SHOCK: COST AND RELIABILITY MORE IMPORTANT THAN STUFF THAT DOESN’T MATTER
According to the media-political complex, Tony Abbott’s excellent London speech on climate change madness was “from the fringe”, “bonkers” and “against the science”.
According to the media-political complex, Tony Abbott’s excellent London speech on climate change madness was “from the fringe”, “bonkers” and “against the science”.
Labor leader Bill Shorten claimed “Australians were appalled to see Tony Abbott just lose the plot on energy prices and climate change.” His deputy, Tanya Plibersek, said: “Tony Abbott’s left the realm of the merely destructive and entered the realm of the loopy.”
Besides the expected dumb abuse, there were also various attempts to debunk many of Abbott’s assertions and to spread panic about the planet’s fate should Australia follow the former Prime Minister’s sensible prescriptions. “The priorities are now clear. Energy prices and reliability are now paramount,” the ABC’s Insiders host Barrie Cassidy warned on Sunday morning, as though prices and reliability shouldn’t be primary issues.
“Emissions, not so much,” Cassidy continued. “And if that means warmer temperatures, well …”
Talk about your science denialism. Right there, in Cassidy’s loopers, bonky connection of Australian electricity use to any global temperature increase, is the central deluded conceit of our entire local climate change industry: that somehow Australia, with our tiny 1.3 per cent contribution to the planet’s human-generated carbon dioxide output, is able to influence the world’s climate.
Australia isn’t able to do so and cannot do so under any imaginable circumstances. Even if it’s the case that CO2 emissions are dicking around with the earth’s thermostat, our minuscule output means we’re not a factor. We’re as able to change the temperature as we’re able to adjust gravity.
Abbott pre-emptively dealt with this in his London speech. “Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile,” he pointed out, “because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s.”
This awkward fact is why our warming alarmists for so long pushed the meaningless but ominous line that Australia produces more carbon dioxide per capita than any other nation. When it emerged that other nations actually had higher outputs, they added a qualification: we were the worst per-capita than any developed nation.
That, too, proved false. They’ll soon be claiming we’re the biggest C02 generator among cricket-playing nations beginning with A and led by someone who is a handful of Newspolls away from oblivion.
“Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause,” Abbott continued. “Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.
“So far, climate change policy has generated new taxes, new subsidies and new restrictions in rich countries and new demands for more aid from poor countries. But for the really big emitters, China and India, it’s a first world problem. Between them, they’re building or planning more than 800 new coal-fired power stations – often using Australian coal.”
Alarmists sometimes claim Australia’s tiny output is of no concern, because by reducing our emissions even further we can set a planet-saving example for bigger emitters to follow. Yeah, right. Picture the scene inside China’s Presidential Office Building:
Loyal advisor: “Boss, have you seen how Australia is crippling its industries, sending pensioners into poverty and wrecking its economy?”
President Xi Jinping: “Yep. What about it?”
Loyal advisor: “I think it would be really cool if we did the same thing.”
Three days later, the loyal advisor’s wife receives a bill for the bullet used in her husband’s execution. But surely, our alarmists plead, it is still worthwhile to take even small steps towards reducing emissions in the name of planetary survival. After all, picking up a single discarded chip packet at the beach may not cause much difference in the larger scheme of things, but it does make our world a marginally nicer place.
That’s true, but picking up a stray chip packet costs nothing beyond a few joules of energy. If it required a $50,000 payment and hundreds of people losing their jobs, even your most vigilant beachcomber might have second thoughts.
As Abbott noted, the climate change alarmism industry is basically set up to transfer money from taxpayers to holy warming believers via government intervention. “Unsurprisingly, the recipients of climate change subsidies and climate change research grants think action is very urgent indeed,” he said. “As for the general public, of course saving the planet counts – until the bills come in ...
“That’s the reality no one has wanted to face for a long time: that we couldn’t reduce emissions without also hurting the economy. That’s the inconvenient truth that can now no longer be avoided.”
The bills are coming due for our idiotic pursuit of what Keven Rudd once claimed was “the great moral challenge of our time”. The greater challenge now for average wage earners is to pay their power charges. For millions of Australians, energy prices and reliability are absolutely paramount.
(This column ran in Monday's Daily Telegraph. To read all columns on their day of publication, please subscribe.)