Global emissions to surge past pre-Covid, as world fails to grasp ‘green recovery’ — RenewEconomy
Global greenhouse gas emissions will surge past pre-Covid levels, as the world returns to old practice, despite calls for a “green recovery”. The post Global emissions to surge past pre-Covid, as world fails to grasp ‘green recovery’ appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Global emissions to surge past pre-Covid, as world fails to grasp ‘green recovery’ — RenewEconomy
Is bigger always better when it comes to solar modules? — RenewEconomy
Large scale solar developers in Australia are starting to explore new, larger, module sizes in their installations. There are now many large modules on the market. But is bigger always better? A large scale PV power plant not only delivers consistent green energy, but is also a significant financial investment over 25 years. Long term…
Is bigger always better when it comes to solar modules? — RenewEconomy
What the most affected regions need from COP26 — The Earthbound Report
I’ve been in Glasgow for the last couple of days, a city full of people, groups, campaigns and delegations all competing for attention. My email inbox is the same – packed with demands from every conceivable interest group, legitimate or illegitimate. Why COP26 must hold a session on vegan diets. Why this is the COP […]
What the most affected regions need from COP26 — The Earthbound Report
World’s biggest solar and storage project proposed for South Australia — RenewEconomy
Photon and RayGen set sights on what they claim will be world’s biggest solar and storage facility, to be built in South Australia. The post World’s biggest solar and storage project proposed for South Australia appeared first on RenewEconomy.
World’s biggest solar and storage project proposed for South Australia — RenewEconomy
The AUKUS FUKUS Fracas: Submarines, Really? — One Finite Planet
This is an amazing diplomatic saga, that just could have an impact on the world political balance. Background. The Main Event. Round 1: Recalled Ambassadors. Round 2: Biden to Macron, “I was under the impression you had been told”. Round 3: Macron, “I don’t think, I know [Scott Morrison Lied]” . Round 4: Morrison: Denials […]
The AUKUS FUKUS Fracas: Submarines, Really? — One Finite Planet
Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis — RenewEconomy
Scott Morrison had a chance to reset Australia’s position on global climate action, instead he leaves Glasgow with Australia’s reputation in crisis. The post Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis — RenewEconomy
Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” — RenewEconomy
Australia unveils 30-30-30 plan, designed to help deliver ultra low cost solar to power new green industries and emission cuts. The post Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” — RenewEconomy
More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices — RenewEconomy
Economic recovery should be fuelled by renewables, not fossil fuels. The post More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices appeared first on RenewEconomy.
More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices — RenewEconomy
Entering the Absurdicene as the Anthropocene loses its relevance — Sustainability Bites
So, if you accept that humanity is now acting in an absurd way (ie, you accept the premise of the Absurdicene) then maybe we need to be honest about the prospects of a rational process towards sustainability. Maybe we need to focus on why this absurdity prevails, and what we need to do to short circuit it.
Entering the Absurdicene as the Anthropocene loses its relevance — Sustainability Bites
With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance
Glasgow will not get close to pledges to halve emissions by 2030, and any reputable climate scientist will say that means warming will shoot past 2°C. The post With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance appeared first on RenewEconomy.
With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance — RenewEconomy So far most of the media coverage and advocacy at COP26 has been poor andseverely misinformed. One after another politicians, business leaders, journalists and NGO advocates talk about “net zero 2050” and the 1.5°C Paris goal in the same breath, and get away with it. This gross underestimation of the climate condition is utterly delusional, and very few seem to be calling it out.
“Net zero 2050” (NZ2050) is a con, as this blog has reported over and over again, as did this Breakthrough report. Central bankers have NZ2050 scenarios in which fossil fuels constitute 50% of primary energy use in 2050. When the Murdoch media endorses the NZ2050 climate goal, you know it is the problem and not the answer. 2050 is so far away it’s a reason for procrastination. Judging by the G20 outcome, even NZ2050 and a coal phase-out may not pass muster in Glasgow. China is on net zero by 2060 and India on net zero by 2070.Current climate models are not capturing all the risks, including the stalling of the Gulf Stream, polar ice melt and the uptick in extreme weather events.
