In which Lloydie of the Amazon and Killer of the IPA make an early arvo appearance ...

 

Wow. Just for the lolz ...

It sometimes takes the pond time to catch up with all that's truly funny, and this morning the pond regretted that an early morning appointment cut short the pond's coverage of the Friday reptile hive mind.

On the other hand, the pond doesn't have many truly ruly deep regrets because our Henry and Dame Groan are staples in the pond's diet, and the pond will always serve up these tasty dishes, good enough to set before a King Donald.

Next Thursday the pond is likely to miss posting altogether because of other commitments, but in the meantime, the least the pond can do is catch up with the reptiles' Friday stew, with EVs haunting their dreams. 

Do android reptiles dream of electric sheep driving EVs around the back paddock?

So the state of hysteria and a saturation of climate science denialists continued well into the day, but at least the pond can leave aside the Kimmel matter.

Bill Kristol pretty much summarised the state of play in The Bulwark ... We're Gonna Call It What It Is ... Yeah. It's Fascism ...

Throw in a 'toon and that's enough ...

Naturally the MAGA-cap-donning, King-loving, fascist-adjacent Dame Slap steered for safer waters ... the war with China by Xmas, with bonus bashing of those bloody sparrows down South. Off to the archive with her ...

Victorian Premier charmed by the smile of Chinese loan sharks
It is highly unlikely any commercial entity would sink money into the almost uninvestable state of Victoria.
Janet Albrechtsen

Also over in what passes for the "news" section was Brownie, and he too could be sent to the archive, a passing better fate than being sent to the cornfield ...

Anthony Albanese’s emissions omission: world-leading target, with a secret price

Anthony Albanese has committed Australia to an uncosted emissions target that will require 90 per cent renewable power and half of new cars to be electric by 2035.
Greg Brown

The pond had to keep some room for expert climate science denialists as it checked out the far right of the rag ...

Lordy, long absent lordy, our Henry and Dame Groan were already long gone, vanished by the reptiles themselves, and in their place was snappy Tom, lathering himself up in wild-eyed despair and a deep anxiety. 

Off to the archive with him ...

With fewer friendships and socialising less in person, we are a nation under the pump in the age of anxiety
Australians are spending more on basics and paying record taxes while making less money, as landmark survey reveals the true cost of our post-pandemic ‘new normal’.
Tom Dusevic

Might the awareness that the planet is comprehensively stuffed? Possibly not, because the rest of the reptiles were resolute in their denialism.

Briefly top of the world ma was Geoff, chambering yet another round ...

Anthony Albanese promises net zero pot of gold, as magic pudding grows
For all of the big declarations and glossy reports, voters are rightly sceptical of crystal-ball modelling assuming a lot over a long period of time
Geoff Chambers

The pond only paused to note the art of the reptile illustration ...

Did you note it too? 

There's Albo's mouth puckered in a grimace as the reptiles give him a right royal bollocking, while there in the background, sinisterly out of focus in the darkness, was a bespectacled loser...

There's a real art to reptile illustrations, but the pond had to move along, because the matter to hand was so urgent that this day there was a rare appearance by Lloydie of the Amazon ...

Naturally Lloydie of the Amazon was full of saucy doubts and fears ...

The header: Albanese spruiks China’s progress on clean energy but how legitimate are his figures?, While Australia aims for ambitious carbon cuts by 2035, China's renewable energy success story masks an uncomfortable truth about its escalating emissions.

The typo caption: The Australian flag at Tian'anmen Square asr (sic) Anthony Albanese pays an official visit to China.

The pond doesn't know what's happened to Lloydie of the Amazon. Perhaps he's been asrd.

The reptiles clocked this effort as just a two minute read, and that's about the length Lloydie seems to manage these days.

It's as if his heart isn't in it, but he knows he must conform to the hive mind, and send his saucy doubts and fears out into the world ...

Anthony’s Albanese’s fun fact on China is that it has “now nearly twice as much” wind and solar power as the rest of the world ­combined.
Here’s a few other fun facts to ponder. China’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 were 12 billion tonnes – or 31.5 per cent of the ­global total.
According to University of Oxford’s Our World Data, China’s emissions grew by 551.96 million tonnes in 2023. This compares with Australia’s total emissions for that year of 384.36 million tonnes, which were down 1.39 million ­tonnes.
China, and the world, might well be building an awful lot of ­renewable energy projects but carbon dioxide emissions are still rising. The global appetite for energy in all its forms is still growing. A massive increase in spending on wind and solar has yet to meaningfully move the dial in terms of total energy use. The “green” future will demand more power, not less.
The challenge is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. A centrepiece of the federal government’s new ambition to reduce emissions by 62 to 70 per cent of 2005 levels by 2035 is a billion ­dollar punt on replacement fuels for oil and gas.
As yesterday’s energy superpower boondoggle, green hydrogen, loses its lustre, the focus is back on biofuels. The government says the first production of “drop-in” cleaner fuels, which can be directly substituted for existing fuels and work in today’s engines, is estimated by 2029. It says Australia has the ingredients needed to make cleaner liquid alternatives to fossil fuels, with ready access to feedstocks like canola, sorghum, sugar and waste.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation found a mature Australian low-carbon liquid fuels industry could deliver around 230 million tonnes CO2-e in cumulative emissions reduction by 2050, equivalent to 2.3 times Australia’s current total annual transport emissions.
The danger is that rather than save the planet, biofuels will simply compete with food production for arable land.

