In which the pond only has the energy for "Ned" going full Pauline and the Ughmann doing his usual climate science denying routines ...

 

Once again the venerable Meade kept the pond up to date with yet another failing of the eternally shameful hive mind at the lizard Oz.

The sub-header Writers duke it out saw Michael Gawenda have a go at Jeff Sparrow in the ethnic cleansing enabling Oz, and unsurprisingly coming off a little the worse for wear.

The venerable Meade thoughtfully provided a link to Sparrow's response to the fuss in Overland ...and there were a couple of zingers. 

After dealing with the matter of the government of Israel committing genocide, Sparrow ended up this way ...

Move along folks. Nothing to see here. Just another day in the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Meade provided a sublime coda:

Late Thursday, days after Sparrow asked for a correction and an apology, The Australian’s article was partially corrected. The first mention now has Sparrow as “a former editor of Overland” but the second still has him as “the editor of Overland magazine”. There is no editor’s note to acknowledge the changes.
Sparrow told Weekly Beast: “Nothing says journalistic ethics like surreptitiously correcting falsehoods without telling your readers – and nothing says journalistic quality like bungling your surreptitious correction.”
The editor-in-chief of the Australian, Michelle Gunn, was approached for comment.

A comment from the hive mind? 

Good luck with that. Never admit error, never surrender, never cease from waging endless jihads ...

The venerable Meade also took a shot at the frequently execrable ABC, and the always execrable Kyle-Jackie O saga, but it's her coverage of the reptiles that keeps the pond tuning in.

There's only so much any one person can do to make sense of the morass, the mugwump swamp that is the hive mind, and this weekend's edition is another reminder that only so much can be covered before exhaustion and a sense of existential ennui sets in ...

Just look at the early Saturday headlines:

Perhaps in a bid to distract from the coalition's pending flop in Farrer, they decided to go all in on Jimbo ...

Jim Chalmers is going for broke. Will we end up a poorer country?
If Australia tips into recession, voters may blame the Treasurer’s great big gamble on tax reform and fairness.
Matthew Cranston
14 min read

A fourteen minute read?!

That's worse than a "Ned" Everest climb. 

Thank the long absent lord the pond could refer correspondents on to the intermittent archive, offering only a teaser trailer which showed off the appalling gif-like illustration (the black and white heads rotate):

Fourteen minutes of fear and loathing, lizard Oz style?

Enough already, and ditto this headlining piece. 

Off to the intermittent archive with it. (It was only allegedly a five minute read, but enough already with the endless Jimbo bashing, which this time required a reptile tag team) ...

EXCLUSIVE
Chalmers’ long path to fiscal repair (take it as … red)
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has warned of tough decisions ahead while unveiling $13bn productivity reforms and signalling tax hikes on housing investments.
By Greg Brown and Geoff Chambers

But "Ned" was also a part of the top of the world ma triptych, and there was no way the pond could duck its obligation to climb the "Ned" Everest.

Sadly, perhaps in another bid to distract from the Farrer matter, it turned out that "Ned" had decided to go full Pauline ...

The pond wanted to start that way to provide some visual context.

See how "Ned's" piece starts with an Australia so overcrowded that some are forced to live in the ocean?

As a visual misrepresentation of the actual demographics of Australia, it's a stunning, malicious, distorting lie, though of a piece with the tone of "Ned" going full Pauline.

And that shot of angry people clutching flags and shouting at someone of dubious ethnic origin is also evocative of "Ned's" tone.

And now we pick up the story with "Ned" heading off to the Caterist MRC for more inspiration in the matter of bashing threatening, disturbing furriners ...

