Wind change through Canberra.
Smoke from south coast is fucked.
Visibility down to about 100m. I can’t imagine how bad it must be on the coast.
Wind change through Canberra.
Smoke from south coast is fucked.
Visibility down to about 100m. I can’t imagine how bad it must be on the coast.
My mum lives in Batemans Bay in one of the areas that got flogged by the fires early in the day, she got to return home this morning. She was one of the lucky ones, 7 homes lost on her street alone, the adjacent streets are still blocked off but it looks bad.
Shoutout to @Schoolboy_Errors I’m now doing this. Thanks mate!!!
My one for Jan is not using yellow sponges with the green scratchy bit and going 100% of dishwashing by hand to a wooden/plant fibre dish brush.
Trying to stay positive amongst the fires.
My mum has started knitting cotton dish cloths and they work really well. I’m trying to convince her to sell them online. For what it’s worth though, I’ve used the same microfibre dish cloth for the last 4 years - it just goes through the clothes wash from time to time - and to be honest, it’s not through an effort to better treat the environment, I just haven’t had the need to replace it.
Those yellow sponge things are useless anyway, I don’t know why they still sell them.
We’ve used cotton “cheeky wipes” for cleaning up our kid’s bum which before having her I was pretty much against the idea of. Maybe your mum should offer them some competition!
Basically just two containers and a bunch of cotton cloths. Environmentally friendly and as soon as we started using them our kid’s nappy rashes cleared right up. I am always recommending them to new parents every opportunity I get. You think you don’t want to deal with the poo but when you use them and then just dump in the machine it’s easy as. All new parents should have a look at their website, because the amount of wipes you go through is ridiculous. We also used the reusable nappies for a fair while, though once the poos turned solid I wasn’t so keen…
Where you get the brush from?
It was a gift but if you google “biodegradable dish brush” you can see what they’re like.
We have been using a coconut based scouring pad:
And these biodegrabale and washable dish cloths:
Nice! Glad to spread the gospel.
Good shout on the dishwashing tips too, will suss out this because I use those rubbish yellow and green sponges.
Also, for my fellow sharemarket investors, AEF is going absolutely apeshit lately, wish I’d got in even earlier.
There’s a big rally planned for this Friday, 5.30pm at town hall. Perfect for killing time between work and Sydney FC.
Interesting opinion piece, while we’re on the topic of media influence in the other thread, funnily enough the piece was pulled from the website in record time so i had to link an archived version.
Edit: Seems to be not loading for a few, pasted below, sorry for the formatting.
It might seem bonkers that some of the worst climate-change deniers seem committed to blaming “greenies” for the holocaust on the eastern seaboard.
But it makes a sick kind of sense.
Somebody has to take the blame and they’ll be damned, literally, if it has to be them.
So in a twist that would have caused Joseph Goebbels’ permanent scowl to curl even more deeply into an approving sneer, they blame those who have been trying to save us from hellfire.
Great job. Well done.
But more than enough professional firefighters have debunked that particular slur for us to have to deal further with it here.
Instead, I’d like to apportion some more blame, and I’d like to tip it all over my own profession. The media.
I put it to my colleagues that we bear a heavy responsibility for the dozens of human lives lost, and the near-incalculable damage to the fragile ecology of this sunburnt country.
Half a billion native animals incinerated.
That was last week.
It’ll be worse now and worse again by the time the last ember is doused.
The devastation has been so vast that the continent’s flora and fauna might not recover.
And we bear some of the blame for that.
I’m not thinking here of the shameless grifters peddling denial and culture war as a business model.
I mean the hard-working, professional news gatherers and the platforms – the papers, news shows and websites – they run.
We have made it possible for powerful commercial interests and the political parties they have captured to pretend we are not entering a death spiral.
We are, and now we know what that looks like.
But every time a legitimate journalist or editor or producer calls on a denier “to put the other side” of the climate change case they make it so much more likely another half-billion kangaroos and wallabies and koalas will burn next year, and dozens more people along with them.
The denial of climate change is not a “side” in an argument.
It’s not a rhetorical exercise.
Climate-change denial is a complex, protean phenomenon that is as much about the genuine convictions held in good faith by deeply misinformed individuals, as is it about preserving the vast and mostly untaxed profits of fossil fuel corporations.
It is also a clear and present danger to human civilisation and life on this planet.
We in the news media, or what’s left of it, cannot simply treat climate-change denial as we would disagreements over tax or health policy.
Even serious and violent disagreements over social and economic policies can still be legitimate differences.
But there is nothing legitimate about climate change denial. It has the backing of a trillion-dollar industry sector, but no actual credibility.
There are no experts to hear from. No counterpoints to be made.
It is all lies in the service of profit and power.
One day it will probably be a crime, the same way that Holocaust denial is a serious offence in Germany.
Until then, however, those of us who work in the media need to take a hard look at our practices and ask ourselves whether we are really serving our audience.
False equivalence will kill us all.
Even the archived version first loads, then disappears (for me).
I got that too.
Edited, copy pasted the article, formatting is a bit weird though
I’ve read a couple things the last few days that mention how the current fires burning across the country have no name. Maybe because they haven’t finished burning yet and don’t look likely too. They don’t belong to one day, one month or even one area.
For me, the only thing I can think of that may have some sort of positive to draw on is to call them the National Climate Fires. Even if it just scares people into taking the Climate Crisis seriously. Which it really should.
Please don’t. Call them that, and the right-wing media will throw themselves at them and they will become an even bigger political shit fight than they are now. If they simply call them the 2019 Fires, there’s less of a chance to throw fuel on the fire (Pun intended).
As per the article posted above, we desperately need to stop making the climate crisis a political issue. A side to pick. It shouldn’t be and that needs to change ASAP.
The only real way to do that is a complete call out, rejection and ridicule of any climate denial. Much like racist and sexist points of view are often called out, rejected and ridiculed.
It is at the point where even friends of mine who even hint at tired old climate denial/its the Green’s fault arguments are immediately and utterly blasted by me.
Why the intolerance? How many years have we been talking about climate change being real, backed up with clear evidence it is occurring? There are no longer any excuses for people to be opposed to the evidence of what humanity has done to increase global temperatures.
While we’re on the topic, what’s up with the tens of thousands of disposable plastic cups we go through every match? How is this still a thing? There are plenty of solutions, either reusable or compostable, that we could and should have implemented years ago.