Climate, environment & energy

Some events in life bring home sharply how real it is. Like this morning. The cat pissing down one of the gas heating vents.

Those hopeful that a reshuffling of the ministry may bring justice for women, might remember that the current government has had a Minister for Climate Change for many years.

What Australia needs? Proper quarantine facilities, vaccine production capacity. What it's getting? A $600m white elephant gas-powered electricity generation plant, that nobody needs and which will drive prices higher.…

Climate change. The volume of combustion gases humanity has released into the atmosphere in the past two-and-a-half centuries; I think it hasn't really registered with many the scale of what's occurred. Take the 2019 mega-fires in…

Climate change is really humans consuming time. Using energy that took millions of years to accumulate, inside a few centuries. We focus on emissions, but those are symptoms, not causes. The cause of climate change is us wanting to be free…

#auspol a victory for coal farmers everywhere. https://t.co/EPWifMu1H8

#auspol the same script across the world, coming to Oz now too. Always a new flavour of 'live with the virus'. The same people and strategy as those who choose to live with climate change. Apologists for the privileged status quo.…

#COVID19Aus #auspol the dangerous delusion of maps. LGAs, like suburbs, are not physically bounded locations. They're administrative constructs. 'Ring-fencing' these rarely works, for that reason - beneath those boundaries, social…

#auspol #COVID19nsw workplaces a critical risk. Employers not bound by the public health orders on how many battery hens they cram into cubicle farms. Many telling staff they can't work from home, and to pay for their own masks.…

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g We tend to…

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#auspol the same calculations worldwide, on climate change too. Public policy driven by attempts to maintain fragile coalitions of reactionary and populist conservatives. NSW's Covid strategy the same. https://t.co/o5BmDO1HUr

#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the irrelevant and powerless resources of individuals. /1…

#covid19 'public health' reduces to the basics. Clean water, clean air, less crowding, sunshine. Industrial pollution was a symptom of an absence of concern about these basics. Pandemics the same, Covid came from filthy air, caused by…

#auspol #covid19aus one day the sun will explode and incinerate the entire solar system. One day journalists might need to actually know something about the topics they report on, to keep getting paid. https://t.co/jqZMcSQEQz

#auspol #covid19 if you feel that conservative politicians will continue to 'follow medical advice', remember they've happily ignored climate science for several decades. Their only use of expert advice is to keep hospital numbers…

#covid19 Eventually all debates if they continue return people to first premises of arguments and ideas. In this case, ideas in health care around individual vs collective have also collided with political ideas in the same area. . /1…

#covid19 #auspol just as climate change mostly isn't about the small actions you take at home, the pandemic also isn't mostly up to all of us. It's up to a handful of leaders to make strong decisions. Don't become the scapegoat for their…

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus a game for people in lockdown. Colour in the infected LGAs. A new LGA every day, sometimes 2 or 3. https://t.co/WnZaIoIwlq

#insiders Health Hazzard talking about ‘balance’, another strategic conservative word. They use it for climate change too, it means ‘we won’t actually act, to save the Economy’. Ask them to ‘balance’ the Economy with childcare, and wages,…

#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

#auspol sometimes I think we made the same mistake with climate change as we have with the pandemic. Emissions, like infections, are the symptom, not the cause. We need to understand what it is in our beliefs and lives that causes both, to…

@auspol what a treat today. NSW press conference where their failure to do anything is rationalised as being the public's fault. Again. Followed by the PM solemnly re-parroting his climate change slogans in relation to the IPCC. Who is…

#covid19aus #covid19nsw #auspol today’s pop quiz. Is this: A. a virus spreading across LGAs unprotected by government, or B. LGA after LGA succumbing to an outbreak of not following rules? https://t.co/TVrDK1Qx1v

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @CrabbBrendan what this chart suggests is that the ‘stronger’ restrictions in the 12 LGAS are essentially doing - nothing. Maybe slowing the same outcome, that’s all. They need to close workplaces.…

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#covid19 Covid is like an earthquake, a disaster mostly of the built environment. How many people work in a building where there are no opening windows? Hospitals almost universally now. Field hospital patients during Spanish Flu had much…

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

#auspol #covid19aus desperation everywhere, for vaccines to end it. Pathogens live in environments, that we create. Our ‘normal’ is that environment. It may be that only a fundamentally different way of life will defeat Covid. Climate…

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW moving to 'heroic' front-line workers phase. Standard libertarian playbook. Like the feds do with firies when their inaction on climate change incinerates whole towns. Put the last line of defence into the…

The vast majority of our ‘Blue Planet’ is as lifeless as any other lump of rock in space. It’s only that tiny, thin blue line that is alive. Climate change plays out in that thin blue line. The pandemic too. All about air.…

The definition of a pandemic is an epidemic that crosses international borders. In NSW Covid isn’t even an epidemic, it’s something that only happens in the poorer LGAs. https://t.co/0jf3jnIExW

#nswpol #auspol saying we need to learn to live with Covid, in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak, is like saying we need to learn to live with climate change by sending the firefighters home in the middle of bushfires.…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

#auspol Imagine if Australia had nuclear powered: - vaccine procurement - progressive taxation - funding to public universities, schools and hospitals - political donation laws - controls on political grants schemes - independent…

#auspol reckon the LNP realise solar panels are nuclear powered?

Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

NSW is preparing a Covid-saturated environment for them, to make them feel more at home. https://t.co/FpLMrdbs6E

#insiders Bananaby talking about protecting the coal industry, as our top export industry. Universities are another of our top export industries, and this government has already presided over more job losses there in the past year than are…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1…

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

Populist libertarianism thinks expressing your personal feelings = politics. Climate change and Covid say: yeh, nah. https://t.co/CVlmoq1NuK

#auspol #covid19aus in our slavish copying of the UK Covid strategy in NSW and Canberra, we’ve moved to the next step. Where experts ‘only advise’, and ‘it’s politicians who make the decisions’. Meaning they ignore the advice. Like they…

There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

#auspol ZeroCovid bad. Net-zero emissions bad. I’m seeing a connection. A War on Zero. Maybe it’s what a lot of them got on science tests, and the memory stings. https://t.co/VAiPsu4ftn

I’m surprised that the government’s climate strategy didn’t end up as a 70% or 80% towards net-zero target. #auspol

This entire pandemic has been about existing vested ‘economic’ interests doing everything in their power to undermine basic public health action. Just as they undermine climate action. Health systems should be the last line of defence, not…

The bushfires of summer 2019, and a way to think about climate change. The astronomical volumes of combustion gases produced by those fires, to put those into perspective. On average, every year for the past 263 years, humanity has…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think…

A hard question not being asked in the West. The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled both climate change and pandemic action, *is* the ‘plurality of belief’ we at the same time advertise as our democratic strength. Our deepest…

We can’t agree on emissions, or on Covid infections. We don’t talk about *why* we have emissions, or pandemics. It’s very difficult to make progress without getting to the why, on anything. Emissions and infections are only by-products of…

293 deaths yesterday in the UK. The government response: ‘get vaccinated’. The libertarians were always going to use vaccines like they use CCS for climate change - as a quick technical fix to restore business as usual. #auspol @RealOzSAGE…

Well done to the ABC for this digital journalism piece. It highlights the trap of believing too much that the daily political debate represents underlying realities. It rarely does, maybe more than 90% of the running and changing of the…

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

As we worship our big steel Gods returning to Kingsford Smith and Tullamarine, a basic stat about our travel obsession. An A380 burns 10-11 TONNES of fuel *per hour*. #auspol /1 https://t.co/31QlMZfcdK Flying on one of these babies to…

What’s the point of our lives? Grant captures the libertarian shift. We have no collective goals, only individual goals. Identity politics of the self. Why we can’t solve climate change, or Covid. All diversity, no unity. No unity *of*…

Drosten here says vaccination can prevent the development of endemic Covid. But can Covid ever be endemic? I see so much confusion over this, so a few questions for those who might know. /1 #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE @c_drosten…

Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

There’s that other critical libertarian strategy word. ‘Balance’. The one they use heavily for climate change. It means ‘do nothing’. https://t.co/kigYoSH2PH

We shouldn’t be surprised as one libertarian country after another surrenders meekly to Covid. We’ve seen how little they care about incinerating the only known life-supporting planet in the universe, through climate change. Covid was…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with everything here, for example I think social media is a response to…

Just a reminder that Covid and climate change are the same issue. Clean air. That thin blue line contains all known life in the universe. You can’t see the Economy from space. https://t.co/uYFquoIG7D

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short…

All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of…

Let’s just say, enough. The same vested interests who have blocked action against climate change have been sabotaging action against the pandemic. Every single day some new strategy, to stop basic public health work. If you’re in a fire,…

Public health action takes place within a society. But starting in the 1970s, society was replaced with an ‘Economy’. The greatest strategic political weapon ever conceived. Many honestly believe it’s an actual thing. As with climate…

If your way of life can’t cope with infectious diseases, the answer is to change your way of life. Like industrial farming, you don’t need to drench the livestock with antibiotics, you need to let them graze in a field. Living with…

SARS-Cov-2 is airborne. But I think it's more important to say, it's mostly STALE air-borne. Yes you can catch it outside, but it's much less likely. Like most respiratory viruses, it's primarily a disease of the built environment.

50 years of libertarianism. No meaningful action against pandemics, or climate change. Rampant inequality. Soaring cost of living, stagnant wages. ‘Getting government out of our lives’. Who put government *in* our lives? We did. To save us…

Democracy is failing not because politicians are rorting and lying and pursuing only what is popular. They've always done that. /1 #auspol https://t.co/4uoofWcyzn It's failing because all the checks and balances to control the populist,…

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

For populist governments, a 'problem' is defined as anything that they're responsible for inside a 3-year electoral cycle. Pretty clear what that means for problems like climate change, and pandemics.

If we were sequencing, or heck, even testing much, in NSW, we could trace this coming. As it is we’ll just potentially see an uptick in hospitalisations and deaths before the boss of the battery hen farm in Macquarie Street adds more…

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

I’d like a new ‘proportionate’ response to the pandemic. Those who argue for widespread infection of the population - 50% is a number bandied about - must demonstrate their commitment to this suggestion by exhibiting the proportionately…

Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol A common line was repeated, that 'business needs certainty'. Actually business doesn't need any more or less…

Cannon-Brookes could buy The Australian, Daily Telegraph, Foxtel, the Herald Sun, and Nine Entertainment , and have change compared to what he's prepared to offer for AGL. And shut them down. Would accelerate the transition to renewables…

Now the libertarian conservatives here and abroad are acting like the old cotton mill industrialists of the 19th century. It really is just unrestrained, naked battery hen farming for the masses. https://t.co/kZHKPgpgje

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move…

Some conservatives say technology will fix climate change. They say the same thing about ending wars. And yet despite the overwhelming technological might of Western powers, when was the last time we won a war? Kuwait? A triviality in…

As an ex-teacher, I’ve tried as well to point out that the NSW government was never going to take ventilation seriously in schools, when they still haven’t even bothered tor remove unflued gas heaters. We all remember these from our youth.…

What we’re seeing right now with Covid is the politics of privilege. Decades of living as if humans have no Earthly constraints, steadfastly refusing to be brought back to a life with sensible constraint. Climate change the same. Reality…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

I know the boomers are a disaster (teasing), but it's either them, or some climate thingy. https://t.co/W8fjhDsIXn

Let’s go back to public health as stopping people getting sick. Rather than the imported battery hen model of medicating the livestock just enough to keep them laying. https://t.co/rWF99RaeI2

Today’s virtual press conference question. “Prime Minister, how will your planned $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy find its way to aged care, roads, schools, hospitals, climate action and legal aid? A working bee for the well-to-do”?

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised.…

@simonahac do you see candidates on a stronger action against Covid platform as within the boundaries of Climate 200 eligibility, for funding? Given the close links between climate change and the growth of pandemics.

“More supply is the issue, not more regulation.” APPEA acting CEO, about the gas crisis. Lobbyists write most of our public policies now. The property lobby the same, ‘release more land’. Airlines, travel and business, ‘relax Covid…

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

Too much wasted time arguing science in this pandemic. We had public health systems and procedures tested over 2 centuries that knew exactly how to beat Covid. The reason they didn’t isn’t scientific, it’s political. It’s the same politics…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

The LNP's 'just pick up a phone and call the gas companies' response to the energy crisis reveals that they had them on speed dial for the past 9 years. Which is why we have no energy policy.

#insiders ‘baseload power’ isn’t a basic amount of energy we can draw upon for basic things. It’s the amount of energy we need to consume to prevent having to turn coal-fired power stations off overnight. $$ to restart them. It’s a metric…

Climate denialism was the seed bed of Covid denialism. Climate deniers are now using the ‘wind and solar farms use a lot more minerals than a gas or coal plant’ spin. A log fire uses less than both. It’s a meaningless distraction, and…

Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart?…

Personal responsibility health = 6000 Australians dead this year. Personal responsibility gas and electricity = no gas or electricity. I’m seeing a pattern.

