Rents & Property Prices Disastrously Inflated for the Investment Profit of Old Rich People and the Neoliberal Inflation & Growth Nerds of Both Major Party Groupings with No Idea of or Care for Responsible Economic Management

openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/116278/1/apo-nid118611-475741.pdf

“The Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement of 1956 is commonly seen
as marking a shift in policy and in political rhetoric, away from public
housing provision towards private home-ownership. Before examining
the evolution of this policy shift, this paper frames it within the context of
the social history of the early 1950s, particularly the post-war affirmation
of the independent family, with its commitments to domesticity as a basis
of citizenship, but in a period when a severe housing shortage also
signaled uncertainties about the reliability of the economic boon. The
paper then examines in detail the evolution of the 1956 Agreement within
the conservative parties, the Commonwealth bureaucracy and the Cabinet.
It concludes that, even though home-ownership emerges from these
debates as a central ideological priority for the Menzies government,
Cabinet thwarted the attempt of Senator Spooner — as the responsible
minister — to abolish the CSHA altogether..”

Above, on the standard academic historical lines nobody seriously working for radical social and economic change really any longer has time to read is John Murphy’s introductory explainer ..sorry i skipped over it at first and just left the link hanging mysteriously in the intelligent electronic ambience in forlorn anticipation of visitation by a Prof Chomsky bulldozer..

Uh-oh he called the entire #Internet ‘a bulldozer’ not the self-conscious predominantly #RCHS-driven #LCHS executive action required to use the vastly metastasising cybermatrix as a ‘bulldozing.’ But that’s no problem to those of us schooled in 20th century #social #science, or simply people who’ve transitioned cognitively to mastery of Piaget’s #concrete #operations, or, how shall I put this politely(?), grown-ups who never fail to embrace #Value in conjunction with #Fact, and will as long as they draw breath ceaselessly think about stuff – #ideation + #Object. See Becker, Nagel, McLuhan & RD Laing (on the literal and actual social (human relationships-) causes of both #depression and #psychotic illness) for examples.

Did I digress? Hah.

Our point which I am magnanimously certain is embraced by millions more thoughtful human beings every week at this terrifying juncture in the history of our species and all the other animals, birds, insects, crustaceans, fish and indeed biologically lesser beings might be succinctly and tersely put when we say like Henry Ford #USA industrialist #History is bunc(om)* at least out of common self-respect if not the love of our own sanity to examine the coercive exploitative #economic motives of the political players here. You might choose to call this scrutiny of political facts, events and motives pragmatism, as the late RJL Hawke did.

And the coercive exploitative economic motive? Or the temper of the times, Leitmotif or motif?? That now-transcendent Ayn Rand/ Alan Greenspan/ Milton “#Freedumb” Friedman neoliberal zeitgeist??? – That was Menzies’ 1944 Reverse Class Warfare by shopkeepers, rentiers & gangsters against the Australian labour movement, nowadays conducted exclusively against what these numpties and rich old men call the “Left,” and actually led by @AustralianLabor’s OWN barking-mad misanthropic enthusiasts for “a little rougher than usual handling” of women, the #Catholic “Right.” **

But you knew that? Just like five days ago you instantly realised what Scott John Morrison was up to erasing and overriding the ministerial authority of five of his own chosen and officially appointed ministers BECAUSE these people would grizzle, groan and even obstruct or quash the various lunatic Institute of Public Affairs boondoggles, vast gifts of public money for #LNP donors and #FossilFuel investors and nasty crackdowns on not just folk on $20k or less or even zero disposable income (eg refugees) but EVERY Australian family on less than $65 – 70,000 annual income that these Albert-Einsteins had planned and calculated in the lead-up to 21st May 2022? Cool. We’re on the same page.

The entire frankly benighted neoliberal fruitcake political class will catch up with our thinking. The #journalists have no choice but to catch up or get the proverbial chopper (there will be no guillotines, ok?). And good riddance to the vast majority of them. If wisdom is a gift then economic insight is a blessing*** indeed. Welcome this era of overhauled education and hard science, research and development geared to and directed to global ecological health.

