Tag: climate change

Australian elections are never what we expect

personby Gillian Polack
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Three years ago on April 10, I wrote:

Australia’s much-awaited (by us, anyhow) election was called yesterday. This is not just any election. It’s our last opportunity to move away from rabid and corrupt politics.

Our next election is on Saturday and we live in a different country. Three years ago, we were ruled by a queen, and now we’re ruled by a king. For some reason, we are far more prone to jokes under Charles than we were under Elizabeth. Technically, most of the parties are still similar, but this is another pivotal election, and not because of Charles. This was our position three years ago https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/2022/04/10/why-the-aussie-elections-are-so-important-this-year-an-introduction-for-the-unwary

We still have Mr Dutton, currently Leader of the Opposition, who has an apparent and possibly heartfelt desire to be Trump-lite. He replaced Scott Morrison when we decided we didn’t want more Trump-lite three years ago, which makes it a mystery to me why he’s choosing this path right now. Maybe he knows something about Australia that I do not know? I suspect his party would have won the election if he had not made that decision. Why do I think this? Dutton was doing very nicely in the polls until his aim to copy Trump was clear.

Independent of his policies, are his nicknames. I suspect he’s in the running for the most nicknames in history of any senior Australian politician. The one that trumps all (sorry, I could not resist the pun) is “Mr Potato Head.” Australians seldom give nice nicknames. Our current prime minister is nicknamed “Albo” which looks innocuous until you allow for the Australian accent. Our accent means that we call our PM “Elbow.” Intentionally.

Back to the parties. Now, there are other parties (minor ones) who also desire to copy Trump. One has even renamed themselves “Trumpet of Patriots.” No-one speaks kindly of them, but speaking kindly of people is not common in this election. The longest debate I’ve heard about them was which nickname is the best. The one that sticks in my mind (not the most common, just the silliest) is “Strumpet.” In and of itself, this will not affect their votes. Their policies, however, are not compatible with the left, or anyone who votes sort of centralish. Most of us vote sort of centralish, which, in comparison to the US, is slightly left wing. Sometimes quite left wing. This means that the Strumpets are the closest Australia comes to a Trump-like party. They’re not that, though. They’re right wing modified by some current causes. Current causes are a big thing right now.

Back to logic and commonsense. Three years ago I explained that the LNP (which we call the “Coalition,” mostly) were in power and that they were right wing. They are still right wing. They’ve lost a lot of their reputation and are in the middle of a generational change. The vote three years ago caused that, in a way, as did their wipeout in the biggest state in the country. Many of the new candidates for this elections (especially in electorates like my own where not a single LNP person won a seat in either house) are shiny new people about whom we know… not much. (If I were writing this for Aussies, I would use ‘bugger all’ instead of ‘…not much’, but I am aware of US sensibilities about what is everyday English in Australia. Not so aware that I refuse to tease you about it, but aware.)

Labor is now in power, and have the Elbow as leader. Albo is not much loved right now (and neither is Penny Wong, who, three years ago, we all adored), but I suspect Labor still represents more than 50% of Australians. It is a party strongly linked to unions and ought to be quite far left (and once was further left) but now it’s the centrist party. Since I’m in the mood to point things out, the party has US spelling and not Aussie spelling because it was named by a teetotaller US founder. Australia being Australia, we named a pub after him, just as we named a swimming pool after a prime minister who drowned. (I wrote about some of this three years ago. Good historical jokes are worth repeating.) I firmly believe that Australia is everyone’s ratbag cousin who is very charming but gets up to much mischief.

Three years ago I talked about the Greens. This year, I want them at the bottom of everyone’s vote. This won’t happen. They have set up a whole branch of the left (including many people who used to be my friends) and those people exclude Jews and hate Jews and blame Jews and do not listen to Jews and… you can imagine the rest. Me, I live it. They’ve put forward candidates that put the bad stuff happening in the Middle East ahead of what’s happening in Australia. If they get as much power as the latest polls suggest (14% of the vote) then quite a few Australian Jews will either have to hide (many are doing this already) or leave (and some have already left).

The party has always been left wing, but now they’re closer to Communist than to the environmental activists they once were. I am often scolded for saying these things. I answer the scolds with the labels placed in Jewish Australians by their supporters.

Some of the new Left don’t even believe there are Jewish Australians. I had that discussion with someone just yesterday. They now believe I exist, but it took two hours to convince them. We’ve been here since the first long term European settlement in 1788 (one of the First Fleet babies was the first Jewish free settler), so many of us are descendants of colonists. Most of us are descendants of refugees. And every day someone scolds me for personally having colonised Israel and murdered Palestinian children.

