I was certain I’d read the most ridiculous thing this week after grazing the ABC headline, Hikers urged to stop using sticks as walking aids as rangers call out damage to the environment.
Yes… That age-old habit of picking up a stick as a walking aid and essential weapon against snakes, spiders, webs, and the odd dingo is now considered an environmental hazard.
In a forest full of trees that make a heck load of branches, most of which is reduced to ash every few years, it is important to remember that at all times you are the problem. Forget about the wind turbine farms bulldozing pathways through rainforests. We need to get serious about small piles of sticks left by the ever-decreasing outdoorsy Australians.
‘The sticks are used by the little creatures of the national park, the echidnas burrowing underneath it … insects, lizards, birds, fungi, and moss.
‘The removal of just one stick can impact these animals in lots of different ways. For echidnas, they’re rummaging around the undergrowth looking for food … so you’re taking away the sticks with all the insects in it.
‘That’s then having an impact on the echidnas and the birds and all the other things using that environment.’
Shock-horror, 146 walking sticks were collected in April. Another added that ‘7,500 sticks go walkabout each year’. These all had to be picked up by park rangers. Sounds tedious. But given the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars generously handed over by taxpayers for the upkeep of the parks, I’m finding it impossible to feel guilty about a walking stick left on a bush track.
It’s not, as they say, ‘a global boiling event’. More like a small inconvenience.
Moving on from the stickocalypse, BlueScope Steel announced $1.15 billion to ‘reline a mothballed coal-fired blast furnace’.
The move embarrassed the green-eyed monster of the vague and shadowy global collective of renewables enthusiasts who saw it as a sign of defeat for the ‘green steel’ future.
As with so many green ideas, the Utopia exists solely in the fever dreams of the deluded – not in the actual world where steel manufacturers have to operate within the bounds of engineering reality.
It was the Chief Executive who pointed out bluntly: ‘There are no technologies which are commercially viable to replace the blast furnace so, we are building a bridge to the future. This allows us to continue to grow and generate the profits that will allow us to invest in the newer technologies, the lower emissions steelmaking technologies as they emerge.’
Bridge to the future.
That sounds like a really fancy way of saying, ‘We’re going to use old-school technology that actually works but don’t worry, we’ll keep pouring money into the dead-end, non-starter, carbon-neutral, net-whatever pet projects.’
If you want wind turbines, you need steel. If you want steel, you need coal.
All those activists defending the woodchipping of rainforests to build wind farms insist, ‘Coal mines are totally worse!’ The ignorance is astonishing. Not only does the renewable version of energy generation mulch the forests, it comes with the bonus coal mine.
The news cycle’s adventures in idiocy didn’t end there. The Conversation chipped in with an article titled, How climate change might trigger earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. You can almost hear Professor Ian Plimer groan and reach for his keyboard.
And if you’re bored with the eternal tick of the climate clock that seems to play by Groundhog Day rules, Labor stole the headlines for a while after it was revealed one branch allegedly forged the signatures of dead people.
Not tickled by Australia’s Night Shyamalan script? China’s propaganda warriors came up with something a little more AI-bot-Hollywood-Blockbuster with: China voices fears of a ‘real-life Godzilla’ and bans Japanese seafood as radioactive water from Fukushima nuclear plant begins being released into the sea. They must have been copying their science notes from António Guterres. You know… The science you ‘trust’ rather than believe.
Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall.
