#dirtyenergy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dirtyenergy, aggregated by home.social.
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RE: https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/116733376345281503
The #DirtyEnergy companies could have chosen to cooperate.
They could could have even profited by pivoting to #CleanEnergy .
Instead, they are the #EnemiesOfTheFuture . -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mikeolson/116018577225689442
“Things change” : On the demise of #DirtyEnergy in #Europe , etc. ( by the essential @pluralistic )…
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(continued)
Even during the dying days of the 2009 Turnbull era, #Coalition #ClimatePolicy extended as far as tepid support for the deeply flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme introduced by #KevinRudd and his #ALP government.
Rudd's #CPRS had a 2050 emissions target of a measly 60% reduction from 2005 levels, had no mechanism for increasing ambition, grandfathered in a generous gift of pollution certificates to the worst polluters, and did nothing about Australia's massive and rapidly growing #DirtyEnergy exports (Australia's worst climate crime, dwarfing domestic emissions—a grand atrocity yet to be addressed in earnest by either side of the duopoly).
But the CPRS was nonetheless a climate policy with mechanisms that might have actually reduced Australia's domestic emissions over time, something the Coalition have never embraced in the almost-sixteen years since then.
Dropping the #NetZero2050 fig leaf is on brand.
(NB Once Abbott rolled Turnbull, PM Rudd could have easily passed his signature legislation if he had been at all willing to negotiate with the Greens under #BobBrown, who would have voted for the CPRS as literally better-than-nothing, with just one or two small tweaks—tweaks later conceded by #JuliaGillard in minority government. But Rudd wouldn't even talk to Brown.)
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On 26th Oct 2021, Australian PM Scott "don't-be-scared-of-coal" Morrison announced the Coalition's #NetZero2050 #ClimateTarget.
That same day, I read the document containing Morrison's 'plan'. It contained nothing to get Australia anywhere near the (already compromised idea of) #NetZero.
There was no plan, no modelling, no change in actual policies. The #ScottMorrison 'commitment' to net zero was still completely consistent with decades of #Coalhugger #Coalition policies. The target was toothless, an exercise in getting a headline to quiet the conscience of the news-skimming voter whose grandkids keep telling them climate is bad but who really wants to vote for hurting marginalised people and/or retaining their current tax loopholes (and who hasn't realised how much the #ALP embraces both anyway).
So with this week's news that #SussanLey has dropped that pretence, at least now there is one iota less dishonesty in Australian politics (albeit one with its own new lies and contradictions).
The last time the Coalition's #ClimatePolicy slightly departed from utter loyalty to the #DirtyEnergy industry was the morning of the 1st Dec 2009 in the hours before #MalcolmTurnbull was deposed as leader of her Majesty's Opposition and replaced by #TonyAbbott by a single vote.
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While the #ALP enjoys shooting fish in a barrell by wedging the #Coalition over their inability to decide whether or not to be honest with voters about the degree to which they outsource their #ClimatePolicy to their #DirtyEnergy donors/owners, don't miss the fact that successive ALP Environment Ministers haven't been able to decide whether the world's largest collection of thousands upon thousands of paleolithic petroglyphs (including depictions of extinct fauna and the oldest known artistic depiction of the human face) a true wonder of the world recently awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status (belatedly, due to threats from what follows), deserves to be protection by environmental regulations from the *massive* industrial operations of a major dirty energy hub operating next door. This is a piece of #DirtyEnergy infrastructure that the ALP have recently given permission to operate for another 45 years, during which time it will enable the combustion of a massive climate-wrecking bomb 13 times larger than Australia's annual emissions.
Court rules against Environment Minister's 'unreasonable delay' in doing his job: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/25/murray-watt-advised-by-own-department-to-declare-protection-order-over-part-of-burrup-peninsula
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@MelissaBenyon Yes, without key pieces of context for that very misleading final quote:
“This [North West Shelf] project is subject to those reforms, which means this plant is required to bring their emissions down each year and reach net zero by 2050 under the safeguard mechanism.”
