Scientists say they're being silenced by the government: from ABC Radio

"On RN Breakfast with Fran Kelly

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As the Morrison Government rushes to amend national environmental protection laws, scientists warn a growing number of their colleagues are being silenced.

A study by the Ecological Society of Australia claims a third of ecologists and conservation scientists employed by government and industry had work "unduly modified" and almost half of those working for government were blocked from releasing their findings.

Their treatment has renewed calls for the creation of an independent environmental agency, something the Coalition has ruled out.

The scientific conspiracy!

Featured:
Don Driscoll, Professor in Terrestrial Ecology, Deakin University

Producer: Cathy Van Extel

Duration: 8min 57sec

Broadcast: Thu 10 Sep 2020

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Related: News outlets continue to ignore climate change in articles about California's record-breaking weather (excerpt): Heated

scientific consensus

 

Now extinct

 

The End of the Environment: Bob Brown.: The Saturday Paper (excerpt)

.... "The prime minister’s post-Covid-19 plan is to roar ahead with a slate of mega-projects that would be delayed by any

Liberals and nationals Fail Australian Forests

proper consideration of their environmental and Indigenous heritage impacts. 

 

While the EPBC Act rarely leads to any project being given the thumbs down, it does require environmental impacts to be assessed, and this takes time. The government’s solution? Get rid of the federal assessment.

 

Forests are only proven carbon storage

When parliament resumes next week, Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley will introduce a bill, under the cover of Covid-19, to amend Howard’s EPBC Act and hand the power to the states – which are more vulnerable to the corporate sector – to approve mining, gas fracking, dam building, the rapid expansion of industrial fish farming and the invasion of national parks by private enterprise. She aims to wash her hands of the Commonwealth’s responsibility for environmental assessment and protection.

 

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Related: Does Australia's government take climate change seriously: Sky News UK Video

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The minister is not waiting for the final report, due in October, of her own inquiry into the EPBC Act, headed by businessman Graeme Samuel. Last month she peremptorily dismissed his interim report’s key recommendation that the Commonwealth set up a policing agency to watch over state management of environmental matters. This was despite Samuel’s finding that “Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat”.

 

Undoubtedly, the powers to protect Indigenous heritage will be the

Koala after wildfire

next thing shunted to the states. Ley knew the Juukan Gorge caves were to be blown up by Rio Tinto before the event and yet she did nothing. Next, she rejected national heritage protection for the ancient Djab Wurrung eucalypts in Victoria. Handing her powers to the states will spare her from such complicit embarrassment in the future.

 

Australia's climate action record

With the Greens opposed, it will be up to Labor and the crossbenchers in the senate to take on Scott Morrison’s game plan to relegate environmental powers to weaker state governments while concentrating economic might in Canberra: a boon for corporate environmental exploiters and their lobbyists in both cases.

 

This is a watershed moment for Australia’s environment. It has taken more than two decades to see any success in our fight to chip away at Howard’s RFAs. And now we face another era wherein policy is being devised to ignore the certainty of environmental devastation for the promise of a quick profit.

 

In Earth’s sixth great age of extinction, there is a rising tide of opposition to the foolishness, if not criminality, of destroying wildlife habitats – from the deep seas to coral reefs and coastlines to what little is left of woodlands, grasslands and forests.

 

Koala and destroyed forest

The phenomenon of Extinction Rebellion, temporarily quietened by Covid-19, is just a hint of the public unrest to come unless the needless exploitation of nature and our finest human heritage ends. Earth’s ecosystem is at breaking point. Our human herd is already using nearly twice the living produce this planet is capable of sustaining and yet, everywhere, the clamour is for “growth”.

If the forests continue to fall, everything else will follow. As with whaling in 1978, the time for logging Australia’s wildlife-filled and carbon-rich native forests is up.

 

For our forests and our wildlife, it’s time."

 

Go to the Saturday Paper's complete article by Bob Brown

August 22 – 28, 2020  |  No. 315   

Related: Does Australia's government take climate change seriously: Sky News UK Video

For Pope Francis, a Perfect Moment for an Unsettling Warning on the Environment: NYT

"Pope Francis used his first full day in Madagascar to hammer the same point home.

“Your lovely island of Madagascar is rich in plant and animal biodiversity, yet this treasure is especially threatened by excessive deforestation, from which some profit,” Francis said Saturday in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, about an hour’s drive from the lemur reserve. “The last forests are menaced by forest fires, poaching, the unrestricted cutting down of valuable woodlands.”

Francis has been making a similar case since his election in 2013, when he put environmental protection and global warming at the top of his agenda. He championed the Paris climate accord and, in 2015, became the first pope to dedicate an encyclical to protecting the earth."

Read the NYT article 

Read also:

Bernie Sanders Calls To Seize the Means of Electricity Production The presidential candidate’s new climate plan includes moving toward 100% public ownership of power.

Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It's unforgivable : The Guardian

"The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom. Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change. That’s not just delinquent, it’s unforgivable."

"It’s time to make sharp demands of our representatives, time to remove those who refuse to act in our common interest, time to elect people with courage, ingenuity and discipline, people who’ll sacrifice pride, privilege and even perks for the sake of something sacred. Because there’s something bigger at stake here than culture wars and the mediocrity of so-called common-sense. It’s the soil under our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe."

Read the complete Tim Winton article in The Guardian

Related: 

Climate change: Sir David Attenborough warns of 'catastrophe': BBC

Australia’s 2018 environmental scorecard: a dreadful year that demands action: The Conversation

"Temperatures went up again, rainfall declined further, and the destruction of vegetation and ecosystems by drought, fire and land clearing continued. Soil moisture, rivers and wetlands all declined, and vegetation growth was poor.
In short, our environment took a beating in 2018, and that was even before the oppressive heatwaves, bushfires and Darling River fish kills of January 2019."

Dar

Indicators of Australia’s environment in 2018 compared with the previous year. Similar to national economic indicators, they provide a summary but also hide regional variations, complex interactions and long-term context. source: http://www.ausenv.online/2018

"Globally, the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerated again after slowing down in 2017. Global air and ocean temperatures remained high, sea levels increased further, and even the ozone hole grew again, after shrinking during the previous two years."

Read the article 

See also:

Australian Coalition government signs off with a budget tailored for climate denial: Renew Economy

SFTP Magazine: Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism

Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism

Extractive Industries in the Era of Climate Change

by Linda Schneider

Special Issue, Summer 2018

“If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?”
—James Fleming, Fixing the Sky¹

"After decades of lurking in the shadows of secretive military research, geoengineering has recently resurfaced in conversations about climate change and crept into the mainstream of international climate policy.² A small group of climate scientists, elite policy advisers and industry representatives from high-polluting countries in the Global North are increasingly vocal about their support for geoengineering—large-scale technological interventions in the climate system—as a means to weaken or suppress some of the symptoms of climate change."

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"A Climate “Technofix”

Geoengineering is an attempt to solve the problem of climate change—a social, political, and ecological crisis—through large-scale technological projects. This “technofix“ mentality lends itself to a systematic disregard of risk, adverse impacts, and unintended side-effects associated with unproven technologies. Side effects are particularly threatening to strained natural ecosystems and economically or ecologically vulnerable populations."

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"The world does not need more technological quick fixes. We need a rapid phaseout of global coal, oil, and gas production and a rapid deconstruction of fossil fuel infrastructure. We need a shift to one hundred percent decentralised renewable energy production and supply from solar and wind. We have exciting, sustainable alternatives to the current status quo: a global transition towards peasant agroecology would produce significantly lower emissions than conventional industrial agriculture and simultaneously pave the way for food sovereignty.¹⁹"
  
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