Ciarán FerrieSpotted in Dublin this morning. A man parks his luxury gas-guzzler pickup on the footpath and proceeds to clear the footpath with a petrol-powered leaf blower that just blows the leaves from the footpath into the road where they gather along the edge of the carriageway where people are cycling.
Overheard on Irish national radio. A man trying to convince listeners that data centres are an essential part of our green infrastructure because the technology they provide will drive the roll out of renewable energy.
Read on Irish national broadcaster website. The Junior Minister for Transport debating plans to expand a small regional airport without once making reference to our commitment to half transport emissions by 2030.
Meanwhile we're getting wall to wall news coverage of the Spanish floods. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Jim Daly@ccferrie Not just any man, the CEO of the IDA.
@psneeze I missed the introduction, but that doesn't surprise me. The IDA are essentially a marketing company - their job, as they see it, is to market Ireland for FDI by whatever means necessary. Their only measure of success is GDP growth and they aren't concerned about the longer term costs of climate change. There will come a point though, as Spain is seeing right now, that those costs will no longer be long-term and they will hold their hands in the air saying "it wasn't me, guv"
@ccferrie That's it pretty much.
Dave Mathieson@ccferrie I heard that. Jaw dropping stuff that went completely unchallenged. As with airport expansion, the arguments for are hard-headed economic imperatives, whereas those against are treated in the media as abstract "Green" ideology that can easily be explained away with a sprinkling of greenwashing
@d_mathieson This attitude was perfectly illustrated in comments by the New Zealand Minister for Fisheries yesterday over concerns about damage to coral through bottom trawling.
"Fisheries is a part of primary produce and, now and again, a couple of lumps of coral will go by the way, but you've got to consider the importance of GDP, and I wouldn't catastrophise the loss of coral"
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/jones-downplays-bottom-trawlers-coral-catch
