The continuing silence about links between extreme weather events and climate change

Many parts of Australia are recovering from the devastating effects of extreme weather events over recent days, including storms that produced unprecedented levels of rainfall, massive ocean waves and king tide surges that caused coastal erosion, and extensive destruction and devastation from massive localized flooding, however, it is interesting to see climate scientists and commentators being cautious and circumspect about linking the severity of the storms to climate change (see articles here, here and here).

A valuable article by social scientists Paul Hoggett and Rosemary Randall, based on interviews with leading UK climate scientists, provides insight into the dynamics of the social and political silencing that makes many climate change scientists unwilling to speak out publicly about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change.

Hoggett and Randall argue that a 'socially constructed silence' between climate scientists and policy makers is one reason why policy making about climate change has become a form of 'symbolic policy making’—a set of practices designed to make it look as though political elites are doing something about climate change while actually doing nothing.

Hoggett and Randall quote one scientist who said that although many scientists believe that the world is heading for a rise in temperatures of 6 degrees, rather than the two degrees claimed, they still remain silent.

A number of reasons for this silence are identified by Hoggett and Randall. They found many scientists identify with an idealized picture of scientific rationality and are uncomfortable with the political controversy surrounding climate change.  Scientists prefer to get on with their research quietly and dispassionately, burying themselves in the excitement and rewards of research, but denying they have any responsibility beyond developing models or crunching the numbers.

Hoggett and Randall quote one researcher:

"so many scientists just want to do their research and as soon as it has some relevance, or policy implications, or a journalist is interested in their research, they are uncomfortable.

Fear of being seen as a whistle blower and damaging their career are also reasons why scientists are unwilling to speak out.

Some scientists are unwilling to challenge political analysis of the scientific evidence. One scientist quoted by Hoggett and Randall was critical of scientists:

“... repeatedly I’ve heard from researchers, academics, senior policy makers, government chief scientists, [that] they can’t say these things publicly, I’m sort of deafened, deafened by the silence of most people who work in the area that we work in, in that they will not criticise when there are often evidently very political assumptions that underpin some of the analysis that comes out."

Hoggett and Randall urge the scientific community to abandon their social and political silence and speak out as a whole, rather than leaving the task to a beleaguered and much-criticized minority.

Climate change and the Canadian City destroyed by wildfires

Watching the shocking images and footages of the terrible destruction and human suffering caused by the wildfires that have destroyed the City of Fort McMurray in Alberta Canada, I am reminded of Wendell Berry's poem The World Bought and Sold.

I dream by night the horror
That I oppose by day.
The nation in its error
And by its work and play

Destroys its land, pollutes
Its streams, and desecrates
Air and light. From the roots
It dies upwards, our rights

Divinely given, plundered
And sold by purchased power
That dies from the head downward
Marketed hour by hour

That market is a grave

Where goods lie dead that ought

To live and grow and thrive,

The dear world sold and bought

To be destroyed by fire,
Forest and soil and stone.
The conscience put to hire
Rules over flesh and bone

To take the coal to burn
They overturn the world
And all the world has worn
Of grace, of heath. The gnarled

Clenched and forever shut
First of their greed makes small
The great life. Hollowed out,
The soul like the green hill

Yields to the force of dearth. 

The crack in the despot's skull
Descends into the earth,
And what was bright turns dull
Wendell Berry (from Leavings)

Fort McMurray is at the heart of one of the world's largest climate destroying industries- the Alberta Tar Sands industry. It is a city and region reliant on fossil fuel extraction. The region has the world's third-largest reserves of oil. As much as a quarter of the country's oil production has been halted by the fire, raising concerns about the effect on the Canadian economy.

The New York times reports:

"....the blaze has consumed whole swaths of Fort McMurray, ranking it as one of the most devastating fires in Canada’s history. The fast-moving flames turned many of the city’s homes — and the baby photos and wedding albums and other treasures that could not be packed in time — into little more than charcoal."

