Andrew Bolt: Global warming folly creating affordability nightmare

You may think huge rises in petrol and food prices – is just Putin’s fault, but our global warming extremists helped create this nightmare.

First, global warming extremists helped start the war in Ukraine.

Now they’re helping to give us world hunger, and huge rises in food prices.

Will this finally shock us out of our green insanity?

World food prices have already hit record highs, and our grocery prices here are rising fast. Worse, the United Nations warns of food shortages this year.

A lot of this latest crisis is simply blamed on the war.

Russia, the world’s biggest exporter of wheat, is invading Ukraine, the world’s fifth biggest, and many Ukrainian farmers won’t be able to plant their crops this spring.

Worse is Russia is also the world’s biggest exporter of fertiliser, with its ally China in second place.

And both have now banned fertiliser exports.

This could be deadly.

Fertiliser prices have soared to levels never seen before, and farmers who can’t afford fertiliser can’t grow as much food.

This is actually part of Russia’s plan.

President Vladimir Putin, in announcing this ban two weeks ago, said “if the West creates problems for Russia, then there will be inevitable negative consequences for the world market … that will make food more expensive.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin

Sure, you may think all this – like the big rise in petrol prices – is just Putin’s fault, but our global warming extremists helped create this nightmare.

We let alarmists such as Greta Thunberg and Tim Flannery persuade us we were heating the world so catastrophically “people are dying” and the collapse of civilisation was “inevitable”.

We let these hysterics then con us into thinking we could stop this by scrapping fossil fuels and using renewables instead.

In fact, this scare was based on a lie.

Our chances of dying in a climate-related disaster have never been lower.

And the “solution” was fantasy.

Wind and solar farms can’t effectively power a 21st-century economy.

But the West went on a ridiculous game of “let’s pretend”.

European countries banned fracking for gas, shut coal-fired generators, and cut exploration for natural gas.

US President Joe Biden won his election promising to ban fracking on federal land.

In Australia, new coal projects struggled to get approvals, coal-fired power plants were closed and fracking in many areas was banned.

The trap was shutting.

Europe, winding down its own gas production, still needed to heat homes, so imported 40 per cent of its gas supplies from Russia instead, until Putin calculated Europe was so hooked on his fossil fuels he could invade Ukraine without Europe daring to fight back.

He wasn’t that wrong.

Europe even now pays Russia more than $1bn a day for its gas, oil and coal – money for Putin’s war machine.

But the West’s global warming folly also caused gas prices to soar, producing this lethal shortage of fertiliser.

Europe pays Russia more than $1bn every day for its gas, oil and coal.

Fertiliser plants were just one more gassy business the West seemed determined to kill.

It takes massive amounts of natural gas – plus nitrogen from the air – to make pellets of plant food, and the emissions are big.

So as gas prices soared, fertiliser plants in the West shut.

Last September, two British plants were closed. In November, Australia’s biggest private gas user, Incitec, said its fertiliser plant near Brisbane would also go, and it would import supplies instead.

Meanwhile, Russia and China became the world’s top two fertiliser exporters, and not just because Russia has lots of gas. Both countries also have weak limits on greenhouse gases.

Now we must pay, as both countries cut off their fertiliser supplies.

It’s hard to exaggerate the West’s suicidal stupidity.

We not only let ourselves become too dependent on Russia and China to grow our food, but even used precious farmland to grow biofuels and wood for Europe’s “renewable” power stations.

That land now competes for scarce fertiliser.

And so global warmists have finally delivered exactly the catastrophes they claimed they were trying to stop.

Eighteen years ago, the Guardian newspaper announced it had found a “secret report” for the Pentagon predicting global warming could create “nuclear conflict” and “famine” by 2020.

Now we’re on the brink of both – but not because of global warming.

No, it’s the global warmists’ policies that were the real danger.