Carbon dioxide and methane release from deep permafrost are not routinely included in climate models; Climate models do not account well for increased warming due to loss of Arctic sea-ice: “Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will advance the 2ºC threshold by 25years”; and rhe IPCC 2021 report gives “a best estimate of equilibrium
climate sensitivity of 3°C” but including factors such as “slow”
feedbacks (carbon stores) and albedo changes (reflectivity), warming may be
as high as 5–6°C for a doubling of carbon dioxide for a range of climate
states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica.
Renew Economy 3rd Nov 2021
Only Britain has the dubious plan to get to net zero by relying on multiple nuclear reactors
Even without our plentiful opportunities to exploit wind, solar, wave and tidal power many countries feel they do not need nuclear power to reach their goals.
Questions remain over the UK’s nuclear power plans https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/02/questions-remain-over-the-uks-nuclear-power-plans?fbclid=IwAR3TQj7xYv3jEY824jm9tVFuNln6CgT7xqS3
No other country taking part in Cop26 is relying on multiple new reactors to get to net zero by 2050 Paul Brown, Tue 2 Nov 2021 In 2007, Vincent de Rivaz, the then EDF chief executive, said Britain would be “cooking our Christmas turkeys” with electricity from Hinkley Point C nuclear station by 2017. Instead the first concrete was poured that year and the turkey is now scheduled for late 2026.
In the race against time to avert dangerous global heating, the UK government has decided to back an untried reactor from Rolls Royce. The first of these could be “plugged into the grid by 2031”, according to Nuclear Industry Association.
Internationally average planning time for reactor proposals is 10 years, plus another decade for building, and that is for already proven designs. The 16 planned Rolls Royce reactors are still on the drawing board. The arguments about where they could be sited are beginning. Apart from other possible objections the favoured UK coastal locations are vulnerable to sea level rise, erosion and storms.
Faced with the well-documented delays and drawbacks to nuclear programmes it is perhaps not surprising that there is no other country taking part in the Cop26 process in Glasgow relying on multiple new nuclear reactors to get to net zero carbon targets by 2050. Even without our plentiful opportunities to exploit wind, solar, wave and tidal power many countries feel they do not need nuclear power to reach their goals.
Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge — RenewEconomy
Day 2 of COP26 saw some leaders make significant pledges to cut methane emissions and halt deforestation. Australia promoted its gas industry to the world. The post Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge — RenewEconomy
November 3 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “My Island Home Is Threatened – We Have No Hill To Run To” • The Marshall Islands are only 2 meters above sea level and we are one of the most threatened countries in the world, due to the sea level rise caused by climate change. Unlike many other island nations, we have […]
November 3 Energy News — geoharvey
Australian media part of the cover-up of Pandora Papers
Meanwhile, the 2016 Panama Papers remain under lock and key, unavailable to the public, secreted by ICIJ. The data is getting stale now. It is six years old. It is wasted, an insult to the people who risked their lives to put it in the public domain.
Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up? https://www.michaelwest.com.au/pandora-papers-is-the-worlds-biggest-leak-the-worlds-biggest-cover-up/ , By Michael West|, October 8, 2021
Where are the US billionaires, the Wall Streeters, the Big Four tax firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC? Michael West explores the mystery of the Pandora Papers in this first of a two-part series.
In the wake of the stunning Pandora Papers data leak this week, the ABC enthused, “Even by the ICIJ’s standards, this is big. If the documents were printed out and stacked up they would be four times taller than Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower”.
Probably not. If we assume Pandora is like its predecessors Panama Papers and Paradise Papers – where less than 1% of the data was made public – that would represent a stack of documents 12.2 metres high, not 1220 metres, which would get you up to Yogurt World on Level 5 of the Centrepoint food court.
Another “biggest data leak in history”, another trove mega-leaks where billionaires, celebrities, Italian mobsters, Russian oligarchs and foreign heads of state have been outed for their links to tax havens.
But where are the US politicians? Where are the Wall Streeters? Where are the Big Four, the masterminds of global tax avoidance PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte?
Conspicuously absent, that’s where. Again.
Beating the B Team
Make no mistake this is fabulous, explosive stuff. The Pandora Papers, like Panama Papers and Paradise papers, are a spectacular data leak but, like the leaks before them, they have blown the lid on the world’s Tax Avoidance B Team.
