By Mike Hosking, 22 April, 2020. Reposted with gratitude.
Mike — common sense for all.
About the most futile of all the futile nonsense that has gone on during this mess is the seemingly never-ending and yet ultimately wasteful attempt by the climate change obsessives to convince us this is all good.
How many stories have we had of how the air quality has improved? As if to show or tell us what? If you do nothing, if you lock everyone away and close an economy you can improve the environment? Do you suspect anyone above the age of six could not have worked that out? Is having a pollution disappear because we are all indoors really a victory?
Reports initially from northern Italy, those satellite photos over China, the vast swathes of the north east of America under fresh clear skies and our own motorway readings. Yes indeed, confirmation that basically if you revert the world back to 1467 you do in fact get fresh air and less pollution.
So what? What’s the inference? That this is all worth it? That we should have lock-downs more often? That if only we go and crash the economies of the world we can breath easy?
This is a go nowhere campaign. Does any one really think that fresh air is a wondrous new discovery, and that all of this virus and its economic and health chaos is well worth the trouble?
Most insidious is the call from the unions and other zealots in an international open letter to not save airlines, not bail them out or offer assistance. They want them left to fail, let them go under, and in allowing that we reduce pollution.
Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? And in presumably being serious about the call, they in a single move expose themselves for who they really are: economic wreckers.
How do they propose the hundreds of thousands of airline employees make a living? Or don’t they care? How do they propose we travel, move freight and do business? Or don’t they care? The answer is they don’t care.
In that revelation is the danger of who they are and what they believe. They’re single-issue nutters who will wreck and destroy anything and everything to achieve their sole aim.
The smart thing, of course, would have been to have sympathised, to have stayed quiet, to not have tried to score cheap and ultimately disastrous points at a time of great hardship, suffering and uncertainty.
But no, they couldn’t help themselves. Well, they lose, because out the other side of this, who’s going to forget the self-absorbed, venal narcissism they have put on display?
Not me.
Views: 25
A little off topic, Mike…but every time I saw you on telly… this song would go round in my head…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2rPDrnQW_8&list=RDl2rPDrnQW_8&start_radio=1&t=15
Actually it’s good to see Mike on this climate site. It’s certainly refreshing to get somebody from the media who is prepared to take a stand and call out all these looney lefty “climate change” nutters.
Good on you , Mike. Keep it coming….with RT’s permission.
This is the topsy-turvy world we now live in, where unions are for market-led creative destruction while right-wing commentators ask for subsidies and bail-outs.
So what is your solution Simon?
You and most of the news commentators have no idea how New Zealands economy works .
In fact you and most of them have not got a clue .
We can not manufacture a great deal of essential products so we have to export to the world things that they want to earn overseas exchange to import what we cannot make economically here .
Our tourist industry earns our country around 7 billion dollars each year so most of that will not be earnt this year .
You seem to favour a demand economy over a free market .
The government imposed the lock down and wage and business subsidies are essential in the medium term so that businesses and employees survive to start producing and building our economy as soon as the lockdown is finished,
New Zealand has borrowed billions of dollars to fund this lock down and if it is not repaid it will always restrict future governments in their ability to spend on essential government services in the foreseeable future .
Graham
Proud to be farming and producing much needed exports for New Zealand.
Straw man.
Nothing anyone says about the effects of the lockdown on the environment — in passing or in ecstasy — alters the science or the need to reduce emissions as fast as practicable.
Furthermore, half the economy was destroyed by the pandemic — it stopped global tourism overnight. Nothing to do with the lockdown here.
The little twerp can tap his pencil all he likes, he’s still not a brass band to march to.
Yes you are right Nick, half the economy has been destroyed by the COVID 19 panic, which in my town means 90% of the economy.
Not that is a concern for self absorbed narcissists like you
Have a nice life.
Anything but CO2
Anything but SARS-CoV-2
Come back when you have something of substance to add Nick.
So explain to me exactly why NZ would have done better than Italy had nature taken its course.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/121287097/coronavirus-as-its-covid19-lockdown-eases-italy-ponders-what-went-wrong
Funny how the same people who deny the effects of AGW likewise deny the pandemic. Were you dropped on your head? Recently?
Incidentally, your idol, Trump, is a gibbering imbecile, so your judgement has proven appalling over and over again. Come back after you’ve tried his remedies for Covid-19.
Hey Nick, to whom are you addressing? Of course I don’t deny the pandemic. We have 3 people on hospital in NZ with COVID-19. We are spending $1 billion a day stopping it get to 13. Is that good value?
Incidentally, your idol, Trump, is a gibbering imbecile,
I don’t know you you are referring to, but Trump is not my idol. I understand that intellectually retarded NZers like you swoon over our “wonderful” PM Princess Cindy, paint 20m high murals of our glorious leader like Stalinist cult members, but normal people do not worship politicians, especially bobble headed cretins like Ardern.
Andy,
The ‘value’ has to be related to the number of people who would have died under business as usual with no social distancing.
The Value of a Statistical Life for roading decisions was about $4.14 million in 2016. I would be curious to see what it works out for COVID-19, I suspect it will be quite a bit higher. Whether that is appropriate depends upon your value judgements.
Hosking typically values haircuts and car parks much higher than the average person. It’s interesting to watch how quickly people turn Keynesian once their livelihood is threatened.
My number one priority is to get myself and my family out of NZ asap
Ardern is a maniac who is on track to destroy this country
Well, that’s a view at odds with most New Zealanders.
What this crisis has shown is which world leaders are statesmen (stateswomen) and who are well out of their depth.
Boris’s handling of the crisis has proved to be particularly incompetent. Missing all of the Cobra emergency meetings in the buildup to the coronavirus crisis shows that details are not his strong point.
“Well, that’s a view at odds with most New Zealanders”
Oh so you have personally spoken with all 5 million NZers?
OK let’s bang on about “Boris” and of course throw in some TDS and detergent drinking memes, and how “wonderful” Princess Cindypants is at “flattening the curve” at $1 billion a day and in the process of merely delaying the spread o CV-19 (not eliminating it, by the definition of flatten the curve), send some cops around to intimidate “far right” people who happen to crititise the govt in written submissions to proposed laws, call people who aren’t keen on killing full term babes as “extremists”, you have all the makings of an authoritarian socialist shithole.
Man you are an imbecile. Half the economy disappeared with global tourism. Nothing whatever to do with Jacinda Ardern.
Furthermore, essential service continued, which shows most of the Key-called rock-star was just currency-dealer hype.
Again I ask: Look what’s happened in Italy, and tell me why the virus would not have made a mess in NZ.
But do fuck off, we don’t need climate deniers and other loonies and cranks in NZ.