Peace? That was a Bretton Woods bankers’ & then millionaires comforting lie born out of horror, pain and grief of Hjalmar Schact’s and Adolf Hitler’s #Oil-#economy #war. – The whole neoliberal neo-keynesian monetarist geopolitical mythology, the fake-#science, and the perverted #mathematics of #Econometrics of the second half of the 20th century turn on this bloody evil lie. I suppose it, Peace objectified, literally means middle-class affluent consumerism in the extractive natural resource-trashing and in fact genocidal export economy.

This devastating obscenity was exactly what Barnaby Joyce, an Australian National Party MP, and no doubt the former PM Bob Menzies too, would have called Retail Politics: gifts rewarding voters, payola, PNG ‘cargo,’ vast taxation offsets, Christian churches wallowing in real estate-, industrial- and Gatesian/ Soros-style “charitable” foundation or solicited donations-wealth, “tithing” (1/10 of income), similar schemes, the near-exact equivalent of the payment of large mediaeval “Indulgences” to rubber-stamp civil, criminal and moral crimes granting the donor immunity from magisterial or celestial punishments AND actually TRASHING free liberal #education and financially taking-over non-profitable “churches” in other countries. For Christ’s sake, sure.

The self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating prophecy of supply-side neoliberal consumer bounties, they reckoned.

If wisdom is a gift then economic insight is a blessing indeed. We all of sound mind and good heart welcome this era of overhauled education and hard science, and embrace research and development geared to and directed to purposeful economic reform and global ecological health TOGETHER.

John Blundell

Independent Journalist

13th August 2022

South Australia – With our Love: let’s do some work please🥸🤨🤓😎🧐😷🙂😋.

*Henry Ford, the Wayside Inn, and the Problem of ‘History Is Bunk’ — Bunk

**https://www.smh.com.au/national/rougher-than-usual-justice-20041209-gdka15.html

Presence, Not Praise: How To Cultivate a Healthy Relationship with Achievement

BY MARIA POPOVA

Despite ample evidence and countless testaments to the opposite, there persists a toxic cultural mythology that creative and intellectual excellence comes from a passive gift bestowed upon the fortunate few by the gods of genius, rather than being the product of the active application and consistent cultivation of skill. So what might the root of that stubborn fallacy be? Childhood and upbringing, it turns out, might have a lot to do.

In The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (public library), psychoanalyst and University College London professor Stephen Grosz builds on more than 50,000 hours of conversation from his quarter-century experience as a practicing psychoanalyst to explore the machinery of our inner life, with insights that are invariably profound and often provocative — for instance, a section titled “How praise can cause a loss of confidence,” in which Grosz writes:

Nowadays, we lavish praise on our children. Praise, self-confidence and academic performance, it is commonly believed, rise and fall together. But current research suggests otherwise — over the past decade, a number of studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to under-perform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting — why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may simply repeat the same work — why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets applause?

Grosz cites psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller’s famous 1998 study, which divided 128 children ages 10 and 11 into two groups. All were asked to solve mathematical problems, but one group were praised for their intellect (“You did really well, you’re so clever.”) while the other for their effort (“You did really well, you must have tried really hard.”) The kids were then given more complex problems, which those previously praised for their hard work approached with dramatically greater resilience and willingness to try different approaches whenever they reached a dead end. By contrast, those who had been praised for their cleverness were much more anxious about failure, stuck with tasks they had already mastered, and dwindled in tenacity in the face of new problems. Grosz summarizes the now-legendary findings:

Ultimately, the thrill created by being told ‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to children in another school, recounting their experience, some of the ‘clever’ children lied, inflating their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters’ confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.

He goes on to admonish against today’s culture of excessive parental praise, which he argues does more for lifting the self-esteem of the parents than for cultivating a healthy one in their children:

Admiring our children may temporarily lift our self-esteem by signaling to those around us what fantastic parents we are and what terrific kids we have — but it isn’t doing much for a child’s sense of self. In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we’re actually doing much the same thing — doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, and about what our child feels, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.

