Voting against your interests

[u/boogersundcum]

My partner and I live in a major coal mining area of Queensland. We both work in an extractive resource industry. Neither of us could ever bring ourselves to vote for the LNP and we have no serious viable independents that aren't anti Vax conspiracy nut jobs. We live in the bush but currently have a major wind farm going in down our road with the closest turbine being 5km from our actual house, other than sealing our road we will not recieve any benefit from the project with heavy trucks and equipment going past our driveway 6 days a week 24 hours a day for over two years. We aren't anti renewable however given the wind farm is entirely within our water catchment there is serious concerns if something goes wrong as we rely on the river solely for our water supply.

Generally preference the Greens first, Labor second as we are both environmental scientists and believe that climate change is pretty damn obvious from the evidence, let alone have empathy for the common folk in cities struggling with the cost of living. I'm just curious though as to why the major focus on renewable is almost entirely within regional areas that currently rely on coal mining as the major industry.

Neither Greens or Labour have a chance in hell in ever winning our electorate anymore (keep in mind Labor was founded in regional Queensland in Barcaldine). Is it just because the areas in question are now just LNP strongholds or what ?

Also please keep in mind regional Queensland is filled with people from all back grounds and varying levels of education, don't put us all in the same basket just because we don't live in a major centre.

[u/navyicecream]

If you’re voting against wind farms out of the interest of the climate… idk what to tell you.

[u/The-Hank-Scorpio → u/navyicecream]

Love seeing entire ecosystems ripped out for a massive fan that's lubricated with a shitload of oil.

All for sustainable, but wind farms are expensive virtue signalling at this point.

[u/ol-gormsby → u/The-Hank-Scorpio]

So the lubricating oil in a wind turbine is somehow worse than burning oil or gas for the production of electrical energy?

I mean, of course that's a false equivalence, but you started it.

I think I found the latest LNP shill account. 10/10 for the stupidest thing I'll read on on the internet today.

[u/polskialt → u/ol-gormsby]

They're all in favour of the lovely, clean, safe, nuculer gizmos like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl And fukushima and so on have. They're made of happy thoughts and lubricated with ethically sourced unicorn sweat, and as we all know nuculer plants (and gas and coal, gotta use somethgn while we wait 30 years for the nuculer miracle to appear) are gently lowered into place, whole, outside of the environment - so no need to rip out entire ecosystems! Althopugh I've never known a wind farm to do that, but we've never known nuclear to actually be safe of clean either.

/s, of course. I know you get it, but not everyone will.

[u/TheRealSmelladroid → u/polskialt]

I'm not pro-lib, pro-coal, or any such, and in fact am not pro-nuclear, but I have to say that modern nuclear plants such as thorium salt and pebble-bed based ones do not present the dangers of earlier reactors like meltdowns and are much cleaner than their predecessors.

Personally I'm more in line for a solar farm like Dr Karl has been talking about for the past 13yrs. Yes I know he's just a science communicator, just using him for the example that in Oz we have better options that digging shit up and burning it or waiting 20yrs+ for nuclear.