More Vegemite for Your Toast, Senator Rennick? 

During my student days, I stayed in a dormitory with international students. We Aussies would delight in telling our visiting American colleagues that Vegemite was like chocolate spread. The more, the better. We would watch them lather it on their toast and then take that first (and last) big bite. The look on their faces was priceless.

Vegemite, Marmite, and Promite are spreads made from yeast extract and are very salty. A little is wonderful. Too much is not a pleasant taste.

We have a conservative Australian senator doing the same with carbon dioxide. Plants like carbon dioxide, right? Helps them grow, right? So, if a little is good, more must be better. In fact, if we burn less fossil fuel and stop putting as much in the air, then we are going to end up with a situation where all the plants die from a lack of CO2, right? How did they survive for millions of years before the industrial revolution? It’s a conundrum. (Note: heavy sarcasm here.)

During a recent senate hearing, Liberal-National Party (conservative) senator Gerrard Rennick expressed his concern that our efforts to reduce co2 emissions will lead to the possible end of all plant life. He is, of course, from the deep north of Queensland.

 “We’ll end up with a situation, if we go net zero on land and the phytoplankton is still taking more carbon out of the atmosphere, that we’ll actually run the carbon levels down to an extent where we destroy our plant life.”

Rennick does not have scientific qualifications. He generally uses senate hearings to criticise the work of scientific agencies like CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. He also believes that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is telling fibs.” Having a master’s degree in taxation law is a good basis to critique science, obviously.

We are in a sad time if we cannot believe our experts in science. If the position was reversed, would our expert in taxation appreciate being told publicly that he was lying in his area of expertise? Another case of ideology trumping the facts, the ignorant denying the wisdom of the knowledgeable.

Sources: GerandRennick.com, RenewEconomy