On Climate

Climate change and the environment. It's antagonists and activists. 

Australian Book Review •

Kurt Johnson reviews ‘Against the Machine: On the unmaking of humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth

When climate change was consigned to a distant future there was a formula for writing about it: frame the problem in the direst terms, identify the barriers to its solution, and conclude with a rallying cry. One of the few to buck this trend was Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017), which diagnosed climate change not as an environmental problem involving emissions, but as a civilisational flaw. It advocated a return to the wild, the human-scaled, the organic, towards what the author called ‘uncivilization’.
The Saturday Paper •

Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil by Royce Kurmelovs

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of these pages that the fossil fuel lobby has captured both major parties. That’s evident from the way in which Labor’s Future Gas Strategy, in the words of one political observer, took “Morrison’s gas-fired recovery, put it in the microwave and heated it up.” So how did we arrive at the point where a change in government is merely a rebranding exercise, where the demand for action from the scientific community and the Australian public is still bar...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Why adapting is the key to survival in climate change

THE ENVIRONMENTLiving HotClive Hamilton & George WilkenfeldHardie Grant, $27.99Clive Hamilton is a peddler of unvarnished truths; politically unpopular in the moment, they are often accepted in the fullness of time. His 2018 Silent Invasion – about Chinese influence in Australian politics – was dumped at the last moment by a jittery publisher. Today, its findings are broadly accepted with the political wind blowing in the opposite direction.In Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Plan...
The Saturday Paper •

How Japan built a market onselling Australian natural gas

By all accounts, Takayuki Ueda’s March 2023 speech in Parliament House rattled senior Labor ministers. The message from the INPEX chief executive was barely softened by the language of international diplomacy, in which he, as a former trade minister, was fluent. As the head of Japan’s largest oil and gas producer, Ueda took aim at a key tool the Australian government was using to reduce domestic exposure to price spikes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year earlier. The Australian Domes
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Myths, spin and outright lies: the truth behind the logging industry

It was once possible to walk the 1500 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane enclosed in native forest. Today Australian forests have been pushed to the margins, surviving as scattered islands, logged around and through. In most states this continues, enabled by expedient myths about forest’s resilience and replaceability that have become entrenched in popular wisdom. These range from “logging is good for fire safety” to “wildlife can simply scuttle away to another tree as soon as one is felled”.
The Saturday Paper •

Wild Quests

In Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals, Satyajit Das, an avid birder and former banker, writes of 30 years visiting wild places from the Congo to Antarctica. Das has witnessed ecotourism’s entire cycle – from idealistic and heady exploration to now, when the last pockets of wilderness are compromised and on the brink of vanishing. Ecotourism once promised a chance to immerse yourself in nature, contribute to conservation and provide opportunity to locals. Naturally,
The Saturday Paper •

Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places

Mining is a dirty business but one we all need. Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places by Christopher Pollon explains just how dirty and how necessary. The book concentrates on mines throughout the global south, in Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia and Chile. It’s as bad as you expect. In some pristine location, prospectors discover a rare element coveted by the increasingly complex electronics manufacturing sector. Immediately a foreign opera
The Saturday Paper •

Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space

The title of British philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new book – Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space – offers a more urgent question than you might think. The race is already on for the moon’s platinum, lithium and titanium, as well as for control of the ice that can be processed into fuel for onward leaps to Mars and beyond. In addition to the ex-Cold War powers, India, China, Japan and the European Union all have space programs. Private companies are also locked i
The Saturday Paper •

Federal government unveils New Vehicle Efficiency Standard

On Sunday the federal government released the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES), a proposal that would introduce limits on vehicle emissions averaged across automotive manufacturers’ fleets, beginning on January 1, 2025, but stepping up targets to eventually bring Australia into line with standards in the United States by 2028. The proposal distils 2700 submissions from the public, lobby groups and organisations. “This is required because almost every advanced economy has implemented a New
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Tyson Yunkaporta’s book bristles with revelation

“There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don’t try to control it and scale it.” says Tyson Yunkaporta in Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. Tyson Yunkaporta worries that Indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and exploited. To prove this point he posits a thought experiment: what if snake scales, the most efficient form of propulsion in the natural world, could be mechanised into a perpetual-motion machine? The surplus energy would need to b
The Saturday Paper •