Context: by "their emissions", the (unnamed) government spokesperson does *not* include the >4b tonnes of CO2 emissions that will result when the gas extracted from the project is burned (called 'scope 3 emissions' in technical jargon), and is only referring the (far smaller) emissions that result from the extraction process itself. However, most readers of the article are unlikely to be aware of this crucial distinction and so miss the verbal sleight of hand at play.
Also missing: even these latter emissions are very likely underestimated by current Australian government methods of accounting for gas extraction, which are not based on the latest research into the scale of methane leakage that occurs during extraction, processing and transport of #FossilGas.
Also also missing: the safeguard mechanism allows #Woodside to 'reduce' 'their emissions' via dodgy #CarbonOffset scams that frequently fail to do anything like what is claimed on the tin.
#Auspol #ClimateJournalism #NorthWestShelf #DirtyEnergy -
This week, the freshly re-elected #Albanese Labor government scandalously approved a forty-year extension on the operational life of the gas hub, a move that not only threatens the priceless petroglyphs, but represents permission for #Woodside (the massive gas company that basically runs the state of Western Australia) to profit off a #CarbonBomb that will, once extracted and burned, add somewhere between four and six billion tonnes of climate-wrecking ocean-acidifying carbon dioxide to the active carbon cycle. The cumulative climate pollution from the life of this one project will thus considerably exceed the sum of Australia's projected national domestic emissions for the next decade or more.
Of all the legacies of this Labor government, this decision (alongside giving the green light to dozens more coal and gas projects) will ultimately be the most impactful. The carbon released for the short-term profits of a wealthy few will contribute to massively disrupting and degrading the habitability of the planet for everyone, continuing to shape life on Earth for at least the next forty thousand years.
/web/20250529055300/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/28/approval-of-woodside-lng-project-gambles-with-ancient-heritage-for-short-term-gain
#Auspol #FossilFuelIndustry #DirtyEnergy #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #FossilGas #Murujuga #BurrupHub #NorthWestShelf #Woodside #ALP 2/2
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Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) on the western coast of the Australian continent is home to the world's largest collection of paleolithic petroglyphs (rock carvings), an ancient art gallery containing around one million images carved into the rocks, some dated to at least 45,000 years old. Many of the images depict Australia's distinctive fauna, including extinct creatures like the thylacine, as well as the oldest known representation of a human face. The rocks are themselves noteworthy as coming from some of the oldest igneous bedrock in the world (around 2.7 billion years old). And the region is home to five #Aboriginal nations who are the inheritors of fifty thousand years of continuous human occupation and culture.
The place is an obvious candidate for #UNESCO World Heritage protection.
However...
The Burrup peninsula is also the location of the #NorthWestShelf gas hub, a massive piece of #DirtyEnergy infrastructure that has played a significant role in placing Australia at or near the top globally of liquefied natural gas exporters. #LNG
Over the last forty or fifty years gas industry activity on the peninsula has measurably degraded the artworks, which have survived intact for forty or fifty thousand years.
#Auspol #FossilfFuelIndusrty #CulturalHeritage #Aboriginal1/2
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Headlines you won't see, but ought to: "Today's celebration of health and fun brought to you by the purveyors of death and planetary ecological breakdown."
#Sportwashing is the practice of sanitising the reputation of a government or corporation through sponsoring sporting events, associating their organisation with the significant public goodwill attached to sports.
A new report by a climate research group called the New Weather Institute calculates that #DirtyEnergy megacorporations have collectively spent at least US$5.6b in such deals.
From the report: “Fossil fuel companies are seeking to associate their product, whose #AirPollution alone is estimated to kill over 5 million people a year, with sport’s immense #SocialCapital and positive health impacts.
“They do this for many of the same reasons that #tobacco companies sponsored sport before it was largely banned – to portray themselves in a positive light and normalise their activities in the eyes of billions of sports fans.
