See also: 

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2019/video/NC1903H020S00

A new Parliamentary Inquiry into the future of the koala is likely to uncover the Berejiklian Government's history of negligence, reckless mismanagement and refusal to listen to the experts. Sue Arnold reports.

In an historic step forward, announced the creation of a Parliamentary Inquiry into the future of the koala in NSW has been announced.   

The Inquiry's committee will be chaired by the Planning and Environment Committee chair and Greens Member of the Legislative Council Cate Faehrmann, and has the numbers to ensure a fair hearing.

Finally, the public will learn the truth which includes: 

• the dirty deals with developers and councils;  
• the impacts of repealing the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 and the Native Vegetation Act 2003; 
• the out-of-control logging of coastal native forest ecosystems — now targeted for burning as “bio-energy”;
• the major conflict of interest issues concerning government appointments and grants;
• a failure to include, discuss or recognise communities and their concerns;
• the lack of monitoring, or compliance; and 
• the absolute refusal of the NSW Government to protect koalas and their habitat.

Hopefully, the hearing will investigate the Roads and Maritime Services' (RMS) ongoing wipe-outs of koalas with carte blanche government approval via State Significant Infrastructure provisions.

The legal impacts of the NSW Bilateral Agreement being negotiated with the Commonwealth and the Common Assessment Method ( Memorandum of Understanding), which effectively remove any upgraded level of protection must also be included in the terms of reference.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/inquiry-to-re...

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http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35140

See also:

AS POLITICIANS TALK more about ramping up their commitments to reducing carbon emissions — over the weekend, even Vice President Mike Pence squirmed when pressed on his climate denialism and said the U.S. is making progress on that front — one key aspect of the crisis remains conspicuously absent from most U.S discussions: so-called climate finance. The question of how much money the U.S. and other wealthy, industrialized nations will transfer to poor, developing countries so that they can effectively reduce their own carbon emissions has gone largely unaddressed, even as it grows in importance. Developing countries already account for more than 60 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions and are expected to contribute nearly 90 percent of emissions growth over the next two decades.

The amount of money needed for “climate finance” is one of the most hotly debated issues between countries and represented one of the most contentious aspects of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Poorer countries have repeatedly said they could make steeper emissions cuts if they were adequately supported by wealthier nations in the process.

A new report from the People’s Policy Project, a socialist think tank, argues that industrialized countries should contribute $2 trillion annually to help developing nations stave off the effects of climate change. An investment of that size would be 20 times larger than existing global commitments, which developed countries are already struggling to meet.

There is also an ideological debate behind the purpose of climate finance. Proponents of environmental justice argue that the U.S. has a moral and ethical responsibility to help less prosperous countries deal with the threat of climate change because so much of the U.S.’s own development and economic growth has contributed to suffering around the globe. Politically speaking, though, the issue is largely framed in terms of national security: The United States will be safer and better off if climate disasters don’t go unmitigated in other parts of the world.

The needle on climate finance has moved slowly since 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at international climate negotiations in Copenhagen that by 2020 the U.S and other developed nations would “mobilize” $100 billion per year from public and private sources. The figure was selected to convey political will and was not based on any scientific analysis. As part of that $100 billion commitment, the U.N. established the Green Climate Fund, designed to finance climate mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries like securing the water supply in South Tarawa, Kiribati, and restoring degraded ecosystems in El Salvador.

The fund’s governing board includes equal representation between developing and developed nations, and its first round of funding began in 2013, when 43 countries pledged to raise $10.3 billion for projects. Of that amount, the U.S. pledged to contribute $3 billion over four years.

As countries and experts debate how much climate aid is needed to raise over the long term, the amount of money raised and spent so far is also a matter of great dispute. One reason for that, according to Kevin Adams, a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, is that countries generally self-report what they’re providing, and so what developing countries say they receive can differ from what developed countries say they have contributed. “This can be due to factors like exchange rates and currency fluctuations, fees paid to consultants or other service providers, as well as the financial instrument used, such as grants versus loans,” he explained.