Angus Taylor on SKY saying the energy crisis is all about supply. Supply to a modern conservative always means just doing what the vested interests in the industry in question want i.e. more of what they’re selling. ‘Pick up the phone’,…

I thought of George Monbiot’s critical piece when discussions about energy needed to run electric cars came up on Q&A this week. We don’t question mobility itself. That mobility is dislocation, fundamentally anti-social. Cars are…

I like to track the politics of language. Right now the climate change denial monkeys are keen on 'we're not there yet', when referring to battery storage. By which they mean we can't store gigawatts of power to replace a power station.…

Whether it’s climate, Covid or abortion, very loud minorities are holding sway over majority and expert opinion. That’s because the loud minorities understand political strategy, and the majority don’t. It’s smoke and mirrors, a massive…

Planet Earth is like most planets, stone dead. It's that shimmering, gaseous, tiniest veneer of blue that is the difference. Air. Engineered by living things. What the Economy attacks, through climate change and now Covid. Dumb, hey.…

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

Climate change deniers concocted a deliberate Steve Bannon-type strategy to ‘flood the zone with shit’. Overwhelm and disorient the public discussion with junk science. This is exactly what Covid minimisers are doing now. Arguing ‘the…

Some mock 'Zero Covid' as an ambition, telling people it means 'no Covid'. It should be called Net Zero Covid, like net zero for climate. Still Covid in pockets, but balanced by control elsewhere. It's how we manage pretty much all…

Climate and Covid deniers are often the same people. They already support carbon capture and storage. A simple HEPA air purifier will do Covid capture and storage. Not a giant leap for mankind.

Broken record, but the options to beat Covid aren't: 1. government spends tens of billions more, or 2. the public accepts mass infection. We've been played, as we were for climate change. The answer is: 3. business funds the basic WHS,…

Where we are now with Covid, with calls for ‘personal responsibility’, is a road we already travelled with climate change. Not a coincidence, the same fuckers using the same strategies. Collective problems as individual problems IS…

One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

Climate deniers talk about 'baseload' power. Which they think means minimum supply, when in fact it means minimum demand before you have to start switching off power stations. Look at this, solar panels in Australia may remove baseload…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

Superannuation is lucky to give a 5% return on investment (ROI) over 15 years. Installing solar panels on your house can give you a ROI of several *hundred* percent over the same period of time. It’s so far ahead of any other way to invest…

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

Respiratory pandemics are like earthquakes, disasters that are almost entirely an artefact of the built environment. All fixable, if made a priority. https://t.co/3kF1nrIByG

When you read the history of public health, governments invented it to DO the ‘weighing up’. It’s spin that public health is something to be ‘balanced’ against ‘economic’ considerations. Like climate balanced against the Economy.…

The plundering of Australia's gas reserves by fossil fuel multinationals is populism at its finest. The royalties? We're giving it away. How did this happen? Politicians signed contracts they didn't understand. They bypassed the officials…

Every time we hear claims that countries must spend X% of GDP on defence, I’m reminded of the power of defence industries as lobbyists. And gas companies of course argued for a ‘gas-led recovery’. Outside the main superpowers, when was the…

The first privatised pandemic can learn from multiple privatised wars. Most modern wars, like Ukraine, are really big trade shows for private arms manufacturers. Major powers become vehicles for the introduction of new products from the…

Watching the UK news about the terrible drought in Europe. In the UK ‘water companies’ are asked to take a range of measures. Another basic service, privatised. Why can’t basics like education, health, water and energy be not-for-profit?…

This seems some sort of counter to those who argue against controls and protections in education environments. https://t.co/KqjfEwa9zS

Cost of living is exploding at the same time in history nearly everything can be provided to people at zero cost. Inflation is really vested interests trying desperately to retain profit margins in the face of that fact. Energy will be…

Australia exports more than 70% of its agricultural produce. Also easily the greatest source of environmental destruction in Australia. We’d be so much better off closing most of our farms, and opening a lot more mines. Both are…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

We miss how Oz politics really works. Australians act as a community. All through the 20+ years of federal LNP resistance to renewables, Australians ignored their bullshit and as a community installed our own solar, at world record pace.…

The Covid minimisers used the climate change denial script almost to the letter. And we still get bogged down seeing it as a health/science issue, as we also debate climate science. That was the strategy, to distract us from the true…

The masses organising to not pay energy bills isn’t the ‘personal responsibility’ the neolibs had in mind, I’m guessing. They prefer the personal responsibility of going to work in a shit, low-paid job, to get infected with Covid.…

NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj One of the most telling…

Most Covid minimisers believe in Covid, it’s just that they want to privatise it. Like they have education, energy, childcare, water and other non-pandemic health care. The Covid debacle is just the latest privatisation debacle. The…

We’re not living with Covid, we’re ignoring it. Like we live with domestic violence, inequality, crumbling public infrastructure, and runaway climate change.

Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining…

The moment questioning of Covid inaction gains traction somewhere, the denialism media immediately launch a counter-offensive. (The Torygraph in this case.) Ditto for climate. The ‘hardline’ article called for basic public health action in…

When politicians want individuals to take individual responsibility for core services like energy or education, they produce sites like this to maximise the information consumers have. With Covid they shut the information down. They don't…

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

Since WW2, we've experienced prosperity and peace probably without parallel in history. The prosperity was largely re-purposed massive war industry, and fossil fuel driven. The refusal to fight Covid is the outcome of that 80 years feeling…

The pretty impressive results from UV air disinfection makes me think light itself should be a much bigger public health topic. It’s not just about air. It’s about the built environment, which is hugely about light too.

Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with…

Australia’s Head of State needs to be…Australia. The landscape, for want of a better word. Indigenous people see themselves as part of it, and even a European scientific culture is discovering its agency. Nations that don’t re-ground in…

In the wave after wave of minimising Covid fairytales, ‘it will become endemic’ is the equivalent of the climate war’s ‘the climate is always warming, it’s a natural process’.

As with climate change, the reason big money has torpedoed public health attempts to suppress Covid is that the people with the deep pockets are planning to be free of any danger. If you’re a patsy on their payroll, even well down the…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

While technology is never simple determinism, gig economy software and also social media software were spawned in the highly libertarian environment of the US. They act as enablers of that social context when introduced in other countries,…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

The embarrassing failure of democracies on climate change and now Covid has to force a re-think of the idea that complex societies are best run by popularity contest, which we call elections. It worked while those elected were guided by…

John Birmingham points out to pro-nukes conservatives, that the Vogtle plant in Georgia is the only nuclear power plant under construction in the US. It’s years behind schedule, and its initial cost of $21 billion has blown out to $42…

A great example of the disconnect between the hot air in daily political discourse and realities out on the ground is renewable energy. I’m not sure many Australians realise the utter phenomenon it already is in Australia. The AEMO stats…

Arguing the bleedingly obvious, that we’re in a pandemic and it’s killing millions of people, is the strategy. Like spending decades arguing that climate change isn’t real. It’s delay, not debate. Tying sane and good people in time-wasting…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

The magnitude of how screwed we likely are with climate change. The amount of heat that's accumulated in the oceans in the past decade is the equivalent of exploding 5 Hiroshima bombs in the water every SECOND, every day since 1990.

The same genius ideologues who privatised generation here then blocked a transition to renewables for decades. Now nothing to stop these mostly foreign-owned generators from shutting down their stranded fossil assets, with zero care for…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

I know some suspect me of having drunk the authoritarian Kool Aid, by suggesting we abolish elections. But I often Tweet about how societies are now modelled after high schools, and their popularity networks. It's not an analogy. Elections…

One climate minimising strategy is to say renewable technologies need a lot more rare earth metals (they do), so they're unrealistic. This is Australian extraction of rare earths in tonnes. Ignoring populist hot air for a decade.…

Missed this in The Australian back in August. No need to build nuclear reactors, there’s a huge one up in the sky sending us energy for free. Science, hey. https://t.co/V5S52tqlw3

As Saul Griffith says, the cheapest energy in the world is Australian rooftop solar. There’s a lesson in that. While elected ideologues dithered, the Australian community started solving the energy problem without them. The community is…

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

Have read much of the report now. There's lots that's good in here. But a private review of a public health emergency says everything that's wrong with the Western Covid response. Failures from 2021-on are mentioned but not really…

Election results and polls won’t tell you who leads. Statistics will tell you the real story, these from the Australia Institute for example. The LNP still say the answer to the energy crisis is to ‘pick up the phone to the gas companies’.…

Yep, but it surprises me that nobody is suggesting funding the poorest households (and even others) to add solar panels and batteries to their homes. Can be installed in a single day, and unlike a rebate creates ongoing generation and…

Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

NSW was the advance guard in destroying Australia's then public health strategy, which was working brilliantly. This was all about politics, and keeping the NSW cabinet unified. Just as federally the LNP sabotaged climate action to create…

We now know you can’t vote your way out of a pandemic. Just as we haven’t been able to vote our way out of climate change. Voting serves only politicians, not societies. If you have to try to make something popular to get it done, nothing…

It makes as much sense to say we can choose to live with Covid as to say we can choose to live with runaway climate change. Existential realities care diddly squat about what we prefer.

The Australian community has been smashing the rest of the world in energy transition to renewables. Our current crisis is entirely due to elected fools providing no infrastructure to use this tsunami of renewable energy. Elections are the…

How many years did politics deny climate change? It’s surprising that we’ve been so amazed that the same politicians decided to ignore Covid. And that we didn’t notice them encouraging debates over ‘the science’, in the same way. To stall…

I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political…

The LNP’s ‘just pick up the phone to the gas companies’ is one of the most hilariously open admissions that your donors own you I’ve ever seen. #insiders

Always follow the money. The International Energy Agency predicts a doubling of net income for oil and gas producers in 2022, to US$4 trillion. Any guess who’s funding the ‘live with the virus’ and anti-climate propaganda with their loose…

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

We need to learn from decades of strategic stalling on climate change, by arguing ‘the science’. I don’t even argue the science of Covid, it’s so patently obvious that infecting everybody repeatedly with a pathogenic virus is idiotic.…

Today I’ve had close friends send me two lots of climate-minimising rubbish, both sourced from YouTube. Social media platforms are engine rooms of social destruction, despite the positives they also have. They must be strongly regulated,…

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate…

This is a regulator. A gas regulator. It regulates the flow of gas so you don’t incinerate your family and house when cooking a bbq. That’s what regulation means, to apportion, to enable. Politicians who remove regulations, like mandates,…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

The fossil fuel industry won again. We ended up with a Covid strategy for climate change this time. They take turns. The only significant progress seems mitigation for the most vulnerable, like for Covid. It will probably not happen too,…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

Journalists don’t point out the obvious use of the same strategies across both climate and Covid. COP27 agreed to little except ‘protecting the vulnerable’, to give rich nations an excuse to do nothing. Like with Covid. That protection…

The people who swear the best way to manage energy is to keep shipping tens of billions of dollars offshore every year to buy it from Texans and the Arab states, also say the best way to beat a pandemic is to do nothing about it. And they…

Australia 2022. Where a workplace has compulsory drug and alcohol testing, which requires people to remove any mask they're wearing, in an enclosed environment with a production line of staff coming in and out.

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

“It’s time to consider removing decisions about climate change from the short-term political cycle.” Let’s add Covid to that list. Elections are destroying civilisation. https://t.co/9E1LVEvLdF

What using popularity (elections) to drive society's decisions does. A simple calculation of home-grown almost free energy, versus buying it from overseas at the cost of tens of billions per year, while incinerating the planet, comes down…

Limited action on climate and Covid, even with changed winners at elections, shows how democracy has been gamed. The conservatives win long-term not by winning elections, but by manipulating what is popular. That way even their opponents…

It alarms me that ‘autonomy’ is being used in a high-risk care environment in this way. Of course aged care residents have autonomy, that’s a straw man. If you’re a HCW, this is helping residents choose safe options that don’t risk death,…

In any field, or even any part of life, the truth of what’s going on is extremely unlikely to be the most obvious thing. If this wasn’t true, everybody would be a genius. I remember that with climate and Covid. None of the popular…

One of my areas of expertise is political strategy. We’re losing against Covid for the same reason we lost against climate change. We’re mistaking politics for a scientific debate. That debate is a fiction, minimisers only use it to…

It’s a very complex task fixing energy without cutting off the rich vein of money from donors. https://t.co/d8pipzSROO

Nothing will be done against Covid. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the inexorable march of the economy. COP27 proved that too, with climate change. The ‘economy’ is a fiction created by economists and politicians to protect the status…

Why can't we fight Covid? The Economy. Why can't we fight climate change? The Economy. Imagine inventing something that is no use to society in its greatest need, and then making it the entire basis for your society. https://t.co/korw4uCQH2

Imagine telling a tradie cutting in a dusty environment that their mask represented their anxiety, rather than their safety. Many of them in fact wouldn't wear one, unless required to. It's called public health, and WHS.…

Using elected leaders (popularity) to solve an energy problem is like taking a poll of the passengers to fly a plane, rather than using a pilot. https://t.co/csWPiJIl33

Covid minimisers trotted out false balance early in the pandemic ('balancing' public health action against the economy). It's what they'd already been doing with climate change for decades. It's the same people. We've spent 3 years trapped…

Electricity generators in NSW often have contracts with local coal mines to supply at a set rate. Just curious how a cap on coal prices impacts that, anybody know?

