In which Killer of the IPA and our Henry strut their Friday stuff ...

 

Another dreary and entirely predictable day at the climate denialist lizard Oz, with the reptiles leading off with an ad hominem attack, in the form of an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Public pashes and private jet dashes: Cannon-Brookes embraces high-flyer way of life
Mike Cannon-Brookes paints himself as a climate crusader. The use of his private jet tells a different story with the Bombardier 7500 ferrying the Atlassian billionaire and his girlfriend around the globe.
By Liam Mendes, John Stensholt and Perry Williams

Don't get the pond wrong, it's all in favour of "kill the rich" memes, and so the pond looks forward to a denunciation of the travel arrangements of the Emeritus Chairman and his brood. 

Meanwhile, here's to a rag - which the pond believes and understands, never having actually seen a copy in recent times - still kills trees for no apparent reason ...

Down below, at the very bottom, the pond noted that the reptiles were resentful of the greenies (for the umpteenth time), while over on the extreme far right our Henry, if flickering in neon ever so briefly, was top of the world ma ...

With the theme being climate, the pond thought it right to take Killer of the IPA off the leash and give him the first go, a trot, a run, a chance to strut his denialist stuff.

One thing's certain. Killer loathes climate science cultists almost as much as he fears and loathes masks ...

The header: Dud climate predictions are no worries for Ross Garnaut, It’s puzzling that Ross Garnaut is still worshipped as some sort of energy policy oracle, especially after championing the idea ‘green hydrogen’.

The caption: Ross Garnaut addresses the National Press Club on “Realising Australia's economic and climate opportunities” in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

The magickal invitation: This article contains features which are only available in the web version,Take me there

As is the vogue in climate science denialist circles, Killer began with a litany of all the predictions that had offended him in the past, the markers that might be used to signal the demise of the climate science religion.

Sadly the pond must mark him down, because there's not a single invoking of the Dorothea Mackeller poem to which all climate change-denying cultists must swear allegiance...

In 2004 The Guardian catastrophised that Britain faced a “Siberian climate” by 2020. In 2008, former US vice-president Al Gore said the Arctic could be entirely ice-free within five years. In 2014 French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the world had “500 days before climate chaos”. And two years ago the UN secretary-general declared that the “era of global boiling (had) arrived.”

Unless Australia slashed its 1.1 per cent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, fruit and vegetables would become a “once-a-year treat”, according to UN climate tsar Simon Stiell, who delivered this warning in Sydney on Monday.

Hours later, climate change economics guru Ross Garnaut said the government would fall short of its existing emission and intermittent energy targets “by a big margin” – let alone the more ambitious targets Chris Bowen is poised to announce. I wouldn’t start stocking up on vitamin C.

The diminishing returns to hysteria and fearmongering isn’t the only problem facing the emissions reduction juggernaut. The rationale for replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar power are crumbling too, as Garnaut’s history of failed predictions and mistaken analyses makes clear.

Inevitably the reptiles introduced a Sky Noise moment down under and never mind that nattering "Ned" had notoriously labelled both Sky after dark and the IPA as tempting and damaging distractions, Australia is well placed to move towards a 100 per cent renewable energy future, according to prominent economist Professor Ross Garnaut. Professor Garnaut said Australia can achieve this aim by the end of the 2030s due to its strong renewable energy base. He told Sky News Australia must move "to a zero-emission economy before 2050" if the government plans to meet its Paris Agreement targets. "The recommendations I make are fully consistent with government policy," he said. "We can make a good start (to achieving zero emissions) within the current policy framework".

Killer was on a climate cult assault roll ...

Launching his 2019 book, Superpower, Garnaut declared he had “no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than experienced in Australia over the past half dozen years”.

Six years later that’s become a fanciful scenario: wholesale electricity prices have roughly tripled from a decade ago, and reliability has tanked. Australian Energy Market Operator chief Daniel Westerman this week revealed the number of interventions to stave off blackouts had exploded from six in 2016 to 1800 last year.

