Australia – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Global Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) capacity, 2010-2020. Twenty years ago, the fossil fuel industry told you that by today, CCS would capture 5,000 million tons of CO2 per year. Today, the world can barely capture 10. Which is so far off target you can’t even see it on this graph. And when you remember that our global emissions are 36 BILLION tonnes each year, even if it had met its target, it would contribute approximately FUCK ALL. Data: IEA. Graphic: The Juice Media

September 3, 2021

Honest Government Ad: Carbon Capture and Storage – “CCS is a complex mining process whereby fossil fuel companies inject donations into the arseholes of politicians to delay climate action”

1 September 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien Government with an important announcement as we enter the next stage of the climate crisis: MASSIVE FIRES, MASSIVE FLOODS, MASSIVE BULLSHIT. As things fall apart and calls grow for us to urgently reduce our emissions we’ve come up with a PR campaign – […]

Screenshot from “Honest Government: Ad Hotel Quarantine and Vaccines” by The Juice Media, 30 July 2021. Shown are headlines describing how experts are calling for urgent action on Covid hotel quarantine in Australia. Photo: The Juice Media

August 2, 2021

Honest Government Ad: Hotel Quarantine and Vaccines in Australia – “You can eat a bag of dicks”

30 July 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien Government. Many of you are wondering, how did we manage to go from Zero Covid and being the envy of the world to being an experiment in what happens when the Delta variant rips through an unvaccinated population? Well, it wasn’t easy – […]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from China and OECD nations, 1990-2019. In 2019, China’s GHG emissions passed the 14 gigaton threshold for the first time, reaching 14,093 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMt CO2e). This represents a more than tripling of 1990 levels, and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. As a result, China’s share of the 2019 global emissions total of 52 gigatons rose to 27 percent. Data: Rhodium Group / UNFCCC. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 8, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the developed world for the first time in 2019

By Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser 6 May 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Each year Rhodium Group provides the most up-to-date global and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates through the ClimateDeck (a partnership with Breakthrough Energy). In addition to our preliminary US and China GHG estimates for 2020, Rhodium provides annual estimates of economy-wide emissions—including all […]

Screenshot from the video, “Honest Government Ad | We Make Everything Good Sh!t”, by The Juice Media, 2 July 2021. Photo: The Juice Media / YouTube

July 7, 2021

Honest Government Ad: We Make Everything Good Sh!t – Australia science agencies “infiltrated and hollowed” out by fossil fuel industry

2 July 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien government. In today’s episode of “We Make Everythig Good Shit”, we look at the CSIRO, your trusted science agency, which has earned a reputation for great inventions: wifi, space stuff, Aeroguard. Unlike gas companies, which have earned a reputation for poisoning aquifers, ripping […]

Global map showing large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures, defined as those that lead to arrests, in January 2021. Nations in green imposed large-scale lockdowns in 2021. Graphic: Al Jazeera / World Happiness Report

March 21, 2021

World Happiness Report 2021: Reasons for Asia-Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19 – Death rate in Asia-Pacific nations 42 times lower than North Atlantic nations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs 20 March 2021 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the […]

A before-and-after satellite view of flooding at Port Macquarie, captured by radar data from the European Union Earth Observation Programme's Sentinel-1 satellite on 12 March 2021 19 March 2021. Photo: Copernicus European Earth Observation Programme

March 21, 2021

Heavy rains in Australia’s east bring worst floods in 50 years – “Yesterday, we were hoping it will only be a one-in-20-year event, now it looks like a one-in-50-year event”

By Angus Thompson, Rachel Clun, and Lucy Cormack 21 March 2021 (Sydney Morning Herald) – The collision of two powerful weather systems over the east coast of NSW on Monday night may see more evacuations as western Sydney residents were forced to flee to higher ground on Sunday when floodwaters inundated their neighbourhoods. The State […]

Map showing market losses per postcode in the “Black Summer” bushfires in Australia, 30 December 2019 - 5 January 2020. Graphic: PERILS AG

January 18, 2021

Final insured losses for “Black Summer” bushfires of 2019/2020 in Australia estimated at A$1.866 billion

ZURICH, 6 January 2021 (PERILS) – PERILS, the independent Zurich-based organisation providing industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, has today disclosed its fourth and final industry loss estimate for the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. The final estimate of the insurance market loss is AUD 1,866m. This compares to the third loss estimate of AUD 1,861 million which […]

Satellite view of wildfires on the U.S. West Coast between 12 September 2020 and 16 September 2020. Video: Michael Benson / CIRA / NOAA

December 30, 2020

Watching Earth burn – “The war has started. We’re losing.”

By Michael Benson 28 December 2020 (The New York Times) – I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. Let me explain. The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to […]

A worker stands outside a construction site of the Xinzhuang coal mine that is part of Huaneng Group’s integrated coal power project, on 30 September 2020. Photo: Thomas Peter / Reuters

December 26, 2020

China rations electricity for millions – “The whole city was dark”

By Vivian Wang 21 December 2020 (The New York Times) – In the city of Yiwu in eastern China, the authorities turned off streetlights for several days and ordered factories to open only part-time. In coastal Wenzhou, the government ordered some companies not to heat their offices unless temperatures are close to freezing. In southern […]

Distribution of major tax cuts for the rich across OECD nations, 1965-2015. This figure visualizes the resulting binary variable that picks out years in which taxes on the rich were reduced substantially. In total, we identify 30 country-year observations where taxes on the rich were significantly reduced. Governments enacted major tax reforms in all countries in our sample and across the whole observation period. Many countries implemented major tax cuts for the rich in the late 1980s. Furthermore, the identification of tax cuts is also in line with previous studies that have focused on income tax progressivity (Rubolino and Waldenström, 2020) or on overall tax progressivity single specific countries (Saez and Zucman, 2019). For instance, echoing these authors’ findings, we find two major reforms that reduced taxes on the rich in the US: 1982 (First Reagan Tax Cut) and 1986/1987 (Second Reagan Tax Cut). Graphic: Hope and Limberg, 2020 / LSE

December 25, 2020

Tax breaks for the rich don’t boost the economy – “Our research shows that the economic case for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak”

16 December 2020 (LSE) – Major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality but do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment, according to new research by LSE and King’s College London. Researchers say governments seeking to restore public finances following the COVID-19 crisis should therefore not be […]