It’s time to plug the Gaia gasbags

Peter FitzSimons and Jane Caro ... both ‘make much of their atheism, but their zealotry in denouncing others for sins against the planet gives rise to a secular fundamentalism’.

The science is settled, and for the good of the planet we must act urgently to curtail our emission pollutants. No, not so much the greenhouse gases; rather, the Gaia gasbags, named after the pagan goddess of Earth.

Every time we have a hurricane or a bushfire these insufferably self-righteous harbingers of climatic cataclysm pop up with all the fervour of a firebrand preacher. You know the score. Get down on your knees, shallow ones, for ye have sinned against Gaia. Bow your heads and repent of your wicked ways, for only I can offer you redemption.

As with many an opportunistic preacher, the Gaia gasbags are very much into congregation shaming, and will exploit any occasion to do it. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull discovered this on the weekend when he was photographed cradling his beer and his baby granddaughter at the football. “I don’t mind PM cuddling his granddaughter at the football,” tweeted Greens MP Adam Bandt. He doesn’t mind? The man is a prince. “But I do mind him threatening her way of life by making global warming worse.”

I don't mind PM cuddling his granddaughter at the football. But I do mind him threatening her way of life by making global warming worse. pic.twitter.com/xhEj0NFRwh

— Adam Bandt 🏳️‍🌈 (@AdamBandt) September 11, 2017

It takes a certain crassness to use a baby for scoring a cheap political point, and Bandt is your man. But like anything, a woman can do the job just as well, as demonstrated by social commentator and feminist Jane Caro.

“Cuddling his granddaughter while holding his beer is lovely,” she tweeted. “Explaining 2 her y he didn’t stand up for the climate-not so much.”

@TurnbullMalcolm cuddling his grand-daughter while holding a beer is lovely. Explaining 2 her y he didn't stand up 4 the climate-not so much

— Jane Caro (@JaneCaro) September 11, 2017

“Record-breaking hurricanes hitting the Americas and wildfires burning the western US,” thundered Fairfax columnist and author Peter FitzSimons. “Drought tightening its grip across Australia, as the prospect looms of the bushfire season from hell. This must be a good time for the federal government to lecture an energy company that says coal is dead and has no economic future.” That’s quite a thought bubble. Given around 73 per cent of our electricity is generated by coal, what could be a worse time to ditch it than now, when we are facing a looming energy crisis caused by the rush for renewables?

But no, that consideration was lost in the sarcasm. “Your 45-year-old power station has plenty more to give and we’d like to use taxpayer dollars to prop it up,” sneered FitzSimons in reference to the government’s preference for the Liddell plant to defer its closure. If the handing out of taxpayer dollars bothers him so much, why does he not oppose the various governments’ dispensing billions in subsidies to the renewable energy industry?

“I warrant that in 10 years’ time it will look criminal in its negligence,” predicted FitzSimons.

Peter Fitzsimons arrives at Sydney International Airport. Photo: John Grainger

As an aside, what is this school of thought which holds that prose can be transformed into something profound merely by italicising every ten or so words? What is criminal is the funding of feel-good energy schemes to the tunes of billions without sufficient thought to their viability. FitzSimons’s gushing enthusiasm for renewables does not lend itself to objectivity, if his celestial epiphanies serve as an example.

“My Qantas flight had to circle regional NSW,” wrote FitzSimons in February this year, “and there they were … dozens of turbines, atop a series of ridges stretching out to the west, lazily and gloriously spinning in the afternoon sun. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I have seen the future, and this is it.”

It wasn’t just the turbines that were spinning in the afternoon sun. If you are going to paraphrase something you perceive to be a Great Leap Forward, make sure you know the historical context. Chairman Mao’s flowery appeal was supposedly to elicit constructive criticism of China’s communist party, just prior to the tragic attempts to industrialise and collectivise the country. In reality it was a ruse to expose the so-called ‘deviationists,’ many of whom would be purged in the Cultural Revolution.

As for the “I have seen the future [and it works]” quote, that was the assessment of American journalist Lincoln Steffens, one of Lenin’s useful idiots, following his three-week tour of the Soviet Union in 1919. Surely FitzSimons — the Eddie McGuire of historians — would know this? He could save himself much embarrassment by taking that ridiculous bandana off his head and tying it tightly around his mouth.