“Since the summer of 2016-17, the Tesla big battery, other batteries, the government’s gas turbines, and more attentive regulatory agencies have made South Australia possibly the most secure region within the National Energy Market,” he said.

It’s a combination that has also given the state – which turned off its last coal power station in 2016 – the most expensive power in the country. In January SA sought to switch on two diesel generators as it scrambled to upgrade interconnector cables to NSW and Victoria to maintain grid stability.

Still, it’s especially puzzling that Professor Garnaut is still worshipped as some sort of energy policy oracle after championing the idea “green hydrogen” – the alleged underpinning of our future “renewable superpower” status – could be anything other than a trendy boondoggle borne of scientific illiteracy.

The electrolysis process that is used to produce it chews up vastly more energy than what remains in the “green hydrogen” thus produced. No wonder 99 per cent of $100bn worth of “green hydrogen” projects have failed to progress in Australia, according to Rystad Energy, practically all of which have received some form government support.

Cue a snap, Daniel Westerman

The pond long ago gave up arguing with reptiles of the Killer kind, but correspondents might feel inclined to take the "nuke the country to save the planet" bait ...

Of the half-dozen “coloured” types of hydrogen identified by the CSIRO, Garnaut should be backing “pink”, if any. That’s not, as you might have thought, hydrogen produced by an LGBTI workforce but rather by nuclear energy, which Garnaut must know Australia needs to develop should it have any serious shot at meeting long-term emissions reductions targets. Speaking in 2011, Garnaut said Australia’s lack of action was “exercis(ing) a veto over effective global mitigation”, while lauding China for its supposed determination to reduce emissions.

At this point Killer came up with a very familiar relativist argument, and to prejudice the read, the pond thought Wilcox caught the notion nicely...

On the keyless Killer ranted from his IPA cell ...

The rest of the world appears to have taken little notice of our efforts since. According to the publicly available Climate Action Tracker, which “tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement”, practically every country in the world is falling short of its Paris emissions goals.

The efforts of India and China, home to more than 40 per cent of the world’s population, are rated “highly insufficient”, which isn’t surprising given their voracious appetite for Australian coal.

China pays lip service to emissions reductions targets, and is spending significant sums on intermittent power, but it also has a massive geopolitical interest in convincing the rest of the world to rely more on solar energy, the component supply chain for which it dominates. The CCP plays a long game.

Hardly any of the world is taking emissions reduction seriously, except for Australia, Europe and Britain, well below 30 per cent of global GDP. Recall Russia, a massive fossil fuel exporter that would probably benefit from global warming, has signed up to the Paris agreement. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise every year, even before Africa’s and India’s economic development begins to accelerate.

Yet another Sky Noise moment down under and never mind that nattering "Ned" had notoriously labelled both Sky after dark and the IPA as tempting and damaging distractions? Sure thing, and even better it features Killer himself, IPA Chief Economist Adam Creighton discusses the latest inflation data as Labor remains pleased with itself over recent numbers. “Look, I understand the politics of it, two-thirds of Australians are generally happy when interest rates go down,” Mr Creighton told Sky News host Danica De Giogio. “But we should think of the one-third who should not be happy about it, and like I said inflation is not low, I mean, three per cent is not low.”

Never underestimate the benefit of a screen cap when offered a talking Killer moment.

Naturally Killer was in awe of King Donald's and his servile minions' denialism ...

“We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Donald Trump told reporters in Britain this week, signalling the US is no longer remotely part of the net zero club either. In July congress rescinded hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Biden-era solar and wind subsidies, while Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency this week said it would no longer classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

“This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,” Commissioner Lee Zeldin said.

On the upside, that reminded the pond of the new Luckovich ...

Now there's denialism in action, and way better than the deals that he's managed with tariffs ...

