In which the pond avoids Thursday at the lizard Oz by doing a headlines compare and contrast ...

 

Amazing really ...in terms at least of local relevance ... as the pond scanned the top of the lizard Oz digital edition searching for a relevant briefing ...

Nope ... nothing, nada, nihil...

Once again the top of the digital news was another story featuring the current reptile tax jihad ...

When the reptiles get a bee in their bonnet and go full crusader, it's time to creep silently off into the bush and watch until the madness subsides.

Over on the extreme far right it was much the same ... all were silent on matters currently happening in NSW ...

You had to scroll way down to come across a small note about the matter ...

Never mind that the term 1-in-500 year record is entirely meaningless, given that the north coast just a few years ago had what was termed a 1-in-100 year flood...

If we keep going with this rate of flooding, we'll be having a 1-in1,000 year flood every second year.

Now the pond will concede that the Graudian in its international edition led with mad King Donald and the sociopathic Netanyahu government...

And why wouldn't they? Narcissistic sociopaths always make for good copy.

The pond will also allow that the reptiles preen and pose and posture and strut about as a national rag, and regional events are beneath its dignity and status. 

The reptiles of Oz can't be expected to pay attention to minor weather or climate events, not like the Nine rags...which, fuck it, decided to do it live ..

But if regional is the qualification, why did the Daily Terror, allegedly Sydney's very own tabloid, this day bury the story and put it next to a carnival of Coke?

And to be fair to the Graudian, it's local edition also said fuck it, we're gonna do it live, and they did it live in a big splash ...

Here's the pond's explanation. 

The reptiles are terrified of ever acknowledging events in the real world when they pertain to climate science or weather events...

You also won't read any yarns like this one, which managed to survive and make it into the light, even as democracy is dying in darkness (and anybody who saw John Oliver on the press will know that authoritarianism has already landed and is flourishing in the USA) ...

Here's the archive link ... Earth’s major climate goal is too warm for the polar ice sheets, study says, If Earth stays at its current levels of warming -- below policymakers’ goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius -- polar ice sheets may melt, causing seas to rise and displacing coastal communities, a study finds.

Back at the lizard Oz, this is the lizard Oz editorialist, somehow not finding much space for weather events, but taking the time and the trouble to berate the greenies and Bowen...

Greens no longer want to plant trees to save planet, Meeting the nation’s overly ambitious climate change targets is difficult enough and something Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is unlikely to achieve.
Editorial

2 min read

Meeting the nation’s overly ambitious climate change targets is difficult enough and something Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is unlikely to achieve. This is partly because a recurring fact of life is that those who claim to be the most concerned about saving the planet will always complain that no action is ever good enough. In politics and public policy, making perfect the enemy of the good is sure to lead to disappointment.
A prime example was the refusal of government to repeal legislation in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act that prohibits nuclear technology even being considered as a zero-emissions source of energy. Another example was the Greens’ refusal to support the Rudd government’s plans for a carbon trading scheme to offset greenhouse gas emissions. The Greens’ failure to compromise extended the climate wars and delivered inaction.
Certainly, many will consider the failure of the Rudd government’s carbon trading scheme as no bad thing. The examples that followed of organised crime taking control of the European carbon market to sell fake offsets is reason enough. But carbon trading also provides one of the least-cost ways for big companies to meet their own emissions reduction targets with the additional benefit of increasing the productivity of rural land.
The meltdown in support for the federal government’s Climate Active market for carbon offsets is another example of green extremism gone wild. Green groups are determined not to support anything that may assist the fossil fuel industry to remain in business. Unsurprisingly, big coal and gas are looking for ways to offset their emissions at scale. This inevitably has led to claims of greenwashing. The federal government and big business are being cowed too easily into surrender rather than argue for a bigger long-term goal. The Climate Active program is not perfect because it allows access to internationally generated permits, some of which may be of dubious value. But the campaign against it is misguided because it slows the development of critical mass in an industry that will be badly needed as finding ways to cut emissions becomes progressively more difficult.
Government plans call for carbon reductions not only in electricity but across the board, including industry and agriculture. Carbon permits can help as well as provide new opportunities to improve the economics of working the land.
That coal and gas producers are using offsets is beside the point. So far the groups speaking out in support of the carbon trading industry have a vested interest to do so. GreenCollar and Climate Friendly have built major businesses based on carbon farming and the offset market. Most of it is through high-quality schemes approved by the federal government under the revised safeguards mechanism, which is more credible than those offered in the voluntary and cheaper Climate Active framework.
But they are right to argue that rather than tearing down what is there, more energy should be put into making it work. This includes approving new methodologies that will unlock new stocks of credible domestic carbon abatement. Done properly, the market is not limited to Australia and potentially could be a major export industry that employs local people and leaves the environment in better shape.
Analyst Saul Kavonic summed up the situation when he said the carbon market had become the biggest driver of conservation of Australian biodiversity and habitat during the past decade, along with returning more money to farmers across the nation. He says green activists effectively are campaigning against planting trees. That is of little surprise but something to think about nonetheless.