The hate is carefully targeted. Most of the rest of Australia has no idea. It’s a bit like domestic violence. “That very good person can’t have caused that black eye. You must’ve walked into a door.” This is being Jewish in Australia right now. It’s why the bottom of both my ballots is already populated by the Green candidates.

There is a new environmental party (Sustainable Australia) which won’t be down the bottom of my ballot. They’re not going to gain power, but if they can increase their influence a bit maybe we can talk about what needs to be done to deal with climate change rather than about the problem of antisemitism. The antisemitism isn’t just the Greens, you see. ASIO (our CIA equivalent) gave its annual assessment publicly this year. They said that antisemitism is Australia’s #1 security threat. Media ignored it. The Greens ignored it. All the other major parties factored it into their policies, but are talking about housing and jobs and the like because we have a housing crisis. I am still dealing with the notion that the new Australia can’t keep more than two ideas in its head at once.

Everyone else belongs to small parties or independents. Lots of those already in Parliament or the Senate are being challenged. Some will get second terms, others will not.

David Pocock is one of the bellwethers. He was voted to replace Zed, who was right wing (LNP) and wildly unpopular as a person. Pocock won partly because he used to be a very famous sportsperson and partly because so many preference votes flowed to him. He was the third in primary votes, and won on preferences. (This is a very Australian thing, and I can explain the voting system again to anyone who has forgotten or would like to be able to follow our vote on Saturday night.) The thing is… he voted leftish for most of his time in the Senate. Frequently, he voted alongside the Greens. He replaced a right wing party in that Senate place. What will that do to his preferences next Saturday?

How many independents and small parties will get through in a strange election where the main left wing party expresses bigotry? It depends on how far we veer left as a country. It depends on how loyal we are to individuals in both Houses. It depends on how personal everything is, in a year when I’m hearing so many people talk about their vote as personal.

I see two big options. One is that a lot of these independents lose their seats. This would return control (in the Senate in particular) to the party with the most seats in the Senate. The other option is that Australians vote a lot of these people into Parliament and the Senate and make everything very, very complex. I’m hoping that this is unlikely, given that many of the independents or small party representatives care only about one issue or are cults of personality, or are “We are not Greens – we just vote with them” people.

We don’t know how many independents or representatives of small parties will get through. The nature of advance polls is to focus on the major parties, so we really do not know how much support these legions of political individuals have in any given region.

Part of this rests on the nature of preferential voting. In the electorate of Blaxland, for instance, which has possibly the highest number of Muslim voters in the country, will the Labor candidate be returned to power, or will Omar Sakr (the Greens candidate) be voted in, or will an independent specifically representing Muslims (the one suggested by the Muslim Vote) get in? The Muslim Vote focuses on Muslim voters and assumes that their main political desire is not about housing or education, but about creating a Palestinian state. I chatted with a friend today, who is also Muslim, but from Indonesia, and she had no idea that this group even existed. The public talk about Muslim votes assume that most Muslims who vote are either Palestinian or support Gazans. And yet… we have many Muslim Australians from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Malaysia and various African countries. I do not know if there is a voting pattern for all these people from all these backgrounds. Some are fully integrated into Australian society, some maintain boundaries and stay largely within their own communities.

My guide to the elections three years ago was a lot simpler. Right now, it feels as if life was a lot simpler three years ago.

PS Just in case you want to know what advice Jewish voters have been given, it’s “Make up your own minds, you’re adults.” We have, however, been given a guide to making up our own minds. 2025 federal election – ECAJ

It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.

But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.

If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).

But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:

Tech Enshittification:

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.

Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.

I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.

The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.

“AI”:

AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.

The Network State:

This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.

I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.

This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning. Continue reading “It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government”…

Thinking About Heat Waves

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I grew up without air conditioning in a small town outside of Houston. We finally got a couple of window units when I was 13, after my great-uncle died and left us a little money.

That made it easier to sleep in the summer, but I still spent a lot of my time in the room we called the den, which wasn’t air-conditioned, sitting in a large easy chair with a fan blowing directly on me. It was my favorite place to read and I read a lot.

Of course, we also had an attic fan, which circulated the air through a lot of the house. I’ll also point out that you don’t move much when you read and that we had plenty of water. A quick shower, a cold drink, and staying out of the sun will keep you going for a long time on a really hot day.

I could say this was all before climate change, but, of course, the climate change we’re experiencing now goes back to the industrial revolution. But while summers in the area where Houston is now have been hot and humid for millennia – long before European colonization – we are now reaching a point where they’ll get just enough worse to make life much harder for everyone.

In our modern world, air conditioning is a necessity. Houston may have become a large city before air conditioning was universal – ports and oil will do that – but it didn’t become the headquarters of so many major corporations until that happened.