Killer then wrapped up climate denialist IPA proceedings for the day ...

In his speech this week Garnaut praised as “herculean” the Albanese government’s efforts to reduce emissions. Indeed, Canberra has more than trebled the budget cost of promoting intermittent energy, legislated a de facto emissions trading scheme via the Safeguard Mechanism (which will cost Australian industry even more than Trump tariffs) and begun to nationalise household electricity bills. If “herculean” is not enough, perhaps the targets themselves are unattainable?

Unfortunately, Chris Bowen is likely to double down on ever more ambitious targets, which remain superficially popular among a voting public that is clueless about the economic and technological realities. A major blackout or further, large unanticipated increases in power prices in coming years could easily be blamed on the net zero crowd.

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Excellent stuff and a worthy starter for the main course of our Henry, and here the pond felt the need to dim the lights and set the mood...

So to a man who has in recent times tended to sound like a Roman tackling the problem of Carthage, what with the necessity to flatten the place to improve the view, and perhaps, who knows, turn Gaza into a new Riviera ...

The header:  In rush to vilify Israel, Sudan’s crisis goes MIA, Who could reasonably deny that a relentless focus on Israel, and on its responsibility alone, has added unstoppable momentum to the current wave of anti-Semitism?

The caption: The photograph from Gaza (left) showing emaciated toddler Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. The New York Times admitted an error in publishing the image after it emerged the child had been diagnosed with pre-existing health conditions. In Sudan, right, Robaika Peter, 25, holds her severely malnourished child at the paediatric ward of the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Sudan on June 25, 2024. Pictures: Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images / Thomas Mukoya, Reuters

The pond hadn't imagined our Henry was inclined to moral relativism, more commonly known as "Whataboutism" ... but just to start the conversation, the pond noticed this graph in Axios, constructed from actual Israeli government sources ...

Pshaw, just like the 300 Spartans, our Henry could do without food or other aid between early March and the middle of May in a doddle, perhaps a canter, certainly never breaking into a sweat ...

Now on with the "whataboutism" ...

On the very same day the ABC reported a UN statement calling Gaza the “hungriest place on Earth”, the World Food Program, which is the UN agency with central responsibility for preventing famines, warned that the situation in Sudan was veering into the “world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history”.

At that time, in late May, 25 million people in Sudan were “acutely food insecure”, while 650,000 – “the highest anywhere in the world” – suffered from “catastrophic levels of hunger”. Since then, conditions have worsened, with the incidence of “catastrophic levels of hunger” increasing by some 10 per cent.

It's not as if the pond is in the business of defending the "aim high" ABC, but it's ironic that they should label it as a "forgotten crisis" ...

And so on, and the ABC even has a tag, and those inclined to misery porn can have a listen or a view ...

In the pond's view, using contending disasters as a way of downgrading the current Gaza genocide is disingenuous at best and shameful at worst...

The disaster’s immediate cause is a struggle between forces mainly backed by Egypt and a rebel group backed mainly by the UAE. But plunging that struggle into unrestrained savagery is the determination of Sudan’s Arabs to exterminate the country’s Masalit minority, who have been expelled from their homelands and herded into refugee camps.

Neither of the warring sides has shown any regard for civilians. Tens of thousands of children have died of starvation since the beginning of the year, as combatants pillage aid and prevent its delivery. Adding to the horror, there is irrefutable evidence of children as young as one being sexually abused before being slaughtered.

Following the release of that evidence, Benny Morris, the “revisionist” historian Israel’s critics love to cite (when it suits them), has described rape as an integral part of “the Arab way of war”.

The reality, he goes on to say, is that the atrocities in Sudan “tell us something many in the West don’t want to hear about the behavioural norms of Arab combatants in wartime”.

One thing is certain: they won’t hear about them on the ABC, which has consistently ignored the rapidly deteriorating situation in Sudan.