...The Menzies Research Centre reports there are now about 2.9 million temporary migrants in Australia, about 10 per cent of the current population of 28 million.
The main category is international students, now running at about 515,000 – and that’s a reduced level – with some of our best universities having nearly 50 per cent of their enrolments being overseas students.
The other remarkable feature in our immigration legacy is that 32 per cent of our population, or 8.8 million people, have been born overseas, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Indeed, the 2021 census showed that more than half of Australian residents, 51.5 per cent, were born overseas or had one parent born overseas. This figure would be even higher today.
The comparable foreign-born figure for the US is only 14 per cent, less than half Australia’s, with the US often wrongly mistaken as being a stronger migrant nation than Australia. In truth, there is no comparison. The average foreign-born percentage for OECD nations is also 14 per cent, far below our figure.

It's easy to see where this is heading. 

Cue a shocking image of soiled, polluted Oz beaches ... Indian-born residents now make up 971,020 of the 8.8 million people in Australia who were born overseas. Picture: NewsWire / Nadir Kinani

What a compelling image of a country flooded by furriners, as "Ned" continued full Pauline ...

Taking the easy road to economic growth
All the above results reveal a sustained transformation in Australia’s society, culture and economy. While migrants are indispensable to our labour market, over the past decade our GDP growth has been driven by population, not productivity, a decisive event. The nation has taken the easy road to economic growth and is paying a devastating price – immigration as a substitute for productivity means per capita income – that is, wages and living standards – has languished, leading to an impatient, disillusioned and angry public mood.
Australia’s immigration story runs far in advance of most other nations and drives social change at a rapid rate. Many people celebrate such diversity; many others believe that Australia’s character and values are being lost. Both feelings demand respect.
Immigration is in overreach. It faces multiple problems, the result of weak management and lack of vision. Recent numbers are too high, the skills program demands a reset, growth in temporary migration is unsustainable and devoid of policy control, while there is rising concern about the values set of a minority of the intake.

Naturally there had to be a snap of Pauline, shown in kindly aunt mode surrounded by dinkum flags ... Pauline Hanson’s One Nation continues to draw support from voters disillusioned with the major parties. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Of course "Ned" attempts to distance himself from Pauline, but it's brief resistance, because she's completely right...

This situation has created an inexcusable gift to Pauline Hanson, courtesy of the Albanese government. Labor deserves much of the blame and should be held to account. Hanson has captured the wave of concern about immigration with polls over the past six months (Newspoll, Resolve Monitor, the Lowy Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs) all showing majority support for a lower intake and sentiment in the plus-50 per cent to 65 per cent zone to cut numbers.
Immigration turning point
Many Western nations now face a turning point in their immigration policies. While the foundations of Australia’s program are stronger than those of most nations, a showdown is coming. The real issue is whether changes will be modest or radical or sensible. The worst mistake the pro-immigration progressive movement can make is to pretend nothing is wrong and that such criticisms are merely racism, a denial sure to be counterproductive.
The coming collision is driven by three simultaneous and inflammatory factors. The biggest is the housing crisis with many young people priced out of the market, feeding intergenerational frictions. Labor is now promoting tax changes in next week’s budget, while Angus Taylor tells Inquirer that immigration will be a “key feature” in his reply to the budget.

And there's the nub of it, the real point of the exercise. 

The beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way has decided to go full Pauline himself, as a way of cutting her off and taking over her turf, being too dumb to realise that he's actually giving her more fuel ...

“You cannot bring people to this country if you don’t have the houses for them. It’s that simple,” the Opposition Leader says.
“Migration levels must be capped by the availability of housing. That’s common sense but it’s not what we have seen. Labor has done the opposite with an unpreceded escalation in immigration numbers, yet housing supply has gone backwards.”

Just to push the point, the reptiles slipped in a a snap reminding the hive mind just how much the Liberal leadership looked like the Mafia ... Angus Taylor is set to unveil a new Coalition immigration policy linking migration to housing supply. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That reminded the pond of a headline in Crikey by the keen Keane ...

If your answers are Tony Abbott or Alexander Downer, you should probably give up
The Liberal presidency wouldn’t be that important in normal times. But given the recent criticism levelled at the party — both externally and internally — it’s become crucial.