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/24/global-green-new-deal-climate-finance/

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Meanwhile Europe is preparing for a MASSIVE  heatwave...

Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944) is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist StudiesDepartment at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.[1] She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist, rather loosely a postmodernist".[2]Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988).[3][4] She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements.[5][6] Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.[7]

Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology.[8] Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999.[9][10] In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's highest honor, the J. D. Bernal Award, for her "distinguished contributions" to the field.[11] Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.[12][13][14]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway

Eugene Stoermer, a freshwater biologist who studies diatoms in the Great Lakes of North America, proposed the name the Anthropocene in 2000 to indicate the anthropogenic processes that are acidifying the waters and changing the nature of life on Earth. The term was picked up and re-used by Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, who joined together with Eugene Stoermer to popularise the name Anthropocene specifically in relationship to those sorts of processes emanating from the mid-18th century related to the steam engine and the extraordinary expansion in the use of fossil fuels that acidify the oceans and bleach the corals. They were particularly worried about a vibrio infection in coral reefs that is responsible for the bleaching. (Haraway, 2014)

In general, the term Anthropocene is used to refer to the preponderance of humans in the balance of earthly life and the human experimentation, albeit until recently unwitting, in the chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. There is disagreement about when the Anthropocence can be said to begin. Some scholars date it back to roughly 10,000 years ago, with the nearly universal extinction of megafauna at the hands of Neolithic hunters. This would make the Holocene and the Anthropocene virtually overlap. A more common view is that the Anthropocene started in modern times. One study (Lewis and Maslin, 2015) dates it to 1610, when the depopulation of the Americas after European conquest led to the reforestation of the New World, bringing on the Little Ice Age.

Thus, Maslin and Lewis (2015: 175) argue that,

“The impacts of the meeting of Old and New World human populations — including the geologically unprecedented homogenization of Earth’s biota — may serve to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. Although it represents a major event in world history, the collision of the Old and New Worlds has not been proposed previously, to our knowledge, as a possible GSSP. We suggest naming the dip in atmospheric CO2 the ‘Orbis spike’ and the suite of changes marking 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene the ‘Orbis hypothesis’, from the Latin for world, because post-1492 humans on the two hemispheres were connected, trade became global, and some prominent social scientists refer to this time as the beginning of the modern ‘world-system’.”

For others, like Stoermer and Crutzen, it is the Industrial Revolution that initiates the Anthropocene, while for yet others the Anthropocene began on 6 August 1945 with the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima (Kunkel, 2017: 22)

However, Donna Haraway proposes that, for all of the failings of the Anthropos and the Anthropocene, and all of the strengths of both, the figure of the Anthropos is not responsible for the processes that threatens mass extinction. Rather, she suggests, if we were to use only one word for the processes that we are talking about, it should be the Capitalocene. It should be noted in passing that geologists use the suffix -cene, derived from the Greek word for new, to designate recent geological eras.

Haraway also argues that a third term is needed: Chthulucene, a word derived from chthon, meaning “earth” in Greek and which is associated with things that dwell in or under the earth. The Cthulucene, for Haraway, refers to processes of reworlding. She suggests it is more like a process of composting than one of being Posthuman. The path towards something that might possibly have a chance of living on, Haraway argues, is through the activation of the chthonic powers that are within our grasp, as we collect up the waste of the Anthropocene and the exterminism of the Capitalocene.

Read more:

http://compendium.kosawese.net/term/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/

At top, Gus, who is not so preciously scientific, called this sequence of events as : the Garbagedestroyeocene, the latest section of the Humaneocene...

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/25/climate-apartheid-un...

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Grubs Gus ...?

More like Mistletoe to me ...

Even the lowliest of grubs perform a useful function in nature, while Mistletoe is nothing more than a parasite, sucking the life out of its unwitting host.

Just saying.

