Tuesday 7 May 2019

This is the Situation.


Those more circumspect may dislike what they are about to read. However, I don’t think it inaccurate to conclude that our planet is dying, capitalism is killing it and we have little time to do something to avoid that.

(source)

From that link:
“Fundamentally, we’re sleepwalking into an extinction crisis. We’re not talking about the biosphere in the way that we need to. Nature is getting eroded in a dramatic way and a loss of natural capital means that humans will suffer in the long run.”
Sir Robert Watson [head of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), equivalent to the IPCC] said there must be transformative change to human civilisation if we are to avoid the extinction crisis.
“By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors,” he said.
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Further coverage:

Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns
Insects are ‘the glue in nature’, says Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, underpinning the food and water we rely on
By Damian Carrington, May 7

Biodiversity: what the UN has found and what it means for humanity
The global assessment report paints a dire picture of our effect on the natural world
By Fiona Harvey, May 7

Original UN/IPBES press release

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In the meantime, Scott Morrison, mediocrity incarnate, and his COALition gang not only cannot offer anything that remotely resembles an adequate answer to the much simpler problem of climate change, but proceeds in a relentless, mendacious, fearmongering campaign to abort Labor’s much more ambitious but still insufficient program to tackle climate change.

(source)

And what passes for Left cannot conceive of any “fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors”, because -- in their opinion -- insisting on that kind of comprehensive, radical change denies the needy of some little improvements. The fact that those little improvements will be insufficient is irrelevant to them.

As doctors have learned, there is a threshold beyond which garden-variety negligence and incompetence and cowardice turns into criminality. We better keep that in mind and hope we don’t cross that line. Our lives hang on that.

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UPDATE:

As is usual in her, the federal minister for the Environment, Melissa Price, is MIA if not AWOL.

As at July 2018, the base salary of an MP was $207K per annum (plus expenses and superannuation). Depending on their additional "responsibilities" MPs receive a supplement. The Prime Minister, for instance, receives a supplement of 160% above the base salary: altogether $538K (plus expenses and superannuation) a year.

Other ministers are paid between $326K and $357K.
 
What is that creature doing to justify her pay?

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