Win, win OR lose, lose?

Steve Bell on global temperatures heading towards ‘uncharted territory’ 

Guardian cartoon Wed 17 May 2023

NOT MY PLANET? 

Steve Bell's cartoon is about the likely coming onset of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a quasi-periodic fluctuation of ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. He uses the graphic techniques in oceanographic and meteorological visual modelling to depict the "face" of a sad world.  

The placard declaring NOT MY PLANET is placed in those centres in the United States from where federal government and global business is conducted, explicitly pointing to a disconnect between the planet Earth and the "powers that be" when it comes to accountability or taking responsibility, disregard, deny or delay the phasing out of fossil fuels. 

Steve Bell's prompt for this cartoon was this story, also published in the Guardian on Wednesday 17 May, on the recent results of research by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

World likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold by 2027, scientists warn

UN agency says El Niño and human-induced climate breakdown could combine to push temperatures into ‘uncharted territory’

Fiona Harvey, Environment editor, reports for the Guardian (Wed 17 May 2023): 

The world is almost certain to experience new record temperatures in the next five years, and temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, scientists have warned.

The breaching of the crucial 1.5C threshold, which scientists have warned could have dire consequences, should be only temporary, according to research from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

However, it would represent a marked acceleration of human impacts on the global climate system, and send the world into “uncharted territory”, the UN agency warned.

Countries have pledged, under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, to try to hold global temperatures to no higher than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, after scientific advice that heating beyond that level would unleash a cascade of increasingly catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts.

Prof Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the WMO, said: “This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5C specified in the Paris agreement, which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency.”

Global average surface temperatures have never before breached the 1.5C threshold. The highest average in previous years was 1.28C above pre-industrial levels.

The report, published on Wednesday, found there was a 66% likelihood of exceeding the 1.5C threshold in at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

New record temperatures have been set in many areas around the world in the heatwaves of the past year, but those highs may only be the beginning, according to the report, as climate breakdown and the impact of a developing El Niño weather system combine to create heatwaves across the globe.

El Niño is part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific. For the past three years, the world has been in the opposing phase, known as La Niña, which has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world.

As La Niña ends and a new El Niño develops, there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, the scientists found.

The report, published on Wednesday, found there was a 66% likelihood of exceeding the 1.5C threshold in at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

New record temperatures have been set in many areas around the world in the heatwaves of the past year, but those highs may only be the beginning, according to the report, as climate breakdown and the impact of a developing El Niño weather system combine to create heatwaves across the globe.

El Niño is part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific. For the past three years, the world has been in the opposing phase, known as La Niña, which has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world.

As La Niña ends and a new El Niño develops, there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, the scientists found. 

There is likely to be less rainfall this year in the Amazon, Central America, Australia and Indonesia, the report found. This is particularly bad news for the Amazon, where scientists have grown increasingly concerned that a vicious cycle of heating and deforestation could tip the region from rainforest into savannah-like conditions.

That could have calamitous consequences for the planet, which relies on rainforests as massive carbon sinks.

Over the next five years, there is likely to be above-average rainfall in northern Europe, Alaska and northern Siberia, and the Sahel, according to the report.

For each year from 2023 to 2027, the global near-surface temperature is predicted to be between 1.1C and 1.8C above the pre-industrial average, taken from the years 1850 to 1900.

The world has warmed considerably in recent years. In 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed, requiring countries to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels while “pursuing efforts” to hold them to 1.5C, it was forecast that the chance of temporarily exceeding the 1.5C threshold within the following five years was zero.

This November, governments will meet for the Cop28 UN climate summit, where they will assess progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. Known as the “global stocktake”, this assessment is likely to show that the world is far off track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the 43% this decade that is required to have a good chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C.

El Niño and the LODE Zone Line

From India to Indonesia, from Australia to the coast of Colombia, the environmental impact of this Oscillation is significant. Those developing countries that depend on their own agriculture and fishing, particularly those bordering the Pacific Ocean, are often the most affected. In this phase of the Oscillation, the pool of warm water in the Pacific near South America is often at its warmest about Christmas. The original phrase, El Niño de Navidad, arose centuries ago, when Peruvian fishermen named the weather phenomenon after the newborn Christ.

In Australia there has been significant interest in a coming period of significantly drier climatic weather conditions. Today, Graham Readfearn, reporting for Guardian Australia (Thu 18 May 2023) makes the connection, in the era of the Anthropocene, that: 

Global heating has likely made El Niños and La Niñas more ‘frequent and extreme’, new study shows

Scientists say greenhouse gases have already affected climate patterns in the Pacific that could lead to more severe weather, floods and heatwaves

Graham Readfearn writes:

Global heating has likely intensified a climate pattern in the Pacific since the 1960s that has driven extreme droughts, floods and heatwaves around the globe, according to a new study.

The scientists said they had shown for the first time that greenhouse gas emissions were likely already making El Niños and La Niñas more severe.

The shifts in ocean temperatures and atmospheric conditions in the Pacific – known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso) – affect weather patterns around the globe, threatening food supplies, spreading disease and impacting societies and ecosystems.

Scientists have struggled to work out if adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – trapping enormous amounts of heat in the ocean – has already changed Enso.

