Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Yet another Aussie academic attack on Democracy, Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, UNSW, UNSW Australia has demanded wide ranging social changes, a “wartime response” to the climate emergency, including vesting the government with extraordinary powers in order to overcome resistance from “vested interests”.
…in practice there are several big, non-technical barriers. These include politics dominated by vested interests, culture, and institutions (organisational structures, laws, and regulations).
Vested interests include the fossil fuel industry, electricity sector, aluminium smelting, concrete, steel and motor vehicles. Governments that receive taxation revenue and political donations from vested interests are reluctant to act effectively.
To overcome this barrier, we need strong and growing pressure from the climate action movement.
…
UNSW PhD candidate Laurence Delina has investigated the rapid, large, socio-economic changes made by several countries just before and during World War 2.
He found that we can learn from wartime experience in changing the labour force and finance.
However, he also pointed out the limitations of the wartime metaphor for rapid climate mitigation:
- Governments may need extraordinary emergency powers to implement rapid mitigation, but these are unlikely to be invoked unless there is support from a large majority of the electorate.
- While such support is almost guaranteed when a country is engaged in a defensive war, it seems unlikely for climate action in countries with powerful vested interests in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Vested interests and genuinely concerned people will exert pressure on governments to direct their policies and resources predominantly towards adaptation measures such as sea walls, and dangerous quick fixes such as geoengineering. While adaptation must not be neglected, mitigation, especially by transforming the energy sector, should be primary.
Unfortunately it’s much easier to make war than to address the global climate crisis rapidly and effectively. Indeed many governments of “democratic” countries, including Australia, make war without parliamentary approval.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/rapid-transition-to-clean-energy-will-take-massive-social-change-58211
The reason it is “difficult” to convince people to support extraordinary incursions of government into everyone’s lives, is nothing bad has happened. Not only has nothing bad happened, greens have a long and growing track record of predicting bad stuff which doesn’t happen.
If I thought there was a climate emergency, I would support extraordinary measures to stabilise the biosphere. But until someone presents more substantial evidence than a bunch of broken models with no predictive skill, I’ll hang on to my democratic right to vote for politicians who ignore radical greens.
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All of this democracy and civil rights stuff has been well and good, but it’s time to grow up and impose a proper authoritarian government based on the best and brightest — university professors, for example.
What has gone wrong at UNS? It used to be a well respected university, particularly in engineering and science.
Some horribly bad hiring has ended that.
TRM
Baxter Black (US animal Vet, cowboy poet and after dinner speaker}
“First rate management hires first rate help
Second rate management hires third rate help”
And from recent comment second rate management keeps hiring it so they still look good.
“Governments may need extraordinary emergency powers to implement rapid mitigation.”
I think we need some serious weeding in some academia and government-funded “science” and this is a pretty clear indicator. Does anyone ever actually listen or is this type of unhinged ranting considered “just rhetoric”?
But the job has been done – more reinforcing to the True Believers who will be motivated to march in the streets should their preferred, instructed, received opinion not be obeyed.
And that’s exactly why universities in Australia must not allow freedom of speech for either academics or students!
Fortunately, no one will take any notice of Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, UNSW, UNSW Australia as they will be too busy looking at football or preparing for the upcoming election in which a carbon tax is electoral poison. His rant is another example of Liberalism passing through socialism on the way to totalitarianism.
It is easy to turn on the (war) spigot, harder to control who gets wet.
Then there is the question of when to turn it off.
Clearly, what is needed is a Department of Climate (DOC). The DOC would have authority over all climate-related aspects (basically, meaning everything). Take a shower one minute too long, and have the DOC breathing down your neck, and more. They would need hordes and hordes of green-shirted “climate inspectors”. Part of your paycheck would be in the form of “carbon credits”, giving you somewhat freer reign. In your 300-sq.-foot (if you’re lucky) tiny home, you could turn up the heat a bit in winter (say, to a sweltering 65°). As a special bonus, when the climate inspectors came snooping around, you’d be able to say “what’s up, DOC”, without getting fined.
It would be awesomesauce.
“They would need hordes and hordes of green-shirted “climate inspectors”.”
