Tesla drivers have smoke blown in their faces | Opinion

So, today I’d like to talk about how much of a mouth-breathing, brainless, pointless waste of sperm and oxygen you’d have to be to engage in “rolling coal”, which is when someone who has modified his diesel-engined shitbox so that it pumps out even more planet-destroying black smoke pulls in front of an electric car and belches acrid exhaust fumes at its occupants. But first I wanted to talk about climate change deniers, and how remarkable it is that they still exist.

There is, of course, some kind of cursed crossover in the Ven diagram that includes both the Rick rollers of coal and the people who hate science, but anyway, let’s digress.

A few years ago, climate change deniers were annoying, unscientific troll turds, the kind of people who choose their feelings over facts. Well, that’s being overly kind, actually, they’re more like the kind of people who choose to support oil companies and Saudi Arabia and let the world burn because they hate their children, and their children’s children too.

In the last little while, however, I have noticed that they’ve gone a bit quiet, perhaps even felt a tiny smear of shame, or embarrassment, as the evidence that man-made climate change is turning our world into a Hollywood disaster movie filled with really poor actors – aka real people.

Now, I’m talking specifically about people I know, either because they’re in my family, or they’re just in my social circle and I’ve heard them say stupid shit like: “Yeah, it’s hot, but Australia has always been hot.”

As the overwhelming evidence mounted again this year, and Europe melted again, some of them fought really hard to change the subject when it came up, but none of them wanted to argue any more.

And yet.. and yet Tony Abbott. The man who once ran our country and pretended, as hard as he could – which wasn’t very hard – that he kind of almost was willing to at least give lip service to the possibility of climate change, while making sure his government, and thus our country, did absolutely nothing about it, while crunching on an onion.

Just last month, however, the man who so many of us thought would be a good Prime Minster, mainly, it seems, because he hated women, believed that God would never make us suffer a climate crisis and thought poor people should lay down and die under Joe Hockey’s boot heel, told a conference in London this:

“I think it is worth stating that the anthropogenic global warming thesis, at least in its more extreme forms, is both ahistorical and utterly implausible. And I think that needs to be repeated. Ladies and gentlemen, the climate cult will eventually be discredited.”

And he said this, let’s not forget,  just after July 2024 had been declared the hottest month recorded in 100,000 years (to which one of my climate denying friends could not help whispering “yeah, right, but they didn’t have thermometers back then, so how do we know?”).

Not content with making himself look like he knew more than the 99 per cent of scientists who agree the climate change is real, Abbott went on to boast that when he was in power he used a “mantra” of saying  that mankind made a difference and that reasonable steps should be taken to reduce emissions.

“Then I would invariably add this rider but not at the expense of jobs, at the expense of ordinary people’s cost of living, and with the effect of driving important industries offshore to countries that don’t take emissions as seriously as we do,” he said. “Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly bold, I would add things like this: you know, 10,000 years or so back we had an ice age. That was rather dramatic climate change, but presumably that had nothing to do with mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions.”

I wouldn’t say he sounds smug and self-satisfied, because I hate understatement too much, but I would say he seems unlikely to buy an electric car any time ever.

He is, however, a lover of culture wars and would thus no doubt be a big supporter of rolling coal types. I must admit that I had not heard of rolling coal until very recently, but it has – at least in the unlighted United States – been a thing since 2014, apparently.

Picture a posse of pick up trucks, three or four, lining up on a highway and then surrounding a Tesla and covering it in black smoke, while cackling like toothless yokels, and you’ve pretty much got the idea of rolling coal.

It’s described as “a symbol of dirty protest against the rise of electric vehicles, which have been caught up in the culture wars” (a culture war around some people wanting to save the planet, at least a bit, by buying an EV sounds absurd, until you recall the phrase “ruin the weekend”).

Rolling coal is also illegal, of course, because it involves deliberately modifying a diesel engine to make it more polluting (while also increasing horsepower, so it’s not all bad). Sinister Diesel, a company that sells the “defeat devices” that allow idiot pick-up drivers to roll their coal recently agreed to pay a $US1 million fine for breaking environmental laws. 

Personally, I think it’s time for fines to be levied on wilful stupidity.