The figures are stark: a search of material added to the ABC website in the last month does not find a single hit for “Sudan” and just one for “Darfur”. But it does find 5750 hits for “Gaza” and 3380 for “famine and Gaza”.

Why then, despite claims that “all lives matter”, are some tragedies so much worthier of our attention and compassion than others, whose sheer scale is vastly greater?

It is, of course, true that our resources of attention and compassion are limited. David Hume was right when he wrote, centuries ago, that “We sympathise more with persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: with our acquaintance, than with strangers: with our countrymen, than with foreigners” – and many more Australians have connections to the Middle East than to Sudan.

Sadly that reference to Hume is about as good as it gets this day for our Henry's arcane references, designed to bolster his pompous pontifications.

At this point, cue a snap designed to elevate one disaster at the expense of another, Asha Kano Kavi, an internally displaced woman from Kadugli, serves wild boiled leaves for food to orphaned children at the Bruam IDP Camp within the Sudan's People Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) controlled area in Sudan in June, 2024. Picture: Reuters

Might not our Henry and the lizard Oz chew gum and and walk and talk and rub tummy and contemplate both disasters with an equal amount of lack of equanimity?

Not really, because it seems that the point of dwelling on  the ongoing Sudan disaster is simply to mitigate, downplay and otherwise diminish the ongoing Gaza disaster.

But while that factor and others are at work, the unmitigated focus on Gaza is scarcely neutral. To begin with, by hiding the facts “many in the West don’t want to hear about the behavioural norms of Arab combatants in wartime” it obscures a central element of the conflict’s ongoing context.

Even more importantly, the focus on Gaza is accompanied by a singular emphasis on Israel, which the ABC mentions some 10 times more frequently than Hamas – an imbalance equally apparent in statements by government ministers, whose ritualistic references to Hamas (such as its calls to voluntarily disarm) are entirely disconnected from reality.

Now our Henry does come up with one of those classic billy goat butts, for what he is rightly famous ...

Israel’s conduct cannot and should not be exempt from even searing criticism. But constantly repeated, the imbalance in emphasis absolves Hamas of its responsibilities, encouraging a simplistic, one-sided narrative in which Israel is the sole actor.

Truly, a splendid billy goat butt, and all in the cause of downplaying the current government of Israel's role in the ongoing Gaza disaster ...

The result is to fuel a dynamic of demonisation whose characteristics have been extensively analysed since the work done by Lewis Coser, an eminent American sociologist who was a refugee from Nazism, in the early 1950s.

Thus, an unrelenting focus on a single party – in this case, Israel – makes it the lightning rod of attention and of the attribution of moral responsibility. As that happens, a symbolic moral boundary is drawn between the active “transgressor” and its allegedly passive “victims”, crystallising a distinction between virtue and vice. Finally, by framing the “transgressors” as evil, the newly drawn moral boundary places the “transgressors” outside the public’s “span of sympathy”, fracturing social bonds, preventing rational discussion and shredding any obligations of civility.

But more than just drawing moral boundaries is needed to convert condemnation into escalating confrontation.

You see? And yet if our Henry was serious he might at least have mentioned King Donald and his love of deporting folk to south Sudan, while at the same time gutting USAID.

Per The Conversation back in April, USAID: the human cost of Donald Trump's aid freeze for a war-torn part of Sudan, and at ABC news (the other mob), Sudan has become a 'case study' for the impact of USAID cuts, aid worker says...

And so on, as the reptiles offered ...South Sudan faces worsening hunger as global aid slows — UN resorts to air-drops to reach families in conflict-hit Upper Nile.

Our Henry carried on with the downplaying ...

Rather, mobilisers, intent on furthering the demonisation, must transform condemnation into outrage by using “scripts” that heighten the perception of evil – a process exemplified in the literature by the New Left’s equating of the US’s conduct in Vietnam with that of Nazi Germany.

