@bmay Speaking as a climate policy ‘hawk’ the problem with his response here is that reducing emissions rapidly, laudable and necessary as that is, will no more foreclose catastrophe than taking your foot off the throttle of a car travelling down an inclined road ending in an abyss. @bmay While reducing emissions to zero tomorrow, were that feasible, would immediately slow the rate of increase in CO2 concentrations in global sinks, it would not end the thermal surplus associated with elevated concentrations of (principally CO2 and CH4) in the atmosphere and

@MoistenedTart What does anyone do when faced with what they accept is an existential threat? You throw everything you have at it because death is final. If you don’t, it’s because you don’t see it in those terms, but rather as a nuisance for which workarounds will do. @MoistenedTart The reality is that the ALP does not take climate change seriously. They see it merely as a threat to Australia’s trading position and business interests and have framed a policy that underpins the position diplomatically while passing the problem onto those

@OurNewHomecoach @Granville4879 Unsurprisingly for a teacher, I tend to take a "systems-driven" approach to explaining persistent features of organisation. It's clear that whatever people have in their minds when it first occurs to them that they'd like to be a politician, as a matter of practice we see @OurNewHomecoach @Granville4879 that in the end, at best only a handful of those who enter politics prove to be honest, principled and diligent in supporting salutary public policy. Were those who bring shame to governance a tiny minority we might think that the problem was something we could accept

Nice analogy ... sure lockdown is regrettable but it was necessary to save lives and will remain so for some time. We’re not in prison or oppressed *by the lockdown*. The government should better look after those suffering financial hardship but that’s scarcely something those

https://twitter.com/Scottyish/status/1445509780693344261

reactionary fools would support .

@earthygirl011 Yes ... an attempt to recompose the unstable alliance between neoliberals and RW populists .. of the 80s and 90s. I’m scratching my head to understand what is meant by “government treating taxpayers’ money as if it were their own”. This is obvious bafflegab. Putting aside the @earthygirl011 the populist trope that sovereign currency issuing states are spending ‘taxpayer money’ rather than simply issuing credit, were the revenue arising from levies on economic activity ‘taxpayer money’ they would ipso facto be ‘the government’s own money’. The executive

@slsandpet Putting aside the ugly impulse for a second, his health economics is deeply flawed. Not so far away from us, in a place called Indonesia, roughly 40,000 have died from Covid since July 1. In the UK 342 have died in the last 72 hours from Covid and they have done far better than @slsandpet NSW/Australia on vaccination. And it’s not *just* deaths but illness too. As we know, this can shatter the lives of those who survive it too. In health economics one considers ‘loss of quality life years’ (LQLY) as a metric for assessing the utility of therapy.

So it appears that one bitter enemy of the working folk and the marginalised of the world has been replaced with yet another. So much was clear from at least April. The challenge for those of us who stand with all of those who lack agency will be to avoid repeating the last four decades of humbug and brutality with its ugly climax in 2016 but instead build the vehicles needed to rewrite governance in America and elsewhere as an instantiation of informed collective agency manifest in policies that maintainable meet the human need.for wellbeing in all

With Australia’s ruling regime trying to pretend that ‘this fire season is normal’ this is a worthwhile call. It it really is normal, why are the resources to fight it inadequate? If it is not normal, when did the regime think an abnormal fire season was likely and how did they

https://twitter.com/AlexWodak/status/1211774551228420096

respond? What warnings did they issue, and on what bases? Was the abnormality they foresaw factored into their calculus of the value to Australia of local and global action on global heating? If not, why not? Based on what has been learned from this fire-season has this calculus