In which a hothouse climate allows our Henry to flower, neigh to blossom, into his usual nightmare blather...

 

Teaser trailer:

Tocqueville’s nightmare had an immense impact on liberal thinkers, beginning with John Stuart Mill.

First half of the matinee:

The reptiles were wildly excited this day ...

...but when the pond looked over on the extreme far right, there was neither hide nor hair of our Henry ...

Sorry, bromancer, with your desire to maintain the reptile anti-Semitic carry on; sorry Alex, urging the pond to rejoice in ethnic cleansing and genocide... 

The pond's natural tendency to exuberance about all that was dampened by the immortal Rowe of the day ...

Just to emphasise the point ...

Besides, if the pond wants to stray into that turf, it needs full pomposity and learned classical references. It's Friday, when the classical gods of Rome and Greece are let loose to roam the earth ...

Such was the shock of our Henry not being visible on the extreme far right that the pond dropped in on Colin Packham, offering this Australia’s 2035 emissions target timetable up in the air as agency considers the Trump effect, Labor is on course to head to the federal election without a 2035 emissions reduction target as the agency tasked with providing advice considers the likely effect of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Col began with an AV distraction:

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has spruiked the Coalition's nuclear power plan during a pre-election pitch as he hopes to combat "exorbitant" energy costs. "Exorbitant energy costs are causing inflation across the economy – food, goods and services are all costing more," Mr Dutton said. "We will replace the existing coal generation network with zero emission nuclear technologies on those sites of the seven retired coal-fired power plants."

Sure enough, the pond was immediately distracted, and reminded of a rant in Crikey by Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer, Dutton’s new nuclear nightmare: construction costs continue to explode, The latest massive cost blowout at a planned power station in the UK demonstrates the absurdity of Peter Dutton's claims about nuclear power in Australia. (paywall)

Peter Dutton’s back-of-the-envelope nuclear power plan has suffered another major hit, with new reports showing the expected cost of the newest planned UK nuclear power plant surging so much its builder has been told to bring in new investors.
The planned Sizewell C nuclear plant in Suffolk, to be built by French nuclear giant EDF in cooperation with the UK government, was costed at £20 billion in 2020. According to the Financial Times, the cost is now expected to double to £40 billion, or $79 billion.
The dramatic increase in costs is based on EDF’s experience with Hinkley Point C, currently being built in Somerset, which was supposed to commence operations this year but will not start until at least 2029. It was initially costed at £18 billion but is now expected to cost up to £46bn, or $90 billion.
So dramatic are the cost blowouts that EDF and the UK government have been searching, with limited success, for other investors to join them in funding Sizewell.
Meanwhile across the Channel, France’s national audit body has warned that the task of building six new nuclear reactors in France — similar in scale to Peter Dutton’s vague plan for seven reactors of various kinds around Australia — is not currently achievable.
The French government announced the plan in 2022, based on France’s long-established nuclear power industry and its state-owned nuclear power multinational EDF, with an initial estimate of €51.7 billion. That was revised up to €67.4 billion ($112 billion) in 2023. It is still unclear how the project will be financed, with little commercial interest prompting the French government to consider an interest-free loan to EDF.

Put it another way ...

Do carry on ...

The cour de comptes also noted the “mediocre profitability” of EDF’s notorious Flamanville nuclear plant, which began producing electricity last year a decade late and 300% over budget. It warned EDF’s exposure to Hinckley was so risky that it should sell part of its stake to other investors before embarking on the construction program for French reactors. The entire program was at risk of failure due to financial problems, the auditors said.
That France, where nuclear power has operated for nearly 70 years, and where EDF operates 18 nuclear power plants, is struggling to fund a program of a similar scale to that proposed by Dutton illustrates the vast credibility gap — one mostly unexplored by a supine mainstream media — attaching to Dutton’s claims that Australia, without an extant nuclear power industry, could construct reactors inside a decade for $263 billion. Based on the European experience — Western countries that are democratic and have independent courts and the rule of law, rather than tinpot sheikhdoms like the United Arab Emirates — the number is patently absurd.
Backed by nonsensical apples-and-oranges modelling by a Liberal-linked consulting firm that even right-wing economists kicked down, the Coalition’s nuclear shambles is bad policy advanced in bad faith by people with no interest in having their ideas tested against the evidence. The evidence from overseas is that nuclear power plants run decades over schedule and suffer budget blowouts in the tens of billions — and that’s in countries with established nuclear power industries and which don’t suffer the kind of routine 20%+ infrastructure cost blowouts incurred by building even simple roads and bridges in Australia.
But good luck finding any of that out from Australian journalists.

