Opinion
People who know me would scarcely credit it, but I really do bite my tongue a lot. No matter how hard it is to do. I mean, I think I really deserve a pat on the back for, when a Guardian-reading acquaintance was pontificating recently about how they source all of their purchases ethically, not blurting out, “And yet, you drive an EV”.
As we all know, the supply-chain for EV manufacture, from child labour in African mines, to slave labour in Chinese factories, and vast lakes of pollution every step of the way, are hardly a case-study of ethical production. But that’s the way of it with such eco-crites: make a couple of piddling grand-stands (in this case, over coffee beans), while ignoring that they’re standing on a mountain of hypocrisy.
It’s also why, as several studies have borne out, the most consciously “green” households almost always have the most gargantuan carbon footprints. The average household in a Teal MP’s electorate has a bigger carbon footprint than the five least-emitting nations in the world.
Because having signalled their virtue with some small things — buying an EV, going to a “climate strike” — they feel entitled to splurge and belch a nation’s worth of carbon dioxide, with their regular overseas holidays. It’s mediaeval Indulgences for Climate Cultists.
But not even the most rabid Teal voter holds a hypocrite’s candle to the duplicity and mendaciousness of a Climate Cultist politician.
Climate hypocrisy comes in many forms, but it is rarely as blatant as when virtue-signalling politicians turn up in separate VIP jets from the same location to stage a renewable energy picture opportunity. This was sanctimony on steroids; activism on Avgas. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen took off from Fairbairn Air Force base in Canberra on two French-built Dassault Falcon jets 20 minutes apart […] Flying to Scone in NSW’s Hunter Valley, the pair showed scant regard for their own carbon footprints, and perfectly encapsulated the Canberra bubble’s insulation from the cost-of-living crisis.
Nothing quite personifies the Climate Cultist politician like flying alone in a luxury private jet, at the taxpayer’s expense, in order to announce that you’re spending a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money, to make electricity less reliable and power bills even more ruinously expensive than ever.
Unless it’s trough-swilling billionaires oinking and snorting for that sweet, sweet taxpayer-funded slop.
The likes of Atlassian/AGL billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and former prime ministerial millionaire Malcolm Turnbull are involved in companies lining up for this largesse. It would seem like an ideal opportunity for them to put their money and climate altruism on the line without government subsidies.
Give over. They’d rather eat a warmed-up pie in Economy, instead of wagyu steak in Business Class.
But it’s not just the towering hypocrisy of the Climate Cult politicians — it’s the staggering, dumb-foundering stupidity. I mean, we all know that Albo and Boofhead aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, but this is world-class dumbassity, even for them.
Our governments subsidise and mandate renewable energy generation to force the closure of coal generation. They also provide direct grants to renewable energy projects and subsidise consumers to install solar cells.
The resultant power price increases have seen governments directly subsidise consumers to help them pay their high electricity bills. Yet because the renewable subsidies successfully forced out large amounts of coal and gas generation, they created an energy reliability crisis, and governments now subsidise some coal generation to remain in operation.
This means that taxpayers are subsidising renewables for the express purpose of forcing coal-fired generation to close down, while they also subsidise coal-fired generation to withstand the impact of those subsidies.
And all the time, the power prices just keep rising. Which is the major factor in manufacturing moving overseas. So what do Australia’s Tweedledum and Tweedledumber do? Force taxpayers to subsidise making more of the renewables which have caused this crisis in the first place.
If there is any more absurd example of disastrous government intervention, I am yet to hear of it. Yet, ever on the lookout for additional opportunities for intervening in this field, Bowen and Albanese came up with Solar Sunshot.
And they did not spare the jet engines getting to a pointless photo opportunity to announce it. Calling a press conference in Canberra just would not cut it, nor would a smaller group of people on a single plane – the same politicians who are hitting us with tax and price penalties to try to corral us into electric vehicles flit about on multiple jets with no compunction.
Except that these idiot eco-crites will almost certainly not even notice, because their fraud is lost in the cacophony of casuistry that is the Climate Cult.
Like Al Gore living in a mansion that consumes 20 times the energy of the average American home. Like DiCaprio travelling the world on private jets and holidaying on luxurious motor yachts while lecturing us on climate. Like teal MP Allegra Spender not bothering with solar panels of her own and keeping the gas-guzzling four-wheel drive so she can get to her other properties on weekends. Like another teal, Zali Steggall, also reluctant to embrace the electric vehicles she demands for others, while she takes hidden donations from people who made much of their fortune from coal. Like anti-capitalism, pro-environment Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi applying to clear native trees for her property development project. Like the airports at Davos filling up with private jets as the World Economic Forum mob turn up to discuss ways to make the rest of us cut our carbon footprints.
Ditto for the COP28 crowd in Dubai.
The Australian
If lies and hypocrisy could run generators, the Climate Cult could power the world in perpetuity.