The refusal to acknowledge the coming software/automation revolution tends to work that way. The usual short-sighted response to this concern is, “Yeah, but ‘buggy whips’, and this time it’s different because internet, so be quiet, and I have computer data to back me up.”
“Well, we can’t give them money for nothing and the chicks for free, so we’ll have to gin up something else to keep the unwashed masses busy since large-scale war just doesn’t work anymore as a distraction/agent for mass societal change”.
Meh. Vastly improved worldwide mass communications has ushered in and turbocharged the age of the busybodies and those whose personality disorders compel them to need to tell you what to do.
I glanced at the article from “The Conversation” and these lines resonated:
First there are the bald untruths such as:
“Global climate change, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is already affecting the planet, with more heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods, and accelerating sea-level rise.”
and
“Most of the technologies and skills we need – renewable energy, energy efficiency, a new transmission line, railways, cycleways, urban design – are commercially available and affordable. In theory these could be scaled up rapidly”
Then there is the clarion call, which the author carefully ascribes to others:
“According to Stefan Rahmstorf, Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we need an emergency response.”
“Several authors, including Australian climate scientist Matthew England, point out that nations made rapid socio-economic changes during wartime and that such an approach could be relevant to rapid climate mitigation.”
These kinds of arguments always bring my mind back to George Orwell and “1984”. Below are a few quotes you may remember:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”
“how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.”
“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
It seems 1984 is just the new present.
Or to quote Coulter in a BBC interview when asked what if the Democrats get elected:
“It’s over,” she replied. “We’re going to be homesick for the rest of our lives because America is gone.”
From the article: “Yet another Aussie academic attack on Democracy, Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, UNSW, UNSW Australia has demanded wide ranging social changes, a “wartime response” to the climate emergency, including vesting the government with extraordinary powers in order to overcome resistance from “vested interests”.”
What climate emergency?
These True Believers are something else. Their CAGW delusions have them living in an extremely stressful world, and they feel like they are reduced to extreme measures to deal with the “climate emergency”.
Either that, or they are cyncial people taking advantage of the situation for their own purposes.
Either way, they are wrong, wrong, wrong. We don’t want to give deluded/selfish people like this “war powers” authority.
+97
If the populace doesn’t like your policies, what choice does it leave you.
Ya gotta just shove it down their throats, it’s for their own good after all.
Dr Mark Diesendorf is an arrogant ecofreak who has published carefully crafted papers to “prove” that Australia can run a 100% renewable generation electricity grid.
A large part of his justification is through inappropriate modelling of demand (averaged over an hour) and renewable generation capacity factors (extrapolated from existing with “improved” technologies) so his position is entirely consistent with CAGW.
And yet his papers are consistently quoted by the renewables and green lobbies for removal of our dependable fossil fuel generation with wind and solar.
You have to reach that perceived “tipping point” where “everybody knows” something due to relentless assertions amplified by an uncritical media. We are close to there now in ClimateTheatre™.
Life for lefties is a perpetual struggle. Doesn’t matter what you’re pathologically struggling against, just so long as you’re always struggling. The problem with that affliction is eventually it becomes obvious that whatever you’re struggling against is somewhat ludicrous to rational folk. Their solution to the age old problem was to find ultimate thing to struggle against. A colourless odourless gas that’s invisible to rational folk but only they can see the struggle in.
observa: You are hereby instructed to report to the Correction Booth for Re-Grooving. It won’t hurt too much and you’ll feel better afterwards. Anticipating your forthcoming compliance and Have A Nice Day (or else)!
That’s funny!
Thing is, there actually are people in the Australian Govn’t who do listen to these people, and Govn’t control like this creeps in to policy and every day life for everyone except them.
We don’t need more Govn’t in Australia, we have enough nanny state intrusion as it is. So if a future Aussie Govn’t wants to head down this path, be sure to know they won”t last two terms.
And in pouncing upon a colourless, odourless gas all around us to struggle against it opens up a huge vista of things to struggle against which is of paramount importance if you’re pathologically afflicted like lefties are-
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
With CO2 they’re in struggle heaven.
Observa wrote: “With CO2 they’re in struggle heaven.”