“These types of sponsorship deals buy so-called ‘social licence’ to operate, in an attempt to divert attention from their role in fuelling the climate crisis and harming human health.”
#ClimateCrisis #FossilFuels #FossilFuelledFascism #SocialLicence #advertising
See also #greenwashing
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Surprising precisely no-one, it turns out that the #DirtyEnergy industry has been polluting public discourse and policy development for even longer than previously thought, according to the latest historical research into the lobbying and PR efforts of the companies who openly publish business plans incompatible with a habitable planet.
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Latest comments from #ExxonMobil CEO are pretty much just this meme.
Not going to link to any corporate news reports on these comments, which all seem to add little to the content of this meme.
#ClimateDisinformationCampaign #DirtyEnergy #propaganda #individualism #consumerism #PersonalResponsibility
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Bill McKibben and Roishetta Ozane discuss #Biden's response to #COP28 and whether his administration is going to give the green light to the biggest buildout of planet-wrecking #dirtyenergy happening anywhere in the world, namely #LNG expansion in the Gulf of Mexico:
"When you live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is pointing a sheet of glass at the sun, filling a tanker with liquefied natural gas and shipping it halfway around the world is archaic. It’s also ruinous: new data from the #Cornell scientist Bob Howarth this fall showed that these ships leak so much #methane that it’s far worse for the climate even than exporting #coal."
/web/20231220054332/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/19/fossil-fuel-expansion-us-biden
#LNG #StopLNG #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #DirtyEnergy #USpol #ClimateJustice #ClimateSolutions #ClimateCrisis #LeaveItInTheGround
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Anyone who thinks #FossilFuels are ever the 'cheaper'/'more affordable' option (a claim that hasn't been true for years, even within the very blinkered assumptions of conventional economic analysis), hasn't even begun to reckon with the true costs of #dirtyEnergy
A more clear-eyed analysis would see that continuing to burn ancient carbon to power our societies is largely a way to strip wealth from the poor and those not yet born and funnel the vast majority of it into the pockets of a tiny number of #plutocrats.
The time to end our reliance on #coal, #oil and #gas was decades ago, but today is better than tomorrow for taking the most ambitious steps imaginable that remain compatible with the avoidance of societal #collapse and a commitment to #justice.
Another world is not just possible, given #ClimateDisruption, it is inevitable. The degree to which that world is habitable, equitable or even slightly just is very much up for grabs.
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A #RisingTide of people seeking to put spokes in the wheels of the the #DeathMachine putting corporate profits before a #HabitablePlanet.
#Solidarity and #gratitude to the hundreds of people who used kayaks and their bodies to blockade the world's busiest #coal port for 32 hours this weekend, and to the thousands who supported them, and to the millions who cheered them on, and to the billions for whose sake they were acting. This was a taste of an unstoppable force of collective #courage, #care and #commitment
#DirectAction #EndCoal #DirtyEnergy #CoalChokesOurFuture #CivilDisobedience #LeaveItInTheGround
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More steps towards #ClimateJustice:
- Listen to better stories (life-affirming, grounded in local realities, respectful of non-exploitative difference, centring the marginalised, acknowledging complex interdependence, subversively intersectional, incrementally transformational, with a horizon that is future-oriented, intergenerational and global)
- Tell better stories
- Resist dehumanising and evocidal tendecies wherever you find them
- Reduce your dependence on #DirtyEnergy (to the extent possible), without succumbing to #BadFaith purity tests, and taking every opportunity to discover richer and more joyous alternatives: -
On Gadigal land, outside the office of Australia's federal Environment Minister @TanyaPlibersek's office, with a large group of school students and their allies, demanding the Australian government #EndFossilFuelSubsidies and commit to #NoNewFossilFuels. #SS4C
All of us can help #ShiftThePower away from #DirtyEnergy:
- Stop repeating their talking points & narratives (not sure which commonly-repeated tropes are part of their decades-long #ClimateDisinformation campaign? Never too late to learn)
- Stop voting for their paid representatives in parliament (typically found within both/most major parties). #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #DirtyDonations #PutCorruptionLast
- Support actions happening near you (not sure what's happening or how to help? Search for your location & #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice).