20,000 homes have been destroyed and the entire population of 88,000 people was forced to evacuate through a post apocalyptic landscape, in what is the largest wildfire evacuation in the history of Alberta.

The fire is still spreading and threatens to break out into neighboring provinces of Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

The shocking irony for the suffering people of Fort McMurray, whose city has been destroyed by wildfires and quasi apocalyptic conditions, is that the fires are the result of unseasonably hot weather conditions resulting from rising temperatures caused by climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

Writing in Climate Central, Brian Kahn provides a sober context for the Fort McMurray wildfires:

"What’s happening in Fort McMurray is a perfect encapsulation of the wicked ways that climate change is impacting wildfire season. A drier than normal winter left a paltry spring snowpack, which was quickly eaten away by warm temperatures. That left plenty of fuel on the ground for wildfires to consume."

Scientific America reports that the Fort McMurray wildfire is indicative of a warming planet and is the latest in a lengthening lineage of wildfires in the northern reaches of the globe. 

It quotes Mike Flanagan, a wildlife researcher at the University of Alberta:

"This fire is consistent with what we expect from human caused climate change affecting our fire regime".

Writing in New Yorker magazine, Elizaberth Colbert writes that raising environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. However, she argues that failing to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense. She writes:

Though it’s tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the past decade.

In Slate magazine, Eric Holthaus links the fires directly to climate change and analyses why people are so hostile and unwilling to accept science that links wildfires to climate change. He writes:

"The sensitivity here, I think, lies in Canada’s unique blend of politics as both an oil producer and a nation on the front lines of climate change. Over the past decade or so, Canada has become a major oil producing state (thanks mostly to Alberta) and the recent rise and fall of oil prices has created a kind of petrostate politics. Indeed, as oil prices have fallen, Alberta’s government has become increasingly cash-strapped, even to the point of cutting funding for wildfire prevention, as Reuters revealed on Thursday. The juxtaposition of that political environment with this specific disaster in the heart of Canadian oil country led to a clamp down on discussion. Right now, Trudeau is trying to have it both ways. Eventually, he’ll have to choose. Albertans know this and are justifiably worried about how future climate policies will affect their lives. 

Beyond all of the political reasons why climate change has become such a charged topic, the social science hints at why truly accepting the threat of climate change is so difficult for so many people: Doing so means accepting that our current way of life, our means of survival, even, are potentially untenable. Accepting climate science can mean accepting that our means of supporting ourselves are impossible. In other words, accepting climate science can threaten our very identities. It is understandable that people would react with fear, anger, and, yes, even vitriol. That does not mean, however, that climate change is not happening, and we should not take it seriously. It simply means the path forward will often require intense personal sacrifice. That is no small thing."

Drew Brown writes about what he calls the 'black irony' of the Fort McMurray wildfires:

"Hardcore environmentalists will no doubt spend a lot of time stressing the black irony of having the Mecca of the Canadian oil industry go up in flames to a climate change-induced wildfire. But those concerns will fall on deaf ears until the immediate human tragedy at play here in northern Alberta has subsided."

The other 'black' irony is that the burning of Fort McMurray coincides with a political offensive by those who support fossil fuel extraction and burning to expand the tar sands pipelines across Alberta. The governments of Alberta and neighboring British Columbia are also planning major expansions in fossil fuel production.

The connection between corporate money and climate change denial and skepticism

A study by Justin Farrell titled Corporate Funding and Ideological Polarization about climate change confirms what many have argued- that behind climate change scepticism and denial is corporate money. 

These findings are not surprising to many people. 

Advocacy and environmental groups have exposed this connection before (here, here and here). 

However, Farrell’s study is one of the few that directly demonstrates the connection between corporate money and the content and specific language used in public messages to encourage public scepticism and question or cast doubt on the science of climate change.

Farrell's study demonstrates, in stark terms, how corporate power and corporate money make it appear that there is more of a debate around climate change than actually exists, with the goal of creating public uncertainty and policy stalemate.

In an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Farrell analyses 20 years of data to show that corporations use their money and wealth to promote and amplify contrarian views about climate change and to create an impression of greater scientific uncertainly than actually exists.

