

The nasty stuff they are digging up, drilling for, shipping off overseas? Carbon that when burnt will greatly worsen the climate change already affecting this state. You following me? Wrecking the state in order to send off stuff that will wreck the state even more, in a process the term “vicious cycle” could have been invented for.

I’d suggest that we should take Queensland away from the Queenslanders. Except, and this is where my story turns from anger to sadness, the other states are just as bad.

Icebergs ahead

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by Economics, Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

The other day a container ship ran aground north of New Zealand. Have to be specific because these events happen over and over. As do the scenes of people trying to clean beaches of toxic oil, wash living seabirds and bury dead ones. As do the unseen scenes on the rocks and under the waves, as fish and molluscs and crustaceans and micro-organisms die, and ecosystems stop functioning. As do the press conferences from prime ministers and ministers promising inquiries and revenge and to make sure it “never happens again”. As does media interest. Until the media cycle is over and the cameras disappear to some other newsworthy event.

Until the next time. Because the outrage from public and politicians lasts only a short time and then the event is forgotten. And outrage is reserved for any environmentalist who dares to suggest a bit more regulation of shipping to stop these events happening. Will be dismissed contemptuously by media and politicians alike as a greenie trying to get in the way of profits and jobs, a throwback who doesn’t understand that shipping companies do a much better job of self-regulation and governments should get out of the way.

Then another ship will grind to a halt somewhere and the whole sequence will start all over again.

A demonstration the other day outside Parliament House (a quiet and civilised one in contrast to the “anti-carbon tax” nastiness) about Alzheimers. Bravo to Ita Buttrose for supporting this cause. Small numbers at the protest, just the tip of the iceberg of sufferers now, and as the Australian population ages (including me) the number of Alzheimer’s patients will grow larger and larger. More expense, more carers needed, more anguish for the patient and their family. Another case where an ounce of prevention is worth several tonnes of cure, and the protesters were calling on more research (from scientists of course) to improve treatment, establish causes, and, one day, find a cure (or cures, there are a number of different forms of dementia apparently).

Governments, of all persuasions, everywhere, seem psychologically unable to spent small amounts (relatively) of money now in order to prevent large problems (costing large amounts) later. They especially seem to hate funding research. So they keep blundering along in the dark, driven either by ideology or faulty information (usually both), trying to do patch up jobs, solve a bit of a problem here, a bit there, leaving most of it for successor governments to deal with (or not) at some later date.

Takes a long time and a lot of research to find out where the icebergs are, plan a course, slow and turn the Titanic, no matter what the major environmental or social problem. It’s time governments started funding research, and re-regulating business, to prevent disasters.

Cry me a river

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

When all the sound and fury erupted over efforts to save the Murray-Darling River system and Craig Knowles was appointed to settle things down there were comments from the government that there needed to be a political solution to find a compromise between the “demands” of the scientists and the demands of the irrigators. This political response was not surprising. The irrigators had simply behaved in the way that a number of other groups have been behaving – miners, alcohol industry, clubs, tobacco industry – when there is any attempt to change their activities for the benefit of society. The formula is simple. Gather together a small number of people in a public place, give them signs to hold up, tell them to make a lot of noise when the tv cameras are rolling, arrange for a “stunt” to happen (burning books for example), accompany it with a well funded tv advertising campaign in which small children, little old ladies and honest small businessmen will be ruined. Ruined. In short, make a lot of noise.

Governments, like people with babies, don’t like a lot of noise. Will do anything to make it stop, get a bit of peace. Will sack one minister, appoint a new one, sack a public servant or two, announce to the media that you have directed that compromise will be found. Win-win solution found. Small children rescued from starvation. Everyone happy. Government re-elected.

Now while that approach may work in situations (site of a new school for example) where political compromise is appropriate, the case of the river (and other ecological issues) is different. The “compromise” for the river is somewhere between taking no water from the river, and therefore letting it at least partially return to its original good health, and taking as much water as the irrigators are already taking and therefore destroying the river as an ecosystem. Fine. Except that in this case the scientists had already worked out that compromise. So what was being said was that a new compromise was going to be reached between the figure that was needed to maintain a minimally functioning river and a totally damaged one, with the emphasis, it was said, on the needs of the irrigators. That is, this compromise was pushed even further down towards the business as usual situation that has so badly damaged the ecology of the river in the last 50 years or so.

Political compromises don’t work in the environment, you can’t make bargains with mother nature. If you want to maintain at least some ecological functions (and believe me, you do) while continuing to exploit some aspect of the environment then ask the scientists for a figure. Don’t ask the politicians. Or the irrigators.

