
Less normal is that earlier this year she published Jokes and Joys, a joke book to raise money for various charities. Over the last ten years, Rinehart has spent millions funding a think-tank dedicated to pumping out climate denialism, bankrolled speaking tours by high-profile denialists like Lord Christopher Monckton (who says he is a member of the House of Lords, despite the fact that he is not), and led the successful campaign to repeal the carbon tax.Īll of which is pretty normal mining-billionaire stuff. She owns more than one percent of Australia’s total landmass, an area roughly the size of the Czech Republic. Take Gina Rinehart, the head of Hancock Prospecting and one of the richest women on earth. But even by the standards of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Australia’s mining magnates are something else. The fact that billionaires are freaks hasn’t been news since most of them got Twitter. They donate huge sums to nearly every political party, own stakes in the country’s biggest media companies, and get massive amounts of public funding to pursue their pet obsessions. It only makes sense when know that Australia has a massive mining industry, which has created a crop of billionaires who are both near-omnipotent and unbelievably weird. In 2015, the man who is now prime minister brought a lump of coal into parliament and waved it around, yelling: “Don’t be scared! Don’t be afraid!” A prominent government MP regularly paints his face black to look like a coal miner and prints bumper stickers reading “Black Coal Matters.” The government’s policy to get Australia to net-zero carbon pollution by 2050, which was announced last week, is based on economic modeling that hasn’t been written yet.įor a country that regularly bursts into flame, this is a weird way to go about things.


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Since the country’s conservative government repealed a national carbon tax in 2014, climate change has driven Australia insane. The COP26 climate conference in Glasgow is finally underway and one thing is certain: the nation of Australia will show its ass.