There are only two ways to meaningfully control energy prices. One is to make it a public resource again and regulate it. Politicians won’t even regulate against a virus, so no to that. The other is generate it yourself. Can’t see this…

Go electric, get your own solar panels. The fossil fuel industry fluffers we elect are so symbiotically dependent upon donations that the planet will be incinerated before real change happens. https://t.co/MO2fiGLn23

Have lost track of the number of false dawns this technology has created. Even if they have done this, it’ll be under highly controlled, hugely expensive lab conditions. It won’t be any help against climate change, though it’ll be used by…

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

AEMO’s graph. Look at that tsunami of rooftop solar. By 2025 already, so much that it will threaten the stability of the grid. Exports throttled already to prevent overload, at a time existing energy companies say ‘supply’ is the issue. 2…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international community pre-existed nations, who were invented at the Peace of…

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

The Tories are allowing the NHS to collapse. They despise it because it’s State-run. They’re doing what Maggie Thatcher did to trains and coal mines, to health. Here in Oz we still shell out billions per year to prop up private health…

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that this is is what PH was designed to do, to do that balancing.…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

This is what ‘endemic’ has always meant. The disease left over when the privileged are safe. The privileged aren’t living with the virus, they try to live in gated, safe environments. They mean the rest of us have to live with it, in a…

Fires, floods and now Covid. Making society an economy omits the basic act of sheltering from a threat. If the economy collapses unless you infect everybody repeatedly, it’s a failed social model. With climate change this will be the…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

A shorter way to explain why nothing is being done to beat the pandemic, is to point out that under current politics nothing is being done to fix any public problem. Education, health, roads, climate change etc. The politics that rejects…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly…

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

Populist politics, where we believe that politicians run countries (and not the thousands of expert officials they employ), has hit roadblocks in every direction. Faced with hugely complex issues to solve, it has nothing except symbolic,…

The class of society doing this are descended from those who sent kids down coal mines. https://t.co/mqcsut2emO

After 30 years of anti-renewables politics, the Oz community has built so much rooftop solar capacity, it’s overwhelmed the grid’s capacity to distribute it. (AEMO graphic.) Oz politics functions via community, not by Left, Right,…

We’re at Yes Minister’s 4th stage of denial with energy as well as Covid. Where the deliberate blockers of essential public infrastructure and administration now use the results of that blocking to argue against fixing the damage, saying…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

The new strategy to pretend to be the champion of the poor your own policies screw relentlessly. With climate change, and also Covid, where forcing infected people to work is sold as looking out for the interests of the poor, who would…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

There’s that balance word again. There’s nothing on the other side of the scales at all. It’s 100% economy, 0% Covid. Just as ‘balanced’ action on climate was always 100% action on the economy, and 0% action on climate. It’s standard…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

The Project running a story on kids not wanting to go back to school. A problem of ‘lockdowns’. No, school is a hostile environment for a lot more children than we’ve bothered to understand, and the pandemic made that visible. Just as…

Those confident that democracy = elections, and elections deliver ‘the will of the people’, might explain how we spent a decade with the previous government actively working against the clear public preference to act hard on climate…

There are 3 masks in this photo, that I spotted. Dr Ryan of course. But the other 2 tell a more interesting story. Parliamentary staff have been required to mask in this pandemic. Like many parliaments, the level of protection for…

Australian politics is communitarian (look it up). Not capitalist, socialist, Left or Right. All through the climate war decades, Australians ignored the BS and went about installing an entire new national electricity generation system…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

Inflation/cost of living driven by high energy prices. Desperate need for emissions reduction. The answer is obvious. Electrify households. Households already built massive solar PV. Now subsidise them to electrify all of their appliances…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

As always, Yes Minster got there first. Buying nuclear deterrents. https://t.co/qNsoGsYbad

It’s not the planet, Earth, that contains the only known life in the universe. It’s the atmosphere, itself created by living things. That tiny, thin blue line. Unique in our known universe. Sustains us, shields us from asteroids and…

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

The projected money on nuclear subs for Australia is about 13,000 times the money allocated (on a competitive grants basis, across multiple infrastructure categories) to Australian schools to fix their ventilation.

Nuclear subs. Like a week-long episode of Utopia. #InsidersABC

Those who say renewables don’t work ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’, also don’t suggest we use them when the sun does shine and the wind blows. We live in a sloganocracy.

The shift to a market-economy fractured all collective attention and energy into millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Any sense of a larger social project was lost. Reality isn’t fooled. It’s now presenting us with an invoice for that 70-year…

The end of cheap money and cheap fossil fuels. The two biggies. Brace position. https://t.co/3xVF19GtjV

We’re at least 30 years too late. Governments won’t fight Covid for the same reason they won’t fight climate change. The transformation of societies into economies, complete decades ago. We missed it. No amount of health data has even the…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

You can't unsee it. An economy, plus 'experience and energy'. That's it. Amazed he called it a 'state', I guess that's a dismantling still in progress. Though not capitalised, so he probably meant the state of being the elected government.…

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

We fixed the GFC by ‘going households’. Australians re-built electricity generation in this country in the past 30 years at the household level. Electrification of households addresses cost of living as well as climate change. Fast. The…

Climate change shows how our current way of running democracy will lead to our extinction. The action needed in the next 5-10 years won’t happen, if we retain a politics based on the team sports of placating human interests. Only a…

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

Given our experience with climate denialism over the past 30 years, why have we spent this pandemic arguing the facts? We already knew that wasn’t going to work. Good people are always miles behind the bad, strategically.

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ makes the excellent point that climate action isn’t just adding renewables to our lives. It’s an entirely new Industrial Revolution. That’s the best way to sell it to the existing status quo, as a new opportunity to make big…

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it does across the board. Was speaking with an insurer and…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

I’m almost completely disinterested in what any politician is doing or not doing, saying or not saying. Team sports politics is a distraction, the thinnest veneer of hot air overlaid upon actual, physical problems. Electoral politics was…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

A survey was asking if electricity should be publicly owned. Actually everything already is. We're a Common-wealth. The State invented the 'private sector', in law. The free-marketers are too stupid to understand. Just as the UN creates…

Who remembers the National Covid Coordination Commission? The ‘gas-led recovery’ folks, not coincidentally often fossil fuel executives. That’s a true voice to parliament, fossil fuel dollars. In fact it replaced parliament itself. The LNP…

The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges off LNP non-policy with values-based capitalism (a laughable…

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy,…

Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

When the solution to a major social problem is said to be ‘more supply’, you know parasitic economic interests have captured the regulatory system. Gas, now housing. Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the market economy.…

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

The thing not often said about fracking is that it represents the death spiral of the fossil fuel industry. All the easy sources of oil and gas are gone. https://t.co/Ll2yYeYGai

Completely separately to the team sports tedium of monarchy vs republic, if royals are becoming irrelevant, what is now 'relevant' instead? Democracies where we ignore pandemics and climate change? The King is a stronger advocate for…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nobody leads, and they even discuss that they may need that.…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

Ha! Was one of the mistakes with climate science to use temperature rather than heat as the measure? The temperature rises people equate with a minor shift on any day, a degree or two. The amount of HEAT it takes to shift global…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

“I think we have the balance right”. If a politician says this, it means “this is as far as the focus group polling and party donors will allow us to go.” Two things will prevent action on Covid, climate change or anything else. /1 1) The…

Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school opening windows, with upper opening clerestory windows and/or…

Australia's communitarian (not capitalist, not socialist) politics is best seen in community-driven change, like the massive installation of solar panels, and Clean Up Australia Day. It's a unique model that no party is tapping into. It's…

A termitarium does something astonishing. It dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. It’s beautifully ventilated, but also protective from the elements, and maintains a stable temperature. It repurposes air and water as…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

I think a quick fix here would be $300 billion+ worth of nuclear submarines, and about $200 billion in tax cuts to the top end of town. https://t.co/9UAD5dRXs5

It took a property developer in this piece to finally speak the truth of what’s happening with housing. Amusingly, everyone calling for more supply (as the gas industry does too) is what’s sending builders to the wall, and driving prices…

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

Why didn’t we act sooner against climate change? The economy wouldn’t allow it. Why aren’t we acting against Covid? The economy won’t allow it. Higher wages? Economy says no. Flexible working conditions? No. Seeing the pattern? A made-up…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

Saul Griffiths and others told the Albanese government this. They listened to the fossil fuel industry instead. Go households. Fix the ‘economy’ and inflation and cost of living, in one go. The economy is households, not businesses.…

There’s only one way knowledge and expertise has ever had political power. By the invention of a public or civil service. Ask Archimedes. The reason our greatest scientists on Covid and climate are ignored by politicians is that…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

The only functioning voice to parliament (the fossil fuel industry) won again. The industry captured our political class years ago, it has elected numpties from both sides rabbit on about ‘supply’ i.e. more of what the industry produces…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

SA Premier on RN this morning parroting talking points from the property industry on housing 'supply'. As all National Cabinet do on gas as well. The surest sign of regulatory capture is the word 'supply'. Where the 'solution' is more of…

In this movie, when the Earth was faced with a catastrophe, did it hastily run elections in every country to see what was the most popular thing to do? Even Hollywood would see that as ridiculous. But here we are. Trying to vote our way…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

I often think that the perfect way to feel the stranglehold popularity politics has over reality is best seen in the way humans actually argue whether to turn sand, wind and sunshine into renewable, clean energy. Pause and think how insane…

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

We’re not winning on climate. And certainly not on Covid. None of these problems can be solved with popularity politics. It doesn’t matter who we vote for or the quality of the politician, action will always be focused on the ‘next vote’,…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

Maybe there was a typo somewhere in the budget papers, 'renewable infection' instead of 'renewable energy'. I remember innumerates telling me cumulative death curves can only ever go up. No, they can be flat. Like ours was, with public…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

The amount of heat added to the oceans by anthropogenic climate change in the past 150 years is the equivalent of exploding 7 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. 1.5 of them every second, for the past 150 years. https://t.co/pT1KYfOcwM

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

Hey travel folk, ‘experience’ climate change firsthand. Your flights will even add a decimal point or two to the warming. https://t.co/2EJx26D8LU

Those who want to be activists for Covid action could simply refuse to hop on a plane, to anywhere. That will strongly limit spread of the virus, and also address climate change, in one action. I guarantee the idiot passion to travel will…

Friends in northern Europe tell me there’s a big push from the rich in southern Europe to move further north, to escape the heat. Reality-based politics, the ‘debates’ on climate change are a sideshow funded by the rich, to mask their…

Even without a pandemic air quality in rooms should be an issue. I worked with un-flued gas heaters in hot stuffy rooms as a teacher, with people nodding off. Yesterday’s training hit 2500 ppm, and was still climbing when I got the door…

The deep links between our schools and our wider culture. For Covid and climate, those who went to exclusive schools increasingly make the decisions, and create enclaves (as their schools were and are) from harm. It's social, not…

Insurance is an individual risk measure. It's all that's left when politicians do no risk mitigation, for climate change or Covid. Watch them line up to blame insurers. As they do central banks, for implementing the monetarism politicians…

That’s the function of social media. To endlessly distract and divert energy from actual change. It’s owned by billionaires, isn’t this obvious? https://t.co/Whk69lnj3m

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

The LNP still on about ‘baseload power’. Baseload means the minimum amount of power we need to USE, to stop us having to turn coal plants off and on daily, which is hugely expensive. There’s so much rooftop solar right now, by 2025 it…

Alan Kohler notes here that climate change isn’t in the RBA mandate. We’ll fix climate change when we recognise it for what it is, a brand new industrial revolution, that will drive down carbon pollution and supercharge the economy.…

Politicians prattle on about the ‘independence’ of central banks. We also have independent expertise for bushfires, pandemics and climate change. They should be running the responses, with the elected at a respectful distance, as in this…

State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team…

Covid and climate change are two things the travel industry is a major cause of. Our travel culture needs to ‘come into land’, as Bruno Latour said. It needs to be grounded again. An end to a culture of disconnection, dislocation and…

Let’s dissolve both houses of parliament indefinitely. Let the public service run the country, and emergency teams led by experts to deal with Covid and climate change. Have citizen assemblies for public input. https://t.co/T1ybon9Aw1

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the…

Australians should be able to buy as much vastly overpriced gas they already own from foreign companies as they like. Or something. https://t.co/hHfwsvUkAD

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

The problem with housing is not supply. Just as it isn’t the problem with gas. That’s spin invented by the housing and gas industries, who want to sell more houses and gas. The problem is the collapse of public housing. And public energy,…

The genius of Gravity was to replace space, with place. The movie makes you feel the void at the heart of our culture. The absence of place. William Shatner when returning from orbit said the ‘final frontier’ is really the Earth beneath…

Another perfect example of how 'lockdowns' never ended. They were privatised. When governments surrendered responsibility for housing and energy, both were privatised. The same has now happened for public health. 'Living with' a pandemic…

The headline is accurate, it has nothing to do with science or climate change. It’s electoral differentiation. The survival of civilisation is at the whim of these ridiculous popularity contests. All that matters is beating the other team.…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement. We misunderstand it as ‘economic’. Massive social problems are…

If we're discussing the science of Covid and climate change, we've already lost. It's never been the role of the public to digest the technicalities of major social issues. They have representative bodies to do that for them. The science…

If you argue to reduce transmission of Covid, and action on climate change, as you should, look at your own travel as a place to start. Listening to people talk about their 2 month stay in Europe, where they contemplate the disasters…

Thanks to @_PH___PH_ for sharing this thread of Kevin Anderson talking about how we misconceive climate change (and I would say Covid too) as something we’re all doing. Most of us are not doing it. I’ve Tweeted for years how talk of ‘the…

Cutting flights by only 2.5% per year would bring rapid neutralisation of the global warming contribution from aviation. Even maintaining current levels of flights (zero growth) would be a powerful intervention. I wouldn’t bet your life…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

I doubt the LNP actually believe nuclear is the answer, because on every measure it laughably isn’t. It’s a straw man designed to start a fight, to create two opposing teams. This is how populism operates. Zero interest in actual issues,…

Reality-based politics. Insurance prices risk. If politicians do nothing to combat risks, for climate or Covid for example, insurance will go up or be removed entirely. (Check your communicable disease exclusions on your own policy.) Votes…

The economy thinks the Covid pandemic’s greatest tragedy was not having people crammed into rooms together at the office. I’ve witnessed these celebrations firsthand, like we’re all supposed to be grateful to be back in the battery hen…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than…

This is the case nearly every day in Australia now. During the day wholesale electricity is not just free, its price is actually negative i.e. generators *pay* wholesalers to take electricity. At the same time retail electricity prices…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

The total reversal of where we get our electricity from, in only 5 years. In 2018 (summer) non-renewables were more than double renewables. Only 5 years later, the mix is reversed. *With* a sabotaging government in charge. Australians will…

We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic, and we’ll have to ‘socialise the losses’ there over the next…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

We saw this ignoring of expertise for 30 years, with climate change. And then we were surprised when the same playbook was used for Covid. https://t.co/nln3zwhHRp

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

So often the anti-everything (climate and Covid action, referendum changes) people remind me of Homer Simpson's gang assaulting people with sacks full of doorknobs. https://t.co/E6LeAg8uJD

There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big solar and wind input. But why is the lowest demand point also…

The renewable transition is stumbling. It’s not too late to follow the Rewiring Australia lead and go households, with solar. The biggest emitters in the country. Immediate bill relief for households. Big cuts in emissions. Oz solar is…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

The immune system for Covid is the exact equivalent of insurance for climate damage. Both individual risk mitigations for what are actually collective problems. Both are ‘small government’ politics, not science.

