Eleven days before the election last May, Scott Morrison announced $15 million to extend a program to build regional study centres in country towns.

The project, Country Universities Centres, was initially proposed by Duncan Taylor, the brother of the federal energy minister, Angus Taylor, when Duncan’s wife, NSW Nationals state upper house MP Bronwyn Taylor, was parliamentary secretary to John Barilaro, the Nationals state leader and deputy premier.

Despite a cost-benefit analysis showing the project would be unlikely to deliver a positive benefit to the state, the NSW government handed over $16 million – $8 million in 2017-18 and another $8 million in 2019.  The grants were awarded without tender.

Bronwyn Taylor has insisted she had nothing to do with the grants yet emails have revealed she was informed about it minutes after the decision was made which caused NSW Labor to ask the pertinent question in Senate estimates:

“You said you had no involvement but you were informed three weeks before the grant is announced. If you weren’t lobbying and engaging behind the scenes why were you told about it?”

The CUCs had previously received $5.1m funding in 2018 from the federal government, including $830,000 for a centre in Goulburn in the seat of Hume, the seat of Angus Taylor, whose wife, Louise Clegg, is on the board of the Goulburn CUC.

In New South Wales the centres have been largely located in seats that coincidentally are under pressure from minor parties, like the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, or independents.

The $15 million handed over during the federal election campaign was for five new centres, only one of which had been decided upon at the time.  It just so happened to be in the seat of Indi where the Coalition were trying to wrest the seat back from the independents.

Once again, we see Coalition governments using public money to shore up their political fortunes and, once again, the Taylor family are the recipients of government largesse.

In fact:

“From the time Angus Taylor entered parliament in September 2013, companies & organisations the Taylor family have managed, directed or are directly associated with have benefited from over $93,515,673 in federal & state government funds.”

It pays to have friends and relatives in high places.

Read more:

https://theaimn.com/speaking-of-rorts/

Casey, Richard Gavin Gardiner, Baron Casey of Berwick, Victoria, and the City of Westminster (1890-1976), engineer, diplomat, politician, governor and governor-general, was born on 29 August 1890 in Brisbane, eldest child of Richard Gardiner Casey, pastoralist and politician, and his Queensland-born wife Jane Eveline (Evelyn Jane), née Harris. Richard senior, the son of Cornelius Casey, worked as a jackeroo, did well as a manager of properties in New South Wales and then became a minor partner in three Queensland holdings. Partly of convict stock, and twenty years younger than her husband, Evelyn came from a notable family: her father George Harris and her maternal grandfather George Thorn had been Queensland parliamentarians, and an uncle George Henry Thorn had been premier in 1876-77.

Poor seasons and low prices impoverished Richard senior and in 1893 he moved his family to Melbourne where he prospered as a company director, partly by drawing on connexions made in Queensland with Thomas and Walter Hall, major partners in the fabulous Mount Morgan Gold Mining Co. Ltd. Affluence was to free young Richard from material worries for the rest of his life, but his father was stern, dominating and misanthropic, and Richard was less privileged in emotional terms. Living in the family mansion, Shipley House, at South Yarra, he was educated as a day-boy at Cumloden School, St Kilda, and then for three years at the nearby Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. With a bent towards science rather than classics, he spent one year (1909) as an engineering student at the University of Melbourne before sailing to England and entering Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1913; M.A., 1918); he graduated with second-class honours in the mechanical sciences tripos. As a student he had been a keen debater and oarsman, rowing for Trinity at Henley, and he saw something of France and Germany. He returned to Australia and, on his father's instruction, worked at Mount Morgan (his father was now chairman of the company) until war broke out in August 1914.

...

In public, Casey seemed to be a devoted Cold-War warrior, fervently supportive of Britain and the U.S.A., and deeply hostile towards the Soviet Union and China; he was the minister responsible for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. In private, his views and at times his behaviour were very different. He came out against Britain's militant reaction to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, but he could not move Menzies and said nothing against Britain in public. Again, while at ease with Americans, excessive dependence on the U.S.A. distressed him. Year after year he campaigned in cabinet for greater Australian self-sufficiency in defence, but was confronted by colleagues who preferred the financially cheaper alternative of alliance diplomacy. Totalitarianism also distressed him, but he argued in private that—whatever one thought of it—a communist China must be accommodated and urged his fellow ministers to allow diplomatic recognition; again, they turned him down.