To explore what the healthier substitute for praise might be, he recounts observing an eighty-year-old remedial reading teacher named Charlotte Stiglitz, the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who told Grosz of her teaching methodology:

I don’t praise a small child for doing what they ought to be able to do,’ she told me. ‘I praise them when they do something really difficult — like sharing a toy or showing patience. I also think it is important to say “thank you”. When I’m slow in getting a snack for a child, or slow to help them and they have been patient, I thank them. But I wouldn’t praise a child who is playing or reading.

Rather than utilizing the familiar mechanisms of reward and punishment, Grosz observed, Charlotte’s method relied on keen attentiveness to “what a child did and how that child did it.” He recounts:

I once watched Charlotte with a four-year-old boy, who was drawing. When he stopped and looked up at her — perhaps expecting praise — she smiled and said, ‘There is a lot of blue in your picture.’ He replied, ‘It’s the pond near my grandmother’s house — there is a bridge.’ He picked up a brown crayon, and said, ‘I’ll show you.’ Unhurried, she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed, she listened. She was present.

Presence, he argues, helps build the child’s confidence by way of indicating he is worthy of the observer’s thoughts and attention — its absence, on the other hand, divorces in the child the journey from the destination by instilling a sense that the activity itself is worthless unless it’s a means to obtaining praise. Grosz reminds us how this plays out for all of us, and why it matters throughout life:

Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness — the feeling that someone is trying to think about us — something we want more than praise?

The Examined Life goes on to explore such enduring facets of the meaning of existence as our inextinguishable urge to change ourselves, the gift of ignorance, and the challenges of intimacy, deconstructing the wall in philosopher Simone Weil’s famous prison parable to reveal the many dimensions in which our desire “to understand and be understood” manifests.

Public domain images via Flickr Commons

3d

Zoe Cohen

This is the foothills of collapse, if you hadn’t noticed And many of the Tory leadership candidates want to scrap netzero 2050… If you want things to really change then you’d better get out on the streets and make yourselves peacefully ungovernable. Nothing else has worked www.juststopoil.org www.extinctionrebellion.uk “#Patients without life threatening illnesses are set to be turned away from A&E in Portsmouth as the £UK’s #heatwave puts extreme pressure on #hospitals. The #heat coupled with staffing difficulties has forced Portsmouth Hospitals University Foundation Trust to declare a critical incident. South Central Ambulance Trust, covering parts of the Midlands and southern England, also declared an incident due to heightened pressure. The heatwave has only just begun and forecasters have refused to rule out the possibility the UK could see record 40C temperatures towards the end of the week. An amber extreme heat alert has been issued for “exceptionally high” temperatures on Sunday, with forecasters warning the conditions have the potential to cause serious illness or even death. A Level Three Heat Health Alert covers east, southeast and southwest England until Friday, with a level 2 alert in place for the rest of England. Scientists say heatwaves are now more intense and more frequent because of global heating caused by burning #fossilfuels. They are also the deadliest extreme weather events in the UK.” (no shit! my addition…) https://lnkd.in/grt8qE6e

Heatwave warning as hospital turns away patients – follow live

independent.co.uk

Wet pants in the @Twitter little boys’ room? Or has that trickle down from the executive washroom upstairs after 25 years of Gordon Geckoe Federal Reserve monetarist & fruitloop fiscal stimulation exuberance and not a little penis-waving begun to make a terrible stink?

Whatever our fearless truth-to-power investigations may show at some point way off into the dodgy future it is clear confusion reigns and the gravely cognitively impaired have taken over. Need I add that this will not end well? Oh. It does seem the world has plummeted from limits to growth to limits to rhetoric in 58 years.

Celebrating the Club of Rome today.

1/3
Dear & not so dear misreaders..
Ms Atwood this is interesting
I think there’s an important new avenue of #Sociology here.
I have been a student and developer of Told Belle/McLuhan edu-socially constructed unlived vicarious “2nd hand” represented #auspol

2/3
lived experiences & relationships affecting all children who grew up with television as entertainment & internet connected screens with lists & bullet points as study.
Misreading is #ITC when politicians are more intent on @GretaThunberg’s blah processes than policy #auspol

3/3
For some reason I am having my comments in #Sociology & #education in relation to your point Ms Atwood about people misreading narratives/ storylines commonly generating in their own minds readings 180° off the original blocked by @Twitter

Mercifully the 3 Tweets have be let through this morning. But a fourth one? Nh-nh. See last section of this report “Now the Climate..”

