The pond hates Mondays, and after time spent with a Caterist and a caterwauling Tom, you will too ...

 

The pond doesn't like Mondays. You could shoot the whole day down and the pond wouldn't care. It's the day when herpetological studies become truly bleak and onerous. There's the Major Mitchell on parade, and the Caterist anxious to nuke the country to save the planet from what the Caterist has deemed a non-existent problem, and the pond has heard it all before ...

Would the Major be taking note of the Canadian wildfires and spinning them as best he could? Would the Major mention the remarkable sight of a tropical storm heading to California and making the US Navy send its San Diego fleet out to sea to dodge the rain and the wind? After all, it's happening now ...

The pond shouldn't have worried, because there was a little relief this day, with the Major seemingly having deserted the parade ground ... and leaving this motley crew behind to do his work ...

What's a "senior reporter" doing handing out advice to Qantas? Who dat Paul Taylor, running the usual Orwellian rag, and with a giant sized snap of George?

The lizard Oz graphics department is getting cheaper by the day ...

And this, straight from the land of Faux Noise and News Corp, a corporation dedicated to lies, disinformation and misinformation ... (and just US$787 million as some kind of measure) ...

...The freedom of expression that is powerfully protected in other jurisdictions, notably across the EU under the European Convention, or under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is not protected in Australian law. We may assume it is, because the ICCPR is binding on Australia. We have various liberties in Australia but we may not know that freedom of expression has never been protected here in the way it should be.
It would be a tragedy to realise too late that nothing can be done to put that right.
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four inspired by the models of authoritarian statehood that prevailed in the late 1940s. It is salutary that the setting was not the Soviet Union but a reimagined England.
Its “Ministry of Truth” used “Newspeak” to maintain that two plus two equals five, as the situation warranted. It was meant as a warning for mankind, including countries such as Australia.
Paul Taylor is an honorary senior lecturer in the TC Beirne school of law at the University of Queensland and a fellow of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law.

Notably across the EU? 

Please keep up. Any herpetology student doing reptile studies 101 would know that the EU is one of the most benighted and bedevilled instruments of the devil ever to land on earth ...

And so it had to be the Caterist ...

It's the usual mantra, and naturally the heroic Caterist will land with a visionary solution which will fix what ails ya, and also delay any action, perhaps as far away as the arrival of the first nuclear sub down under ... but first the litany ... which naturally ignores the sorry state of California thanks to the Enron saga, which happened way back in 2000-2001, but has taken a power of money, time and effort to sort out ...

At this point in the bog standard Caterist diatribe about renewables, the lizard Oz graphics department slipped in a snap, and the pond decided it could safely lump it with the huuuge snap of Wong that followed down the page:

That left just a couple of gobbets to go ... filled with a flurry of impressive figures designed to show that the Caterist wasn't just a floodwaters in quarries whisperer, he was a kWh whisperer too ...

Good old Ted. Someone finally had a kind word for Ted. But what's this assault on coal? Back in the day, the Caterist still saw king coal as the solution, as noted in In defence of coal ...

A lot of coal defending went down that day back in November 2018 ... excuse the pond for quoting at length because it's such an admirable expression of the true Caterist ... not in the sense of truth, but in revealing the black, coal-crusted soul of the Caterist ... (the nuns always warned the pond about getting too many black specks of coal on the soul) ...

...The spread of global-warming anxiety since the turn of the century prompted a search for a new emblem. Doe-eyed polar bears adrift on ice occupied the slot for a while, until the activists discovered the emotive charm of Queensland’s Barrier Reef and the dark underbelly of coal.

The Barrier Reef is the most protected, pampered coral formation in the world. Billions have been spent to preserve it. The theory that it is being damaged by climate change is far from proven. It has been damaged by farm-water runoff, now controlled and filtered, and the crown-of-thorns starfish, an insidious aquatic vandal that has become the target of a multimillion-dollar cull.

The chance opportunity to put coal and coral together came in 2010 when the Queensland government opened the way for a rail line from the North Galilee Basin to the coast, as a precursor for mining some of the richest untapped coal reserves in the world.

