One Day Soon, When The Earth Is Barely Habitable, Will People Hunt Down Today's Politicians And Hang Them? Will There Be Trials First?

It’s 3,350 miles from Canberra, capital of Australia, to Jakarta, capital-- for now-- of Indonesia, a little less than 7 hours by air.

Air quality index (AQI) readings above 200 are considered dangerous to human health. A reading over 300 means no one should go outdoors. This week in Canberra readings were over 3,000-- sometimes double that. And some of the Canberra suburbs like Monash and Florey were even worse. There are cities around the world you’ve probably never heard of where breathing the air is deadly-- Linfen, Pingdingshan, Luohe, Zhengzhou, Dongying, Jining, Xinxiang, Anyang, Jinan and dozens more in China, Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmadi in Kuwait, Barisal, Gazipur and Narayangong in Bangladesh, Nagpur, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Patna, Faridabad, Kanpur and dozens more in India. And speaking of India, the capital city, Delhi is basically unlivable-- as is a hip and happening suburb, Gurugram-- and three the the country’s greatest tourist attractions, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi (formerly Benares) are to dangerous to visit without a heavy duty mask. Three of Pakistan’s biggest cities are also basically uninhabitable-- Karachi, Rawalpindi, Peshawar-- as are the capitals of Mongolia (Ulaan Baatar) and Uganda (Kampala).

I was supposed to visit Hanoi over the Christmas holiday but I cancelled the trip at the last minute when the AQI readings were hovering around 700. I first visited Katmandu, capital of Nepal, in 1971 and loved it. I’ve been back several times but the last time I was there, will, unfortunately be the last time. A heavy duty breathing mask wasn’t enough.

You’ve read about the fires in Australia, right? As Adam Morton, the environmental editor of The Guardian reported last week, Yes, Australia has always had bushfires: but 2019 is like nothing we've seen before. “Record low rainfall,” he wrote, “has contributed to a continent-scale emergency that has burned through more than 5 million hectares… an area larger than many countries… and alarmed scientists, doctors and firefighters.” Over a thousand homes have been burned and at least 9 people have died-- as have hundreds of millions of animals.

The right-wing government-- which denies a Climate Crisis-- is trying to play the whole thing down as just run of the mill stuff. The firefighting agency for New South Wales begs to differ. And David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says “the most striking thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat. ‘The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented. There has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania.’“

He says one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.”

“You can’t properly run an economy when you get a third to a half of the population affected by smoke, and the media completely focused on fires,” he says. “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sort of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”

Ross Bradstock, from the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, points to the Gospers Mountain fire, which started in a lightning strike north-west of Sydney in late October and has now burned about 500,000 hectares, as evidence of how this season differs from what has come before.

The fire has now combined with others on the NSW Central Coast to create a mega-blaze, but Bradstock says it was almost certainly the largest single ignition-point forest fire recorded in Australia and, for mid-latitude forests, possibly the world. He says it is bigger than any in California and Mediterranean Europe. A large fire in those conditions is usually about 100,000 hectares.

“We can find no evidence of forest fires of that size anywhere,” he says. “You just don’t see fires of this size in these parts of the world because you do not usually get the extreme dryness and unrelenting nature of the weather.”

Two months in, Bradstock says the Gospers Mountain is a monster, “just unimaginably big” and near impossible to contain unless there is substantial rain.

…This season has also seen the loss of rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps and banana plantations that do not usually burn because they are too wet.

Damage to the Gondwana rainforests in 40 reserves between Brisbane and Newcastle prompted the Unesco world heritage centre to last month express their concern to Australian authorities. The reserves include the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on the planet, some warm temperate rainforest and nearly all the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. They are considered a living link to the vegetation that covered the southern supercontinent Gondwana before it broke up about 180 million years ago.

There are also fears critically endangered Wollemi pines have burned in the fires tearing through the Blue Mountains. They were thought extinct until discovered by bushwalkers in 1994. Their whereabouts had been kept secret from the public to keep them safe.

