This article goes on and around the theme of the gas industry and climate change, the nation-states, and mentions the "Gaslight Effect" of Australian fossil fuel political parties.

Many Climate Activists know the terrible facts about the useless and damaging transition from coal to gas already. Not just inconvenient such as like an individual death sentence, but doing active harm all around.  I have previously seen and linked-in presentations of future effects of "Gas - Transition" studies done quite some years ago. Anybody who looks can find them, and there are more references in the online report found on the "Price of Oil" website. Hint: the word "price" here refers to life, not money. None of this yet seems to have cut any ice with capitalist corporation friendly parties in Australia like the LNP or ALP. Or with the Murdoch NewsFork media. LNP seems to be the Australian Coal Party, the ALP by actions identified itself as the Australian Gas Fracking Party. All charging directly into climate hell, as if they ruled some imaginary planet B.

The Australian Constitution? Practically made for State and Federal divisions of power, and for Mining Industries to rule them all. The state governments get to mine, and the federal government has to try and stop them stuffing up the planet, but appears to be ruled by the Minerals council of Australia.
Naturally both industry party representations pretend to be antagonistic, but they really need each other, working in tandem to help keep out parties like the Greens out of the fossil fuel power club. Environmental saviours are extremely disliked.

Both parties are really friendly to the alternative fossil fuel lobby. This is a long-standing traditional arrangement in Western democratic fossil fuel "power" nations.

Fossil fuel access is national state economic and military power. This is a level one coercive power rule. States and politicians are power-mad by nature. Both aussie parties seem to have MPs that are too busy planning new ways to let foreign capitalist make money, to meet with ecosystem collapse aware, climate-activist and economic kollapsnik electoral constituents like myself.

National governments charge into stupidity by nature

This is conclusion that comes from a straight-forwards read of "Seeing Like a State - James C Scott."

The standardizing state

States have a strong tendency to apply thin, formulaic simplifications on nature and society, in measurement and actions. Complexity of relationships in complex systems, local culture and the richness of ecosystems and human experience get maximally abstracted and standardised, down to the basic wants and designs of state power and business economics. Since any large social process or event will inevitably be far more complex than the schemata humans can devise, nation-states are bound to a degree of failure./p>

How things still manage to work

Throughout his book James Scott makes the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability. What keeps the state running, apart from energy dissipation to do work, is the practical experience and skills that are acquired in the individuals of society, and their relationships. In relation to nature, the complexities and diversity of ecosystems, the constant learning of successful solutions, are necessary to maintain integrity and productivity. Scott uses the Greek concept of "mētis" for the lived embodiment of experience and learned skills, that cannot be passed on by language and writing alone.

Why grandest plans are likely to go wrong

Government schemes fail because of over-idealisation and abstraction of reality. The more "conditions" required for a plan, that require "idealization", the more is it likely to fail. When a scheme is for optimising just one or two aspects of a complex system, like production rates and profit, or jobs and growth, much of other internal and external system consequences can make the goals self-defeating. Add other goals like "sustainability" or "environment protection", and too many goals together are incompatible with reality. States use documents and plans use idealisation and abstractions of language to bend and bury perceptions and behaviour of reality, which allows the most conflicting parts of reality to be verbally ignored. As I listen to the latest political push-overs to finalise the Queensland Adani Coal mine, and the babble of approval process language, I am impressed as to how much States are really good at fooling themselves.

Everything is part of a web of cause and effect that embraces every event, from the smallest to the greatest.

The lesson taught by karma is that every action that a person does or leaves undone is a cause that has unavoidable effects.

-  John Michael Greer - Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth

Global Abandonment

From the 1980s on, the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others. The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy. - Bruno Latour

Because states are institutions with goals that are system-conflicting and in really impossible in the long term, their language and political parties become warped, to drive an altered consciousness of their key individuals and officials, to prevent reality from intruding, and keep democracy, and better understanding at a safe distance. Political parties and states create the fantasy world they pretend they can live in. If there is a planet B, it must be the fantasy world of modern states. Hence the popular slogan "There is no planet B".

