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Why defending the coal industry in Australia is never a good move

Last week I released a video on coal mining. Nothing controversial, it was only saying that everything mainstream media has ever told you about carbon intensive mining is a complete and utter lie. Now obviously, seeing as the vast majority of my audience are Gen Yer’s, they mostly thought, “what’s a main stream media?” However, many, many people who I’m assuming just saw the video on the fly, for lack of a better phrase, had a total mental break down. Pretty sad that seeing a video you don’t agree with is the modern day equivalent of spending 3 years in Nam. At this point our species must be so weak that it’s only a matter of years before the greatest UFC fighter in the world is an earthworm.

 

The number of emails, inbox messages, comments of people telling me that I’m not allowed to be biased. That I have to tell “the whole story”, I’m not allowed to mislead people with, “facts”. “Ok, deal” I wrote back to 10 or 20 before I couldn’t be bothered anymore “I’ll stop being biased when every commercial station, Murdoch’s media empire and Macquarie Radio does ok?” Sometimes they’d write back acknowledging, the mainstream media had “some issues” but, “it doesn’t mean you can be biased just because they are”. It was at this point I had two terrifying realizations at once. It was like I was that spoilt British girl in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ whining on the steam boat ride, “make it stop daddy I want to get off!”

 

The first realization was that Sesame Street’s got their figures wrong. The vast majority of their audience is clearly adults in the, “I caught a big fish once, look at my Facebook profile for proof” demographic. Stop getting numbers and letters to sponsor you Sesame Street! One of your parent channel’s, (PBS) longest serving sponsor is Exxon Mobil, go the whole hog and get vodka to sponsor the Count counting down how many shots Burt can do. Ernie quietly sobbing off screen as he watches his life long friend’s battle with alcoholism completely lost pining, “this used to be such a good neighborhood!”

How else could you possibly be a fully-grown man and have the same morality of a five year old? It’s scary to think that when these people are thinking of a retort to someone pointing out that virtually none of the media in this country has their interests at heart, is designed to make them complacent with having corporate cheats and thieves own every facet of their society, from government to universities to 90% of the capital, the image that emerges in their mind is a bunch of kids from Harlem holding hands with puppets chanting, “everyone needs to be fair yaaaayyy”.

 

Second, which scared me the most, was the understanding that by attacking coal, I’d taken a stab at this country’s sacred cow. People took OFFENCE to me desecrating something chimney sweeps clean. How pathetic is that? We WORSHIP carbon dioxide. This supposed great giver of economic life we’ve been taught we must forever continue to burn, in larger and larger amounts, lest the mighty sun gods, Rinehart, BHP and Rio Tinto get angry and abandon us forever, leaving us to our fate to do what we can with the 94% of our GDP that has nothing to do with carbon intensive industries.  Whatever shall we do without our blessed church, a giant ditch?

 

Honestly is our self-esteem that low? Must we have the same mentality a hillbilly that went to school once and ran home scared because the teacher was wearing perfume does? Forever doomed to a life of digging, “cause digging’s all we know”.  I know you saw a grey monotone man whose name you can’t remember on T.V once say, “there’s no doubt that mining is what’s keeping Australia’s economy afloat” but you know why he’s monotonous? Because just like you he’s doing a job he hates “just to get by”. He’s TOLD to say that! Just like in that Hoyts job you had when you were 15 you had to ask customers, “do you want to upsize your popcorn and drink?”

Why would you trust what is essentially a grown up candy bar attendant from some hack think tank like the IPA, completely funded by Exxon Mobil, Shell, BHP and all the other companies in Australia hell bent on giving the world lung cancer over respected journalists like Paul Cleary and David Mcknight? Why trust them over world renowned economists like John Edwards and Brett Paris and the former spin doctor Guy Pearse, who defected from a carbon lobby group that discussed, WHILE HE WAS IN THE ROOM, how best to deceive the public on coal’s importance to our economy? I guess the short answer is these people aren’t on T.V. Long answer? These people aren’t on television.

 

So are we forced to believe the candy bar attendants of economics? These drab false prophets from the Queensland Resources Council or the Lavoisier Group barely ever say a single fact when they talk about mining because like all religions, coal worship is faith based. At least the ancient Egyptians were worshiping cool things like a guy with a dog’s head; we’re worshipping a punishment Santa Clause gives to bad kids. Bowing to it and chanting, “we haven’t been nice! We haven’t been nice!”. On the rare occasion they do chuck us a fact it’s something meaningless like royalties from coal going up 500% this decade. That’s like me boasting I gave a squeegee guy 5 bucks instead of a goldy. I suppose I’d feel good about myself and want to brag about it too but I’m not changing that guy’s life.

Out of every dollar mining ships out of Australia, the government gets 6 -7 cents, we receive fewer royalties from most of our mines than even third world countries like Indonesia or Brazil and we think this grand cheapskate industry whose mantra is “I’m not leaving a tip” is keeping us afloat? Australia’s 10 most carbon intensive industries including coal mining, aluminum smelting and coal seam gas only account for 4% of our GDP and 3% of our employment. If I chopped off 4% of your hand you wouldn’t even get special provisions in the HSC, the adjudicators would tell you the same thing every economist in the world is telling us now, “stop bitching you’re fine.” It would have less of an impact on the economy than if all the waiters in this country went on strike because they’re tired of old South African couples demanding to see their manager very 3 seconds about the service being, “jUst EppAUlling”.

 

You never hear that carbon intensive mining is actually hindering our economy. We already missed the boat. If we acted earlier, the green sector would have created far more jobs than mining ever did but East Asia beat us to it. CO2 emissions are soon to be the most traded commodity on the planet. We’re going to miss out on that too as we have become, the south central LA of green house gas emissions. An inconveniently placed ghetto that’s on the rest of the world’s way to work, rolling their windows up as we glare at them from our pile of coal yelling, “2 for 1! Going out of business sale baby!”

 

Pricing carbon would save us billions in handouts and assistance packages to industries like sugar and timber. Sugar has been begging for an ETS for years so they can produce ethanol and receive carbon credits for it. The Timber industry’s been limping for even longer than sugar but with carbon credits, not only could we protect our old growth forest from becoming chop sticks in 3 dollar Tuesdays Sushi Trains (seriously how demeaning for a 10,000 year old tree?) loggers are all of a sudden are encouraged to log plantation timbre in a way that sucks up just as much, if not more CO2 than their o’natural cousins. Why can’t we let loggers play out their ultimate fantasy and PROVE once and for all that tree huggers, “are good for nothing so and so’s” by pricing carbon and cutting off the cancerous industries that harm every facet of our society?

 

Why can’t we worship another god?

source:http://www.sbs.com.au