- Learn more about why we're collectively still failing to implement (political/economic/societal/cultural) changes at a scale & pace commensurate with the scale & pace of the #ClimateCrisis (hint: too much power in too few hands: #plutocracy #colonialism #capitalism #patriarchy #individualism).
- Consider the stakes: life as we know it is incompatible with the public business plans of the most powerful corporations on the planet. One/both of those realities will definitely change. Will you? -
CW: On the growth of authoritarianism 🧵
#Trump and his spokespeople have talked openly about:
- #GOP plans to secure (i.e. steal) the 2024 US election by subverting or bypassing remaining bodies working in favour of free(r) & fair(er) voting;
- invoking the #InsurrectionAct in order to use the military to quell protests;
- purging the #USmilitary & government of independently-minded individuals and replacing them with loyalists;
- removing #TermLimits and other constitutional or institutional checks on #SupremeExecutivePower;
- bringing independent government-funded bodies under direct presidential control;
- locking up his political enemies (or worse, implicit in constant violent metaphors), including partisan opponents, media critics and #antifascist activists;
- blanket presidential pardons for himself & his cronies;
- deporting undesirable people by the millions (requiring the establishment of huge deportation camps (i.e. #ConcentrationCamps);
- further dismantling the vestiges of anything resembling a welfare state;
- pulling out of multilateral & international bodies, reconfiguring #geopolitics even further in favour of #authoritarian regimes;
- slashing taxes on the wealthy;
- further dismantling #EnvironmentalRegulation;
- expediting the construction of #DirtyEnergy infrastructure.
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"Five global north governments stand out as the biggest #ClimateHypocrites and most egregious #PlanetWreckers: the #UnitedStates, #Canada, #Australia, #Norway, and the #UnitedKingdom. Despite having the greatest economic means to rapidly phase out production, they are responsible for a majority (51%) of planned expansion from new #oil and #gas fields through 2050. New drilling in countries with high incomes, diversified economies and outsized historical responsibility for causing the #ClimateCrisis, while claiming to be #ClimateLeaders, is inexcusable. These countries must not only stop expansion immediately but also move first and fastest to phase out their production and pay their fair share to fund a just global #EnergyTransition.”
#NoNewCoal #NoNewGas #NoNewOil #LeaveItInTheGround #DirtyEnergy #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #Auspol #UKpol #USpol
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The world spends more than $5 trillion a year on dirty energy subsidies, according to a new report. This amount is more than the global health budget and 10 times the spending on clean energy. The report warns that these subsidies are fueling the climate crisis and harming human health and development. #DirtyEnergy #Subsidies #ClimateCrisis https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/dirty-energy-subsidies-oil/
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Headline quote says that the Australian #ALP government is "missing half the equation" when it comes to taking action to mitigate climate disruption.
While there is federal support for expanding cleaner forms of energy, the Australian government continues to approve new coal and gas projects, and even create new forms of indirect #DirtyEnergySubsidies (such as federal funding for the #MiddleArm industrial hub in #Darwin, representing a substantial gift to the #FossilGas industry). Hence, they are "missing half the equation".
But I would argue that they are missing *most* of the equation, because stopping the increase of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases from being emitted by winding down the #DirtyEnergy industry as rapidly and humanely as possible is the single biggest aspect of #ClimateAction. Doing so will require replacement forms of energy (and all kinds of shifts in how energy is used), yes, but this is actually a secondary goal required to achieve the main one: an end to humanity's dependence on dirty energy ASAP.
#Auspol #ClimateStrategy #ClimatePolicy #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #ALPClimatePolicy #ClimateCommunication
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All the smoke around Sydney this week is from hazard reduction burns. i.e. controlled burns conducted by the rural fire service to mitigate this summer's bushfire's risk, which has been assessed as particularly high, after three very wet La Ninã years and with a likely El Niño developing.