Latour describes political orientations as "attractors". I here use and probably misrepresent to some degree, his scheme figures, which shows politics to be inventing an imaginary attractor, rather then having to deal with a real earth. I own graphics version, modified from his figure 3, for this context. Both left and right, of politics pertaining to ruling a state, capitalism or socialism, depend more on the institution of states, and are to be found somewhere between the "modernization" axis and the imaginary planet "B". Collapsing economies from resource depletion, and chaotic nature with global heating, is over-running the assumptions of states, political parties, globalizers and localizers alike. They move to the greater certainty of their own fanciful abstractions, that worked so well when fossil fuels and space to expand were cheap, towards planet "B".

The real nature on real earth is literally running out of space, but it is only "unoccupied space" within the imaginations of states. States push the demands of reality aside in order to continue on with business as usual, no matter what.

A leaderless world in panic

Forward everything - more illusions of progress, neoliberal deckchair reorganisation for the rich.

Backwards everything -  Lock the borders, public frightened, want keep out the refugees and asylum seekers.

Both global and local forces have panic drives towards unreality, global heating denial and resource collapse denial.

Currently nation states are acting as if in a zombified state of mental shock.

Too many democractic representatives can't think past the social herd and fear responses in their brains.

This eclipses the panic denial response of elites to "Limits to Growth" after 1972, and business as usual went on as usual.

The distance from the realities of global heating are much greater than differences between right and left extremities of parties of States.  Bruno Latour, a veteran French humanities writer, went to great lengths to describe this in his recent book - "Down to Earth : Politics In the New Climatic Regime". His philosophical views are based on abstractions of political reality, but I think it is a fair, cleverly literate and damning summary.

Latour asserts that the globalist ruling classes have abandoned the idea of a common world, because it threatens their dominance. He does this using the US transition to Trumpism as an illustrative example.

Abandonment requires an obsessional denial of climate change, projected and foisted upon the public.

Ordinary people already had a general tendency to be skeptical; now they have been incited, thanks to billions of dollars invested in disinformation, to be sceptical about one massive fact - the mutation of the climate.
... At a point when the public could have found an emergency exit, the climate skeptics stood in their way and denied them access. When the time comes to judge, this is the crime for which charges will be brought. - Bruno Latour

The drivers of the State

Most of the time I can't tell the differences between the major political parties ALP and LNP. Both are conditioned by moulding of "Seeing like a state", and base their public justifications in the language of state progress, which is mostly neoliberal in tone, regardless of party. But they become mere implementors of plans for resource development financed by large overseas investors and pushed on them by large overseas corporations. Australian Governments have become dress-ups legal drafts people that are forced to accept the outlines and conditions of external agencies with singular drives and goals, in return for maintaining the State currency trading value, for flows of goods and services into Australia, all which were produced by other states with similar mono-maniacal goals of growth through exploitation.

Both want to grow the Chinese-Asian-Indian Economies, and associated growth in greenhouse gas emissions, as fast as they can be grown, like children at a party with too many toy balloons. In this case, there are going to be lots of those iconic black of carbon balloons, and some methane - green ones as well. Most comical recently are the helpless antics of the USA-Western alliance in the South China Sea, as they face the enlarged Chinese forces created with help of all that economic growth to which Australian fossil fuel exports have created. The worlds biggest economic giant multiply magnified. How predictable is the outcome?

A nation that competes on price, by selling as much raw resources as fast as possible, is a slave to those making the best use of those resources. It accelerates resource depletion, and gets the minimum amount of return over the shortest time period. The apparent mineral boom, and fossil fuel export period, apparently creates a high wealth per person, because of Australia's relatively low population. It won't last another generation. High growth rates based on sheer output quantity are wasteful. The good news is that global heating may cut short the indefinite period of time for future generations of greater poverty spent trying to survive in a nation of deep abandoned mine pits, and baked dry lands.

Of course the ALP was awake to the money making potentials of a gas export boom, to be presented as a "solution" to global warming, and has been working for the such investments since before Martin Ferguson was the federal resources minister. The end-use "cleaner-burn" fuel-transition hype was hard-hyped and various methane leak possibilities were neglected.  Investors have schemed and lobbied about LNG export plans have been laid since the technology was worked out for its money-making and energy-supply potential. Again the push to sell as much as possible, as quickly as the market demand will take it. All the jobs from local manufacture that are disappearing after the local gas price becomes the higher export LNG gas price. Governments have not measured the lost jobs and value-add industries, which is a consequence of high volume gas exports. Where was the cost analysis? Who got the benefits?