For no particular reason, the reptiles maintained the China ranting with an AV distraction featuring former chairman Rudd, Kevin Rudd has accused China of being the main cause of disruption within the Indo-Pacific region. The Ambassador to the US says a unity between Australia and America could combat the Southeast Asian power. Kevin Rudd’s comments precede an expected meeting of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump later this month, in which China is expected to be a major talking point. Mr Albanese has been criticised for refusing to call out Beijing on its behaviour for fear of upsetting the bilateral relationship.

And that was pretty much it for an underdone Lloydie ...

Mr Albanese says the new figure is a “responsible target supported by science and a practical plan to get there and built on proven technology”.
“It is the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs and to ensure that we act in our ­national interest”, the Prime Minister said.
A Net Zero Plan includes an extra $2bn for the energy sector through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and another $5bn for the National Reconstruction Fund to help large industry decarbonise. For transport, there is more money for electric vehicle charging.
There is little or no detail on how this adds up to achieve the new target. Significantly, changes to the safeguards mechanism that determine how quickly industry must cut emissions or pay to cover them has been kicked down the road for later.
Instead, there is more hype about Australia’s opportunity to lead the worldwide green industrial revolution.
The Greens have accused Labor of being the worst type of climate hypocrite: claiming to care and then approve more coal and gas projects.
Business has been left holding the bill. Many will be thankful the target was set at 62 per cent. But this figure will be ignored by detractors. The Paris Agreement set a target of less than 2 degrees warming with an ambition for 1.5. But nobody talks about 2 degrees. Just like political pressure will be for 70 per cent because with China’s annual emissions increasing by more than the whole of Australia’s emissions in recent years there is no time to waste.

No time to waste? B

y the pond's reckoning, the denialist reptiles have all the time in the world to waste, and a planet to ruin ...as if the French clock man had infested the reptiles with a brain worm and they wanted to do the planet slowly, a nice slow broiling until the thing was leathery and dry.

Again the pond must apologies for not being able to attend to the American comedy ...

So many choices ... but if the pond can't offer a goodly dose of anti-vaxxer mayhem , the pond can offer as the bonus for the day Killer of the IPA, famous for his anti-vax ways and his fear of masks, and not too shabby at climate science denialism either ...

The header: Net-zero credibility in fantasy policy - from the barely believable to the absurd, Across the globe, almost three billion people still rely primarily on wood, straw and dried dung for cooking or heating.

The caption for that damned old woman ruining the planet: An old woman in a coastal village on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island still collects driftwood for her cooking. Picture: People Travel

Unlike Lloydie, Killer of the IPA was feeling his oats, and the reptiles clocked him as a full four minute denialist outing ...

Were there any lingering doubts that we’ve entered a post-rational world – where feelings and fantasies govern public policy – they were snuffed out on Thursday when the government told voters that two plus two equals five.
In what must rank as one of the most brazen public policy announcements in Australian history, Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen promised to radically restructure the Australian economy within a decade at zero cost.
Even setting aside the laughable notion that cutting Australia’s 1.1 per cent share of global emissions would make a measurable dent in global climate patterns, the claim was absurd.
Not only would a new plan to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 62-70 per cent from 2005 levels by 2035 cost nothing, it would supposedly be a boon for jobs, growth, incomes and the environment, we were told.
The Treasurer unveiled modelling asserting that the costs of not pursuing net zero would be “significant and consequential” and “exceed” the costs of following the government’s far more coercive plan, an affront to economic principles that suggests individuals and businesses should be free to choose how to invest. Indeed, we are asked to believe that forcing hundreds of billions – ultimately trillions – of dollars into wind and solar, whose intermittency and inefficiency have consistently pushed up power prices wherever they’ve been rolled out, would be cheaper than doing nothing.

Strangely the reptiles insisted on putting a graph into Killer's column, as if Killer needed that sort of nonsense ...

Killer was suppurating with an IPA rage at the futility of it all ...

For all the talk at the press conference of “the science”, actual science – based on observation and evidence – was nowhere to be found in Treasury’s 54 pages of voodoo economics.
“Across all scenarios, global mitigation action is assumed to be sufficient to ensure global temperatures are kept well below 2C by the end of this century,” the document says.
In other words, Treasury simply assumed the world will achieve net zero by 2050 – a proposition that is patently, and increasingly, false.
According to the International Energy Agency, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen 63 per cent since nations solemnly agreed to cut them at Kyoto in 1997. They have increased almost every year since, including rising by almost 1 per cent last year.
Albanese offered a “fun fact” that China has almost twice as much wind and solar under construction as the rest of the world combined. But this trivia is meaningless; China is big. The climate doesn’t care about national trivia or Treasury’s gushing over 165 “net-zero commitments”. It cares about total emissions – and China began building almost 95GW of new coal power plants last year alone, the highest on record and about four times our entire coal power fleet.

