Letter to little Jimmy AngryRantyPants

HI Jimmy

You may be surprised to get this letter seeing I am long since past and if you followed the instructions of my will, boiled into a vat of Beer.

Hi!

As I write this you don't exist but I thought I should take this time to say sorry. Sorry :) ( That's a smiley face we use to use these when we didn't have time to write longer nice things. Kind of awkward aren't they?)

You see we are in the middle of this thing called Climate Change. You don't have it as you'd call it Climate Changed. Anyhoo we noticed the environment isn't fairly happy with what we have done over the last 50 years (i know! 50 years not long but there ya go.) Things moved very fast when I was your age. I know they don't for you anymore, I guess that's what happens without resources.

Anyway, people didn't believe in Climate Change, for a lot of reasons but mostly because we believed in money more. Oh we loved money. None of us ever had enough and a few of us had the vast majority of it. We used this money to buy big houses that we could lock our responsibility to each other out of, and we drove ridiculous big cars which insulated us from caring and we bought things. Just things. We loved things.

There was a moment, not a unique moment, but a moment where our leaders decided to put a price on carbon ( basically a pollution tax) as a step towards moving away from contributing to climate change but we argued. It wasn't a big moment or a noticeable moment but it was a moment where the people with a lot of money protected their money and the rest of us were made scared by them and our leaders followed a "party line". They liked to make us scared then. About so many things, seemingly everything outside of our ridiculously big houses.

It was a moment which passed.

It's a shame. So I imagine you have many reasons to fear now although little doubt of what the future will hold as we sorted that for you. I hope you don't fear though. I hope you learned hope and generosity and love and fellowship because I find it hard to find it today

Sorry

Captain Angry Ranty Pants

Sustainable fishing

Guest Post by Tynon the Dugong

Helopo. i am Tynon. a Dugong

I hope you all are habving a rweallly rweallly lovelly swwimmm somrewwjhere. i am
 
i love to habve a rweally lovpoley swwimmm and i pray fpor clean oceasns so we can allll swimmm

wjhaty is miopdasty worruyinmgh! Wew are running out of  fioddasdashgs. No mpore fioddasdashg means noi more fioddasdashg and vjhips.

I don't eats fioddasdashg or vjhips (i eat seaaw grass. I'm a vergan) but i like fioddasdashg and we shoudl protect them. I swwimmm with thenm and fioddasdashgare [ppoirttyyt aNMDS FIUN

No fioddasdashg! Itsd worruyinmgh! asop, dszfj apoi worruyinmgh!

it sdfhk awehj msdfjli xcvi ansda whTY M,wqioulk we fpo wjhemn opiur po cceamn sa doie? whjat!yoiuy salklk nrewerwd topi styoippo eatyytiuongh spo m,uichj nbnadlky mciuaghhjt fiosjh. miopdasty worruyinmgh M,wqioulk we fpo wjhemn opiur po cceamn sa doie? whjat!yoiuy salklk nrewerwd topi styoippo eatyytiuongh spo m,uichj nbnadlky mciuaghhjt fiosjh. M,wqioulk we fpo wjhemn opiur po cceamn sa doie? whjat!yoiuy salklk nrewerwd topi styoippo eatyytiuongh spo m,uichj nbnadlky mciuaghhjt fiosjh. M,wqioulk we fpo wjhemn opiur po cceamn sa doie? whjat!yoiuy salklk nrewerwd topi styoippo eatyytiuongh spo m,uichj nbnadlky mciuaghhjt fiosjh.....worruyinmgh worruyinmgh worruyinmgh!!!!!!!

(Hmm. We may stop it there. Tynon types with his flippers. When he gets excited he loses all sense of what he is saying. Which in this case is that the decline of fioddasdashg fish stocks is worruyinmgh worrying! Buy fish for the future. Can't afford it? Can you afford not to? Sustainable fish info here and here and here  Captain Angry Ranty Pants)

Blog Action Day - Climate Change

Oh its so simple, it seems all we have to do is shower with a bucket, buy a gray water sign, slip on an artfully trendy wrist band with a slogan like 'feed the world', ' I care' or ' I bought this to alleviate my guilt', pay a couple of dollars extra when you fly to carbon neutralise your flight and buy the occasional organic product and the world environmental crisis is no longer a problem.

Phew

Thank the lord.

And here I was thinking we had a problem, as i drink the last few percentages of my cities water supply, watch the river ways belch under the combined refuse of too many houses and their idiotic need for lawn while thinking 'isn't it nicer that the summers are longer now'

People it's not going away and unless we do something radical then its all going to shit in a handbasket. And i don't even use hand baskets so that's how shitful it's going to be

Here's what we have to do.

Firstly stop "A Current Affair" and "Today Tonight". Not going to help the environment but I just don't like them and while we are changing things it seems like a good as time as any.

Ban all private Motor Car use. You heard me! All of it! If you want to go somewhere use those useless dangly things below your hips, catch public transport or catch a taxi.
Excellent. While at it ban Motor sports as well. Pointless. yes yes yes the oil industry will be a little upset by lot of revenue but may go someways to making people review fighting in deserts over some black sticky stuff. Oh and public transport is totally funded by the government, say the tobacco lobby. If you can't afford it from the tax made already then increase the tax on cigarettes.

Ban Lawns, except in public spaces. They waste too much water and pump too much fertiliser into the water systems. We can all recreate together in an outpouring of daily communal good will. Come on name three people you know who actually use their lawn!

Restrict Airtravel. Maybe a limit of flights per lifetime or maybe we should just stop all flights to Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane both on reasons of conservation and good taste. Hell let's sell Perth to the South Africans. They can make of it what they will and we can ignore Adelaide like a strange second cousin and stop inviting it to our weddings. Brisbane we will leave as the new capital of Cane Todia. Obviously we can easily stop flying overseas because everywhere else is full of terrorists, crooks and "it isn’t really as nice as we thought it was when we read the brochure"

Reduce population. Obviously when the Baby Boomers all retire and the Superannuation and health care system collapses under the weight of their doddering Alzheimic advance, as they constantly mutter it was better in my day we can quite easily ignore their generation and let them fade. And lets be honest it not like old people are the biggest consumers, most don't drive out of their suburbs.

The real issue though is the growth of the population. Lets face it Conservation = Contraception. From now on everyone is allowed one kiddie, yes only one for keeps. You can have two but the second is just a spare, in case. At a suitably prearranged age you must choose between them and let one of them go. No need to be fatal about it, we'll ship them all off to Tasmania or let them loose in the Simpson Desert or some other place that we all have heard about but would never go to thank you very much. Nice. They could become an attraction "come see the herds of the Other children of Australia roam the countryside" Goodo. Nothing wrong with a population of people who live on the outskirts and add to our tourism dollar but we never have to care about. And the few pinky lefties who care about them, can buy an artfully trendy wristband and chuck on a t-shirt, that always solves the issues of the world