Talk about ‘balancing’ water use in the Murray-Darling basin between economic, social and environmental uses is the same bullshit balance of economy vs climate change, and economy vs Covid. Weasel words. These aren’t separate domains to…

Worth pointing out every day that 'balancing' the economy against public health action led very quickly to 100% action for the economy, and 0% for Covid. A politician who uses the word 'balance' is lying, always. Climate change already…

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too…

Exactly right. As for the GFC, ‘go households’. This also has a macro effect, because energy is a grid, so both local and global at the same time. Nothing would transform the country faster, including cost of living. https://t.co/CYH7srQnMr

Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Households drive the economy, businesses are just rent-seekers. Try…

What’s happening in the US is a new industrial revolution. Which is EXACTLY what we need to fix climate change and Covid. No ‘balance’ required, what we call economies have always boomed when we fixed major social problems. Those…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production through supply and demand markets is mythology. All of it reliant…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

It’s not normal to hop between countries, all year, every year, whenever the whim takes us. To fly between capital cities like you’re taking a bus down to the library. If we converted monetary prices to energy consumed, we might progress…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

The real joy of Spring weather, where you can finally open every door and window in the house without refrigerating everything inside. Safe, fresh air all day. That tiny blue line remains the only known life in the universe. Both Covid and…

Self-regulation is the economic equivalent of masturbation. Sometimes it happens, but even then only one party benefits. Banks, energy… https://t.co/GkucSwvRgR

Some stories ram home the unreality. The debate over Qatar and airfares. In a sane society the air travel debate would be an energy debate, not an airfare debate. Only 2-4% of the world fly internationally. About 1% of the world is…

While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because of groups. Groups are one ‘phase’ of individual life. Like…

Even if you adopt the economic view of the world, if you see societies as economies, all major problems like climate change and Covid are really just rent-seeking old technologies protecting a nearly 300-year-old industrial revolution,…

The ‘economy’ has been duping us for years. Daylight Saving Time again. It wasn’t invented to save energy (it doesn’t). It was promoted by business (the economy) as a way to give working people a perception of having more leisure time,…

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

The Albanese government needs to GO HOUSEHOLDS, who are smashing records as always. As @GriffithSaul has suggested. Add subsidies for batteries and more appliances. The centralised generation and transmission line focus is old-energy…

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

Sunak’s Tories are jettisoning much of their climate change action, in favour of ‘practical’ net zero. There’s one of those weasel words, like ‘balance’. Means do nothing. In ‘balancing’ Covid action against the economy, can anybody…

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

If meekly surrendering to a pandemic and climate chaos isn’t clear proof that ‘the economy’ is a toxic cultural model, what else would be? Astounding that it’s still seen as some form of immutable baseline of living.

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

The AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics reports are a wonderful example of the sort of rich information that never makes it through the fog of populist bullshit we call politics. https://t.co/3ZTPKAS21J

Hidden by all the polly waffle of the referendum, Australia hit a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricity came from renewables, around lunch time. That number projected to hit 100% by 2025, less than 2 years’ away.…

So far the people we vote for have fucked up climate change, Covid, and now Indigenous recognition. The constant there is voting, that mechanism fails at every hurdle. Time for reality-based politics. 2+2 = 4, irrespective of how popular 4…

The peak energy problem, where we get big surges morning and evening, has a lot to do with the structure of our working day. The economy creates a lot of the problem. WFH mitigates it. https://t.co/5pIdaRo54f

I love that reality carries on mostly oblivious to what social media thinks, about anything. For example energy companies rushing to solar and wind and storage, because it’s hugely profitable for them. While morons sit here every day…

@simonahac @GriffithSaul are you seeing much appetite in Australia yet for the idea of virtual transmission lines, using battery storage to replace some transmission? Quite different to a VPP model? https://t.co/Fme0QJZKxs…

Storage is increasingly the solution to energy grid upgrades. Much faster and cheaper than building thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines. Already happening out on the ground. Social media will mobilise resistance to every…

Fossil fuels are just buried solar energy. It's all solar, whether you choose oil, gas and coal (stored solar), or use today's sunlight directly. But you don't need to extract, transport and refine today's sunlight. You can store it too,…

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

Imagine historians writing about our age. ‘In the early 21st century many humans actively fought against cheap, almost free, pollution-free energy, and advocated entire populations being infected with pandemic viruses.’

We’re getting nowhere with Covid talking about health and disease. The rich buy enclaves for that. This is really a story about clean air. Look at how (regular) amendments there stalled over 30 years ago, in the US. The same time climate…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

What 'reality-based politics' means, have a look at our shift to renewables. All through the years of LNP anti-renewables drivel, we were shifting anyway. Reality was ignoring them. Voting didn't do this. It only speeds or slows…

'Uber' energy is coming. Peer-to-peer energy sharing, disintermediating existing retailers. Where your solar surplus can be sold-on to others in the community, directly. Solar owners as 'prosumers'. https://t.co/OhVbgQRLuf

We could dramatically accelerate the renewables transition if we stopped trying to keep the old poles-and-wires system by swapping out only the generators. Batteries are a paradigm-shift. They can even replace some transmission lines, in…

We’ve spent 30+ years talking about the science of climate change. Almost none of that talk changed our politics. Politics is about creating the stories that make the global individual. That’s what the opponents of climate change action…

There are signs the government understands that its only path to renewables in the time required is to target households. Electrify households, and install batteries at every scale. Will also address cost of living. Everything else will be…

The fastest way to head off this latest LNP wrecking exercise is to continuously ask Dutton and Littleproud which communities they plan to install the nuclear reactors in, and which communities will be getting the waste. Fight populist…

If you shift to reality-based politics (not team sports politics), it’s clear the shift to renewables would happen even if there were no climate change threat. Follow the money. Nuclear the only technology getting MORE expensive (*wave to…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

Air pollution from burning fossil fuels kills 3.6 million people globally every year. This is 6-times the annual death toll of all murders, war deaths, and terrorist attacks combined. https://t.co/6bt26aGzzo

The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

For every litre of fuel you put in an ICE vehicle, about 700 ml goes out the exhaust as wasted heat. They're hopelessly inefficient. Put the same energy in an EV that you have in a tank of petrol or diesel, and the EV will travel thousands…

Governments are struggling to build new transmission lines and solar and wind farms to bring renewable energy to households and businesses, at the same time as those households and businesses are already generating it on their roofs. The…

Virtual transmission (using batteries to replace many transmission lines) and consumer energy trading (like 'Uber'-Energy, where you sell your excess solar to other consumers in a consumer market) are on the AEMO and government radar. We…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

We endured years of political slogans about 'baseload' and 'supply'. About 6000 megawatts of large-scale solar and wind is switched off every day, because there's nowhere for that tsunami of energy to go. About enough to get us through…

If you dramatically accelerate the rollout of EVs, you're solving more than 2 problems, fast. Why are we still waiting for vehicle emissions standards? https://t.co/vhXmYfQHzx

I always encourage anti-EV and anti-renewables trolls to invest every last cent of their life savings in ICEs, coal, oil and nuclear. Nothing like personal bankruptcy to shift deeply-embedded slogans. https://t.co/6qYolEfq1B

The more renewable energy and EVs take hold, the more the countering propaganda ramps up. A current favourite is that sales of EVs are collapsing. Didn’t take more than a minute to trace that back to its source. https://t.co/Fz2EGk7Y25

You can now get a reading of national weather by looking at the wholesale spot price for electricity (the purple line). Yesterday’s widespread storms drove that price up, as sunshine plummeted. Not an argument against renewables, an…

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

A coal washer. The only 'clean coal' you'll find. The second you burn it, it will never be clean again. https://t.co/iVBROSDfBC

Somebody suggested the other day that the fact an ICE is rarely even 30% efficient 'makes it the same as solar panels'. Yeh, nah. https://t.co/42t8bK4zUb

Batteries are changing assumptions around energy provision. Combined with the unbeatable cost advantages of solar panels, they challenge the idea of investing heavily in centralised generation, or long transmission lines. The price of…

We’ve always ‘overbuilt’ power generation, to provide redundancy. Renewables, particularly solar, make this a vital strategy because they’re incredibly cheap. Combining lots of surplus panels with battery storage is easily the fastest and…

Electricity retailers are maybe not all bad. Have looked at the energy trading systems that allow individuals to access the wholesale electricity market and buy and sell directly. It’s difficult to out-perform a good retailer, even with…

I think we should be concerned that our new renewables-based grid will be so heavily privatised from the beginning. Privatised energy has been mostly a failure. The only exception may be focusing more on rooftop solar, which would also be…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

Great window into how trained we are now to assuming a ‘market’ is a solution to everything. 70 years of propaganda. The same is happening with the shift to a renewable energy grid, nearly entirely private at grid level. Government should…

Albanese came to power trying to emulate Hawke, the consensus-builder. But Hawke was working with an older sort of opposition, still aiming for public policy outcomes. The LNP, like the Tories and Republicans, hasn't been like that for at…

Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dictates of a handful of entirely arbitrary statistical…

Watching ordinary households and businesses lay waste to fatuous slogans is infinitely more fun than listening to politicians. This is maximum 'penetration' of renewables to the grid at a point in time. 100% by 2025. Then extending this…

What great project(s) are our nations engaged in that require us to push aside action on climate change and Covid? Can anybody name one? If something else is more important than heading off incineration and infection, what is it?

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

Despite almost universal obstruction politically, notice that action on renewable energy has been underway for years. Our popularity contests (elections) are irrelevant hot air sideshows to objective, material realities. Come over to…

In 2008/9 the Rudd Govt targeted households to head off a financial crisis. Households *are* the economy, not one business would survive without households. The reverse isn’t true. All of our largest political problems converge upon…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

Societies operate on trust, not information (or mis- or disinformation). Don’t challenge with facts, say ‘so, this (climate science, or whatever) isn’t your job, why don’t you respect the people whose job it is? Are they coming into your…

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

One of the mysteries of motoring is why hybrids have been allowed to wallow in the Greenie/Granny car category in the public mind for so long. Yes they save you a lot of fuel. But they do a lot more than that. In many ways they’re the…

Society is social groups. The anti-lockdown group is also often the anti-EV, anti-renewables group. One of the ways to really wind them up is to debunk the idea of the ‘grunt’ of ICEs. In reality combustion engines are puny, and always…

Society is social. Imitative rivalry, and status, in all things. Covid, climate change, housing, schooling - everything. Always follow the votes, what's popular. https://t.co/ZaGvb0rFOD

We had years of dispatchable LNP slogans about ‘cheap, dispatchable coal’. Our prices are sky-high right now because of expensive coal. Meanwhile renewables flood the grid with better than free energy, in wholesale terms they’ll pay you to…

The anti-government conservatives worldwide are trying to start culture wars over nuclear power. If they win government it’ll have to be big-government owned and operated. Nobody else will touch it, it’s far too expensive, and there are no…

And again, conservatives who do this are snookering themselves. Nobody wants to invest in coal or nuclear plants. Their only alternative is governments building these plants, a ridiculous and punitively expensive fantasy.…

One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle fleet of over 10 million. It would be far too expensive to…

There’s growing realisation that everything we see for both Covid and climate is really basic human social behaviour. Societies are not run on information, they’re run on relationships. https://t.co/ZKWfkZ7WLg

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for…

Many households can achieve the desired end state of lower (even zero) electricity prices, in 1-2 days. Just by having solar installed. I haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year since I had mine installed. I've made money. /1…

For those looking at solar as an option, the new retailers that allow you to access wholesale electricity pricing can make a battery by itself a worthwhile investment, even without solar panels. Charge it up with cheap daytime wholesale…

Having a fun slogan-slaying day. Like 'renewables are heavily subsidised, that's why they're cheaper'. https://t.co/A4L3NDsh0P

Many anti-EV/anti-renewables warriors make a lot of noise about the need for storage with electrification. But fossil fuels only appear ‘dispatchable’ because they use storage too. The energy is stored in the fuel. And two-thirds of it is…

I continue to advocate strongly to all the anti-EV and anti-renewables crowd to invest heavily using their own money, in ICEs and coal- and nuclear-powered electricity. Put their money where their mouths are. https://t.co/uVozr3o96m

Public health is being dismantled by the same people and for the same reasons as public schooling, public electricity, public water, public banking, public transport, public libraries and public roads. The inaction on Covid is a late…

From this I take that 'authoritarian' States are way in the lead, unless they own fuck-tonnes of oil, gas and coal. Meanwhile democracies count the angels on the heads of pins, on social media. https://t.co/ji4UePLl79

I see a new spin-slogan word emerging from COP28. ‘Pragmatism’. Pragmatic use of fossil fuels. Like balanced infection with Covid. It actually means the same thing in both cases - do nothing.