The pond certainly didn't learn any of that from Col ... instead Col gamely carried on ...

Australia is on course to head to the polls without Labor setting a 2035 emission reduction target, as the agency tasked with advising the government is yet to appoint an expert panel, amid expectations US president-elect Donald Trump will slash US climate change ambitions.
Labor had promised to deliver its 2035 targets by February, in line with the Paris Agreement, but it must first receive advice from the Climate Change Authority, which is now chaired by former NSW Liberal treasurer Matt Kean.
Mr Kean late last year insisted that advice was on course to be delivered to Labor by the end of 2024, but the election of Mr Trump as US president saw the CCA rethink its timetable.
Mr Kean said the agency would need to re-examine its modelling in the wake of the election of Mr Trump.
During his first term, Mr Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and during the recent campaign he said he was likely to do so again, putting global plans to fight climate change into disarray.
With the inauguration of Mr Trump less than a week away, The Australian understands the CCA has yet to finalise its technical expert advisory panel.
The delay will see Australia technically fall foul of its Paris Agreement target, but analysts have said it could be advantageous to head to the polls without a contentious target that could focus voter attention on the cost of reducing emissions.
Because of the delay, Australian voters may not know the intentions of the major parties on emissions beyond 2030.

Actually Col, we have a pretty good idea of the government's policies...Australia expands four coal mines despite warning of climate ‘death sentence’

a betrayal of global climate commitments.

Anthony Albanese’s government on Thursday approved the Boggabri, Caval Ridge Horse Pit, Lake Vermont Meadowbrook and Vulcan South coal mines to extend or expand their operations.

Analysts said these mines could release over 850 million tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes, double the annual emissions of Australia.

“To put it plainly – it’s a death sentence for us if larger nations continue to open new fossil fuel projects,” Tuvalu’s prime minister Feleti Teo said.

This is the seventh coal mine expansion approved by the Albanese government in less than 90 days. The continued expansion of coal mines comes even as Australia pushes to host the Cop31 climate summit in 2026 on behalf of the island nations.

“The nation intends to co-host COP31 – the 2026 UN Climate Talks –but ongoing expansion of coal and gas risks jeopardising relationships in the region and Australia’s legitimacy as a climate leader,” Reverend James Bhagwan, general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, said.

Joseph Sikulu, Pacific managing director of the advocacy group 350.org, accused the Albanese government of hypocrisy, adding that the emissions from these projects would dwarf those of the Pacific region.

“These mines will emit 7.5 times more carbon than all Pacific island nations produce in a year,” he said. “This makes a mockery of the ‘family’ Australia claims to call the Pacific.”

And so on, and it's much the same with gas ...Japan and Australia’s gas-fuelled obsession endures under Asia Zero Emission Community

Australia is giving away its gas for free to the Japanese gas industry to profit from. The status quo contributes to delaying decarbonisation across the Asia-Pacific. If Japan and Australia are serious about climate action, they cannot allow projects involving fossil fuels and unproven technologies to go forward under the guise of AZEC, at the expense of everyone but the gas industry.

And so on, and on, but do carry on Col ...

