Opinion: Climate of fear won’t work at the ballot box

I’ve a tip for our leaders. Voters at the next federal election won’t be thinking about net zero emissions, they’ll be thinking about the cost of housing, food, fuel and raising a family, writes Mike O’Connor.

The wonderful thing about Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese promising to propel the nation towards a net zero emissions target at a point in time somewhere over the rainbow is that neither of them are going to be around when these magical years are finally upon us.

In the finest traditions of the ­political art they can promise whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that it’s a fanciful figure plucked from the air and designed to shimmer like a distant mirage for the duration of the election campaign.

Climate change has become political capital and Labor and the Coalition are now both fixated upon being seen to be doing something – anything – to save the nation from the apocalypse that we are assured, thanks to computer modelling, threatens it.

The Climate Council’s Tim ­Flannery knows a thing or two about computer modelling, having ­confidently predicted that drought conditions would become permanent in eastern Australia.

“Water is going to be in short ­supply across the eastern states,” he warned.

“One morning in the not-too-distant future in one of the major cities, taps will be turned on and instead of water, there will only be a whistling in the pipes. Not a drop. ­Totally dry,” he announced.

I turned on the taps at our place last week as the rain pelted down and indeed there was a whistle. It turned out to be the kettle.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Next year, and the PM and the Opposition Leader must hope that it will occur before polling day to vindicate their shining net zero targets, the Arctic ice cap will disappear.

We know this because back in 2005, Mr Flannery peered into his computer screen and announced that within 15 years, the ice cap would melt.

It stubbornly refused to do so last year, covering an area of 14 million square kilometres, so if our man Flannery is right then apart from whistling taps, 2022 is going to be the year of the Big Melt.

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society was unfazed by the dogged refusal of the Arctic ice to disappear and recently gave Mr Flannery a medal for his “dogged determination” to communicate the critical science of climate change. Well done, sir!

Mention net zero and the demise of the Great Barrier Reef is immediately raised with the Queensland Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon warning last week that “we know the biggest threat to the reef is climate change”.

I refer the Minister to the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s website where she will find the recently released results of its annual survey of the reef. The institute is not shy when it comes to predicting the destruction of the reef. After all, you can’t expect to get lots of nice big government grants if everything is hunky dory. Much better to paint a picture of doom and threatened disaster.

The reef, however, like the Arctic Ice, has refused to do the right thing and die, the survey showing that across the three major regions of the reef there has not been greater coral growth since records began to be kept in the 1980s. This is the same institute that predicted that by 2022, the coral cover of the reef could be reduced by 50 per cent.

Sounds like good news, does it not, in spite of predictions of its imminent demise by everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio – “What once had looked like an endless underwater utopia is now riddled with bleached coral reefs and massive dead zones’’ – and former US president Barack Obama – “The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened”.

We must hope that the United ­Nations bureaucrats in UNESCO who want to declare the reef to be ­endangered read the report and its inconvenient truths.

AIMS, while faced with irrefutable evidence that the Great Barrier Reef is getting along very nicely, was not going to give in without a fight.

“The prognosis for the future disturbance regime under climate change is one of increasingly frequent and longer lasting marine heatwaves and a greater proportion of severe tropical cyclones. Mitigation of these climatic threats requires immediate global action on climate change,” it warned.

Amazing, is it not, how in the face of endless predictions of doom and disaster being proved to be so hopelessly false, AIMS can still make this claim with absolute certainty.

I’ve a tip for Anthony and Scott. When most voters come to cast their votes in the next federal election, they won’t be thinking about net zero emissions and climate change. They’ll be thinking about the cost of housing, food, fuel and raising a family.

As Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville famously remarked – “It’s the economy, stupid!”