Both the ALP and the Coalition have brought policies that most independent analysis suggests will fail to reach the presumed bipartisan target of a 5 per cent reduction in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020.

That, in itself, makes both policy positions untenable. They don’t match the science, they don’t match the expectations of public polling and they don’t match the business need for some sort of certainty to unlock the tens of billions of investment that must be made to bring Australia’s energy network, and its broader economy, into the 21st century.

The most remarkable thing is that the media and the electorate will let them get away with it. The extent to which they do will be answered by the performance of The Greens, the party – according to RBA board member Warwick McKibbin – that has produced “closest to the best policy on climate change”. And the only party that is unable to deliver it.

How the politics of Dumb and Dumber entered the climate debate can be traced back to the fateful day in Canberra when the Liberals rolled Malcolm Turnbull and, much to their own surprise, put Tony Abbott in his place.

Abbott’s climate scepticism didn’t win him any greater support, but his “great big tax” mantra certainly hit a nerve – mostly Labor’s. It fits neatly into a newspaper headline and an audio sound bite: so effectively, that Abbott hasn’t been compelled to produce another original thought on the matter ever since.

The Labor government has been unable to resist the scare campaign, centred as it is around the impact of energy prices in the western suburbs of Sydney. Ever since Rudd pulled the ETS, destroying the last vestiges of his credibility, and was finally dispatched, and Gillard and her advisors dreamed up the Citizens Assembly, the ALP has tried to create a smaller target for the Opposition.

Gillard didn’t even mention climate change in the official election launch, but the Opposition took a shot at it anyway, suggesting it had a secret deal with The Greens to produce an interim carbon tax. So Labor retreated further and promised it would not.

The ALP has promised a suite of policies that sound nice and are steps in the right direction, but don’t mean a lot because they lack ambition. The fuel efficiency measures still leave Australia well behind the rest of the world, the emission caps on new power stations will not affect those already in the planning stages, and the reward for early action for business means nothing unless company boards can see a carbon price.

The Liberals, bizarrely, have chosen a direct action scheme that rewards the two groups that argued loudest against an emissions trading scheme – the farmers and the heavy emitters – by creating a private and exclusive “abatement market” run by bureaucrats and to be paid for by taxpayers. How did this get through?

It reminds some observers of the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme which was panned by a subsequent audit as being next to useless. Even more bizarrely, the Liberals climate spokesman Greg Hunt compares it to the UN Clean Development Mechanism. That, though, produces a tradable commodity, a Certified Emission Reduction unit. It’s a carbon market! Albeit one that has been rorted horribly because it is run by bureaucrats.

None of this is quite as bizarre as the concept of the citizens assembly. As soon as 14 million Australians go to the polls to elect their leaders, the ALP (presuming its re-elected) will go to the phone book to find 150 souls to consider a strategy to address the greatest moral and business challenge we face.

It turns out that UTS researchers have already done something similar, but much more extensive. A project they conducted, targeting not just 150 Australians, but 7000, and staggered over four in-depth studies, concluded that most voters want the government to adopt an ETS now, and to target bigger reduction targets.

The four studies – conducted at yearly intervals – showed that voters wanted revenues generated by an ETS to be used to ease poverty, assist seniors and invested in research and development, and not to be used to reduce taxes for business.

Professor Jordan Louviere, who headed the research, said it showed that the proposed Citizen’s Assembly was unnecessary – what the community has clearly wanted for years is an ETS.

“It is possible, now, for the government to come up with a workable ETS plan that meets the community’s expectations and makes the trade-offs clear that will come with an effective plan,” he says.

“From the public’s perspective any climate change plan consists of eight key features: When does it start? How will revenue be collected? What will be done with the revenue raised? What happens with the transport sector? Are energy-intensive sectors of the economy given special treatment? Does the plan have a strong R&D component? What reduction in carbon emissions should Australia aim for? Finally, should Australia move now or wait for other countries?

“We asked our survey respondents to choose between plans consisting of different options for these features. In doing so we made it clear to them the nature of trade-offs that would be involved in, say, holding back on the start of an emissions trading scheme or protecting certain industries.

“Overall our results suggest that Australians are committed to a climate change plan that works. They believe that it is happening and clearly recognise that there are substantial costs to adopting a plan.”