Authorities say the smoke that has smothered Sydney, Canberra and other centres and towns in recent weeks has produced pollution up to 11 times greater than the hazardous level for human health. In Sydney, the air pollution has been hazardous for at least 30 days.

NSW’s director of environmental health, Richard Broome, last week told reporters the state was enduring “an unprecedented emergency from a smoke point of view”. “We haven’t seen conditions like this in Sydney, certainly in anyone’s memory that I’ve spoken to,” he said.

Broome said there is early evidence that the number of people turning up at hospital emergency departments needing help is higher than usual. Dr Kate Charlesworth, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, said there was no safe level of air pollution, and that the most vulnerable in the community-- babies, children, the elderly and people with pre-existing disease-- were the most likely to be affected.

What role does climate change play?

The explanation should be familiar by now: greenhouse gas emissions do not cause bushfires, but they play a demonstrated role in increasing average and particularly extreme temperatures and contribute to the extraordinarily dry conditions afflicting eastern Australia.

Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.

Multiple studies, here and overseas, have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.

In the past, the season started in spring in NSW before moving south to Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the new year. Just as Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country.

Among other issues, that is putting greater strain on volunteer firefighting brigades. It is an issue that firefighters and some experts say the country needs to acknowledge and address. The Morrison government appeared to make an initial, qualified step in this direction on Christmas Eve.

So what does this have to do with Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, Australia’s closest neighbor to the north? Their climate crisis is very different from Canberra’s-- but no less horrifying. Yesterday, Eric Leister, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, reported that heavy rains have caused the worst flooding in years and has turned deadly and left much of the city underwater. So far there are 26 reported deaths, 62,000 have been evacuated from their homes and several parts of the city are without power. Rail and road services all around the city has been disrupted and the airport was forced to shut down.





Reuters: “Dwikorita Karnawati, head of the Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), told reporters separately that heavy rainfall may continue until mid February.”

Over 30 million people live in the Jakarta area-- which is often as polluted as Delhi (and getting worse)-- and the government has recognized that the city isn’t going to survive the Climate Crisis and is planning to move the government to Borneo, northwest of Java, the overcrowded island that includes Jakarta, which is also sinking. When will it be open season on politicians who accept bribes from corporations who benefit from denying the Climate Crisis? When?

Australia Solved The Gun Problem. We Can Too

-by Reese Erlich

Progressives aren’t supposed to say this. But none of the major gun control proposals now being debated in Washington would actually stop mass shootings. I know that sounds heretical, or even worse, like an echo of the National Rifle Association line. But it’s true.

An AR-15 assault rifle

Let’s take a look:

Ban sales of AR-15 and other assault rifles. Assault rifles are deadly. But other semi-automatic weapons, which would not be banned, are just as dangerous. And even if all semi-automatic rifles were banned, Americans still have access to plenty of deadly ordinance. In 1966 a shooter at the University of Texas used a bolt action and pump action rifles to murder 14 and wound 31.

Better background checks will stop the shooters. Such checks might stop a random shooter or two, but almost all the recent mass killers would have passed background checks. Proposed stricter background checks would not stop gun sales to the severely mentally ill.

Require gun purchasers to be 21. Ask any teens who have had an adult buy them bottles of alcohol how well that works. In a number of recent shootings, young teens stole guns from their parents’ gun cabinets.

There’s a fundamental flaw in gun reform laws currently under consideration. America is flooded with firearms. Potential mass murderers have access to tens of millions of legal and illegal guns. The spousal abuser or the psychopath can find a very deadly weapon with relative ease. So even the most positive, partial reforms won’t solve the problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I support significant reform measures-- but for political reasons-- not because they will have much immediate impact. The NRA’s stranglehold on US politics must be broken. Oregon took a good step recently by prohibiting domestic abusers and those subject to restraining orders from owning guns. Banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines would definitely weaken the gun lobby’s power.

And I think it’s time Americans seriously consider gun reform that would actually stop mass killings. Australians did it and so can we.