It's the latest attempt at delay and obfuscation and sure enough over on the extreme far right came this "thought" piece ...

Carbon market is an investment in the nation
The carbon market is allowing billions of dollars to be invested into our land sector, to supplement farm income and build greater resilience into our landscapes
By Alasdair MacLeod

Inevitably MacLeod had skin in the game ...Alasdair MacLeod is executive chairman of Macdoch Australia, which includes carbon project developer Atlas Carbon.

For light relief, the pond turned to Megan Herbert, offering a dilemma that never troubles the reptiles...

As for the rest of the lizard Oz, Thursday is always the bleakest day of the week, and the pond decided to do a mini-strike ...a shallow collection of gobbets reflecting the shallowness on offer.

Correspondents always get agitated when petulant Peta hovers into view... and with good reason ...

Ley walks away from decades of precedent
It will now be much harder, near mission impossible, for the Liberals to win in 2028, given Ley’s declaration a coalition won’t be re-formed before the election.

By Peta Credlin
Columnist

How on earth could she manage to blame Sussssan when it was Little to be Proud of's mob that chucked a tanty, did an epic sulk, took on a Black Knight stand? 

Yet she could ...

The Nationals have been criticised for leaving the negotiating table too soon, particularly after Sussan Ley’s bereavement.
But it was Ley herself who set an arbitrary deadline to announce her shadow ministry on Thursday that then affected Coalition negotiations. And for what? The only real deadline for Ley is the resumption of parliament and that’s not until July.

The real problem? 

Petulant Peta wants to keep nuking the country to save the planet, and being in barking mad far right ratbag Black Knight mode suits her temperament ...

The Liberals must be a “modern” party, representing “modern” Australia, says Ley. This seems to be code for saying the party lost the election because it was “too right wing”, with a message to inner-urban Liberals that the party might purge itself of conservatives as well as reconsider nuclear power. But that would be a real misreading of the electorate here and of the global shifts on energy. Until earlier this year, the Dutton opposition was riding high in the polls even though its only substantive policy was nuclear energy. It was only when Labor opened up its Medicare assault that this changed, as Australians voted with the government to “save” Medicare far more than they voted against the opposition on nuclear.
How can support for nuclear be “hard right” when it’s the policy of the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party, and with Germany rethinking its previous opposition as Canada’s new left-wing PM has declared he’ll use oil and gas to remake the country as an energy superpower?

There was only so much of this that the pond could take, so the pond quickly jumped to the end ...

...The tragedy for the Liberal campaign is not that the party had a nuclear power policy, it’s that it never fought hard enough for it. Nor was the Liberal energy policy as comprehensive as it needed to be given the piecemeal handling of issues such as gas.
Freed from the more conservative ballast the Nationals have provided, the Liberals could simply “me too” Labor’s renewables-only energy policy. That’s certainly the push from NSW factional players who have significant commercial interests in renewables.
If the Liberals now cave in to cashed-up renewable industry puppet masters, this could become an existential crisis. After all, one of the main factors behind the United Australia Party’s demise was its dependence for funding on shadowy financiers. It was to defeat this that Robert Menzies set up a Liberal Party that – back then at least – was actually responsible to its membership.
Whatever happens, rarely has Menzies’ dictum been more fully borne out that “defeat disunites the defeated”.

