We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel.
Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo.
Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade.
You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale.
You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok.
The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero.
Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city.
There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete.
Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuel-free.
How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live?
Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain.
Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”.
The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”
Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem.
Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept.
Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad.
This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weather-dependent power in the space of a generation.
The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime.
Outside this climate church there is no salvation.
But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math?
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We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel.
Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo.
Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade.
You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale.
You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok.
The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero.
Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city.
There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete.
Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuel-free.
How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live?
Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain.
Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”.
The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”
Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem.
Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept.
Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad.
This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weather-dependent power in the space of a generation.
The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime.
Outside this climate church there is no salvation.
But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math?