Cheers.

I almost screamed at my idiot box tonight Gus ...

I felt just like the Peter Finch character in the movie 'Network' as I listened to the besuited morons on the ABC program 'The Drum' ernestly talking-up the importance of 'economic growth' as the cure to all of our future ills.

I wondered what phoney 'business school' these fools had attended that the simple logic that economic growth is driven by ever increasing consumption, regardless of whether it is a function of population increase or rampant consumerism, or both, simply escapes them. As does the capacity to recognise that continuous economic growth is impossible when it encounters finite resources.

These fools lack the insight to recognise that the future of humanity rests in its capacity to reinvent itself & to learn to live in harmony, not only with each other, but our environment & other species, & to make do with less rather than more. Instead they worship at the feet of failed marketers like Morrison or Philistines like Dutton, content to be 'farmed' as the ultimate domesticated beast of consumption, grown fat but spiritually impoverished.

Just opened the window Gus ...

If you listen intently, you just might hear me calling from our little piece of paradise.

Take Care.

Yes john... I can hear your screams from 425,7 kilometres away! As the crow flies that is... My own screams are silent, like that of the famous actor, Rod Steiger... in the Pawnbroker...

And yes... Mistletoe we are rather than "grubs", but Mistletoe is ignorant and pretty... We should be knowledgeable, yet we are fucking ugly...

Imagine if more than a quarter of a century ago, the bushwalker David Noble had not stumbled across the stand of Wollemi pines and they had remained undiscovered.

The trees survive in three stands in just one remote canyon in a massive wilderness to Sydney’s north-west. Until they were found, they were a species clinging to the edge of the precipice of extinction – just one disaster away from vanishing.

A quarter of a century for a species with a lineage going back to the age of dinosaurs is not even a fraction of a millionth of a blip.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/17/wollemi-pines-tim...

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From Cory Morningstar on Facebook

After two months of hard work, we are proud to announce our new campaign and website to oppose the financialization of nature (as well as “social and human capital”).

No foundation funding. No advertising. No Vogue layouts. A grassroots volunteer effort – asking for nothing except your resistance.

No Deal For Nature 

https://nodealfornature.org/

The financialization of nature (monetization of nature) is to be agreed upon this year (The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 15-28 October 2020). This is the corporate capture of the commons, global in scale. This represents the greatest transformation of the financial economic system in modern day history. Those with money will own nature. 

The capture of nature is moving forward under the guise of the “New Deal For Nature” term/campaign led by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and WWF. The key players include the United Nations (WEF partner as of June 13, 2019), the Natural Capital Coalition, Conservation International, Business for Nature, IUCN, WBCSD, Al Gore, etc. 

Founding partners of Business for Nature include the World Economic Forum, The Natural Capital Coalition, WWF, We Mean Business, WBCSD, The Food and Land Use Coalition, Tropical Forest Alliance, The Nature Conservancy, International Chamber of Commerce, World Resources Institute,Confederation of Indian Industry, and Entreprises pour l’Environnement (EpE). 

Growing list of Business for Nature partners:

https://www.businessfornature.org/about

The “Super Year” campaign has been designed to establish the social license required of the citizenry. They want you to not only accept, but even demand, A New Deal For Nature. All roads, all campaigns that have saturated the media since the fall of 2018, have strategically led to this grotesque intent. 

The sister campaign of New Deal For Nature is Voice For The Planet (WEF & WWF) promoted by Attenborough, Goodall & Thunberg. 

Catte Black and all at OffG are proud to be working in concert with Cory and everyone at No Deal For Nature. We urge our readers to bookmark the website and follow them on Twitter at @nodealfornature.

see:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/02/07/launching-no-deal-for-nature/

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From Science:

Read from top.

Rather than benefiting the environment, large-scale tree planting may do the opposite, two new studies have found.

One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions. 

A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated. 

The key message from both papers is that planting trees is not a simple climate solution. 