 

Farrell used computer analytics to systematically examine printed matter published by 164 groups, including think-tanks and lobbying firms, and more than 4,500 individuals who have been skeptical of mainstream scientific views on climate change. Farrell analysed documents, statements, articles, policy papers and transcripts produced by these groups over 20-years.

In comparing the groups that received corporate funding with those that did not, Farrell found an an “ecosystem of influence” within corporate funded and supported groups.

 

Farrell found that groups that received corporate funding consistently promoted the same contrarian themes such as - climate change is cyclical in nature and that there are positive benefits to carbon dioxide. 

Over time, the effect of all these separate groups giving the same message is create an increased sense of cohesion. There was no evidence of such coordination among the non-funded groups.

Farrell concludes that corporate money “created a united network within which the contrarian messages could be strategically created and spread.”

He writes

“This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own.”

How plundering of our oceans is destroying fish stocks

"Under the euphemism of fishing, in pursuit of seafood, we are exterminating animals from the oceans: wiping out the larger predators, altering food webs and destroying habitats at a staggering rate and on a confounding scale, in an epic slaughter of life beneath the waves. The truth taints the palate. Starting in the fresh waters, in rivers and lakes, spreading to the coastal shallows and now rampant in the high and deep seas, we have stalked the stocks to the point of catastrophe. It is a darkly grand story of the reduction of our collective inheritance, and one little apprehended under the glaring lights of the fish-market floor".

David Ritter, CEO Greenpeace Australia

The evidence is shocking. Another great extinction is under way under the sea.  Without urgent measures we may be the last generation to catch food from the oceans. 

The demand of global capitalism for ever increasing profit is exterminating marine life across the globe.  We are destroying entire species of marine life in the pursuit of corporate profit, commercial gain and escalating consumer demand for seafood.

The CEO of Greenpeace Australia, WA born David Ritter has written that the killing of animals and plants is a consequence of the functioning and distribution of power:

Species loss is caused by the harmful actions of powerful actors, private interests that are facilitated by governments failing to act for the common good. At present, our political systems are deficient in preserving the variety of life around us.

A study by the World Wide Fund for Nature and Zoological Society of London has found that half the world's marine mammals, birds, reptiles and fish have been lost in a generation. Since 1970 global populations of marine species have plummeted 50%.

A report in Science Magazine claims that world fish stocks may run out by 2048.

Species essential to commercial fishing and global food supply have suffered the greatest declines. Population of tuna, mackerel and bonitos have dropped 75%. Shark finning and industrial fishing are decimating shark and ray populations with 1 in 4 species threatened by extinction. Orange roughy or sea perch is in severe decline.  Marine vertebrate populations have declined by 49% with some stocks declining by 75%

Sea cucumber populations have fallen by 94-98%.

A particular concern is the loss of predatory species including grouper, tuna and billfish and shark and ray species to be threatened with extinction.  Predators keep prey populations in balance, and the loss of predators can cause trophic (nutritional) cascades through food webs that affect entire ocean ecosystems.

85% of global fish stocks are overexploited by a commercial (corporate) fishing industry characterised by myopic profit exploitation, a rush to exploit escalating consumer demand for seafood and a brutal approach to the exploitation of fish and marine stocks.

The commercial fishing industry is dominated by global transnational corporations. Many conceal their promiscuous profit taking and exploitation of fish stocks under the cover of sustainable fishing.

Greed, commercial pressures and technology designed to maximise profit result in destructive fishing practices, including massive by catch, public subsidies that encourage overfishing, lack of regulation, poor fisheries management, pirate fishers and agreements designed to benefit commercial fleets.

In an article in the Griffith Review Greenpace CEO David Ritter documents the ways corporate fishing fleets ruthlessly exploit marine life, thereby destroying the world’s fish stocks in pursuit of huge profit.