But because the system has natural swings spanning decades and actual observations have been too sparse, the scientists looked instead at more than 40 models of the climate, analysed in several ways.

Dr Wenju Cai, lead author of the study from Australia’s CSIRO science agency, said the models showed a “human fingerprint” from 1960 onwards.

This meant climate change had likely made both El Niños and La Niñas “more frequent and more extreme,” he said.

But some other scientists not involved in the study had reservations about the findings, raising concerns about the reliance on modelling.

The study has been in the works for five years, and Cai said it showed “we are experiencing a vastly different climate to that of the distant past” and would help scientists understand how Enso will change in the future “given sea surface temperatures are continuing to increase”.

During La Niña periods, sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are cooler than a long-term average – dampening global temperatures. During El Niños, the opposite is true.

In a world with enhanced greenhouse warming, the models showed the sea surface temperature extremes had intensified by about 10% when they compared the 60 years before 1960 to the 60 years after.

Dr Mike McPhaden, a senior research scientist at the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a co-author on the paper, said scientists had grappled for 30 years with the question of whether human activity was altering Enso.

He said the researchers had thrown “everything at this problem” to find an answer, and had wrung out “every bit of information” from models to make their case.

He said: “The big events pack the most punch, so even though 10% doesn’t sound like much, it juices up the strongest and most societally relevant year-to-year climate fluctuation on the planet.

“In practical terms, this translates into more extreme and frequent droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires and severe storms, just like we observed during the recent triple dip La Niña that ended in March.”

Because Enso can swing naturally across decades even 150 years of sea surface temperature observations was not enough to tease out the human-forced changes from those natural swings, McPhaden said.

He said the study relied on the latest climate models that had known limitations. “However, they are the best tools available to us for addressing this problem,” he said.

Dr Sarah Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at UNSW Canberra who was not involved in the research, said she was “a bit apprehensive” because of the reliance on modelling.

“But if we’re going to rely just on observations then we would need hundreds of years of data as a bare minimum and we don’t have that long to wait,” she said.

“This has almost been in the ‘too hard’ basket for scientists. But it’s the first study that’s really tried to address the question.

“[The authors] have come out with an interesting result that’s going to need to be explored further.”

Dr Shayne McGregor, an expert on Enso at Monash University in Melbourne, who was not involved in the research, said he was “not convinced” the study had shown that human-caused climate change was having an effect on El Niños or La Niñas.

“It’s possible, but for me there are a lot of question marks still. Just because the models agree, that doesn’t mean they’re correct [about what’s happening in the real world].”

He said Enso was “hugely variable” and while the research “provides evidence to support the idea that greenhouse gas warming may have influenced Enso” this evidence was “suggestive” rather than conclusive.

The study appears in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. 

Instead of the Anthropocene lets think Capitalocene! 

A general use of the term anthropocene is reflected in its use in this post, that is of a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.

The coining of the term Anthropocene originates in a combination of anthropo- from the Ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) meaning 'human' and -cene from καινός (kainos) meaning 'new' or 'recent'.

As early as 1873, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani acknowledged the increasing power and effect of humanity on the Earth's systems and referred to an 'anthropozoic era'.

Although the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is often credited with coining the term anthropocene, it was in informal use in the mid-1970s. However, it was Paul J. Crutzen, the Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist, who is credited with independently re-inventing and popularising the word. Crutzen says, "I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly thought this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: 'No, we are in the Anthropocene.' I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck." 

The term has its value, but for Re:LODE Radio it is the cue to the use of another term coined by Jason W. Moore, oft referenced in the LODE Re:LODE project. 

This Abstract of an essay by Jason W. Moore: The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, was published online: 17 Mar 2017.

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.

The creatures, too, must become free.

(Thomas Münzer, 1524)

When and where did humanity’s modern relation with the rest of nature begin? The question has gained new prominence with growing concern over accelerating climate change. For the past decade, one answer to this question has captivated scholarly and popular audiences alike: the Anthropocene.

It is, in Paul Voosen’s apt phrase, ‘an argument wrapped in a word’.

Just what kind of argument is it? As with all fashionable concepts, the Anthropocene has been subject to a wide spectrum of interpretations. But one is dominant. This tells us that the origins of modern world are to be found in Britain, right around the dawn of the nineteenth century. The motive force behind this epochal shift? Coal and steam. The driving force behind coal and steam? Not class. Not capital. Not imperialism. Not even culture. But … you guessed it, the Anthropos: humanity as an undifferentiated whole.

The Anthropocene is a comforting story with uncomfortable facts. It fits easily within a conventional description – and analytical logic – that separates humanity from the web of life. This makes for a familiar story, one of Humanity doing many terrible things to Nature. It goes something like this. Take one part ‘human’. Then one part ‘environmental consequences’. Voila!, we have a tale of humans ‘overwhelming the great forces of nature’. I call the logic that animates this tale Green Arithmetic. Nature becomes a factor, a variable, a part of the story. This logic runs deep. It is a reflex, a part of our intellectual muscle memory. It shapes our thinking of planetary crisis and its origins, preconceptualizing humanity and nature as separate first, connected second.