• Will millions more trees really stop climate change?
• 'A trillion trees to the rescue'
• Trees 'most effective solution' for climate change
• Is there any point in planting new trees?

Over the past few years, the idea of planting trees as a low cost, high impact solution to climate change has really taken hold.

So far, around 40 nations have endorsed the idea.

But scientists have urged caution against the headlong rush to plant new forests. 

They point to the fact that in the Bonn Challenge nearly 80% of the commitments made to date involve planting monoculture plantations or a limited mix of trees that produce specific products such as fruit or rubber. 

The authors of this new study have looked closely at the financial incentives given to private landowners to plant trees. 

These payments are seen as a key element of increasing the number of trees significantly. 

The study looked at the example of Chile, where a decree subsidising tree planting ran from 1974 to 2012, and was widely seen as a globally influential afforestation policy.

The law subsidised 75% of the costs of planting new forests.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53138178

Even the presidents do it: 

But the point of the exercise isn't trees or symbols per se, but retaining (saving) bio-diversity and habitats, plus carbon sinks... Thus planting trees for their "usefulness" to the human species is akin to having cleared the rainforests of Borneo for planting palm-oil palm-trees, or even clearing the Amazon forest to plant grasses, fruit trees and corn for making hamburgers in the USA (them again — they're everywhere, including on your dumbPhone).

As shown last night on the last instalment of Australia's Ocean Odyssey, the landscape of the southern western tip of Tasmania at Port Davey is a wonder of how lands and forests can be protected from human intrusion... And yet, on a beach that has not seen a human in fifty or so years, the rubbish brought in by the East Australian Current  shows the extend of the Garbagedestroyeocene... We need to protect (i. e. LEAVE ALONE) the remaining forests on the planet... Let it be... and reduce human carbon emissions drastically to zero... and control our garbage at the source: ban disposable plastics.

Read from top.

The New South Wales government has dropped a plan that could have opened up new areas of the state’s protected old-growth forests to logging.

Conservationists have called the decision a win for the state’s environment and threatened wildlife after years of habitat loss and the devastating 2019-20 bushfires.

Guardian Australia revealed last year the government had asked the state’s Natural Resources Commission (NRC) to remap old-growth forest in the state’s north-east, a move that potentially would have opened areas to the timber industry that are currently off limits.

The proposal prompted anger from conservationists, who have put pressure on the government to keep the protections in place.

In a report, quietly published on Thursday, the NRC said it had suspended the project and would redirect the money it planned to use for the old-growth reassessment into its forest monitoring and improvement program.

“This is a terrific result for our forests and wildlife,” the Nature ConservationCouncil chief executive, Chris Gambian, said.

“We have been saying for months that logging in public native forests must be suspended in the wake of the bushfires, at least until a full ecological assessment has been conducted.”

Gambian said suspending the remapping project was a sensible first step toward better protection of the state’s native forests.

“The next step is to develop a plan to end native forest logging once and for all and to ensure a just transition for timber workers and the industry.”

In its report, the commission said more than 102,000 hectares of mapped old-growth forest on the state’s north coast – 45% of mapped old growth in the region – had experienced either full or partial burning of the tree canopy in the 2019-20 fire disaster.

The commission said that because of this the remote sensing it planned to use to develop the new maps could no longer be accurately applied.

“The commission advised the NSW government we would be unable to continue in accordance with the terms of reference,” the commission said.

“Based on this advice, the NSW government has now suspended the program and approved the remaining funds being repurposed to the Forest Monitoring and Improvement Program.”

The independent MLC Justin Field welcomed the redirection of the funding but said it was disappointing it had taken an unprecedented bushfire season for the government to abandon the proposal.

Field said the proposed remapping exercise was indicative of a structural problem within the state’s native forestry industry that had been exacerbated by the fires.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/25/nsw-scraps-plan-that...

Meanwhile:

Morrison government has failed in its duty to protect environment, auditor general finds

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