If Casey was an innovator at all, it was in constantly preaching the importance of Asia to an Australia which had taken little interest in it. He frequently visited Asia (and thereby forced the Australian press to take an interest), kept a close eye on aid to Asian countries and urged his young diplomats to concentrate on Asia rather than Europe. Casey had also given close attention to the Antarctic since the 1920s and played a leading part in the negotiation in 1959 of a treaty covering co-operation in exploration and scientific research there. A research station and several geographical features in Antarctica were named after him. Throughout the 1950s Casey was, as well, the minister responsible for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Although tending to be impatient with theoretical work, he was personally committed to furthering the role of the C.S.I.R.O., and few other areas of government so absorbed him or allowed him to operate with such conviction.

In January 1960 Casey was made a life peer; next month he resigned from the ministry and parliament. It was by then something of an anomaly that an Australian should be appointed to the Upper House of another country's parliament, yet, for most Australians, Britain was still the mother country and few were inclined to quibble. Lord Casey ordered his time around annual trips to London and appearances in the House of Lords, but he had no obvious constituency, he was distressed to find that British interest in the old dominions was waning fast, and he warmed to the forms of Westminster no more than he had to those of Canberra. At home, he enjoyed having a seat (1960-65) on the C.S.I.R.O. executive; he involved himself in the Australian-American Association, the Australian-Asian Association of Victoria, the Freedom from Hunger Campaign, and International House at the University of Melbourne. Then, in mid-1965, he accepted appointment, and on 22 September was sworn in, as governor-general—nominated to his grateful surprise by Menzies.

Casey was the first Australian citizen to be recommended for the governor-generalship by a non-Labor government; provided that he performed well, it was unlikely that there would be a reversion to appointees from Britain. He did perform well, mainly because he took the office seriously and because he enjoyed it. More interventionist than convention encouraged, he interposed in disputes between 'his' ministers in the interests of harmony in 'his' governments, raised policy matters with ministers and senior public servants, and questioned submissions. He was fortunate in that he had the kind of presence which, while not very impressive in cabinet rooms or parliamentary chambers, was well suited to vice-regal office. And in Maie he had an ideal wife, sharply conscious of her dignity but down-to-earth. Casey also literally civilized the office. Averse to uniforms and plumes, he chose civilian forms which made it easier for men like (Sir) Paul Hasluck to succeed him.

Read more:

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/casey-richard-gavin-gardiner-9706

...

Kean had to win over the Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her right-wing Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, Nationals leader John Barilaro, and lately Labor and the Greens to ensure that even a change of government would likely leave the policy framework intact.

"This is durable and lasting reform," Kean says. "This means energy policy in NSW is settled – this is so important for the private sector."

Such multi-party support has largely eluded policymakers at a state and federal level. Kean himself describes taking on the energy and environment portfolios in March 2019 not long before Malcolm Turnbull became the third prime minister to be rolled, in part, because of climate policy. He says he then found a "smouldering wreck" of an energy policy after Scott Morrison abandoned the National Energy Guarantee.

D'Ambrosio has been a long-serving energy minister in Victoria and has watched the prospects of a coherent national climate and energy policy wax and wane.

While overseeing a more pro-renewables policy mix than NSW, D'Ambrosio knows securing the same bipartisan support is getting harder as Victorian Liberals drift further right.

Likewise in Queensland, the policy divide between Labor and the opposition remains wide. Had Annastacia Palaszczuk's Labor Party lost last month's election, an incoming Liberal National government would have likely dismembered most of Labor's plans for renewable energy and hydrogen hubs.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/clean-and-green-powering-through-watershed-week-for-energy-policy-20201127-p56ikc.html

Now I know. The Federal Government under the superb leadership of Scomo-the-Priest and his acolyte Angus Taylor the non-believer in windmills, are playing a double game to suck up to El Trumpo, who is about to depart for worse pastures... So, they let the States do the hard yards towards mitigating global warming while doing the opposite by supporting coal and gas... It's a win-win loose-loose situation which can only make us proud to be an Aussie, especially when the temperature around the country has been well above 40 degrees Celsius, by the end of spring. It appears that the overnight "temp" in Newtown has not dipped below 31... 