Firing ahead

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by Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A short piece for you to go on with while I get the next longer post written. I know quite a few of you are interested in the topic of Aboriginal economy and fire and the Australian environment, one of my major research interests “back in the day” (oh what a horrible phrase that is, who would use it?).

One of the great friends of Watermelon sent me this link to a talk on fire by Dr Arn Tolsma who I hadn’t come across before. He explores very nicely the themes I have been following since the late 1970s – that Australian habitats are not “adapted to fire”; that there is no evidence that Aboriginal use of fire affected the environment; and that use of prescribed burning in fire prevention activities damages the environment.

These issues are also explored in the following recent publications:

Vital Importance of Habitat S. Don Bradshaw Australasian Science November-December 2009

Mooney, S.D., et al., Late Quaternary fire regimes of Australasia, Quaternary Science Reviews (2010) doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.10.010

Little evidence for fire-adapted plant traits in Mediterranean climate regions S. Don Bradshaw, Kingsley W. Dixon, Stephen D. Hopper, Hans Lambers and Shane R.Turner Trends in Plant Science February 2011

Good to see the ideas I have been exploring over more than 30 years (see tabs above – “History” and “Fire”), and been alternately criticised or ignored for doing so, being developed with firm evidence by other brave researchers.

Haunting houses

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

Are you familiar with the tv program “Grand Designs” in which people unaccountably decide to build houses accompanied by Kevin McCloud prophesying disaster at every turn? Always interesting though because of the great range of projects. I find especially interesting those that involve “restoring” or “converting” some old, often very old (this being Britain), building.

On the evidence of this show heritage/local council authorities in Britain seem to have wildly different ideas about how to keep historic buildings in the landscape. Some are allowed to rot and be vandalised with no effort at protection, in others owners are prevented from doing minimal structural work to stop them falling down, others are forced to do silly things with roofing or cladding, others can essentially demolish a building and then rebuild it differently in the name of “preservation”.

There is probably a similar mish-mash across Australia, based on my observations. Is the reason a lack of public interest in preserving our history? A lack of funding for government heritage departments? A piecemeal approach between and within local councils? A general local government philosophy that values development over conservation? A resistance by individual property owners to valuing the old over the new?

Probably all of the above. But I reckon the British people are going to wake up one day and say “what happened to our local histories?” (the big stuff like castles is safe). I think in Australia we might as a country start to take stock of what we have in the way of historic buildings, and develop a plan for the survival of all of the most historically important ones (as well as Aboriginal sites which need their own approach).

Otherwise we too will wake up and find the last old farmhouse, or pub, or shearing shed, has blown down in a storm, and can’t be restored. Nor can we restore the memories, the sense of earlier times, the lives of our ancestors, that those buildings once represented.

Lost is lost and gone is gone forever.

But now we want our money back

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by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , ,

In 1975 anthropologist Hannah Middleton published a book on Aboriginal land rights called “But now we want our land back”. The title was a quote from one of the Aboriginal people she worked with. It’s many decades since I read it, and I can’t remember what interpretation she placed on the phrase, which was often quoted in the years that followed. But I reckon the meaning was along these lines. When white fellas arrived in Australia they laid claim to individual ownership of pieces of land – owned them, used them, excluded others from them, grew rich from them. This attitude to land was completely alien to the Aboriginal people watching this process with some bemusement (while trying to avoid being killed as they tried to keep using their ancestral lands to sustain themselves). “Silly white fellas, how could you own land? Land owned you.” Land was owned by everyone and no one in an Aboriginal group – no individual could alienate a piece of land from the rest of the group, the concept made no sense. Still, if the white fellas wanted to pretend that it did make sense, behave in this silly way, let them get on with it, they would come to their senses one day.

But they never did, and the consequences of their behaviour impacted every Aboriginal person on the continent. By the 1970s they had had enough – OK, you’ve had your fun, we went along with the joke for 200 years, but now we want our land back.

I feel the same way about the rise and rise in the number of billionaires, the result, all around the world, of policies (including very low tax policies) designed specifically to cause a rise and rise in the number of billionaires. We all know, don’t we, that you can’t really have such disparities of wealth in society. Oh we can pretend for a while that it is real, laugh along at the antics of the nouveau rich and the oldeau rich as they flaunt their Lamborghinis and diamonds and influence on politicians, but we all know it is as silly a concept as owning land in an Aboriginal society.

Quite apart from the damage to society that such grotesque differences in wealth cause (just as damage to Aboriginal society would be caused by individual land ownership), their origin lies, ultimately, in grotesquely unequal exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Directly or indirectly a billionaire can only be created by using millions of times the resources, destroying millions of times the ecology, spewing out millions of times the amount of greenhouse gas, as your ordinary everyday existing-on-a-few-hundred-dollars-a-year member of the rest of the 7 billion non-billionaire citizens of the planet.

