As part of our drive to keep our comment section the best in New Zealand we showcase each week an example of a top-notch comment that adds value to The BFD.
Today’s comment was written by David Theobald Thank you David Theobald for taking the time to craft such an interesting comment.
As we sit here in the South Pacific getting through winter the MSM is bombarding us with pretty much non-stop fear-mongering re summer on the other side of the equator. I return from the spin cycle to the coffee and Vogels and am assaulted in the aural and visual departments by Ryan Bridge’s locum. We have pictures of tourists not visiting the Acropolis, weather maps of Europe coloured orange and red (the land masses were always green but no shock and awe in that, is there?) and if I have to see the warning sign at the start of the road through Death Valley again, I’ll scream. That sign has been in place for decades – at least.
Then RB’s locum decides to interview the Kapiti Coast’s resident nutter, James Renwick. The man is the embodiment of the suggestion that climate change has morphed from a scientific thing to a religion. The scary thing is that, on a very, very superficial level he is very believable. He delivers his nonsense with the conviction of someone reading out the football results – he really believes what he is saying. He quotes rubbish like we have just had the hottest week for 125,000 years with a straight face. No evidence, hottest where? The world as a whole, I think he means. This is a concept so barmy as to hardly merit dissection – so he just drops it into the conversation as a ‘fact’. Not challenged at all. Any change in the weather – heat, excess rain, drought ‘you name it’ (the latter an actual quote he used twice) is ‘not weather but climate change caused by man burning fossil fuels’. Anything that happens outside your bedroom window is due to man burning fossil fuels. All delivered with an earnestness that would have the unthinking cowering behind the fridge.
The man is barking. When asked if were to be anointed as PM today, what would he do? ‘If I were PM of Aotearoa (a man with a name suggesting ancestry in a Scottish glen as opposed to a marae who can’t even bring himself to say New Zealand), I would pump money into public transport, electrify the entire transport fleet, install recharging stations all over the show, close Huntly and move towards renewables and batteries’. A total disconnect with reality. There is no way any of the above (apart from wasting money on buses and trains) is even possible even if it were desirable. ‘Renewables’ just don’t have the capacity to supply enough energy to run a viable society and batteries just store energy and don’t actually make a single joule. I wonder if Renwick would be in the market for a perpetual motion machine that I am giving away with every bridge purchase.
Fortunately, it is unlikely that this man will get any nearer the levers of power than the disruptive places on energy review panels and the like he has already held. But with the intellectual candlepower available in our current lot of politicians – or their likely successors, unfortunately – an influential place on a review panel is enough to cause very expensive havoc.
No matter, my garage has thankfully been returned to full strength and I plan on exercising both the supercharged V6 and the twin-turbo V8 today – so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Renwick.