WIRES’ unspent bushfire donations

During the Black Summer bushfires, images of injured and charred wildlife flashed across international news. Australia’s largest animal rescue service, WIRES, raised $91 million through its bushfire appeal. In the four years since, less than a quarter of that money has been spent. Critics complain the funds are not evenly distributed. Frontline volunteers say they are under-resourced and forced into onerous compliance procedures. In some instances, they are paying vet bills themselves. They say
The Saturday Paper •

Quitting the energy sector to fight climate change

James wasn’t long out of university when he started working as an engineer for energy giant Santos. He remembers feeling tremendous respect for the “high-stakes” work and technical prowess of his colleagues, but he also remembers his alarm over the climate crisis building, followed by the inescapable conviction that Santos’s core business was contributing to the problem. “I saw it all with a growing sense of real, deep cynicism,” he says, asking not to use his real name. James recalls becoming
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Misunderstood hero: This magical book will help you see mushrooms anew

If we ever get out of this environmental mess, it won’t be thanks to ego-driven men with projects and messiah complexes visible from space. It will be the quiet oddballs on their hands and knees rooting around in the underbrush that help us slow down and see the ancient wisdom around our feet. People such as Alison Pouliot, author of Underground Lovers: Encounters with Fungi, her third book on mushrooms. This is one of a slew of recent books looking to set the record straight on mushrooms. Fungi
The Saturday Paper •

SEA’s electric vehicles v the state

The announcement, made last month, must have felt like deja vu. As part of its election commitments, the Andrews government promised it would revive the historic State Electricity Commission. Aligned with Labor’s “Just Transition” policies, the proposal involves vast renewable projects that will create 21st-century jobs for the economically depressed Latrobe Valley, a region struggling with its post-coal identity. The timing was uncanny, too. It was similarly close to the 2018 state election th
The Sydney Morning Herald •

This ‘heroic’ book offers some hope for our future

The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam. Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis has a special role to play. Gergis is one of hundreds of scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessmen
Michael West •

Bulldozing trust: when the big build back tramples on communities and wildlife

It was shovels at the ready as Australia plotted recovery from the economic ravages wrought by the pandemic. Buildings, roads, ports, dams. But hasty decision making is leading to long-term regrets among some affected communities. Kurt Johnson hones in on one example. Demolition of office buildings and the clearing of 1253 trees has begun for a 418-home “family friendly community” in Sydney’s West Pennant Hills. A black wall more than two metres high has been erected right up to the kerb. It bl
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Sydney region’s last healthy koala population threatened by development

Greater Sydney’s only disease-free and growing koala population is under threat by the construction of a housing estate in its habitat without promised safeguards in place, scientists warn. Earthworks for the first of a two-stage 5000-home development between the Nepean and Georges rivers near Campbelltown, by Lendlease, began in January after being approved in 2019. The plans for the two-stage development, known as Figtree Hill and Mt Gilead, included koala underpasses and corridors of a speci
Australian Book Review •

Kurt Johnson reviews ‘Crimes against Nature: Capitalism and global heating’ by Jeff Sparrow

There is a debate as long-running as climate change itself: can capitalism, with its demand for endless growth, be sustained on a planet with finite bounds and limited resources? Freemarketeers say yes. For them, the issue is not capitalism per se but an economic model that does not factor in the true cost of emissions. As a result, we the people and the planet are subsidising industries that pollute for free. The counterargument is based on simple intuition: How on earth can capitalism, the uns
Michael West •

Fog of War: how Australian taxpayers enriched Putin's fracking mate

At long last, the Australian government has added one of Putin’s claque to the sanctions list, Origin’s fracking partner in the Beetaloo Basin. And dirty dealings in a dirty industry don’t end there. The case highlights the massive government outlay required for otherwise uneconomic projects, writes Kurt Johnson. It’s worth asking exactly why the Australian government dithered until today to sanction oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. This associate of Vladimir Putin, owner of world’s largest collecti
RenewEconomy •

Could a skills shortage stall the renewable energy revolution?

Industry insiders are warning that Australia will struggle to meet the demand for both specialised and generalised skills to drive the post-Covid renewable energy transformation, especially those skills needed to develop the states’ regional Renewable Energy Zones. With an estimated $66 billion to be invested in renewable energy over the next 10 to 15 years, and a further $27 billion in rooftop solar and battery storage, the money and the ambition for a revolution are there, yet the risk of bei
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