Andrew Bolt: Global warming ad cold comfort for aged and poor
THE cold kills, especially the old. The SBS ad telling old people not to turn on their heaters in winter is not just stupid, pointless and heartless — but it’s potentially lethal, writes Andrew Bolt.
Opinion
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HOW dangerous is SBS? And how many people must suffer and even die before these green zealots show mercy?
It’s bad enough that we’ve got new bans on free plastic shopping bags that will save very few turtles but could well kill humans, thanks to the bacteria that tend to fester in the reusable bags we must use instead.
But now our taxpayer-funded SBS is urging an even deadlier sacrifice for mother Earth.
It is running an ad to push its global warming religion that could make our annual winter death toll even worse, especially among poor pensioners.
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The ad shows an elderly woman shivering in bed and complaining: “It’s still pretty cold in here.”
She asks her husband to turn on the heating on their reverse-cycle airconditioner — one of the blessings of modern technology that have made our lives infinitely more comfortable.
But “no!” insists some pushy woman with shining eyes who somehow pops up in the couple’s bed and orders them to suffer for the sake of the Paris agreement — that holy text of warmists.
“To meet the targets set out in the Paris agreement heating is one area we can all cut back on as it can reduce our emissions by more than 10 per cent,” chirrups this home invader. “And if all Australians did the same we’d easily hit out targets by 2020.”
Sadly, the pensioners don’t know they’re being conned.
Yes, this Paris agreement binds tiny Australia to cutting its emissions from things like coal-fired power stations that warmists say cause warming doom.
But this agreement does not bind the world’s three biggest emitters. China and India can increase their own massive emissions, and the United States refuses to agree to anything.
Worse, Australia is so small that our cuts would make essentially no difference to temperatures — “virtually nothing”, as Chief Scientist Alan Finkel admitted.
And here’s the good news the SBS ad did not mention: global warming, some of it natural, has turned out to be less than predicted, and better for us.
The world has so far warmed just 0.18 degrees above the 30-year average, according to the latest satellite data of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Meanwhile, we’re getting fewer cyclones and record crops.
So sum it all up: SBS is demanding a useless and needless sacrifice from pensioners that could actually kill them.
FACT: about 5000 more Australians die each winter than die in other seasons. (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics.)
FACT: Australians are more likely to die in winter than even Swedes, who live in a much colder climate, but have better insulated and heated homes. (Source: Adrian Barnett, Associate Professor of Public Health, Queensland University of Technology.)
FACT: the frail and old especially are more likely to die in winter because of cold-related conditions, including pneumonia and blood clots. (Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.)
FACT: half the homes surveyed in the Illawarra, Shoalhaven and Wingecarribee regions of NSW had living rooms where temperatures were below 16°C for a quarter of the time, with some occupants too scared to turn on the heating because electricity cost too much. (Source: Wollongong University’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre.)
Cold kills, especially the old.
So SBS telling old people not to turn on their heaters in winter is not just stupid, pointless and heartless, but potentially lethal.
Mind you, as that Wollongong study noted, we have jacked up electricity prices so much that poorer Australians are already too frightened to use their heaters, anyway.
And who’s to blame? The politicians whose insane global warming policies drove coal-fired power stations out of business and forced us to use more expensive green power instead.
Take Victoria. After its giant Hazelwood power station closed last year, retail electricity prices jumped an estimated 16 per cent.
For the rich, that’s merely annoying. For the poor, that’s real hardship. For the very poor, that’s a dangerously cold winter without heating.
And think of the other ways warmists make the poor suffer for the warming religion.
Their global warming policies haven’t just made the poor shiver in unheated homes.
They have also made electricity too expensive for heavy industries, which once gave thousands of the poor a job.
They have also diverted billions of taxpayers’ dollars that could have been spent on schools and hospitals into useless wind and solar farms instead.
What a scandal, and all summed up by this: global warming won’t kill you, but global warming policies might.
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