Don't vilify our history

WANT to make a greenie's head explode?

Tell them this: “Coal burning power stations were, in their day (and still are in many ways), green technology!”

They probably won’t be able to speak for a minute or two while their brains try to reset, and their eyeballs stop looking in opposite directions, but while they’re trying to regain their delusions, take the opportunity to get in a couple more ‘factjabs’.

Explain to them that before people were able to connect to cleaner, cheaper, more efficient electricity they had to cut down trees to burn wood and other combustibles in their homes to cook, wash themselves and their clothes, and to keep their home theatre rooms warm in winter.

Today, Collie is still a living example of the ying-yang of yesteryear.

This is seen in the wood-burning home fires and modern coal-powered electricity factories that have been living side by side since the 1940s.

If your city-dwelling, uni mates with their hipster “greens” virtues don’t believe you, why not invite them to ride their bicycles to join you for a Collie winter?

On any morning between April and October in Collie, they can experience the particulate-matter that spews not from coal-fuelled electricity factories, but from the many home chimneys in and around Collie that were built in the “BCE” (before cheap electricity) era.

Wood burning in home fires is still very common, not only in Collie but in and around lots of other Australian country towns thanks to the relatively easy access to firewood.

Home fires are still very common even in the cities as a way of not only saving money for heating, but also to look trendy.

Lots of new, expensive houses are being built with wood fireplaces and other contraptions.

With the advent of cheap, efficient electricity from Collie’s coal-fuelled electricity factories, industry and technologies developed and produced more and more things.

This meant more and more jobs, and then more and more people being able to buy more and more things.

This meant even more jobs and even more prosperity for not only us living in first world, rich economies, but just as importantly for those living in second and third world economies.

The invention of the steam engine, which helped produce the industrial revolution, led us to be part of the most amazing transformation of human society, economy, culture and technology.

It deserves respect for its place in the history of humanity.

What advancements come next as we transition, we can only imagine, but only if the neo-Luddites, despot opportunists, and other sociopaths don’t have their hate-fuelled, anti-humanity, hypocritical, hypothetical, ignorant, zombie-like, ideological, and sinister way.

The future is coming, but we all must be part of its careful, wise and reasoned evolution.

The vilification of our history is not the way.

For our future's sake we, the majority, must reject the lies, the hate and the fear being spread by the same minorities that gave the world Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and more.

We love humanity when it's good, and we love the electricity that has been made from Collie coal.

Don Scott Mumballup