Category: Recommended Reading

A Moment of Clarity

Pardon me for I will get a bit polemical. I’m not here to explain or to argue or even to discuss. I’m here to plead.

Climate change is happening. It’s happening fast. It’s man-made. Burning oil, coal, and gas – trapped carbon dug out of the ground and burnt in air to produce carbon dioxide – is the main cause. We don’t know what exactly is going to happen, climate has changed naturally before but nothing in the history of the planet has messed up the climate this much or this fast before except for an asteroid impact. But it’s a good bet that there will be more droughts, floods, heat waves, and bush fires. There will be food shortage and water shortage. Sea levels will rise, drowning major coastal cities. Most wildlife will not be able to adapt and will go extinct. Famines and wars will break out. Lots of people will die. Maybe it won’t be you, but it will be your children, or your grandchildren. At the very least, they can forget about going to the snow in the winter or visiting the Great Barrier Reef.

We know what must be done. We need to stop digging new coal mines, oil wells, or gas fields. We need to stop burning coal, oil, and gas to power our cities and our cars. We need to generate energy from renewables or nuclear power. Deforestation must be reversed. Investment poured into research in energy efficiency, storage, and removing excess carbon that’s already in the air.

No more talk, no more giving space to people who have yet to decide whether to argue it’s not happening, happening but not because of humans, or happening but it’s actually a good thing. No more trying to make it about something else, whether that’s overthrowing capitalism or abolishing patriarchy. Action must be immediate, not waiting for some unforeseeable future when your group of revolutionaries establish your socialist utopia. We know what must be done.

As for the argument that we are just one country, too small to change the world, this is complete bullshit. We are one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and gas. We are one of the world’s richest countries, one of the best educated, one of the most stable, has a top 20 biggest economy, we attract migrants and students from all over the world. We are a powerful country. We just tell ourselves we are weak to avoid responsibility. This is especially heinous if you also want to call yourselves nationalists or patriots.

Individuals can’t do much by themselves. We still need to eat and live and work. Switch to a renewable energy retailer. Put solar panels on your roof, if you can. Buy an electric car if you can afford it. Take more public transport where you can. Don’t use as much electricity. Don’t buy as much stuff, they all take energy to produce. Support businesses that do the right thing. All these things add up. But ultimately we will need governments to put in laws to move society as whole in the right direction. Which means paying attention to politics.

What’s an acceptable level of inequality, what’s gender, what’s appropriate between men and women, what’s a right punishment for a crime, how much should you pay for healthcare, for education, how much should you be taxed, how much immigration is too much, what’s the right religion (if any), how much power should employers have vs employees, how big or small should government be. These are not unimportant questions but we have debated them since the beginning of civilisation and they can be infinitely debated until the end of fucking time. Man-made climate change is different. This is something we have never dealt with, not on this scale. And we only have a few years to get our act together before best case it gets A LOT more expensive to deal with or worse case it sends *everyone* into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. There aren’t gray areas, like there might be with what’s a good tax rate or when’s comedy too offensive. We know how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere, we know how much of it there is now, and it’s way more than what it was, and there is no safe level of carbon dioxide we can add going forward.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but if climate change not already your first priority when deciding who to vote for, I implore you please make it so. All the other reasons you vote, maybe those things can wait, maybe they’re not even things governments can even really help with. Remember we have a preferential voting system, you don’t vote just for one party but you number them in order from most preferred.

At the moment, the party with the best record on this is the Australian Greens. No new coal, oil, or gas. 100% renewable energy. No more cutting down forests. You do not have to agree with everything they do, God knows I don’t. You may disagree with how best to get us to negative carbon emissions, you might think nuclear power is a good investment for example, which the Greens are not in favour of. But this is not about renewables vs nuclear. This is about getting the country off fossil fuels. And if you are so wedded to nuclear power as a solution that you end up supporting people who would dig up more coal and oil and gas, you are doing it wrong.

Other parties with strong climate change policies are the Australian Progressives, Australian Democrats, the Pirate Party, the Science Party, the Reason Party, the Victorian Socialists, and Independents For Climate Action Now. There are independents standing for election in certain seats that have a strong climate change focus: Oliver Yates in Kooyong, Cecilia Moar in Mallee, Rob Oakeshott in Cowper, Zali Steggall in Warringah, Kerryn Phelps in Wentworth, among others. If you care very strongly about animal rights or reducing immigration, I suggest the Animal Justice Party or Sustainable Australia Party respectively.

Of the two major parties that will form the next government, Labor has clearly the better policies. But Labor is also committing to opening up new gas fields and building new coal mines. Labor state government in Victoria is busy cutting down native forests for pulp. If you must give Labor your first preference can I ask that you at least bombard them with regular calls and emails demanding urgent and immediate action on climate change from now all the way until whenever they are out of office.

The media, the fossil fuel barons, the oil companies, various rusted-on ideologues will try to distract you with bullshit and half-truths and sensationalised stories and fairytales about how things will be okay if we just get guillotine all the billionai. Push them aside. They are distractions. Secure the bag. Don’t be remembered as the generation that squandered its rights and privileges on petty bullshit. Be the generation history will remember as the one with the courage and clarity to act.

Labour Day

The Eight Hour Day was a campaign by the labour movement in the 1850s that brought about important changes to the rights of workers. In the 1800s, most Victorians worked up to 14 hours a day, six days a week. There was no sick leave, no holiday leave and employers could sack employees at any time, without giving a reason.

When the French author and politician Albert Metin arrived in Australia in 1899 he described the antipodes as a “workers’ paradise”. A place where the advancement of workers’ rights were not based on political theory but rather a series of pragmatic steps taken to address specific issues: the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, compulsory arbitration, setting limits to the rights of property, the democratic vote and many other measures.