The dominant Anthropocene argument also nestles comfortably within a conventional narrative of modernity. The Industrial Revolution is understood as a set of technical, class, and sometimes political relations emerging around coal and steam between 1760 and 1830. This era marks the birth of, well, you name it: industrial society, capitalism, modernity – or so we are told. The Industrial Revolution has served as the lodestar not only of social theory and economic history, but also of Green Thought. In this sense, the ‘transition debate’ is unavoidable – accounts of planetary change and crisis necessarily imply an account of their origins.

The Anthropocene has become something more than a scholarly concept. It has become a wider conversation around humanity’s place in the web of life – a conversation unfolding in the popular press, in activist circles, and across the Two Cultures of the human and natural sciences. There are many positive elements of this conversation – and more than a few problems. In what follows, I explore three entangled moments of that Anthropocene conversation. First is Humanity and Nature as real abstractions – abstractions with operative force in reproducing the world as we know it. These abstractions elide decisive questions of difference amongst humans, and how that difference is constituted through relations within the web of life. Second, I consider historical capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital and nature, dependent on finding and co-producing Cheap Natures. Finally, I ground these two moments in the history of capitalist origins – which is also the origins of ecological crisis. In successive and overlapping philosophical, politico-economic, and world-historical registers we might begin to identify twenty-first century capitalism’s spaces of vulnerability and contradiction – spaces co-produced through the web of life.

In Part I of this essay, I pursue two major arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – part of nature. Next, I engage the Anthropocene as a mode of historical thinking. The Anthropocene conversation is in fact several. One is an ongoing debate over ‘golden spikes’ and the stratigraphic record; it is a debate over geological history. My concern in this essay lies elsewhere. I will focus on the dominant periodization, which sees modernity beginning in Great Britain around 1800. Here, the Anthropocene’s periodization meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the turning point in human affairs.

This, however, denies a longer history of capitalism that begins in the era of Columbus. The erasure of capitalism’s early-modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global natures long before the steam engine, is therefore significant in our work to develop an effective radical politics around global warming … and far more than global warming alone! Ask any historian and she will tell you: how one periodizes history powerfully shapes the interpretation of events, and one’s choice of strategic relations. Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine, and we have a very different view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450.

That transition marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature. It was greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established some four centuries earlier.

From this standpoint, we may ask, Are we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene – the ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital?

How one answers the historical question shapes one’s analysis of – and response to – the crises of the present.

South Australia tells gas industry the state is ‘at your disposal’

As if to underline the value of the term "capitalocene", two stories from South Australia, and situated along the LODE Zone Line, reveal the "uncontroversial" power of capital and the "controversial" power of protest. 

A win win for capitalist interests?

Royce Kurmelovs in Adelaide reports for Guardian Australia on this story (Tue 16 May 2023) under the subheading: 

SA energy minister tells industry ‘we are here to help’ while federal resources minister Madeleine King promotes carbon capture and storage

Royce Kurmelovs writes:

South Australia’s minister for energy and mining has told a conference of the oil and gas industry in Adelaide that his state government is “at your disposal”.

Tom Koutsantonis made the extraordinary comments during his address to the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association national conference on Monday morning.

He said oil and gas companies were needed to achieve net zero by 2050, claiming “we cannot transform our economy to net zero without this industry”.

“We are thankful you are here. We are happy to a be recipient of Appea’s largesse in the form of coming here more often,” Koutsantonis said.

“The South Australian government is at your disposal, we are here to help and we are here to offer you a pathway to the future.”

Koutsantonis made the comments following a speech by federal resources minister, Madeleine King, who spoke about helping to develop a carbon capture and storage industry in Australia through the government’s future gas strategy.

King said it was important for Australia to remain a “reliable, essential” supplier of gas for domestic and export market as the world looked to reduce its emissions ahead of 2050.

She said capture and storage was a “necessary part of a wider decarbonisation effort”, with the government having released new acreage for greenhouse gas storage projects for the “first time in years”.

“The will is there, the knowhow is there,” said. “We want a regulatory system for carbon capture and storage that is robust and responsive and position Australians resources sector to bring new CCS projects on line.”

King also said the industry could obtain credits for lowering their emissions below baseline under the safeguard mechanism, but only “if they are verified and scientifically sound”.

The announcements were welcomed by the Woodside chief executive and chair of Appea, Meg O’Neill, who said it provided “a great opportunity to outline the ongoing role of gas in the energy transition”.

“The strategy will guide a realistic pathway for Australia into the future whereby responsible resource development is understood and can continue,” she said.

But O’Neill said “regulatory certainty” was required if the government wanted to develop a carbon capture and storage industry.

“In Australia, I believe this is a technology that may have been judged too soon,” she said. “It works.”

Extinction Rebellion South Australia spokesperson Anna Slynn said the comments from King and Koutsantonis were “dangerous” given the imminent threat posed by the catastrophic risk of global heating, and pledged to make attendees “feel unwelcome” through protest outside the venue.

“The world’s climate scientists have been completely clear; there should be no further expansion of oil and gas if we want to avert complete climate catastrophe,” she said. “Life is in the balance. We will continue to make Appea feel unwelcome until they leave".

The International Energy Agency has said limiting global heating to 1.5C as set out in the Paris agreement meant there could be no new oil, gas or coal investment beyond 2021.