In 2011, an anti-coal axis of environmental activists, including Greenpeace and others, held a secret counsel of war in the New South Wales Blue Mountains to formulate a strategy.

The strategy document that emerged, Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom, proposed a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to change the image of coal from ‘the backbone of the economy’ to ‘a destructive industry’ that ‘corrupts our democracy and threatens the global climate’.

The movement had rich friends, including the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Australian internet entrepreneur Graeme Wood, the founder of the online travel service Wotif and a prominent backer of the Australian digital edition of the Guardian.

Law-fare and corporate activism became their chosen methods. With a campaign strategy that would make Coca-Cola envious and the help of international single-issue campaigners like Avaaz, they turned the fight to stop the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland into a global crusade.

‘They’re trying to put a toxic coal complex in the heart of the magical Great Barrier Reef — it’s a crazy plan, but we’ve got a chance to stop it’, read an email that spread across the world.

‘This is a do-or-die moment for the reef-wrecking coal mine… Let’s stop the reef-killing deal.’

For the record, the Adani mine is 260 miles inland and the reef, at its closest, is 10 miles offshore. To claim it is ‘in the heart of the magical Great Barrier Reef’ is like saying Oxford is at the heart of Lake Windermere.

Yet the campaign has been ruthlessly successful. Adani’s plans to use the blessed reserves of central Queensland to fuel prosperity in India have been delayed, and might never go ahead.

History is unlikely to be kind to the decarbonisation movement. Coercive attempts to stop the use of fossil fuels are delivering the same perverse economic consequences as the attempts to close down American saloon bars in the 1920s.

The consumers pay more for a substance they choose not to live without, while the producers count the profits.

The American fondness for alcohol hardly abated during Prohibition. With demand and supply unequally matched, the price of beer rose by 700 per cent in the US between 1920 and 1933. The price of a bottle of brandy rose by 433 per cent and spirits by 270 per cent. A fourfold increase in deaths from alcohol poisoning and a rise in organised crime were just two unintended consequences. The enrichment of the alcohol companies was another.

A report released this month by international financial analysts Redburn predicts a similar result from the crusade against fossil fuels.

The attempt to starve coal producers of capital has impeded their attempts to build new coal mines, but it hasn’t got in the way of profits. The price of coal has risen to a six-year high, which is good news for the coal business, but bad news if you’re living in, say, India’s Bihar state, where three out of four households don’t have electricity.

If the price of coal rises, says Redburn, ‘the one to two billion people on the planet with zero or unreliable access to modern energy would remain priced out of the market’.

Redburn’s analysts turn the tables on so-called ethical investors by forcing them to confront the consequences of fossil-fuel divestment, a phenomenon that has swept university campuses, shareholder meetings and boardrooms, much as anti-alcohol mania did a century ago.

‘Given the pernicious consequences of energy undersupply, we would go so far as to argue that the socially responsible investor has a duty to ensure capital is available to the fossil fuel industry, for as long as it is needed’, they write.

Unless the supply of coal is increased, the world’s poor will be trapped for even longer in poverty, burning whatever they can get to keep life and limb together. Industrial development will be constrained. Fewer goods and services will be purchased. The smug inner glow of virtue-seeking First World activists will hardly compensate for the global decline in material prosperity.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, Canberra.

Why does the Caterist now seek to abandon this wealth-giving wonder, this prosperity-laden future? Well there's a new distraction from renewables in town ... and the Caterist has of late got on board that bandwagon, and these days never shuts up about it  ...

The pond couldn't resist heading off to see how that was going, first of all here, back in 2022 ...

But 2022 hardly seems fair ... how about Bill Gates in 2023?

When it opens (potentially in 2030) ... and as for the forthcoming war with China by Xmas, can we just hold off until the subs arrive?

And it's just a bloody demonstration plant to see if they've ironed out all the bugs ...

And why didn't the Caterist mention that Bill Gates was involved? Why that's as sure a sign of the devil at work in Wyoming as if George Soros had been funding it ...

The pond realises that the devil usually goes down to Georgia, but Bill Gates in Wyoming?