David Ritter writes:

"The world's fishing fleet is two and a half times larger than the oceans can sustainably support. Yet, more than a third of the global fishing industry's revenues come from subsidies, which are currently estimated at around US$34 billion a year. We are funding the fishing industry to systematically destroy our shared inheritance."

But the threat to marine life comes not just from overfishing and industrial and illegal fishing, but other by-products of predatory and exploitative capitalism. 

Other factors include industrial pollution, overdevelopment of marine habitat, plastic contamination (12 million tones of plastic enter the oceas each year) and climate change resulting from burning of fossil fuels (which accelerate acidification of oceans and destroy coral reefs which sustain fisheries stocks) are all to blame.

Marine turtles are on the brink of extinction. The grazing habits of sea turtles help maintain sea grass beds. More than half of the world’s marine turtles carry a burden of plastic debris. The risk to turtles is greatest off the east coast of Australia, North America and Africa. A study by the CSIRO found that more than 60% of seabird species have ingested plastic.

The world’s coral reefs, which support 25% of marine species, could be wiped out as ocean temperatures continue to rise at current rates.

Louise Heaps, Chief Advisor on Marine Policy at WWF describes the situation as catastrophic, as humans destroy vital food sources and the ecology of the oceans.

Hurtling towards the abyss: global temperatures rising at unprecedented ratess

A new report in Science confirms that global warming  is occurring at a unprecedented rate.

The study shows that global temperatures skyrocketed in the last century at a rate that had previously taken 4,000 years and that the earth is hurtling towards temperatures unseen in 11,000 years.

This report on the study appears in Common Dreams.

"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum," said climatologist Shaun Marcott, lead author of the study. "We've never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly."

Marcott said that current "global temperatures are warmer than about 75 percent of anything we've seen over the last 11,000 years or so." By 2100, he said, global temperatures will be "well above anything we've ever seen in the last 11,000 years."

"The climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its entire existence," NPR quotes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying. "And that is quite a sobering thought."

Australia's angry summer

The Australian Climate Commission* has just released a report titled the Angry Summer which confirms what many of us already knew- that Australia’s record-breaking summer heatwave was made worse by climate change. 

It was the hottest summer ever, capped by the longest and most extreme heatwave on record. Sydney, Newcastle and Hobart experienced their hottest days on record. Rainfall records were smashed along eastern Australia, tropical cyclones wreaked havoc, bushfires raged in every state and territory and tornadoes hit parts of Queensland. 123 records were broken throughout Australia in 90 days.

The report says warmer and more moist conditions have caused weather patterns to change, and while Australia has always experienced extreme weather events, they are hitting harder and more often.It goes on to say;

Australia’s Angry Summer shows that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians. The significant impacts of extreme weather on people, property, communities and the environment highlight the serious consequences of failing to adequately address climate change".

The 12-page report, by the body set up to provide independent advice on the science of climate change, points to a record-breaking stretch of seven days in January when daily temperatures across the country averaged above 39C.

The Report argues that it is virtually certain that extreme hot weather will continue to become even more frequent and severe around the globe, including Australia, over the coming decades The authors write:

"Climate change has made the extreme heat conditions worse, with the length, extent and severity of the January heatwave unprecedented since records began.......All of the extreme weather events of the Angry Summer occurred in a climate system that contains vastly more heat compared to 50 years ago."

*  The Climate Commission was established to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about, the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price.

John Quiggin and market fundamentalism in Queensland

John Quiggin writes  here on his blog on the effects of the Newman Government's market fundamentalism on Queensland's capacity to cope with the consequences of flood damage.

The Queensland example is a reminder that cutting essential public services is not just bad policy, it degrades social and social and community wellbeing and  threatens human life.

John Quiggin's piece is also a reminder that the ruling political and corporate elite in a market fundamentalist society almost always use their power to enrich and benefit themselves and those who support and share their world view and political and economic visions.

John Quiggin writes

The floodwaters have receded and the miserable task of cleaning up is beginning in Bundaberg, Laidley and other communities. 