The US and Australia share some common history. The British sent settlers to occupy colonial land, although the Australians had to get out of prison first. Both countries encouraged gun ownership by white settlers, Rebecca Peters, a representative of Australia’s International Action Network on Small Arms, told me. “Early settlers depended on killing animals and the indigenous people who lived there before.”

And in modern times both countries had strong gun lobbies paid for by firearm manufacturers. The Australian gun lobby had blocked effective gun control at both the federal and state levels.

For Australians, everything changed on April 28, 1996. That day a young curly haired, blond man brought an AR-15 and another semi–automatic rifle to the popular tourist town of Pt. Arthur in southeastern Tasmania. He fired randomly, killing 35 people and wounding 18. The massacre of men, women and children shocked Australians much like the Parkland, Florida impacted Americans.

But the Aussies did something about it.

Just 12 days after the shooting, conservative Prime Minister John Howard brought together legislators to pass comprehensive, national gun control laws. But what appeared to be a legislative miracle was actually the culmination of years of grass-roots efforts.

Local activists and public health professionals had been educating the public since the late 1980s, said Peters. They found a sympathetic audience among trade unionists and some Labor Party politicians. “We built a solid grassroots movement,” she said. “We didn’t just leap into tragedy mode after a shooting.”

Activists called for universal gun registration, and it was just as controversial in Australia as in the US. The gun lobby argued that the government would confiscate everyone’s guns.

Simon Chapman, emeritus professor in public health at the University of Sydney, remembers the most effective argument gun reform campaigners made on that topic.

“We register cars,” he would say. “We register boats. We even register dogs. So what’s the problem in registering guns?”

So in the spring of 1996, the federal parliament passed a comprehensive measures that included:

All semi-automatic rifles and pump action shotguns were banned, as were high capacity magazines.

The government purchased existing firearms that had been banned, paying retail plus 10 percent.

All firearms were registered and new buyers were required to prove a “genuine reason” for gun ownership such as hunting or target practice at a shooter’s club.

New gun owners must wait 28 days to take delivery, be subject to a comprehensive background check, and take a gun safety course.

The results were striking. There have been no mass shootings. Gun murders and suicides have dropped precipitously. There are 200 fewer deaths every year as a result of gun control, according to Peters.

And, oh yes, hunters continue to hunt, and target shooters continue to plink. No armies of jack booted police have stormed private residences to seize weapons.

Australia’s stringent gun control laws aren’t likely to be adopted in the U.S. anytime soon. But we can learn something from their political organizing.

Today, the NRA stops even the smallest gun reforms from passing the U.S Congress. But other, seemingly undefeatable lobbies nave been weakened. Look at Big Tobacco and the right-wing Cuba Lobby. The NRA could be next.

Today the NRA faces a formidable enemy. The Parkland high school students have sparked grass-roots efforts among other students and their parents. They’ve sat in at the Florida state house and in the U.S. Senate.

Peters said grass roots organizing defeated the gun lobby in Australia and it can be done in the US as well. “The NRA uses power of intimidation,” she said. “And they often win the public relations war. But they can be defeated.”

Unlike South Dakota, Australia Will Help China Seize Stolen Ex-Pat Funds

In the light of the Mike Rounds EB-5 visa-selling scandal that could throw the South Dakota senate race to outspoken progressive populist Rick Weiland, maybe it's time to go back to the June guest post Qiao Li did for us, China's Naked Officials. Short version: Chinese bureaucrats and government officials are illegally moving vast sums of wealth offshore for their own and their families' use. The Washington-based Global Financial Integrity group, which analyses illicit financial flows, estimates that $2.83 trillion flowed illegally out of China from 2005 to 2011.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that China's Communist Party "will likely never open all the files on its recent painful past." And, presumably, they don't foresee a future without the Communist Party being in control. "Only a 'small number' of the party's historical files were still sealed, [Xie Chuntao, Director of the Party History Teaching and Research Department of the Party School] said. 'Some involve the state's core interests, and some are not convenient to be released,' Xie added. 'From a historical research it is to be hoped that it would be best if they are all opened. But I fear this cannot happen, and may never happen'."

