The dog photographed in the article - Millie the Maltese shih tzu - was bashed with a metal pole by Mark Martinaj for 5 minutes and has since disappeared, presumed killed. He successfully appealed his jail sentence and got off with a community corrections order.

We need to somehow invent batteries and solar panels that can be made using nothing non-renewable, but we’re not even close.

This is simply untrue. Here’s an in depth Technology Connections video about renewable power, including the ease of recycling both solar panels and batteries

Solar panels are 90% recyclable and most parts can be easily separated by hand. The aluminum, glass, silver and copper can then be simply melted down. The only reason it isn’t more common is that the labor costs are more expensive than buying virgin raw materials - a capitalism problem, not a technical problem.

Likewise, most batteries are recyclable by simply separating the electrodes and melting them down. For alkali metals like Lithium and Sodium you have the complication of having to work in an inert space but that doesn’t make it impossible, just more work (Edit: Ask a chemistry graduate, they have probably done this in a glove box before). Again, it’s a problem of the labor cost of recycling being prohibitive, not a technical problem. Lithium batteries are 98% recyclable.

The suggestion that 98% recyclable batteries are somehow less sustainable than oil-based fuels that are literally burnt up and completely unrecoverable is ludicrous.

What non-renewable materials?

What is less renewable than literally burning a finite resource?

If that’s the lesson you think needs to be learned, you’ve learned the wrong lesson from this.

As another person said, we’re at the “And Find Out” stages of climate change and fossil fuels.

We need to take more ownership of our petrol/diesel/oil supply.

Or maybe we could shift away from the fossil fuel fetish toward sustainable sources of energy.

These people who complain about being “not able to leave their house” are probably the same people who complain about the NDIS paying for support workers to get disabled clients out of the house, saying that that’s not necessary or essential.

Even the right-wing AFR agrees climate change is making insurance more expensive

Probably the same ones who bought a stupidly oversized and heavy vehicle and now complain about fuel prices.

More broadly, “the only reason this is still an issue” is we have been dragging our feet on electrification in general. We have known for decades that gas and oil are finite and cause pollution but it’s always someone else’s problem until the prices inevitably go up.