And, like the others, the data has not actually been made public; not much of it anyway, maybe 1%. The rest is sitting with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington. It has been leaked to the ICIJ alone which in turn leaks bits of it, presumably a very small part of it, to its “global media partners”.
n Australia, these are Nine Entertainment’s AFR, Guardian and ABC who are themselves keeping most of it a secret. This from Guardian Australia:
“Australians who appear in the data include senior figures from the finance and property industries. The Guardian has chosen not to identify them.
“About 400 Australian names are contained in the papers, a cache of 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Samoa.”
Meanwhile Julian Assange
Meanwhile Julian Assange continues to rot in London’s Belmarsh Prison, facing extradition to the US, abandoned by successive Australian governments amid reports of a CIA plot to assassinate him. His crime? Wikileaks made public US war crimes; a real leak, documents actually made public.
In contrast, the Washington-based ICIJ has consistently refused to release its data to the public, preferring instead to conduct a choreographed media circus. Its director, Australian journalist Gerard Ryle, declined to respond to questions for this story, doubly ironic given we used to work together on the newsroom floors at Fairfax and the ICIJ is a self-styled beacon of journalistic integrity dedicated to “expose the truth and hold the powerful accountable, while also adhering to the highest standards of fairness and accuracy”.
One question we put to Ryle was whether ICIJ had received a subpoena from US authorities for this incredible trove of corporate information, say the Department of Justice. If not, why not?
The questions are many, not only because of the sheer magnitude of this set of leaks but also because the effect of the Pandora Papers is to, deservedly, trash a suite of non-US tax havens such as the notorious British Virgin Islands and the upshot will be to drive global wealth towards secrecy jurisdictions in the US such as Rupert Murdoch’s preferred haven of Delaware.
So, what is going on here?
The way ICIJ works is they use a panel of 150 “media partners”, mostly large corporate media organisations around the world, to disseminate the information, or at least the bits of it they deem suitable.
In the case of Panama Papers, an anonymous source dubbed John Doe hacked Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and leaked the data to German journalists who got it to ICIJ for dissemination to its band of media partners.
14 Mossack Fonsecas
This time around, there are 14 Mossack Fonsecas; that is, 14 “offshore service providers” have been hacked. This is hacking on an industrial, possibly sovereign, scale. It is possible these “offshore service providers”, from Hong Kong to the Caribbean, divulged the information voluntarily, but unlikely.
Who benefits? The US and the Big Four. Just as the Panama Papers helped to demolish Panama as a tax haven, compelling clients of Mossack Fonseca to flee to other secrecy jurisdictions to hide their money, the upshot of the Pandora Papers is that, right at this moment, the super rich who secrete their money in the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles or Cyprus will be thinking long and hard about restructuring to hide their riches via Delaware or another onshore tax haven in the US.
They will also think long and hard about getting the Big Four global tax firms – PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG – to manage their affairs. The A Team.
This is of course a speculative conclusion but also, as one regulatory finance source confided to Michael West Media this week, just a matter of putting two and two together. The Washington-based ICIJ never seems to be harassed by US authorities, the Big Four are rarely named, US billionaires are rarely named, blue chip tax avoiders are rarely named, the identity of the vast bulk of wealthy Australians in the data are never named.
Foreign PEPs, mobsters and oligarchs
This is not to disparage the work of Gerard Ryle and his team. The latest mega-leak of almost 12 million documents from offshore finance firms has identified the usual high profile types: crooner Julio Iglesias, cricket star Sachin Tendulkar, pop music diva Shakira, supermodel Claudia Schiffer and “an Italian mobster known as “Lell the Fat One”.
Great headlines, and every one a worthy story, although many will have bona fide reasons for being in tax havens. Rich people avoid tax, full stop. We will discuss the mechanics of secrecy jurisdictions, how it all works and who actually benefits in the sequel to this story.
Besides the crooners, mobsters and Russian oligarchs however, the Pandora Papers have outed an array of ”politically exposed persons” (PEP); former politicians and present heads of state. From King Abdullah of Jordan, Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family, the prime minister of the Czech republic, Andrej Babiš and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to former British prime minister Tony Blair and three current Latin American heads of state, those identified publicly in Pandora Papers have sent shockwaves around the world.