Still, it’s useful to point out that in places that have always had hot, humid summers, people figured out how to survive and thrive before air conditioning. Some of that came from building with the weather in mind, some from knowing it was going to happen and being prepared.

Those who live in places that get serious winter will tell you the same thing about winter.

There is a point where those things don’t do enough. We’re going to get heat waves that kill people who do everything right.

Continue reading “Thinking About Heat Waves”…

Thinking About the Apocalypse

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I came up with the perfect first question for the “Essential Skills for the Coming Apocalypse” panel at WisCon 24 hours after the panel ended. I should have started with:

What does apocalypse mean?

It wasn’t that I hadn’t prepped for the panel. But it took doing the panel and then thinking about why it didn’t satisfy me to figure out that we needed to start by defining our terms.

So what does apocalypse mean?

The original Greek word means revelation. Biblical scholars tell us that apocalypse pieces were common in Jewish writings even before we get to the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation. It was, essentially, a genre. And it was very metaphorical, as Revelation demonstrates.

Some of it, I think, was revolutionary in scope, though expressed in religious terms.

This obviously was not the focus of the panel. We were talking about the modern meaning, which is more along the lines of horrific catastrophe.

When I was young, the term meant the aftermath of nuclear war. That’s where all the bunkers and ideas about back to the Stone Age come from.

But while that is still possible today (too many extremist governments have nukes and of course the US already used some of ours), I suspect most of us are thinking about the multiple disasters coming from climate change aggravated by fascism and income inequality.

Also pandemics.

While those will cause great suffering, we aren’t all headed to the stone age or even hunter gatherer or subsistence farming lifestyles as a result.

I don’t even think we’re going back to a world where most people are farmers. Right now most of the people on the world live in cities.

Zombies may be entertaining but they are just another metaphor after all. And as for the chatbots becoming evil sentient AI, well, that makes for entertaining movies, but that’s not even close to the actual threat posed by large language models. They’re a problem but they’re  not the apocalypse. Continue reading “Thinking About the Apocalypse”…

March 769, 2020

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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That’s the date in my personal pandemic time. I start with March 17, 2020, when the Bay Area shut down. That was the first shut down in the United States.

Back then, I figured it would all blow over soon. I recall saying “I’ll go nuts if this is still going on in May.”

Maybe I did go nuts. I’m certainly not at my best. I saw an article in the paper about older people — mostly people about my age, not the very elderly — feeling like some of their life has been stolen from them.

I feel like that.

The other day I said to my sweetheart, “Do you think things will ever get better?”

And he said, “Look around you.”

It’s not just the pandemic. Russia invaded Ukraine and the news from there is horrific — not just war, but obscene war crimes. The only good thing I can get out of all that is that for once the U.S. government is doing the right thing. It’s a difficult problem, bringing back the fears of nuclear war that all us boomers grew up on, but near as I can tell the powers that be are actually balancing doing the right thing with making sure they don’t trigger something worse.

California is in a serious drought. We’re going to have more fires, because this land was meant to burn regularly, but the way things are set up we’re going to have out-of-control fires in areas where people live.

The politics in the United States have crossed over into absolutely insane. We don’t ever get a reasoned debate on how to solve problems because the right wing extremists keep making up absurd claims that are irrelevant to everything we need to do. Much of that is rooted in racism and misogyny and is being used to disguise all the ways they want to make the rich richer.

Meanwhile, more and more people are living on the streets. And despite the fact that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels even if you don’t take into consideration all the benefits given to oil companies, we’re still refusing to take action to shut down coal mines and fracking for gas and oil.

So the pandemic continues, now combined with with a pretense that it’s over. Authoritarianism runs wild. No one’s doing anything like enough to address climate change. And even in progressive places like Oakland it seems to be impossible to actually fix the problems in our everyday lives.

I have a bad feeling that the rest of my life will continue to be pockmarked with all these things. And it makes me very angry. Continue reading “March 769, 2020”…

The Lessons Wombats Teach Me

personby Gillian Polack
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This week is far too full of crises. Every time there’s a crisis, people raise money to help everyone deal. When the Australian bushfires dominated my life (aeons ago: 2109-2020 – the fires were out just after the pandemic hit Australia) books were a good fundraiser. I often contribute to such books, because they give more than I can give, personally. The anthology I was in that helped save wildlife during that particular crisis was called Oz is Burning. It contains some remarkable stories, and I’m very pleased I could contribute and be in such company.

There was one fundraising book that stood head and shoulders above all the others. Jackie French lives in rural Australia and she’s currently dealing with floods. Her part of rural Australia was very badly hit by the fires, and she handled it in a very Jackie-ish fashion. During the crisis she reported to the rest of us what was happening in her local town. She was cut off for what felt like months (I don’t know what it felt like to her, but I was worried about her for over a year) and she compiled observations and reports and made sure the rest of the world knew what was going on.

