In which the pond spends quality climate denialist time with the Major and the Caterist ...

 

The pond always follows the Weekly Beast, out on a Friday. It's clear that Amanda Meade has a deep love of the reptiles, and last week here she led off with news of the Chairman and his empire ...

After brief addresses by News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch and chief executive Robert Thomson, shareholder activist Stephen Mayne, who was on the call, asked why the company did not “accommodate some of James’s views on climate change and Donald Trump such that he didn’t feel the need to completely walk away from the company”....
....Rupert Murdoch’s answer was difficult to hear but he said, once again, that he does not deny climate change.
“Our board is open to any discussions, but James ... he claimed that our papers had covered the bushfires in Australia without discussing climate change,” Murdoch said. “We do not deny climate change, we’re not deniers.”
At the AGM last year, Rupert Murdoch said “there are no climate change deniers around, I can assure you”, prompting this piece by Amy Remeikis that listed just some of the writers who deny the climate crisis.

Well yes, and in the alternative Trumpian world that the chairman inhabits, lying is just business as usual. But what does this have to do with the price of eggs in the world of the Murdochians? 

Well there was also this comical whine from the Bolter ...

 “It seems News Corp’s real sin is to hire any conservatives at all – a handful of columnists and presenters like me, who dare still question the global warming scare beloved of Rudd and Turnbull,” Bolt wrote at about the same time as Rupert Murdoch said “we do not deny climate change”.

But also in that piece by Amy Remeikis, well worth a read for the climate denialist fun of it, the Major was featured in his role as Big Sir Echo ...

Andrew Bolt told his viewers on Tuesday night that he had again complained to the ABC about the latest Media Watch segment. If you follow Bolt’s many writings about climate it is obvious he does accept the temperature is rising. It has risen one degree since the start of the 20th century.
But Bolt also reports scientists from other disciplines who question parts of the science. Many say climate models are not yet sophisticated enough to account for the effective regulation of atmospheric CO2 by the deep oceans, forests and soils. Bolt and others criticised by Media Watch often point to effects from solar activity. Many writers, like many climate scientists, say CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas, pointing to water vapour and methane. These are all facts.

Of course the Major's relationship to the facts is a bit like his relationship to that long-lost Order of Lenin medal, but here's the joy of it, it's Monday, and the Major is back, doing the Long March, because reptiles are notorious for the size of their brains. and simple-minded slogans are all that will stick for longer than a nanosecond  ... though it really should have been the woke long march, just for the sake of completeness...

 

 

 

 

The game of course is to trek through the thickets of the Major's thinking - pea or tennis ball size? - to arrive at a mention of climate. He can never help himself, and though it sometimes can be a long game, there's always a tie-breaker ...

 

 

It's a fair to middling opening for the Major, whining about social media and the move to the left, and making a splendid move up the arse of News Corp, as he always does, and it's charming to see an old fart think that the world belongs to old farts, as if the young didn't have a major advantage on their side, like y'know ... youth.

It used to be that Major types used to harumph about socialists at twenty, capitalist billionaires by forty, but these days the reptiles seemed to have abandoned vulgar youff for senility, dementia, and hair dye of the Donald and Rudy kind ...

The Major also seems not to have caught up with the news that you'd have to be a mug to fork out squillions for a generalist arts degree, what with SloMo's mob having determined that general knowledge is totally useless, and you' probably better off being an expert in the goal kickers at Collingwood in 1968 if you want to stand a chance of winning the mug at Hard Quiz ...

 

The notion that Windschuttle, long discredited, and a paranoid delusional fool to boot, should turn up in the Major's piece is just a chance for the pond to link to The Monthly here (but there's a paywall), or this review of the first volume of his opus here, which concluded ...

...Windschuttle also feels impelled to explore why all these historians have engaged in this pernicious conspiracy to make up stories about Aborigines. He finds the reason in their exposure to Marxism either as students, or genetically. ‘Lyndall Ryan’s parents, Jack and Edna Ryan, were well-known members of the Communist and Trotskyist political movements from the 1920s to the 1940s’ (p.401). Oh, for heaven’s sake. I went to school with a girl whose parents were hard-line communists and she became a raving New Ager avant le lettre. My mother holds Robert Menzies in high regard. So what? One begins to wonder why anyone is even taking this book seriously at all. But then this is from a man who appears to believe in all seriousness that the decline in belief in the Tri-Hybrid theory of Aboriginal origins is due to a communist plot.
One is left wondering why anyone should feel so violently in need of attacking the most oppressed and disadvantaged members of Australian society. Windschuttle writes with a total lack of affect for Aboriginal people, referring in many places to ‘natives’ and ‘half-castes’. Few people these days would be unaware that such terms are considered by them to be offensive, but evidently he doesn’t care about that. It just doesn’t seem to occur to him that you don’t need to invoke a communist plot to understand why people who work with Aborigines might feel some kind of fellow feeling for them: it’s called compassion.