Labor has set an aggressive target of reducing emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, a target that the Coalition has aggressively campaigned against, arguing it is unachievable. The Coalition has said it will not offer an alternative plan before the election.
Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists Australia is on course to meet its 2030 target.
“Because we are working with industry and business, there is a clear understanding of what needs to be done over the next five years to reduce emissions in their sectors for Australia to meet its legislated 2030 emissions reduction target.”
Mr Trump has poured scorn on attempts to cut emissions, in contrast to his predecessors.
The outgoing Biden administration last year announced a US target to cut emissions by between 61 and 66 per cent by 2035, but Mr Trump intends to drop this.
Mr Trump has pledged immediate action to bolster fossil fuel production and limit government support for both electric cars and renewable energy.
It is unclear whether Mr Trump can or will overturn Mr Biden’s signature energy transition legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers a wave of sweeteners to bolster clean energy generation.

“Our robust reforms and pragmatic policies are delivering what we’ve always said – Australia’s 43 per cent target is ambitious but achievable,” a spokeswoman for Mr Bowen said.

At this point, Col and the reptiles discovered a truly banal image and a startling notion, Australia is one of the world’s largest per capita emitters of carbon dioxide.

Neither the image or the news about the emissions - how we love to emit - stopped Col from carrying on ...

The looming election, due by mid May, is expected to be a referendum on the country’s economy, which is buckling under a cost of living crisis and high inflation that saw the Reserve Bank lift interest rates 13 times to a 13-year high.
The voter focus is in contrast to the 2022 election, when emissions were front and centre in the minds of voters. The 2022 election saw the Greens pick up their largest share of the vote and several independents were elected to parliament on a platform of environmental action.
Labor moved quickly to set a target of having renewables generate 82 per cent of the country’s electricity by 2030, substantially reducing emissions. Labor also implemented the Safeguard Mechanism policy, which requires Australia’s largest polluters to reduce emissions by about 5 per cent a year.
But a cost-of-living crisis, fuelled in large part by a surge in utility bills, has seen a swing – particularly against the Greens.
A record number of Australians have been unable to pay their utility bills. Supporters of the energy transition insist the rollout of renewables is putting downward pressure on bills.
The federal government in May 2024 offered a series of sweeteners, headlined by a $300 energy rebate that has helped temporarily lower inflation. Those rebates are set to end within months, though there are widespread expectations that Treasurer Jim Chalmers will extend them.

Meanwhile, no thanks to the LA fires, over at The Conversation, Climate change is forcing us to rethink our sense of ‘home’ – and what it means to lose it.

Perhaps there are other ways forward ...

Indeed, indeed, what a worthy aspiration, and our Henry is up to the challenge.

You see, he was just hiding, displaced, marked down, sent to the cornfield, off to the outside dunny, a sign that even the reptiles were well over him ...

But he was lurking, and the pond dug him up ...just so the pond could offer the regular Friday treat of pomposity and portentous pretentiousness, with the hole in the bucket man offering up Principles of freedom crushed by intolerance, Of course, ostracising the voices with which one disagrees is nothing new. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was fully familiar with its antecedents in classical Greece, foresaw the danger of a new form of ostracism emerging in a world increasingly shaped by public opinion.

The reptiles began with an image, Nina Sanadze at home surrounded by her sculptures and drawings. Image: Lillie Thompson

Then our Henry began a sorry tale ...

As this paper reported last weekend, Nina Sanadze, a well-known Australian sculptor, has been hounded out of Melbourne’s Gertrude Studio for refusing to denounce Israel and endorse the massacre Hamas perpetrated on October 7, 2023.
The move follows a concerted campaign launched after the “doxxing” in January last year of a group of Jewish creative artists by a reporter from The New York Times.
Fuelling that campaign was a statement, issued by the National Association for the Visual Arts, asserting that “armed attacks on October 7 by Palestinian people cannot be de-contextualised from 75 years of settler colonialism”. While never even naming Hamas – much less mentioning its atrocities – the statement urged artists to act in whatever way they could to “stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza”.
With Sanadze being identified in the doxxing as one of the five most prominent Australian Jewish artists, Gertrude came under enormous pressure to exclude her from its facilities – pressures to which it eventually succumbed. Unfortunately, Sanadze’s “cancelling” is only the latest instance of a far broader assault on artistic freedom.