Try getting a politician to say that. Maybe on Monday.

http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/path-least-resistance-0?utm_source=Climate+Spectator+daily&utm_campaign=a5bcf06f72-&utm_medium=email

At least one man has drowned in crude during the clean-up operation, which has expanded as the area of the slick has doubled in size despite earlier government assurances that it was being contained and posed no risk to ecologically sensitive areas.

Five days after a pipeline explosion at the north-east port of Dalian, oil had reportedly spread over an area of 430 square kilometres, prompting a dispersal mission along the coast.

Hundreds of local volunteers are spreading absorbent matting along the Yellow Sea shoreline in an attempt to stop the slick from damaging beaches.

Out at sea, authorities have started to use oil-consuming bacteria to try to disperse the slick, along with chemical agents and lengthy floating barrages.

Even though maritime officials have mobilised 800 fishing boats to assist the 40 specialist vessels in the operation, the winds and tides are spreading the slick wider and thinner.

The difficult conditions have proved fatal for at least one man. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned on Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

In some areas, volunteers equipped only with rubber gloves, rubber boots and rudimentary tools have struggled to cope with the waves washing up on the beaches.

“I’ve been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil,” Zhong Yu of the environmental group Greenpeace China, told the Associated Press. “The oil is half-solid and half-liquid and is as sticky as asphalt.”

Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned until the end of August.

“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals and water quality, and sea birds,” Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the city’s Maritime Safety Administration, told a regional TV station.

The authorities say the leak was staunched within 24 hours of last Friday’s accident, but they have yet to reveal how much oil was discharged before then. The state-run China Central television channel estimates the spill at 1,500 tons, less than 0.5% of the amount released into the ocean by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Local officials have been upbeat about the prospects of a quick clean-up and a resumption of normal services at the port, which has had to redirect 420 vessels from the area of the slick.

“Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters,” Dalian’s vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told reporters earlier this week. Other officials expect the operation to last twice as long and even then it is far from clear that the ecological damage will end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/21/china-oil-spill-disaster-wildlife

The latest U.S. Treasury Z1 Flow of Funds report was released on March 11, 2010, bringing the data current through the end of 2009.

http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=28677991&access_key=key-jgtahbtbcd3hvfpfvno&page=1&viewMode=list" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="500" width="600" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"

By Margot O’Neill for Lateline

A new survey of Australian politicians shows a clear majority believe climate change is happening, but many appear to be unsure about some of its consequences.

The University of Queensland (UQ) survey of more than 300 federal, state and local government politicians found that nearly 70 per cent believed human-induced climate change is happening and rated it as one of Australia’s most important challenges.

But more than 40 per cent of those questioned said they believed it would be safe for the planet to warm by 4 degrees Celsius, despite scientific warnings that a global temperature increase of 2 degrees or more could be dangerous.

The survey also uncovered confusion about what climate change really means.
For instance, 75 per cent of politicians believe the Great Barrier Reef is threatened by global warming, but only 55 per cent agree that ocean ecosystems are also threatened, even though the Great Barrier Reef is part of the ocean’s ecosystems.

Kelly Fielding, from the Institute for Social Science Research at UQ, says the results highlight the complexity of the issue of climate change.

“It takes a high level of knowledge, and scientific knowledge, to really understand the full range of effects,” she said.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of UQ’s Global Change Institute agrees.

“This is a complex area and I think this is revealing that even our leaders have trouble sort of getting the core concepts,” he said.

Some scientists are alarmed by the response on the effects of a 4-degree temperature rise.

Nearly 7 per cent of politicians believe a rise of up to 6 degrees would be safe.

Climate scientists say such rises will probably lead to an escalation of heatwaves, bushfires and the melting of the polar ice caps.

“The thing that scared me most of all in the survey is the temperature question,” said Andy Pitman from the University of NSW’s Climate Change Centre.

“I find it remarkable that people would think warming of four, five, six, seven degrees might be loosely defined as safe.”

Dr Fielding says some stark party political differences were also evident.

Asked whether the planet is warming because of human activity producing greenhouse gases, 98 per cent of Greens said “yes” compared to 89 per cent of Labor, 57 per cent for non-aligned politicians and 38 per cent of Liberal-National politicians.

Throughout the survey, many more Liberal-National politicians answered “don’t know” or “uncertain”.