I still haven’t found a better way to capture the stupidity of popularity culture than to watch people seriously arguing every day against getting free energy from sunshine.

The Minerals Council trying to make solar installations into political pink batts. The narratives and strategies are so transparent. Alas it doesn’t stop them being effective. https://t.co/sFu2Zh4GWb

Remarkable things are happening in China. Probably why we need nuclear subs, to protect us from remarkable things. https://t.co/kGyYcjQuUY

Watching governments do effectively nothing for decades on the existential threat of climate change, through multiple rounds of elections, somehow didn’t prepare us for them doing nothing about Covid. Popularity solves no problems. It…

In an article that shows how many households can be free of electricity bills in about a day, it also talks about high power prices for years. We’re doing this backwards, do households FIRST. Fixing the grid can be slower.…

Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or trying to eliminate the pathogen, you *domesticate* it. /1…

While the LNP bleat fantasies about nuclear power, renewables are smashing it in Australia. Follow reality, not the exhausting stupidity of the popularity daily news cycle. https://t.co/XNCUvrVO7P

I imagine Peter Dutton winning the next election, and then having to install nuclear reactors that don't exist, into communities that don't want them. Every cloud has a silver lining.

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

COP is showing again that real change will never come from people agreeing or disagreeing. It will come from reality intervening. In this case, the only thing genuinely shifting world energy use right now is the phenomenal drop in price…

How stupid are we that we even allow the slogan ‘lives and livelihoods’ to be used? Used to prevent action against climate and Covid. As if lives and livelihoods were ever 2 distinct things. https://t.co/IwVo3NT8iK

Reality politics will prevail. If you’re stuck debating this with people, just keep asking them how much of their own money they’re investing in coal or gas or nuclear. It’ll be zero. https://t.co/BBfT3NV8ZA

We’re not winning against Covid, but because the same forces that oppose action are the ones who oppose action on climate change, opposing either helps the other. We’re beginning to beat the bastards. Obstruction to Covid action is also…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

A favourite of mine in the anti-renewables arguments is that renewables are a blight on the view in the countryside. https://t.co/ouCKIKSl5S

The people who tell you a $10K home battery is ‘energy for the rich’. While they tow $125K caravans with $120K 4WDs, packed with $25K worth of fishing gear.

@EdConwaySky posted this yesterday, it's a topic that needs urgent discussion. The black line is the US. Australia is pretty close to that black line too. Studies say about 80 gigajoules per capita is sufficient for a good life. We're…

We have tax cuts to fund. And nuclear subs. https://t.co/IhySKkCenH

The single greatest thing you can do to change societies fast is put solar panels on your roof. A distributed power system is a distribution of power in both meanings of that word. Fossil fuels allowed immense concentration of power in…

Le Mans introduced hybrids over a decade ago as a pro-climate measure. The hybrids proved unbeatable, they’ve won every race since. Hybrids are the best performance engines in the world, using half the fuel. F1 cars have been hybrid for…

Progressives tend to assume change comes from 'bringing the crowd along' in endless discussions. But major change comes when things 'go viral'. Rapid imitative behaviour, where large numbers of people get behind a cause, seen as a rival to…

Yes! This how mass change happens for everything. The change ‘goes viral’. (Viruses don’t go viral, human behaviour does.) Solar in particular is smashing existing fossil fuel interests. It’s our key to changing everything, not just…

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

Last night was a close-run thing for NSW. Enormous demand, very limited supply. We sat happily behind the meter, immune from it. We need this sort of scare to accelerate storage and renewable generation. https://t.co/nzp8rgbqAG

Following the etymology of the word, economic politics is going to be forced to the realisation that households are ‘the economy’. Not business. Albanese needs to recognise fast this is his solution for energy. Just as it was Rudd’s for…

If you look you’ll see the same social mechanisms that drive everything, everywhere. High status individuals drive behaviour, as others imitate them. Applies to Covid, climate change, perfume - everything. Societies don’t run on…

Fascinating carbon offsetting scheme in the UK, where polluting firms pay to retrofit social housing for energy efficiency, solar, battery and heat pumps. Link in alt text. https://t.co/e5Jmleap1D

@MChandlerMather this UK scheme, re-purposing carbon offsetting towards energy efficient and renewables-powered social housing. If we did the same here to not only retrofit but also build efficient social housing, it’d tick both climate…

"The 28th meeting to deal with climate change was the 26th waste of time." Alan Kohler

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

Some say our decline in vaccination rates for all diseases is due to ‘vaccine fatigue’. It seems pretty lively to me, plenty of energy. https://t.co/Me76sUX0kP

If Covid was such a strain on the original National Cabinet, they should have resigned then to make way for fresh energy, rather than completely capitulate to the virus as a form of stress relief. https://t.co/mXtVhkHJJR Link:…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

The speed of change with renewables is breathtaking. Almost a dramatic story every single day. This one is huge. The savings to households and businesses will be significant, and much more. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zF1EWcWTYn

There’s no excuse for journalists and others not to take the LNP to task on their nuclear fantasy. No need for both-sideism here. There aren’t two sides. Just reality, and nonsense. No need to ‘have a conversation’ about patent bullshit.…

Much more fun than arguing is to just encourage people to walk the talk of their beliefs. On Covid, encourage them to keep getting infected, and see how it pans out for them. On renewables and EVs, encourage them to invest their life…

What would the LNP do if it won the next election? Tear out the fast-chargers, the new transmission lines, the solar and wind farms? Ban sales of EVs, and heavily subsidise sales of ICEs? Build coal and nuclear power stations (that don’t…

Superb piece tracking the shifting frames throughout the pandemic, to relentlessly dismantle public health efforts. All I’d add to it is that we should have seen this coming, we’d lived the same techniques for 30 years, with climate change…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

Just as the simplest solution for Covid is to dramatically cut back its transmission, “the most effective solution to reducing both the climate and health impacts of aviation is to fly less.” https://t.co/tquDopgYn1

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

I wonder if the era of the belief in ‘speaking truth to power’ is drawing to a close. Pilger was very much in that tradition. A problematic belief that power and truth are two separate domains. We’ve seen this with Covid. /1…

All of the terribly complex things politicians say they need to ‘balance’ in their thinking when addressing a pandemic or climate change are all really just a handful of donors.

All of what a society does is connected. Energy is the lynchpin. Renewables have created a gaping wound in the status quo, and remain the fastest way to uproot all of the entrenched stupidities, including for Covid. Covid and climate…

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

The many ‘debates’ about Covid and climate here and elsewhere every day are mostly people encountering ‘flooding the zone with shit’. That’s the intent, to bury you in pointless arguments, day in and day out, so nothing gets done.

We know Covid is tremendously dangerous and damaging. We knew climate change was the same, for 30+ years. It didn’t stop climate change. Knowledge and information are not what drive societies.

The most powerful political force in Australia right now isn’t the ALP, LNP, independents or any other elected pollies, or their donors. It’s rooftop solar. This isn’t just about energy, our political and business hierarchies were created…

This is where we need to reframe. All massive boosts to what's called 'the economy' come from addressing urgent social need. The original Industrial Revolution was about social need. Both climate change and Covid are HUGE opportunities to…

To give an indication of how much aviation seems oblivious to climate action elsewhere, the fuel for the new Sydney airport will need to be trucked there, every day, there's no pipeline (yet). Up to 65 B-double trucks full of fuel, every…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy itself. Covid and climate change are the economy being held…

Having worked in nuclear engineering, the article did nothing to convince me this is true. It did convince me that the business model of influencers is to continuously generate attention. https://t.co/MvTNgNNAfg

The way we get 800 km of range out of an ICE vehicle is to put over 3000 km worth of energy in the tank. https://t.co/GH5liqY8t9

Embarrassing that solar farms can be rejected because of 'scenic quality'. Anybody who's lived near a coal plant knows impact on the view was never a consideration for those. Humanity is running out of time. https://t.co/mnvhtHNGn3…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust others, in all areas of life, to know things. And they trust us…

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4 years of teaching like that, never infected. /1 This was so…

UK Labour on TV saying that while other issues like the environment are important, ‘the economy’ is the bedrock of being able to do anything. Complete nonsense, and complete capture by conservative framings. The economy is how…

Lovely example of the mythology of ‘the people’ and ‘grassroots action’. Much of the anti-renewables protesting has been organised by the LNP. This pro-renewables counter-protesting is largely organised by unions. All change is led.…

The community opposition to renewables projects is the same as the community opposition to further Covid action. Fake. Created, by the same people. Communities or ‘the people’ don’t spontaneously mobilise in one direction. All change is…

The Nats found a way to marry their affair with fossil fuel and mining dollars to their traditional base. Renewables. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is some ‘grassroots’ movement. The Nats are out there scaring the horses every day,…

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

‘Balancing’ Covid action against the economy became 0% action against Covid, 100% action for the economy. Similarly, ‘hybrid immunity’ became ‘just get infected’, minus any vaccination. As with climate action, the endgame is - do nothing.…

Insurance is the last line of risk management. Politicians are doing none at all, and now have the gall to ‘grill’ insurers when they won’t cough up for the climate clusterfuck politicians have made. https://t.co/LKsny4d4dI

Current wholesale price for electricity in Victoria, where its largest coal plant has gone down? $16,600/MWh. In South Australia, with its renewables? -$86.12. They're paying people to use it. Meanwhile the LNP is probably somewhere in Don…

The power of climate. It’s the poles and wires that make overly centralised electricity generation a problem. Go households, create resilience by distributing generation across the entire grid. Also the fastest way to drive prices down.…

The double-climate/Covid special. Friend back from a holiday in Queensland. Spent most of the holiday isolating as family tested positive after arrival. Then humidity was 100% and temperature high-30s outside, so didn't want to go out…

This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalry. People will bankrupt themselves to try to climb this status…

Even without climate change, it's astonishing we've persisted with internal combustion engines for so long. The technology is absolute rubbish. Grossly and irreparably inefficient and polluting, noisy and far too many complex moving parts.…

Happening everywhere, climate events destroying public infrastructure. Authorities completely overwhelmed by the damage. Meantime communities, whose spending patterns show dominant emphasis on private consumption like travel, dining…

Power is power. As in energy is also political power. Today’s power hierarchies are mostly fossil fuel hierarchies. Adding solar to your home is easily the most revolutionary political act you can take. On all issues, including Covid.…

German farmers want the opposite of Oz farmers, because there government *wants* to bury the cables (opposite of here). Reveals that in both cases it's really about anti-renewables, which in turn is about opposing "Lefties" and "Greenies".…

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

If your office environment had CO2 readings of between high-500s and mid-700s, and you also used an air purifier at your own workstation, would you mask? Curious how people do their risk assessments.

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

Rooftop solar is the way people should be thinking about Covid. The collective grid-level effort is lagging, but you can create energy independence and make money using your own roof. That will also have powerful impact on the wider…

Different country, same shit. The strategies are shared globally. Renewables spoil the view of the monocultural wastelands of modern agriculture. 'Pristine viewscapes'. Those bales of hay must be thousands of years old.…

Discussing Covid with a friend this morning, who said “the whole world has moved on.” This is the delusion, that reality will be what people decide it is. Reality will decide how Covid (and climate change) end. Nothing anybody says, no…

Beautiful formulation. It takes a lot more time, money and energy to manage an epidemic/pandemic state than a disease elimination state. It’s why elimination of disease was central to democracies, until the madness of ‘living with’ Covid.…

The government still have an opportunity to listen to Saul Griffith and solve at least 2 problems at once. Electrify homes, subsidies for appliances, solar and batteries. Creates a dramatic shift in cost of living, and also a huge boost to…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

The politics of impossibility pretends Covid is like the tides, unstoppable. It could have been knee-capped inside a few months. Political libertarians were never going to allow us to do that. Just as they haven’t allowed action on climate…

I cheer on BYD every day, for putting a rocket up an entitled car industry and its political minions. Like solar energy, forget all the hot air of 'debate'. The new world is being made right now. Opinions are irrelevant. Reality politics.…

People so often despair that we're not doing basic things like changing to renewable energy and stopping Covid spreading. But then they forget the most popular radio shows in the country. This is the raw material democracy is dealing with.…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

There’s that ‘balance’ word again, a modern propaganda favourite. In every case the ‘balance’ means doing nothing for the thing that is balancing against anything financial, or the economy more generally. Climate change, Covid, air safety,…

People invented the State. Because they wanted it. It does critical things that weren't happening without it. We should see anti-State ideologies for what they are, social wrecking balls dismantling centuries of social progress. Whether…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

Do you reckon if we never get the nuclear subs, they’ll refund our $10 billion to upgrade UK and US facilities? Me either. https://t.co/coNlMQ3vP5

Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networks out into society. Creating an illusion of mass support.…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

This year’s home insurance renewal bills should be a real hoot for many climate deniers. Pollies will encourage us to blame the insurers, but political refusal to do collective things shifted all the risk management to individuals. As…

You can't vote your way out of a pandemic or climate change. And you can't insure your way out either. https://t.co/R8Nj7gbyQP https://t.co/PxcQiR4kmR

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

The world is networked. A handful of hubs, networked out into the community. Oil, gas, coal, information, Covid. All networked. You don’t need to change everything. Just the hubs. https://t.co/lZyOmMPd2r https://t.co/XYvUhaP6b1

I guess it’s not surprising MAGAs re-post Russian propaganda without even realising what it is. Looking forward to the Biden v Putin contest in November. https://t.co/zplGSb4jw4

At some times there have been up to 79 coal ships queued off the coast of Newcastle, very close to shore. Nobody much cared, it was a curiosity. Australia is on a fast-track to becoming an international laughing stock.…

The people have spoken! No they haven’t, it’s an artefact of the survey. Voting does the same. What needs to be done with energy is unconnected to what any person thinks, and what they think can be shifted any time, with persuasive…

On of the great myths of ‘the economy’ is that it operates already *without* massive government ‘intervention’. Governments create the entire framework of economic activity, including the existence of companies. /1 https://t.co/GvBKOnIYha…

The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

Imagine a climate scientist walking into somebody else’s workplace, and telling them how to do their job. They’d be told to fuck off. This is what climate scientists should be saying to climate deniers. It’s about respect for the work…

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't just use it to share details of those lives. /1…

There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is…

The economic phrase ‘picking winners’ is a sure marker of a moron at work. Under the LNP Australia avoided picking winners for most of the past 2 decades. It turned us into a quarry for the Chinese and fossil fuel companies.

