In which the pond settles for the bromancer and "Ned" and a standard serve of FUD ...

 

The bad news is that the pond could only endure two reptiles this day; the good news is that this allowed the pond to take a look at other stories.

Surely the weirdest moment came with this thrust and parry, as recorded at Huff Post ...

Catherine Glenn Foster, the president and CEO of Americans United for Life, was responding to questions from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about whether she thinks a 10-year-old girl would or should “choose” to have a baby. After some back and forth, during which Foster refused to answer the question, she came up with a response.

“I believe it would probably impact her life, and so, therefore, it would fall under any exception and would not be an abortion,” said Foster.

“Wait,” replied Swalwell, puzzled. “It would not be an abortion if a 10-year-old with her parents made the decision not to have a baby that was the result of a rape?”

“If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion,” Foster said. “So it would not fall under any abortion restriction in our nation.”

Talk about alternative facts, alternative realities and alternative universes ... but Faux Noise was up to the challenge, as noted in the Daily Beast ...

Shameless and pathetic, but Watters wasn't alone in his grifting ... the WSJ was at it too, and assorted GOP types, with Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio surely worth a place in the hall of shame for dropkick loser and malignant twit ... Ohio's attorney general dismissed the story of a 10-year-old child who sought an abortion after being raped. Days later, he celebrated a suspect's arrest in the case.

That wasn't the worst of Yost's blaming the victim and the doctor ... and those alternative universes grew a bit larger ...

And so to the first of the reptiles this day, and the pond must stay loyal to the bromancer, but here's the thing ... with climate science and the climate pressing down on the reptiles, what's interesting is the way that the reptiles have warped their routines into new riffs.

Now the message is that, thanks to Labor we're doing enough, and by the way, have you thought about nuking the planet, and pumping the gas, and staying loyal to sweet, pure, innocent, dinkum Oz coal ...

It will take a long time to get there with the bromancer, but we will eventually arrive ...

We shouldn't be churlish? But that's the name of the reptile game ... a little patience please, allow the bromancer to weave his magic ...

You might wonder why a snap of that dreadful woman was inserted in the bromancer piece at that point, but every reptile story must have its satanic figure ... now back to the weaving ...

And the bromancer kept on exuding cynicism by blathering about everything being almost entirely fraudulent, as he continued his slow build, but we will eventually get there, the pond promises ... Sri Lanka will become a symbol of all that greenie guff, and never you mind all the corruption ...

And there's the payoff to all that talk of fraud, and that churlish, swaggering air of deep cynicism. It comes with this condescending line: "No doubt Pacific leaders believe everything they say about climate."

No doubt the hapless Poms might also be thinking about the climate, as per WaPo, paywall affected ...

But back to the Pacific, and the bromancer, and the figments of imagination and accepting climate science for the most cynical, blackmailing, extortionist reasons ...

Liz Truss? 

That's camp cosplay on a level the pond has rarely seen ... but the pond shouldn't distract from the bromancer's message. 

Support discussion of the climate crisis? Terrible idea! No reason to have a conference on the reptiles' front door.

Wheel in The New Yorker and misrepresent it? Much better, because remember, these days the strategy is simply to talk down renewables at every opportunity ... and yet ... in a March 2022 piece in The New Yorker, there was a strangely optimistic McKibben ...

The more data sets that Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings. They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible. Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”

The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”

Sorry, Bill, any switch to renewables is hugely expensive?, the bromancer has scribbled it, and so it must be so ...

Ah, there go those alternative universes again ... and so to the final gobbet, with the bromancer having done all the spadework, the hard yards and sundry other clichés, and now ready to nuke and gas the planet ... but not before paying reptile tribute to dear, sweet, innocent, dinkum, decent Oz coal ...

And so the usual reptile climate science denialism has been served, as have the gods of fossil fuels, and it was time for the infallible Pope to step in ...

The pond does miss the immortal Rowe, but when checking up on him, was directed to these yarns ...

By golly, that's rich. It was featured in the Weekly Beast under the header Stoker's delusion. What a splendid idea. Import a columnist so that other columnists might have fun trashing the delusions.

But then the pond was doubly blessed by another piece ...

The martyred Messiah!

It put the pond in a good mood, ready to tackle the mountain known as "Ned", though this Everest was just another example of the reptiles doing everything they could to cultivate a climate of fear and loathing, and taking an eternity of time to do it ... with "Ned" as usual resorting to another expert in FUD to do his work ... because parrots are at their best when reciting the thoughts of others  ...

Oh the cunning villains, of course climate science is completely disconnected from reality, it's just a geopolitical policy power play ... and so to the kind words for coal and gas, because what else could a kind county do, but keep shipping them out .... we are, after all, just a humble island nation ...

Carry on "Ned", with your natter ...

Ah, more idle talk of renewables, and naturally "Ned" will chip away at that notion, in the interminable style he has which makes watching paint dry the latest fad for devotees of the reptiles ...

Can "Ned" cope? Can the reptiles cope? Of course they can't ... see how "Ned" beavers away ...

Yes, back in the day, climate science denialism used to be easy, straightforward, but now there are complications, though not the fate of the planet, more the question of partisan parish pump politics ...  lo, behold the false messiah, agitating the power drunk greenies, giving the mutton Dutton a hard time, and yet there's still time to nuke and gas and coal the planet ...

Yergin? Why he's an expert at FUD, as he managed back in 2021 in The Atlantic, and so is ideal for "Ned's" purposes, because "Ned" loves to parrot the thoughts of others ...

Here's how it works. Yergin accepts the science, they all do these days, but it's terribly hard, so hard, it seems pointless to try, when we could all just get on with the assorted daily disasters, doing the best we can, sweltering or drowning or whatever, just remember that transitioning is a tough gig, and why not just keep on with the fossil fuels, because it's so much easier ...

Slowly "Ned" will weave his way through this maze to that sublimely reptilian conclusion ... the next stage in the revised reptile response to climate science, having moved from denialism to "it's all too hard, just keep with the fossil fuels" ...

Sorry, "Ned" didn't end with that click bait video about "radical green policy impacts", because there's a final gobbet of FUD to go ... and never mind the cost of the changes already being felt around the world ... remember, it's all too hard, so just step on the gas ...

Ah, at last ... we've arrived at changeable facts, and gas, and the only tragedy is that "Ned" couldn't work in a plug for nuking the planet ... he just had to settle for gassing it ...

Does the pond have any regrets for having endured all this? Well it would have been nice to have made note of US events, but a couple of cartoons will round things out ...