“The boot’s on the other foot” a First Nations elder said to me in 1974 at Chihduna on South Australia’s west coast. Poignant. The bloke was wrong by the way – captured by undergraduate revolutionary sentiment in the person of a Queen’s Counsel personage who founded the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement of SA back then.

Writing about misreadings being culturally, socially and educationally reinforced for “socially engineered” negative ends including unquestioning noise-making consumer subservience (along exactly the lines advised by Sigmund Freud’s brother-in-law Edward Bernays in the 1920’s) puts us at the sharp end of children’s skills development & training policy.

There is a crying need – everywhere – for kids to learn Critical Thinking. To be exposed to Paulo Friere’s or Ivan Illich’s Problem Posing Education, for example. If the mediaeval #CatholicChurch continues to bribe, blackmail & neutralise the AUTHENTIC education of children and young people that is all the more reason for global leaders to urgently marginalise that institution – to flatly and simply strip it of all its outrageous secular public policy making powers. #auspol

The mental AND cognitive dumbdown – learned helplessness* – is violently eroding active and emotional intelligence in a human race and ecological biota now also under dire threat of microbial viruses. I believe Ms Atwood’s incidental and unexceptionable observation points strongly towards urgent society-wide, worldwide reexamination.

Now the #Climate Intransigence Sharp End..

We get right down to the bedrock of #FossilFuels-#economy/ major accountancy firms/ #wallstreet #CrimesAgainstHumanity : the following #Twitter message is currently BLOCKED from transmission from my account #wired_we:

“Renewable controllable gas for this generation and the next” – a free-to-air television advertisement 8:25 pm 13/7/2022 @SBS.

We will fight you people into the ground. No insurance available to you #Oil #Economy ghouls – only huge bags & suitcases full of organised crime 💰🤑 . You’re done. #Independents @Greens #climate #energy #journalist John Blundell SA

14th July 2022 10:30 AM Central Australian Time

Astounding

*Martin Seligman USA 1965: Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

Adam Morton Climate and environment editor @adamlmorton Fri 1 Jul 2022 17.10 AEST

• Western Australian authorities have recommended a 50-year extension of the country’s biggest polluting fossil fuel development, sparking condemnation from climate campaigners who warned it could add more than 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The WA Environment Protection Authority (EPA) advised the state government it should give the greenlight to oil and gas giant Woodside Energy to run its North West Shelf gas development in the Pilbara until 2070.

It recommended the approval be conditional on Woodside reducing the total net greenhouse gas emissions released from the gas processing facility by two-thirds – from 385m tonnes to 128m tonnes – on the way to reaching net zero carbon pollution by 2050. The company could meet those targets by cutting emissions or buying carbon credits to offset its pollution.

Opponents said the condition covered only a fraction of the total pollution expected from the expansion as the vast bulk would be “scope three” emissions released after the gas was exported and burned overseas.

Woodside has estimated the development’s scope three emissions would be about 80m tonnes a year. Climate campaigners said it suggested it could be responsible for more than 4bn tonnes of additional carbon dioxide over 50 years – more than eight times Australia’s annual emissions.

The head of clean transitions at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Jess Panegyres, said the North West Shelf expansion would undermine Australia’s emissions reduction efforts and add to a worsening climate crisis if allowed to go ahead.

She said the EPA recommendation could lead to Woodside tapping a long-promised new gas field, Browse, off the WA coast, and showed “how fossil fuel companies can exploit our weak environmental laws in their own self-interest”.

“Both the UN and International Energy Agency have been very clear that there can be no new gas developments to limit global warming to 1.5C, but Woodside continues to aggressively expand its operations, even with the global gas market set to shrink as the world switches to cleaner, safer renewables,” Panegyres said. “This dangerous company does not have Australia’s economic or environmental best interests at heart.”

Woodside said the release of the EPA recommendations marked an important step in the North West Shelf expansion. Its executive vice-president, Fiona Hick, said the company would carefully consider the conditions proposed by the EPA.

“At a time of heightened concern around energy security, the North West Shelf project has an important role to play in delivering natural gas to local and international customers, providing energy that can support their decarbonisation commitments,” she said.