Nicholas Reece in The Age, 10 March 2019

A Night In El Paso, TX

A man walked by wearing a sleeveless denim jacket with a rendering of a grim reaper on the back. The staff of the reaper’s scythe was an AK-47, the blade an American flag. He stopped briefly to inspect the merchandise. I asked Gaudet and Thompson how, as self-employed entrepreneurs, they got their healthcare.

“Right now I don’t even have healthcare,” Thompson said.

“I go to the emergency room,” Gaudet said, laughing.

“I just go to the emergency room,” Thompson agreed.

I asked if they would support higher taxes for millionaires if it meant that people like them would get free healthcare. Gaudet didn’t hesitate. “No, because one day we might be the millionaires.”

As I walked back to the Coliseum parking lot, I heard [Senator Ted Cruz’s] disembodied voice introduce an idea that is, perhaps, one of the more diabolically brilliant pieces of political propaganda conjured in some time. Trump needs to be re-elected, Cruz said, because he “needs time to finish the wall”.

This was the first time this idea was introduced, the idea that the wall did not need to be begun. It did not need to be built. It needed to be finished.

Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers, The Guardian, 2 March 2019

Three Articles on Education

Christopher Bantick in the Sydney Morning Herald weighs in on plans to ban mobile phones in schools. An admission of failure, he calls it.

I have asked students to use their mobile phones in class and I would do so again. A mobile can find the right word or solve a grammar problem in a few clicks. Anyone under 30 is super-fast at texting; is it not sensible to have instant answers in a class that are on point and of the moment? Googling is not bad karma.

Here’s Clare Lombardo of NPR on a peculiarly American problem – the huge disparity between “White” and “Black” school districts – but one with broader implications. Sometimes problems in education aren’t about education at all.

We have built a school funding system that is reliant on geography, and therefore the school funding system has inherited all of the historical ills of where we have forced and incentivized people to live

Finally, teacher Bernie Bleske on Medium – writing for America but the experience is depressingly similar in many countries – on the sheer absurdity that is high school, and what can be done about it.

The system’s scheduling fails on every possible level. If the goal is productivity, the fractured nature of the tasks undermines efficient product. So much time is spent in transition that very little is accomplished before there is a demand to move on. If the goal is maximum content conveyed, then the system works marginally well, in that students are pretty much bombarded with detail throughout their school day. However, that breadth of content comes at the cost of depth of understanding. The fractured nature of the work, the short amount of time provided, and the speed of change all undermine learning beyond the superficial. It’s shocking, really, that students learn as much as they do.

Cleaning up the oceans one bin at a time

Perth surfers Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski garnered international attention in 2015 for their Seabin prototype, which was created after they became frustrated at the amount of rubbish floating in the ocean.

A successful crowd-funding campaign allowed the device to be produced commercially and the City of Cockburn, in Perth’s southern suburbs, has become the first WA council to buy one.

ABC News

The start of something promising perhaps.

Democracy Drowns in Bullshit

Social media appears to be better suited to dividing than uniting, at least when it comes to politics. The glut of information, impossible to sort through for the ordinary citizen, shakes people’s understanding of the world and causes them to retreat back to their own biases. Social media, in the way it’s used now, objectively favors authoritarians.

How social media platforms enable politicians to undermine democracy, Zack Beauchamp on Vox, 22 January 2019

Kevin Rudd on Australia

These are my views on the core elements of a vision for our country’s future today. Its unapologetically a vision for a Big Australia because I do not believe we can safely guarantee the nation’s future in this deeply uncertain world unless we become much bigger than we are… This is an Australia big enough and bold enough in its national vision to dream on a wide canvas, rather than simply contenting ourselves be a small and provincial place, of what Manning Clark once called the “narrowers and straighteners.” Instead, ours can be a strong Australia, a competitive Australia, an inclusive Australia, a compassionate Australia and a sustainable Australia. Neither conservative, nor neo-liberal nor the blind socialism of the utopians… It is a vision for an Australian social democracy that is capable of bringing the nation with us as we navigate the difficult challenges and complex world of the future.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, 4 February 2019

It’s long, but I encourage you to read it in full. I don’t agree 100% with everything he says in this essay, but he provides what is sorely lacking in our age of short attention spans and perpetual outrage, a coherent vision for where we could be going as a nation, to preserve and strengthen our democracy in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world.

The World Economy According to Rutger Bregman

The modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap, or a collateralised debt obligation? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don’t the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?

Dutch historian and last week’s Twitter celebrity Rutger Bregman on the rot at the heart of capitalism and what can be done about it, The Guardian, 31 March 2017

I’m halfway through his book Utopia For Realists; highly recommended for anyone who wants to make the world a better place.

Decarceration and Climate Boomers

Two pieces of good(ish) news this month courtesy of The Guardian

The first piece of good news comes from Western Australia where as of the time of writing more than $320,000 has been raised to free Aboriginal women jailed for unpaid fines in a grassroots campaign led by Sisters Inside. While it’s depressing that a supposedly civilised country we still have to deal with debtors prisons that basically criminalises people for being poor, this is the kind of citizen activism that we sorely need more of in an age where electoral politics is becoming increasingly gridlocked and/or ideologically-extreme. Link to the Gofundme page here.

Now baby boomers get a bad rep for trashing the environment and leaving younger generations to deal with the mess, but these older Australians are passionate climate activists who actually care what kind of world they are leaving for their children and grandchildren. Articles like this are important because too often the rhetoric around climate change frames it as a generational conflict or an ideological conflict (the Greens I’m looking at you) when it doesn’t have to be. The continued habitability of the planet is too important an issue to become just another political football.