The fossil fuel industry lobby groups that throw around money, promises fortunes for investors, and jobs for the boys are the real drivers. Both LNP and ALP fall for the bribes most eagerly, and don't seem to rate renewable energy in the same terms and scale of investment and subsides as coal, oil and gas. No NAIF for renewable energy.

Only the ALP was stupid enough to make gas fracking a campaign promise, in what has been said to have been a "climate change election".  This felt fairly devastating to myself as a climate activist, and I am sure soured off a lot of environment educated people, who otherwise would have more eagerly voted for ALP. As for the presumed beneficiaries, and positives, I was aware it would be fat capitalists, foreign corporations, environmental damage and not that many jobs. 

The ALP cursed their party with this gas announcement, much like the man who shot the albatross in the "Rime of the ancient mariner". Global heating issues will be even more prominent next election, as new records break, and new bigger disasters hit all around the globe and Australia. The yearly global heating economic costs are growing with the temperatures. As Richard De Natale , Greens leader noted in his address to the National Press Club, this was the trend, that ALP climate policies get weaker still each election. Does the ALP think that environmentalists are such fools?

Now the LNP has scraped into power again, with much the same result as 2016, Labor Premier Palasczuk in Queensland has no political reason to hold off the Adani Coal Mine any longer, and so approvals are going forwards like fools to a gold rush in unseemly haste. The Coal shills and spruikers should be aware by now that their days are seriously numbered. Demand in India for new coal generation has seriously dropped off. Given the extraction and delivery costs of Adani's poor quality coal, the mine will be a dead loss all round. Another coal mine project in the Galilee basin has already pulled out indefinitely.

As Jeremy Leggett's slide says, 

India's renewable rush puts coal on the back burner. Many coal projects "are mired in deep financial distress and private investment in coal power has ground to a near halt."  The reason is clear.

The climate costs keep rising

The Climate Council’s report, ‘Compound Costs: How Climate Change is Damaging Australia’s Economy’, finds there are few forces affecting the Australian economy that can match the scale, persistence and systemic risk associated with climate change.

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/compound-costs-how-climate-change-damages-australias-economy/

I find this makes me extremely, extremely angry, whenever I think about it, so I will just write this down to make sure it extremely public, to make sure that everyone knows. Chris Bowen never wants me to come and meet talk about anything, despite letters, emails, and requests made to his electoral staff. He is failing to carry out his electoral duties, that is, to be a so-called representative, and meet with people he is supposed to represent. He certainly doesn't want to meet with conflicting people like me. I am sure he thinks I am mentally ill. As a result I just want to keep kicking him and his party's reputation downwards as hard as possible, every week.

Meanwhile, Mr Chris Bowen, MP for McMahon, Australia's next greatest treasurer in waiting, doesn't yet want to speak with climate activist voters in his electorate. Fortunately the climate council is saying they will fly in experts and talk to each MP where necessary.  I want a full report of every meeting. We will need a lot of them. 

No wonder that trust in the ALP declined in this election, when they can't stand straight on important issues related to ecosystems and species survival. Half-hearted policy blandishments just won't do to hide the big damaging carbon policies. I prefer a stupid political enemy I can really hate, not clever shifty ones. The ALP fracking policy for the NT with the help of money from the NAIF managed to make all its other policies look and sound like the misdirection and inducements of a big con job.

On being challenged about fracking the ALP, an ALP politician said on the issue that "water-trigger" would protect the NT. I guess the point being made was that if proves harmful, it will be stopped.  Nice to know about the precaution principle. 

"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically"

Strong precaution holds that regulation is required whenever there is a possible risk to health, safety, or the environment, even if the supporting evidence is speculative and even if the economic costs of regulation are high.

Am I so stupid as to believe that NT is fully protected from fracking harm by the "water-trigger"? Ecosystem resilience is threatened by every human activity.
Perhaps Climate activists are considered by the ALP as being next to One Nation supporters at the bottom of the social pile like Pauline Hanson, and Malcolm Roberts for their evident homely Australian dumbness.

It would be impossible to find single individuals responsible for the ALP loss, but I will continue to do my very best to expose the ongoing ALP corruption by the large amounts of donations and blandishments of the global fossil fuel capitalist social order, as long as they refuse to meet people who won't agree with them, because on some things I can be a really vindictive person. But I can't promise a new negative article every week. The ALP has proven immune to climate criticism.