Sorry, it's behind the paywall, but the opening three pars says all that needs to be said...

For a failing party that is now, even in Coalition with the Nationals, polling in the low twenties below One Nation, the choice of federal president is apposite: two old male political failures.
In the blue corner, Tony Abbott, Australia’s worst prime minister, who couldn’t even make two years before his party dumped him, and then lost his seat in what remains the best demonstration of how the Liberals have systematically alienated their heartland.
And in the other, also blue, corner, Alexander Downer, briefly Australia’s worst opposition leader and then worst foreign affairs minister, chiefly known for outsourcing Australian foreign policy to the Bush administration and his still unexplained role in bugging the Timor-Leste cabinet, then going off to work for the chief beneficiary of the bugging, Woodside.

And that's why "Ned" paused to offer a message from his sponsor:

Taylor says the ratio of migrants to housing is running double over the previous figure. He says: “The situation is unsustainable and it’s no wonder young Australians can’t get into a home. For the year we are going into, they are running immigration numbers 80,000 above the targets and housing 70,000 a year below the targets. And Labor’s answer is to put more taxes on it. Seriously, who thought that up?”
He will attack Labor’s intergenerational tax changes by saying the real problem is immigration. Taylor’s pledge to cap migration flows by housing availability points to a decisive shift in immigration policy and politics. It follows a similar move by Canada that cut migration numbers and foreign students in a desperate bid to reduce housing costs – the result has been a shrinking population with benefits for the housing market and affordability but with related evidence that high migration was not the sole cause of the problem.

Now back to full Pauline fear mongering, because everything is fracturing and fraying, all is chaos, and how soon can we introduce a down under version of ICE to bring peace to the streets?

The second factor in Australia’s political debate has been the immediate leap in the net overseas migration numbers with the border opening after the Covid freeze. The NOM hit 538,340 in 2022-23 and 429,000 the following year. These numbers received massive and damaging political prominence, but they measure all arrivals and departures and should not be confused with the formal policy. The government is desperate, given the political optics, to cut them but the task has proven difficult, Jim Chalmers has conceded the current planned reduction to 225,000 won’t be reached.
Social cohesion is fraying
The third element has been the erosion of social cohesion with an entrenched antisemitism that repudiates our multicultural ethic and that culminated in the Bondi massacre of 15 people and the creation of the royal commission.
The Middle East conflict has resounded in this country with pro-Palestinian protests, open support for pro-Hamas terrorism, attacks on Jewish people and almost free licence given to radical Islamists and preachers endorsing violence against Jews – events that have led to a profound rethink within conservative politics in this country.
In his recent Australian Values Migration Plan, Taylor, after declaring his support for immigration, said people with the “wrong motivations” who had “subversive intent” were being allowed entry. The upshot is that Australians “can see the country they love changing for the worse”.

At this point you need to understand lizard Oz dogwhistles which are immediately understood by the hive mind ... The Middle East conflict has resounded in this country.

Islamics!

Say no more!

Now back to another message from the sponsor, making sure you get the dogwhistle, which is to say "based on values"!

Taylor says the nation cannot discriminate on nationality, race, gender or faith but must now discriminate “based on values”. He says migrants from liberal democracies have a greater likelihood of subscribing to our values – a claim that has provoked criticism and poses implementation difficulties.

Time now for more saucy doubts and fears... and not just from the beefy boofhead, but from experts!

In truth, reform of both numbers and of standards is a diabolically challenging mix. The apparent success of Hanson’s populist anti-immigration campaign complicates the task, given that Hanson polarises opinion. Taylor needs to win back voters from One Nation yet also differentiate the Liberals from One Nation. While One Nation is seen in the polls as the party best able to manage immigration, its real position is to throttle immigration in a way guaranteed to damage the country.
The multiple defects in the current immigration agenda have provoked multiple solutions – even from established champions of the program. Commentator and former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi said last month: “Three million temporary entrants are incompatible with the size of the current permanent intake.”
Immigration specialist and Australian National University emeritus professor of demography Peter McDonald has recently produced, along with ANU Migration Hub director Alan Gamlen, a blueprint for major change, warning that the growth in the temporary intake must be curbed and stabilised.