The Aussie connection
A slew of tax authorities have vowed to take action, including the Australian Tax Office which, on Wednesday, froze more than $80 million in assets and companies linked to Gold Coast property developer Jim Raptis.
Westpac director Steve Harker was also identified as a client of one of the offshore service providers Singapore’s Asiaciti. As the identities of most of the Australians remain a secret, Harker is probably feeling unfairly targeted. What of the other 400 Australians?
No doubt the draconian defamation laws in this country, laws which protect the wealthy, played a part in the decision of local media to keep the names secret. Yet this also goes to the fundamental issue with ICIJ’s arbitrary arrangements and its media partners cherry-picking the data.
If ICIJ were truly fair dinkum about transparency and public interest, it would make the data from all its leaks public so that boffins from around the world, anybody for that matter, could hop in and dig around.
Who is calling the shots? One man apparently, Gerard Ryle. In the wake of the Panama Papers, when we asked Ryle on a number of occasions for an ICIJ log-in to analyse the data, we were denied.
“My path, my call,” said Ryle. We already have our media partners, he said.
Meanwhile, the 2016 Panama Papers remain under lock and key, unavailable to the public, secreted by ICIJ. The data is getting stale now. It is six years old. It is wasted, an insult to the people who risked their lives to put it in the public domain.
In Part II: who guards the guards? The second story in our investigation of the ICIJ and its Offshore Leaks examines what is really going on with international tax avoidance.
Michael West
Michael West established michaelwest.com.au to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. Formerly a journalist and editor at Fairfax newspapers and a columnist at News Corp, West was appointed Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelWestBiz.
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time, Rt.com29 Oct, 2021
If the WikiLeaks founder is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting.
For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.
Assange, with long white hair, appeared on screen the first day from the video conference room in HM Prison Belmarsh. He was wearing a white shirt with an untied tie around his neck. He looked gaunt and tired. He did not appear in court, the judges explained, because he was receiving a “high dose of medication.” On the second day he was apparently not present in the prison’s video conference room.
Assange is being extradited because his organization WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes – including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints. He is also being targeted by US authorities for other leaks, especially those that exposed the hacking tools used by the CIA known as Vault 7, which enables the spy agency to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers, and the operating systems of most smart phones, as well as operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to use the Espionage Act to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information.
If the appeal by the United States is accepted, Assange will be retried in London. The ruling on the appeal is not expected until at least January.
Assange’s September 2020 trial painfully exposed how vulnerable he has become after 12 years of detention, including seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He has in the past attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He suffers from hallucinations and depression, takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. After he was observed pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face, and banging his head against the wall, he was transferred for several months to the medical wing of the Belmarsh prison. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”
James Lewis, the lawyer for the United States, attempted to discredit the detailed and disturbing medical and psychological reports on Assange presented to the court in September 2020, painting him instead as a liar and malingerer. He excoriated the decision of Judge Baraitser to bar extradition, questioned her competence, and breezily dismissed the mountains of evidence that high-security prisoners in the United States, like Assange, subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), and held in virtual isolation in supermax prisons, suffer psychological distress. He charged Dr. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, who examined Assange and testified for the defense, with deception for “concealing” that Assange fathered two children with his fiancée, Stella Moris while in refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He said that, should the Australian government request Assange, he could serve his prison time in Australia, his home country, after his appeals had been exhausted, but stopped short of promising that Assange would not be held in isolation or subject to SAMs…………………
There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the US Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Assange is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration. The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are guilty of egregious crimes. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Assange, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.
Assange’s “crime” is that he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians. He exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo. He exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other UN representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime. He exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that, under post-Nuremberg laws, is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, which authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of US citizens in Yemen. He exposed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians. He exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform. He exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party. He exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permit the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones, and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images, and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.
He exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption, and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths alone he is guilty. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/538822-assange-battle-for-press-freedom/#comment-5589120643
1 This month.
20 September –National Day of Action in Melbourne on the International Day of Peace
Help Aunty Sue Protect Her Land and Sacred Sites From Destructive Rocket Testing.
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Australians deserve the truth
about
AUKUS – https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 