“What you’re seeing is greater certainty and belief on the part of the Labor Party politicians and more knowledge about the specifics of climate change, whereas for the Liberal-National Party politicians it’s greater uncertainty and that uncertainty is creeping through in terms of being able to respond to sort of specific questions about climate change that tap into the detail of climate change,” she said.

Only 56 per cent of surveyed politicians trust the world’s leading climate science body, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, although nearly 70 per cent said they were greatly influenced by what scientists say.

But again, that depends on party affiliation. Nine-eight per cent of Greens said they were greatly influenced by scientists compared to 85 per cent of Labor politicians, 54 per cent for non-aligned politicians and dropping to 44 per cent for Liberal-National politicians.

Only 18 per cent of federal politicians responded to the survey. Of the entire survey group, 97 were Labor, 73 Liberal-National, 41 were Greens and the remaining 97 described themselves as non-aligned.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/12/2980671.htm?section=justin

The Greens released the policy at the launch of their Tasmanian federal election campaign in Hobart and have said that businesses willing to develop large-scale renewable energy projects would be eligible to apply for 100 % loan guarantees, similar to a scheme in the United States.

Greens Senator Christine Milne says ‘the scheme would create jobs and give banks the confidence to lend money to renewable ventures in the future; of course it is some risk for government to take on with loan guarantees but the benefits are so much greater because it means we will see the rollout of renewables as quickly as possible across Australia; people trying to seek finance for large-scale renewable energy investments are having difficulties and this is for solar thermal with storage, for geothermal, for wave power; in the United States – having recognised that – they moved to loan guarantees and that has been the basis on which they have managed to get the investment and the shift to renewables’.

DB: Whilst I have no problems with this policy, geothermal is a waste of time and money and the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) of wave energy will most likely remain in the negative.

Last week at the Security B-Sides and DEFCON conferences in Las Vegas, HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 (and founder and chief architect of Metasploit), disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in VxWorks, which is used to power Apple Airport Extreme access points, Mars rovers and C-130 Hercules aircrafts, in addition to microwaves, switches, sensors, telecom equipment and industrial control monitors.

VxWorks has a service enabled by default that provides read or write access to a device’s memory and allows functions to be called, Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. The vulnerable service, called WDB agent, is a “debugger” for the VxWorks operating system that is used to diagnose problems and ensure code is working properly when a product is being developed.

The debugging service, a selectable component in the VxWorks configuration enabled by default, is not secured and represents a security hole in a deployed system, according to an advisory issued by US-CERT.

The exposed WDB agent “allows anyone with network access to the device to take complete control of the device,” Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. “With a little bit of work, you could hijack just about any device.”  To determine how widespread the problem was, Moore wrote a scanner module for the Metasploit open-source penetration testing framework to run a network survey that encompassed more than 3.1 billion IP addresses (sic) and more than 250,000 products representing 100 vendors were found with the WDB agent exposed, he said.

Moreover, say Moore ‘unknown hackers spent most of 2006 scanning for the service; there is a pretty good chance that someone already found this vulnerability and exploited it en masse all throughout 2006; it was more than likely someone doing something malicious, but we have no clue what that was; there’s just a huge variety of what you can do with this vulnerability – if you know how to apply it; meanwhile, a separate vulnerability involving the hashing algorithm that is used in the standard authentication API for VxWorks could allow an attacker to brute force a password; the hashing algorithm is susceptible to collisions, meaning an attacker would be able to brute force a password in a relatively short period of time by guessing a string that produces the same hash as a legitimate password, according to a separate advisory posted by US-CERT’, said Moore.

Moore contacted the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and provided researchers with a list of affected devices, with the goal of notifying as many vendors as possible. VxWorks customers include Northrop Grumman, Motorola, Dell, Apple, HP and Cisco. VxWorks is produced by Wind River, acquired by Intel in 2009.  Wind River plans to fix the weak password hashing vulnerability in VxWorks 6.9, which has not yet been released, according to Moore. However, the vendor has not made any promises to fix older affected versions of the embedded operating system.

“I expect to see this bug live on almost indefinitely,” Moore said; however, a Wind River spokesman told SCMagazineUS.com (in an email) that when contacted by Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center, Wind River immediately assessed the alert, issued patches on August 2 and was instructed by CERT to provide a “synchronous public response.” But Moore wrote in his blog that these two bugs are “just the tip of the iceberg; the VxWorks platform largely has been ignored for the past 10 years and needs to be more thoroughly tested’.

