Watching the Leader of the Greens paddle around in a synthetic raft, wearing plastic shades, complaining about the evils of fossil fuel, has got to be ‘peak Green’.
He was part of a protest that paddled out into the Port of Newcastle to make a nuisance of themselves under the guise of ‘stopping coal’. Raising their oars instead of their fists, they peacefully bobbed around contributing nothing much of interest to the historical narrative.
Never mind that 20 per cent of that coal is off to the communist utopia of China to fire up the factories that make wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries inline with Green ideology.
The rest of it will end up in India, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan to power their grids. Do the Greens want to be responsible for power outages across Asia that would result in poor and vulnerable people dying?
Climate Change activism seems like it could pose a serious threat to our Asian and Pacific neighbours. To be fair, some of those neighbours put out the guilt-ridden begging bowl for naive Prime Ministers at climate conferences. After the Australian Treasury has been left a few hundred million dollars lighter, those nations flog their own fossil fuel assets off to China, guilt free. It is a strange thing to do if you believe your island is drowning.
We might also wonder why we don’t we hear anything from eco-warriors about the Blue Memorandums that sneakily redefine the mineral assets of the oceans. Is it because China is a non-Western communist empire instead of a ‘capitalist colonial oppressor’? Or maybe they saw ‘sustainable development’ in the opening paragraph and stopped reading.
The Greens are one of those political parties that, if they ever got their way and had their wishes granted by political genie, the country would be destroyed overnight. Forget the Dark Ages… They used oil. Forget the Stone Age… They had wooden fires. The Green Ages would be something uniquely primitive.
Obviously you can’t have tiny little canoes paddling around near giant ships, and eventually 170 people were arrested. Only two of those remained in custody and are due in court tomorrow.
By the end of the event, 138 had been charged with the disruption of a major facility, in this case, the Port of Newcastle which is (horrifyingly) under a $1.75 billion, 98-year lease to a Chinese entity thanks to the NSW Liberal Party.
Meanwhile, the Australian climate decided to troll the protesters, putting on an outrageously beautiful late Spring day for them.
Spectators were treated with entertaining hypocrisies, such as sailing ships displaying QR codes taking people to websites that require cloud-based servers in other countries to function. Servers built with steel, plastic, and rare materials, connected to an inter-continental internet with thousands of kilometres of undersea cables laid by giant ships and heavy equipment. All of it constructed with fossil fuels.
If we were to strip coal and fossil fuels from the world, as desired, today’s protest would have comprised a few hundred naked people being chased by sharks.
And so it was that the protesters suffered through idyllic conditions, and the tide continued to rise and fall normally, as per the movement of the Sun and Moon.