Tag: Over the horizon

Enviroment

Environment: COP meetings keep happening; emissions keep rising

COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. United nations climate change conference. 7-18 November 2022 will be international climate summit. Flat vector modern banner.

Four reports and Greta Thunberg highlight the failure of 30 years of COP meetings to slow climate change. Our weekly environment report.

Use of fossil fuels and non-fossil fuels in 2050

The IEA report I summarised above includes the following figure (page 58). It shows the amount of energy (in Exajoules) provided by fossil and non-fossil energy sources from 2020-2050. The figure on the left shows the likely trajectories if all governments’ current policies are pursued. The figure on the right shows the trajectories that are needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Current policies will more than double non-fossil supplies by 2050, whereas the net zero course needs an almost four-fold increase. The big change though is in the supply of fossil energy. Current policies will produce only a marginal reduction in fossil fuel energy, but to achieve net zero emissions fossil energy must be reduced to approximately one-fifth of 2020 levels by 2050.

Source: Environment: COP meetings keep happening; emissions keep rising

Informed Comment

Election 2022 results: There are no natural majorities anymore. Albanese’s might be the last one

The election results have revealed a realignment of support for the major parties.

Our major parties’ primary votes are in structural decline, not because they are simply hopeless, but because our politics has fragmented to the point there are no natural majorities in Australia anymore. We now have majorities of dissent – so we can remove a government via a coalition of discontent, but any new government becomes vulnerable to a new dissenting majority forming around it. Our tradition of compulsory preferential voting has camouflaged this, artificially preserving two-party dominance. If we had a more European-style proportional system, we’d have had European-style results for a decade now: moving from one minority government to another, each made up of a temporary coalition of rivals. This might be the moment that our political fracturing finally overpowered the masking tape of our electoral system.

Source: Election 2022 results: There are no natural majorities anymore. Albanese’s might be the last one

Trump, Trumpland, Uncategorized

We’ve Reached Peak Trumpian Dystopia | The Nation

donald-trump-hair-eye-gt-img

Herein lies the sobering reassurance of such stories. They remind us that worlds, like people, die all the time, only to be replaced by new worlds. Cities fall and rise again, as do civilizations. Even dystopian places like Idi Amin’s Uganda or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodian killing fields eventually burn out. The handmaid lives to tell her tale and Gilead, too, crumbles in the end.

Athens survived the plague, though its democracy was compromised by war and disease. America, too, will live on. But it will have lost some further measure of its greatness thanks in no small part to the man who, however cynically, wanted to make it great again.

via We’ve Reached Peak Trumpian Dystopia | The Nation

Imperialism

Dissecting the jingoistic media coverage of the Venezuela crisis — RT Op-ed

Dissecting the jingoistic media coverage of the Venezuela crisis

 Dissecting the jingoistic media coverage of the Venezuela crisis — RT Op-ed

and

It’s not just Venezuela: Nicaragua & Cuba also on the way of American imperialism – K. Livingstone

Future Possibility and Necessity

Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump From Office?

A new dark age” may ultimately prove euphemistic. The original Dark Ages concluded with the planet still habitable. Humanity now faces the near-term historical threat of extinction thanks to the grave “ecological rifts” generated by a global profit system upheld by both ruling parties that is turning earth into a great, big Greenhouse Gas Chamber. “The uncomfortable truth,” philosopher Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 17 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”

via Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump From Office?

clean energy, Uncategorized

Solar PV and wind are on track to replace all coal, oil and gas within two decades

Solar photovoltaic and wind power are rapidly getting cheaper and more abundant – so much so that they are on track to entirely supplant fossil fuels worldwide within two decades, with the time frame depending mostly on politics. The protestation from some politicians that we need to build new coal stations sounds rather quaint.

via Solar PV and wind are on track to replace all coal, oil and gas within two decades

Media

Fairfax, News Corp and bleeding the ink out of newspapers

Source: Fairfax, News Corp and bleeding the ink out of newspapers