So it was fun for a while, going along with this fairytale of how good billionaires were for the Earth, but now the party is over, now it is getting serious, and now we want our money back. Now is the time for every country in the world to tax billionaires at a 99% rate (still leave them with at least ten million dollars each, but I’m a generous man, and a Lamborghini is not cheap to run given its petrol consumption). The resulting billions, trillions of dollars, to be poured into replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, protecting and repairing damaged ecosystems; and providing decent health care, and sustainable housing and employment and agricultural enterprises for the rest of the population of the world.

They’ll be happy enough, the billionaires, I reckon, had a good run, knew it couldn’t last forever. Can hear them now, singing along, CD in the Lamborghini sound system, with a former radical rock star (now minister in a socialist wealth-redistributing Labor government of course) “The time has come, to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share”. To the world.

Rare Earth

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the report about “rare earths” a group of, obviously, rare minerals now apparently essential for all sorts of electronic goods and military purposes. China has pretty much cornered the market on them and other countries are trying to find other sources so as to have a competitive market. Trouble is they are hard to find, and are in low concentrations so you need to dig out huge volumes of soil/rock and process it, and there are waste products notably radioactive ones which need to be somehow disposed of. Now given all that you would think our government would get scientists on to finding alternatives to rare earths, but no, some Australian mining companies are gearing up to find and mine the stuff and to hell with the damage they cause. Money to be made.

This approach of getting stuff you can’t eat from underground, while wrecking the land above that can produce food, is already in operation with the fight over coal seam gas extraction. Tony Abbott got himself into trouble the other day, wavering between appeasing his own party’s supporters the miners, or the National’s supporters in the farmers. He finished up satisfying neither. But given the lack of really good deep rich soils in Australia, the proposition that we should wreck some of the best in southern Qld and northern NSW, extracting gas in a process that pollutes soil and water supplies and will add to greenhouse gas production when burnt, seems, politely, insane.

On the other hand we can actually improve our farming land. Starting in the 1930s when Louis Bromfield discovered the benefits of minimum tillage and retaining humus in the damaged farming soils of America, the benefits of such an approach are rediscovered every few years. But in recent years an added incentive, if one was needed, for retaining and building organic content, is the idea that such practices can help in removing CO2 from the air and “fixing it”. The government and Greens have just passed a bill (opposed by the Coalition) in which farmers will be paid a price per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. At the time of writing I don’t have the details of the bill and while it is a win-win situation for farmers and the environment, the price will need to be high enough to not only encourage farmers to build carbon levels in soil, but to maintain those practices over decades. In addition, for it to have any significant impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the areas needed will be huge (say a million hectares or more). So it isn’t any kind of “answer” to climate change but every little helps, and being paid to build soil organic matter seems like a good deal to me.

Anyway, it’s certainly better than digging huge open cut mines and spreading thorium, or injecting stuff into coal seams and polluting the water table.

Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore” or, more importantly, I say, “take care of your farming land, they certainly aren’t making any more of that.”

Alive with the dead

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by Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Jennifer over at No Place For Sheep has pre-empted, almost word for word, what I had intended to write today. She sets out nicely the kind of conservative mentality embodied by David Cameron, to whom the answer to any social problem, indeed any protest of any kind, is more and more repression by more and more police armed with more and more weapons.

Still, speaking of David Cameron, sort of, let’s talk about a more pleasant subject, sort of. I have, for well over half a century (gawd I hate having to say things like that), been a fan of Richard Jefferies, ever since I came across his “Bevis”, one of the best books for/about boys ever written. I thought, as a child, that this was his claim to fame, but then discovered much later his major career as one of the first and greatest nature writers (including the nature of cities, and a great understanding of farming life, I am delighted to own a first edition of “Hodge and his masters”, a terrific affectionate account of farming in England in his time) of the nineteenth century.

Then discovered through this article that, stunningly, the place where Jeffries had grown up, the places he knew and described in Bevis and the rest of his books, was under threat from a local council full of people who seemed to have no idea of who this local hero was and to care less. They want to bulldoze the lot and put a housing estate over the fields where Richard (and young Bevis), ran and played and observed the world around them.