At another oil and gas conference last year, Koutsantonis was caught up in protests by Extinction Rebellion targeting fossil fuel producers over its role in driving climate change. 

So, who are the criminals? 

Extinction Rebellion protest outside the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association conference in Adelaide on Thursday. The SA premier, Peter Malinauskas, has denied the new anti-protest laws are targeted at a specific group of protesters. 

Royce Kurmelovs (Thu 18 May 2023) reports today under the headline:

South Australia rushes through anti-protest laws as activists rally outside oil and gas conference

Climate activists face large penalties and three-month jail terms in bipartisan move which appears to have been hashed out on talkback radio

South Australia has rushed through anti-protest laws less than a day after a rally outside the annual oil and gas conference in Adelaide briefly closed traffic.

The extraordinary move – which appears to have been hashed out on talkback radio on Thursday morning – comes after the mining and energy minister, Tom Koutsantonis, told the industry the state government was “at your service”.

On Thursday, Extinction Rebellion protesters suspended themselves from the Morphett Street Bridge near the Adelaide Convention Centre and closed traffic for a short time.

South Australian police commissioner said at the time he had been frustrated by the protesters. 

“The ropes are fully extended across the street. So we can’t, as much as we might like to, cut the rope and let them drop,” Grant Stevens said.

On Thursday morning, the opposition leader, David Speirs, suggested to talkback radio that fines against protesters should be increased and courts should be given the power to jail protesters.

In a following interview, the SA premier, Peter Malinauskas, said his government would be open to passing changes to the laws but it would need “bipartisan support”.

By midday the government had introduced changes to the Summary Offences Act to South Australian parliament after an urgent meeting to discuss imposing fines up to $50,000 and possible three-month jail terms where a person “intentionally or recklessly obstructs the free passage of a public place”.

These changes apply to existing laws which previously imposed a $750 fine and no jail time.

Protesters march to the APPEA conference in Adelaide. 

The premier said the actions of Extinction Rebellion was doing “the cause of decarbonisation harm” but denied the changes interfered with the right to protest or that they targeted a specific group of protesters.

He instead said they were only an “update” to existing laws.

“[Extinction Rebellion] disrupt business in a way that compromises the ability for people to be able to earn a living,” Malinauskas said.

“They’ve disrupted our emergency services when it otherwise got plenty of other work to do around the standard. And the parliament is going to respond quickly.”

Anna Slynn, a spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion South Australia, said: “These new penalties that have been introduced to parliament serve two purposes: one, as a means of curbing people’s absolute and necessary right to peaceful non-violent protest and disruption.

“Two: to distract from the fact that APPEA [Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association] have been here all week, making plans to expand oil and gas production. These plans have bipartisan support, both in SA and federally, and are completely contradictory to their very public claims to be acting on climate change.”

On Tuesday, the South Australian energy and mining minister, Tom Koutsantonis, told representatives of the Australian oil and gas industry that the state government is “at your disposal” in an extended welcome for the opening of its annual conference.

Malinauskas said the comments and the speed with which the legislation passed had no bearing on his government’s commitment to decarbonisation, saying “we are further advanced than any other jurisdiction in the world”.

“This is about addressing a suite of actions which is inconsistent with community expectations and already inconsistent with the law,” he said.

The South Australian attorney general, Kyam Maher, said the rapid passage of the bill through the lower house, with support from the Liberal opposition, was not “common practice, but it’s not unusual”.

He said the legislation would not apply to protests swept up in current demonstrations but would prevent future protesters from blocking traffic which may hypothetically be used by an ambulance.

“This sends a clear signal that if you are unreasonably impinging on other people’s freedoms, if you’re doing things that could potentially stop, for example, an ambulance getting to a hospital, then the court has a greater range of penalties they could impose on you,” he said.

Maher could not confirm whether an ambulance had actually been blocked, with ambulances still able to use the tram tracks.

The attorney general said he hoped the bill would pass the upper house “soon” with support from the South Australian Liberal party in the upper house.

Knitting Nannas tell court NSW protest laws have left them ‘frightened’ to take climate action

Helen Kvelde (centre) with Knitting Nannas climate campaigners outside the NSW supreme court, where a challenge to the state’s protest laws is being heard

Ben Doherty for Guardian Australia reports (Wed 10 May 2023) that:

Two members of the environmental group are challenging new laws which impose jail terms for demonstrations that disrupt major roads or public facilities

Climate activists have been “intimidated” and “frightened” from protesting by sweeping new laws that impose jail terms for demonstrations that disrupt major roads or public facilities, the New South Wales supreme court has heard.

Simply gathering near a train station in the city could see protesters jailed, environmental campaigners have told the court, so broad are the new laws’ powers.

“The impact of these laws have been to intimidate me,” the environmental activist and member of the Knitting Nannas, Helen Kvelde, told the court in an affidavit, part of a constitutional legal challenge to the laws. 

Win win for climate activism? 

The backstory . . . 

Australian Associated Press and Jordyn Beazley for Guardian Australia reported earlier this year (Wed 15 Mar 2023) that: 

Climate activist Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco’s 15-month jail sentence quashed on appeal

Coco cried tears of joy in court and said she would continue raising the alarm on the climate emergency

A 15-month jail sentence imposed on a climate protester who blocked one lane on the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a truck has been quashed.

