Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Home fires burning

All of the western countries fighting Germany and Japan in the Second World War realized that they needed to go on a war footing to meet the enormous challenge. Many of the governments had been very slow to recognize the threat, and few had prepared (and those who had merely got themselves ready to fight the First World War again), but once hostilities were under way the activity in government, business, and in homes, was frantic.

The recognition of global warming has been as belated as the recognition that the Germans were about to invade Poland, the Japanese about to bomb Pearl Harbor. And given that failure, that dodgy intelligence about the real world, all of us now have to respond to the consequences. It doesn't mean we shouldn't persist in our demands that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced (and we should keep on promoting solar and wind energy, hybrid cars, energy conservation), but since they haven't been yet, we have to prepare for the consequences of the ignorance of foolish men and evil energy companies.

We are now at the stage of the German tanks crossing the Polish border, the Japanese planes launched from their carriers. The effects of global warming are already seriously impacting the world and are set to get much worse. There are a number of things that serious Climate War Cabinets around the world should do.

Relatively dry countries and regions that rely on irrigation to grow exotic (and profitable) crops must immediately start on a serious and urgent buy back of all irrigation licenses and undertake schemes to help both farmers and communities adjust. In the post-War(ming) world it isn't going to be possible to find enough water to make deserts bloom, and the water will be needed for other purposes.

Immediately halt wood-chipping and logging in old growth forests, and the clearing of vegetation in farming areas. But simultaneously encourage a plantation timber industry based on already cleared unviable farm lands.

Immediately pressure state and local governments to put an end to any new coastal developments, and investigate relocation of individuals and businesses already on coasts.

Put an end to all fishing activity on coral reefs, ban commercial shipping through waters above them, and seriously review tourism in those areas.

Massively invest in research and development of new farm enterprises, new crops, new livestock breeds, and put serious money into providing income to farmers protecting natural ecosystems on their farms. A massive campaign of buying back farming properties suitable for conservation activities would also commence. And it would extend the National Park systems (land and marine) and provide adequate funding for them.

Seriously invest in rail infrastructure, and plan for transport needs in a way that fully integrates rail, road, sea and air transport, in order to massively reduce energy needs in the sector.

Reinstate public ownership of water, energy and transport companies in order to effectively respond to community needs without the distorting effect of the profit motive in those essential services. And encourage individuals and companies to generate their own energy from renewable sources and feed back into the grid, and aim at making every community self sufficient in water by recycling.

Facilitate the production of basic food necessities on a local and regional basis, to reduce transport costs of food.

Look at the needs of the work force were in terms of the new war economy, and properly encourage tertiary education and retraining to again have a local manufacturing industry, specializing in renewable energy technology, fuel efficient cars, transport industries, and IT. Review Free Trade Agreements and introduce measures to prevent takeovers of local companies by overseas corporations, and the outsourcing of jobs.

Put an end to any programs of prescribed burning (or 'thinning') of forests, realising that the dual impacts of climate change and burning on forests is going to cause massive loss of biodiversity, permanent damage to forest ecosystems, and ultimately the loss of the forests themselves.

Review and reduce the mining and sale of coal.

Review and reduce airline activity.

Can you think of others?

A big disruption to the economy? Sure, war does that. Do we have a choice? Yes, the big change can happen in a planned way or in an unplanned shambles. Perhaps all the business councils and right wing think tanks who have so disastrously kept us on a business as usual course for the last ten years could put themselves to work helping, under left wing economist supervision, the transition. Redemption of sorts, I suppose.

Seems daunting? Our grandparents and great-grandparents did it in the 1940s (and a number of the measures above were also instituted then). All together now.

Check out my warnings over several years on The Watermelon Blog - 'Those who think the things I say severe, or even malicious, should just see the things I do not say.' (George Bernard Shaw).

global warming

30 May 2007
Category Climate change
1 comments

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Them gosh darn energy companies is evil!

{ 2:15 AM, 31 May 2007 } { Posted by Robert }
While you’ve walked the borders between metaphor, cliché, analogy, and forced-comparison many times before, this has to be one of the most adorable efforts. “We are now at the stage of the German tanks crossing the Polish border, the Japanese planes launched from their carriers.” Eek! I better call my Aunt and Uncle in France and tell them not to give up this time! As you can probably tell, I think that the sense of urgency you’re trying to impart falls more than a little flat.

I have some other bones to pick with you, but I primarily want to address the morality you attach to global warming. Specifically, you call energy corporations “evil.” Hmmm. George Bush was mocked for calling North Korea part of an “axis of evil” when it does things like starve its own people for national pride, systematically oppresses its women, and demands worship of its god-leader under penalties ranging from jail time to death, whatever the god-leader feels like. However, you reserve the adjective (used without so much as a hint of irony to temper it) for “evil energy companies.”

I’m sorry, but are those the same energy companies that allow you to maintain this blog by typing on a computer in a well-lit room that is likely temperature-controlled? Are they the same companies that give you the fuel used to operate your farming machinery and raise sheep? Perhaps they’re the same companies that supply fuel to the emergency vehicles that carry heart-attack victims to the hospital and that then give energy to heart bypass machines and other instruments that save lives.

Well, call me old-fashioned, but I think it would be decidedly more evil to stop producing all that energy that does all that good in the name of a slow, looming, not-yet-materialized threat called “global warming” than to steadily adopt green practices without interrupting the supply of energy.

[David says - Ah Robert, welcome back, you will be pleased to know that your impassioned defence of energy companies has inspired me to write another blog, just for you. Watch this space]

[David also says - and by the way I am not in 'well-lit room that is likely temperature-controlled'. The light comes through a window, and at night a low energy single bulb lights it. The house has no air conditioning in summer, and we rarely have any heating on in winter, and when we do it is just a small stand alone electric heater. There is a solar hot water system on the roof. Our water supply comes from the rain, and our waste water goes into a hole in the ground. I will soon look at some solar panels for electricity supply. My small farm truck runs on diesel, my wife's car is what you would call a 'compact'. But certainly, the day I have a heart attack I hope the ambulance does have some fuel supplied by those public-spirited energy companies. Incidentally you must be so familiar with my blog by now that you could write my biography! I look forward to it.]

Edited by mrpickwick on 31/5/2007 at 7:35 PM

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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)

"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)