How else to make sure the oil on the water catches fire? 

Send in a Kroger to Kroger it, to the delight of unlovely meter maid Rita ... Former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger claims the problems with housing in Australia are “too much regulation” and “mass immigration”. Mr Kroger told Sky News host Rita Panahi that housing is “regulated to death”. “Too much regulation on housing and too much mass immigration; they’re the problems with housing today.”

By this time the pond had grown full weary, but not "Ned" as he kept on pounding the Pauline drum ...

McDonald tells Inquirer: “We think the temporary population needs to be managed and stabilised. It’s about 1.7 million and there’s a tendency to think it’s going to go away. But this population is embedded in the economy. We estimate there’s roughly half a million temporary migrants working in skilled jobs. Temporary migrants are a high proportion of the labour force in aged care. We need to recognise we have an ongoing temporary population, not ignore it, which is the current kind of policy.
“We sleepwalked into this situation. Over the last 20 years both Labor and Coalition governments have made various changes leading to the temporary population continuing to grow. This country has a history of saying migration should be permanent only, so if we are going in this direction then we need to plan for our temporary population.”
In a recent analysis, Nico Louw from the Menzies Research Centre says the key to reducing immigration numbers lies in the temporary migrant category. The permanent program at 185,000, split between the skilled and family streams, is “only a small part” of the immigration story.
Temporary migration comprises students, working holiday makers and visitors. But international students dominate, with many staying for years and a significant number becoming citizens. Getting the temporary numbers down needs action on both sides of the equation – limiting arrivals and increasing departures.
Louw argues public sentiment is changing decisively on immigration: “Australians have historically been more willing to accept higher levels of legal migration when they believe the government has control of the borders” – this is the legacy of the border controls of the Howard and Abbott governments – “but this relationship has broken down, as legal migration surged at the same time as a rising cost of living, high housing costs and a sense of fragmenting social cohesion.”

Nico Louw? That name doesn't quite sound Anglo-Celtic approved, but don't worry, the reptiles have lined up a stunning snap to illustrate tertiary education ... Australia’s university sector is moving towards a likely crisis over the reduction in international students.

The university sector is moving towards a likely crisis?

That's nothing up against the actual crisis currently happening in the lizard Oz graphics department ...

In January this year official figures show there were 515,717 international students in Australia, a fall on the previous year, with China comprising 23 per cent and India 17 per cent. Before the 2025 election both Labor and the Coalition focused on lower student numbers in their efforts to return immigration overall to its pre-pandemic levels.
Australia’s university sector is moving towards a likely crisis over the reduction in international students, a cohort vital in delivering revenue for the higher education sector. The university sector has been stunningly incompetent in managing its interests and its image with the public and the political class in recent years. Having enjoyed, along with the mining industry, a generation of national income success wired into the Chinese market, the message now being sent is one of retreat.
The government is driven by the politics and the reality that, if reductions in numbers are essential, then the student intake is the obvious target. Whether Labor has the nous to protect the export industry, reduce the numbers and manage the consequences is doubtful.
The wider migrant story is the dominance of India and China. Recent official figures reveal the explosion of migrants from India with our Indian-born numbers now numbering 971,000, more than doubling over the past decade. India has now replaced England as the largest source nation of foreign-born residents. Chinese-born migrant numbers are 731,000, another substantial increase over the decade.

At this point the reptiles did what they've taken to doing often lately. 

Wind back the clock ... Children aboard the post WWII Sitmar liner, Fairsea, which made several journeys to Australia under the International Refugee Organisation from 1949 to 1951, carrying displaced persons affected by the war. Picture: National Archives of Australia

"Ned" went on to provide a hint of the great displacement theory ...