Still blathering on about Ming the Merciless? 

Still locked in the 1950s? Oi vey ...

And there was the infallible Pope's version of the tiff ...

It's always in the details. 

What a way to give fresh life to a bike ... dammit, he's got the SMR the Duttonator promised the pond would have in its back yard by Xmas ...

As usual, Jack the Insider tried to sound a little more balanced by pointing out the tanty ...

Now you’re just somebody that we used to know
The Nationals have formally fled the field of battle, in a tantrum that means they now must rely on the generosity of Anthony Albanese to determine crucial matters of party status and funding.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

In a supreme act of will, Jack didn't once mention the urgent need to nuke the country ...

...The tantrum means the Nats now must rely on the generosity of Anthony Albanese to determine crucial matters of party status and funding, administrative support and senior roles in parliamentary committees. In the absence of an act of prime ministerial magnanimity (I have to ask, why should he?), the Nationals on the frontbenches in the 47th parliament effectively have voted for a 60 per cent pay cut in the 48th. To be fair, they will be working a lot less. As many as nine Nationals who had been poised to take positions in the shadow cabinet now will be consigned to the backbenches. It really is that dumb.

In the Senate, the Nats have been whittled down to just three with the loss of Perin Davey in NSW who was third on the joint Coalition Senate ticket and failed to get even close to a quota.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who left the party to caucus with the Liberal Party, almost certainly will get a shadow ministry. At the same time, her new friends may be wondering how she may get re-elected to the Senate representing a party that has no presence in the Northern Territory, but that’s a problem for two elections away. For now, if the Territorian senator wants to take the great leap to the lower house there aren’t many safe seats left, and those that are will not be coughed up in a hurry. In any event, now would not be a good time.

David Littleproud’s latest crack at nominative determinism was an ambush for the hell of it. Alas, we are at that point in the relationship breakdown known as the “Now, let’s not say anything we can’t take back” stage where tempers are a little fraught.

Otherwise, the Liberal partyroom would be voluble in condemnation, knowing the member for Maranoa offered Sussan Ley what effectively was a take-it-or-we-leave shakedown less than a week after her mother died. When asked what the urgency was, Littleproud resumed relationship banalities. The Liberal Party was going on its own journey and he was loath to intervene. Sure, they’d text, What’sApp, and be supportive of one another and maybe, just maybe. Well, who knows?

“At some point we will be trying to get back together and make sure we give a cogent argument of the Australian people about an alternative to Anthony Albanese,” Littleproud said.

It would have been an act of high duplicity for Ley to accede to these demands without consulting her partyroom. But the last straw was an insistence that Nationals members of the shadow cabinet should be unrestrained by cabinet solidarity and offer free criticism of Liberal policy as they saw fit. Do these people want Albanese to be Prime Minister for life?

Ley was right to walk away... 

Enough already Jack, the pond just wanted a discreet distance between the Golding cartoons, what with all that talk of Black Knights acting as rumps ...

What else? 

The Gaza ethnic cleansing continues apace, but it was also marked down, and placed alongside that climate event ...

You could also find that other story if you scrolled way down the lizard Oz ...

What's the ultimate point of all this pond headline coverage?

In the end, if you want the news, why not just head off to the Graudian for Ley v. Bid (thereby handily avoiding simpleton Simon and his conflict of interest) or for news of Mad King Donald ... or for news of the Gaza matter ...

That it should come to this, that a British colonial invader provides more reliable reporting than a US owned rag masquerading under the phoney banner of being Australian.

How insufferable these reptiles are, and yet in their own way, also how wretched and pathetic...

And with that, enough already with headline surveys, it's time to wrap up proceedings with an immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the details ...