By Angela Moscaritolo (Aug 4, 2010 12:55 PM); see original article on scmagazineus.com

Reply by Gary Woodman (Aug 9th):

‘Or maybe not.

It’s a problem that won’t go away because those networked devices with embedded VxWorks probably weren’t designed to be easily updated in the field without physically accessing them, and often the point of these devices is to have them in the field where they are hard to physically access; fixing will cost many times more than replacing, most likely.

It’s also a problem generically with networked devices, i.e. it isn’t limited to VxWorks and the like. Many new electronic devices are coming with networking capabilities these days, including mobile phones, TVs, e-book readers, and the vast majority will never receive software updates (being consumer equipment run by naïve consumers). Most run some version of Linux if not using a commercial RTOS, often with some software services that make them vulnerable to attack if someone chose to. But they aren’t Windows desktops so nobody much is looking at them that way. Yet.

This story may be a bit of a beat up, but it does foreshadow the spread of computer worms and viruses from Windows to the wider computing arena’.

As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make. This is a sampling of what one finds:

* Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren.
* Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.
* Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
* Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

There are some lovely photos accompanying the article, including one showing what a darkened street in Colorado looks like as a result of not being able to afford street lights. Read the article to revel in the details of this widespread misery. Meanwhile, the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest — the ones who caused these problems in the first place — continues to thrive. Let’s recall what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson said last year in The Atlantic about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues:

‘Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or — here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique — the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk — at least until the riots grow too large’.

The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.

UPDATE: It’s probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning: “Back to Stone Age” — which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.”

Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights – or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State – that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Funnily enough, when the USSR collapsed, so too did the supply of oil to Cuba, by two thirds. In the ensuing period the average Cuban lost 22 pounds (lbs) in weight.

Add to that the embargo on Cuba by the USA – enforced by banning ships who had been to Cuba from enterting any harbour of port in the USA – and you could see why they went on a forced diet.

In fact it was several Australians who went to Cuba and taught them Permaculture practices (from Bill Mollison from Tassie) that helped create a largely self-sufficient food producing country it now is.

Now it appears that the shoe is on the other foot; with Americans suggested as the most obese nation, the global financial crisis worm – instigated by the Americans – has come back to visit them, with the significant increase in requests for food stamps.

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 40 plus million in May this year, as the jobless rate hovers near a 27-year high.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 % from a year earlier and increased 0.9% from April this year (3 months ago), the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website that pparticipation has set records for 18 straight months.

Over an eighth of the American population will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1 2009 and according to White House estimates, the figure is projected to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.

In spite of prolonged droughts and ensuing water shortages and subsequent billion $ investments in water infrastructure, what remaining arable food growing areas are destined to be sold off in one way or another. The Mary River dam would have done more than damage a fragile eco-system, it would have covered arable land and caused much ecological damage and now, Queensland Labor has planned the sell off of Darling Downs to make a few $’s in royalties and massive profts for major financial contributors.

Around the world in another socialist government also known for previous experiments in agriculture and social experiments, they too are suffering from droughts and if you think it wont affect us here, then think again.

Russia is a major food exporter, but record temperatures this summer are expected to halve exports; there are also fears the government could start an export ban to protect domestic supplies, which will result in a food price inflation. President of the Russian Grain Union, Arkady Zlachevsky says there is hope that Siberian crops will help improve the total output; however, non-political commentators believe a forecast if 11 million tonnes is more accurate than exports of 14 to 15 million tonnes.

Russia had agreed to sell 180 thousand tonnes of wheat to Egypt after shunning a similar offer from the United States. Grain prices last week reached $240 per tonne, up from $180. It doesn’t matter where it is, if the product is more scarce, then demand will push the price up, whatever the commodity.

In Australia we have seen federal governments implement owrk practices at the behest of corporations; its common practice to employ people from many other conuntries to ‘supply labour where there is a shortage’, the problem is that most of these industries have skilled and semi-skilled unemployed Australians on the dole because of off-shore labour.

There needs to be a more balanced approach between Unions and Corporations, otherwise the inflexability of egos will end up with conflict. As in the USA and Greece, there will be increasing protests and bloodshed.