Piers Akerman: Australia must not surrender to global warming lobby

The UN’s Glasgow COP26 gabfest is underpinned by no more than a climate catastrophy theory, writes Piers Akerman.

With the Glasgow COP26 fiasco due to begin next Sunday, it has become crystal clear that the green-left have long abandoned nuanced discussion about climate change.

They have effectively cancelled reason in favour of slogans shrieked by truant schoolchildren.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson voiced his concerns about this creeping, worldwide push for the censorship of views that deviate from a particular narrative in a video appearance before a loaded Senate inquiry Friday.

“Across News Corp, across the globe, there are contrasting concepts, diverging views, a contest of ideas,” he said. “It should be of concern that the contest of ideas is not cherished by all, and that a movement to silence, to censor views, to shame and to ostracise has gained momentum in much of the world.”

Both the taxpayer-funded ABC and the Nine Media group’s newspapers have presented just one side of the debate and the outgoing editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Lisa Davies, said last week that she was proud that the newspaper was “the first to call out the inextricable link with climate change through this piece by former fire chief Greg Mullins, and then-environment minister Matt Kean’s bold statement of the same fact, ‘this is not normal’”.

Except that no reputable organisation or inquiry has actually found any such “inextricable” link between climate change and last summer’s bushfires.

Wishy-hopey thinking is behind all of the global warmists views and aspirations.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor will reject calls by Britain and the US to phase out all coal-fired power generation by 2030.

COP26 is underpinned by no more than a theory based on modelling by a group of scientists, many conflicted by funding from the so-called renewable energy sector – the windmill, solar and now hydrogen-producing companies.

The UN’s IPCC claims there is a “consensus” that global warming is taking place and that it is attributable wholly, or at least largely, to human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide. There are no dissenters on IPCC panel.

This not how science works. Those who believed in the “consensus” model of science were responsible for gagging Galileo when he presented the unpopular but accurate description of the solar system.

Australia has already outsourced the bulk of its manufacturing to China which is currently paying top dollar for coal and is in the process of building more than 100 new coal-fired power stations even as our power companies bow before populist demands to decarbonise energy supplies.

In Europe, power is being rationed and bills are soaring as the wind and sun fail to respond to the needs of the green-left and winter rapidly approaches.

Batteries, championed by the global warmists as the solution to intermittent power supplies, simply don’t cut it. While handy for short-term grid stabilisation they don’t have the capacity to keep the lights on let alone the wheels of industry turning for more than a few hours at most.

Hydrogen is no more than a pipedream and it would take decades for nuclear to be a viable source of power even if we began building nuclear power plants tomorrow.

With just seven days to go, splits are emerging among the European bloc of nations committed to net zero at Glasgow, with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic rejecting the EU’s heavy-handed bureaucratic approach.

China, the world’s greatest emitter, and Russia, No.4, aren’t sending their leaders to Scotland. India, No.3, is off again, on again. Both China and India need fossil fuels to maintain the rate of industrialisation they rightly boast has lifted massive numbers of their population from poverty.

Without China, COP26’s objectives are unobtainable.

Our Energy Minister Angus Taylor has declared that calls by Britain and the US to phase out all coal-fired power generation by 2030 will be rejected. He will not sign up to Glasgow climate change agreements and targets that negatively impact miners, manufacturers and farmers or jeopardise affordable, reliable power.

Labor, pushed by the green-left, will overreach and declare unattainable short-term goals and deliver the next election to the Coalition.

How the UK’s PM Boris Johnson manages to deflate the hopes of the 25,000-plus enthusiasts including the perpetually outraged Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, the entire British royal family, and a slew of wealthy virtue signallers is yet to be seen.