Being the sort of person who constantly worries that my roof could cave in any day, I really crave certainty. You’ve got to admire people who know for sure that nothing bad will ever happen as long as they have cheap, coal-produced electricity. They must sleep well at night.
But how can those people - like Alan Jones who knows that climate change is a hoax - be so sure that a glorious future is to be found in mines in the ground.
They rant with such righteous zeal it’s almost as if they know something.
Has god, or whatever, been in their ear telling them that the carbon economy is the only possible economy? That coal, oil, gas, whatever, was put there for this very purpose?
Did I miss that bit in the Bible where god said: ‘‘I made coal and I saw that it was good. You will use no other energy source while there is a skerrick of coal to be dug up’’?
Did he also say you must burn, burn burn it until the skies darken like molten sludge, until birds drop from the sky and crops shrivel, until your lungs gasp for air like fish on a footpath?
And what were his plans after that? If the climate change deniers know something they should share it so the rest of us can be assured that the future is safe for our grandchildren.
We need to know where they are getting their certainty from, otherwise we uncertain people will think they are nothing but modern day Luddites.
We will assume they are just fearful people missing the message of history. Like those spinners, weavers and agricultural labourers who destroyed machinery that had taken their jobs because they did not understand that the Industrial Revolution was the start of another time.
Those Luddite types were undoubtedly there when the wheel was invented, berating the adventurous wheel users as destroyers of their lifestyle. Those wheels will put our people out of jobs, mate.
They probably objected to the use of bronze and iron when those ages were ready to roll, preferring to spend days sharpening stone axes. Passing fad, this iron stuff.
They would have hated Gutenberg’s printing press which took books and reading from a privileged niche activity to a tool of the masses. What next, they would have said, those morons could never learn to read.
What’s so bad about clean energy one might ask? Could the deniers and carbon tax objectors please tell us.
What if this is the start of another time — another revolution — moving us away from something that is tired and spent to a new way of doing things? New technologies, that sort of thing.
Then again, perhaps coal is part of god’s plan for the apocalypse. And renewal.
When the seven horsemen do whatever they do, the Earth will be turned inside out, with forests and green bits buried kilometers below the surface where they will gestate to make coal for the year 360,002,012.