Blog

Embrace the renewables revolution

An interview with Xavier Rizos

Xavier Rizos researches relationships between economics, governance, regulation, politics and culture. We spoke to him about his article ‘Will the market save us?’ which is featured in the new Overland, and why it will take more than a ‘carbon tax’ for Australia to have an effective climate policy.

What motivated you to write this article now? Do you find that there is still much confusion around what the government’s carbon package actually involves? ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 8-12-2011, 2 user comments

Extreme weather and Mother Earth: nature gets legal rights in Bolivia

Evo MoralesAs extreme weather becomes the norm Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, believes that to fight climate change we need to recover the values of indigenous people.

Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright says something similar in her essay ‘Deep Weather’ in the latest issue of Meanjin. Noting the devastation of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the 2011 floods in eastern Australia and Cyclone Yasi, as well as extreme weather events around the world, Wright wonders ‘what the traditional Indigenous caretakers of the land think about these extreme weather events of flood, fire and wind’ and asks why we’re not hearing their ancient stories about ‘how to respect the weather’. Her blunt reply? What Indigenous Australians say ‘is not considered relevant’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 17-06-2011, 12 user comments

Non-fiction review: Monsoon

Monsoon

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the battle for supremacy in the 21st century
Robert D Kaplan
Black Inc.

Robert D Kaplan, the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the battle for supremacy in the 21st century, is a man on a mission. Since the 1990s, when President Clinton was seen clutching a copy of Kaplan’s book on the Balkans under his arm, Kaplan’s work has become a lightning rod for US public and political opinion in a similar vein to pop political scientists like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. And he has certainly been taken seriously by successive American administrations since his leap to fame under Clinton’s elbow: aside from his work as correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan sits on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and is a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security in Washington. ... read more

Written by Ruby J Murray on 10-03-2011, 3 user comments

In praise of Climate Camp

On Saturday morning, two activists at Camp for Climate Action chained themselves to Xstrata Ravensworth Coalmine.

They were arrested for their action. On Sunday, over 150 activists pushed over a fence to block the train lines running to Bayswater coal-fired power station. The most recent count is 73 activists arrested, including an 88-year-old man. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 7-12-2010, 1 user comment

Science cannot save us: the politics of climate action

Wind turbineIn March 2009 I was the lead NSW delegate to the Australian Greens’ National Council in Perth when I experienced a curious fact of climate politics. Our state party put a proposal that the Senators pull back from having emissions trading as the key plank of climate policy, a position Christine Milne had enshrined in Re-Energising Australia. We wanted to stress direct government intervention with a planned ‘just transition’ of jobs. We were met by hostility from the Senators, and incomprehension from many delegates. In essence, three arguments were put in favour of an ETS: a pragmatic view that it was ‘the only game in town’, a general commitment to markets, and a focus on cap & trade being able to deliver emission abatement targets based on scientific consensus. ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 20-10-2010, 7 user comments

Non-fiction review: Here on Earth

'Here on Earth' Here on Earth
Tim Flannery
Text

Flannery’s new book Here On Earth reads like a cross between Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond, which is reassuring given it has the title of a Leelee Sobieski film. It also sort of makes sense; both of these authors have read and commented on the book, and Diamond is referenced throughout. Flannery has clearly read their work and is borrowing from their styles, which I enjoyed.

The book talks a lot about the Gaia Hypothesis and essentially argues for it throughout. For those unaware, the Gaia hypothesis states that the world as a whole tends to act as a singular organism and has many feedbacks and other mechanisms to maintain a given state. I personally am not a fan. I believe the world does a lot of things we don’t understand and certainly has all sorts of negative and positive feedback models going on, but I find both the name of the hypothesis and many of the people claiming to adhere to it irritating. It’s all a bit hippy-pie-in-the-sky from where I’m sitting, and I was surprised to find Flannery advocating it. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 19-10-2010, 6 user comments

Clive Hamilton in full effect

The excerpted Clive Hamilton essay on climate denialism at the ABC has now generated nearly 800 comments over at Drum, as well as spawning a reply from climate skeptics. You can now read Hamilton's original essay from Overland 200 in full online. This might be a good time to mention that, until the end of September, we're offering a special deal for new subscribers: if you sign up now, you'll receive five editions for the price of four. If you've been enjoying the content from Overland 200, now's the time to do the right thing and give the magazine your support. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-09-2010, 1 user comment

Attack of the knuckle draggers

In an article in the latest edition of The Monthly, former Iemma staffer Mark Aarons says this of Labor Right backroom artists Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar:

Enter Arbib and Bitar and their focus groups. Their technique involves targeting the least politically committed voters in key marginal seats. Swing voters of this kind care most of all about themselves and are not loyal to any particular party or leader. The Arbib-Bitar theory is that these people determine who wins government, and that their views should therefore predominate in policy-setting. In a bizarre reversal of conventional political wisdom, leadership is redefined as following such people by pandering to them.

