Usually the pond likes to kick back and relax on a Thursday, with a message direct from Malware's office, kindly relayed by the savvy Savva, but fair dibs, Dame Groan has come up with a beauty this day, and the reptiles rightly decided it should be top of the digital opinion pops …
It concerns the suffering and unholy persecution of the onion muncher by wretched devious bureaucrats, and the importance of not giving a rat's about climate science and all that nonsense…
In short, Dame Groan goes the full onion-munching Donald …
It turns out that the onion muncher didn't have a clue and simply did what he was told, being something of a dumb bunny, and how wrong and unfair is that!
Indeed, indeed, the onion muncher simply had nothing to do with it. Waiter, a bowl of water for the onion muncher, so that Dame Groan might bathe him …
Ah, that feels better, now on to explain even more the suffering and persecution of the innocent, hapless onion muncher, a lamb to the slaughter up against those cunning, wretched, devious, perhaps even deviant cardigan wearers ...
By this stage in Dame Groan's tale of woe, the pond was shedding copious tears …
The pond almost thought of putting on Poor, Poor Pitiful Us, as first recorded by Warren Zevon in 1976 - though selfishly he thought it was just about "me" ….
How else to lament so much suffering?
Mind you, when we join with the Donald in full Trumpist flights of fancy, and head back to dinkum clean Oz coal, oi, oi, oi, we might just help fuck the planet, but relax young 'uns, Dame Groan and the pond will be long gone, and if they ever succeed in bringing back the dinosaurs, everyone will be at home in the new world …
And speaking of dinosaurs, Rowe observed another one the other day, with more Rowe here …
D'Groan: "Tony Abbott is correct to blame our beaurocrats for handing out extraordinarily bad advice to his government in relation to Australia's proposed commitment to the Paris Agreement."
ReplyDeleteOh boy, now we know who it was that "advised" in favour of awarding a knightship to Phillip (but why not Charles as well ?).
But, you know, it isn't just the carbon emissions that count against coal mining, it's also the high sickness and death rate in mining locations. So:
Research estimates that 24 people die for every terawatt hours (TWh) of coal burnt. Children are at particular risk from air pollution because they breathe more for their body weight than adults.
In the Hunter Region of New South Wales there are many open cut coal mines and four active coal-fired power stations. The surrounding population has a higher incidence of the above diseases and has levels of ill health and mortality not experienced elsewhere. Air pollution from Hazelwood in Victoria, to be closed in 2017, causes about 18 deaths a year, around 1% of annual mortalities in Gippsland.
[ https://theconversation.com/why-coal-fired-power-stations-need-to-shut-on-health-grounds-68809 ]
But then, the lizards in the Murdochian herpetarium "never gave their life survival welfare more than a passing thought" if that.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteSo Dame Groan’s argument for why a rich country like Australia should be excluded from the challenge to limit global warming to less than 2’C, is that we are unfairly lumbered with having almost the highest CO2 emissions per capita in the world (coming second just behind Saudi Arabia and emitting over twice per person than China).
https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html#.Wz2XTop_WhA
DiddyWrote
G'day, DW
DeleteI reckon that Dame Groan would be only too happy to acknowledge, and even boast of, such a high rate of per capita emissions. It means Australia has all those wealth earning high energy industries, you know. All those lovely "industrial plants that rely on affordable, dispatchable electricity". Those ones that "have also played to our strength as a country with massive deposits of coal, iron ore, aluminium, lead, nickel and other metals". How strange, she didn't actually mention lithium or uranium by name. Nor the mineral sands of Fraser Island.
Anyway, all of that is surely worth more than the lives of a few kids and their parents in mining regions. And as for our CO2 emissions, well, doesn't really mean a thing, does it because Dame Groan and her fellow reptiles will be long dead before the temperature increase starts killing other people.