Here in Brisbane we were lucky enough to avoid another flood. The remnants of Cyclone Oswald hit us in the form of a summer storm, bigger than usual, but a pretty regular event here. It wasn’t surprising that hundreds of thousands of people (including me) lost electrical power, or that repairs couldn’t start until the wind had subsided. Even so, the restoration of power was very slow – in many places slower than in 2011. 

It’s become evident that, like all areas of the Queensland public sector, the electricity distributors (Energex in the Brisbane region and Ergon elsewhere) have been subject to staff cuts that have hampered their ability to respond. The union was issuing warnings about this last year, and they have been proved right. In one startling case, workers were delayed from responding to the emergency in Bundaberg, so they could be briefed on their redundancy options. 

Ergon and Energex are government-owned corporations, which are normally supposed to make their own commercial decisions. In this case, however, the shareholding ministers, Energy Minister Mark McArdle and Treasurer Tim Nicholls, have actively intervened to push for job cuts. The obvious explanation is that they are trying to boost profitability (at least in the short term) to prepare the enterprises for privatisation. The regulatory system is supposed to require Energex and Ergon to meet reliability standards, but it seems likely that it is vulnerable to gaming, possibly by excluding extreme (but not uncommon or unpredictable) events like this storm from the criteria

The cuts in the electricity sector have been matched or exceeded across the entire public sector, including the services on which we all rely in an emergency. Meanwhile, Campbell and Nicholls are building themselves a brand new office tower, demolishing the aging but serviceable building in which they currently work. They are paying off their supporters with cuts in payroll tax, grants to racing clubs and so on.

In Hurricane Sandy's wake

photos courtesy of Naked Capitalism

"This disaster is a big wake up call. The East Coast will limp through it, with more deaths and dislocations than were necessary. The open question is whether the officialdom will engage in the kind of post mortems and investments to reduce the impact of future disasters" Yves Smith Naked Capitalism

As the death toll continues to mount from Hurricane Sandy, articles are starting to appear about the social legacy of  the hurricane for New York and the northeastern parts of the USA.

Michelle Chen points out that  natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy compound and expose established and manufactured inequality. Chen argues that like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Sandy has exposed the appalling inequalities and racial, economic and social divides in New York. 

Chen writes:

But in the microcosm of New York City, we can already see who’s going to bear the brunt of the damage. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, floodwaters have a way of exposing the race and class divisions that stratify our cities.

In Naked Capitalism Yves Smith provides some chilling photos and reports of the hurricane's force in New York and its impact on the "fragility of complex systems" (see here here, here and here).

Smith notes that that the hardest-hit workers belong to the forgotten ranks of “the janitors, the cooks and delivery men, the people who run newsstands and dry cleaners and cobblers and food carts” and the health care workers who respond to day-to-day emergencies. Smith writes that most neglected survivors will presumably be those who lack insurance, those living paycheck to paycheck, those without the legal know-how and social supports needed to navigate systems of disaster relief.

In the UK Guardian Bill McKibben laments the impact of the hurricane on the New York subway system which he argues is a critical part of the ecosystem of New York. McKibben highlights how the subway system forms part of the democratic heart of New York by virtue of the reliance of ordinary New Yorkers on the system for their daily lives. McKibben writes:

I'm an environmentalist: New York is as beautiful and diverse and glorious as an old-growth forest. It's as grand, in its unplanned tumble, as anything ever devised by man or nature. And now, I fear its roots are being severed.

The impact of the cyclone on elderly and disabled people in New York is also starting to be recognised as horror stories emerge of elderly people who perished because they chose to stay in their houses or were unable to flee due to their disability or lack of support and assistance. 

The heightened vulnerability of older people to the impact of  serious climate related disasters is well documented, no better example than Eric Klinenburg's remarkable expose of the effect of the 1995 Chicago heat wave on older residents.

What is also re-emerging "post Sandy" is recognition of the tradition of service provision, mutual aid and volunteering as a form of political organising.

Occupy Sandy for example is a coordinated effort by many of the groups involved in the Occupy Movement to provide relief and supplies to those most directly affected by the Hurricane.