Arbib and Bitar are the inheritors of Graham Richardson’s ‘whatever it takes’ approach to the maintenance of power and were, of course, part of the shadow-team that rolled Rudd and installed Gillard. If Aarons is correct, the move against Rudd was in large part a response to the fidgety vacillations of 250000 self-interested, knuckle dragging (generic, non-racial sense), swinging voters as measured by Labor’s ‘internal polling’. The other macro factors at play in their decision to move on Rudd were the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the Mining Super Profits Tax, both of which were vehemently and vociferously opposed by the mining industry in expensive, well-organised public relations campaigns. Clearly, Gillard has been promoted on condition that she delay action on climate change to some indeterminate time in the future and soften the mining tax. But we know all that. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 10-08-2010, 12 user comments

Metaphorically leaking

As far as metaphors go, the destruction in 2001 of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre could be regarded as both the most potent and vilest in the world’s history. It was both a tactical, quasi-military strike against the most prominent architectural symbol of American global power and a pointedly symbolic blow, which drew, in the semiotic sense, on its biblical forerunner, the collapse of the Tower of Babel. To add to its potency, in hindsight at least, it can be regarded as a harbinger of the collapse of the global financial system. A very disconcerting element of prophecy appears to have been at work even if there is no substantive link between credit default swaps and planes smashing into buildings. Would that it were not so, but metaphors are slippery like that, which brings me to another contemporary metaphor, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 12-07-2010, 6 user comments

Non-fiction review –
Screw Light Bulbs

Screw Light Bulbs
Donna Green & Liz Minchin
UWA Publishing

Screw Light Bulbs coverScrew Light Bulbs was written when its authors got to the point of having written or read one too many articles suggesting that the best thing individuals could do towards fighting climate change was change their light bulbs. Recognising that this was at best a bandaid solution for an ulcerous wound, the book – and the attitude – was born.

The book aims to give advice as to what people can actually do towards fighting climate change in their daily lives – and for those who can’t be bothered to read the book, there’s a summary in chapter 7. A lot of these are things we’ve heard before, like limit your consumption, and buy better appliances, and why offsetting carbon emissions doesn’t really work. While the advice may not be new, the reasons for doing so are outlined explicitly and the mathematics involved is described at least superficially. I personally am searching for a specific calculation to use that can tell me, for example, whether it’s more environmentally friendly to buy cans or bottles of soft drink, or drive a ten-year-old car or buy a new, more efficient one, with all the inbuilt emissions. Screw Light Bulbs doesn’t do that, but it does give a good idea of what kind of things need to be involved in your calculations and where you can start looking for the information to complete that kind of assessment. There’s a very nice reference section at the back which I am sure I will have nerdy, nerdy fun with. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 2-07-2010, 5 user comments

First thoughts on the political

This year, with two elections in Victoria, Australia, it’s time to think about the political. Not that I ever stop thinking about it, given my past: the uncivil sixties, two communist parties, decades of feminism and a talismanic text, Bloch’s three volume The Principle of Hope, purchased from the International Bookshop as late as 1986.

Ah, the past. Or should that be ex-past? You know, the Python joke about ex-parrots. Sometimes that past seems just as stuffed, just as feather-dustery.

Still I’ve been mulling over ideas (new to me) on the political, ideas that shimmer the way mirages do on country roads in summer, elusively out there. But let’s forget for the moment about theory – Schmitt’s and Mouffe’s, and their interpreters. Let’s get down in the dirt where what happens happens, in a small coastal town on the Great Ocean Road at a community meeting. ... read more

Written by Sophia Always on 10-05-2010, 5 user comments

Collapsing societies

So I finally got around to reading Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Clearly I'm way behind the times, but the book is eight hundred pages long. Anyway, the central thesis of the book is that environmental factors, and the way people respond to them, can play a major role in the collapse of societies. The suggestion is not that environmental issues cause all societal collapses, but that if enough environmental pressure is placed on a society, if that pressure is not relieved or responded to in an appropriate way, societies can fail – and even cease to exist. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 19-04-2010, No comments

Water

I worry a lot lately about water.

It's a categorical fact that Australia is the driest inhabited continent on the planet. It's well known. We have a lot of droughts, and we have a lot of long droughts. We're affected by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and we're affected by the lesser known Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. New Guinea casts a rain-shadow over northern Australia. We have huge deserts that dry all the water out of any air that passes over them. Australia is just a bloody dry place.

So it's a pity that we're so ridiculously bad at conserving water.

Australia is the driest continent in the world, but per capita, Australians are among the top ten water users in the world. I consider this to be one of those crazy statistics that Australia comes up with once in a while just to mess with me; the last good one I heard was that Australia, the least forested country in the world, is also the biggest exporter of woodchips. Anyway. Most of the water that is used in Australia is used for agriculture; if my university lecturers are to be believed, the break-up of water use in Australia is about as follows: ten percent residential, twenty percent industrial, seventy percent agricultural. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 13-04-2010, 2 user comments

Sisters on the planet

Recent International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrations raised the question of what is the appropriate balance between celebrating successful Australian women, and the noteworthy achievements of women elsewhere who face great hardships.

Along with many others, I had the opportunity to celebrate the bravery and resilience of women depicted in a series of short films called Sisters on the Planet. These are stories of the achievements of women living with little access to essential resources.

The films are a result of an IWD collaboration between Sustainable Illawarra and Oxfam Australia (who support a group of women leaders fighting climate change in their communities). The informative and inspirational films depict the daily efforts and worries women face in providing for their families and communities. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 25-03-2010, 4 user comments

The elephant in the room

So lets get to it. I live outside the village of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales, on a property that overlooks Nimbin Rocks, a 40 million year-old geological formation that is a sacred site for the Bundjalung nation and was once a burial ground for the Clever Men of the Widjyabal people.

The Nimbin Rocks

Fortunately – and as odd as it may seem to say this – the Rocks are on private land, on one of the many local communes that ring Nimbin. Indigenous people still have access to the site, and are engaged in a large-scale bush regeneration project there, but the restricted access ensures that tourists are not free to climb the Rocks (and shit all over them), as is the case with Uluru. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 15-03-2010, 25 user comments