With pals like Kerry…

There was trouble last night in the otherwise pleasant town of Lexington, Virginia, temporary home to Quadrant Online’s mobile US office. In the next-door room at the Econolodge motel, a mother and son were fighting, loudly and with much cursing, about her imminent admission to a clinic for alcoholics. Like the late Amy Winehouse, she didn’t want to go to rehab.

Fortunately  there is always the Silly Morning Herald to bring a smile after a sleepless night, and this morning’s epistle from environment editor Nick O’Malley, an amusingly righteous deacon in the Church of Climate Doom, made a splendid cheer-me-up. Once, when his newspaper was centre-left but sane, such a paean to John Kerry would have inspired something akin to shock. But these days, with Nine’s management hellbent on securing a Darwin Award for inspired self-destruction of reputation and prospects, well you just have to laugh.

Kerry, fresh back from Davos, jets hither and yon to catastropharian gatherings in a private jet. It used to be a Gulfstream belonging to his wife, the beneficiary of a plane crash that killed her first husband, an heir to the Heinz fortune, but these days it is of the chartered variety — a change prompted by frequent accusations of hypocrisy. How the carbon emissions of a rented plane differ from those of one owned by a spouse has never been explained. Meanwhile, Kerry urges less well married mortals to fly less, drive less, consume less and lead poorer lives for Gaia’s benefit, sponging the eco sins from his greenish soul with carbon offsets. It would need to be a big sponge because a climateer with five mansions (at last count), a 76-foot yacht and an indulgent attitude towards China’s burgeoning crop of coal-burning power stations has quite some scrubbing to do.

O’Malley’s delight that Kerry has abandoned his former sinecure as the administration’s chief climate scold to take a leading role in Biden’s re-election campaign is inspired by what Silly readers are assured is the runaway success of the “Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $500 billion in clean-energy incentives.” Translated from SMH-speak, that means megabucks raining down on “sustainable energy” outfits whose recent performance belies their industries’ publicists that they are painting the future an indelible green.

Last week, for example, the winter cold crippled electric cars and stranded drivers in less temperate climes. This setback follows Hertz slashing its Tesla fleet,a mass dumping that will further depress the price of used EV’s. Autor dealers know all about it, having found themselves stuck with acres of unsold electro-units. Ford is  drastically cutting production of its Lightning F-150 EV pickups, the truck Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen reckons is “hugely popular” in the US and will tow your boat or caravan all weekend. It won’t, not unless your there-and-back journey is 40 miles or less. As MotorTrend put it, a Lightning towing a load has less range “than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank.”

Wind turbines? Land-based wind farms were shut down in the cold because, when power to heat homes is most needed, they don’t work too well. As to the offshore variety, it seems Washington’s support is essential because profit-oriented investors are scarce and growing more so.

If campaign guru Kerry does for Joe Biden what he has achieved for green energy, the old fella’ is in even more trouble than the latest polls suggest.

–rf