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https://www.gawker.com/politics/meet-australias-batshit-insane-mining-billionaires>
"The COP26 climate conference in Glasgow is finally underway and one thing is
certain: the nation of Australia will show its ass.
Since the country’s conservative government repealed a national carbon tax in
2014, climate change has driven Australia insane. In 2015, the man who is now
prime minister brought a lump of coal into parliament and waved it around,
yelling: “Don’t be scared! Don’t be afraid!” A prominent government MP
regularly paints his face black to look like a coal miner and prints bumper
stickers reading “Black Coal Matters.” The government’s policy to get Australia
to net-zero carbon pollution by 2050, which was announced last week, is based
on economic modeling that hasn’t been written yet.
For a country that regularly bursts into flame, this is a weird way to go about
things. It only makes sense when know that Australia has a massive mining
industry, which has created a crop of billionaires who are both near-omnipotent
and unbelievably weird. They donate huge sums to nearly every political party,
own stakes in the country’s biggest media companies, and get massive amounts of
public funding to pursue their pet obsessions.
The fact that billionaires are freaks hasn’t been news since most of them got
Twitter. But even by the standards of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,
Australia’s mining magnates are something else."
Via Diane A.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