The reptiles have been giving Sandadze an unseemly amount of space of late, with Sandze seizing the moment to promote a new gallery and blathering about "uncancelling" politically censored, silenced and muted voices...though strangely not some voices...

Never mind, the pond doesn't intend to get in those weeds, especially not the talk of animal behaviour, or other tedious explanations...

In another leaked, private message, Sanadze said she was ­“facetiously” referring to Hamas exploiting humanitarian aid when she described captured Palestinian men, stripped to their underwear by the Israeli Defence Forces in December 2023, as “overweight”. She also wrote that “Israel was arresting them (the men) not executing”. (sorry, another lizard Oz story in the redemptive campaign, so no link)

What a sublime joke, what hilarious comedy stylings, and they were so good, they sent our Henry off into an ever expanding rant, as is our Henry's wont...

Historically, artists campaigned for the right to create unhampered by social and political pressure. Works were to be judged strictly on their merits, not on the basis of the views or character of their creator; and equally, creators were not to be prosecuted, punished or proscribed merely because their works offended some and appalled others. In short, the artistic and literary arena was to be one in which all artists and works could contend.
Now, those principles have been buried. Echoing the fatwa the ayatollah Khomeini issued in 1989 condemning Salman Rushdie, some 7000 writers called last October for all the creators who had not “publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law”, or who were in other ways “complicit” with Israel, to be effectively erased from the public sphere.

At this point, the reptiles interrupted with another image, “Zio Dogs” graffiti at Gertrude Contemporary the day artist Sanadze was moving sculptures for an exhibition.

Then came the required dose of portentous pomposity:

Of course, ostracising the voices with which one disagrees is nothing new. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was fully familiar with its antecedents in classical Greece, foresaw the danger of a new form of ostracism emerging in a world increasingly shaped by public opinion.
Already at the beginning of the 19th century, Hegel had warned about the ambivalence of public opinion’s sway, describing its immense force as deserving to be “despised as well as respected”. Some years later, Tocqueville, witnessing the attacks being launched in the US by the Jacksonian populists against their political opponents, feared that public opinion’s overwhelming force would inaugurate an age in which dissidents were banished into oblivion.
“The master,” he wrote in one of Democracy in America’s most chilling passages, “no longer says: think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; but from this day forth you shall be a stranger among us. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they too, be shunned in turn. No, I will not take your life; but the life I leave you with is worse than death.”

Whatever else you might say, the life that has been left in Gaza, no thanks to Hamas or a fundamentalist Israeli government intent on extermination, might well be worse than death ...Gaza in rubble and ruin, After a year of conflict, two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed, leaving behind 42 million tonnes of rubble and a mountain of health risks.

Israel’s military campaign since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack has devastated the Gaza Strip, leaving an estimated 42 million tonnes of debris piled where houses, mosques, schools and shops used to stand. In April a U.N. estimate reckoned that this would take 14 years to dispose of, while the U.N. official overseeing the problem said the clean-up would cost at least $1.2 billion.

Tackling the debris crisis will be harder because it is spread across so much of the Gaza Strip, and because there are so many areas of intense destruction. The volume of rubble is immense and continues to accumulate rapidly. Adding to the complexity is the large quantity of unexploded ordnance (UXO) as well as risks from asbestos and other contaminants, especially in refugee camps, and the large number of bodies still lying in the rubble.

The World Health Organization said large amounts of dust released from destroyed buildings are releasing hazardous materials that float into the air or seep into water supplies, risking serious health problems for Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

According to a damage assessment from UNOSAT, 163,778 structures were damaged in the Gaza Strip based on images taken on Sept. 3 and Sept. 6 amounting to 66% of the total. Of these, 78% were completely destroyed or severely or moderately damaged.

