Stay together for the planet’s sake, Fielding

One thing you have to do in spin doctoring is go with the flow. If the issue of the day (or millennia) is say, global warming, you don’t try and turn your issue into an alternative flavour of the month. You just hook your little wagon to that rollin’ freight train.

So here’s a classic, Senator Fielding (an accident of the Australian voting system) is a family values guy and he believes divorce is bad. And now he has a great new way of pushing what has become a pretty tired old message. Oh yeah, brothers, divorce is warming our planet faster than a forty buck kettle.

Well, not directly. It’s the tendency of the divorced to go and live what is known now as a ‘resource inefficient lifestyle”. That is living on your own you sad (world-destroying) bastards. I guess old people who have out-lived their partners, the lonely, the misfits are all similarly guilty of putting their own pleasures before the cause of keeping the sea down at a level that won’t see the rest of us losing our favourite beaches.

Fielding knows what he’s doing. His ‘divorce is cooking our goose’ pitch went down a treat with the freak show seeking media. After all that’s how I got onto it. I’m not sitting here on my own watching senate hearings on Foxtel all day while I wait for the baseball season to start, no sirree. I got people living here with me.

While Fielding has managed to re-position divorce in a whole new light, I doubt the global warming crew are all that thrilled. Winning the support of fruitbats like Fielding is not a plus. Some warming-skeptic bloggers are chortling already.

Fielding’s effort also passes the old media maxim of “everything old is new again”. The report he referred to yesterday was published more than twelve months ago:

Lead researcher Jianguo Liu, a sustainability expert with Michigan State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, wasn’t all that surprised by the results, published in Monday’s online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and fellow researcher Eunice Yu concluded that in 2005, in the United States alone, divorced households could have saved 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water if their “resource-use efficiency” had been comparable to that of married households.

Of course, another big issue out there is obesity and you guessed it fat people are villains in the global warming caper too. But fit people release more C02, so take your choice on that one.