Paul Sheehan, and the art of the disingenuous contradictory panic merchant who sees no reason to panic except when there's a reason to panic ...

(Above: Wyangala dam in 2005, when it was down to eight per cent capacity. Just another drought, we were told, in Cash flows in for drought of the century. But that was back in the days that John Howard ruled the roost. And those silly greens keep on talking as if climate change might have something to do with it, here).

What we love here at loon pond most of all is cheekiness.

Or perhaps the capacity to blow whichever way the wind blows. Provided it's done with hysterical cheekiness.

As in Paul Sheehan's Rudd's green credentials a lot of hot air.

Some might think a more appropriate title for such a column would be Sheehan's green credentials a lot of hot air.

After all, was it only in April of this year that Sheehan was warning us to Beware the climate of conformity and powerfully endorsing Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, while chastising the world for failing to question its orthodoxies and intellectual habit?. Back then the message was, if you'll excuse the Tony Abbott language, shit happens:

"It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age."

If we look at the last 6 million years, the Earth was warmer than it is now for 3 million years. The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctica and Greenland are geologically unusual. Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time. What follows is an intense compression of the book's 500 pages and all their provocative arguments and conclusions:

Is dangerous warming occurring? No.

Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No.

Oh that's all right then. Alarmed about the water supply and rain and drought and the rivers and the whole damn thing? Panicked and worried about our ability to buy copious quantities of water in pursuit of healthy consumerism? Why, you sound like an alarmist silly billy or a green.

Not worried about energy requirements or cost or emissions or such like folderol, since all this talk of carbon is tommy rot? Think the earth can carry 9 billion people with ease? Well why not build a desalination plant just to get us over that temporary, unexpected drought?

Not if you want to wish the umbrage of that fierce environmentalist Paul Sheehan:

Kevin Rudd, frenetic in Copenhagen, would have us believe he is an environmental statesman. He is certainly trying. But he risks appearing to be an environmental blowhard.

Sydney's desalination plant, built at a cost of $400 million, and commencing operating this week, is the perfect monument to Labor's idea of environmentalism.

Oh dear, would this be the same Paul Sheehan who berated the greens in Island faces rising tide of regulation as he wrote of Lord Howe island being inundated by petty bureaucracy, and a doctrinaire brand of sanctimonious environmentalist that irritates more than educates, especially when it comes to noble pine trees?

''They should cut down the pine trees and use the timber to make cabins further up the hill, so that when global warming brings a rise in sea level, they will still have a resort and they can still call it Pinetrees.'' His attitude was a metaphor for the dark side of the environmental movement, the uncompromising, didactic, self-important side. Religious zeal may be on the wane in our society, but the impulse towards crusading, evangelistic certainty is not.

Yep, it surely is. The impulse towards crusading, evangelistic certainty, I mean:

Last week I received shocking photos of the Wyangala Dam, which once held several times the volume of Sydney Harbour but is now reduced to a chain of brown pools. The Lachlan River, which once fed a majestic floodplain with regular healthy flooding, has been blocked off below Condobolin to ensure water supplies for the town. This has never happened before. A rich flood plain has become an arid zone.

Dearie me, they didn't build a desalination plant, and now they want to ensure water supplies for the town of Condobolin. Well there's only about 3,500 people in Condobolin, how much simpler it would have been just to forcibly move everybody out of the town, ship them to Sydney or some other capital city, and chalk the move up to sensible environmentalism. Because then they can use the water from the desalination plant.

Think of it as a temporary retreat in our ongoing bid to dominate mother earth (oh enough with that sentimental gaia rubbish).

You see, if global warming a myth, surely the most important thing we can do to help along the planet is dig up our cheap coal and ship it overseas, to help struggling developing countries improve their economies and the living standards of their people? Sure there might be a little environmental damage along the way, but think of the jobs and the ability to buy plasma screens.

Silly possum, clearly you understand nothing. Listen to that fierce environmentalist Paul Sheehan, as he explains big Labor is aligned with big business, especially when it comes to mining (the goose that asked about big Capitalism and the big end of town will resume his seat, and refrain from any more unseemly outbursts):

''The water that comes out of mining is heavily polluted with salt and other heavy metals. No one knows what to do with it apart from evaporating it in huge storage dams, causing ongoing water and land pollution.

''NSW is similarly for sale when it comes to mining, particularly coal seam methane, and much of the prospecting for coal-seam methane gas occurs on prime agricultural land, or land with high conservation values.''

Over the next 30 years, governments in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane expect to receive about $40 billion in royalties from these mines, but these royalties will not cover the economic costs to repair the ecosystem. That cost will be carried by the taxpayer, and absorbed by the environment.

Oh dear, that sounds ominous. Well let's forget Ian Plimer, he's clearly not the solution, let's instead turn to a scientist who wants a carbon tax as a way of making sure everybody suffers immediately because something has to happen immediately, as a way of avoiding business as usual, of the kind of business as usual Paul Sheehan urged on the world because Ian Plimer said shit happens, and we should carry on regardless:

Carbon trading is a system dismissed by the world's most influential scientist on global warming, James Hansen, who, as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, essentially invented and popularised the concept of human-induced global warming.

Hansen believes carbon trading schemes, especially those as complex and compromised as the scheme proposed by the Rudd Government, are misguided: ''These cap-and-trade trading schemes are a terrible idea. They are a way to continue business as usual … ''

Oh dear, a carbon tax. That sounds expensive, and after all Ian Plimer said it would be totally unnecessary and Paul Sheehan seemed to think he was a top notch scientist. Perhaps we should think about business as usual.