Woodside recently dramatically expanded its fossil fuel footprint by merging its petroleum assets with those of the global miner BHP, a step that made it one of the world’s Top 10 oil and gas companies. It is proposing several new developments in Western Australia, including a $16bn development of the untapped Scarborough gas field.

It has been criticised for failing to explain how it would meet what it has described as its aspiration to reach net zero emissions by 2050. At an annual general meeting in May, 48.97% of shareholders voted against the company’s climate report.

Federal government emissions data shows the North West Shelf development emitted more than 6.7m tonnes of carbon dioxide in the 2020-21 calendar year, more than any other Australian industrial facility.

Part II, Distorted Belief, Enlightenment Philosophy, Combustion Society.

Any society that as commonly with affluent post 1789 “enlightenment” nations, and now with the frenzy of algorithm- or #ArtificialIntelligence-“captured marketing victims that is vastly cashed-up neoliberal screw the-/ profit from-the-poor Friedmanism at its zenith, seeks to virtually replace the business of government (best summed up in contemporary progressive City of London terms as #ESG I might say – that is making both industry and public services work not only for upper middle income people but for everyone) with statements, announcements and outrageously costly feasibility or scoping studies about government. Debate, speeches, ceremonies, celebrations and memorable television events, ludicrously “balanced” by ponderous polite consideration of say the femicide epidemics all over the world where every “stakeholder” including the hateful corrupt and complicit is assured of an equal say. How else do countries entertain presidents who urge police to shoot down people they don’t like (being competitive young males) except by corrupt and compromised newsmedia. How, and some of us have been deeply distressed, lost and voiceless in a purported liberal democracy (not presumably a two-party racist sexist neofascist electoral autocracy as #India) about both issues has our country ignored the non-Burmese people of horrific Myanmar and “not-a-#journalist!” Assange for another decade?? And how for the love of decency and natural justice have we kept selling #coal into South Asia and profiting from exploitative and now obviously lethally dangerous neocolonial #carpetbagger business dealings there? So in this context – as an enormously well-read person trying to contribute to his people – I offer some notes that help explain how we became a country that doesn’t do any work but considers it noble and fine to endlessly pointlessly and gallingly talk about it.

In turn, I’m sure the sociology of ACUP, ECUP & HCUP (Blundell 1997) will help you find answers as to how we must get young Australians out of their obviously bullied and suborned state and looking towards healthy productive economic lives. To hell with the technical Billy the Goose political pantomime.

Now the @Guardian report from Perth, Western Australia that finally and mercifully if one takes a sanguine view as we all must at this moment of global #weather cataclysm due ONLY to man-made carbon & other heating gases discharged to our atmosphere by the combustion🔥💥of #FossilFuels, lays bare the frankly deranged view in Australia amongst rich old white people and their younger political class acolytes/ Kool Aid guzzlers/ bewildered rhetoricians calling themselves journalists whose dualist mentality holds that the debate or “the show’s” the thing (or thing-k..

– This clearly psychotic vision of real-world material content as mere scenic props for the macabre performances of a “chattering class” with its objectified manipulable capitalised Environment as one siloed field or compartment of study & decision, while all others including human health, longevity, ecology, tourism, mountain climbing &c were distinct and separate matters..

– Distinct neoclassical specialisms whose entire raison d’être (purpose for being, Fr) is detailed legalistic examination, multi-million dollar research grants from the barking-mad global oligarchs & their tax cheating foundations, prestigious awards and glittering prizes and lofty elevation to salaried riches, public honours and many rides on big✈️ s. **

– What a piece of work was Man.

John Blundell, 5/7/2022

• Western Australia’s EPA urges 50-year extension of country’s most polluting gas project https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/01/western-australias-epa-urges-50-year-extension-of-countrys-most-polluting-gas-project?CMP=share_btn_tw (republished above)

**Artificial Compartmentalisation under Patriarchal Fiscal Elites along with #ECUP & #HCUP were identified by myself publishing as Community Economist – later CE Publications Worldwide (until 2003) – 1996. The other two: Excessive Codification under Patriarchy, Human Commodification under patriarchic fiscal/ monetary elites – Marxist neoclassical people please note the process is to turn the low-income person into an object for trade, a situation of depersonalisation and #coercion and NOT of #commodotisation, #dehumanisation or brutal #slavery (these states are obviously present with genocidal governments and organised crime cartels – our job is to relate to and represent the broad mass of humans, to empower and enable not facilitate or patronise.)