In a piece titled After Sandy Communities Mobilize a new Kind of Disaster Relief Laura Gottesdeiner writes:

For organizers, however, disaster relief and political protest are two tactics toward a common goal: stopping large-scale human suffering incentivized by global economic forces. After all, as a former volunteer at occupied Zuccotti Park recently reminded me, Occupy itself was also born out of a deadly and lucrative crisis.

In this piece Sarah Jaffe writes about the ways that the New Yorkers involved in the Occupy Movement have mobilised to provide mutual aid to those most directly affected;

"There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks...............................................................................................................

“It’s amazing how organized we are, it’s amazing how much so many people involved with the social movement have learned about themselves, about each other, about all of how, how to put these values into practice,” Michael Premo, one of the Occupy organizers in Sunset Park, told me.

In Red Hook earlier I’d seen lines around the block for food, diapers, blankets, flashlights, water, as the Red Hook Initiative/Occupy Sandy effort had expanded to more buildings, separated its hot food distribution from the place to get supplies to take home. The public housing all around us was still powerless and cold, but there were so many volunteers that they didn’t know what to do with us all. Salgado showed back up the next day and saw two people whose doors she’d knocked on the night before, there to help.......................................

Just ask the community groups who jumped into action for Sandy, the organizers who make their (meager) living providing services to people facing foreclosure, to immigrant workers fighting wage theft, to neighborhoods trying to keep out the corporate-backed charter schools. At 1pm I dropped off two bags of clothing at the New York Communities for Change offices in downtown Brooklyn, walking past gas cans filled last night in Connecticut by volunteers to make sure the cars kept going out to the Rockaways, to Long Island; at 11pm I said goodnight to an organizer going back to sleep in his office to start again tomorrow."

Arctic ice melting at alarming speed

Recent data on the rate of Arctic Sea Ice melt is profoundly troubling. Scientists describe it as unprecedented and astounding.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center illustrates the melt since 1979 in the graph below, showing a decline in the ice extent at 10.2% per decade:

This report is from Common Dreams:

  "It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago," Dr. Kim Holmen, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute told the BBC. "And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us."

"This year's melting season is a Goliath," also notes geophysicist Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at City University of New York, the Wall Street Journal reports. "The ice is being lost at a very strong pace."

Weather Underground co-founder Dr. Jeff Masters writes that "Every major scientific institution that tracks Arctic sea ice agrees that new records for low ice area, extent, and volume have been set. These organizations include the University of Washington Polar Science Center (a new record for low ice volume), the Nansen Environmental & Remote Sensing Center in Norway, and the University of Illinois Cryosphere Today."

Environmental activist Tim DeChrisopher faces 10 years in jail for civil disobedience

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think the opportunity that's here is to build a real resistance movement -- not just a lobby movement, but a resistance movement, that says this path that we're on is absolutely unacceptable, and we're going to use our power as citizens and as a movement to shut this system. I think that's where we need to be right now, recognizing that this is not a matter of lobbying for trivial reforms, but we're at a point where we need to make the path we're on absolutely impossible to continue. Hopefully that's the lesson that people are taking out of this.
Tim DeChristopher

Student and activist Tim DeChristopher found a way to resist corporate power and fight against the damage caused by US oil and gas corporations. But it may cost him a long prison term.

On June 23 the environmental activist and campaigner  will find out whether he will spend the next ten years in a US Federal Prison for an act of civil disobedience against the oil and gas industry.

His case is being seen as yet another example of the serious assault on public protest and dissent that is occurring around the world, whereby governments and corporations are increasingly using whatever means possible, such as anti- terrorist legislation, increased police powers, direct restrictions on public protest, SLAPP suits and arbitrary detention, to prevent and limit the right to protest.

In December 2008 DeChristopher participated in an oil and gas auction of 150,000 acres of public land in Southern Utah. Sale of the land had been fast tracked in the last days of the Bush administration to benefit the fossil fuel industry. It was a last minute land grab authorized in the last days of the Bush administration.

