“A corrupt and demoralized ALP, presiding over climate policy farce, couldn’t give a frack about global warming. The country clings to its fossil fuel export bonanza while killing off the renewable energy scams.” I agree but not the scams part. But frankly the rest of your stuff is… shall we just call it crap and leave it at that.

It is true that habitat loss/biodiversity/persistant toxics/asbestos/radiation/lead/etc (all the ‘little’ problems) have dropped even further down the to-do list, but we were never more than pretending to care about those problems anyway, just like we pretend (5% ?? pfft!) about anthropogenic global warming.

What those issues lack is AGWs easy faith. One can accept AGW and simply conclude that those at fault lie far away (eg. China), and then get on with BAU in the meanwhile. No messy lying in front of machinery, tedious meetings, or personal change required!

Your argument is precisely what I’ve said since the birth of the cult. We had to channel/placate the ferocity/energy of the millenarian cult- because it had for a few brief years the power of Savonarola. The idea was to tie every “carbon” policy to environmentalism- i.e.make every “carbon” policy consonant with environmental policy. So that even if the entire CO2 theory turns to dust, we’ve still gained. This strategy has been a total failure: the policies adopted have been irrelevant or inimical to the real environment. Whether it be the carbon tax or wind turbines or geothermal, the policy (and often implementation) has been counter-productive. Politically, the battle is almost lost.

As I say often- the carbon cult is its own worst enemy. It’s failed to make any constructive use of the power it once had, and its fascistic stupidity is delivering us into the hands of the hard Right, rednecks, feral corporations etc.

So the natural carbon sinks are being screwed a bit more every year…Even in 20 years I’ve seen a marked decline in species abundance in the areas I know- areas with no apparently “new development”. We’ve slowly gone backwards for the past decade. The next decade will be a lot worse, unless we can kill the cult in order to target the enemy, which is our old friend, corrupt, rapacious corporate capitalism.

Not “win-win” (to use a revoltingly trite phrase) but certainly acknowledging the one is intimately and intricately linked to the other. In a world of ever-increasing population and resource extraction, ya gotta take what ya can git.

Mild conditions and continued de-industrialisation also have something to do with it, right Hugh?

At the same time we have a peak debt problem. About the only thing not in short supply at the moment is money which they keep printing and feeding to the bankers, the military and so forth but not to you or I.

We have the US and allies running wild looking to satisfy the needs of the military/industrial complex and we have the mainstream press ignoring or trivializing these problems and creating a culture of selfishness, ignorance and apathy.

To be fair on Crikey, at least they do cover most of the issues in a more enlightened way but what we are all neglecting to discuss is why the problems continue and are, in fact, escalating. There is no simple answer to that but perhaps a start would be to recognize that our capitalist system is broken and our major parties as well as those in the the rest of developed world refuse to let go of it.

We must realize that the relentless pursuit of growth, trickle down economics and the “free market” controlled by corporate monopolies or oligopolies will have a sad ending. I began to recognize the problem around about the time of the failed Copenhagen climate summit and events since then have reinforced my belief.

And at least we agree on one thing Fractious- the media focus on climate to the exclusion of everything else environmental…

Lovelock has apologised (his name never mentioned since his recantation- airbrushed from history by the Cult), and Lomberg is the new guru of choice for recovering climate fanatics…

Whether you accept the facts of climate change or not, we will still be screwed if we keep up the rate we’re ra ping the environment.

How things have changed in three years…Crikey, once a cauldron of climate hysteria, is now largely silent on the greatest moral challenge. Just the occasional outsourced professional propaganda piece like this one today.

The hubris of the urban progressive is now archived, a memory stick of embarrassment. The Liberals didn’t split into impotence. There was no apotheosis of the Greens. The metrosexual banker swears allegiance to the simian priest. A corrupt and demoralised ALP, presiding over climate policy farce, couldn’t give a frack about global warming. The country clings to its fossil fuel export bonanza while killing off the renewable energy scams.

Meanwhile, out in the Environment, rednecks flourish like noxious weeds. Operation Roll-back has begun. The fragile environmental gains of the past 30 years are being dismantled. Logging will restart in State Forest here a decade after it was killed off.

No surprise that low postcode Crikey failed to replace the mass of climate hysteria verbiage with anything about the real environment…

While there uncertainties over what rates of change (as opposed to thresholds) are sustainable, the weight of evidence for mine is that coral reefs will prove more resilient than Hoegh-Guldberg believes.

In any case, I hasten to add that this experiment (sustained global CO2 concentration > 450 ppm) is not an experiment we should be running, for a whole bunch of other reasons, even if it proves me right.