Peter Sainsbury
Peter Sainsbury is a retired public health worker with a long interest in social policy, particularly social justice, and now focusing on climate change and environmental sustainability. He is extremely pessimistic about the world avoiding catastrophic global warming.
Peter's recent articles
18 December 2021
Sunday environmental round up
Most of Earths minerals need living organisms to form. Young people recommend consuming less: smartphones, meat and alcohol would be good starts.
11 December 2021
Sunday environmental round up
Cooee Australia, stop producing fossil fuels and develop credible climate action plans. All nations must preserve ecosystems with irrecoverable carbon.
7 December 2021
Dave Sharma, the very model of a Wentworth modern Liberal
Preparing for a tough election battle, federal Liberal MP Dave Sharma massages the truth on the governments climate action for Wentworths voters.
4 December 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Coal region residents want economic transition. Plastic becoming a significant producer of CO2. Illegal logging and fishing in Myanmar and Mexico.
27 November 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
On land and sea, humans need to do a better job protecting the environment and our rights to enjoy healthy environments.
20 November 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
COP26 is finished but are we any closer to reducing emissions? Global temperatures rising and supplies of fresh water falling.
13 November 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Fossil capital (grateful nod to Andreas Malm) holds up climate action in Glasgow and Canberra, a fishy resuce, the vicious CO2 circle.
6 November 2021
Sunday environmental round up
COP, COP, COP and COP focusing on forests and migration.
30 October 2021
Sunday environmental round up
While humans struggle to do the right thing for themselves and their fellow Earth travellers, animals act to save the world.
23 October 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
I know Scotty is a regular reader, so this week's round up is a handy cheat sheet to help him as COP26 in Glasgow beckons.
16 October 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Climate change creates internal refugees for countries least able to cope. Urgent action required to reduce methane emissions but its easy. Australian companies carbon offsetting schemes are corporate greenwashing and nations emission reduction promises are just that promises.
9 October 2021
Sunday environmental round up
Thirty per cent of tree species are at risk of extinction, an issue of vital importance to city dwellers. Disasters are linked and compound each other and share human-induced root causes. Summer night-time temperatures rising. Angus Taylor touting positive energy.
2 October 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
The rate of global warming set to double as fossil fuel use falls. Australias climate negligence threatening security. Children born today will be exposed to more extreme weather events. Patchwork deforestation creates more forest edges.
25 September 2021
Sunday environmental round up
The pressure rises before the Glasgow COP meeting. The end of coal may be on the distant horizon but 80 per cent of the worlds energy still comes from fossil fuels and corporate America is preparing to fight Bidens climate action plans.
18 September 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
China could close all its coal-fired power stations by 2045. North Atlantic right whales facing climate change threats quicker than humans are moving to protect them. More than 200 environmental activists murdered in 2020.
11 September 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Small farmers and local, sustainable food production more likely to feed the world than multinational corporations supported by government subsidies. Health professionals come out fighting on climate change and Biden hears the roar. 2020 and the planet is in its worst shape ever.
28 August 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Almost half of all children globally are at Extremely High risk of suffering harmful consequences of climate change and other environmental shocks. Frogs and pollinators are at the sharp end of the loss of biodiversity. Fast fashion: first world behaviour with third world environmental and social consequences. Third world?? bah, who cares?
21 August 2021
Sunday environmental round up
Take-away messages from the IPCCs climate science report and what it means for Australia. Environmental battlegrounds in the current session of parliament. Legal challenges to ministerial discretion and little-known threatened animals.
14 August 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Unlike Australia, the USA is actively supporting a just transition for communities hard-hit by the demise of fossil fuels. The science and politics of solar radiation management. An Australian environmental philanthropists tips for doing the unexpected, and coastlines as essential infrastructure.
31 July 2021
Sunday environmental round up - bees like blue.
John Kerry predicts an unlivable tomorrow if the Glasgow COP fails to deliver clear plans for the next decade, but are wealthy nations listening? Recommendations for speeding the transition to EVs and making electricity systems more resilient. Bees like blue.
24 July 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Developing nations issue a last chance challenge to rich countries in the lead up to the Glasgow climate change meeting. Exxons climate action cynicism exposed by insiders. EU wants all new cars to be EVs by 2035. Alan Kohler calls for more climate change risk analysis. Street art proclaims Dont Frack the NT in Melbourne.
17 July 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Plants and growth: where to plant 60 billion trees in the USA; climate change destroying kelp forests; burning biomass destroys native forests and fuels climate change; and forbs disappearing from Victorias basalt plains. Plus degrowth, of the economy rather than vegetation.
10 July 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Greta Thunberg accuses world leaders of pretending to tackle climate change. Ecocide gets a legal definition President Bolsonaro beware! Economic viability of gas power plants justified on false assumptions and lots of reasons why nuclear isnt the answer either. Australias emissions per person not as praiseworthy as the government would have us believe.
3 July 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Marine algal blooms are increasing but not everywhere, while bottom trawling fishing releases vast amounts of CO2. Earth is trapping even more solar energy than expected: anthropogenic or meteorological? Whichever, every fraction of a degree of global warming wipes out another glacier. Lessons from wartime Canada.
26 June 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Food farming is an important source of air pollution, no matter how much the industry denies it. Urgent measures needed to ensure that the energy transition has the metals it needs. Thirty years of climate change diplomacy doesnt seem to have achieved much.
19 June 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 20 June 2021
The harmful health effects of climate change are under-recognised. Calls for a socio-ecological approach to tackling climate change and biodiversity loss together. Trends in the reporting of climate science. Zombie fires in northern boreal forests, and LGBQTI+ activists stand up for climate change and human rights.