Indeed, indeed, and so on in many other places elsewhere, but didn't the pond promise a little climate science denialism? Never fear, the Major is here ...

 

You see? What on earth do events at Nine have to do with climate change? But notice how the Major slips in a reference to climate change, as smooth a segue as might be found, as if the Major was trying to revive memories of Torvill and Dean as well as Windschuttle ... and see how modern the Major in his moves.

These days coal is a little on the nose, what with failing demand, and so the shift is on to gas, and so the Major wisely talks of the "fossil fuel export industry", because that sounds better ... well at least if you're a fossil in love with fossils, and exporting damage to the rest of the world makes it hunky dory ...

And that provides the pond with its own segue ... because the reptiles think they've struck oil with Labor ...

 

 

Spoiler alert, they're talking about that internationally recognised climate expert Senator Murray Watt, of who's Watt on Watt Watt's second base ... (a Queenslander, being totally toad) ...

And see, there's a link to the Caterist, and who better to talk up gas than the gaseous one, an expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries, and pretty much else that the federal government flings at him, not to mention how to reliably score a handsome serve of cash in the paw ...

 

 

It wasn't so long ago that the Caterist and other reptiles were dancing in the streets, celebrating the thousand year reign of coal ...

 

 

Yes, the Caterist also moonlightedover at Spiked, but the pond would rather stick a hot poker in its eye than provide a link ...

These days, things being what they've become, the Caterist finds it easier to scribble in defence of gas ... oh, and by the way, despite a generous amount of cash in the paw from the federal government for the Caterist's pathetic think tank, note the resentment that oozes from his subsidised pores at the thought of richer think tanks ...

 

Reptile devotees will find much to admire here. There's the smooth transition from coal to gas, there's a pretence that the Caterist gives a flying fuck about climate science and emissions - in much the same way that tobacco companies and the IPA once cared about cancer, and probably still do - and tidy lines of the Billy Goat butt kind: "The path to net-zero emissions will be revealed in the fullness of time and may or may not mean turning off the gas."

When you get that sort of line, you realise you must be in the presence of a genius of the Chauncey Gardiner kind, or a blithering idiot, or a Zen Buddhist intent on setting a particularly tricky koan for extended contemplation ... well, you may, or you may not ... but the Caterist is just warming up ...

 

Only a few years ago, the impossible trifecta in the Caterist universe included dear, sweet, dinkum, clean, pure, potent Oz coal ...

As for gas, back in 2018, you could have read this at the Graudian ...

Australia’s carbon footprint has expanded for the last three years straight – and the coal industry is not to blame. The biggest driver has been liquefied natural gas, known as LNG.
Science and policy institute Climate Analytics found that between 2015 and 2020 the emissions growth from LNG will effectively wipe out the carbon pollution avoided through the 23% renewable energy target.
It leaves those watching the industry wondering why it is all but absent from national debates about climate policy – and just how long that can continue.
“It’s been incredible that until now this industry has gotten away with being such a massive source of carbon dioxide – and particularly carbon dioxide growth – while barely being acknowledged,” says Piers Verstegen, the director of the Conservation Council of Western Australia.

Or you might head off to Natural gas is a much 'dirtier' energy source than we thought ...

Or dozens of other papers that don't suit the Caterist or the reptile universe ... because they'll scribble just about anything in support of fossil fuels, while downplaying renewables ... it's the reptile Murdochian way ...

And now, here's the funny thing. Remember how the reptiles like to talk about and denigrate apocalyptic thinking? That's because they're addicted to their own concept of the apocalypse ... how about the abolishing of capitalism and starting again for starters?.

Why, how could a Caterist survive on government grants if that sort of apocalyptic thinking took hold ...

To a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false? Does that apply to the movement of flood waters in quarries too?

And so, as usual, it's left to the cartoonists to explore the issues of the day that the reptiles prefer to ignore ... starting with a Wilcox who scored another Cartoonist of the Year award ...

 

 

 ... followed by an immortal, if somewhat demonic Rowe, possibly derived from Alien, celebrating the Murdochian climate denialist in chief (with more Rowe here) ...