Labor ‘firming up’ the fossil fuel industry. The gas giants have been basically running the country at least since the time of the Gillard government. https://t.co/6AQHdmIk0b

The NSW Government was never going to do anything for Covid, in schools. It won’t even remove unflued gas heaters. Schools are likely the main hubs of Covid infection. This is why. The air in schools is filthy. https://t.co/d5I9a1KHfp

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

To be clear, my cat would be a better government than the current LNP. But this is typical electoral politics. $300 cash splash with an election looming. Smarter policy would have been targeted electrification of low-income households,…

I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes presented to others. That’s part of being young. It brings energy to a society. And sometimes necessary disruption. But something…

The hubris of minimisers to think that humans have a choice on what to do about Covid. Or climate change for the climate deniers. Like reality cares what we choose. https://t.co/Ee6n21EzUR

Keeping in mind that for much of the 'intermittency', people are in bed asleep. 5 hours of national storage should be enough to do it. Coal-fired power's 'baseload' always just meant 'the minimum amount we have to *use*, so we don't have…

Societies are always just social. And historically all that has created significant social change has been disaster and catastrophe. Housing as just one more example. The hierarchies of social life are not disrupted without catastrophe.…

As with climate change, we don't have the choice whether to act or not, on Covid. Just the choice of how soon to act. Reality doesn't care. It just kills more, the slower we act.

"And yet it moves." Galileo's famous response when told he couldn't say the Earth moves around the sun. "And yet we're in a pandemic and a climate emergency", we could say today. https://t.co/V9Kmm2TQxN

“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

The question I haven't heard asked of Peter Dutton's nuke dreams is - who's going to build the new coal plants he'll need, while they build the nuclear power stations? The existing coal plants are falling apart. #auspol…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it.…

Those shocked at the cavalier approach to public safety with Covid may not remember the open-air atomic bomb tests that flourished in the 1950s, post-war. Las Vegas, 1953. https://t.co/YAsaDLRv6x

Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere, always. So life as we know it has to be shut down to beat…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to make it public. 1/4 As soon as you pick a team in that debate,…

Haven't paid a cent for electricity in two years at my place. System will pay for itself inside 4 years. Always check which teams experts align themselves with online. It's an interesting networking journey. https://t.co/ZRsXJgxGmL

The bullshit of ‘free trade’ politics. Imposing tariffs on Chinese cars because China ‘subsidises’ the industry. Give us a fucking break. The same nations are shopfronts for fossil fuel businesses, and have been for decades. Massive…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

At least 61% of Australians wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a nuclear reactor, and a sausage factory. https://t.co/yFnlIFuXxr https://t.co/8j8pikKu5Q

"The Great Compression". Only catastrophe brings about meaningful social change. The data is compelling. And the logic. Without catastrophe, social conformity and imitative rivalry are too strong to allow significant change. /1…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

The climate deniers use their own special maths too. Absolute figures when they want to paint China as the great coal eating behemoth. The per capita figure embarrasses Australia. And even Germany. https://t.co/fOaZCQOT0f

More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

Immunity is thought of as our individual immune systems. But there’s a collective immunity too. The one that prevents pathogens arriving at your individual immune system. Pathogens are organisms, living in environments. Modifications to…

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

Trying to turn it into a cost of living issue. I have almost zero energy costs. I'm not a high income earner. I did it with renewables and EVs. Reminds me of sitting in science class with complete morons. Covid and climate, not an ounce of…

The US has 88,000 tonnes of nuclear waste it can't dispose of. It's adding another 2000 tonnes every year. Some of their enthusiasm for AUKUS is Australia maybe taking some of that waste. Nuclear energy is energy for culture warriors and…

Australia should be the next Saudi Arabia. Not content with gutting revenue from our resources over the past 30 years, the LNP now want us to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of nuclear technology from offshore. And $50+ billion a…

Climate change is often thought of as a ‘natural world’ problem. It’s much more than that. Our trillions of dollars and tonnes worth of infrastructure is built to tolerances that climate change will often exceed. We can’t afford to…

Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure we think will shield us from the heat, may not be able to. /1…

Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

#Insiders correctly noting that climate change politics is easier when the whole country is on fire. Only catastrophes shift societies in meaningful ways. Without them, it’s just team sports.

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw At that price, if we were to replace our…

The LNP is trying to shut Australian renewables down. Companies from other parts of the world are queuing to invest in them. Not satisfied in gutting revenue from resource sales in the past 20 years, now they want to kneecap our greatest…

This is where the fossil fuel age in many ways began. Saudi Arabia's first successful oil well, Well 7. The "Prosperity Well". In 1938 it struck major oil. In a way 2024 is 1938, when it comes to energy. And Australia should be Saudi…

The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It needs to be disrupted. Smashed. This is a key fact of social life.…

Coalition of free market fundamentalists launches nuclear building program styled on the Soviets. The ridiculous rabbit holes populist politics takes us down. #auspol https://t.co/neE9lXSDfv https://t.co/YmzICk5awg

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol…

Peter Stahel understands what Dutton is up to. I fear the ALP don't. And most commentators don't either. We'll wallow in the 'facts' of nuclear, thinking that will win the argument. Always the same mistake. https://t.co/n2PpMZcoXJ

Excellent. But remember Abbott's string and tin can NBN being fact-checked too? It made no difference. Nuclear is a stalking horse. A strategy to mop up votes of those who want renewables, but don't want the ALP. Societies don't run on…

Simple. There are a lot of voters (including in Teal seats) who want action against climate change, but don't like Labor or The Greens. Dutton's nuclear mirage now gives them a way to vote LNP again. Even though he'll never build a single…

One of the weirdest manipulations in the energy debates is the idea of 'baseload power'. The public has been led to believe this means the minimum amount of supply the energy grid needs to be able to supply, 24 hours per day. That's not…

New meaningless spin word. 'Reliable'. Solar panels have no moving parts. That's reliable. Nuclear power plants need continuous maintenance to be reliable. They're full of complex tech that can break at any time. https://t.co/0DLwoF8kZw

Another stupidity of the energy debate. ‘When the sun doesn’t shine.’ Most of the time the sun doesn’t shine we’re in bed, using very little electricity. https://t.co/Sth8ZcR0Va

Every day, with gas outages predicted and renewables rollout too slow, we’re getting closer to realising we should be electrifying households. As Rewiring Australia said. Direct action at the consumer end, not producer. Also drives down…

Watch as this unfolds. ‘See? We told you we need to be fracking for more gas.’ And ‘renewables can’t supply baseload power!’ They’ll turn the inaction THEY created into a reason for even more inaction. They will always win, at whatever…

What am I not seeing here? The maximum capacity the nuclear announcements this week could produce is 9.8 GW (1.4 GW for the APR1400, the biggest reactor mentioned, x7). The NEM is currently about 64 GW. Nearly 22 GW of that is coal plants,…

Summarises everything that makes Australian nuclear a total fantasy. A world where the most popular politician once advised rinsing lungs with disinfectant, to kill Covid. We’re not seeing that popularity (electoral) politics is the…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

Ask Ted #Insiders which nuclear power plants have lasted 80-100 years, or are even projected to.

Nuclear power plants are no advance on the hopeless efficiency of coal plants. About two-thirds of the heat goes straight out the cooling tower into the air. The same for ICE vs EV vehicles. Fossil and nuclear fuel technology waste most of…

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

Notice the whole country is talking about nuclear? That was the point. The more outrageously stupid the idea is, the more it gets airtime. It’s sucked the oxygen out of every other public issue. A marginal Opposition with no polices now…

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

Anthony Albanese can say, ‘do you want to wait 15-20 years for a nuclear fantasy that won’t happen, that we’ll need to mortgage the country to afford, or do you want us to help you make your household all-electric TODAY, to drive your cost…

This graph is the ALP’s pathway to complete obliteration of the nuclear fantasy. https://t.co/Rqb5JMy7x2

Also the countries that have nuclear built it before they had cheap renewables available. They wouldn't do it again now, most are already switching. And we have no right to commit future generations to waste management, for tens of…

Every country making actual progress with renewables and EVs is becoming more ‘authoritarian’, just like the dreaded Chinese. Their patience with the idiot idea that great public policy comes from distilling bullshit from millions of…

The ALP is asleep here. GO HOUSEHOLDS. The LNP is circling to take that space now. Leaving the ALP with stalled big renewables and transmission line upgrade delays, while the LNP looks like the only household friend. https://t.co/12CdHey7LG

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

@AlanKohler, brutal today. The world won't act against climate change, it's going backwards. Only catastrophe shifts human action. Just sayin'. Again. People care about senators crossing the floor. More team sports. Fiddling while the…

The enormity of this decision for democracy everywhere. Not since 1215 have Western rulers been above the law. These aren’t analogies. This is the literal Return of the King, and the end of democracy. The reversal of the Magna Carta. /1…

If only modern wannabe Kings had an actually useful agenda, like slowing climate change and Covid. We need somebody 'authoritarian' to bring about the changes needed, discussing and voting our way out is a laughable failure. Unfortunately…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

The astonishing revolution taking place right under our noses. While we're trapped in team sports engineered by the LNP over nuclear. And what's making all of this possible? China, and their 'authoritarian' State. The engine room of global…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

If you think social media is vital to beating a pandemic, ask yourself why nations are doing nothing in the first place, to fight the pandemic. SM crippled public health. Just as it did climate action. It's now monetising the 'resistance'…

Post-WW2, war industries mobilised to churn out massive amounts of consumer goods, housing, agriculture, etc. Re-building societies. We're now living in the last afterglow of that collective focus. It's why we don't fight pandemics or…

Because those 20 countries started building nuclear well before there was mass-scale, cheap renewables. https://t.co/DzGxGjCUj1

I’m fascinated by us, as a culture. Nothing is more invisible to you, than your own culture. It just seems like the natural order of things. Here’s why I think our culture doesn’t understand Covid. And throw in climate change too. /1 There…

Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these platforms to change the world is dangerous in multiple ways.…

Notice the only thing nuclear eats is hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. https://t.co/qXinRTUNxc

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develop a hierarchy of bad to good to perfect ventilation. Or the…

Those European and US lines have barely budged in 40 years. Leaders there now desperately trying to curtail the Chinese line with tariffs, to protect domestic vehicle and energy industries. Fossil fuel industries that should have been shut…

This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

I believe Tesla got rid of its marketing department. But MAGAs love EVs, right? https://t.co/43QeGEvwHl

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

House is closed up in winter, freezing here. Well insulated, double-glazed UPVC windows. No draughts. 4 people. However I did leave the old gas lighting vents in the top of the walls. And use an air circulator (Vornado) in conjunction with…

There was a moment in time when the disruption of Covid opened the possibility of more flexible work practices. As always, only catastrophe forced a possible change. In many workplaces that door slammed shut again quite some time ago, with…

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

I've never formally fit-tested a mask. Still a Novid. I do use glasses as a test of fit, but it's otherwise just what feels right. And I've been in high-risk environments. Goes to what @jeremyphoward found earlier in the pandemic. We're…

Only catastrophe will disrupt this status quo. I wish it were otherwise. The only manageable catastrophe candidate is Chinese renewable and EV technology, totally smashing our fossil fuel industries. https://t.co/CS4MBd2E2Y

For decades there have been calls for emergency strong action by governments, on climate change. One government is actually doing it. ‘The economy’ in the West is horrified. Which shows its true function. https://t.co/Nrc32AtiwA…

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

Example of how the imitative rivalry of social media (team sports) loops back into everyday life. Posts on social media platforms about EVs attract a conga line of rabid ICE fans, who pile-on with mockery and derision. They could just do…

Who grew up in an Australian classroom heated by an unflued gas heater? And can remember the drowsiness, an indication of the crap exhaust gases we were breathing? Nobody loses cleaning school air. Many don’t even have basic HVAC, which…

This short video shows brilliantly many of the dimensions of social conformity I Tweet about. If you want to understand why nothing is done for climate change or Covid (or anything important), here it mostly is. h/t @DrDuchovny…

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite. A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1…

"The communications landscape has also changed from years past, with social media providing an open door for third parties to organize and encourage local residents to oppose solar projects." Shut social media down. https://t.co/5CTJuAe0mh

I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar panels, EVs and EV batteries. /1 https://t.co/xTEsxdujNX…

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

Social media has done this. When I was a kid you got the energy system engineers said was the best. Nobody even paid any attention to it. Involving 'the people' in critical decisions means no decisions are ever made. Just endless social…

If oil companies were really confident their business model will survive, they'd flood the world with cheap fuel, to obstruct the transition to other energy sources. But they're charging like wounded bulls. They want to make every last…

Gas is a transition fuel. The transition of revenue from coal and oil, to gas.

