Feeding the Fat Green Pigs Published by the Saltbush Club

     In the era before coal, oil and electricity, the environment suffered greatly. Whales were slaughtered for lamp oil; forests were cleared for firewood, mine props, building materials, roofing shingles and sailing masts; London (“The Big Smoke”) and Pittsburgh (“The Smoky City”) were smothered in smog from open fires, charcoal kilns and iron smelters; horses powered public and military transport and city streets were layered with horse manure. Then came the hydro-carbon revolution. Kerosene lamps saved the whales and coal-powered steam engines delivered electricity (clean-coal-by-wire) to the cities. Much of the sulphurous smogs disappeared. Coke from coal replaced wood charcoal to make iron and steel. Steel and concrete saved the forests and trucks and railways allowed the farmland which once fed millions of horses, mules and oxen to produce food for humans. Not one of these boons for humans AND the environment was driven by a UN resolution, invented by a government committee or funded by statutory levies on consumers, or subsidies from taxpayers. None were mandated in a government energy plan. The anti-human, anti-industry policies of the Global Greens are now reversing all that progress. A key event occurred in 2006 when a leading left-wing politician, Al Gore, invented the Global Warming Industry. Despite a finding by a British High Court that his movie “The Inconvenient Truth” contained nine key scientific errors, it is still shown in schools. This has misled students and teachers and created spreading circles of damage to jobs, industry and the cost and reliability of electricity. It also created fake industries based on energy adventurism, UN talk-fests, climate hysteria and green activism.

     The Green Piglets were born, and the environment and the economy suffered. Land that once fed horses is now used to produce biodiesel and ethanol for cars, so food prices must go up. Forests are felled to burn in green power stations and for green-tick buildings while grasslands are invaded by feral pests, woody weeds and bushfires from the ever-growing parks and Kyoto Protocol Forests. Birds and bats are being sliced by wind turbines, flatlands are being smothered by solar panels, access roads and transmission lines. But electricity costs soar, supply is rationed while reliability crashes. Behind every one of these modern maladies are troughs of Big Green Pigs getting fat on market mandates, subsidies from consumers or tax payers, and special tax treatments. In the background, governments fund an academic/media industry promoting climate alarmism, energy rationing and intermittent energy. Electric cars and penny farthings were pushed off the roads by Henry Ford’s petrol engines, but politicians are trying to put them back – a Tesla for the rich and a bicycle for the poor. Consumers and industry don’t count and taxpayers are there to be milked. In this Greentopia no one needs miners, farmers or fishermen. All are lost for a fake global warming Emergency.