She reported on wildlife as part of this. Also, as someone who knows wombats particularly well.

One of the wombats she helped had a particular story. She talked about this wombat on social media and we all wanted a happy outcome… but we weren’t sure that the wombat would survive.

Later in 2020, she turned the wombat’s experience into a book for children. The Fire Wombat became an instant classic (though not as classic as her earlier book, The Diary of a Wombat ) and raised money to help wombats. It talks children through the crisis and how those rare animals who survived were helped. It gave children a path to understanding the impossible and, at the same time, raised money to help wombats.

I have my copy in front of me now and have re-read it. The floods in Australia right now are hurting the same regions as the fires did just over two years ago. Jackie’s work reminds me that wombats need help, too.

When we’re both allowed to travel again, and when it’s safe (fire and pandemic and now floods) I’m going to feed her dinner and ask her to sign her book. Her work has helped me remember how to get through crises and how to look outside my small environment and see what I can do. I may not be able to do much, but if Jackie can write this amazing book when she’s confined to a very small piece of land for over two years then that opens the door for me. I just need to consider what I’m capable of. Step One is to not let the fear developed by over 30 months of sequential crises decide my actions.

PS Jackie writes about so much more than wombats. She’s one of Australia’s best writers. I wrote this piece because wombats bring me comfort.

The Future Is Starting Right Now

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Ministry for the FutureKim Stanley Robinson is an optimist.

If you only read chapter 1 of The Ministry for the Future, you might not believe that. But even though his novel opens with a horrific and all too realistic disaster caused by climate change — and later describes several others — he isn’t writing a dystopia.

Rather he’s writing a story in which human beings find ways to deal with climate change without pretending that the process won’t be messy.

I called him an optimist, not Pollyanna. (Do people still read Pollyanna?)

He knows how bad things are and how much worse they can get, but he also knows we are capable of making things better. In this book, the efforts to address climate change include everything from economics to politics to geoengineering to violent actions against those who refuse to take action to stop carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.

There’s also what happens with climate refugees, mental breakdowns among those who have suffered from disasters, and violence against those working for real change. It’s a long book.

I have no doubt that we’re going to see something similar to the disorder he chronicles here over the next 30 years or so. I hope he’s right that we’ll get some of the positive changes, too.

He has more faith in political change than I have, but Wikipedia reports that Francis Fukuyama, who was notoriously wrong about the end of history, has called the book “ludicrously unrealistic.”

If I have to choose between Stan Robinson and Francis Fukuyama, I’m going with Stan every time. Continue reading “The Future Is Starting Right Now”…

Apocalypse Now

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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If you’ve ever wondered what you would do in the apocalypse, look at what you’re doing now.

That’s your answer.

OK, before you either panic or tell me I’m overreacting, let me break some of that down.

First off, while I am using apocalypse in its current casual meaning of a collapse of civilization, I’m not including the various religious interpretations. This isn’t the fundamentalist End Times.

And in truth, I don’t mean the end of the (human) world, because I’ve never believed that was going to happen even at the height of the Cold War when the US and the Soviets were rattling so many missiles at each other.

We’re not going to all be living in caves or in isolated groups with no access to the many things we humans have developed over the years. We’ll even have a lot of the good things left.

But we are already in a period of change and chaos, some of it extreme and much of it causing a great deal of human suffering. It’s going to keep happening. Of course, like everything else in this world, it will not be equally distributed.

So despite the fact that some of that change is going to be catastrophic, you’re still going to have to pay your taxes, get the groceries, and take the cat to the vet, all while trying to dodge the crisis du jour, whether pandemic, disaster, or political.

From the way things look right now, we’re going to continue to have all three of those crises for the foreseeable future. Continue reading “Apocalypse Now”…

Angry These Days

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The latest IPCC report makes it clear that climate change is happening now and that we need major, concerted, international efforts to slow it down and deal with the ongoing crises it will cause.

After 18 months of a worldwide pandemic, it’s pretty obvious that major, concerted, international efforts will only happen in a fantasy world. And not in a fantasy novel, since I’m sure no editor would accept a novel that posited major, concerted, international efforts to do anything.

“Too implausible,” they would say. And they would be right.

I haven’t thought about the report very much. I knew what it would say when I heard it was coming out. Good news about important things is in short supply.

In truth, I’ve been depressed lately. Anxious, too, though not as anxious as I was last year. And angry. Very, very, very angry.

This might seem to call for therapy. But I’m depressed, anxious, and angry because of the pandemic, the atrocious US public health response, right-wing extremism, and climate change.

A therapist can’t fix any of that. All a therapist can do is help me put up with this nonsense.

And I don’t want to put up with it. Continue reading “Angry These Days”…