In which Polonius and the dog botherer do it for Joel ...

 

 

 

 

After overdosing on cartoons yesterday, the pond knew it would have to come down from its sugar high, and what better way to produce a bummer downer than to have Joel glaring out beneath prattling Polonius?

 

Perhaps a little translation is in order. "Climate realist" is Polonial speak for climate science denialism, and his talk of the base is just a way of saying "fuck the planet, Joel might lose his seat, and what a catastrophe that would be... because what's the fate of billions up against a man up himself in his own climate realist way ..."

 

The reptiles must have selected that portrait, with its supercilious Joel sneer, just to reinforce the pond's point ...

 

Never mind, it's a meditative Sunday, and we know what that means when Polonius is on duty. Sure, it might be 2020, but 1914 is where you must start when doling out climate science denialism ...

 

 

 

Put even more simply, Joel wants his focus on jobs now ... which is to say his job ... now! 

Not some distant job for Joel in the distant future, but Joel's survival right here and now. Is he happy to take down the rest of the Labor party while he jostles for his job? Of course he is, he's Joel (no, the pond isn't yet prepared to accept that 'Joel' is the male equivalent to 'Karen', but dammit, it must be a close run thing).

Here's the thing. Unlike the 'leet Polonius, tucked away in Sydney's CBD and living in the style of an inner city ponce, the pond is from Tamworth, centre of the known universe, at least until they appointed Barners, when it instantly became a slum ...

Put simply - as simply as possible, because Polonius is a simpleton - the idea of appealing to miners and agricultural workers is something of a contradictory aim. Just ask the Liverpool plains farmers confronted with rich agricultural land being torn up for coal. Just look at the way that the lovely Hunter Valley, long home for horsey types, wine and mixed farming, has been reduced to the valleys of the moon, with Joel wanting even more craters ...

 

 

There was good land there, once upon a time, now gone forever.

Back in 2015 The Conversation was noting Disused mines blight New South Wales, yet the approvals continue ... 

And that's Joel's job scheme. Not filling in the mines, not reclaiming the land, that's not possible. No, he wants to create more holes, and if that also means fucking the planet, well what the heck. There's a job at stake here, and it's a vitally important job ... Joel's job ... and of course, being a closet climate science denialist, Polonius is all in for Joel ...

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's a crime to spend your working life in a university? What then the penalty for the crime of working for decades at an institute with an inner city eerie, occasionally scribbling nonsense of a right wing kind for newspapers, and as far removed from manual labour as might be imagined ... yet somehow, deluded into thinking that this means Polonius is at one with the rustic workers ...

Well the pond has relatives in Tamworth, and they know what's happening to the climate, and they also know that it's not a good outlook if you happen to make your living from the land.

It's one of the most condescending bullshit lines of all, that apparently the rustics are happy to go about quietly in their lives, apparently unaware of, and unconcerned by climate science, which is only a matter for cheesecloth wearers in the big smoke ...

And yet here we were in August 2020 in The Conversation ...

The National Farmer’s Federation says Australia needs a tougher policy on climate, today calling on the Morrison government to commit to an economy wide target of net-zero greenhouse gas emission by 2050.
It’s quite reasonable for the farming sector to call for stronger action on climate change. Agriculture is particularly vulnerable to a changing climate, and the sector is on its way to having the technologies to become “carbon neutral”, while maintaining profitability.
Agriculture is a big deal to Australia. Farms comprise 51% of land use in Australia and contributed 11% of all goods and services exports in 2018–19. However, the sector also contributed 14% of national greenhouse gas emissions.
A climate-ready and carbon neutral food production sector is vital to the future of Australia’s food security and economy.

There's a lot more, easily googled of farmers doing farming things to cope with climate change ... as here in November 2019 ...

Running 800 bulls and supplying genetics for the beef industry is demanding in the best of seasons. As a way to create more flexibility and reduce the risk of drought, Lucinda Corrigan, her husband Bryan and children Ruth and Anthony – the fifth generation to work the property – have implemented an impressive livestock management system.

Their aim is to help preserve resources on their family’s near-150-year-old 3,800-hectare enterprise, Rennylea Angus. Operating as a 3,500-head Angus cattle stud, it spans seven properties, some leased, in the Murray Valley between Albury and Holbrook.

