Critical Times

by Renfrey Clarke

When a respected scientific journal carries a peer-reviewed article branding the key technology behind “clean coal” as “profoundly non-feasible” , you’d expect governments and coal corporations to react in some fashion.

After all, the proposed Waxman-Markey climate bill in the US reportedly promises “clean coal” a staggering US$60 billion in subsidies. Here in Australia, the Rudd government last year pledged to spend A$2.

Source: Green Left

by Simon Butler
13 February 2010

The December 7-18 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen was supposed to “seal a global deal” to tackle climate change. It failed miserably.

A number of commentators have put forward a simple explanation: China did it.

Click on the link below to view the video, “Unmineable Minds” on YouTube. It is a plea to save Arkaroola from the devastation of mining this world heritage geological feature of South Australia.

http://www.

by Renfrey Clarke

How to sum up the Liberal Party’s “direct action” scheme for global warming mitigation? Well, how about “a fraud wrapped in demagogy inside a delusion”?

The delusion is that the measures outlined in the scheme would represent a meaningful contribution by Australia to saving nature and humanity from climate change.

The demagogy lies in the decision by the Liberals to issue the policy even though many of them – if not most – remain unconvinced that global warming is even a problem. Opposition leader Tony Abbott assured a meeting in country Victoria last October that climate change was “absolute crap”.

Source: Socialist Aotearoa

Commentary: Omar Hamed, Socialist Aotearoa, Wellington Branch

Despite selling out every night it screens at the cinema on Courtney Place and becoming the highest grossing film of all time, few have picked up on Avatar’s blatant allusions to the historical drama of Bougainville that happened on New Zealand’s doorstep thirteen years ago. The films names, plot and characters are almost direct references to the 1997 Bougainville crisis yet no one seems to have drawn the dots between science fiction and south Pacific fact. Until now.

Source: The Guardian
by Bob Briton

The federal government’s long term plans for public education took a giant leap forward last week with the release of school test data on the “My School” website. It crashed shortly afterwards following what the government insists was a rush of visits from interested parents. Education Minister Julia Gillard was at pains to point out in the weeks and months leading up to the launch that it would not rank schools in a league table of achievement in the Commonwealth’s NAPLAN testing.

Source: Vanguard
by Ned K.
In October this year, the largest rubber and tyre manufacturer in the world, Bridgestone, announced it will close its Salisbury tyre plant in the northern suburbs of Adelaide by 30 April 2010. 600 workers will lose their jobs as a direct result of the closure.

by Renfrey Clarke

The target posed by James Hansen of stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 ppm is increasingly understood in conjunction with the need to keep cumulative emissions within a tight global “budget”. While the point at which budgeted emissions occur is not in theory crucial, in practice there is a need to ensure that emissions peak early and decline swiftly thereafter. Low or zero-emissions energy generating plant needs to be built out at an accelerated rate, with the time-frame seeming to exclude nuclear power.

Source: Vanguard

The fingerprints of US imperialism were all over the Copenhagen Conference, and the handwriting on the flimsy ‘Copenhagen Accord’ also matched that of the main environmental criminal.

Unwilling to accept any responsibility for its historic and current contributions to global climate warming, and determined to resist any restrictions or imposition of costs on its polluting industrial monopolies, US imperialism has, until recently, opposed any effective international action to deal with it. Unable to deny the science any longer, US imperialism was forced to participate in the UN process or lose all credibility.

By Prof. JOSE MARIA SISON
Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle

Human societies have created the bases of our survival, sustenance and advancement through the use of our natural resources in production with rudimentary tools and rising levels of science and technology. Yet in no time in history has environmental destruction been systematically brought about in most parts of the world.

by Humphrey McQueen

Note from Critical Times: For those interested in a Marxist interpretation of the workings of capitalism, Humphrey McQueen provides a number (8 to be precise) of insightful explanations. His article will give the reader intense but enjoyable reading over the holidays. To use his own words, ” knowing how to identify each form of capital depends on recognising its function in the social patterns of exploitation.

by Renfrey Clarke

Climate change deniers, conservative politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists were all but incontinent with delight. Deluging the internet in mid-November were thousands of documents and private emails that had been exchanged over more than a decade by prominent climate scientists. The materials were posted anonymously after hackers penetrated the server of one of Britain’s main climate change research centres, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Source: The Guardian

by Peter Mac

The Rudd government has so far failed to take advantage of a golden opportunity to acquire the vast southern Queensland irrigation property, Cubbie Station. The huge consumption of water in this and other irrigation properties in the St George area has drastically reduced water flows into the upper Murray River for years, just when flows have been shrinking because of climate change.

Cubbie Station’s dams, which have the greatest capacity of any irrigation property in Australia, can hold 530 billion litres, almost as much as Sydney Harbour.

Source: International League of Peoples’ Struggles

By Prof. JOSE MARIA SISON
Chairperson, ILPS International Coordinating Committee

Since the fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989, the world capitalist system has sunk deeper into crisis. It is now undergoing its most severe crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with some commentators calling the present crisis “the Greater Depression” in terms of its effects on the jobs and livelihood of the workers and peoples of the world.

by Humphrey McQueen

The great Tree of Life –The tangled bank – Publishing – Anthropocentrisms – Kew Gardens – Voyaging – In Australia – Darwin’s botanical ignorance – Darwin learns botany – the Hookers – ‘The Origin of Species’ – Artificial and Natural Selections –Paleo-botany – Super-continents or migration? – Orchidiae – – Brown and Sprengel – Cross-fertilisation – The necessity of sex – Sexual selection – The utility of beauty – Colour vision – Marketing Memes – ‘fatal to my theory’: Kelvin and Jenkin – Darwin runs out of time – Darwin runs faster – Pangenesis – ‘Let us imagine’ – Mendel – Life, the unfinished experiment

Despite Charles Darwin’s confessing in 1843 to an ‘entire ignorance of Botany’, he had, before his death in 1882, inherited the laurel of Jupiter Botanicus. On the centenary of The Origin of Species in 1959, population geneticist J. B.

Noted historian Humphrey McQueen (above) and South Australian State Secretary of the CFMEU Martin O’Malley were interviewed about issues in the construction industry by Catherine Zengerer of SA Unions for the Your Rights at Night broadcast on Radio Adelaide 101.5.

Here is a link to the first of several podcasts on the topic:

http://houndbite.

by Renfrey Clarke

If the Weekend Australian devotes a whole broadsheet page to a proposed solution to global warming, the editors must want to inform the public on how best to combat climate change. Right?

Hardly. If the Weekend Australian cared about our climate, it wouldn’t draw its text from one of the strangest travesties of climate science ever to issue from a printing press.

by Renfrey Clarke

Admit it: you’re just a little disturbed when industrialists, fossil-fuel lobbyists and the Liberal and National parties thunder that big, quick cuts to carbon emissions would bankrupt Australian business. Well, aren’t you?
Rest easy. Australian capitalism has ample money – and technical resources too – that could be used to cut emissions drastically in as little as a decade.

by Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
3 October 2009

The leaders of the imperialist powers and the world’s other big economies concluded their G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, USA and declared the capitalist world economy on the path to recovery. They praised themselves for arresting economic decline and stabilizing financial markets, and for starting a reform process towards “strong, sustained and balanced growth in the 21st century”.

by Renfrey Clarke

Not in so many words, mind you – frankness has rarely been the strong suit of News Corporation journalists and editors. The editorial in question, published in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian on September 10, argued in support of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) – in other words, “clean coal”.

“By launching Australia’s Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute earlier this year,” the editorial intoned, “Kevin Rudd recognised that coal would continue to be our major source of power for decades to come….