Yep indeedy do, and that was back in October, and since then much has been done to add to the picture ...

Put it another way ...

A nightmare landscape, which makes our Henry's blathering about nightmares something of a nightmare ...  but please, do admire the way he manages to expand his ranting vision ...

Tocqueville’s nightmare had an immense impact on liberal thinkers, beginning with John Stuart Mill. Especially when it is whipped into a frenzy, Mill grimly noted, public opinion can impose “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself”.
And whenever that “spirit of intolerant mediocrity” was allowed to prevail, irresistible impetus would be given to the “ever-flowing current of human affairs toward the worse”.
There is, nonetheless, a crucial respect in which our current predicament contradicts the 19th-century liberals’ projections. The risks public opinion posed, they believed, lay in the uneducated masses, who were less likely to be moved by reason than by emotion. That is why Mill considered it essential to ensure the “intelligent” could resist the “democracy of mere numbers” by granting greater voting power to “the more educated, more intrinsically valuable members of society” – at least until universal education had made “the lower classes” less vulnerable to fanaticism.
But the lynch mobs that now dominate the public sphere are not populated by the least educated majority of the population. They are, on the contrary, largely comprised of a narrow minority of graduates, who – according to the classical liberals – ought to be immune to madnesses such as anti-Semitism. Yet the statement demanding that authors publicly renege their support for Israel is blatantly anti-Semitic, as it is plainly targeted at, and overwhelmingly intended to intimidate, writers who are Jewish.
Nor is anti-Semitism the only madness to grip the products of our academic institutions, and notably of the (increasingly misnamed) humanities departments. Rather, it was their calls that resonated most loudly in the persecution of Cardinal George Pell, the excesses of the #MeToo movement, the demonisation of “climate deniers”, the attempted suppression of dissenting opinion during the pandemic and the vilification of those who advocated a No vote in the voice referendum.

Oh sheesh, scare quotes for demonised "climate deniers", a nod to the Pellists, a ritual abjuring of the #MeToo movement, a glib tossed salad note about dissenting opinions in the pandemic, and the routine bashing of uppity difficult blacks?

Does that mean our Henry is a climate science denier; loves the way that the Catholic church molested thousands of children and refused to face up to it; turned full RFK Jr/Killer Creighton and refused all vaccines and urgings to wear masks, on the basis of his own expert medical opinion, taking to Ivermectin like a stallion; and thinks locking up ten year old black kids in adult prisons will be jolly good and teach them a lesson?

Who knows, because our Henry didn't expand on his litany, and instead rambled to a close ...

No one more astutely grasped the nature of that phenomenon than Theodore Adorno, the founder of Critical Theory, particularly after students he considered “red fascists” shut down his philosophy lectures for being “irrelevant” in 1968 and 1969.
Those students, he argued, exemplified the “neo-stupidity” of the “half educated” – they were instructed but not cultured, sufficiently learned to be arrogant but not sufficiently learned to understand the limits of their knowledge. They had, in other words, never understood how to be righteous without being self-righteous, to judge without being judgmental and to be moral without being merely moralistic.
Today’s situation is even worse than that. Too often, on issues that range from climate change to gender, and from Australian history to Indigenous policy, young people are taught answers, not questions. Little wonder then that the question mark, which is the hallmark of an open society, has vanished from their keyboard, if not from their vocabulary; and little wonder too that the spirit of tolerance, which is the spirit of liberty, has vanished with it.
There is, no doubt, more the government could and must do to protect those such as Nina Sanadze, who are bearing that trend’s awful consequences. In the end, however, Judge Learned Hand was right when he said “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women – when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; while it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it”. As we celebrate Australia Day, preserving liberty’s embattled spirit deserves to be the greatest priority of all.

Oh sheesh, a final Oz day huzzah ... a cry for freedumb in a way only our Henry can manage...

Sadly, the pond had already used up the infallible Pope of the day, but be reassured that liberty's embattled spirit is in fine fettle...