Deanna “Violet” Coco, 32, was issued with a 12-month conditional release order on Wednesday after district court judge Mark Williams heard she had been initially imprisoned on false information provided by the NSW police.

Coco cried tears of joy in court, with her supporters cheering outside the Downing Centre.

She told reporters she would pursue compensation against the police after spending 13 days in prison.

“Obviously we need to continue our right to protest. Protest is such an important part of our democracy,” she said.

“I plan to keep continuing to raise the alarm on the climate and ecological emergency to avert billions of deaths.”

NSW Greens MP and spokesperson for justice, Sue Higgins, said the case has brought the cost of NSW anti-protest laws to democracy into plain view.

“The NSW Coalition, in lockstep with Labor, created a moral panic in response to climate activist protests and rushed anti-protest laws through the parliament,” Higgins said.

“The Greens will challenge the next parliament to review and repeal these anti-protest laws and to ensure that members of the community who engage in peaceful protest and nonviolent civil disobedience are not sentenced to prison terms.”

The Coalition passed the anti-protest laws with Labor’s backing in April last year. It includes fines of up to $22,000 and up to two years in jail for anyone found to have blocked major infrastructure in a way which “seriously disrupts or obstructs vehicles or pedestrians”.

Coco was the first person to be jailed under the laws and was granted bail in December.

Coco and three others drove a Hino truck on to the Harbour Bridge in morning peak hour on 13 April, 2022, as part of an environmental protest against climate inaction for Fireproof Australia.

Typical TV news media coverage from 10 News:

Sydney Harbour Bridge Traffic Stopped By Climate Protesters 10 News First Apr 13, 2022

Australian Associated Press and Jordyn Beazley's report continues: 

Climbing on to the roof of the vehicle alongside Alan Russell Glover, the pair lit orange flares and livestreamed the protest.

Two others, Karen Fitzgibbon and Jay Larbalestier, sat on the ground in front of the truck and superglued their hands to the roadway.

On Wednesday, Williams heard an appeal by Coco of the 15-month jail sentence imposed in the local court last December.

He noted police had included a “false fact” and a “false assertion” in their case against Coco that an ambulance with flashing sirens and lights had been impeded from crossing the bridge to an emergency because of the protest.

President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Josh Pallas, said the revelation the police included false information in their case against Coco was “shocking”.

“In the lead up to the election on 25 March, pressure is building on premier Dominic Perrottet as the reality of how bad it is for protestors in NSW today sinks in,” he said.

Crown prosecutor Isabella Maxwell-Williams unsuccessfully argued Coco should be incarcerated because of her lengthy history of illegal protest which included supergluing herself to an intersection in St Kilda as part of the Extinction Australia group.

She said the protest was not peaceful, in that it affected many hundreds of Sydneysiders and put the community as well as the activists themselves in danger.

The judge noted that these past matters had all been dealt with through fines or bonds without any convictions.

He also said she had showed remorse for her actions and was channelling her diagnosed climate anxiety into productive community work such as volunteering to help flood victims in Lismore.

With the jail term quashed, Coco remains convicted for two charges of resisting police and using an unauthorised explosive.

At the same time, Williams heard an appeal by Glover, now 61, of an 18-month community correction order.

The judge quashed convictions for Glover and imposed a 12-month conditional release order, hearing that this was his first criminal offence and the charges had resulted in him being stood down from working as a volunteer firefighter.

The court heard Glover was a man of “considerable bravery” having risked his life battling the 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires.

NSW police declined to comment. 

A week earlier . . . 

. . . NSW police drop claim that protest involving Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco blocked ambulance

Michael McGowan reporting for Guardian Australia (Tue 7 Mar 2023):

Magistrate hearing case against two co-accused questioned why officers say ‘no ambulance was obstructed’

Police have backtracked on their claim that a climate protest on the Sydney Harbour Bridge last year blocked an ambulance with its sirens running from responding to an emergency, an assertion repeatedly referred to in the jail sentence of demonstrator Deanna “Violet” Coco.

On Tuesday Alan Glover and Karen Fitzgibbon, two of the four people co-accused of blocking the bridge during a climate protest last April, appeared before the Downing Centre local court for sentencing over the protest.

Magistrate Daniel Reiss sentenced each of them to an 18-month community corrections order and a $3,000 fine over the protest.

But agreed facts tendered as part of the case revealed that the New South Wales police now concede that “no ambulance was obstructed from responding to an emergency as a result of the incident” during the April protest.

The statement differs from a set of facts tendered by police during Coco’s case last year, which saw her sentenced to 15 months in prison with a non-parole period of eight months. She has launched an appeal against the sentence.

During that case, NSW police alleged the demonstration “not only caused serious disruption to peak-hour traffic” but also “prevented an ambulance responding to an emergency under lights and sirens as it was unable to navigate through the increased heavy traffic”.

“This imposition to a critical emergency service has the potential to result in fatality,” the police alleged at the time.

The removal of the claim in Glover and Fitzgibbon’s matter was questioned by Reiss, who asked why the police had taken a “contradictory position”.

Police prosecutor Ernest Chan told the court that the ambulance was “no longer pressed and hence it was removed from the agreed facts”.

