Below is a re-post of an essential blog, Beyond the carbon price, a Faustian bargain, by David Spratt, Climate Code Red, Australia. Bold added for emphasis by ecoSanity.

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The carbon tax (in Australia) starts on July 1 this year, so there’s some tidying up to do around the edges -- appointments, financing, regulations -- and then a big tick next to the climate policy box on the cabinet whiteboard. Minister Greg Combet has already taken on the additional portfolios of industry and innovation.

If only. A barely reported new study on Earth’s energy imbalance from NASA climate chief James Hansen and his research team contends that, far from answering the climate challenge, we have constructed "a Faustian bargain".

Nutshell

Excerpts from Time to Derail Fossil Fuel Train, Energy Agency Warns, Stephen Leahy, IPS (with links added by ecoSanity)

Countries have chained themselves to a fossil fuel train that is headed straight off a cliff, warns the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system, the IEA said Wednesday in London on the release of the 2011 World Energy Outlook.

...the conservative IEA called for urgent action by governments to massively shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy and boost energy efficiency. Without a major shift in priorities in the next five years, there will be enough fossil fuel infrastructure in place to guarantee a two-degree C rise in temperatures, it warned...

..."Delaying action is a false economy," the World Energy Outlook report emphasises. Every dollar of investment in cleaner technology before 2020 avoids the need to spend an additional 4.30 dollars after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions, it said.

No climate scientist considers a two-degree C temperature increase "safe". In fact, many experts, along with more than 100 countries, want overall global warming to be limited to less than 1.5 degrees C.

The IEA's urgent recommendations come on the heels of a U.S. Department of Energy announcement last week that global carbon emissions jumped six percent in 2010, the biggest increase ever. That puts the world on the road to a worst case scenario of six degrees C of global warming by 2100.

Below is a re-post of an essential blog, Re-thinking a "Safe Climate": Have We Already Gone Too Far?, by David Spratt, Co-Author of Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action, (website: ClimateActionCentre.org).  Additional bolding added for emphasis by ecoSanity.

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It is hard to argue that anything above the Holocene maximum (of around 0.5 degrees above the pre-industrial temperature) can preserve a safe climate, and that we have already gone too far.  The notion that 1.5C is a safe target is out the window, and even 1 degree looks like an unacceptably high risk.

NASA climate chief James Hansen says:

• At current temperatures, no "cushion" left to avoid dangerous climate change
• "... even small global warming above the level of the Holocene begins to generate a disproportionate warming on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets."

As global temperatures rise to be 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial level, is the planet already entering a zone of dangerous climate change?

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The words are deliberate: "I want people to understand how big it is, and how long it might take," because the machinery of government needs to be reshaped.

The premier goes on to "hope and pray that mother nature is leaving us alone to get on with the job of cleaning up and recovering from this event".

Yes, but … we also need to leave Mother Nature alone, and stop loading the atmosphere with carbon emissions, so that more extreme climate events which are part-and-parcel of a warming planet do not tumble down upon us with increasing frequency, as they have around the globe in the last year.

Below are two essential new analyses by Carbon Equity Australia's, David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action, and another by George Monbiot, author of Heat and columnist for The Guardian, among other things.  Both are leading voices of reason on the perils posed by the climate crisis and both are staunch advocates of the need to confront it with EMERGENCY GLOBAL ACTION in order for humanity -- and most other life -- to survive.

To our knowledge, the 2 new Greenpeace reports below are the most urgent pronouncements by an international NGO to date that only EMERGENCY GLOBAL ACTION can avoid runaway "climate chaos".