Australia, courtesy of immigration, has rapidly turned into one of the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse Western nations. The 2021 census showed that one in four people (23 per cent) spoke a language other than English at home, the most common being Mandarin and Arabic. A total of 872,000 people self-reported speaking English “not well” or “not at all”.
Too much of the current debate ignores the Australian fertility crisis and the indispensable role of immigration in our tight labour market filled with job vacancies. Our current fertility rate has fallen to 1.42 compared with the 2.1 replacement level – this means the Australian people are deciding they have no economic option but a strong, ongoing immigration program.
But that program demands reform in our economic interests.
Former Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, who reviewed the program in 2023, found that almost half of permanent migrants work below their skill level, despite one in three occupations facing worker shortages. The skills mismatch undermines both our economy and the immigration program. It needs to be urgently addressed.
Analysing the economics of the program, University of NSW Scientia professor Richard Holden tells Inquirer: “Australia has historically focused too much on GDP and too little on GDP per capita. It’s the latter which is the right measure of living standards. Immigration mechanically boosts GDP, but only boosts GDP per capita if immigrants are more highly skilled than average, or fill gaps in the labour market that aren’t being met domestically.

In these kinds of reptile stories, there always has to be some kind of villain, hiding the real story, and here he is ... Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s department has been called to develop ‘a better picture of temporary migrant outflows’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

We're flying blind, completely in the dark, as hordes of furriners take over the country ...

“The other element of confusion on immigration concerns temporary immigration. This can also be economically and socially valuable, but we must focus on steady-state levels, not the large outflows or inflows that occurred around the time of the pandemic. The Department of Home Affairs needs to make more accurate forecasts and a key element of this is developing a better picture of temporary migrant outflows. The quality of our national discussion about migration would be vastly improved and more constructive if we had accurate numbers.”
Yet there is a bigger issue because immigration is not just a policy. By definition immigration changes a nation because it changes numbers, people and culture. This is a decisive political event. The question then becomes: is it possible to substantially reform an immigration program that has become an integral component in our national identity?
This is the conundrum that Australia is about to face.
In a September 2025 paper authors Gamlen and Andrew Jaspan said that despite a global populist disruption around immigration, Australia was different. Reaching a remarkable conclusion, they wrote: “Migration in Australia is thus not just policy but part of the nation’s identity and state machinery: it is pre-political. This stability has shielded it from the immigration-driven turmoil seen in Britain with Brexit and in the US with Trump. Though Australia has more foreign-born residents than either, its debates are calmer, thanks to both national identity and long-term state capacity.”

Is it ironic then that "Ned" should turn to an Australian of Greek descent for insights? RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras says Australia ‘has fundamentally changed who it is’. Picture NCA NewsWire / Aaron Francis

Not really, it's just the way the reptile game is played ...

These are revealing judgments pointing both to the confidence and complacency of the immigration establishment. It is true that immigration has borne exaggerated blame for many of our current ills from housing costs to political polarisation – yet it is equally true that it must bear some of the blame, that the current program is losing public support and that it is undermined by a range of policy mistakes.
Is genuine reform of immigration possible? The ruthless assessment of the Coalition’s prospects by RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras suggests it might be a bridge too far and that Australia is far different from the nation that initially voted for John Howard in 1996.
Samaras says Australia “has fundamentally changed who it is”. In the inner metropolitan seats the percentage of people who are foreign born or had a parent foreign born is now nearly 66 per cent.
“These voters are not looking for a cultural restoration project,” he says. Samaras seizes on the turning point that India is now replacing England as Australia’s largest overseas-born diaspora and warns that Taylor, in pitching to so-called “Australian values”, is not talking to the people he needs to win.
It is a fair warning. But there is no reason Indian and Chinese migrants should automatically shun the Liberals, nor is there any reason to think they would automatically oppose sensible immigration reform. But that is a bigger question that will need to be addressed in the Australian democracy.