Reiss asked whether the fourth co-defendant, Jay Larbalestier, who last year received an intensive corrections order and $7,196 fine after spending more than 40 days under house arrest as per his bail conditions, had been informed of the change in the police position.

Chan responded, “no”.

“He may have an interest in that,” Reiss said.

During the hearing, Glover’s barrister, Felicity Graham, said police had “maintained a false assertion” about the ambulance, which had been “corrected” only after the first two defendants were convicted.

“Ms Coco and Mr Larbalestier were sentenced on that false basis and so there is a number of bases on which to consider that there would be an appropriate and different approach taken to Mr Glover’s case,” she said. “It’s simply just not the case that that event occurred.”

The ambulance was directly cited by magistrate Allison Hawkins in sentencing Coco to a 15-month prison sentence last December.

During her sentencing, both the prosecutor and Hawkins repeatedly cited the ambulance in reference to the seriousness of the offence.

“[W]hat you have failed to take into account in the actions of stopping people going about their everyday life, is other people’s mental health concerns, or other people’s health and safety,” Hawkins said at the time.

“You have halted an ambulance under lights and siren. What about the person in there? What about that person and their family? What are they to think of you and your cause? In fact, you do damage to your cause when you do childish stunts and dangerous stunts like this. It angers the community and rightfully so.”

Coco was jailed after she blocked a lane of traffic on the Harbour Bridge during the protest in April.

She parked a truck and stood holding a lit flare on the bridge during the protest, along with three others arrested at the same time.

She had pleaded guilty to seven charges, including using or modifying an authorised explosive not as prescribed and resisting a police officer during arrest.

An appeal against her sentence is listed to be heard before the district court next week.

While both of the protesters before the court on Tuesday pleaded guilty to blocking the bridge, Graham urged Reiss to not record a conviction in the case based partly on his “genuine motivations”.

Glover, a longtime volunteer firefighter, was inspired to take part in the protest over his distress at the black summer bushfires and the climate emergency, Graham said, a caused that was “not in the class of being a frivolous or fringe issue”.

But in handing down the sentence, Reiss said despite the community “understanding and appreciating … the environmental position we all find ourselves in … not very many in the community would in any way support this kind of conduct”.

Some three months previously . . . 

. . . Greens push for federal ‘right to protest’ law after NSW jailing of Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco

Michael McGowan reported for Guardian Australia (Tue 20 Dec 2022). He writes:

A series of harsh state-based laws cracking down on climate activists could be overridden by a federal “right to protest” bill being pushed by the Greens.

After the jailing of climate activist Deanna “Violet” Coco in New South Wales this month, the party says the commonwealth has the power to overturn the series of state laws passed in recent years that experts say curtailed the right to protest in Australia.

After obtaining legal advice from Prof George Williams, a constitutional law expert at the University of NSW, Greens senator David Shoebridge said he plans to introduce a bill into parliament that would “rebalance the scales towards justice” by enshrining the right to peaceful assembly into law.

“The right to nonviolent protest is essential in any free society, but we see politicians across the country increasingly using their positions of power to crack down on protests that threaten the fossil fuel and logging industries,” he said.

“Australian politicians are quick to condemn other nations that criminalise and attack peaceful protests, but under our noses governments across Australia have been chipping away at this fundamental right.”

Coco was jailed after a protest on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge this year in which she parked a truck and stood holding a lit flare.

Her 15-month prison sentence, which is currently subject to an appeal, placed a new spotlight on a suite of laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters across Australia.

In NSW, the government this year passed laws introducing a possible two-year jail term for protests that disturb major roads, bridges and ports. The bill was rushed through parliament in April with the support of the Labor opposition.

While Coco was last week released on bail ahead her March appeal, the Guardian has previously revealed that at least a dozen other climate activists face possible jail time under the same laws.

In some cases, court documents show protesters – seen at a June march that caused disruption in Sydney’s CBD – were identified on social media before being charged by police.

While the NSW laws are subject to a supreme court challenge by the Environmental Defenders Office, they are among a series of state-based laws passed in recent years that have cracked down on climate protesters.

In Victoria, forestry activists will be subject to up to $21,000 in fines and 12 months in prison for protesting near logging areas, while in Queensland people found possessing devices used in disruptive protests can face two years in jail under laws passed in 2018.

But the Greens say the commonwealth has the power to override these state-based laws by legislating a federal right to protest bill.

Advice provided by Williams and seen by the Guardian states that Australia has the power to introduce laws conforming with international treaties and conventions under the external affairs power in the constitution.

It was the same provision used in the case that saw the Franklin River Dam blocked by the high court in 1983, as well as federal laws that overrode Tasmania’s ban on gay sex.

“Basically, the commonwealth has the power to implement conventions and the constitution says where there is a conflict with the states, they are overridden,” Williams said.

The EDO’s case against the NSW government is set to be heard in the state’s supreme court in May. It centres around two women, 57-year-old preschool teacher Dominique Jacobs from Gloucester in the Hunter Valley and 71-year-old psychologist Helen Kvelde, who blocked a major road into Port Botany with two trucks during a protest in March.

Williams said he could “see why” the EDO was running the case, which will rest on whether the court decides the laws unreasonably impinge on the implied right to freedom of political communication.

