We can tell skeptics are winning by the scale of the panic
Labor made a “big” concession this week and it has triggered the Anti-carbon Tribe. Anthony Albanese dared to concede that coal might have a future but only with impossible fantasy carbon capture limits. In his horror at this, Bernard Keane of Crikey.com puts forward his best scientific argument — essentially that 50% of Australians who don’t hate coal like he does, are ignorant denialist terrorists who vote for pork barrelling representatives who are willing to “blow up their own government”.
As usual, he is projecting his own destructive politics onto those who disagree. He aims to silence debate through personal denigration, to win an argument through character assassination, and to continue being (in his terms) a debate-denialist who pretends that tens of thousands of skeptical engineer’s and geologist’s and meteorologist’s opinions should be mocked and ignored. He’s also a voter-denialist suggesting that the representatives of half of Australia could not possibly represent a genuine point of view. They work as agents of “Murdoch”.
Bernard Keane promotes the science of tribal namecalling
Bernard Keane, Crikey.com
Labor offers to deal with terrorists in climate wars
The worst possible outcome would be … offering to negotiate:
In offering bipartisanship on energy, Labor is offering to do a deal with the ‘terrorists’ who have thwarted all forms of climate action for years.
Cherry-pick a few hot years, ignore 4.5 billion, and namecall:
After the second hottest year on record globally, the hottest year on record in Australia, our second hottest summer ever after 2018-19, an unprecedentedly catastrophic summer of bushfires and record-breaking Arctic and Antarctic temperatures, Labor has opted to, in effect, surrender on climate to the denialists of the Coalition.
It’s not that Australians voted for people who disagree with Bernard, it’s just a big conspiracy:
By abandoning any interest in a National Energy Guarantee, Anthony Albanese will position Labor as weaker on climate action than Malcolm Turnbull, who at least sought to include both energy security and emissions reduction within his energy policy framework before another right-wing/Murdoch putsch forced him out.
When Labor sends carbon credits to Big Bankers, and giant multinational conglomerates for expensive ineffective methods of carbon reduction, that’s “accepting the science”. When Tony Abbott designs a scheme to pay any business that can reduce carbon cheaply, that’s “pork barrelling”.
In the Coalition’s hands, direct funding ends up being treated as a pork barrel, handed to key supporter groups like farmers, or to its donors.
Like most religious believers, Keane only cares about carbon reduction when it suits his politics. Carbon Capture is useless, but so are carbon emission taxes. Direct funding of carbon reduction reduces carbon at $14 a ton — 300 times more effective per dollar than the Carbon Tax.
For Keane, the point of “carbon taxes” is to send funds to fellow lefty dependents, not to change carbon emissions.
We know how far left Turnbull was because of how much the extreme far left still admire him:
As Malcolm Turnbull correctly put it, these people operate like terrorists, intent on blowing up their own government, with the support of News Corp, if anyone tries to address climate change. You can’t do any sort of deal with them. That merely rewards terrorists.
The people trying to “blow up the government” were the panic merchants who overthrew a 90 seat landslide winner because the ABC told them he was unelectable.