Read from top.

People like Scomo and Taylor (read from top) are idiots. They were not born that way. They learned not to be intelligent. For profit. Being dumb to reality is profitable if you sell duck shit. Anyway, As Sydney, Australia, is cooking above 40 degrees Celsius for the second day in a row, still in springtime, just in case you missed this new release, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZBzkOwohMs

REPORT

Abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia beyond the tipping point.

Science  27 Nov 2020:

Vol. 370, Issue 6520, pp. 1095-1099

Unprecedented heatwave-drought concurrences in the past two decades have been reported over inner East Asia. Tree-ring–based reconstructions of heatwaves and soil moisture for the past 260 years reveal an abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over this region. Enhanced land-atmosphere coupling, associated with persistent soil moisture deficit, appears to intensify surface warming and anticyclonic circulation anomalies, fueling heatwaves that exacerbate soil drying. Our analysis demonstrates that the magnitude of the warm and dry anomalies compounding in the recent two decades is unprecedented over the quarter of a millennium, and this trend clearly exceeds the natural variability range. The “hockey stick”–like change warns that the warming and drying concurrence is potentially irreversible beyond a tipping point in the East Asian climate system.

Global warming has led to a shift in the probability distribution of summer temperatures (1), causing more frequent summer heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes (2, 3). Diverse and complex regional or global feedback mechanisms determine the magnitude of changes in heatwave frequency and regionality (4–9). In addition to the emergence of heatwave-prone atmospheric stagnation, soil moisture deficit before or during droughts has been identified as a key factor exacerbating heatwaves through the land-atmosphere coupling (10–14). This drought-heatwave interaction is particularly pronounced in semiarid regions such as southern Europe, western North America, and inner East Asia (Mongolia and northern China), where the land-atmosphere coupling is strong (15–20).

Although increasing concentration of greenhouse gases may enhance soil moisture deficits and heatwave occurrences in a warmer climate (21–23), the extent to which summer heatwaves are affected by the global warming–induced soil moisture reduction in a long-term context remains unclear. In this study, we used tree-ring data to reconstruct both heatwave frequency and soil moisture variability in inner East Asia, centered over Mongolia, for the past 260 years. We found a robust tendency toward a hotter and drier climate, with a stronger coupling of heatwave and drought in recent decades that was not observed before the 1990s. This trend, which was found in both observations and reconstructions, is likely associated with an enhanced land-atmosphere coupling associated with persistent soil moisture deficit.

Inner East Asia, including Mongolia and its surroundings (Fig. 1), features arid and semiarid climates where annual precipitation is <300 mm. It is one of the hotspots showing the strongest warming in the latter part of the 20th century (24). The frequency of summer heatwaves in this region has increased significantly during the past two decades (Fig. 1A). Concurrently, soil moisture content has shown a significant drying trend (Fig. 1B), which is consistent with previous studies based on observation and land surface modeling (25–27) (also see fig. S1).

 Download high-res image

 Open in new tab

 Download Powerpoint

Fig. 1 Trends of hot day frequency and soil moisture content.

(A and B) Trends of July-August mean extremely hot day frequency (A) and soil moisture content (B) in 1979–2017. Black frame marks the defined domain of inner East Asia. Black dots mark the grids where the trends are significant at the P < 0.05 level. Triangles and circles mark the locations where the tree-ring data were used to reconstruct the extremely hot day frequency and soil moisture variability on interannual and above-interannual time scale, respectively.

To determine whether this modern-era drying falls within or outside the range of long-term natural variability, we reconstructed summer heatwave and soil moisture variations based on independent tree-ring chronologies sampled in inner East Asia (see the supplementary materials).