“There has been some success with like challenges but in the end these things always depend on the detail … but it’s a difficult road,” he said.

Shoebridge said federal intervention was necessary because “the right to protest is under assault in states and territories across the country”.

“The environment and justice movements are increasingly under threat of legal sanctions and arrest for acts of nonviolent resistance to the extractive industries, especially logging and fossil fuels,” he said.

Repression of dissent on a global scale? 

An increasingly onerous series of harsh state-based laws cracking down on climate activists are to be expected across the world.

Matt Simon in an interview with Jason Moore for WIRED (Sep 20 2019) picks this theme up towards the end of their conversation. The article is headlined:

Capitalism Made This Mess, and This Mess Will Ruin Capitalism

To understand climate change, one environmental historian says we need to realize we've entered a new era: the Capitalocene. 

Most of us have probably heard of the Anthropocene, humanity’s stain on the geological record through activities like land misuse and plastic pollution. Jason Moore, an environmental historian and sociologist at Binghamton University, calls the problem something else: the Capitalocene. WIRED sat down with Moore to talk about what got us into this mess, why capitalism won’t survive it, and what a brighter future might actually look like.

WIRED: What is the Capitalocene you’re proposing?

Jason Moore: Capitalocene is a kind of critical provocation to this sensibility of the Anthropocene, which is: We have met the enemy and he is us. So the idea that we're all going to cover our footprints, we're going to be more sustainable consumers, we're going to pay attention to population, are really consequences of a highly unequal system of power and wealth.

There’s an assignment of blame here, which corporations love to do in particular with their workers—if you don't meet your goals as a company, it's not the people in the C-suites that are getting laid off, it's the laborers. The climate crisis strikes me as an extension of that, that 100 corporations are responsible for 70 percent of emissions, but they're the ones who will say, "Well, you as consumers could do a whole lot yourselves."

That's right, and there's also a shift from looking at production to looking at consumption. Most carbon dioxide doesn’t come from people flying around the world, although that's a major contributor to it. It comes from production. For younger people there seems to be a kind of cognitive dissonance between yes, we are responsible, and at the same time we know that we are not responsible.

Is capitalism compatible at all with any movement on climate change?

That's the classic ecosocialist question. It's very clear that the problem is not technological—there are the technological means to decarbonize very rapidly. Still, if you solarize and go with wind, you have to store all the energy, you have to rebuild the electrical grids. It's usually costly, and finance capital is really wary of those long-term projects.

What the venture capitalists want is a very narrow version of a technological application that can be used and put on the market right away. Out there in the culture, we think of capitalism as entrepreneurial and risk-taking and innovative, and that sometimes is the case but only within a very, very narrow frame. And we're talking about huge existential transformations of the earth.

Is there historical precedent here? Have, for instance, natural climate fluctuations in the past threatened capitalism?

Climate changes over the past 2,000 years have been extraordinarily destabilizing to ruling classes. This was the case for the Roman Empire in the West. So drought pushes the Huns, which pushes the Goths, they go into Western Europe. But more fundamentally, the changing climate after the year 400 creates all sorts of economic and political tensions, and in Western Europe the Roman Empire collapses. We now understand that wasn't a terrible thing, that in fact there was more equality, a lower birth rate. There were peasants reorganizing agriculture so that they depended on many different sources of food and had many different livelihood strategies, instead of just growing wheat for the Roman overlords.

Moments of climate change become moments of climate crisis, and that's in the relatively milder climate shifts of the Holocene, which is now over. Capitalism is not going to survive, but it also depends on what we mean by capitalism. For me, Capitalocene is a critique of this idea that capitalism is just about economics. Because it's also a system of power and it's a system of culture.

A difference this time with human-made climate change compared with past realignments of power is that capitalism has wrapped around the world. You have all these economically interconnected countries.

It's interconnectedness in an imperial sense in terms of great powers, but also in terms of the overwhelming power of finance capital, which is of course kept afloat by the great powers. I think that it makes the global system much more volatile and much more vulnerable. In places like Dubai and Miami, they're already getting skittish. What happens when Miami has storm surges of 3 or 4 feet every year? What happens when Manhattan experiences a superstorm Sandy kind of reality every couple of years?

So what would an ideal system look like? How might we politically and economically get along better with the planet?

You would have to have a democratically controlled accumulation fund. I think that banking and finance have to be socialized because otherwise you're continually at the mercy of big capital deciding what's profitable or not.

What would the ideal world be like? It would integrate town and country, it would have cheap and low-carbon public transportation. We also have to look at the actual history of huge destructive events in the 20th century and its relationship to the web of life. I think about the willingness of countries like the US to, for instance, destroy Vietnam in that ecocidal way. That great quotation during the Tet Offensive: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." That will be the tendency of one or more great powers in the era of climate crisis, that as social justice politics and movements challenge the present regime, there will be an attempt to impose a devastating military solution on that.

So given all that, are you optimistic about this future?

It is going to be difficult. I would just remind everyone that climate change is bad for ruling classes. It's miserable for all the rest of us over the time spans of 10 and 20 and 30 years, that we're all going to be living through very difficult times. But there will also be times at which the 1 percent, in whatever form that takes, will be thoroughly and radically destabilized. I don't think ruling classes are at all prepared for the kinds of political and cultural transformations that will occur in this period.