Oh dear, that reminded the pond of this story in Haaretz, archive link:

The pond doesn't accuse our Henry of being vile, though a close reading of that text might suggest he is...

The real point of his disingenuous, insulting exercise was never to contemplate the terrible events in Sudan, causes and possible solutions .... it was to distract from the current genocidal inclined government of Israel ...

As the outrage those scripts provoke foment mass protests, repeatedly participating in public displays of hatred cements the commitment of the weakly involved and incites hardcore activists to push the boundaries ever further.

Even worse, those displays of hatred normalise violence against the out-group, who – precisely because they are singled out for attack – are increasingly viewed by bystanders as “not quite like us” and hence not “meriting the sympathy we would extend to ‘our kind’ ”.

Meanwhile, with the lunacy of the fringe entering the mainstream, anyone even indirectly related to the out-group “becomes viewed as polluted” unless they can prove their innocence by denouncing their former friends and associates. As they are anathemised, they lose the right to hold their own opinions and to the equal and effective protection of the laws.

Coser, writing late in life, feared that the changes in communications technology that were creating a “global village” would bring more, and more rapid, demonisation rather than less.

As we were bombarded by images of dreadful events, he argued, the demonisers’ ready scripts would allow us to escape the burden of coping with moral complexity. Moreover, with everything occurring in full public gaze, the pressures to conform would increase, raising the cost of refusing to join the baying pack. Large conurbations favour anonymity; as history grimly shows, it takes a village to burn a witch – and no village mobilises witch hunters more venomous than the online village in which we live.

Little wonder that process has unfolded time and again in recent years. But its current reach and ferocity are truly unprecedented. That is largely because the “villain” takes more tangible form than in previous episodes: radical environmentalists may despise “climate deniers” but there are not well-defined, readily identifiable, communities of “climate deniers” for them to attack. Now the haters have a target: the Jews.

Actually, if the pond might resort to another Haaretz story, it's more about Benji's mob ... archive link

Just as our Henry might have expended some energy analysing what had contributed to and compounded the current disaster in Sudan, he might also have spent some energy analysing the assorted steps - all designed to ensure Benji's political survival - which have led to the current Gaza disaster.

The pond can only quote a few examples from Amir Tibon's piece. 

This will have to do, but the link is there for those who care to look at alternative realities...

And so on and all our Henry can offer in his furious fulminations is the old saw, the old trope, that criticising the current behaviour of the current genocidal Israeli government must be a form of blatant anti-Semitism ...

The transposition is hardly accidental. Not only is there a natural link between Israel and Australia’s Jewish community; the demonisation of Israel rekindles ancient prejudices in some and unleashes the deeply ingrained hatreds of others. As all the vices anti-Semites have always associated with Jews – vindictiveness, arrogance, demonic power and global reach – are heaped on to Israel, “Israel” has become little more than a signifier for “Jew”.

When, after attacks on synagogues, restaurants and individuals, the National Gallery of Victoria is targeted, in torrents of punitive hysteria, because the Gandel family, which is Jewish, has generously endowed it, who can possibly deny that the vilest forms of anti-Semitism are at work?

And who could reasonably deny that a relentless focus on Israel, and on its responsibility alone, has added unstoppable momentum to the hostility and encouraged the unabashed expression of blatant anti-Semitism?

An ugly abyss has opened up. It is, in the end, not only the Jews it will swallow. It is our moral bearings and, with them, our way of life.

And the reptiles keep on charging others for their hysteria, and yet, what to make of that level of Henry hysteria.

It is our moral bearings and, with them, our way of life.

Personally speaking, the pond's way of life bears little resemblance to a Palestinian being starved to death as a method of war.

But if Benji's mob wanted a full-throated apologist in a state of hysterical uproar, how lucky they were to have landed on our Henry. Lord Haw-Haw couldn't have done it better, and tough luck Sudan, it was never really about you ...

What a relief it is to look away, and instead have fun with the fire ant-riddled infallible Pope ....