“You can’t reengineer all of U.S. infrastructure as quickly as the climate is changing." Infrastructure is the core business of all government. It's only reported when competing political teams fight about it. Everything we call 'politics'…

The imitative rivalry at the base of all societies. The battle for status, in groups. I call them teams, because it captures the battle aspect better. Team sports. Pick any current issue. Gaza, climate, Covid. Anything. You will always…

There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James Lovelock used to say it. He thought it was already much too…

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

You can’t elect climate change away. https://t.co/HaelRUv70P

Churchill addressing the US Congress in December 1941, to convince them to join the fight against Hitler. Later that evening he had a mild heart attack. He'd been under huge strain. He led on for years. Leaders could lead solutions to…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

The only thing that changes societies is catastrophes. Like Australia, whose only meaningful change to carbon emissions remains the impact of a pandemic. Described as a ‘disaster’ for the economy. The economy is the disaster. Just the…

Interesting things here. - plateauing of UK emissions in the 20th century probably due to de-industrialisation - the massive jump in Australian emissions with the introduction of coal-fired electricity - the staggering injustice of the…

The excitement of the US election. Hilarious that we still think elections change anything meaningfully For example, the only reason anything at all is happening with renewables isn’t about who gets elected. It’s China’s astronomical…

That black band (coal) overnight for NSW represents the perennial pointlessness of NSW governance. Daytimes are dominated by ordinary peoples’ solar (yellow), years ahead of government. I call the black ‘baseload black’. The slogans from…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

China is the catastrophic disruptor to our status quo that may save the world. Our status quo is mobilising nuclear subs against it. China is doing all of the things the West only talks about. And making those things affordable for the…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

Two aspects of the diversionary ‘China is the big polluter’ narratives around climate change that aren’t as much mentioned. Time. Western countries have been polluting since the 1700s. That pollution is cumulative. The data tells the…

The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car industry. /1 https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY China’s threat to Western…

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

Peter Dutton is in contention at the next election because his opponents are still 'fact-checking' him on things like nuclear power. He knows nuclear is BS. Societies don't run on information. He's starting a fight. Fights generate teams,…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

Remind those who say a lack of public chargers means EVs are impractical that for about the first 25 years after combustion cars were introduced, there were no gas/service stations. You bought the fuel in a tin at the pharmacist or general…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s how it unfolded. 1/7 https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

There is a decent minority who want to control Covid, and a sizeable majority who want to fight climate change. How many of that minority and majority would sacrifice their own jet flights to do it?

@TurnbullMalcolm cut through the fog best in this great piece by Eric Campbell. The Coalition has no intention of ever building nuclear anything. It’s a mechanism only to start a fight, to generate votes. Same method every time.…

Catastrophes change societies. They're the only things that do. EV owners in Florida are charging at home and getting out of there. The power of a distributed energy system, which fossil fuels absolutely aren't. https://t.co/Dtw56cDuKT

We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy'. The status quo re-badged. To quote... 1/2…

More from the 2024 State of the Climate Report. Watch electoral politics every day and marvel at the complete irrelevance of it. It’s just social football, with teams. The status quo of team sports - status - is far too powerful to ever…

Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

I watched this launch today. A few thoughts. I think Tesla do some fantastic technology, brilliant engineering. It's hard to talk about because of the minefield of team sports battle surrounding the CEO. /1 https://t.co/gQpk0mbgOP I think…

Al Gore’s anger. The status quo won’t respond, to this or anything. History shows it. It will need to be destroyed by disruption. China’s renewables are doing this. It’s why the status quo has ramped up the attack rhetoric on China. But…

I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

Possibly up to a trillion dolars worth of nuclear reactors and subs, neither of which are needed. And not one cent or even care for any of this. The next generation. The complete insanity of popularity-driven governance.…

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries was largely the introduction of fossil fuel-driven life, by the West. The next Industrial Revolution began some time ago. In Asia. China mostly. All of our toxic slogan-driven life…

As societies we only functioned with a plurality of beliefs when the essential infrastructure of social life didn’t depend on those beliefs. Now what you believe also determines how you live, and what threat you are to others. 1/5…

For a few years now I’ve argued for what I call ‘reality-based politics’. Not really ever explaining what I mean by that. I’ll use Covid as an example. /1 In a nutshell, it’s the humility of knowing that how things turn out is rarely in…

The hidden story of chronic impacts of infection. Those who followed Queen’s career sometimes noticed how Freddie Mercury’s live performances deteriorated after 1982. The band toured in 1984 and 1986 (for the last time). Something wasn’t…

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles. The Chinese have a glut of them. You’d think that’s problem…

Note how lockdowns in 2020 KO'd a lethal virus, *and* kicked climate change in the soft parts. Only catastrophes save societies. By kicking ours down the road by pretending to 'live with' it, we're only delaying the same outcome. Reality…

Revolutionary social action comes not from the provision of information, or disinformation or misinformation. It comes when status is threatened. if you can find a way to make climate change and Covid a threat to people’s status, they will…

The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate change and Covid. Elections create our greatest passion. The…

Nuclear power stations are like coal-fired power stations. Basically just steam engines. The steam engine was invented in the 17th century.

Nuclear power stations are like coal-fired power stations. Basically just steam engines. The steam engine was invented in the 17th century. Let's move on.

This is just for power supply. On my way into work today I thought about climate change and Covid. Both greater emergencies than any war. Why are societies not on a war footing? 'The economy' is why. Really just the status quo, in economic…

And here again, only one superpower is even trying to recognise the magnitude of the catastrophe we're facing. It's offering the world cheap renewables and EVs. And what are we doing? Spending astronomical sums on nuclear submarines, to…

An excellent question. But not understandable at the level of content. Societies are groups with varying status, battling for suprermacy. All content is just fuel for the team battles. They're often climate deniers too. Same reason.…

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t. Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid,…

An election is literally a type of Miss Universe competition. A popularity contest oblivious to most of the material realities of the world. It’s delicious that Trump once co-owned the Miss Universe competition. His election is not just…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers. For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 https://t.co/1Wc9ZiCQJa "Events like these are often described as moral…

John Howard pissed away nation-building mining revenue as tax cuts and election bribes to boomers, like tax-free super. Now we’re staring down the barrel of ignoring our chance to be the Saudi Arabia of the next century, with our…

Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a daycare facility. They spent almost 22 years in jail. Status did…

I look on every day as our most serious problems have nothing done about them. Activism won’t shift that. Somebody called me cynical for continually pointing this out. To me cynical is pretending all of these daily team sports solve…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

COP29 was a cop-out. As all the climate conferences are. It’s ridiculous to think the status quo will shift by having conversations. https://t.co/YkYf1Fb3H5

So, which of us is wiling to give up flying for recreational purposes? Easily the biggest destroyer of public health measures too, as well as climate action. Our desires. Not ‘capitalism’ or any of that other scapegoating nonsense.…

I love that moment when the fantasy BS of elections meets reality head-on. Like Dutton having to actually build nuclear power stations. https://t.co/cNIS94FOQj

NSW hanging on by its fingernails for this afternoon's peak. Nuclear reactors 20 years from now are as useful as a cock-flavoured lollipop (Dodgeball). https://t.co/eHJB90S1UO

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

@simonahac I thought this was a damning indictment of what happens when you’re a State that drags its feet in the renewables transition. Nearly half of the coal fleet down, and we’re not even in summer yet. Only renewables kept the lights…

Asking ordinary people whether we should use nuclear power is like asking them to do their own brain surgery. They wouldn't have a clue. This is populism, the idea ordinary people run societies. They don't, they have their own jobs.…

The most common assumptions about democracy, what it is or even should be, are wrong. Democracy is not ‘the people’ running societies. That’s populism. That’s Homer’s car, the idea that ordinary people have the expertise to run a country.…

Dutton’s nuclear policy is clearly not even promising a major role for nuclear in the grid. It’s really a policy to replace battery and pumped hydro firming, with gas. As others have said, it’s really a policy for the gas industry. The…

As an engineer, I think it’s worth repeating every day: Renewables are the *only* cheap source of energy. There are no other cheap sources of energy.

I mean who can we believe here, on energy? Australia’s top scientists and engineers, or an ex-Queensland cop? https://t.co/3THVAVIOBI

Australia is going nowhere on emissions. No amount of gradual planning will shift a status quo. It will just game the planning, as is happening. Only catastrophe creates meaningful shifts to a status quo. Like Chinese disruption with…

“The Coalition's plan for nuclear power is a big idea, of which we don't see that many in our current politics.” It really, laughably isn’t. It’s a political strategy with zero engineering or economic reality. Transition to renewables is…

This article is an example of how pointless our political journalism now is. Takes an issue where there is an absolutely clear objective reality - nuclear energy is a bullshit option in 2024 - and makes it about the competing interests of…

The cost of nuclear power has risen over 25% in the last 10 years, while in the same period the cost of solar power has fallen almost 90%, the cost of wind power has fallen nearly 50% and the cost of batteries has fallen roughly 90%. /1…

Tired of the bullshit of electoral politics on energy (or anything), where the ALP has no strategic brains or balls to implement anything, and the LNP are just wreckers employed by fossil fuel interests…? In 2024 you can avoid all of it.…

Nuclear power plants are just steam engines with fission as the coal. Steam engines were introduced around 1700. Well beyond time to move on.

Spending over $300 billion taxpayer dollars to provide less than 40% of the grid’s electricity, in a grid already well on track to provide 100% without spending a cent? Don’t blame me. I’ve always thought elections were a stupid idea.

With what is it, almost $800 billion in proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, you’d have to say the Australian budget has been ‘nuked’. By the advocates of small government.

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

Dutton’s policy is so bad that it should disqualify the LNP from eligibility for office. Our natural advantages in energy completely abandoned. We should be the Saudi Arabia of coming centuries. Elections mean they may still win.…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

@BYDCompany are you in the home battery business? Because you could absolutely clean up there, existing offerings are still far too expensive for what you get.

It’s emotionally satisfying to imagine that action against things like climate change and Covid is being blocked by a small cabal of evil [insert chosen baddies] people. The reality is more banal, and more difficult. /1 The ‘status quo’ is…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” Chinese disruption allows you to bypass the idiot stalemate of our energy culture wars. Fuck…

If this election isn’t a test of the idiocy of electoral democracy, I don’t know what would be. A Dutton victory would destroy all of Australia’s natural advantages in the 21st century. Energy is literally power. https://t.co/Hab4CzqRh8

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

Why the ALP isn’t running a ‘Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is coming to turn off your solar panels’ line is a mystery. 4 million Australians have solar panels, and nuclear doesn’t play nice with solar. https://t.co/V15pTyi2ps

‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I love that home of many an oil man, Texas, is infected badly with a cheap renewable energy virus. https://t.co/rODIorRPoh

The ultimate determinant of power (in all senses of the word) is energy. The decision to shift Australia to nuclear, with its renewables resources, is akin to Saudia Arabia deciding in the 1970s to sell sand instead of oil. Except we’re…

We’re not within a million miles of fixing either Covid or climate change, the two greatest issues of our time. Because our politics is focused on winning elections - populism - and not simple, practical, material outcomes.

Again, everybody already knew this. There’s not one - not a single one - workable element to the LNP nuclear ‘plan’. Calling it a plan is a joke, it’s a set of slogans designed to capture votes. https://t.co/LiQqnc7tty

Will 2025 be the year we finally infect our way out of the pandemic? Like trying to heat and melt our way out of climate change.

We don’t need another enquiry into petrol prices. They’re high because fossil fuel companies are c***s. We know how to fix that. The NRMA would do better advising us to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.…

In 2025, it would be nice if we could reframe fights against calamities like Covid and climate change by not just hoping the facts will change anything. Fixing them needs to become a high status thing to do. Nothing else will bring change.

Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores. Because that’s what they’re up to. 1/7 Dewey and Lippmann in their famous early 20th century debates on democracy more or less…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

After spending several years here writing about the idiot ‘team sports’ of social life, where you back a position inside a group or team, and then battle other teams, it apparently astonished some people that I made a material decision…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

The MAGAs now discovering that violating a judge’s orders is a contempt of court. Project 2025’s ‘unitary executive’ is just a bog standard King. All societies revert to monarchies eventually. https://t.co/VjqT7SVhS5

Negotiating basic ideas and behaviours around things like public health and renewable energy with friends, family and colleagues rams home every day the damage social media is doing. It’s like living in a perpetually growing community of…

An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of people suddenly pile-on to a chosen scapegoating target. This is a critical thing to understand. /1 https://t.co/hQqBRdf863…

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to destroy Tesla. Righteous zealotry has replaced public life.…

Imagine if climate activists said that petrol and diesel vehicles need to go, so we should all go out and vandalise and burn those vehicles, while abusing their drivers. They’d be called extremists. But Tesla attacks? Widely cheered. Our…

“…activists focusing ire on a corporation has a long history in America.” ‘Troubling’, yes, rather than people cheering on the destruction. It’s deeply unpopular to say this, and in populist cultures, that’s why it has to be said. /1…

Nothing changes in kidult culture. The only catastrophe is disrupted holidays. Not pandemics, not climate change. Just interruption to lifestyles. The daily team sports of manufactured identities is the only priority. Status games.…

I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live a very happy life, believing that. Because it grounds me, I…

Far and away the greatest cost in household energy budgets is fuel for vehicles. It costs next to nothing to fuel an EV. The same idiots going to an election promising cuts to fuel excise despise EVs. Elections are a gathering of the…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

The world is effectively doing sweet fuck all to confront the actual reality of climate change. The status quo will not shift, on anything, unless it is forced to. By catastrophe of some kind. https://t.co/MCk94AGdbS

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

The idea we live in nation States is now quaint. Social media has rapidly assumed dominance as the place where we transact every aspect of human life, from the most personal, to the professional and political. Just think of the…

Saul Griffiths told Labor to go household electrification at the start of their first term. It would have transformed both the energy and political landscape, driving costs down for consumers while the wider grid was upgraded. Energy is…

The building industry is falling off a cliff. All that will save it is building public housing, for government, to create affordable homes for ordinary people. Marketisation destroyed housing, energy, health and education. The market is a…

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

Listening to a Tory toff on UK television still championing ‘levelling up’, or ‘growing the pie’. All the BS high status folk invented to try to avoid the inescapable fact that they’re robber barons. Again, none of this will ever resolve…

Saudi Arabia never built any nuclear plants because of its natural energy advantages. It wants some now because those natural advantages are over. Australia should be the next Saudi Arabia and ignore the nuclear distraction.…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

‘Community opposition’ is a subset of belief in ‘the people’. Both are myths. There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Every time somebody evokes the people or the community, look for an activism in play from a tiny handful of people. /1…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1…

The sad truth that nothing will shift a status quo without catastrophe is highlighted nicely by us opening new airports. Air travel uses astronomical amounts of fossil fuel. Some analysts even call airports stranded assets.…

If your life and SM feed is full of idiot boy racers telling everybody about the ‘grunt’ of their petrol and diesel sex toys, some basic engineering can help. The noise a combustion engine makes is the noise of the 80% of unburned energy…

Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route information or education through a fictitious ‘people’, to get…

I’ve always found social media appalling, I come back here as others do to gather information I shouldn’t need, but do to maintain my own life and safety, because of the wreckage to our institutions caused by the same platforms The place…

What to do when governments and business refuse to control disease in public places. Just as they offloaded the costs of education, transport, and energy onto you, to ‘free’ you from the tyranny of government. https://t.co/uxNjWDMcN5…

Renewable energy is a needed revolution. The only placeholder I’ll put in the ground in 2025 is that I bet we look back in a few decades and wonder why we privatised almost all of it, from Day 1. I bet that will be a chicken that comes…

It sums up kidult society that the only human response to this climate-related event is ‘eco-grief’ workshops for humans, apparently traumatised by what they’re seeing washed up on the beach. You’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragically…

While so much oxygen and energy is wasted on empty, pointless terms sports of Left v Right, social media warriors are storming the Bastille from every direction. Social media. is designed to substitute adult civilisation with the…

What we used to call the ‘public sphere’ has been almost entirely replaced with social media, the space where we now transact all of society. Public policy is determined by what’s ‘trending’. That in turn is usually determined by…

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

Using your own nation’s extraordinary natural advantages in renewable energy as a pawn in your pathetic social media culture wars is beyond contempt. These are crimes against Australia and its future. Against the future of civilisation…

That thin blue veneer harbours the only known life in the entire universe. It’s air. The health of that atmosphere should be far and away humankind’s greatest priority. Climate change and airborne infectious soups tell us that air has…

The status quo is winning on climate action. The world seems a million miles away from hitting most targets. Only catastrophe shifts a status quo. Real change happens, to paraphrase Planck again, one funeral at a time.…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

The Albanese government’s attempt in its first term to ape the status quo by simply replacing fossil fuel generation in the electricity grid with renewables was a lost opportunity. They should have ‘gone households’ right from the start.…

The Nationals members whipping up fake hysteria in key electorates over renewables are vandals of historic proportions. It’s the Nats’ only schtick left to maintain relevance in rural communities. They long ago became Gina Rinehart’s party.

Chalmers talking about EV drivers paying their fair share is fossil fuel propaganda come to life and parroted out the mouth of a lobbied cyborg. Ditch the diesel fuel rebate, Jim. It’ll rake in billions more than slugging a struggling…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

The fossil fuel industry has its tentacles into every aspect of our lives. The most revolutionary politics you can pursue is to drive an EV, and put solar panels on your house. No amount of voting will change anything. But doing those…

This is a much, much bigger story than something like “Hitler invades Poland”. Many find the view that only catastrophe will shift a human status quo pessimistic. Have a look around. How’s it all going, on our big challenges? Nowhere?…

The transition to renewables shows how human societies work. Objectively everybody should be celebrating this near-free energy. But as with all human change the status quo is more interested in its status, than in anything else. Only…

How is the world going with climate targets? Nowhere. The status quo will never change something that it relies upon for its own existence. Look around. Humans are just fighting each other in imitative teams, for status/identity. 1/3…

We can’t ‘reform’ or ‘manage’ our way to Net Zero. Have we forgotten that fossil fuels entered our societies as part of a revolution, the Industrial Revolution? No gradualism there. Only another revolution will get them out. @TimBuckleyCEF…

Only rarely do we recognise that an actual revolution introduced fossil fuels to our societies. Not any sort of gradual, managed change with things like targets. It will need a revolution to wean us off them. Only total disruption shifts a…

Fossil fuel energy is the root of our status quo. Feel the magnitude. In just the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, estimates of profit to the oil industry and oil nations are over US $50 trillion. That’s nearly $3 billion profit per DAY.…

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You…

In Blast from the Past, Christopher Walken’s character, locked away in an underground bunker since a false alarm nuclear strike decades previously, re-emerges. And plans another bunker. How I see the ‘Left’, ‘Right’, ‘authoritarian’ Cold…

Nobel Peace Prize: Don’t Care Wars: Don’t Care Left, Right, democracy, autocracy: Don’t Care Culture and identity wars: Don’t Care Travel: Don’t Care Economies: Don’t Care Collapse of civilisation and ecosystems, by burning millions of…

We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial group. The declaration didn’t even pretend to do the things it…

The energy and environmental impacts of AI are a common narrative now. It’s funny how we never question the real elephant in our cultural room. Recreational travel. On energy it’s bad enough, but let’s see CO2 emissions. /1…

A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything else is status games, dressed up in various costumes. But there…

Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely backwards. We know from real life experience:…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

Fossil fuels were introduced to the world via a revolution. Only revolutions can puncture a status quo. It’ll take a revolution to get rid of them again. Only the Chinese are really trying. https://t.co/o30q2eA7hg

A status quo will never change itself, it has to be forced to change, by catastrophic disruption. The West is the winner of the last revolution, the fossil fuel-led Industrial Revolution. It'll be the last to realise how fucked it is for…

Most social problems are generated by tiny numbers of people who form hubs in social networks. This account for example is one society could easily choose to shut down, to prevent misinformation on vaccination being spread to millions. And…

This is the turnaround the LNP now hope they can engineer with climate politics too. Economics and engineering knows anti-renewables is an idiot fantasy. But this is populism, they only need to win votes. Likely they’ll let renewables win,…

If the ALP wants to head off Voice-like populist climate politics from the LNP, it needs to continue to focus strategically on households. Continue to subsidise power bills, and electrification of home energy use. Really get serious on…

The empirical realities make the LNP’s populist shift on climate action a laughable fantasy. And you can see here the root deeper cause of rising prices. We privatised electricity decades ago. That’s why these costs now have to be paid by…

The Republicans and Democrats in the US have swapped ideologies over the course of their history. Societies don't run on politics, they run on imitation/conformity, driven by status. Political parties will happily swap ideologies to follow…

I call it the ‘sub quotient’. Look at any social need, and see how much of it would disappear with the sums allocated to these subs. We need to defend ourselves from the only country that keeps our economy afloat. Also the world leader in…

An actual revolution put fossil fuels into our lives. No amount of meetings or agreements or KPIs will get them out. It will need another revolution. The Chinese are building one, maybe it will be enough. Maybe. https://t.co/cCynwDzNaZ

We stopped entire societies for well over a decade in the 20th century, to fight two world wars of much lower risk to humanity. Societies don’t run on facts. They run on status. As the Victorians linked vital public infrastructure to…

Treasury finally has Jim house-trained. First with his ridiculous EV tax, and now on energy bill relief. Call the bill relief ‘grandfathering’ and it’s exactly the process used for many other major transitions. https://t.co/60tdfb6lIt

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

In the roughly 4 billion years that known life has existed, it's only in the past 100 that one life form believed it determined its own destiny. The Greeks called that hubris. Nearly everything in our individual and collective lives is…

The genius of the Tupperware party was to understand that what people think and do is driven by social conformity. If you target the social networks rather than thinking of humans as information processors, you can have success. Now,…

We’re actually living in a time that you could call the reversion to the long mean. In historical terms, there’s only ever really been one superpower. Fossil fuels created a temporary disruption to the historical pattern, now returning to…

Imagine a new world order where Europe and Asia (including Australia/NZ) all align behind China as the dominant superpower. And maybe even allow Russia back into the fold, it was the Americans that drove them out originally. 1/3…

Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that…

I’ve been watching the response to AI follow the same status-preserving obstruction we see for climate change, renewables, EVs, control of viruses, etc. The bar constantly raised higher, the more our existing status is challenged. I spend…

That fossil fuel detour is what gave the West global dominance, over Asia. But that dominance is now only 250-300 years old, while Asian dominance was 10 times that in terms of years. And Asia cleverly has already led the transition to…

How good is China, and their weapons of mass renewables transformation? https://t.co/YoOJ6iUNbG

The destruction of public health was really the privatisation of it, as we’d already done for energy, education, transport etc. The pathogens are still there, but now you have to deal with them at home. Matthew, see if you can get some…

In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the…

Only catastrophes change societies. The disaster in the Middle East may accelerate the global shift to action on climate change. Because without fuel, we’ll have no other choice. When we have choice, we always default to the status quo.…

That tragicomic meeting of two forces in Western society, social media social contagion, and fossil fuels. https://t.co/pig4ak8jij

Heaven and Earth will be moved to try to rescue the fossil fuel status quo. This is how meaningful change always happens, it will need to be completely smashed and crippled to change. It is never incremental or gradual or rational. China…

Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could…

The casualness of the Western response to the global energy crisis, which could actually break Western nations across every dimension of their operations. It shows the way their surrendering of public life to social media has strangled…

For the nuclear numpties, a nuclear power plant is just a hideously expensive 19th century steam turbine, with fission heating the water. Time to move on.

Why are we even arguing about how to generate energy? It’s engineering. Ask the engineers for a consensus view and they’ll tell you straight away what to do. They would have fixed Covid for us too. Civilisation means telling everybody to…

The dominant propaganda the fossil fuel status quo is rolling out in the face of the international clusterfuck we’re now living in? That renewable energy is only for the rich. We’ve heard that same rubbish before, the ‘inner city elites’…

The question for democracies is how King Trump accidentally managed to get them to mobilise renewables and EVs at last, after decades of standard democracy couldn’t move the dial? https://t.co/hCTb8QPFYb

Another manufactured outrage about EVs is that they’re heavily subsidised compared to combustion vehicles. Annual government subsidies to combustion vehicles are up to 15 times greater than what EVs receive, per year. New vehicle emissions…

Australia has been producing well over 10 million tonnes of coal ash waste, per year, for decades, to generate its electricity. The vast majority of it just sits in big holes in the ground, in ash dams. Compare with the 90,000 tonnes of…

Happy to test this dreary old hypothesis by removing all subsidy to fossil fuels, and letting the two options slug it out. https://t.co/xzSYBlZddF

The engineered hysteria from the fossil fuel status quo will become more and more strident as the entire edifice collapses. https://t.co/V5fxeqmjty

Last time I checked Australians were finally buying EVs, because embracing fossil fuels was sending them broke. https://t.co/rKsdTnqiLU

I’d like to say I’m never surprised by what the fossil fuel status quo will come up with as a way to avoid change. But the idea Australia will now become a major oil producer is maybe Peak Bullshit.

The comments under these posts are almost universally little Aussie Trumpies saying ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ Australian conservatives are at the ‘will drop pants for food’ stage of extinction denial. Using the destruction of Australia’s…

If as history suggests meaningful change comes only from catastrophic destruction of an existing status quo, every day this war goes on accelerates needed change to our societies. Covid brought us widespread WFH. Iran may finally break the…

Trump is dramatically accelerating the collapse of the fossil fuel status quo. The exact opposite of what he wants to do. Populism usually does this. The grandiose, insane dreams of the populists never happen. But their destruction of the…

The anti-EV folk are parroting right now that we’ll need nuclear energy for the apparently vast new amount of electrical energy needed for the shift to EVs. The amount of electrical energy needed to fuel your average daily driving is about…

The Australian government, first on EVs (road user charges) and now on network costs for grid supply, is trying to fund the renewables transition by increasingly targeting Australians who have invested in the change themselves. By evoking…

The men and women who built the original Snowy Hydro scheme, a renewable energy project that helped create modern Australia, would surely feel violated by 2026 politics. Anti-immigration. Anti-renewables. A disgrace to their legacy.…

The sad truth is that this continued disaster is all that was ever going to shift the fossil fuel status quo. Catastrophe is all that ever does. And so often the catastrophe is of the status quo’s own making, as its disconnect from actual…

The electricity grid is a model for society, not just a service. There is no real ‘local’ or ‘global’ in a grid. It collapses that distinction. Fake debates on the socials won’t change the world. Electrifying your life will, with immediate…

Hey #Insiders. I haven’t had an electricity bill in 3 years. I don’t pay a cent for petrol or diesel either. Now just waiting for the dullards to catch up.