Now the @Guardian report from Perth, Western Australia that finally and mercifully if one takes a sanguine view as we all must at this moment of global #weather cataclysm due ONLY to man-made carbon & other heating gases discharged to our atmosphere by the combustion🔥💥of #FossilFuels, lays bare the frankly deranged view in Australia amongst rich old white people and their younger political class acolytes/ Kool Aid guzzlers/ bewildered rhetoricians calling themselves journalists whose dualist mentality holds that the debate or “the show’s” the thing (or thing-k..)..

twitter.com/bom_au/status/1543440847215026178

People not only want #climate “denier-list” mad men’s and women’s heads on plates, but want every official and public servant employed – state, local or federal – who is on public record holding that man-made #climate change due to carbon gases pumped into our atmosphere is only one of several factors trashing the earth’s 6 to 7000 year-old #weather #systems OUT.

It’s our country and we want what’s left of it back in safe hands guided by intelligent and cognitively unimpaired minds immediately.

John Blundell

South Australia

Fossil Fuels

By Marianne Lavelle

November 9, 2016 Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of maximum fossil fuel production in the U.S. while rolling back environmental protections. Credit: Getty Images

Donald Trump’s astonishing victory has turned the world of climate action upside down, setting back U.S. environmental policy and threatening the international drive to cut carbon pollution and slow global warming.

The stunning upset by Trump, who has routinely suggested that climate change is a hoax, threatens to unravel President Obama’s climate action agenda, built on executive orders and regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon clampdown at power plants. Trump has vowed to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, but could cripple it by merely retreating from the U.S. commitment. As the world’s second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide pollution, the U.S. could render the global treaty meaningless, at a time when scientists are urging nations to quickly raise their ambition, or risk an escalating climate crisis.

Leading up to the election, the gulf between Trump and Hillary Clinton on climate and energy was wide and the stakes couldn’t have been higher. But the campaign was not fought on those issues. And despite environmental groups pouring an enormous amount of money and people power into the race, they were unable to break through with the message that climate action is urgent.

The result sent shockwaves through the global climate talks now happening in Morocco, known as COP 22, that aim to turn the Paris agreement’s promises into action. Many there expressed deep concern and disappointment. 

“We are all stunned at the COP,” said Saleemul Huq, a climate expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “No one had anticipated this result, and hence there was no plan B. We will have to think about what happens next.”

In another disappointing outcome for climate advocates, Republicans maintained their control of the Senate, winning eight of 11 key races, as well as keeping their majority in the House of Representatives. Both chambers are strongly opposed to climate action policies.

The nation’s climate leaders were left stunned, somber, angry and reflective. They had already prepped their wish lists for Clinton that included a massive clean energy spending program, a moratorium on fossil fuel leases on federal lands and other rules to curb the coal, oil and gas industry’s impact on the atmosphere and water.  

Most environmental groups had backed the Democratic nominee, despite reservations among progressives about her all-of-the-above energy approach. In her, they believed they had a leader who understands the risk of climate change and respected the science. Clinton had been challenged from the left by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, but climate activists were confident they would have been able to influence her policy and push her to further commitments to action. Most of all, she wasn’t Trump.

Now, with little chance to have their agenda heard in Washington, environmental groups will be forced to play defense. At first, that will mean an effort to block Trump’s plans, perhaps by convincing Senate Democrats to block appointments or use the filibuster. Legal challenges are another avenue, but Trump will be able to quickly make his mark on the judiciary, with his appointment of a Supreme Court justice.

Trump has signaled plans to populate his cabinet with oil industry executives and allies, to eliminate the EPA, and to cut all federal spending on the United Nations climate process. Trump has claimed that he will save $100 billion over eight years, which appears to be based on a plan to end federal funding for solar and wind energy, efficiency, batteries, clean cars and climate science, wrote Joe Romm, a former Energy Department official and founder of the Center for American Progress’ Climate Progress blog.