Ha Ha, I am really happy about that -7.24% swing against your personal vote, Mr Bowen. Too bad that +8% went to the one nation party candidate. I hope you lose lots more next time. It looks like your party has already lost the idea of this species staying on this planet. The ALP deserved several kicks in the pants, and it doesn't seem any of them so far have been hard enough, to push out that global capitalist social order. At least the LNP don't try to be too clever at hiding who they really work for. Better to have the better known and stupider devil.

Australia's place in the Global Capitalist Social Order

According to today's greatest worshippers of the global capitalist social order, Coal and Gas in Australian needs to grow demand and profits at the same time, by creating more population and emissions growth in the high paying and consuming classes in Asia. This has always one of the ALP's great promotion of money making interests. Never mind those poor people in India, those victims of modern progress, that won't be helped anyway. And never mind all the poor Australian unemployed that aren't going to be helped by anyone's tax breaks, or the corporate wealth that trickles no further down as Australia's corporate and political elites. After all, Australia's own emissions must be kept down, while Australia's contribution to Asia's rises in temporary meteoric fashion.

I have been unemployed by choice for at least 10 years, so I have had plenty of time to research and experience the general running-down and climate destruction of things. Entropy increase works in mysterious ways in societies and political parties as well as in rodent over-population experiments and physics. Just look at the Brexit mess in the UK. Another sign of western civilisation senility and collapse. The ALP and LNP are much the same, having being sniffing at the foreign money emissions for far too long. As far as I know, Anthony Albanese won't be changing the spots and money cancer in the ALP. I predict that ALP the will not distance itself from fossil fuel corporate donations, and so is just as likely to be shifty and untrusted in any number of forthcoming elections. People read the body language.

Which global-climate-evil capitalist bribe party have you preferred lately?

LNG gas leading the charge onwards to planet B.

Here is report that points out that Gas is a total failure as a climate transition fuel. Main big number points are as follows:-

Gas breaks the carbon budget Coal-to-gas switching doesn’t cut it Low-cost renewables can displace coal & gas Gas isn’t essential for grid reliability New gas infrastructure locks in emissions

All in online report, see title - link.

Did I not mention great harm to Australia's land and water resources, as the ALP set as a central policy to risk turning the NT into a poisoned wasteland? Abrogation of rights of original landowners?. And that rather inconclusive "scientific report", that was rather restricted in scope. Great harm from global heating is guaranteed by gas fracking as much as coal. Safety for the regions "only" water systems is not guaranteed, especially if the "Water trigger" proves a failure. Profits, donations and rewards to the enabling politicians in the ALP to be arranged in future for sure, as per previous kick-backs. Irreversible damage risks no problem if lots of money.

Unprecedented

No human society, however wise, subtle, prudent, and cautious you may think it to be, has had to grapple with the reactions of the earth system to the actions of eight or nine billion humans. All the wisdom accumulated over ten thousand years, even if we were to succeed in rediscovering it, has never served more than a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million human beings on a relatively stable stage.

We understand nothing about the vacuity of contemporary politics if we do not appreciate the stunning extent to which the situation is unprecedented. -- Bruno Latour

Capitalist Takeover all Governments

As the human civilization settles into its local minina of global capitalist social order, with global internet, entertainment, with copied and formaliac patterns of organisation, it shouldn't be surprising that even African nations are adopting the same patterns. If so, all national governments and all political parties become moulded alike, according to base social instincts and global technologies, even those that are naturally threatened by others because they have large fossil fuels. Iran, China, Russia, India, Pakistan are all capitalist nations, with varying degrees social investments in their own populations, depending on available resources, energy and national incomes. Even North Korea is said to becoming more capitalist. 

It becomes obvious that capitalism is trying to block any radical efforts for global heating prevention. Today's national governments are riddled with capitalism.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism

It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

-- Joseph Goebbels

"Green New Deal"-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

This conspiracism of the elite, these claims that genuine mass movement can’t possibly really exist and must be in some way being guided by agents provocateurs, is just one of the ways in which those currently running things have resorted to a kind of political gaslighting in an attempt to maintain their grip on power.

The Gaslight Effect

The "Gaslight effect" is used as a term  to describe a genuine form of emotional abuse, where an abuser will deny reality in an attempt to get their victim to literally doubt their own sanity.

