> When the vote came on May 18, it was not, as some had predicted, a watershed climate change election. Australians, especially in coal country, voted to keep the incumbent conservative coalition in power.
> Within days, the Carmichael mine had new momentum.
One billionaire plus the Australian voting majority.
People like to say and act like, "Oh, I'm one person, what I do doesn't matter," but that's rationalizing the decision not to act. Individual behavior makes a difference. I don't just mean using less air conditioning to conserve power, though that matters too. People can influence and lead each other.
According to Mark Blyth ( Prof. of political economy at Brown ).
India is going to continue to build 200 more coal powered plants despite knowing exactly how awful climate change is going to be for India.
Pakistan is following similar strategy.
The idea is that Europe/US have more to lose due to climate change, so when time comes they can use these coal fired plants as a bargaining chip ("bribe") for technology transfer, better trade deals, etc.
I do not agree or disagree with his assessment, it could very well be true.
But if you are India, spending MORE money to fix climate change wont make much of a difference as the biggest polluters are US / CHINA / EU.
So a MAD type strategy makes sense from their perspective.
When reading comments or articles that acknowledge the problem, but have a rosy outlook on technical or market solutions to the problem, I rarely get the impression that they've spent time grappling with how many deliberative entities in a complex adaptive system are going to interact and recalculate as many social, political, economic, and climatic dynamics play off of each other.
Many here may not realise that there's massive problems with this crackpot deal cooked up by our politicians: It's actually 'protected' by Indigenous (Aboriginal) Land Rights.
Apparently the profitability of the future Adani mine in Queensland will not be assured [1], however I would guess the coal power plants Adani owns will make up for that.
How can India meet the Paris agreement[2] while letting Adani build new coal power plants?
> Within days, the Carmichael mine had new momentum.
One billionaire plus the Australian voting majority.
People like to say and act like, "Oh, I'm one person, what I do doesn't matter," but that's rationalizing the decision not to act. Individual behavior makes a difference. I don't just mean using less air conditioning to conserve power, though that matters too. People can influence and lead each other.