DeChristopher was outraged by the illegality of the land grab and the fact that leases were being handed out in an irregular way. He was also outraged about the ways that the oil and gas companies privatized all their profits and externalized all their costs. His argument was that the oil and gas companies had no intention to pay the full costs of their operations which are offloaded to the public :

"Well, I saw this auction as, first off, a fraud against the American people, that the government wasn’t following their own rules and was locking the public out of the decision-making process for public property. I also saw it as a real threat to my future, because of the impact on climate change that this kind of “drill now, think later” mentality was having, and an attack on our public lands, on our natural heritage, in pretty pristine and irreplaceable areas in southern Utah".

DeChristopher successfully bought (without any money or intention to pay) 22,000 acres of the land in order to save it from fossil fuel extraction. De Christopher had originally attended the auction to protest without any intention of bidding for the land. However, upon entry to the auction he was asked if he intended to be a bidder to which he replied "yes" and he became Bidder No 70. DeChristopher then proceeded to bid and successfully secured 13 leases, thereby disrupting the sale.

De Christopher actually raised the money to buy the land but he was still charged with fraud because at the time of the auction he had no intention to pay. However, that fact and many other issues were not allowed to be introduced into the trial.

In March 2011 he was convicted of fraud and faces a 10 year jail term and $750,000 fine imposed by the Obama administration.

As Tim De Christopher points out his case was prosecuted to scare off others who might consider civil disobedience.

"I was born the year that Ronald Reagan took office. The reality throughout my lifetime has been, corporations and governments are powerful, and people are weak, and there is nothing you can do to change that. Now that paradigm is starting to shift, and all of a sudden, the world is starting to believe in people power again"

Various web sites have been set up to publicize DeChristopher's case (Bidder 70) and  The Trial of Tim DeChristopher and a Facebook site allows you to follow the case. Interviews and stories about DeChristopher can be read here, here, here, here, here and here.

Queensland floods: Australia's "Katrina moment?"

 "Since the 1980s, Australia has become the model of a social democracy where the cult of the “market” has diminished public services and infrastructure budgets and divided by wealth a society that once boasted the most equitable spread of personal income in the world".
John Pilger

As always, John Pilger, Australia's finest journalist offers a contrarian view on the Queensland floods in in this recent piece (here).

Pilger describes the floods as "Australia Katrina moment", in recognition that the devastation and destruction that resulted was compounded by policy decisions (and inaction) by successive Federal, State and local governments and Australia's corporate elite.

Pilger describes a political culture and political system subservient to business and corporate interests which stood by and allowed excessive land clearing on flood prone areas and environmental degradation, failed to invest in public infrastructure to protect flood prone communities and benefited from property speculation and property development which sold property and houses on flood prone land.

Pilger also describes how  pro-market and pro-business regulatory institutions allowed insurance companies to avoid an agreed definition of what constituted a flood, thereby allowing them to more easily refuse to honor claims of flood damage.

The pact consumers live by

Stephanie McMillan on the pact between the corporations who produce the goods and the consumers who buy them

The mad monk's green army is coming

image courtesy of The Punch www.thepunch.com.au/images

A few months ago Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was claiming that "climate change is crap". Voted in to the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party by the climate change deniers now in control of the Party Tony Abbott has all of a sudden turned environmental warrior.

Claiming he is a "pragmatic environmentalist" Abbott wants to convert all the environmentalists to the Liberal cause, save the Murray Darling and create a new 15,000 strong "green army". Climate change?. Well that's not really an important issue to the new "Green Liberals".

And of course Tony Abbott has a front bench with such impeccable environmental credentials- Barnaby Joyce, Nick Minchin, Kevin Andrews, Phillip Ruddock, Bronwyn Bishop, Julie Bishop to name just a few. All with proud records of fighting for environmental causes.

Just what is the cause of this Liberal conversion to environmental causes? Is there an election coming up!!!