So much for the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the death of Lin Biao in a plane crash as mysterious as the one Karl Rove used to murder Paul Wellstone. But what about Chinese deprecations that are happening today-- like the hacking of Apple's iCloud and, going back to the naked officials, the deal China made with Australia to seize their outsourced assets-- a very different kind of deal than the one South Dakota ex-Governor Mike Rounds made to get a cut of the stolen assets for himself.

Australian police have agreed to assist China in the extradition and seizure of assets of corrupt Chinese officials who have fled with hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit funds, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported on Monday.

The joint operation would make its first seizure of assets in Australia within weeks, the newspaper quoted Bruce Hill, manager of Australian Federal Police (AFP) operations in Asia, as saying in an interview.

AFP officials in Canberra had no immediate comment.

China announced in July an operation called Fox Hunt to go after corrupt officials who have fled overseas with their ill-gotten gains, part of President Xi Jinping's broader crackdown on graft.

Getting such cooperation from Australia would be a coup for Beijing, which has struggled to get its hands on suspects in Western countries, whose governments have been reluctant to hand over wanted Chinese because of concerns over whether they would get fair trials back home.

The United States, Canada and Australia are the three most popular destinations for suspected Chinese economic criminals, Chinese state media has said.

Australia and China had agreed on a priority list of alleged economic fugitives who have taken residence in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

Among the suspects identified by the AFP were naturalized Australian citizens and permanent residents who for years had laundered money under the guise of being genuine investment or business migrants from China, it added. [This, of course, is exactly what Mike Rounds and his cronies in South Dakota have been doing.]

The priority list agreed between China's Ministry of Public Security and the AFP was culled from a broader list of "less than a 100 people," Hill told the paper, adding that the assets being pursued by China in Australia were in the "many hundreds of millions of dollars."

Australia and China don't have an extradition agreement, but the Australian attorney general can consider extradition requests for offences under the U.N. Convention against Corruption, which Canberra and Beijing are both parties to.

Interestingly, last week Australia started boosting a visa scheme like the one that got Mike Rounds into so much trouble that aims to lure "investment" from wealthy Chinese, including jumping the wealthy crooks to the front of the visa line, just the way Rounds did in South Dakota.

New Polling Shows Overwhelming Support For Cap-And-Trade Legislation-- Voters Ready To Decimate Conservative Opponents

Karl Rove may have been trying to rev up the old GOP smear'n'fear machine on the fascist-oriented Editorial Page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, but a new poll came out showing that what voters are really angry about-- at least those not brainwashed by GOP propagandists Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh-- is the concerted efforts of reactionary politicians to sabotage environmental legislation."[C]onservative opposition will be set for an election drubbing if it blocks a planned emissions trading scheme, according to a poll published Saturday." Predictions are that at least 20 non-rural conservative seats would change hands if they block the bill in the Senate.

The poll showed that 63 percent of opposition supporters in the cities thought the legislation should be passed, while only 28 percent thought it should not.

If one in 10 of those voters switched sides, it would cost the opposition 20 seats it holds with margins of less than 6.5 percent.

The survey also showed that younger opposition voters aged 18 to 34 favor the government's legislation by a margin of almost five to one.

Of course, we're not talking about the U.S. That's from a report about Australia. Idiot America (the book, not necessarily your brother-in-law), on the other hand, is currently consumed with making mountains out of molehills and may realize that our posterity will be so broke and so utterly owned by the wealthy elite that we might as well destroy the earth and save them the misery.

The alternative is another bruising battle with astroturfed zombies (knows as teabaggers in America) like the one over healthcare reform in which a significant minority of hate-spewing Americans decided to cut off their-- and our-- noses to spite... well to spite everything that makes their own lives not worth living. Why they don't commit mass suicide and let the rest of us get on with making the world a better place is unanswerable.

Tomorrow is not an option.

Those ought to be the words coming from the White House right now on global warming. Never again can we tolerate a year like 2009, when attempts to cap carbon pollution go nowhere. Already this month, President Barack Obama has confirmed two painful truths. First: Congress will not complete work on a global warming bill in 2009. And second, the corollary blow: There will be no international climate deal in Denmark next month, dashing years of international hopes.