And there you have it. 

Despite a token gesture at the end, a mild warning about so-called "Australian values", it looks like "Ned" and the reptiles are going to swing in behind the beefy boofhead, in a desperate bid to beat Pauline, by becoming Pauline, and by provoking even more hysteria and bigotry.

As if News Corp hasn't already done enough to damage the world ...

Dealing with "Ned" entirely drained the pond of energy. 

The pond realises that the dog botherer was also out and about bashing the federal government, while the bromancer was to hand to dance on the grave of Sir Keir.

The pond will tackle them tomorrow because it took the last reserves to summon up the courage to deal with the lizard Oz's resident climate science denialist in chief ...

The header showing some nifty Ughmann footwork: Australia is facing an energy addition, not a transition, as fossil fuel use grows; Increased electrification and more efficient tech don’t replace fossil fuels but complement them.

The caption for the image reminding the hive mind that they must live in the past: A GMH ad shows a Holden VT Commodore SS fying (sic, so and thus) over a group of Ford Falcons amid record sales in the late 1990s, when the big car brands were still locked in competition.

The current oil shock has perhaps made even the most catatonic of the hive mind a little EV curious, which helps explain why the Ughmann had to do that incredibly clever bit of tap dancing: Increased electrification and more efficient tech don’t replace fossil fuels but complement them.

How to set the tone of someone determined to live in the past?

Please, allow the Ughmann to show the way ...

As my mates and I finally got our licences towards the end of the 1970s there seemed to be an unwritten rule for all teenagers: you could drive Mum’s car but not Dad’s.
In the shadow of the 1973 oil shock, the mums’ cars had one thing in common: They were tiny. Because getting a licence is such a seminal moment in any teenage life, the brands are seared into my memory: the Datsun 120Y, the Toyota Corollas and my mum’s car, the Holden Gemini.
But all the dads’ cars were still big and, in those days, most fell into one of two tribes: Holden or Ford. This disposition was genetic and every year sons and fathers geared up for the annual title fight between the rival camps that played out on the racetrack at Bathurst.
My dad was a Holden man and I got to drive the Statesman just once. When I arrived, beaming with pride, to pick up my mate Damien from his place, his father shook his head and said my dad must have rocks in his head. I think that was because Damien’s dad was a Ford man.

Cue yet another back to the future illustration, archive cheap ... A Ford Falcon and a Holden Torana in 1973.

Despite screaming and kicking, the Ughmann was forced to deal with the oil shock elephant in the room, while still celebrating the way that fossil fuels are helping ruin the planet ...

Markets and people did change their behaviour after the first big oil shock, but they also hedged. Small cars became fashionable, but big cars did not disappear. People adapted around their needs.
It was during this era that oil’s share of the world’s primary energy system peaked. It has drifted lower since, but the surface story is deceptive because the total volume of oil consumed kept rising as the world grew richer and industrialisation spread.
Energy addition — not transition
In 2024 humanity burned more coal, oil and gas than in any single year in history, despite all the talk of record growth in renewable energy. Both statements are true and together they point to a deeper reality. There is no simple transition from one energy system to another. There is an energy addition. New energy sources do not necessarily replace old ones. More often they are layered on top as societies consume ever more power.
The pattern was identified in the 19th century by English economist William Stanley Jevons in what became known as the Jevons Paradox. He observed that as steam engines became more efficient, Britain did not burn less coal. It burned far more. Efficiency lowered costs, expanded capability and unleashed greater consumption. That pattern has repeated ever since.
More efficient little cars did not consign the big ones to history. More efficient computers increased electricity use. LED lighting cut the cost of illumination and we responded by festooning the world with pretty lights.
Human beings rarely use efficiency to consume less energy. More often we use it to do more.
This energy shock will drive a move away from oil dependence and ensure every government tries to secure more of it within their own borders.
There has been a spike in electric vehicle sales here, which is a good thing and will probably endure. But how many of those sales are for a second car?

