Trinket People will Rescue Australia. Tim Blair
In times of great physical and spiritual crisis, we typically turn to figures of significant moral standing we hope may somehow be able to guide us.
Few such figures have been apparent, sadly, since the beginning of Australia’s continuing bushfire disaster. Few, that is, aside from thousands of heroic volunteer fire fighters who lead by example rather than word.
To them, I offer the deepest gratitude and appreciation. Those men and women are our greatest Australians, risking and in too many tragic cases losing their lives as they seek to protect others.
But there remains a vacuum in guidance beyond the fires. There remains the absence of a figurehead capable of putting in words the nation’s grief and suffering, and of charting our course to recovery.
Now, however, a powerful voice of ethical and righteous reason is finally heard. It came from that celebrated purveyor of principle and conscience known as Tiffany & Co.
“Dear Prime Minister Morrison,” the New York-based $4.4 billion per year diamond and trinket retailer announced in a full-page advertisement published last week by the Sydney Morning Herald.
“As the brave people of Australia continue to battle bushfires that are devastating communities and wildlife, now is the time for bold and decisive climate action.
“This disaster of climate change is too real, and the threat to our planet and our children is too great.”
Oh, thank you, Tiffany & Co. Thank you for saving Australia and the planet by deploying all the kilotonnes of ecological wisdom and concern generated at your Fifth Avenue headquarters in Manhattan.
Tiffany & Co’s thousands of customers throughout fire-struck areas of regional Australia are no doubt hugely impressed by the company’s climate policy directive. Why, I’ve heard that grateful firefighters out Cobargo way are even wearing $17,000 Tiffany diamond dragonfly brooches in tribute as they wade into the flames.
In further thanks, perhaps we could order that all NSW fire engines be repainted in Tiffany’s trademark aquamarine. After all, when the going gets tough, the tough turn to Tiffany.
If it weren’t for opportunistic wealthy wokens carrying on during these fires, there’s a real danger that sensible discussion leading to achievable solutions might occur. Instead we’re stuck with posh mineral retailers and the likes of mining inheritance millionaire Simon Holmes a Court telling us what to do.
“Our only chance to maintain our standard of living, and our economy, is if all countries rapidly decarbonise,” climate evangelist Holmes a Court claimed last week.
Well, that takes diamonds out of the picture then. And who knew that paying gigantic renewables-subsidising power bills is making us richer, while nearly $100 billion in coal exports are sending us broke?
That’s how things work with Holmes a Court’s creative woke math, which also finds that Australia’s puny 1.3 per cent of global human-caused carbon dioxide emissions is in fact a really huge amount.
“If all countries with emissions under a ‘measly’ two per cent were lumped together we’d together be responsible for almost as much annual emissions as China and India put together,” Holmes a Court, whose calculator has an “if” button, wrote in the Guardian.
“How about if we divide China into 56 countries of 25 million people, each with emissions half of Australia’s – would that let them off the hook?”
If, if, if. “Australia has the highest emissions per capita of all major nations,” Holmes a Court continued, using an argument now abandoned even by some leftists.
“The atmosphere doesn’t react on a per capita basis,” Holmes a Court’s fellow Guardian climate shrieker Greg Jericho wrote in 2018. “It reacts to the total level of CO2 emissions.”
Not in Simon’s world it doesn’t. “The ‘too small to matter’ argument is logically absurd,” Holmes a Court asserts. So let’s consider his own carbon contributions.
In the same piece denouncing the relative size of individual Australians’ carbon output, Holmes a Court lists a few places he’s lately visited. Presumably he didn’t travel aboard Greta Thunberg’s zero-carbon miracle yacht.
“In November I visited a cement factory in Belgium that is trialling a low-cost technology,” Holmes a Court revealed.
“In Essen, in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, I saw a technology that allows power-hungry aluminium smelters to operate well … In nearby Duisburg, I visited ThyssenKrupp, a major German industrial company with a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.”
Sounds like a fine holiday. Pity the rest of us will soon be decarbonised and unable to enjoy similar journeys, even if we’re stuffed into the economy seats.
Cocaine – according to the late comedian Robin Williams, who was deeply informed on the subject – was God’s way of telling you you are making too much money. This is no longer the case.
Now, the failsafe indicator of reckless wealth is a conspicuous, unrealistic and scolding devotion to climate issues. We’re being lectured on economic and ecological justice by jewellery-rattling millionaire Tesla owners.
The richer they get, the greener and more judgmental they become