CHARLES WOOLEY
ScoMo was over the moon at Don’s party in Washington; so enthused he has promised a whopping $150 million of your money to support the President’s Artemis mission to Mars, which will use the moon as way station for the colonisation of the red planet. It was indeed a Star Trek moment: “Beam me up, Scotty”.
Morrison and Trump are slow to warm to the dangers of climate change. Probably Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Sutherland Shire in Sydney’s south will be underwater by the time they get aboard with the millions of kids who last week took to the world’s streets. But by that time, according to most climate scientists, it will be too late.
Unless of course you have a rocket-ship handy and a domed city prepared on another planet.
The Don and ScoMo seem like great mates, for now at least, so perhaps they would make great space buddies too.
“So, we’ll be doing the moon, but we’ll really be doing Mars, and we’re making tremendous progress,” the President said, clearly indicating that Mars is his next big prize after that missile base in the NT.
ScoMo was just a little bit more down to earth. “Space is about jobs as much as anything else,” the PM reminded us. He didn’t quite say, “the best form of welfare is to be an astronaut.” But it’s early days yet, and this might get a lot bigger, so long as the “titanium” ScoMo remains the Commander in Chief’s favourite Martian.
Mars, apparently, might once have been quite a bit like our planet, many hundreds of million years ago, before the little green men stuffed up the place and had to move to nearby Earth.
More importantly, these days Mars is a much better bet than the Moon for another Trump golf resort. It has sub-surface ice and the Don could water his greens.
On the Moon, it’s calculated you could hit a golf ball 3948m. That’s too far. Mars has only 38 per cent of Earth’s gravity and the Don could still belt that ball a lot further than down in Florida. But not so ridiculously far that he keeps losing it.
As his mate ScoMo excitedly told him over a few drinks in the Whitehouse, “how great is Mars!”
ScoMo is now signing a memorandum of understanding with NASA, outlining a shared interest in space travel. But at the same time this week came a discordant note: NASA was warning that the warmest 10 years in more than 139 years of recording have all occurred since 2005.
At the risk of being repetitive, it was the same news from the World Meteorological Organisation: accelerating climate change means sea levels are rising and carbon dioxide levels are increasing.
The WMO said global temperatures between 2015-19 were the hottest on record, and carbon emissions in the same period had risen by 20 per cent.
In politics, where a week is a long time, the end of the world — if it is beyond the next election — is too far off to worry about. That is the reason, kiddies, that some of your elders and their political representatives seem so insouciant about what is coming.
Were there a yellow line, a big stop sign or a “Wrong Way: Go Back” sign, something might get done. But, as a leading NASA climate scientist, Kate Marvel, said this week: “Change is coming whether we like it or not.”
The quandary about taking action now or continuing with business as usual, she summed up perfectly: “Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.”
While our kids were striking in the street, Australia’s Finance Minister and Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator, Mathias Cormann, time-travelled back from a future (where apparently there was “no problemo”) to tell the kids: “School time is a time to go to school.”
Hardly an unexpected tautology from an automaton, and quite reasonable compared with the pronouncement of Federal Liberal MP Craig Kelly whose solid grasp of climate science was succinctly summed up when he addressed the kids from the floor of Parliament and told them that “everything you are told is a lie”.
No wonder today’s kids love their Greens. Tasmanian Greens leader Cassy O’Connor told the River City rally what they wanted to hear: “This is a message to our leaders; listen to the kids, listen to the people; they are demanding change.”
The Prime Minister, of course, has been more concerned with the political climate in Washington. “We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments,” he told the kids before jetting off to America. “What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.” The problem with learning is, of course, that it tends to lead to activism.
ScoMo could shut down the schools and save the $20 billion a year we spend on education. With the money saved he could really get with Trump’s Mars project and turn our kids into a generation of space cadets.
If the world’s scientists are not wrong; if the United Nations, the WMO and NASA are not madly deluded about global warming, the Trump/ScoMo Mars project could still be a winner because — if everything turns to s*** — we will need somewhere else to live.
And if it doesn’t, well good on you anyway, kids, for caring and for doing something about it. That’s more than your parents did.