Cranky Lizard Speaks

September, 2017

Cranky Lizard is not a climate scientist, whatever that means!! Cranky is not a sociologist or an anthropologist nor an historian. Cranky Lizard is definitely not a witch or a warlock, depending on your take of things. Cranky Lizard is merely an observer of the human form.

In terms of human occupation of the Earth, in a very general sense, a few hundred years is not much in terms of relative time.

A few hundred years ago, sensible people, living in small villages and towns in Europe and Great Britain used to strap women to poles and drown them in the village pond because they were witches. Other times they would rope them onto poles and burn them alive because they were witches.

By doing so, the villages believed that they would make their villages safer. Witches were threats to public life and by removing them from public life everyone would be safer, which is a sensible and desirable public goal.

So, flick go the witches.

The only evidence needed to condemn someone as a witch was the testimony of a few other people who knew about witches, there was never any recorded instance of witches doing any actual harm to anyone. But as the shouting and finger pointing increased, so did the hysteria. Common sense fled the scene and mob rule prevailed. So, witches were burnt or drowned.

At some obscure point in time, common sense returned to the villages and towns. Witches disappeared and the burning and drowning of women stopped. However other dreadful things appeared, such as disease, famine and vampires. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode roughshod across the land. Villages and towns prayed en masse, Christian crosses were carried in front of individuals to protect them from the nightmares, in particular the ‘end of the Earth’, which was the unimaginable horror of all horrors.

Time passed, centuries unfolded, empires came and went, as they do. Cruel senseless wars engulfed us all, millions died on battlefields, on the oceans and in cities and towns across the globe.

Homo sapiens however, wobbled on, guided by the belief that we were fundamentally good, and we are. And that we have a right to be here on Earth and to use its resources to enhance our lives.

Which we do!

But as the eternal rhythms of the Earth sway gently over time, the old, unimaginable fear has returned and lurks just outside of the peripheral vision of most of us, but not all of us.

An horrific gore covered nemesis has emerged from the stinking miasma of corporate greed, climate change.

This, of course, is our ancient enemy – the end of the Earth.

It was first called out as global warming, but that did not play with the mob because most of us knew it was rubbish. But climate change, well that is the same old beast dressed in a shiny corporate suit. This beast has infected our universities, our political parties, some state institutions, the bearded wild-eyed mobs and parts of our media.

And this time it has, as an incubus, a substance from the Devil…coal.

Coal, the ancient remains of trees, vegetables, grass and animals. The very stuff from which we are made, the fuel which provides the energy for the machines which have transformed our Earth and given warmth and light to our communities, is now the vehicle which will drive us to our doom.

Coal, burnt to make energy, will bring about the end of the Earth.

Elements of the human race, normally sensible people, as indeed were the witch burners, have been galvanized into action. Governments have flogged protective legislature through various chambers, Australian sovereign states have handed their bums, in brown paper bags, to the modern saviours of our planet, those humans who have invented ‘clean energy targets’.

Flushed out by the largesse of the clean energy targets financial programmes, and excited by the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’, herds of aggressive panhandlers, gimlet eyed zealots and earnest professors in sandals and hemp shirts have nearly succeeded in closing down the coal industry.

Cranky Lizard points out that only Australia, in the global community, has been able to see this impending tragedy to the human race, as we close down our coal industry most other nations are building new coal powered energy plants, with some 600 plus new coal fired power stations being built as you read this.

For Australia, of course, this means thousands of fellow Australians, who have done nothing wrong, will become unemployed. Whole regional and rural communities will be forced into a long, sad, shallow dive towards irrelevance, and as we have seen already, our cities, our industries, our lifestyle will change into drab, dreary twilight zones, dependant for light and energy on crazily spinning wind machines, whole banks of mirrors and solar panels, bizarre paddle machines in our tidal waters and diesel-powered generators.

Cranky Lizard urges you all to contemplate the mad irony of this. We burn diesel fired generators to make power instead of coal.

Australia of course is rich in coal. We have more than most countries in the world and we shall sell it to them, but we won’t use it ourselves. No Sir, not us! We are too smart for that.

Cranky Lizard accepts that a new source of energy is needed to power our global communities as oil, diesel and petrol will not last forever. Rocket fuel will not give us the force we need to travel to new galaxies and we cannot sustain over 100,000 jet fuel burning aircraft in our skies forever, we simply cannot.

These new sources exist. Nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, magnetic levitation and other sources of energy remain understood but not tamed. H2O, water, contains the elements of ferocious unlimited energy but we are not there yet.

Cranky Lizard suggests that we let common-sense back into the equation and direct our thoughts and energy into developing these new energy sources. And that as a community we demand that our political leaders reject the rubbish of clean energy targets and focus our national wealth, both intellectual and financial, on exploring and taming new energy sources for us, homo sapiens.

Cranky Lizard discreetly and diplomatically recommends that you contact your local Federal MP if you are concerned about living in the dark.

There must be light at the end of the tunnel. Cranky Lizard just can’t seem to find it!