The heatwave reconstruction in Fig. 2A, explaining 74% of the variance in the instrumental heatwave record for the period 1967–2002, shows a weak long-term change before the 20th century. Subsequently, it displays a gradual increase until the 1950s, followed by a phase of pronounced increase since the 1970s. The elevated heatwave frequency in recent decades appears to exceed that of natural variability in the context of the past 260 years. This result echoes previous summer temperature reconstructions in the same region (28).

 Download high-res image

 Open in new tab

 Download Powerpoint

Fig. 2 Tree-ring width–based reconstructions.

(A and B) Tree-ring width–based reconstructions of July-August mean extremely hot day frequency (A) and soil moisture anomaly (B) in 1750–2002 in inner East Asia (solid black curves) and their uncertainty (gray bars, defined as 2σ of reconstruction ensembles). The red and blue curves in (A) are the extremely hot day frequency variability derived from ERA interim and station datasets. The red, cyan, blue, and pink curves in (B) are the soil moisture anomaly derived from the JULES-Sheffield (1948–2010), JULES-JRA55 (1979–2017), and GLDAS-1 (ensemble mean, 1979–2017), and total water storage anomaly (relative to a value of –35kg/m2) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission over 2002–2016 (for details, see the supplementary materials; note that there are data missing in August of 2013 and July of 2014), respectively. Dashed horizontal lines represent the long-term mean and ±2σ over the period 1750–2002. The correlation coefficients (r) are calculated between the reconstruction and the reanalysis data in (A) and between the reconstruction and JULES-Sheffield soil moisture in (B). r1diff is the correlation coefficient of the first difference of time series.

The soil moisture reconstruction in Fig. 2B, which explains 76% of the variance in observed soil moisture over the period 1948–2002, shows a negligible trend until the end of the 20th century, after which its accelerated decline becomes evident. It should be noted that the reconstructed and simulated soil moisture records reveal periods of reductions in the 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s that are in good agreement with documented megadrought events in Mongolia (29–31) (also see fig. S2). However, the post–20th-century reduction of soil moisture reached a record low, plummeting below the –2 SD level. This is consistent with other soil moisture datasets and a satellite-based total water storage observation (Fig. 2B; also see the supplementary materials), suggesting an abrupt and unprecedented drying trend.

When the reconstructions of heatwave frequency and soil moisture are compared (Fig. 3A), a substantial shift toward a “drier-hotter” regime from the late 20th century onward is apparent. This latter regime is unusual because before the 1950s, the two variables shared a more or less coherent long-term change in which both were increasing. In summer, a dry soil condition can exert heat into the lower atmosphere through sensible heat flux while suppressing evaporative cooling, so positive feedback between droughts and near-surface warming can be triggered by the soil moisture deficit reaching certain thresholds. Over multidecadal time scales, heatwave frequency and soil moisture exhibit a weak anticorrelation (r = –0.05, P > 0.1) until the mid-20th century (thick lines in Fig. 3A). In the past 260 years, only the recent decades show a significant anticorrelation between heatwave frequency and soil moisture, alongside a radical decline in soil moisture (Fig. 3B). The observation of the compound warming and drying is unprecedented in inner East Asia, implying a regime change in the regional land-atmosphere coupling. The upshot of this result is that the regional near-surface air may have increased its sensitivity to soil moisture fluctuation. A series of recent heatwave events in Europe (32) and North America (18) have revealed this phenomenon, suggesting that the semiarid climate of this region has entered a new regime in which soil moisture no longer mitigates anomalously high air temperature.

Read more:

Abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia beyond the tipping point.

Science  27 Nov 2020:

Vol. 370, Issue 6520, pp. 1095-1099

Read from top. The idiots are winning...

From David Brooks

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on?

Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?

My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.

This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny. “We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”

Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.