“The first thing that we’ve done much more successfully, in the past few years since the Millennium drought, is protect our soil resources by better management of livestock, using the water when it falls more efficiently and preserving it in pasture and in the landscape.”

Compared to other regions, Lucinda says they are in the best of NSW right now. But they’re facing their third failed spring in a row, with 280mm of rain to the end of September this year at Culcairn, and 100mm more at Rennylea, in a region that averages between 600mm-700mm. “We’re preparing for the worst – it’s pretty unprecedented really,” says Lucinda.

The Corrigans have been gearing up for increasingly tough conditions for the past 30 years, including planting 100,000 trees across their farming enterprise. “Our natural assets will help make farming systems more resilient,” Lucinda says.

There's a lot more at the link, but Joel doesn't care about that. Joel cares about his job, and he sees his job as tied to mining and fossil fuels ... and frankly, as a result, if Joel loses his job, the pond won's shed a single tear ... because a choice between eating a lump of coal and eating food is an easy one for the pond to make.

Evidently Polonius didn't care that much either because in his final gobbet he switched his talk to US coastal elites, as you'd expect of a 'leet scribbler hunkered down on the east coast in Sydney ...

 

 

After all that, the pond returned like a dog to its grass-swallowing induced vomit to marvel yet again at that eruption earlier in the week ...

Please allow the pond to continue on with that story of News Corp's defensive bullshit, as found here ...

...Kelly said at the time that Mr Turnbull had exaggerated the impact News Corp had on the issue of climate change and told the former prime minister not to lecture him.
But News Corp has now doubled down on its stance on the matter, accusing Mr Turnbull's comments of being "blatantly untrue".
A News Corp spokesperson conducted internal research and said that of the 3335 stories published by The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser between September 1, 2019 and January 23, 2020, just 3.4 per cent mentioned the words "arson or "arsonists".
"The facts demonstrate starkly the falsity of Mr Turnbull's claim," a News Corp spokesman said.
"In this same period, news.com.au also published more than 300 bushfire stories, of which only 16 mentioned arson, equivalent to 5 per cent," the spokesman said. "Not one of these small number of stories stated the bushfires were 'all the consequence' of arsonists."
A story in The Australian in January during the crisis that drew a link between arson and bushfires was heavily criticised.
The comments made by Mr Turnbull have reignited a discussion about News Corp's editorial stance on the topic of climate change. Mr Murdoch's youngest son James Murdoch abruptly resigned from the board of the global media company in August after years of expressing unease about its editorial direction.
Mr Murdoch and his wife Kathryn Hufschmid, who has worked for the Clinton Climate Initiative, accused the global media empire of promoting climate denialism after News Corp's coverage of the bushfires gained global attention. Former News Corp finance manager Emily Townsend sent an email to all employees earlier this year accusing her employer of spreading a "misinformation campaign" on climate change that was "dangerous" and "unconscionable".
News Corp Australia boss Michael Miller denied the claims at the time.
"Contrary to what some critics have argued, News Corp does not deny climate change or the gravity of its threat," he said. "However, we - as is the traditional role of a publisher - do report a variety of views and opinions on this issue and many others that are important in the public discourse on the fires."

News Corp publishes a variety of views and opinions on climate science?

In your deluded, delusional dreams, Mr Miller. Not in the lizard Oz. The lizard Oz's commentary pages are wall to wall chockers with climate science denialism. The pond has kept track of it for years, and you can count on one hand the sensible stories, compared to stories from boneheads of the bromancer and dog botherer kind.

Yes, we've had the genteel Polonial version, now it's time to get into the denialist gutter with the dog botherer ...

 

 

Of course they were going to run with a snap of Joel. Polonius had Joel and so must the dog botherer, because ... peas in a denialist pod ...

 

 

Nota bene that talk of "the climate debate". It's a favourite reptile ploy, a way of suggesting that the science is still open to debate, that the conclusions can be argued way ...

It's a variant on "climate realist", and it serves exactly the same denialist point, here transcribed by the dog botherer into "energy pragmatism" and "political reality"... as if anyone by now is unaware that the dog botherer is a barking mad, died in the wool denialist of the old school ...