We're already seeing this in part around the generational shift and the fact that now we can talk about socialism. That's really the first time since maybe 1970 to '75 we could do it in a public way. Capitalism is much less resilient than most people credit it. It had its social legitimacy, because in one way or another it could promise development. And I don't think anyone takes that idea seriously anymore. 

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

This memorable scene from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, shows the destruction of a coastal community during the Vietnam War.

Arthur Rackham's illustration to The Ride of the Valkyries

The commander of the helicopter squadron, a Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, sound blasts the "enemy" during the dawn napalm attack, playing "Ride of the Valkyries" on loudspeakers. At some point he is triggered into saying, angrily and resentfully, "savages". 

Q. And babies?

A. And babies.

Photographs of casualties in the Philippines, the result of U.S. military action, resonate with different places and different times following the continued spatial expansion of American economic, political and military power. Three generations later as part of the protest movement against America's conduct in the Vietnam War, this iconic anti-Vietnam War poster was produced on the 26th December 1969. The poster uses uses a colour photograph of the My Lai Massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968. It shows about a dozen dead and partly naked South Vietnamese women and babies in contorted positions stacked together on a dirt road, killed by U.S. forces. The picture is overlaid in semi-transparent blood-red lettering that asks along the top "Q. And babies?", and at the bottom answers "A. And babies." The quote is from a Mike Wallace CBS News television interview with U.S. soldier Paul Meadlo, who participated in the massacre. 

Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?

A. Right.

Q. And you killed how many? At that time?

A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can't – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.

Q. Men, women, and children?

A. Men, women, and children.

Q. And babies?

A. And babies. 

The lettering was sourced from The New York Times, which printed a transcript of the Meadlo interview the day after.

According to cultural historian M. Paul Holsinger, And babies was "easily the most successful poster to vent the outrage that so many felt about the conflict in Southeast Asia."

In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), a group of New York City artists who opposed the war, used Haeberle's shocking photograph of the My Lai Massacre, to create this poster titled And babies. It was produced by AWC members Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Frazer Dougherty along with Museum of Modern Art members Arthur Drexler and Elizabeth Shaw. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had promised to fund and circulate the poster, but after seeing the 2 by 3 foot poster, pulled financing for the project at the last minute. MoMA's Board of Trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley (head of CBS), who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster. Both were firm supporters of the war effort and backed the Nixon administration. It is unclear if they pulled out for political reasons (as pro-war supporters), or simply to avoid a scandal (personally and/or for MoMA), but the official reason, stated in a press release, was that the poster was outside the "function" of the museum. Nevertheless, under the sole sponsorship of the AWC, 50,000 posters were printed by New York City's lithographers union.

On December 26, 1969, a grassroots network of volunteer artists, students and peace activists began circulating it worldwide. Many newspapers and television shows re-printed images of the poster, consumer poster versions soon followed, and it was carried in protest marches around the world, all further increasing its viewership. In a further protest of MoMA's decision to pull out of the project, copies of the poster were carried by members of the AWC into the MoMA and unfurled in front of Picasso's painting Guernica, on loan to MoMA at the time, a painting that depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians.

One member of the group was Tony Shafrazi, who returned in 1974 to spray paint the Guernica with the words "KILL LIES ALL" in blood red paint, protesting about Richard Nixon's pardon of William Calley for the latter's actions during the My Lai massacre.

Although the photograph was shot almost two years prior to the production of the poster, Haeberle had not released it until late 1969. It was a colour photograph taken on his personal camera, which he did not turn over to the military, unlike the black and white photographs he took on a military camera. Haeberle sold the colour photographs to Life magazine where they were first seen nationally in the December 5, 1969, issue. When the poster came out a few weeks later, in late December 1969, the image was still quite shocking and new to most viewers but already becoming a defining image of the My Lai Massacre and U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.

So, who are the "savages"? 

Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines. It's a connection that cannot be avoided when it comes to understanding the place of the Philippines in the history of the centuries old globalised geopolitical landscape. 

The Re:LODE Radio page "So, who are the savages?" attempts to offer an historical context for the present geopolitical situation, and especially the impact of the ongoing contestation between the US and China for various degrees of global hegemony. 

At the turn of the twentieth century, with a globally expansionist United States, China was a market for potential exploitation.

And, after all, the Philippines are only the stepping-stone to China

Supporters of U.S. policy in the Philippines frequently reminded the American public that acquisition of a colony in Asia could open the door toward trade opportunities in China. This 1900 cartoon by Emil Flohri shows Uncle Sam bringing not only “education” and “religion” but a vast array of consumer goods to an eager Chinese population. The many signs on the Chinese shore itemise all the goods that presumably will find a market in China. The tiny Chinese figure dressed in traditional clothing follows the condescending stereotype demeaning non-Western, non-Caucasian peoples. 

Belt and Road Initiative

In 2013, around a hundred years later, the spatially expansionist ambitions of the current leadership of Chinese Communist state are exemplified in the so-called Belt and Road Intiative. Is this an example of a weird China/US or US/China reversal, a flip-flopping of history, repeating itself as a potential tragedy in the making?

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