So Mr. Obama should move quickly from explaining failure to achieving real success. He should travel to the Copenhagen climate conference in December and guarantee drastic action from the U.S. in 2010, even if it means blowing everything up in Congress and starting over. If a "cap and trade" bill won't fly in the Senate in 2010, then let the Environmental Protection Agency explore maximum-strength carbon regulations while, legislatively, we switch back to Mr. Obama's original presidential campaign plan: "cap and rebate."

Quote of the day: Chimpy the Prez turns out to be the worldwide cham-peen at regime change-- toppling regimes that get too close to him

"President Bush has probably dithered too long to have
any hope of solving the world's most complicated and
persistent rebus ["the Israeli-Palestinian morass"].
His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war."

"Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. . . .
"And regime change, it turns out, is infectious--a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration's Mesopotamian misadventure."
--Hendrik Hertzberg, in a "Comment" piece, "Follow the Leaders," in the Dec. 10 New Yorker

It started with Spain, Hertzberg recalls, then proceeded to Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia, and onward to Britain's Tony Blair, and most recently it has sent Australia's John Howard packing.

It's a favorite theme of Howie's when he's traveling: What do people around the world think of the U.S.? And in the Age of Bush, can this be separated from what they think about our government? Hertzberg has some thoughts:

They don't much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia's Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes's "America Against the World" (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners "found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable." An avalanche of new international polls--from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others--show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. "Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us," Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about "world opinion," wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Count that--along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment--as another cost of the war."

"Those costs keep mounting," Hertzberg concludes, "and they're not likely to abate until there's regime change a little closer to home."

#

TWO BUSH ALLIES DEFEATED-- NEW LEADERS IN AUSTRALIA AND POLAND VOW END TO PARTICIPATION IN HIS IRAQ BOONDOGGLE

Poland has been ruled by two extreme right, viciously homophobic twins President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Last month their right-wing party took a drubbing in parliamentary elections and the new Prime Minister, confirmed yesterday, is Donald Tusk, a moderate. Yesterday Tusk reaffirmed his pledge to pull Poland's remaining 900 troops out of Iraq and to back away from the Kaczynski's bellicose pro-American posture towards Russia.

"In a year's time, I will tell you here in this chamber that our military mission in Iraq is over," Tusk said, as the house erupted in applause.

"We have taken the decision, as far as the government powers go, to make 2008 the year when the pullout of Poland's military mission is started and completed," Tusk said. "We will carry out that operation with the conviction that we have done more than what our allies, especially the U.S., had expected from us."

On top of that Bush's closest ally, Australian neanderthal John Howard "suffered a humiliating defeat" today. Kevin Rudd, a moderate left candidate will be the new prime minister and he has promised to overturn the ultra-reactionary Bush-like policies of his predecessor, particularly in regard to Global Warming and Iraq. Bush's only ally left in the entire world on Global Warming is now Oklahoma crazy right-wing senator, James Inhofe. Rudd won a clear parliamentary majority and it looks like Howard may actually lose his own suburban Sydney seat to boot! It is likely that Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett will join the new cabinet as Environmental Minister.

Rudd campaigned on promises that "his first acts as prime minister will include pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto climate agreement and to negotiate the withdrawal of Australian combat troops from Iraq," both seen as repudiations of George Bush's embarrassing leadership.

Remember this?




UPDATE: GLENN GREENWALD LISTS THE REASONS TO CELEBRATE THE OVERDUE POLITICAL DEMISE OF JOHN HOWARD

I had forgotten about Howard's slurs against Democrats, although I had remembered that he had lost his marbles long ago. I love this from the video Glenn found (re: Howard's tough re-election bid)

Vice President Cheney is heading to Australia later this month to try and help. The White House can hardly afford to have another friend of the president go the way of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Well, one did-- and worse. I know there are scores of Democratic candidates around the country who are hoping Vice President Cheney heads to their constituencies to campaign for their opponents just the way he did for John Howard.