In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html

Strangely, the major way to reset the values is to pay cash (a carbon added price — tax) that is to say BUY TRUST. People who don't believe (it's not a belief, but a scientific reality) in global warming will have to pay more for stuff may eventually be accepted. Explaining the science is not enough... Governments should make electric cars mandatory for all newly made vehicles NOW. All fossil fuel engines should be taxed out of existence while electric vehicles should be only fuelled by renewables. Soon the set up would come to be "accepted" if not fully understood. But the "Republican" disinformation isn't exclusive. It comes mostly from the US major industries: all the car manufacturers, the oil suppliers and the weapon industries.

Note: plane travel should be limited. Tourism has to be 100 per cent based on renewable transport and activities. Cruise ships have to become electric and covered with solar panels from end to end. We have 12 years to get there, yet the shit will hit the fan nonetheless, but at half-speed... Thereafter will be determined by what we do NOW...

Biden will fudge it. He has no will to properly do it... (I say this to challenge the bloke...)

Read from top.

Biden will fudge it. He has no will to properly do it... Retooling industries from petrochemical to new ideas and purposes is THE ONLY WAY... Thus:

Community leaders long at odds with the powerful petrochemical industry in Louisiana took note when their Congressional representative, Cedric Richmond, announced November 12 that he was taking a new job in the Biden White House. In his announcement, Richmond, a Democratic representative in Louisiana for most of the heavily industrialized region stretching from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, made no mention of his constituents’ ongoing battle for environmental justice.

Richmond has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in fossil fuel campaign contributions during his career. Despite this history, some fenceline communities in Louisiana are looking forward to the potential of what Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House with Richmond by his side could mean for their majority-Black neighborhoods which are impacted daily by air pollution from an expanding petrochemical industry.  

On his campaign website, Biden has called for environmental justice and “rooting out the systemic racism in our laws, policies, institutions, and hearts,” linking this cause to the pandemic, which continues to disproportionately impact people of color. 

“Any sound energy and environmental policy must … recognize that communities of color and low-income communities have faced disproportionate harm from climate change and environmental contaminants for decades,” reads Biden’s website. “It must also hold corporate polluters responsible for rampant pollution … [and] means officials setting policy must be accountable to the people and communities they serve, not to polluters and corporations.”

Richmond will become a senior adviser to the President as the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, giving up his seat in Louisiana’s Second Congressional District that he has held since 2011 — a district which includes seven of the nation’s 10 most polluted census tracts.

Robert Taylor and Sharon Lavigne are both Richmond’s constituents. They live in two of the problematic census tracts in an area known as “Cancer Alley” — an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s lined with dozens of petrochemical plants and oil refineries.

Lavigne is the founder of RISE St. James, and Taylor is the executive director of the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, two community groups that are fighting for clean air. These two groups, along with state and national environmental advocates, have been fighting for years to stop the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Black communities in Louisiana, and pushing for meaningful action against facilities that exceed safe levels of air pollutants.

“Electing a president who saw fit to mention environmental justice on a national stage during a debate is a step in the right direction,” Taylor said.

Though Biden’s transition team is saying the things they want to hear, Taylor’s and Lavigne’s enthusiasm is measured. Both are taking a “wait-and-see” approach and noting who is joining Biden’s team before considering the president-elect a true ally.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/11/24/cancer-alley-cedric-richmond-louisiana-biden-white-house

Read from top.

Angus Taylor should be sacked...

Energy Minister Angus Taylor has admitted the government was on track to reduce Australia’s emissions by just 1 per cent before COVID shutdowns and travel restrictions, with critics saying he deserves “no credit” for the latest greenhouse gas figures.

Mr Taylor has been jokingly branded the “Steven Bradbury” of politics, with environmental groups saying the encouraging emissions figures were due to luck.

“COVID is not a climate policy,” Greens leader Adam Bandt said.

The latest quarterly update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, released Monday, showed Australia’s emissions for the year to June are estimated to be 513.4 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, 3 per cent lower than the previous period.

The decrease is a result of drops in electricity, transport, fugitive emissions, industry, agriculture and waste.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/11/30/angus-taylor-emissions-virus/

Most of the reductions were due to the States, while the Federal monsters were encouraging more coal burning (er sorry, more coal and gas burning)... Should we count the bushfires, the CO2 Australian budget went through the roof.

Read from top.