As Jack Watkins says in The Independent article “Jefferies’ books are being read once more. They carry heightened value at a time when a backsliding David Cameron has gone from vowing to make his government “the greenest ever” to preparing a loosening of the planning rules that could unleash a bonfire of the countryside.” he also points out that “Jefferies, reared on the homely terrain at Coate, urged us to seek uncommon species in common places. A commonplace flower held as much delight for him as a rare one. No wonder the planners of Swindon would have us believe he wasn’t a major writer. He was their spiritual enemy, and his prose still hounds them from his grave, 120 years after his death”. (he died of tb aged just 38 in 1887, a great loss, in the house pictured below at Goring on the south coast of England which I visited in 2001)

Well the Jefferies Land Conservation Trust organised a petition to the council and in June won the first battle, although the developers are to appeal.

Does any of this matter to us not living near Swindon? John Donne, wrote “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am part of mankind” and we could modify that to read “The death of any piece of nature diminishes me, for I am part of the world”. Of course climate change is the big game in town, and we all have to keep fighting to get change on that frightening front. But all over the world groups like the Jefferies Land Conservation Trust are fighting to preserve small pieces of the environment against overwhelming odds. I am just reading Naomi Oreskes “The merchants of doubt” about the massive investment by those who want no part of the environment anywhere any time ever protected.

People like the Koch brothers in America, and the mining company executives of Australia have huge financial resources, the support of the mainstream media and the cacophony of voices from the fake astroturf groups they have established. The least we can do is fightback where possible, using the web to ensure that no one fights alone for our precious planet.

As Watkins says “Officialdom, if it had its way, would like to parcel up the best parts of the countryside into “approved” areas, facilitating a developers’ profitable free-for-all over the remainder, having thought it sold us the dummy that anything undesignated must therefore be without value.” This is not an approach just in England. In America the Republicans are trying to repeal all legislation protecting the environment, and I am sure that will be on Tony Abbott’s to-do list when elected here.

The bell is tolling for all of us.

[Note - few of the Jefferies books are in print (Bevis and the companion volume Wood Magic are, or were until recently at least) but all of his writing is available through Amazon as ebooks (many of them free thanks to volunteer work from Jefferies lovers). Check him out by typing his name into their search function, he was a good fellow - "naturalist and prose poet of the countryside" says the blue plaque on his house, a good description).]

Having a laugh

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Barry O’Farrell (Premier of New South Wales) is now under pressure it seems from both the far right (Fred Nile and the Shooters) and the right (federal minister Martin Ferguson). The Shooters and Fishers have already put a stop to protecting marine life (a ten year moratorium not just 5 years as I thought when I wrote about this before) and have begun putting on pressure to see every child in the state armed to the teeth and shooting guns at school. Fred Nile is said to have had a chat with Barry demanding that all teachers in public schools be replaced with chaplains approved by him (Fred), and that there be none of this teaching of “ethics” which apparently is incompatible with religion. Now Martin is demanding that NSW end all resistance and have every part of the state explored for uranium deposits, so Barry is faced with three demands all of which would have toxic legacies for generations to come for the citizens of this proud state.

I am reminded of a comedy sketch I saw years ago, the comedian now forgotten (see comments), in which Walter Raleigh comes back from America having discovered tobacco and is trying to sell its benefits to the British government whose response is incredulous – “And then they do what Walter? They stick this tube of paper full of leaves of a nasty weed into their mouths and then they set fire to it? Right, we’ll give that a miss Walt, thanks for asking.”

Just as well I ‘m not Premier, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face as these similar propositions were paraded through my office by apparently serious people. “Really, armed schoolchildren learning fundamentalist religion with no ethics whose job prospects are in uranium mining, in a state whose environment is being wrecked? Sorry, that’s a bit of a cough I have developed, my secretary will show you out, don’t call us we’ll call you.” But I am sure Barry, a much nicer and more polite man than me, will have listened to all this nonsense attentively, taken notes without laughing, and politely seen them to the door. Ushered in the next lot of ideologues demanding cattle in high country, the sale of all public assets, an increase in tree clearing, private operators in National Parks, and the destruction of the union movement in the state.

There seems to be a view from some political commentators, far less astute than yours truly, that you have to do deals with all these mad-brained people in order to get through your own agenda, which I had understood to mean catching up on years of neglect by the Labor Party (hampered by its own right wing nutters) of areas such as infrastructure, transport, hospitals, schools. Are these people beating a path to your door really going to block you on these electorally popular moves if you don’t go along with their hare-brained agendas? What if you were to discuss stuff with Labor and the Greens and isolate Mr Nile and friends in their own little world? I reckon you are a smart enough politician to rack up achievements in the next four years without giving the state a terrible case of addiction to crazy ideology with endless harmful effects. Good start with standing firm on ethics.

But do try to keep a straight face.