This election the LNP and Murdoch media have been treated the Australian public to another major "Gaslighting".  The ABC media reporting also takes part in these denial games. On 24th May, Extinction Rebellion organised various visibility events some Major Cities around the world, and Sydney attracted reasonable numbers, such that a street march to Hyde park required police to stop traffic.  ABC media covered a Melbourne event, presumably because traffic stopped by large numbers, but nothing in Sydney on the same day. Since I was at the Sydney event at the time, I will put my own mobile phone collected materials in a page here for evidence.

A multiple city event is harder to dismiss than a single city traffic upset. The ABC also didn't bother to mention reasons about why so many people turned up. Denying the reality of what people want is a gaslighting democracy. While the demands of the Extinction Rebellion movement may seem extreme, the fact that governments are not acknowledging they exist, and that governments seem to be heading in the opposite direction off to planet B, and are suppressing real dialog, suggests that more, not less, extremism will be generated in future. Standard processes in democracies have already been working hard to bury the threat of global warming for the last 30 plus years, so at this stage, with a renewed climate denial government, it seems a sane response to remove all trust in state and commercial media, democratic systems, institutions, and government. I have seen politicians as part of the citizens climate lobby. Nothing important has changed about nation states and capitalism in the last 30 years. It isn't treated seriously. Citizens lobbies have failed against the dead weight of state dependency on fossil fuels.

The Australia media, national and state governments, and elected representatives of democracies are all working hard to damp public awareness of protests demanding states to heed the need for climate action, precisely what governments and media systems seem designed to deliberately ignore.

All of these nations and states that are refusing to adapt will gradually fail. This will entail collapse of availability and quality of goods and services, even food and water systems.

States are large conglomerations of diverse groups and interests held together by high energy requiring services. As the state weakens, because resources and energy supplies diminish, service provisions collapse, and distrust between multiple groups are likely to fracture nations apart, in multiple conflicts over access to salvageable resources and wealth.

The only option left is to prepare and gather community survival skills, and sustainable local resources, for living beyond unavoidable "Seneca Collapse" of failing states, after which life support goods and services will rapidly become unavailable. Predicted by growing resource hunger, still growing population, depleting resources. The other necessary resource will be extremely prolonged good luck. Global elites are well ahead on this game because of wealth expropriation. The only question remaining is the time course of events, after how many decades, and at what stage of collapse, and total greenhouse gas emissions, do the last human contributions to further global warming become insignificant. A Seneca Collapse is one where the rate of collapse is much faster than the period of growth.  "Growth is sluggish, Ruin is rapid". It is built-in to how most of nature and human systems work. It is a feature, not a bug.

What makes systems collapse, is going beyond the scales of material and energy exchange and storage, that allow the systems to be stable.

Going beyond limits stretches all the inter-connected parts life to their survival limits. The "elastic band" of earth systems resilience has stretched as far as it can, and is going to break very soon.
In the case of global heating and resource depletion, the necessary scales, for sustainability, are the rather low global rates at which Gaia cycles carbon out of air and oceans, and back into rocks, and having the lowest possible depletion of non-renewable resources, via all the very best "r-words", reuse, recycle, reduce, repair. In a few hundred years the global economy has consumed all of the best parts of earth's endowment bequest of minerals and fossil energy, leaving not much in the ground for the indefinite species future, and an excess of pollution products that will take nature several millennia to break down and reprocess.

Earth cannot support 8 billion people all at once, for much longer.

Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb in 1968, says in a recent interview, we are now doomed. 

The greatest threat in the human era is the idea we can go on growing forever which comes from a lot of really stupid economists who are so badly trained. With a few outstanding exceptions, most of them have had no training in natural sciences or how the natural world works. They actually believe growth, including population growth, is the best thing in the world, that it can go on forever. That each nation’s Growth National Product (GNP) can grow forever.

Growth mania is the greatest danger. It’s the hardest thing to exterminate because the so-called educated people who meet in Davos at the World Destroyers' meeting every year are absolutely dedicated to growth and more consumerism. Paul Ehrlich

Consider this wacko language at the "World Economic Forum" , from Al Gore, that "This is the fourth year in a row, that the World Economic Forum has named the climate crisis as the number one threat to the global economy". 

More correct - "The global economy and the richest people like us that it supports, are the number one threat to keeping our climate survivable and our biological life support systems intact. We are the direct cause of our climate crisis."  The climate crisis can only be solved by a collapse of the global economy, sooner or later.