The brazen stupidity of the Greens and the climate change religion has been on display throughout the current bushfires in all its sickening hypocrisy. Let’s just get one thing straight here, dudes — and I mean ‘straight’ in its old-fashioned sense, meaning ‘accurate’ rather than its newfangled sense, meaning ‘morally inferior because it is the antithesis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, inter-wotsits’. (Clearly you have to spell things out for this mob; brains were obviously in short supply when the likes of Adam Bandt were being assembled on some malfunctioning, eco-friendly, biofuel-powered production line). So here goes.

There is absolutely nothing effective that any Australian government can do to prevent or slow down climate change.

Sorry guys.

With Australia accounting for around 1 per cent of global carbon emissions, even if we reduced our national footprint to zero and plunged ourselves back into some Earth Hour-inspired era of candlelit gloom and medieval poverty and disease, bushfires would still rage around us in all their pent-up fury.

Or to put it another way, even if you accept that the carbon tax reduced our electricity consumption by around 10 per cent (a highly contentious argument, given that we probably exported that consumption to dirtier parts of the globe) and that that reduction was sustainable in the years ahead — and I mean ‘sustainable’ in its old-fashioned sense, meaning ‘likely to go on’, rather than its newfangled sense, meaning ‘morally superior as in windmills and the like’ — keeping the carbon tax in place still wouldn’t make a jot of difference to future disasters, climate-induced or otherwise, because the statistical measurable difference between a bushfire racing towards your home at 100 per cent capacity and one raging through your living room at 99.9 per cent capacity is, in fact, zero.

Which leads us back to Cousin Kev’s Crazy Copenhagen Conundrum. Apparently, the best way we have of persuading the rest of the world to lower their emissions is by setting a good example, bearing the brunt of the pain ourselves and keeping our fingers crossed that from Mongolia to Mogadishu they’ll be so impressed by our mighty efforts that they too will see the light (or the dark, rather) and follow suit.

In much the same way, presumably, that nuclear proliferation no longer exists because we banned nukes, that the rest of the world no longer fights bloody wars because we don’t, that the rest of the world have banned semi-automatic weapons because we did, that the rest of the world subsist largely on a diet of burgers, Vegemite and beer because we do, and that the rest of the world spend most of their leisure time lying on the beach in their undies covered in factor 30 fretting about melanoma because we do.

Nope. The rest of the world will do whatever’s in their economic interests to do, unless we are prepared to apply unrelenting pressure to make them bend to our will. How so? We can talk. The Left want us on as many international committees as possible smugly arguing our case with sanctimonious outrage while scoffing caviar and bubbly up the pointy end of the carbon-emitting plane. Might work. Might not.

Or we could apply massive economic pressure, along the lines of: ‘Sorry, you filthy bastards, unless you cut emissions we’re not going to let you buy any more of our gold, copper, uranium, gas and, er, coal.’

Sadly (because we don’t manufacture anything that the rest of the world is remotely interested in) we have nothing else of inducement value to offer.

Well, I suppose we do have something. Our lifestyle; apparently the envy of the known world. We could always flog chunks of it off in exchange for action on climate change. We could take, say, 100,000 asylum seekers — no boats required, we’ll fly ’em in first class — from every country that reduces its carbon footprint by 10 per cent.

Alternatively, we could threaten to withdraw our lavish overseas aid unless specific recipients agree to lower their standards of living to reduce emissions, but that might seem a tad unfair seeing as aid is supposedly being given in order to raise their standards of living.

Or we could go to war. Taking a leaf out of the highly successful Israeli ‘direct action’ manifesto, we could simply bomb any brown coal-fired generators anywhere in the world that we felt were unduly contributing to our ‘unseasonal’ bushfires and floods.

Personally, I favour the latter. Time is running out, and if Mr Bandt is correct, every day counts. Unfortunately, the previous government left our military in such a shocking state that we’d be lucky if we could get a plane with a decent sized bomb actually up into the air, let alone manage to fly it under cover of darkness on an exciting, Entebbe-style mission to the pollution-spewing dark, satanic mills of, well, somewhere like Entebbe.

So it looks like Aussie Gaia’s future is in the lap of the gods. As Australians, we are utterly at the mercy of whatever it is that the serious carbon-emitters (China, the US, India, Russia, Brazil etc) decide to do. And we can stamp our feet and splutter all we like, but they will go their own way regardless of what we do or say or how many bushfires Tony Abbott has to single-handedly go and put out.

Meanwhile, we do have the power in our own hands to do something useful to prevent the devastation wrought by such enviro-catastrophes, anthropogenically induced or otherwise.

We can build dams and we can reduce the fuel load in our glorious bushlands. We can bulldoze proper firebreaks between suburbs and forests. We can burn off during winter, like we used to do when I was a kid; match in hand, finger in the air, down at the bottom of the paddock. We can disband local councils that do not actively follow serious fuel reduction strategies. We can implement bushfire safety measures with the same zeal we prosecute people with unfenced swimming pools. In other words, we can pretty much reverse the entire Greens/Labor ethos over environmental management, which, self-evidently, doesn’t work.

And while we’re at it, let’s see what measures we ourselves can take to clean up the genuine, visible pollution clogging our waterways and killing our oceans.

Time to get serious about practical environmental measures and disaster-prevention/mitigation. Or we can carry on fretting about possible long-term global effects upon our climate over which we can do diddly-squat.