W. Each New Climate Disaster, Power Turns Back To Cheap Carbon Profits Like Dogs Returning To Vomit

[hatrack]

EDIT

“I’ve never seen so many natural disasters …” said the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk. “[M]ore cyclones, more floods, a couple of year ago … we had the catastrophic fire event in central Queensland.” But even as Palaszczuk acknowledged the role of the climate crisis in the recent catastrophes, she doubled down on her state’s output of fossil fuels. “Queensland is lucky,” she said. “We have coal, we have gas, and we have huge renewable investment, which is going to really rapidly increase over the next 10 years.”

One presumes that, with a multibillion-dollar flood bill looming and many of its citizens homeless, the state doesn’t want to forgo the mining revenue on which it has traditionally relied. What an illustration of the mess in which we find ourselves – reliant on coal to pay for the damage coal brings. In a different context, the sociologist C Wright Mills outlined what he called “crackpot realism”, a political consensus perfectly reasonable on its own terms but utterly deranged from the perspective of the species.

EDIT

If we once hoped that real-world manifestations of the climate emergency would, in and of themselves, force world leaders to change, we should quit kidding ourselves. It’s now clear the reverse holds true: that each fresh environmental calamity sends the wealthy and the powerful, like dogs returning to their vomit, to the cheap profits of the carbon economy.

As disaster chases disaster, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – and, for that matter, to the water. That means drawing the links between global heating and the proliferation of “one-in-1000-year” occurrences and insisting on climate action, even (or perhaps especially) amid economic and political uncertainty.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/15/is-battling-back-to-back-disasters-distracting-us-from-fighting-the-climate-crisisEDIT

[NNadir]

1. In some very prominent countries, people turn to carbon whenever the weather is too nice...

...for the wind to blow.

Electricity Map (Accessed 3/16/22, 16:32 Berlin Time)

We have, right here on DU, lots and lots and lots of people who think what these people are doing, these people above with a carbon intensity of 351 g CO2/kwh, is a good idea for confronting Putin. The people stating this - dare I call them "morons" - fail to recognize which country in Europe has sent Putin the most Euros to fund his exercise in murder.

And of course the coal these people are burning is murder, and they're burning it for the popular but completely delusional idea that nuclear energy, of all things, is "too dangerous."

We have uneducated kids complaining here about so called "nuclear waste," people who have never opened a science book in their useless lives, who like to assume that there are no people actually people who do open science books.

If you raise the issue of climate change with these ignorant, frankly deadly kids, or the matter of the massive death toll associated with dangerous fossil fuels, they whine - without a trace of ethics - that one is engaging in Whataboutism with respect to their QANONS modeled paranoia about what they, in their appalling ignorance, deadly ignorance, call "nuclear waste."

It's easy to pick on the Australians of course, but far more difficult to look in the mirror and really see what's written on our faces.

As far as Climate Change goes, the popular idea here strikes me as similar to the idea among nut cases in the Trump/GQP that Ivermectin cures Covid.

So called "renewable energy" has been every bit as effective at addressing climate change as Ivermectin has been for treating Covid.

That's a fact. It's nearly 50 ppm accumulations of the deadly fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere in the last 20 years is a fact and that it's a fact that the storage of used nuclear fuel isn't killing people while fossil fuel is killing at a scale of 70 million people every decade.

Facts matter.

We have a lot of woo-woo around here as well.