I am so angry

 For a long time, it was possible to say that climate change was just a lot of leftist bleeding-heart pointy-headed intellectuals whingeing. I mean, data? Trends? Charts? How we laughed.

But we can all see, with our own eyes, that it's happening. 50 degrees C in Canada? C'mon, Canada? Bushfires north of the Arctic circle? Record heat, again and again. One-in-a-thousand-year floods/droughts happening every second year. Temperatures so high that people are just dying. It's happening right now, everywhere.

And the oil and coal companies did their level best to misinform and to lie, to harass climate scientists, to buy politicians, to stop or slow the transition to clean energy. They deserve no pity, no indulgence. The collapse of our environment is now obvious, and they have made it worse.

It is true that even paid-off and depreciated coal is now more expensive than new-build wind and solar, almost everywhere. But the coal miners and power stations are not going to go quietly. They're going to ask for subsidies to keep going. They're calling them 'capacity supports', just in case renewables don't provide all the power needed. Never mind that for the billions they're asking, we could put in enough batteries to give us power for hours and hours.

They're labelling themselves 'green', with lots of feel-good ads featuring families and chortling babies, happy little penguins, green forests. They are not. There is no such thing as green oil or clean coal. But if they can bamboozle us for another few years, then their jobs and their bonuses and their Bentleys are safe.

We need to cut emissions by half this decade. By half. If we do that, then the decade-by-decade rise in temperatures, currently ~0.2 degrees C, will also halve, and we stand a chance of limiting the increase to 1.7 degrees by 2050. We're already up by 1.2 degrees since pre-industrial levels.  And look how bad things are now!

Yes, the writing is on the wall for coal and oil. But their lie departments are working full time on techniques to keep the fountains of money flowing, at our cost. Don't be misled by the cutesy ads. They've never cared about us, and if they could, they would ban wind turbines and solar panels and electric cars, and bugger the climate. Bugger us.

I am so angry.

Cutesy oil company ad