Vikki Campion: Unaffordable power, and now the bags don’t work
As the PM signs Australia up to a raft of G7 climate agreements, Vikki Campion asks at what point “sustainable” climate moves become untenable for the average Aussie.
Opinion
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Soaked in watermelon juice, the “sustainable” paper bag splits over the sloped Woollies carpark.
The single mum is humiliated by grappling with her wayward flock of children as the family groceries roll down the street.
On the other side of the planet, enjoying a European summer, the Prime Minister empathised with the single mother by signing her up to a further raft of international agreements in the form of the G7 climate cult.
Its purpose is for governments, led by Germany, to create new emissions-free markets to force products on us that people otherwise would neither buy nor produce.
Similar to paper bags, which were forced on us to meet government and boardroom sustainability requirements in the first place.
These agreements have worked out so well. Power she can’t afford and soaring grocery prices.
The disconnect is farther than the distance between Germany and regional Tweed.
The G7 commits to “phase out finance for high-emission technologies” and to create markets for “near zero emissions production”.
In other words, reasonable enterprises that have existed in Australia for decades will be run out of business because they do not follow the edicts of the green cult.
That means concrete, steel, aluminium, vegetables that need fertiliser, beef and dairy because of methane. How untenable do you want the cost of living to become for our single mum?
Under the G7 climate club, the government will fund the chosen companies with your money, using taxpayer subsidies and “green” public procurement policies or regulations.
Exactly the kind of thing that has landed us with the return of the 1970s brown paper bag, this time apparently recycled, and the cost of living crisis.
Why is our Prime Minister signing us up to a group that tells you in its terms of reference that it designs false economies? They create markets for goods that no one would demand.
Can’t we smell a rat? Here we have something that is not backed by a market, and without the government ordering it and getting you to pay for it, wouldn’t otherwise work.
It’s gone from economics to a cult, where the only reason for existing is the guilt projected in your direction to abide by it.
This idea does not stop with paper bags. They have grander schemes ahead and a lot more of your money to pay for it.
As of May, Albo committed federal taxpayers to spend $2bn to underwrite green hydrogen projects, including hundreds of millions of dollars in feasibility studies and funds to “cover the commercial gap between the cost of hydrogen production from renewables and its current market price”.
This week, coal was dropped from Labor’s policy platform document, and federal correspondence from Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s office reveals his oblivious or willing ignorance to consider bringing nuclear into the mix to reduce energy prices and environmental destruction from wind, solar and transmission lines.
If you will sign up for European agreements, why not start building European power, which has as one of its key components nuclear?
It’s not just that Bowen won’t let the government build nuclear; he won’t remove the prohibitions so that other companies, which would fit into the G7 mantra, could.
Even after reports showed the figures for Bowen’s renewables dream is $1.5 trillion for 2030 and
$7-9 trillion for the 2050 net zero target, his office continued to send out messages this week insisting renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
“In the absence of an established nuclear industry, and with abundant land and renewable resources, renewable energy is the most cost-effective form of generation for Australia’s future. This includes the additional costs of storage and new transmission,” his letter said.
How is $9 trillion the cheapest alternative?
Like a cult, how ludicrous do the sermons have to become before we start to question the leader? What started as plausible has become insane.
Dare suggest that the new paper bags are crap and be attacked by eco-winged monkeys on social media, moralising that Mum should have brought her bag from home, instead of accepting the new “sustainable” option is less effective and more expensive than what they previously had.
I hope, too, that these eco-heroes can rely on Vietnamese and Chinese quality control to ensure that the bags are 100 per cent recycled paper like they promise.
If they can illegally log in Asia without us being able to do anything about it, good luck trying to regulate their recycling. Remember soft-plastics recycling scheme REDcycle was revealed to be less recycling and more warehousing? That scheme was in Australia.
How is our oversight thousands of kilometres away, that these savagely defended bags are recycled from old paper and not rainforest trees?
In the meantime, we have replaced supermarket grocery bags that can be used repeatedly for years with paper bags with a useful life of about 12 minutes at nearly twice the price – that we don’t even know are 100 per cent recycled.
And the same minds that believe that $9 trillion is a good deal for renewable energy, that Europe’s G7 rules will help Australia, savage the harried mum whose 25c bag failed to carry a two-litre milk and a chunk of watermelon.
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