Donald Trump can show us the light on energy

LET’S hope the reports are true: that President Trump will follow through on his campaign promise to take the US out of the so-called Paris Climate Agreement, writes Terry McCrann.

Donald Trump may take the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

LET’S hope the reports are true: that President Trump will follow through on his campaign promise to take the US out of the so-called Paris Climate Agreement.

In a broad general sense it would be a rare statement of sanity in this space; that at least as long as he remains President the US will stop drinking the Climate Change Kool-Aid.

More narrowly, a US withdrawal is critical to getting some policy sanity in Australia. Ideally, we would follow; but as there’s zero chance of that under the current clueless prime minister, hopefully it would at least force some reality back into the discussion about energy and electricity in particular.

Yesterday we had power which was fundamentally reliable, plentiful and cheap — and critically not just for consumers but also business.

But in recent years at both state and federal level we have embarked on a deliberate policy course of making electricity not just less but actually deliberately unreliable, and we are headed for power rationing and the most expensive electricity in the world.

All to absolutely no point other than moral preening. We can cut our emissions of carbon dioxide to zero — indeed, we could actually go negative, by closing down the country entirely and switch to just growing trees — and it would make zero difference to global or indeed local temperatures.

Our CO2 emissions are swamped by China’s; and the “Fake Paris Agreement to supposedly take action on climate change” allows China to increase its emissions out to 2030 by an amount that would swamp 100 per cent of our emissions many times over.

In the world of combined cognitive dissonance and outright lying that is the Climate Change movement, the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 — China, by a long, long way over the US — is defined as cutting emissions by increasing them.

Indeed, the “Agreement” allows everyone to increase their emissions, as the so-called promised cuts are only on a ‘best intentions’ basis. Only idiots like us will actually try to deliver.

NOW, at the G7 meeting over the weekend, the mostly European countries led by Germany and France which have been drinking the Kool-Aid the longest, tried to pressure President Trump to publicly commit to the “Fake Paris Agreement”.

His refusal might normally be taken as a pretty clear indication of what he intended to do; otherwise why not bask in their warm, indeed their Global Warming, approval?

But as we should know Trump is definitely a “one-off”. Maybe he just wanted to head-fake them over their fake agreement?

Hopefully not; even though the US could easily meet the “commitments” made by the predecessor Kool-Aid drinking Obama administration under the Fake Paris Agreement, because its emissions have fallen thanks to shale gas.

We could actually go down a similar path with coal seam gas to replace coal-fired power, as shale gas has done in the US.

Of course, first best would be to stick with the coal; but at least with (more expensive) gas we could sustain reliable, relatively cheap (compared with useless wind) and plentiful power. But no, state governments have insanely stopped even that.

So we need President Trump to formally walk away from Paris to expose the utter idiocy of Australia staying with our commitments — against a US which was outside the agreement and a China which was pumping more and more CO2 inside it.

Instead we have a PM who insists in bashing his (and our) head against a Trump brick, ahem, wall.

The day after Trump won the election, Malcolm Turnbull made a big show of formally signing on to Paris.

What, did he think his powers of persuasion, so on show during our recent election campaign, could persuade Trump to do a U-turn with their first telephone conversation?

Then when the new president gave him a golden opportunity to argue aggressively for even bigger corporate tax cuts — with the US likely to cut from 35 to well below our 30 per cent — our PM Whimp stuck with his plan to marginally cut corporate rates, and then only after 10 years.

Clearly we have a PM who doesn’t understand that the world of the 21st century moves a little faster than it did in the 19th.

Setting out to maintain his perfect record of “Trump missteps” Turnbull also stuck even more doggedly to the TPP trade deal even after Trump formally abandoned it. The TPP situation is an exact parallel of the Fake Paris Climate agreement, as neither will include easily the two biggest players: China and the US.

Could someone please inform the PM?

 

SMARTEST IDIOT IN THE ROOM?

EVEN better news: one of those ‘smartest guys in the room’ has told the AFR that we can end all subsidies for wind and solar, abandon the mandated requirement to force 20 per cent of our electricity from renewables and even tear up our Paris commitments.

They’ve all become superfluous, according to this “Mr Smartest”, a Jim Barry from global investor BlackRock.

He was quoted in the AFR as saying that renewable energy was “now competing head-to-head with coal on cost”; and that our sticking with coal was “defying gravity”.

Fine: given this development clearly there’s no further need to force electricity companies to buy wind and solar, there’s similarly no further need to artificially force up the price of coal-fired power; our power companies will rush to build more profitable wind and solar “plants”.

Why, our emissions should plunge, plunge, plunge under their own, so to speak, steam.

And BlackRock will refuse all subsidies?

Originally published as Donald Trump can show us the light on energy