For some weird reason, the reptiles insisted on suggesting that the planet was in danger.

This must be the third time they've turned up in the pond, and who knows how many times the canny reptiles recycled them, proving that waste not, want not might really help ...

All that nonsense only sent Killer into an even steeper spiral, an even more alarming spin, like an out of control cyclone ...

Meanwhile, after trillions of dollars in investment and endless hype, wind and solar together contributed just 3.1 per cent of global energy supply in 2022, according to the IEA. While global emissions may soon plateau, the idea they will collapse to near zero by 2050 is ludicrous. Indeed, electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centres alone is expected to double by 2030 to about 945 terawatt hours – slightly more than all of Japan’s electricity consumption.
Treasury’s modelling hinges on heroic projections of booming demand for “clean energy-embedded export industries” – undefined, non-existent and perhaps too embarrassing to call by their real name: green hydrogen, which had failed repeatedly to deliver commercial returns despite billions in subsidies.
The Soviets would have been proud of Bowen’s grandiose Net Zero Plan, unveiled alongside six Sector Plans “to show industry and investors what the government thinks is the most feasible decarbonisation pathway”. Not pursuing net zero, Treasury warns, would “result in capital misallocation as businesses invest without clear direction”. Heaven forbid businesses invest without government direction!
As esteemed Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil noted last year the world’s first energy revolution – from wood to fossil fuels, or from a less to a more efficient energy source – took two centuries and still wasn’t complete. Almost three billion people today rely primarily on wood, straw and dried dung for cooking or heating. Believing we could replace the “entire energy foundation of modern civilisation” within 25 years, and this time from a more efficient to a less efficient source of energy, was delusional.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of the keen Kean, as a way of getting Killer of the IPA even more agitated, Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean says Australia is positioning itself as a global leader on climate ambition. Picture: AAP

The pond did think of trying to placate Killer with a little comedy which resolutely avoided mentioning crazed anti-vaxxers or crazy mask-fearers ...

Instead it featured a classic News Corp flop ...Is this the worst product launch in Australian media history (that's an archive link) ...

Inter alia ...

Did that sooth Killer's grumpiness? 

Nah, the curmudgeon was even more upset ...

Even The New York Times, bastion of fashionable internationalism, published a lengthy piece this week lamenting that “the whole world has soured on climate politics”, noting the obvious collapse of interest in net zero across societies and governments.

Hang on, hang on, what's this "bastion of fashionable internationalism"?

Shouldn't Killer be talking about "globalist elites"  or "passport wanderers" or "rootless cosmopolitanism", so that people of Killer's kind and inclination might better understand what he means?

Never mind, he was ready to root them out, much like King Donald ...

In short, there will be no net zero by 2050, and there is no “transition”. The central assumption underpinning the government’s modelling is simply wrong.
Matt Kean, chair of the Climate Change Authority, said the government was “positioning Australia as a global leader on climate ambition”.
If only Treasury had modelled the likely outcome if the world simply ignored Australia’s supposed climate leadership.
It is sad to see our leaders spout such logical and empirical nonsense. Achieving the emissions cuts they propose would require a carbon tax of hundreds of dollars a tonne – more than 10 times the level briefly imposed by Julia Gillard’s government in 2012.
Even if the increasingly hysterical climate forecasts prove accurate, the rational strategy would be to wait, see if the fears are justified, and adapt if necessary, as humans always have. The IPCC itself conceded in 2014 that “changes in income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance and many other aspects of socio-economic development will have an impact … that is large relative to the impact of climate change”.
Flagging his new targets this week, Bowen said he wanted emissions cuts that make Australians “proud”. He will for right for a time at least; pride may well be the only positive payoff they deliver until the massive economic damage becomes clear.
Adam Creighton is senior fellow and chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What a strident call to action ...

Even if the increasingly hysterical climate forecasts prove accurate, the rational strategy would be to wait, see if the fears are justified, and adapt if necessary, as humans always have.

Yeah, right, it's clear Killer hasn't invested in a seaside mansion.

Why did he bother with such a feeble attempt at a fig leaf? He should be out and proud ...

Even if the increasingly hysterical climate forecasts prove accurate, expect your insurance to go up by squillions, if you're lucky enough to get any, and expect your seaside mansion to flop into the sea, and see if I or the IPA give a damn, or care a hoot, a whit, a bit, or a fig for your fate ...you should have retreated to live in a cave, as humans once did.

While others might not be so sure, the pond was pleased it did this catch-up. 

It's no small boast to say that our Henry, Dame Groan, Lloydie of the Amazon and Killer of the IPA have all starred on a single Friday in the pond, and have all offered the very best of reptile climate science denialism.

Best of all, they all served - the pond thanks them for their service - so that the pond might segue to the infallible Pope, hitting that sweet spot yet again ...