Piers Akerman: Why the Turnbull government should back out of the Paris Agreement
THE Turnbull Government’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Agreement is a costly and deadly exercise in vanity and futility, Piers Akerman writes.
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THE Turnbull Government’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Agreement is a costly and deadly exercise in vanity and futility.
As former prime minister Tony Abbott has patiently explained, it makes no sense for Australia to remain beholden to an agreement that punishes our nation and rewards its competitors while doing nothing to alleviate the overblown threat of global warming.
China, India and the US contribute 50 per cent of the world’s so-called greenhouse emissions and have no intention of hobbling their economies for the sake of the Green religion, so why should we?
Both Chief Scientist Alan Finkel and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg agree that removing the minuscule amount our emissions contribute to the atmosphere would be meaningless in terms of influencing climate change.
China, India and Japan are using Australian coal to power their industrial engines.
They manage to do so after paying the additional cost of training coal from efficient Australian mines to expensive Australian ports where it is transported to their power stations.
Because we are now slaves to those whom Lenin is understood to have termed “useful idiots” (those trying to destroy their own countries and make them ripe for revolution) our industries are now crippled by the prohibitive cost of inefficient electricity delivered by power companies gaming the system to increase their profits.
The elderly are dying because they can’t afford to heat their homes.
Yet we could be powering the nation with coal used in power stations built beside the mines that currently export that coal. That would reduce the costs to manufacturers and domestic consumers.
It really is such a no-brainer that both Labor, which wishes to increase the punitive emissions reduction target even further, and the Turnbull Liberals, who are bent on virtue-signalling to the international community by sticking to the dead Paris Agreement, are guilty of sabotaging the national interest.
Do they really believe the zealots who seem to think that carbon dioxide is harmful to the Great Barrier Reef if it is sourced from Australia but not that harmful if sourced from China, India or Japan or some other country where our coal is being burnt?
Abbott has eaten his share of humble pie for signing up to the Paris Agreement, admitting that he didn’t anticipate how the aspirational targets agreed to then would become binding commitments later. (That should be a lesson to others who feel inclined in the future to align themselves with one of the UN’s attention-grabbing fashion statements.)
“One of the most important laws of politics is: Beware the unintended consequences of what seems-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time,” he said.
“I’m not sure that the Howard government fully anticipated where the renewable energy target would lead when it first made the decision to impose one. I didn’t anticipate how agreeing to emissions that were 26 per cent lower in 2030 than in 2005 would subsequently become a linear progression of roughly equal cuts every year over the next decade. But now that we are more alive to all the consequences of combining energy policy with emissions policy — and now we understand this will define our economy for decades to come — there is no excuse for getting it wrong again.”
It makes no sense for Australia to remain beholden to an agreement that punishes our nation and rewards its competitors while doing nothing to alleviate the overblown threat of global warming.
The National Party is testing its new leader Michael McCormack with a two-page list of demands to be met by Turnbull with the goal of ensuring cheaper and reliable power is returned to Australians.
Nationals want their Coalition partners to create a $5 billion fund to ensure a reliable energy mix is delivered in “the short, medium and long term”.
Only coal, gas or traditional hydro projects capable of delivering power 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, regardless of weather conditions, would be eligible for assistance under the Nationals’ proposal.
McCormack must show he has the spine to deliver this for his members or he will have them cross the floor and vote against him and the government on its National Energy Guarantee legislation.
Turnbull has lost a lot of authority within the Liberal Party even as he attempts to win back conservative members with a few inconsequential victories.
Last month, the party’s conservative wing used its numbers at their annual federal council to roll Trish Worth, one of four Liberal vice-presidents and seen as an acolyte of Turnbull ally Christopher Pyne, and replace her with NSW conservative Tina McQueen.
They also rebuffed Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s plea to delegates to reject a vote in favour of moving Australia’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Rarely are ministerial positions snubbed.
Abbott’s argument is logical and irrefutable. China and India were never part of the Paris Agreement and the US has now withdrawn. It is not a global agreement and it doesn’t deserve being treated with the sanctity that followers of the poisonous Green ideology have accorded it.
Bishop Michael Curry in his sermon at the recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made a powerful point about energy.
Quoting the late French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he said the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries of human history.
Fire, to a great extent, made human civilisation possible, he explained. Cooking food reduced the spread of disease, heating made it possible to stay warm in cold climates enabling human migration.
“Fire made the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution possible. The advances of science and technology are greatly dependent on the human capacity to take fire and use it for human good.”
Why then are the Greens, the Turnbull government and Labor so opposed to harnessing fire’s power now?