The word climate is clickbait to the ABC and Guardian Australia in the way the word sex is to the Daily Mail.
The left media’s reporting of climate change is so hysterical it is no wonder voters, in what was supposed to be a climate election, rejected Labor’s ambitious, uncosted plans and its prevarication on the Adani coal mine.
First, to Adani’s Carmichael project, the banning of which would do nothing to change the temperature in the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, no matter how many times activists falsely claim the mine could kill the reef.
Even those adult voters who were motivated by concern about climate change know there are many greenhouse gases apart from CO2 and almost all of them enter the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere.
Queenslanders knew Adani was 400 km inland and farther from the reef than existing coal mines in the Bowen Basin. They also knew other coal mines had been approved by the state Labor government during the federal election campaign.
Pembroke Resources’ Olive Downs mine in the Bowen Basin, closer to the reef than Adani’s project, was approved the Tuesday before the May 18 election. It is about the same size as the Adani mine.
On April 30 Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham told parliament he had approved an expansion of Yancoal’s Cameby Downs mine northwest of Brisbane the week before.
The Adani debate was dumb and you did not need to be a “climate change denier” — a tag meant to cower people into sidelining their common sense — to think so. Queenslanders know coal is the nation’s biggest export commodity at $70 billion a year.
SEE ALSO: REEF Hysteria: Exaggerated Claims And Falsehoods To Further Belief In Climate Apocalypse
When Sydney tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes created a Twitter stir the day before the election proclaiming, “Coal is dead. The only question is how fast Australia realizes this and transitions to clean energy,” Queenslanders’ BS detectors chimed in.
One of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett, has just invested $US10bn ($US14.4bn) in Occidental Petroleum to back its $US38bn bid for Anadarko Petroleum so he clearly sees a future in fossil fuels.
And while $200,000 a year mining jobs may not seem attractive to Cannon-Brookes from his $100 million Sydney harborside mansion, they are enticing to families in central Queensland.
Indeed, if coal were dead how would Cannon-Brookes explain the April average thermal coal price of $US86.77 a metric tonne? This is down slightly from the start of the year but remains near medium-term highs and reflects the building of hundreds of new coal-fired plants globally.
Did conservationists really expect cynical Queenslanders to take notice of former Greens leader Bob Brown’s convoy from Melbourne to the central Queensland coalmines or Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg and the regular Friday climate strikes by Australia’s schoolchildren?
Why on earth would adult voters stoke the irrational fears of children? Do climate change alarmist editors really think adults make decisions about jobs and employment based on children’s nightmares?
The Guardian may have decided to change its editorial stylebook to refer to climate change around the world as a “climate emergency,” but many grown-up voters would regard that as leftist hectoring.
Read more at The Australian (subscription required)
Would love to know who the mental midgets are at the Guardian that keep pumping the earth has a fever con-game .
Maybe they are in too deep . 10’s of thousands of fuel poverty deaths each year egged on by the Guardian .