In which the dog botherer continues the climate wars, Polonius forgets to nuke the country, and the Angelic one offers a dose of tyke transphobia ...

 

What a relief to be able to start the pond's Sunday meditation with a little light relief ... almost a happy ending of the Lehrmann kind ...

It took the pond back to the happy days when you could generate a story just by compiling a list of responses of the amusing kind ...

The pond liked the Daily Beast compile because of this line: “It was the Jewish Space Lasers being controlled by the Gazpacho Police targeting the Peach Tree dishes on Capitol Hill.” And the note: Another pointed out that Trump’s own golf club is located near the quake’s epicenter in New Jersey. Eek, perhaps it is a sign and portent of things to come ... repent now, ye pussy gropers ...

Now on with reptile business and yesterday the pond cracked a joke about simpleton Simon declaring "The climate wars may be over ..." and then the pond suggesting it would believe that up until the next reptile mention of climate alarmists and climate catastrophists ...

It would be disingenuous for the pond not to 'fess up. 

The pond knew that the dog botherer was on the climate science denialist warpath yet again, and the pond had already designated the dog molester as the opening act for this day's reptile circus ... yep, the climate wars may be over, but the raging at climate catastrophists never ends in reptile la la land ...

It's exceptionally droll for the pooch groper to get agitated about climate hypocrisy, though it does come in many forms.

One of the most bewildering forms is for a dedicated climate science denialist berating others for failing to do their bit by the planet.

According to devoted climate science denialists of the dog assaulting kind, none of it matters, it's all a cult and a religion, so why does he join the religion merely for the purpose of smiting and smoting those who have strayed from the path?

If you actually accepted climate science and its implications for the planet, you might have cause for righteous indignation, but why blather on like a braying donkey when none of it matters?

At this point the pond should note that the reptiles decided it was such thin gruel that they decided to overload the text with an abundance of snaps ...

Getting back to the pond's theme, if you happen to accept climate science and its implications, you might have recently read the Graudian story Just 57 companies linked to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016, Analysis reveals many big producers increased output of fossil fuels and related emissions in seven years after Paris climate deal.

A mere 57 oil, gas, coal and cement producers are directly linked to 80% of the world’s global fossil CO2 emissions since the 2016 Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.

This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers.

Although governments pledged in Paris to cut greenhouse gases, the analysis reveals that most mega-producers increased their output of fossil fuels and related emissions in the seven years after that climate agreement, compared with the seven years before.

In the database of 122 of the world’s biggest historical climate polluters, the researchers found that 65% of state entities and 55% of private-sector companies had scaled up production.

During this period, the biggest investor-owned contributor to emissions was ExxonMobil of the United States, which was linked to 3.6 gigatonnes of CO2 over seven years, or 1.4% of the global total. Close behind were Shell, BP, Chevron and TotalEnergies, each of which was associated with at least 1% of global emissions.

The most striking trend, however, was the surging growth of emissions related to state and state-owned producers, particularly in the Asian coal sector.

There's a graph too, to please the ABC finance report, and it helps put in perspective the faux indignation offered by a non-believer donning the garments of a believer so that he can throw stones in the Taliban style at the lifestyles of the rich ...

"The climate wars may be over ..."

Pull the other leg, simpleton Simon, with the pond reading the Graudian story Global rainforest loss continues at rate of 10 football pitches a minute, Despite major progress in Brazil and Colombia, deforestation led by farming still cleared an area nearly equal to Switzerland.

Experts have warned that continuing deforestation means governments are dangerously off-track when it comes to meeting their climate and biodiversity commitments. At the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai, governments agreed on the need to halt and reverse the loss and degradation of forests by 2030, after a commitment by world leaders at Cop26 in Glasgow to end their destruction this decade.

But the new figures show that the world is a long way from meeting this target, with little change in global forest loss for several years.

While Brazil had significantly slowed its rate of forest loss, the country remained one of the top three countries for losing primary rainforest, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia. Together, they accounted for more than half of the total global destruction.

Bolivia recorded a major surge in forest loss for the third consecutive year – despite having less than half of the forest of other major rainforest countries such as the DRC and Indonesia – driven largely by the expansion of soya farming.

Laos and Nicaragua lost major chunks of their remaining untouched rainforest in 2023, clearing 1.9% and 4.2% respectively in a single year, which researchers said was because highly fragmented forests in countries that had already been cleared extensively can often be more quickly erased.

Sombre stuff, but the dog botherer is content to go renewables and celebrity hunting ....

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an astonishing array of huge pictorial panels, some sort of answer to solar farms perhaps ...

Astonishing really, all figures designed to evoke fear and loathing in the aging reptile demographic, exhausted by the dog botherer's alarmist, catastrophic rhetoric...

Nobody does hypocrisy like a catastrophist railing at alleged climate catastrophists as a climate catastrophe unfolds ... like a dog botherer proposing that climate science is crap, and so berating pollies and celebrities for crimes against humanity, when allegedly the crime doesn't exist. Pollute as much as you like in the dog botherer world, and all will be well ...