Yes, CO2 satifies all their “struggle” needs. I agree with you, the Left has to struggle against something always. It’s what they do.
‘Governments that receive taxation revenue and political donations from vested interests are reluctant to act effectively.’
Well, just give them a tax holiday. That will fix it.
Godwin’s law not withstanding, in 1933 didn’t a building over heat and the second most influential government official demand and get “extraordinary emergency powers?” It didn’t work out well then; and IMO it won’t work out well now–i.e., unless people like Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, Richard Lindzen, etc. are given the “powers.”
I posted the following comment on The Conversation:
Mark Diesendorf – The basic premise of your article – that “Global climate change, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is already affecting the planet” – is false. With your background in mathematics, I am disappointed that you have not understood this. Especially as, in May 2008 after a talk that you gave on sustainabkle energy, I suggested to you that it would be a good idea not to rely on the climate science to justify sustainable energy (because the climate science was highly suspect) but to deal with sustainable energy on its own merits.
My background is in mathematics too – admittedly pure maths not applied maths but the underlying rules are the same. I have studied the climate science scene in more depth since 2008 and have now written a number of articles which explain the situation in more detail and from different angles. I would very much appreciate it if you would take the time to read them, and to understand that there are many genuine reasons to doubt climate science as it stands today.
A series of 4 articles examines the basic equation underlying CO2, and relates it to past climate.
The Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide
Part 1 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/25/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-1/
Part 2 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/27/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-2/
Part 3 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/31/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-3/
Part 4 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/01/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-4/
The end result, using the climate models’ own mathematical profile, is that CO2 has clearly not been the major driver of past climate.
The next article looks into the physics behind the computer models, and shows that the methods used necessarily lead to a large proportion of climate change being attributed to factors that are poorly understood:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/17/how-reliable-are-the-climate-models/
(The footnotes in this article are actually pretty important)
The last article looks at the way the climate models are structured, and shows that they cannot work in their current form:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/08/inside-the-climate-computer-models/
I appreciate that these articles add up to a lot of reading, but in your article, you do emphasise how desperately important climate change is : “we need an emergency response”. If you would take the time to read and understand what I have written, then I am sure that you will realise that there is actually good reason to pause and reflect for a while, before committing to dramatic and expensive actions.
Many thanks.
Mike Jonas.
PS. Apologies for the long delay in posting this. I have only just come across your article. I saw it in wattsupwiththat.com
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/20/aussie-climate-professor-governments-may-need-extraordinary-emergency-powers/
I’ll try to post this comment there, so that you can if you wish reply to it there in order to reach a larger audience.
It doesn’t need a genius to figure out that those who call for more government power are serving those who want more power, this has always been the case.
They are the first to regret their decisions too, revolutionaries are always the first targets when the revolution runs it’s course
Yes, we have an Alinskyan problem here in Australia.
Sounds like it.
“Governments may need extraordinary emergency powers to implement rapid mitigation.”
This is how Obama plans to stay in power !
I don’t see that happening. Obama will go, not so quietly, into the night. That’s the way I’m going to go, too. 🙂
I agree completely! But in service of genuine science. Arrest all scientists and politicians serving the utterly false idea that we should be removing plant food from the atmosphere – such a self-evidently destructive idea as anything could possibly be. Charge ’em all with treason against the planet – starving the poor and wildlife, damaging human and animal health with subsonic windmill noise, torturing birds with solar concentrators, exploding bats with turbines. A good dictatorship should remove all greens – false friends of the planet – from all schools, the judiciary, universities, etc. Establish genuine science to research efficient energy production, to include nuclear fission and hopefully fusion. Wonderful plan, when you insert the true instead of the false.
(Sort of tongue in cheek – but how far they go will force how far we have to go.)
UNSW PhD candidate Laurence Delina has investigated the rapid, large, socio-economic changes made by several countries just before and during World War 2.
Like Germany, Italy, and Japan?
How convenient the only way out is for gov’ts to be granted ’emergency powers’.
cookie cutter – create dilemma, propose action, take credit…..
Yes, Governments do need extraordinary powers-
To put danderous idiots, like Mark Diesendorf, in the lunatic asylum he and other “environMENTALists” so richly deserve.