Say what? EV sales are a good thing, useful for mums to do the shopping perhaps? 

But not manly things, not full beast ... and ineluctable, completely mysterious, full of strange and exotic rituals ... An electric vehicle charging

Quick, time to downplay any heretical thoughts ...

The geography of our island continent, the way our systems are built and the slow turnover in our car fleet mean it will be a very long time before EVs dominate the private vehicle market. The next step, electrifying all road transport, mining and agriculture, remains a distant dream.
The other feature of this crisis is to highlight what might be called the hangman’s noose theory of politics: the imminent threat of execution does tend to clarify the mind and prompt deathbed conversions. Our leaders have finally recognised that this nation runs on liquid fuel, that energy security is national security and that their job security depends on securing hydrocarbons.
It is too early to declare that the era of fossil fuel hysteria in our leadership caste is over, but it may have peaked. The man who once declared fossil fuels had no place in our future is now on the diesel diplomacy circuit, breathing a sigh of relief each time a supertanker full of fuel heaves into view. The leaders of the march to poverty are quiet­ly retreating.

Ram the point home with a graph ...

Actually since the Ughmann mentioned Indonesia, the pond came across this EV tidbit while reading an old Bill McKibben substack entry, An El Niño is brewing, And with it the next, pivotal, chapter of the climate fight.

The pond came to it via a story in the both siderist NY Times, David Wallace-Wells writing The World is About to Get a Preview of Life in 20235 (*intermittent archive link)

A climate monster is growing right now in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. They now know the pattern quite well: A marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean scrambles global weather and produces in some places more intense droughts and in others more intense rainfall and flooding; disruptions to hurricane patterns and monsoon seasons, which can cause widespread crop failures; and much more punishing heat.
The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts.”

And so on.

Fiddle-de-dee and back to that Indonesian EV tidbit ...

Good possible news from Indonesia, where a surge in EVs means that the government may not need to turn over millions of acres of forest for biofuels plantations. David Fickling has the story:
"The switch in Southeast Asia has been less celebrated, but is becoming breathtakingly rapid. EVs in Thailand are already cheaper than the fossil-powered equivalent, and made up about a fifth of the market last year. In Singapore, they accounted for a Chinese-style 45%, and 32% in Vietnam.
The pivot in Indonesia, the fourth-most populous country with 285 million people, has been even more dramatic. In 2020, less than one in every 350 cars sold was electric. In December, that number stood at more than one in three."

Oh yes, times are are changing, and in his attempt to hold back the tide, the Ughmann offered a curious mea culpa...

I have never held Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen or the Albanese government solely responsible for Australia’s deep exposure to this fuel crisis. That failure has been decades in the making. Several generations of politicians of all hues hollowed out our resilience and the incumbents’ demonisation of hydrocarbons just drove the nails deeper into the coffin.
The measures the government has announced to secure and store more fuel, and the modest proposal to examine expanding refining capacity, are welcome first steps. The aim should be to become as energy self-sufficient as possible and Australia has the resources to do it. That will be expensive and take time, but weigh it against any future crisis.
Gas is on the march from sea to shining sea and even Victoria, whose government turned its crusade against all fossil fuel into a long morality play, has been mugged by reality.
Victoria’s multi-titled Energy Minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, likes to refer to the fuel essential to her state’s survival as “fossil gas”. On her watch Victoria made it all but impossible to tap that resource even as its reserves declined and the state drifted towards energy bankruptcy. Victoria entrenched a permanent ban on fracking and coal-seam gas extraction in its constitution and imposed a moratorium on conventional onshore gas exploration.
When gas prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in an act of supernatural hypocrisy Victoria whined that it should be entitled to Queensland’s coal-seam gas. It then wanted all Australian taxpayers to underwrite the absurdity of building a liquefied natural gas import terminal in a state sitting above untapped gas reserves. Now Victoria is in the middle of an awkward script rewrite.

