Australian right wing publicity sharks, such as mining pit feeder Gina Rinehart, and that other deep right wing bottom feeder Pauline Hanson, are again looking for victims.

Who else is more appropriate for the Coal-Ignition government supporters but to pick on the victims of their policies?  Victimize the victims is such an easy game.  By the usual definition, these are people with limited options for survival or fighting back.

The favourite snack of the money sharks is "Australians on Welfare".  That is, anyone who needs taxpayer handouts, who can be safely despised by the money sect of Australia, that exclusive club of people who think they deserve all they have and need even more.

http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/gina-rinehart-hits-out-at-australians-again--welfare-is-not-a-bottomless-pit-214515860.html

The victims and hangers-on of civilization include the long term unemployed.  Their ranks are booming as manufacturing jobs lost, and export industries going under. These are victims of our resources mining boom. The disappeared job openings, training and apprenticeships for young people. Opportunites for the young have been replaced by the approved migrant intake to fill jobs in Gina's mining boom. Emphasis on a fossil fuel export economy, is killing the growth of more sustainable options. 

These victims are somehow painted by Gina, by dubious emotional labelling, as the Chain of hangers-on which is dragging down the Australian Economy. While the point about growing generations of welfare dependents is so very easy and obvious to make, it is unlikely to be self-caused. The causes are more likely to be found in the energy and work systems of civilization and its economy, and in our wider culture and values, and political attitudes to work, education and self-respect.

Where does our national wealth come from?

From Nature of course. We depend on the laws of physics and the practical logistics of survival. Our wealth is the total capacity of civilization to have a flow of energy from primary sources. Limits to growth of the flow rate of energy is the main limit to growth of the economy.

Our fresh food comes from biologic primary energy production, when photosynthesis takes particular short wave light energy from the sun, to power synthesis of sugar from carbon dioxide and water.  We are primary or secondary food chain dependents. Other constraints of growing and harvesting conditions apply, requiring constant renewal from natural cycles. What is taken must be replaced. Everything must be reused, except the Sun's energy flow, which will last much longer than the human species.  Nature has no operating manual, nor an operator, is permanently unstable and ever-changing,  but the rules and the fine print have been largely found by scientific observational history and experiment.

To get our food and water, and maintain our civilization and its rate of growth, fossil fuels have provided energy for extraction, growing transport, processing of all our necessities.  People control the energy and materials flow to sustain civilized existance by using  technology fashioned from previously captured materials and embedded energy, known as our "Tools". The total energy contribution of physical human labor to the economy is negligible, the equivalent of box movers and check out supervisors at supermarkets.  More arduous manipulation skills are still required in agriculture and some manufacturing and building, where labour exploitation is common.  Globalization of resources, manufacture and trade, powered by fossil fuels, has enabled global growth. All other potentially limiting resources are still easiily obtained using technology and energy expenditure. Fossil fuel energy enables extraction of all we need from Nature, which is processed and exchanged as goods and services,  This includes essential water, food and fibre production, and minerals, and phosphorus mining. Extraction and transport fossil fuel energy, particularly oil, is embedded in every global good and service.  Mostly everyone in the loop is able to get a share, including the welfare dependents so often derided by the rich and ridiculous.

Just as the human physical energy contribution is limited, so the non-contribution of welfare recipients to labor energy has negligible effect on resource productivity.  Human food energy consumption (I have read it somewhere, and will have to find a reference) takes up about 4% of global energy consumption. The rest most be used by the global economic energy utilizing machinery, with allowance for waste, inefficiency and entropic loss.

According to climate physicist and now carbon economics researcher Timothy Garrett, the entire accumulation of the wealth of civilization, is proportional to our energy consumption, and their related carbon emissions. This relationship holds steady for the entire period of reliable energy and wealth statistics for global civilization, at least till 2010. Accumulated wealth is measured by the integral of yearly global GDP (Gross Domestic Product), using inflation adjusted, price purchasing equivalent dollar conversions. Energy consumption is averaged over each year.

Every year, the global GDP total increases, representing more people and their infrastructure. There is a very stable constant ratio of this growing total, to the yearly energy consumption. According to Tim Garretts helpful website explanations, every 1,000 US dollars adjusted to year 2005 requires a continuous 7 watts of power to maintain.  Multiply the current accumulated wealth. (2300 trillion dollars about 2010), and the number of seconds in a year, to get our current "maintenance"  energy demand of global civilization.

Garrett suggests that we are always trying to expand our energy consumption, in order to accumulate more wealth, or reduce the cost of maintenance by improved energy efficiency. More available energy means more wealth is accumulated, which then requires more energy consumption for maintenance. This looks to be an expression of the Vicious Circle Principle of growth.  The global economic exchange of goods, services and transportable energy, ensures a well mixed match of total wealth to current energy consumption. At every scale of our economy, everywhere, there is a fear of contraction, and a welcoming of growth.

From Garrett's published Abstract (4 MAR 2014)  titled  "Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis"  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%292328-4277/earlyview

This paper shows that the key components that determine whether civilization “innovates” itself toward faster economic growth include energy reserve discovery, improvements to human and infrastructure longevity, and reductions in the amount of energy required to extract raw materials. Growth slows due to a combination of prior growth, energy reserve depletion, and a “fraying” of civilization networks due to natural disasters. Theoretical and numerical arguments suggest that when growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to such externalities as natural disasters, and the risk is for an accelerating collapse.

Many people would agree that global economic growth now falters, because of the incredible current size of our global economy. Sheer size has overwhelmed the scale of Natures ability to supply maintenance resources. Limits on extraction, and depletioni are now the major Chain dragging down further economic growth.  It is a sign of energy desparation that further growth of the civilization monster, for instance by energy hungry India and China, requires new monster mega coal-energy mines.  Billionaires like Gina Rinehart should reflect that it is mostly the size of their share of the chain that is doing the dragging. Collapse is in our long term species best interests.

We do not want to bring on more growth, more Climate Change, to overwhelm Nature's capacity for self-renewal. It is obvious that further growth will only make the hunger desparately worse. Denial and blockade of new mega coal-energy mines is the best thing that any human being can do for their nation, their planet, for Nature. It needs to be done for any human beings to have some kind of long term cultural future. Gina's mega mines are consuming Nature and its capacity to support future generations.

See Our Land, our Water, our Future. https://www.landwaterfuture.org.au/#join-the-fight

http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Economics.html  Tim Garrett's website pages on economics, global wealth and energy consumption, and his references are all worth reading.

Garrett concluded that his model shows that a safe climate requires a rapid reduction in the size of maintained wealth, as well as rapid abandonment of carbon burning energy sources, to the global tune of 1 GW of less energy carbon consumed per day. (About 1 big  nuclear reactor's worth).

Accelerated climate change is not survivable. A rapid collapse of carbon energy use is both necessary and inevitable, The coal mining pits need to be abandoned, now. Productive land and water, and quality ecosystems are being threatened with destruction, for short term and climate change inducing coal energy.  Further loss of useable Land and Water is already likely from climate change already in the pipeline, from all prior carbon emissions.