Basically, Trump has promised an America-first, drill-baby-drill energy policy. He has promised unfettered production of coal, oil and natural gas and to “bring the coal industry back 100 percent.”  

Trump said he will rescind any regulations that unduly burden energy development, including the Clean Power Plan, which, if it survives legal challenges, was to have been the cornerstone of Obama’s climate action legacy and the main policy for realizing the nation’s Paris goals. He also said he would abolish the Waters of the U.S. rule, which the fracking industry in North Dakota has opposed. Trump said he would urge TransCanada to renew its permit application for the Keystone XL pipeline. Within his first 100 days, Trump said he would lift moratoriums on fossil fuel production in federal areas, which could clear the way to new coal leasing in the West as well as coastal oil drilling, not only in the Arctic but also the Atlantic and potentially, the Pacific.

“Western Energy Alliance is overjoyed that we will not be experiencing a third term of the Obama Administration,” the industry group said in a statement this morning. “President-elect Trump understands that overregulation is killing American opportunity, and his plans to spur development of domestic shale oil and natural gas will create hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs while delivering widespread prosperity and low energy prices for consumers.”

Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer who represents coal-burning utilities and who spent four years as an  assistant administrator in the EPA under President George W. Bush, said that if the courts don’t kill the Clean Power Plan, Trump will have a number of other options. “I think it’s certain the Clean Power Plan will be revoked,” he said this morning. “The only question is how.”

For his energy and environmental policy team, Trump has selected one of the nation’s most prominent climate contrarians, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to head his EPA transition. Ebell worked on policy for the tobacco industry before his years of work opposing environmental regulations and sowing doubt on climate science. Trump is also reported to be considering Harold Hamm, chief executive of fracking industry leader Continental Resources, for energy secretary, and Forrest Lucas, co-founder of oil products company Lucas Oil, for interior secretary.

Long-term, the environmental movement faces soul-searching about its own direction, and how to turn widespread popular support for environmental protection into an effective political force for urgent climate action.

Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, said this morning that he was feeling “angry and sad and contemplative.”

Looking to the future, he said, “I think it starts with being thoughtful about how we got into this position, and how fear played a role in this election, and looking at how do we build a stronger, broader, more powerful coalition to get the solutions we need.

“We have an opportunity to show climate solutions work for all Americans, including low-income white folks as well as communities of color all across the country.”

Brune said green groups will also have to remain on offense, in addition to resisting Trump’s plans. “We’ve made tremendous climate and clean energy progress, and that can’t be stopped, even with a united climate-denying federal government.”

Brune pointed to state and city governments choosing renewable energy over coal, and the efforts of private companies on climate change, as well as popular support for action on climate change. “Trump, McConnell and Paul Ryan, all working together, can’t stop that,” he said. “The best lever that we have is a majority of the voting public that believes that climate change is real and we need to do something about it. The Republican leadership will expose themselves politically if they overreach.”

Clearly, though, the early battle lines will be Trump’s regulatory proposals.

“If his goal is to dismantle EPA, then our job is clear,” said Jeremy Symons, associate vice president for climate policy affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s to protect the bedrock environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act that have been at the heart of America’s environmental progress, and it is to mobilize the public, who overwhelmingly support the EPA and these laws.”

Symons said he believes that the industry would rue the demolition of the environmental protection architecture that Trump has promised. “I think the election should be a wake-up call to businesses, who now face a future of regulatory chaos if President-elect Trump tries to follow through on dismantling the regulatory framework that protects the air we breathe and the water we drink,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that our environmental laws work. And any attempt to roll back these laws will create regulatory chaos for business and will precipitate a backlash from the public.”  

Trump will be the only world leader who rejects climate science, according to a study by the Sierra Club. This is a particularly tough pill for climate activists to swallow.

“Trump’s election is a disaster, but we must channel our anger and fear into hope and resolve. Our work becomes much harder now, but it’s not impossible, and we refuse to give up,” said May Boeve, executive director of the climate advocacy group 350.org. “We refuse to leave the future of our climate in Trump’s hands. Now is the time to take a deep breath and fight like never before.”