Enough already, the pond has been there before, and likely will be there again next week. Meanwhile, with the Major AWOL (there will be punishment), what to do for a bonus? 

Might the reptiles have noted the tropical storm in California or the Canadian wildfires at the top of the digital edition?

Nope, just the usual, plus an ominous hint from Ita, and the treatment of the Voice as a matter of religion and faith ... but lo, there on the top far right was a new reptile star, waiting to be born.

The pond can't ever recollect paying attention to this caterwauling Tom, but he delivers an astonishing word salad ...

Some might wonder at all the links that this caterwauling Tom offers in his word salad ... and the pond took the trouble to click on a few so that there would be no need for others to worry about missing something. It turned out it was the usual in house, deeply self-referential fluff gathering and navel gazing, with nattering "Ned" first off the block ...

The point of course is to keep the readership in the house, clicking on links and imagining they're getting a wider perspective, only to see "Ned" rabbit on in the usual way ...

The pond thought paying attention to all the links might get in the way of this alley cat Tom, on the prowl for more verbiage, with which to toss his word salad ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, and yet still he went on and on ...

At this point, the reptiles decided to sneak in a snap of a potato ...

... and then there was a final gobbet ...

Memo to Tom. We all get older and flabbier, and most of us get poorer, because we don't have hapless minions to produce word salads for suckers ... so that we can live a Succession lifestyle ...

Yes, the scripts for Succession are out and about and there's a review in the NYRB titled Scorpion Party, which seems to be outside the paywall for the moment ...

“The original idea,” Armstrong writes in his introduction to the first season of the published scripts, “a faux-documentary laying out Rupert Murdoch’s business secrets, with them delivered straight to camera, evolved as…a sort of TV play, set at the media owner’s eightieth birthday party.” It wasn’t working, and he considered making a series about an invented business family, but for five years worried that “a fictional family would never have the power of a real one.” Then he found, through research into the lives and legends of real-life media families, that using all the stories and, in a sense (though he doesn’t say this), the entire culture around such figures was the key to making something brilliant. For a while it was “Festen-meets-Dallas,” but at heart the idea for Succession was hugely topical. It was Brexit and Trump:

"The way the UK press had primed the EU debate for decades. The way the US media’s conservative outriders prepared the way for Trump, hovered at the brink of support and then dived in. The British press of Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers, Maxwell and Murdoch, and the US news environment of Fox and Breitbart. The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many."

And at the end?

...It’s hard not to invoke the little beasts of the night. The show itself does it several times. Way back in the first season, Logan’s brother Ewan (a salty old refusenik who speaks for the moral minority) calls the family a “nest of rats.” By the close of season 4, there’s more sting: it’s a “scorpion party.”

Here are the children, afraid of the dark and the funny truths that make them cry. They watch a video of their father listening to someone sing an old Scots song, “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” with its message of love and fellow feeling set against avarice, and they play for a night at being kingmakers, while we marvel at their ruin. “We’re bullshit,” Roman says, in a devastating moment at the end, his wounds open. “It’s all fucking nothing.” This is not ruin in the normal sense, but one where the poverty of spirit never ends.

Pity, they should have been singing Waltzing Matilda, what with it featuring thieves, or perhaps, in the channelling spirit of Tom, "We'll all be rooned, said Hanrahan" ...

And now after that extended aside, to revert to caterwauling Tom.

What was that rousing crap about being timid, what's with all the clickbait links? The pond clicked on a few, just so others wouldn't have anxiety attacks about missing out, and what do you know, mostly it was Tom quoting Tom, though the pond did spot a lesser member of the Kelly gang ...

Stand by for a quick montage of the headlines ...

And so on and so forth, and the pond apologises that it only went with the first few pars of Tom quoting Tom, but there's only so much the pond can stand seeing a man so far up himself there's not the slightest possibility of enjoying a little sunshine ...

Stop it Tom, stop it now. In the pond's early days in the classroom - younger, fitter, not so flabby - naughty boys rubbing themselves for pleasure were sent for a good caning (and probably a few of them got off on that too) ...

And with that, this Monday was done, save for a thought from the immortal Rowe ...