The #RFS is way behind schedule on this due to all the rain and other complicating factors causing many delays. With temperatures topping 30ºC this weekend, they are rushing to get as much done as they can before the window closes.
Speaking of which, make sure all your windows are closed.
It's a nasty trade-off: to reduce the risk of a climate disaster hitting hard this summer, we conduct an activity with its own risk of air quality for five million people dropping into the toilet for a week. These days of bad air (and even worse nights) will result in premature deaths, increased hospitalisations, and some long-term damage to everyone's respiratory health (esp children).
Once more, given the direct impacts on air quality and the long-term global worsening of #wildfire risk, this moment is another salutary reminder that #DirtyEnergy sends our future up in smoke.
#NSWpol #BushfireRisk #bushfire #ElNino #ClimateImpacts #ClimateDisruption #Auspol
3/3EDIT: added climate context.
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CW: Boring discussion of corporate tax 2/2
How much tax #DirtyEnergy companies pay is largely irrelevant to the question we were discussing, since a company that is both taxed and receives significant subsidies will do better than a competitor (e.g. a renewable energy company) that is taxed and doesn't receive those subsidies. I probably should have said something like that. (I could also have made a point about government funds not being derived from taxation, but I really didn't get the vibe that that was going to be particularly fruitful approach for this gentleman.)
Instead I replied that dirty energy companies pay relatively little tax due to exploiting tax loopholes (that they also lobby to put in). He scoffed in disbelief and changed the subject.
With that context, now you'll understand how embarrassed I was to have just stumbled across this table for 2020–21 and realise I was wrong.
Of the twenty-four largest dirty energy companies in Australia, only one of them paid “relatively little” income tax that year.
#TaxAvoidance #TaxJustice #Auspol #DirtyEnergySubsidies #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics
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CW: Boring discussion of corporate tax 1/2
After giving a climate talk to a community group the other day, one guy came up to me to "give feedback" (i.e. complain that I didn't focus enough on telling people how to cut their personal #CarbonFootprint - to use the phrase that #BP really wants us to focus on).
This led into a discussion about why individual consumer choices always have the system stacked against them. As part of that point, I mentioned the enormous scale of #DirtyEnergySubsidies (>$7t globally each year, though I focused on $11b annually in Australia, which is a widely cited figure based on a narrower definition of subsidy; he seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn't care as much if I wasn't talking about his country.)
Upon hearing of these subsidies (which were apparently news to him), he said "yeah, but how much tax do they contribute?"
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#Auspol #TaxJustice #FossilFuelSubsidies #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #DirtyEnergy #SystemChangeNotClimateChange
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@swearyanthony I was actually just thinking a few hours before seeing this: "if I were a #billionaire #DirtyEnergy #plutocrat and I wanted to pollute public discourse, wouldn't I want to set up various awards to give my corporate megaphone (#MurdochPress etc) a veneer of 'quality journalism'? Hmmm,I wonder what the history and funding of the Walkleys is?"
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China continues coal spree despite climate goals https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-plants-climate-goals-carbon?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
This isn’t good. But before we all leap in with collective condemnation and whataboutism, I wonder how many of those plants *wouldn’t* be required if the rest of the world stopped treating China as it’s main factory? I wonder how much of the energy being added is simply offsetting even sharper energy growth in ‘post-industrial’ nations like UK?
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"Calling #hydrogen #CleanEnergy is a #scam to prop up the #OilAndGas industry."
"The #Biden administration's plans to expand this #DirtyEnergy will only increase #oil and #gas extraction at a time when the #ClimateEmergency demands the opposite," said Grant. "We need investment in affordable, reliable, community-supported #RenewableEnergy like #wind and #solar."
Silas Grant, a campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, quoted in
'#Climate Scam': 180+ Groups Tell Biden to Drop Support for Hydrogen
"Calling hydrogen clean #energy is a scam to prop up the oil and gas industry," said one campaigner.