12 June 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Ecosocialist advice for the G7s leaders and encouragement to read a recent P&I article on carbon accounting. The price of solar panels is rising slightly and our sylvan friends are emitting treethane. Finally, a plea to dog owners.
5 June 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Chemical pollution is an under-appreciated threat to our oceans. China and the OECD are now running neck-and-neck on greenhouse gas emissions but Australias major overseas coal and gas customers place their bets elsewhere as Net Zero starts to make a strong run in the 2050 Survival Stakes.
29 May 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Only a quarter of Earths land was wild 12,000 years ago. Tropical deforestation increases despite international agreements to stop it by 2030. Plans to save Australias 50 most threatened plants, six unburnt forests on the east coast, and WAs native vegetation.
22 May 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
The International Energy Agency recognises the climate emergency and plots a course to net zero, plus NGOs give world leaders advice on how to ensure Glasgows COP26 is a success. An Australian construction company tells a government inquiry that working for Adani is uninsurable. Stunning photo of Earths thin, life-preserving air-bag.
15 May 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Energy use is soaring in 2021 after COVID reduced demand in 2020. Renewables are approaching take-off in the USA, while the Australian government continues to load them with ballast. Call for health care services globally to reduce their large carbon footprint.
8 May 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Vast foreign debts hobble the efforts of poor countries to pursue climate action. Ways to reduce the embodied carbon emissions in buildings. Traditional owners fight back against Adani. German court forces government to take stronger climate action.
1 May 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Geopolitics and climate change combine to damage lives and environments in Iraq, but moves to make ecocide a crime. APRA invites comments on its guidance for the financial sector on climate change, while Scotty used emissions per person to mislead the world.
24 April 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Sharan Burrow paints a picture of an inclusive future. Northern summers getting hotter but Australias environment deteriorates. Oil companies greenwashing activities exposed. Lessons from Germany about how to exit coal (if you want to, that is).
17 April 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Net-zero emissions: is it just greenwashing for business-as-usual? Despite the COVID-induced global economic slowdown, deforestation and the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouses gases both increased in 2020. Limited bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef this summer.
10 April 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 11 April 2021
Factions of the Liberal and National parties continue their coal wars in NSW. Scientists in the USA recommend solar geoengineering research but a community backlash delays experiments in Sweden. Health workers hold up the Adanis mine development.
3 April 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 4 April 2021
Colonialism and racisms longstanding and ongoing links to climate change. Six principles for decarbonising industry, VW on Teslas tail, and a new, free, online course on climate change.
27 March 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 28 March 2021
Eight tips to save insects from catastrophic (for them and us) decline, followed by articles on a green COVID-recovery and the energy transition, including Dos and Donts for subsidising hydrogen.
20 March 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 21 March 2021
Last chance to have a say on the review of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Increasing temperatures are changing the climate-defining currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Forests being lost to provide wood to burn for electricity and land for agriculture. Hotchpotch of rules govern single-use plastics across Australia.
13 March 2021
Sunday environmental round up.
Threats to human existence not what you might expect. The lightly tapped potential of energy efficiency (turning off your computer camera helps) and the heavily exploited pangolins. Cormanns Pauline conversion to climate action on the plane to Paris undermined by sceptics.
6 March 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 7 March 2021
UKs and Canadas Powering Past Coal promises look hollow, as do many companies net zero commitments. Ecosystems already collapsing globally and in Australia. EVs and loose leaf tea are better for the environment. And a historical quiz.
27 February 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 28 February 2021
Australias rooftop solar is burying coal while chilly Texas provides lessons about the energy transition. Four storey buildings with a courtyard provide the most energy efficient homes. Extinction in six minutes (the facts not the event), and native snails coming back from near extinction on Lord Howe.
20 February 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 21 February 2021
Stories from Guyana, USA and south west Africa illustrate the local dangers of oil and gas developments, while oil companies globally are struggling. Stories from Nicaragua, Cambodia, India and Lizard Island about the effects of climate change on communities and nature.
13 February 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 14 February 2021
Australian coal causes at least 320,000 premature deaths globally every year six times more people than the industry employs. Coal from a fully operational Galilee Basin will cause approximately 200,000 premature deaths per year. Australias whole fossil fuel industry employs only 133,000 people. Electric vehicle prices falling. Sawfish severely threatened.
6 February 2021
Sunday environmental round up. The bells are tolling for coal. Is Fitzgibbon deaf?
Lots about Australia this week: sharks in greater peril from humans than vice versa; bells tolling, albeit still distantly, for coking coal and more loudly for thermal coal; gas industry captures the WA government; evidence that last years bushfires were linked to climate change.
30 January 2021
Taxpayers' $50m gift to gas in Beetaloo Basin sums up the crisis: Environmental round-up Jan 31
Heat causes climate change and climate change causes humans to produce reports: reports documenting the worsening problem and its causes; reports about the actions needed but not being taken; and reports about actions that should be avoided but are taken any way. And through it all, we keep burning coal.
23 January 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 24 January 2021
The land this week: strategies to reduce agricultural land and habitat loss, and improve human health, even as the global population increases; the massive carbon footprint of dairy products; problems in Asia - slow-onset impacts of climate change to displace millions and dodgy deforestation practices harm the environment and communities; biochar promises much but many unanswered questions; rains help Australian birds breed up.
16 January 2021
Sunday environmental round up, 17 January 2021
Some good and some bad news about climate change from 2020, with a focus on the rapidly warming Arctic. Different starting points and scopes for two plans to keep warming under 1.5oC but their strategies share many commonalities. Three-quarters of Australias threatened species are plants and their numbers are declining. Some heart-warming and some heart stopping wildlife photos.