Not with a bang

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by Climate Change, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

If you wanted a date to live in infamy, the day when it finally became clear that this little planet of ours (well, when I say ours I don’t mean that literally, the planet is owned by the corporations of course, I know that) is stuffed, then 4th July is the date for you. Not fourth of July American time you understand, which apparently commemorates something else, but Australian time (to the extent that the two differ).

That was the date on which Tony Abbott, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyalish Opposition in Australia gave an interview about his plans for dealing with global warming. Well, when I say interview, it was more of a chat with a friendly and sympathetic friend, and when I say plans, I don’t mean actual plans, because, being the Opposition, as Tony said, they don’t have to have plans as such. But, there we were, all ears, as was Tony (sorry, that was a bit ad hom, as they say on denier blogs, and anyway he doesn’t listen, more all eyes), and he was chattering away. Sadly though, as he might have said, with a little learning, “Our dried voices, when we whisper together, are quiet and meaningless”.

Let me build suspense, as great writers do, and go back a little. The great interview came at the end of a week or so during which we had been softened up for it by events. There was another small, but highly media magnified, demonstration by the Alan Jones fan club, a well-informed (naturally after years of radio listening) and highly patriotic group holding up placards attacking the prime minister of their country as “Bitch” “Witch” and “Liar”. They were warmed up by that great stand up comedian (well, when I say “great” …) Barnaby Joyce, almost weeping into a microphone at the thought of stuff being done to protect the environment, and weeping at the idea that his financial circumstances, already poor as a mere Senator, were about to be made dire by this wicked socialist government. He also seemed to be weeping at the idea that anything should ever be done to conserve anything (except the National Party, obviously). And then the main act, Lord Jones himself, demanding that nothing be done to save the planet, nothing at all, absolutely nothing, telling the prime minister to go away and leave him, the great man, alone, and the howls of approval from his audience gradually rose like the sound of Roman spectators at the Colosseum.

And then there was our Prime Minister in person, telling us that the Carbon Tax was, wasn’t, was, wasn’t a carbon tax. But if it was it wouldn’t apply to anything so there Mr Jones, and especially it wouldn’t apply to petrol, because, well, why would it, except maybe diesel? But then the Truckies Union secretary and well-known greenie demanded to know why the PM cared more about cattle than his members saving 5 cents a litre on diesel and it would mean the ruin of the industry and his members were going to block every highway between Hobart and Cooktown.

And suddenly, bizarrely, there was Barnaby again, back at parliament house, just time for a press conference as he ran to his accountant to save his house mortgage, ranting incoherently about seeing the Greens arrive at parliament house in cars but he thought they should have come on horses not that he thought they should have come at all. Then he got on his own horse and galloped away. Still puzzled by that one, but the media seemed to think it made sense.

And so to Tony Abbott. Almost as difficult to distil meaning from his words as to frack gas from coal seams, but let me try. He loves coal and coal mines and would never do anything to reduce their output and sales of coal. Questioned on “brown coal”, which the interviewer and Tony seemed to think was the only one causing CO2 production (not that there’s anything wrong with that) he was unwilling to think about switching to natural gas (see love of coal). Certainly “black coal” was untouchable. And petrol. Fancy adding 5 cents to petrol to ruin the lives of working families (and Barnaby). Well, no, it wasn’t going on petrol now, thanks to him, but who knew what the future might bring (apart from melting ice and rising seas, but he didn’t say that).

Well then, if he wasn’t going to reduce the mining and burning of the stuff that actually produces greenhouse gases, what was he going to do? Good things. Like, planting trees, that was a good thing wasn’t it? And, um, burying carbon in the ground. Also good. Now I don’t know if he had consulted with Barnaby, and the rest of his coalition partners in the National Party, but I suspect that when he does he will find that not only don’t they want to plant trees but they want to keep massively clearing the existing ones from farmland and woodchipping any remaining forests. So, whatever short-term small take up of CO2 might be achieved by planting pine trees would be massively undermined (hah) by the loss of existing trees. And in any case he must know (?) that keeping on pumping out more and more CO2 while trying to mop up a small fraction of the increase (at best, and temporarily) with trees makes no sense at all, that burying charcoal in soil has little benefit, and that no “carbon capture” technology works or could work on any scale.

So the policy amounts to doing absolutely nothing while giving corporations billions of dollars (pretty much the norm for any conservative government anywhere, if I may permit myself to be a little snide, just for a moment). Still, as he said, if he did manage to achieve 5% reduction (undefined) that would be as useful or as useless as the government was aiming at. The only true point he made.

There you have it, indirect inaction from one side of Australian politics, direct inaction from the other.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with the babble of hollow men.