“Our hearts go out today to the millions of people who voted against bigotry and hate and now have to accept the fact that the man who ridiculed and threatened them for months is now President-elect of the United States,” said Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard. “Greenpeace and millions of people around the world have all the power we need to combat climate change and create a just world for everyone. Let’s use this moment to reenergize the fight for the climate and the fight for human rights around the world.”

The movement’s defeat went far deeper than just the presidential race.

The League of Conservation Voters, which gave Clinton its earliest presidential endorsement ever, and spent a record $45 million to elect her and pro-climate action members of Congress, watched four of its five preferred Senate candidates and five of its seven House candidates lose. LCV’s only winning Senate candidate was Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who will take the seat of retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, becoming the first Latina in the Senate.  

Opposite LCV in many of the races was the political network of the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers, which stayed mainly out of the presidential race, but spent at least $44 million on down-ballot contests. Seven of the eight Koch-backed Senate candidates were victorious; the network’s only loss was to Masto. The Koch brothers’ effort was bolstered by massive spending by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative and anti-regulatory organizations, including the National Rifle Association.

InsideClimate News reporter Zahra Hirji contributes

..and in Terrifying Climate Denialist Australia a Critical Re-examination of Half-broken Humanity’s Ludicrous 19th Century City of London Philosophies & Beliefs

Now the @Guardian report from Perth, Western Australia that finally and mercifully if one takes a sanguine view as we all must at this moment of global #weather cataclysm due ONLY to man-made carbon & other heating gases discharged to our atmosphere by the combustion🔥💥of #FossilFuels, lays bare the frankly deranged view in Australia amongst rich old white people and their younger political class acolytes/ Kool Aid guzzlers/ bewildered rhetoricians calling themselves journalists whose dualist mentality holds that the debate or “the show’s” the thing (or thing-k – this a kind of objectivist Rand-Greenspan/ substantivist, mad-bishop Berkeley solopsistic/ ‘internet-of-things,’ anthropocentric algorythm, fevered #STEM #science and drawing room-/ focus group-driven divinely or at least psychotically Reverse Transubstantiated conversational universe – but you all knew that, right?){1}

– This clearly psychotic vision of real-world material content as mere scenic props for the macabre performances of a “chattering class” with its objectified manipulable capitalised Environment as one siloed{2} field or compartment of study & decision, while all others including human health, longevity, ecology, tourism, mountain climbing &c were distinct and separate matters..

– Distinct neoclassical specialisms whose entire raison d’être (purpose for being) is detailed legalistic examination, multi-million dollar research grants from the barking-mad global oligarchs & their tax cheating foundations, prestigious awards and glittering prizes and lofty elevation to salaried riches, public honours and many rides on big✈️s in reward for producing Carl Sagan’s pseudo-#science and sectoral derivative #Econometric tosh – surveys that count so much stuff that large warehouses & vast KW Hours of electricity are required to store humanly & ecologically useless data, that like old #BlockChain transactions are of zero value the moment after it has been processed, and unecologically referenced partial analysis in any and all fields of #research masquerading as #biology, oceanography, sociology, atmospheric science OR economics in particular, these being the essential tools humanity must exploit to arrest man-made #global #heating (NOT to greenwash or talk sh.. about).

– What a piece of work was Man.

John Blundell

South Australia 23 Sept 2022

{1}Western Australia’s EPA urges 50-year extension of country’s most polluting gas project https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/01/western-australias-epa-urges-50-year-extension-of-countrys-most-polluting-gas-project?CMP=share_btn_tw

{2}Artificial Compartmentalisation under Patriarchic Fiscal Elites along with #ECUP -EXCESSIVE CODIFICATION & #HCUP – HUMAN COMMODIFICATION – were identified by myself publishing as Community Economist – later CE Publications Worldwide (until 2003) in1996. Students will note that patriarchic fiscal elites characterise oligarchy, plutocracy, monarchy, gerontocracy, kleptocracy and all other aberrant forms of hierarchical military societal organisation tending to autocracy (the rule of one – or a completely unhinged Australian Prime Minister who was apparently magnanimously bestowed on that utterly bewildered nation by God or some sh..)