Random thoughts on the day before Xmas

(image courtesy of Mimi Larson)

" In 2010 we should concentrate on generating the kind of public information, vigorous debate and grassroots organizing that could shift the center of political gravity in a progressive direction.....Among progressives, in these dark closing days of 2009, there's a surplus of frustration, anger and despair. Let's transform those downbeat energies into fuel for the imperative political work ahead"

Norman Solomon, Flares in the Political Dark

Random thoughts is a weekly attempt to use the words and thoughts of others to illuminate aspects of contemporary life here in Australia and Western Australia.

Saturday's random thoughts- Wendell Berry

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental problems" without correcting the economic oversimplifications that caused them. This over-simplification is now either a matter of corporate behaviour or of behaviour under the influence of corporate behaviour. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity as individuals, as especially as individual consumers, in the behaviour of corporations"

Wendell Berry, The Idea of a Local Economy.

Random thoughts is a weekly attempt to use the words and thoughts of others to illuminate aspects of contemporary life here in Australia and Western Australia.

Photos of civil society rising in Copenhagen

(photos of hundreds of detained protesters in Copenhagen- a link to some fantastic photos can be found at the end of this piece)

There are moments in the history of great social movements that prove pivotal, when the momentum for change seems unable to be constrained. Let us hope that the citizen inspired climate justice movement that is rising in Copenhagen and around the world, represents such a moment

Over the weekend 100,000 people marched through the streets of Copenhagen to demand a fair, ambitious and binding deal to reduce emissions to address the climate change crises that confronts the world. It was the largest demonstration for climate justice in history. Similar demonstrations took place around the world. An estimated 90,000 people marched in demonstrations around Australia.

But judging by the actions of the Danish police there will be a backlash against citizens who demand action on climate change. The Danish police have shown little respect for the right of people to protest. Thousands of police blocked off streets, surrounded protesters and arrested over 1000 peaceful protesters.

Photos from protests outside the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit can be viewed at Photo Viewer - thestar.com

Civil society rising up: keeping up to date with civil society activism at Copenhagen

As the Copenhagen Summit gets underway it is interesting to see the rising tide of climate justice activism emerging out of civil society and citizen action. Much of this civil society activity is on display outside the Summit, having been excluded from participating directly in the Summit.

Public protests are expected to start later this week in Copenhagen, however in the lead up to Copenhagen tens of thousands of people marched throughout Europe calling on world leaders to reach an agreement to reduce emissions in Copenhagen. Protesters took to the streets in Belfast, Glasgow, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and London. The largest protest was in London, where organizers of the Stop Climate Chaos protest put the crowd total at 50,000.

A major focus of civil society activity is to give voice to people from countries most directly affected by climate change in Africa, Asia, The Pacific and the Middle East. The Global Justice Ecology Project has a blog from Copenhagen here where you can keep up to date and the excellent USA alternative media outlet Democracy Now is broadcasting live from Copenhagen.

There is an excellent couple of pieces from Yes Magazine here. The first is about the growing power of the climate justice movement. Mark Engler, who has written before about the need for civil disobedience on climate change, writes that:

Climate-change activism has been taking place in some form for decades, but in recent years the ripples created by events like the Selby camp have been swelling into something larger—something that is attracting ever-greater numbers of mainstream environmentalists, gathering support from top climate scientists and prominent public figures, and starting to look a lot like a mass movement.

The second piece provides a climate action resource guide.

Leading Climate change scientist James Hansen, recently interviewed on the ABC's Lateline program and in the Guardian, provides important leadership and inspiration for climate justice activism. Hansen has been active in climate change protests in the USA and has recently said in the Guardian that it would be better for the planet for the Summit to fail, as any agreement that comes out of Copenhagen will be deeply flawed.

A group of freelance journalists-the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists- have contributed to the climate justice movement with their eight- country investigative report (including Australia) documenting global efforts by the fossil fuel industry and carbon emitters to stymie any new climate treaty in Copenhagen. The group is reporting from Copenhagen on the power of corporate and business lobbying efforts in Copenhagen and their reports from the Summit on corporate lobbying can be found here.