Would that be the kind of business as usual expounded by Paul Sheehan back in 2005 when he approvingly wrote It's a whole new way of seeing green?

The land needs more people and animals, not less, to avoid environmental disaster, writes Paul Sheehan.

Indeed, now how about we tuck into some liver with fava beans, and a nice chianti, or perhaps a little seafood with another fierce environmentalist, so green that when you put him in a forest you can't tell him apart from the leaves, well known for his key role in the recent Liberal party civil war:

I have been waiting for this civil war since August 12, the night I went to dinner at the Cape Cod restaurant in Canberra. It's an excellent little seafood restaurant tucked into the Deakin shopping centre not far from Parliament House. It is also a haunt of Senator Nick Minchin. We dined together that night.

I've known Minchin for a long time. What we discussed that night, as with nearly every other discussion we've had over the years, was off the record. But it has all come to pass now.

Minchin was worried. He could see a train wreck coming. He believed the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme would be a disaster for the economy. He formed this view from an ultimate insider's perspective - 10 years as minister for industry and then minister for finance.

This was even before he got to the issue of climate change science, which Minchin regards as highly contested. (Malcolm and the mincer).

Would that be a dinner with a man who wants business as usual because climate change is just an international left conspiracy, and who doesn't want an ETS scheme, and who doesn't want a carbon tax of the Hansen kind, because it too would be a disaster for the economy, and who just wants things to keep chugging along, because for the moment we're just in an awkward period of droughts and water shortages, but things will turn as they always do, and meantime, let's just keep digging it all up and shipping it overseas?

Why yes, I guess so, but you see there's four legs good big business as usual, and then there's two legs baaad Labor big business as usual:

Business as usual is exactly what the Rudd Government, the unions and the Labor patronage machine are all about. The soaring rhetoric about climate change is just carbon emission.

The Copenhagen summit and carbon trading were the linchpins for Rudd's determination to push his emissions trading legislation through Parliament. Failure to do so, he implied, would force him to call an early election on the principle of saving the environment.

The Liberals called his bluff. The compliant Malcolm Turnbull was replaced with Tony Abbott, who immediately called for an election on emissions trading.

In response, Rudd's election threat is melting away, along with his credibility as an environmentalist as the Murray-Darling systems dies, the miners rule, and the cities bulge with new arrivals and congestion on a scale not seen in this country before.

Oh dear it's a disaster, and it's all the fault of Chairman Rudd.

Sssh, whatever you do, don't blame the incoherent ramblings of totally contradictory newspaper columnists.

I know, I know, there are newspaper columnists, whose credibility as environmentalists long ago melted away, as they consistently bag environmentalists and greenies, and proffer alternative solutions, and deny climate warming, and celebrate Ian Plimer, and urge the economy to grow, and then write hysterical denunciations of Labor governments as failed environmentalists in the area of water policy, water security, coal mining, and global warming.

But the funniest thing of all?

Sheehan's strange notion that a government with Nick Minchin in it, and as things currently stand, lead by Tony Abbott would be doing anything differently. As if the Liberal party during the Howard years did anything differently, and as if Chairman Rudd isn't consciously aping everything the Howard government did so he can extend his own time in power.

But of course the whole point of Sheehan's column is not to provide logical or coherent arguments in favour of sound environmental policies. He has form as a denier, as a disingenuous muddier of the water, as a party political hack who uses the environment to bash up Labor, while ignoring the defects in the Liberal party. Mention green and he sees red.

Is it possible for the major parties to rise above this cheap petty point scoring and do something constructive about the environment?

Sorry, that would be like asking Paul Sheehan to stop writing hysterical, easy, cheap articles featuring petty point scoring.

As long ago as 1973 the South Australian Film Corporation produced a documentary Shed Tears for the River, observing the parlous condition and situation of the Murray Darling basin. Nothing much happened then, and nothing much has happened since then - except perhaps for Paul Sheehan's sudden, belated realisation that water security and water shortages are a part of state tribalism and rivalry more ferocious than football wars, and seemingly beyond the powers of any Federal government to restrain and direct.

Which is why when you ask Sheehan for actual policy insights, you get drivel, and why you get anxiety about the Lachlan without asking the concomitant question about what to do about Condobolin and water security, or what to do about securing a water supply for Sydney, at a time when the Sydney is growing and supplying the water to facilitate the conspicuous growth is getting harder by the day.

Put up prices on electricity and water? Attempt to use the market to curb growth? Tax the populace in some way to make people aware of environmental costs?

No thanks, just give me another serve of that liver and fava beans, and I'll have another glass of chianti. Delicious.

Now where were we? Remind me again Ian Plimer why climate change is a fraud, and greenies are hoaxers, and there's nothing wrong with burning coal, and why we shouldn't worry terribly much about the world, which can after all take care of itself ...

Yep, hysterical panic merchant cheekiness so we can look towards the Liberal party as environmental saviours. Come to think of it, I will have another chianti. No, not a glass, pass me the whole damn bottle ...

(Below: Wyangala dam from a different angle, with the mudline showing a one time high water mark. Alarmed, panicked, shocked by an hysterical Sheehan? Never mind, Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott and Nick "business as usual" Minchin will make sure Chairman Rudd keeps promising much and doing nothing, and Paul Sheehan will be there to cheer the process on).