And so it was back to full-blown fossil fuels worship, as the faithful climate science denying unreformed seminarian is always inclined to do ... A crippling onshore exploration ban for a decade failed to recognise Victoria’s dependency on gas.

And at this point the Ughmann dived off into a tale about how this new fangled battery thingie was ruining everything, including F1:

This week the Allan government approved Amplitude Energy’s Annie project in the offshore Otway Basin that is expected to begin delivering gas by 2028. The Victorian budget also borrowed more money to secure 10 million litres of diesel.
So the winds of change are blowing, they will likely blow in all directions at once and right now we are in the eye of the storm. If the Strait of Hormuz does not return to something approaching normal service soon, this crisis is far from over. Australia has been insulated by its wealth, but money cannot paper over physical supply short­ages forever. We have outbid poorer countries for fuel. We cannot see and do not care about their suffering. But in time the pain will work its way up the food chain.
And amid all this, one of the clearest signals about where the energy story may be heading came from an unlikely place: Formula One president Mohammed Ben Sulayem is on a quest to bring back V8 engines by 2031. The former rally driver has been pushing at this door for some time and, after mounting complaints about the sport’s latest hybrid rules, it may be starting to open.
F1 is the world’s most technologically advanced motorsport, a rolling laboratory where elite engineers push the limits of machine performance. For the past 15 years it has pursued ever more sophisticated hybrid technology, turning its cars into astonishingly efficient but increasingly heavy, expensive and complicated energy management systems.
Many drivers and fans loathe the latest cars. Gone is the raw mechanical violence of the old V10s and V8s, the screaming engines driven flat out on instinct and nerve. The new hybrids draw roughly half their power from batteries, making them fast but bloodless and difficult to handle.
Like everything in energy, there are trade-offs.
The problem at the heart of the new 2026 rules is that drivers are forced to constantly harvest energy under braking and carefully manage how their car’s power is used. Drive reports that, on tracks with fewer heavy braking zones, drivers “are required to do what’s known as “superclipping”, which means instead of using the engine to drive the wheels, they use it to charge the battery, running it as a kind of electrical generator”.

And there you have it. 

You can grow a 12 year old into a man, but you'll still get a 12 year old lusting for raw mechanical violence, and screaming engines ... (preferably doing doughnuts at 3 am outside your home) ... Drivers are having trouble controlling cars under the new regulations. Picture: AP

Damn you electricity and batteries and such like, you're ruining everything, including the beasts!

And so at last to the final gobbet ...

Instead of the machine serving the driver, the driver increasingly serves the machine. The car is no longer built simply to be as fast as possible. It must constantly manage its own energy anxieties, divert­ing power away from performance to sustain the system itself.
Then there is the cost. Before the hybrid era, engine deals reportedly cost teams between $4m and $7m a season. Today’s turbo hybrid power units run to more than $20m, while manufacturers are estimated to have spent more than $1.4bn developing competitive hybrid engines.
F1 has stumbled into the same dilemma confronting much of the wider energy transition. As systems become more complex, more capital, engineering and effort go into managing energy, storing it, shifting it and stabilising it, rather than simply producing abundant, reliable power.
Producing affordable, reliable energy using all our natural resources should be the goal of any sensible government. Without it we will go broke. We should reduce emissions where we can, as fast as we sensibly can, within the limits imposed by physics, engineering and economics, not driven by slogans such as net zero.
As we are learning, physical systems do not bend to ideology.

Oh there's a saucy admission ...

We should reduce emissions where we can, as fast as we sensibly can...

Indeed, indeed, nothing like an oil shock to make a climate science denialist tread a little warily, while still worshipping at the altar of fossil fuels.

Is that a reminder of the way that the planet actually behaves in response to an overdose of fossil fuels, what with physical systems not bending easily to Ughmann ideology?

On the other hand, it could be worse ...

And with that other game entering a new phase ...

... this couldn't happen to a nicer authoritarian dictator ...