Truly this man is either a numbskull or deeply weird, or perhaps both, and yet "The climate wars may be over ...", except simplistic Simon forgot to tell the dog botherer, ranting away at the evangelists ... and yes, even going "virtue signalling", which the pond really should have added to "Orwellian" and "woke" yesterday as reptile word crimes, except that "virtue signalling" these days tends to come out of the mouths of dinosaurs stuck in the early days of the climate and culture wars ...

Meanwhile, the pond presumes that the dog botherer is an enthusiastic user of utes (per utegate) and private jets and studiously avoids separating out his garbage, because he's entirely pleased living in his own shit ...

Meanwhile, even though he was relegated to second place, Polonius was in top form with his prattle, urging on Captain Spud ... and yes, there will be a history lesson ...

At this point the pond was bewildered, because Polonius had spent plenty of time on Scullin and none on Captain Spud's master plan to nuke the country to save the planet and thus march forward to a splendid victory.

The pond had a left over reference, Reuben Finighan's piece in The Conversation, Is nuclear the answer to Australia’s climate crisis?

There were some splendid arguments in favour of SMRs ...

Proponents of nuclear power pin their hopes on small modular reactors (SMRs), which replace huge gigawatt-scale units with small units that offer the possibility of being produced at scale. This might allow nuclear to finally harness Wright’s law.

Yet commercial SMRs are years from deployment. The US firm NuScale, scheduled to build two plants in Idaho by 2030, has not yet broken ground, and on-paper costs have already ballooned to around A$189 per megawatt hour.

And SMRs are decades away from broad deployment. If early examples work well, in the 2030s there will be a round of early SMRs in the US and European countries that have existing nuclear skills and supply chains. If that goes well, we may see a serious rollout from the 2040s onwards.

In these same decades, solar, wind, and storage will still be descending the Wright’s law cost curve. Last year the Morrison government was spruiking the goal of getting solar below $15 per megawatt hour by 2030. SMRs must achieve improbable cost reductions to compete.

Finally, SMRs may be necessary and competitive in countries with poor renewable energy resources. But Australia has the richest combined solar and wind resources in the world.

Instead of celebrating SMRs, and their vast potential, the reptiles interrupted Polonius with a snap of a fiend designed to terrify the demographic ...

With that done, surely Polonius would turn his prattle towards nuking the country to save the planet, a winning strategy that would ensure victory ...

But what about the winning strategy? Uh oh, forget that, it's time for the ABC bee that's always buzzing in the Polonial noggin to come out of the hive mind, though this time the ABC is joined by the Quarterly Essay ...

Funny, Blaine presents himself as much a writer as a journalist, and that would have allowed Polonious to rail and rant about writers' festivals ...

Never mind, it seems the pond must get past another snap before we all get a chance to celebrate the winning strategy of nuking the country ...

With just one gobbet to go, it was way past time for Polonius to join in nuking the country ...

Not a single word about nuking the country to save the planet. 

What on earth does it mean? The sharpest tool in the shed came up with an astonishing vision, a transformative policy to bash unbelievers around the head in best thuggee style, and Polonius has completely ignored it. Perhaps this means that the sharpest tool in the shed has meet the dullest knife in the reptile kitchen drawer ...

And so to a little transphobia. The pond wouldn't normally indulge - it upsets the pond's partner - but this is fundamentalist tyke the Angelic one doing the transphobia, and the pond always manages to find room for her heavenly utterances, even ones as boring and as predictable as this outing ...

It wasn't a good sign, neither the header nor the snap, but the pond persisted ...

Don't get the pond wrong. The pond is always up for a giggle. But pitching a giggle for girlies and the giggling girlie pretending she hadn't thought about TG folk tells the pond it's in the presence of a first class loon, made all the more special by girlie Angelic one talking it up for a tyke giggle ...

It goes without saying that a gathering of bigots wouldn't be complete without a head bigot so the reptiles offered up a snap ...

At this point the pond bitterly resented the way there was no way it could run a cartoon for girlies celebrating Catholic beliefs ...

Instead there was more blather about girlies needing a good giggle with TG folk not needing to apply ...

Well no, not really. Se's a bigot. She and the Angelic one are amongst the reasons TG folk have safety needs. The othering of others ... the studious bigotry, the studied exclusion, the refusal to allow a common humanity ...

At this point the pond regretted that it hadn't run cartoons with the bromancer yesterday, thinking that the killing fields were too awful for 'toons, but what the heck ... the bigots had had their say and it was time for some kind of relief, any kind of relief ...

And then there was just a short final gobbet to go ... and lordy lordy, was it only last week that talk of the Garrick club was all the go ...

There's a special irony in that topic for those who can bear to read the final bigoted par ... you know the old line about not wanting to discriminate against trans people, except wanting to discriminate against trans people, a bit like the Garrick club not having anything against women, except a desire not to have women on the premises, or if on the premises, then only as guests ...

Uh huh ... so much ignorance and bigotry in the world, but then the Catholic church has been a leader in the field for a few thousand years and you have to head to ancient times to see it on open display without a fig leaf ...

And with that, a few cartoons to celebrate the events of the week not covered by the reptiles this weekend ...