Bolt: Chris Bowen’s calls are no longer laughable. They’re cause for panic
Column after column, I have treated Chris Bowen as a joke, but the time for laughing is over. Australia’s spectacularly incompetent energy minister has just signed a document agreeing to our destruction.
I must apologise to you readers.
In column after column, I have treated Chris Bowen as a joke. A clown.
Well, the time for laughing at Australia’s spectacularly incompetent Energy and Climate Change Minister is over, now that he’s signed an international document agreeing to our destruction.
Now is the time to panic, because Bowen agreed at the annual United Nations climate change conference to kill a quarter of Australia’s exports.
Yes, our massive exports of coal and natural gas – worth $150bn a year last year – must end over the next 25 years. That’s cash to pay for our hospitals, pensions and schools,
What’s more, Bowen also pledged to get rid of Australia’s coal and gas generators, when we’re already critically short of cheap and reliable electricity.
I’ve never before seen an Australian politician actually promise to destroy Australia’s standard of living.
But Bowen did that on Friday in Belem, Brazil, signing the Belem Declaration on the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.
Is this why the UN’s climate bosses made him president of negotiations for the next climate conference? Has this gee-gaw – president of the world! – turned the head of Australia’s most dangerous politician?
Bowen would not describe what he’s just done in the blunt words I’ve used.
But the declaration he signed, along with more than 20 other countries, commits Australia to working “collectively towards a just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels”, and “rapidly scaling up renewable energy and energy efficiency to replace fossil fuel-based energy capacity” to meet net zero emissions targets.
In case you doubt what this means, the extremist Climate Council of Tim Flannery, the former Labor-appointed chief climate commission, hailed this as “the strongest language we’ve seen from the Australian Government yet about the need to switch away from fossil fuels”.
And a Bowen spokesman confirmed Bowen was even taking credit for it, saying Australia was “instrumental in delivering the landmark agreement by all countries at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels”.
Has Bowen ever considered what it would mean to Australia if the world now did exactly what he’s called for?
Imagine: no buyers of our coal or natural gas. No coal or gas even for our own electricity.
Petrol, also gone. Oil, gone. Fertilisers and cement, which are heavy uses of fossil fuels, replaced with what?
Don’t ask Bowen. He’s so clueless that he promised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a miracle green gas – green hydrogen, made from water – to make us a “renewable energy superpower”, only to have almost every project crash or iced for being too expensive and impractical.
But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Saturday grasped another green straw, signing a climate declaration himself in South Africa, promising to “support the implementation of efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally” to get to “net zero” emissions.
No wonder also China signed the agreement at this meeting of G20 leading economies – because guess which country supplies 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels and 60 per cent of its wind turbines?
And guess which sucker down south imports 90 per cent of its solar panels from China, plus wind turbines?
Yes, global warming is the great scam that forces the West to de-industrialise while China almost literally steps on the gas.
Does Albanese actually understand that Bowen has just signed up to an agenda that spells our decline, as communist China gets mightier and more threatening?
Asked on Saturday about what Bowen has just done, Albanese claimed it was no big deal. Nothing had changed. Of course, Australia would still use gas as “a part of the transition which is occurring” to renewables.
But then came this:
JOURNALIST: Are there any plans to taper down Australia’s production of fossil fuels?
ALBANESE: Our position is the same today as it was yesterday. The cheapest form of new energy is renewables.
A dodge and weave. A no, but yes.
So Bowen declares the world should reject our coal and gas, while Albanese gives shifty answers, suggesting, well, we might actually need some of that gas ourselves, for a while, but plays dumb about our exports.
The best we can hope for is that Bowen and Albanese are actually monstrous climate hypocrites, signing declarations they don’t really mean and expect the world to ignore.
But the worst is shocking: that by intention or ignorance, they mean to destroy our electricity system and the exports that keep Australia afloat.
Originally published as Bolt: Chris Bowen’s calls are no longer laughable. They’re cause for panic
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