“Because of climate change,” said Caro in October last year, “we really are in a sticky situation.” How sticky? “I see trouble ahead, real trouble ahead.” What does think she is, an astrologer? “I’m thinking about … climate change,” she wrote in January 2016, “because I am soon to become a grandmother. What else is there to think about?”

Well for starters, what about curtailing her own emissions? “You really know you are travelling too much when even the (lovely) guy in the Qantas lounge raises his eyebrow at you & says ‘Back so soon?’,” she tweeted only two months after her plaintive climate soliloquy. Has she ever reflected on the fact that commercial airlines are a big contributor to carbon dioxide emissions?

You really know you are travelling too much when even the (lovely) guy in the Qantas lounge raises his eyebrow at you & says 'Back so soon?'

— Jane Caro (@JaneCaro) September 18, 2014

Ditto for FitzSimons, who in May this year complained that the proposed banning of laptops on international flights would severely impede his ability to write.

So why the double standards, doomsayers? Interestingly, both Caro and FitzSimons make much of their atheism, but their zealotry in denouncing others for sins against the planet gives rise to a secular fundamentalism. Like a haughty archbishop, it is a case of do as I say and not as I do.

“In Qantas lounge (again) on my way to WOMAD [World of Music, Arts and Dance festival] to talk about selling the reality of climate change,” she tweeted in March last year.

When the irony was pointed out to her, Caro was unfazed. “I have a 70 acre plantation of hard wood eucalypts growing,” she replied. “I’m carbon negative.”

@simon_as_twit @deemadigan I have a 70 acre plantation of hard wood eucalypts growing. I'm carbon negative.

— Jane Caro (@JaneCaro) March 13, 2016

Carbon negative? Is this the Gaia version of purchasing the papal indulgences of old? Even assuming her reasoning is correct, Caro seemingly does not get that individual offsetting means nothing. She still contributes to the gross total of man-made emissions, which far exceed the result of any attempts to negate them.

Amusingly, Caro’s invoking of carbon immunity reveals another of her inconsistencies, and that is her purported love of egalitarianism.

@GrayConnolly @stephenlaw60 I particularly loathe people inheriting unearned privilege & feeling somehow superior as a result.

— Jane Caro (@JaneCaro) January 25, 2014

“I particularly loathe people inheriting unearned privilege & feeling somehow superior as a result,” she states. Ah, but who was feeling superior as a result of her tree-fest? Should we restrict airline travel to those with a rural weekender?

Caro might care to check her spatial privilege. The world’s population is around 7.5 billion, and the total land surface is roughly 37 billion acres. That equates to around 4.93 acres per person. Now take into account the world is one third desert. How are the chances of everyone being allotted 70 acres of arable land looking?

Could it be that these trendy virtue gimmicks are no solution? In July, FitzSimons heralded the coming of the great Tesla battery, quoting the South Australian premier with unquestioning acceptance. “Battery storage is the future of our national energy market,” said Jay Weatherill, “and the eyes of the world will be following our leadership in this space.”

“BOOM!” championed FitzSimons sycophantically. Only a couple of months later he was lamenting the state of battery storage on his computer. “Battery power not close to what they claim! Never is, on ANY computer!,” he tweeted.

Got the new Apple Macbook Pro.
As ever, love it, EXCEPT battery power not close to what they claim!
Never is, on ANY computer!

— Peter FitzSimons (@Peter_Fitz) September 3, 2017

Hello Fitz? Hello? Which bright spark regarded Elon Musk with his oversized Eveready as the energy messiah?

It is time commentators belatedly admitted that the obsession with renewables, driven largely by a Greens agenda that regards coal as anathema, has been a costly debacle. Far from taking us to a land of milk and honey, we have been plagued with rent seekers, false prophets, and peddlers of energy elixir. Time also perhaps to shun the nuclear naysayers and consider what that form of power could offer us. Oh, and while we are at it, let’s plug the Gaia gasbags. The atmosphere will be a lot healthier for it.