 

 

It's always the way with the reptiles. Point the finger at China, and ignore what might be done in our own backyard, if nothing else as a way of shaming the Chinese ... but the dog botherer doesn't really care that much, because the dog botherer has never accepted the science, or rather, he thinks he's a better scientist than all those folks out on field trips observing what's happening in the world and reporting back ...

What would they know, up against the dog botherer's sense of his own infallibility?

 

 

 

Climate and energy did him enormous damage? Oh that must explain why he lost and why the Donald is heading into a second term ...

 

 

 

Actually the pond wanted to use that cartoon just for a little break, before heading off to an NY Times story in October by Eric Lipton, here ...

PAGE, Ariz. — For decades, waves of electricity poured from this behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of coal a day.

But as the day shift ended here at the Navajo Generating Station one evening early this year, all but a half-dozen spaces in the employee parking lot — a stretch of asphalt larger than a football field — were empty.

It was a similar scene at the nearby Kayenta coal mine, which fueled the plant. Dozens of the giant earth-moving machines that for decades ripped apart the hillside sat parked in long rows, motionless. Not a single coal miner was in sight, just a big, black Chihuahuan raven sitting atop a light post.

Saving these two complexes was at the heart of an intense three-year effort by the Trump administration to stabilize the coal industry and make good on President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to end “the war on coal.”

“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump promised soon after taking office.

He didn’t.

Despite Mr. Trump’s stocking his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry, rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only accelerated in recent years.

And with the president now in the closing stages of his struggling re-election campaign, his failure to live up to his pledge challenges his claim to be a champion of working people and to restore what he portrayed four years ago as the United States’ lost industrial might.

The story of the complex in Arizona demonstrates the lengths the administration went to in helping a favored industry, the limits of its ability to counter powerful economic forces pushing in the other direction and ultimately Mr. Trump’s quiet retreat from his promises.

In the years after Mr. Trump’s election, the federal government offered help valued at as much as $1 billion to keep this one power plant and coal mine up and running by embracing an industry plan to relax costly air-quality requirements.

A Republican lawmaker from Arizona sought to force one of the state’s largest utilities to continue to buy power from the plant. Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, offered to discount the price of the coal it was selling the power plant from the Kayenta mine.

None of it proved to be enough. By late last year, both the Kayenta mine and the Navajo Generating Station had gone offline, a high-profile example of the industry’s broader collapse and the resulting economic and political aftershocks.

 

And so on and on, because coal and Joel are stranded assets, as is News Corp.

But why did the pond want to run with that, and at such length, though there's more at the link, and much more elsewhere to be found by googling?

Well it was because the reptiles came up with one of the more fatuous and egregious illustrations they've managed in recent times to accompany the dog botherer ... on the basis that a lie repeated regularly enough soon takes on the patina of reptile truth ...

 

 

There was a perverse echo of all this blather in this week's Kudelka, to be found here ...

 

 

Yes, we wouldn't want to interfere with mining operations, and we certainly wouldn't want to take climate science seriously or do anything about it, not while the dog botherer is on the case, and News Corp carries on with its monomaniacal fixation on featuring only the denialists ...

 

No need to wait until you're ninety. You're a recalcitrant fuckwit right now, and you'd never publish a humiliating apology now, so the chances of doing it when you're 90 are vanishingly small ... not because you might not make it to 90, but because, even with the acidified ocean lapping at your feet, and the temperature high, and the poles and glaciers melting, and the tundra letting loose its methane, and the world changed for the worse, you'd still be an unreconstructed, unrepentant reptile luddite of the first water ...

See how I helped bring the apocalypse, you'd yowl into the J. G. Balldard wind, see how right I was to mock the energy debates of 2020.

"Contrary to what some critics have argued, News Corp does not deny climate change or the gravity of its threat," he said.

Oh fuck off, you bald faced liar ... and let the pond enjoy a Rowe cartoon in peace ... with more Rowe to be enjoyed here ...

 

 

 

By golly, with just a bit of imagination, you could transform that COVID ball into a patented lump of Joel-approved, dog botherer certified SloMo coal ...

And with a bit more imagination you could turn all the impeccable sources below into scientific evidence, perfect proof that science denialists of the dog botherer kind did the most expert research to achieve their peak level of denialism ...