Andrew Bolt: Chance to drought-proof our cities goes to waste

Global warming has become an excuse for not thinking and not doing the simple things that save lives and properties and keep our cities watered.

Yes, my first reaction in these floods is sympathy for the people whose homes are ruined, businesses smashed and crops washed away.

But my second is anger. How could we be so stupid to let so much water go to waste? Who were those “experts” who told us not to build more dams?

Look at all this water. We could have stored it to drought-proof our cities and many irrigators for generations.

So why didn’t we?

This week, I read this headline in the far-Left Age newspaper: “Climate risk for dams revealed as Eildon struggles to hold back floods.”

What? Has this newspaper forgotten its pet experts used to say the exact opposite – that global warming meant dams such as the Eildon wouldn’t fill?

It wasn’t just the clownish Tim Flannery, once our Labor-appointed chief climate commissioner, who claimed in 2007 that “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams”.

Water pours from the Wyangala Dam in NSW. Picture: Gary Ramage

Global warming experts around the country said much the same, persuading gullible politicians that there was no point building dams anymore.

The Bureau of Meteorology, for instance, told The Age in 2009 the good rains of the 1960s and 1970s were gone, thanks to global warming: “We are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.”

Melbourne Water, in charge of the water supplies of our second-biggest and fastest-growing city, used that same excuse to reject a new dam, even in 2009 when its dams were just one-quarter full in a terrible drought, triggering emergency bans on watering gardens.

One of the “key reasons” it gave for rejecting a new dam was that “investing billions of dollars in another rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky”.

Maybe it was just listening to its Labor masters. The then water minister Lisa Neville said global warming was drying out our dams, so building a new one didn’t make sense: “Any new dams would mean less water for all and would be unlikely to capture enough water to be worth it.”

But look today: Melbourne’s dams are 98 per cent full, and there are flood warnings on rivers such as the Mitchell, which once had a dam reservation until a green Labor government scrapped it.

Flooding in Forbes. Picture Joshua Gavin.

Dams in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra are also full, or close to, and undammed rivers are flooding. True, Victoria is our maddest state, but Labor politicians across the country weren’t much saner. Just four of the 20 dams we’ve built since 2003 are outside Tasmania, and the global warming mania of some politicians actually cost lives.

In 2010, Kristina Keneally, the then NSW premier, killed the proposed Tillegra dam on the Williams River, in the Hunter.

One of the excuses she gave was global warming. The dam might not fill, since there was ”increased vulnerability to the effects of reduced rainfall as a result of climate change”.

It didn’t take long to prove Keneally was another climate chump. Just five years later, Dungog, downstream of where the dam would have been, was flooded. About 80 homes and shops were damaged and three people died.

In 2006, the Victorian Labor government similarly rejected plans to build a dam on the Maribyrnong, a river that downstream snakes through Melbourne suburbs.

Flooding along the Maribyrnong River. Picture: David Caird

Environment minister John Thwaites, a global warming evangelist, who is now chairman of Melbourne Water, said: “The advice from Melbourne Water is that there is almost no water there anyway to dam.”

Turns out there was actually more than enough water in the Maribyrnong last month to flood 245 Melbourne homes.

Again and again, our experts forget that Australia really is a land of “droughts and flooding rains”. Droughts follow rains follow droughts … In a drought these experts say, oh, don’t build a dam, we’ll never get the rains to fill it. Global warming. In a flood they see no need to build a dam because – look – we’ve got all this terrible water already. Global warming.

Global warming is an excuse for not thinking and not doing the simple things that save lives and properties and keep our cities watered. Like building dams.

No, our global warmists cry: Much better to try to change the world’s climate and somehow stop both floods and droughts.

Oh really? But meanwhile I see all this water going to waste. I know these floods will one day be followed by droughts and then we’ll wonder: Where did all that water go?

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Chance to drought-proof our cities goes to waste