Climate change zealotry is a luxury pastime of rich world – ordinary voters sense the fraud
An Adelaide COP31 would smash Dubai’s record for the most “polluting” climate conference ever, given the immense distances attendees would need to travel to get there. Antalya would be a much more meteorologically safe choice.
Greenhouse gas emissions from extravagant conferences aren’t relevant to the global total. But then neither are Australia’s, which the government nevertheless is seeking to crush at immense cost by 2035. It’s part of our compulsory global leadership on climate, as Matt Kean put it last month. This mantra, we’re told, should be accepted by ordinary Australians, though apparently it’s not necessary for the world’s army of climate change evangelists, even as they dial up the apocalyptic rhetoric.
Australia’s per capita emissions are among the highest in the world yet the government welcomes hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the developing world every year, supercharging the carbon footprint.
Conservatively, these new immigrants are adding roughly an extra four million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year above what they otherwise would have. On current trends, in 2035 they will together add 40 million tonnes of CO2, which is a very large share of the 215 million tonnes forecast for that year if the government achieves a 65 per cent reduction on 2005 levels. Boosting diversity and solving the “skills crisis” trump the planet’s survival, apparently.
So does warfare. The first three years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict generated an extra 230 million tonnes of CO2, about the annual equivalent of Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia or the annual emissions of adding 120 million combustion engines to the world’s roads.
Yet the governments most in thrall to climate change zealotry – such as Britain, Germany and Denmark – are the loudest in calling for escalation. Indeed, it was net-zero champion Boris Johnson who former top Ukrainian officials say scuttled 2022 peace talks.
The prospect of a devastating escalation that could within even a few years render the Paris climate goals even more hopelessly unachievable is a risk worth taking, apparently. Still, all these governments can rest easy knowing CO2 emissions from military operations, which experts say make up over 5 per cent of the global total, have been largely exempt from national reporting since the 1997 Kyoto protocol.
Individuals don’t believe the alarmist hype either. Flood risk might have been top of mind for the Prime Minister when he bought a Central Coast clifftop getaway last year, but high-income, climate-conscious Australians deep down call rubbish on the government’s fearmongering National Climate Risk Assessment, which warned one million homes were at “high risk” from climate change by 2050.
More than 35 per cent of Byron Bay properties are at “severe or moderate risk”, according to the Climate Council’s Climate Risk Map, yet prices have doubled over the past decade. More than 160 properties, almost a fifth of the total, in Sydney Harbour’s Point Piper, are at “high risk” of flooding as the exclusive peninsula smashes global price records.
Victoria has approved construction of the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere in Southbank, where 95 per cent of properties are already at “high or severe” climate change risk.
Two decades after its release Al Gore’s popular fearmongering film, An Inconvenient Truth, has been relegated to the fiction section in the US. Markets, not manifestos, reveal what people truly believe. Martin Smith, an environmental economist at Duke University, told The Washington Post in 2024 that demand for US coastal property “remained astronomically high” despite the supposed climate risks.
It’s more important than ever to look at how individuals and institutions behave to divine their beliefs, not what they say. Just as dozens of public health zealots disobeyed their own diktats during the pandemic, suggesting their private views were decidedly less alarmist than their public fearmongering, the governments and individuals cheering on climate catastrophism don’t really believe their cant either.
Voters care even less about climate change, consistently telling pollsters the world over they wouldn’t personally spend more than a few dollars a week to avoid an alleged global climate armageddon. To be sure, it’s fashionable to declare “we must do more” to stop climate change, but so long as that “we” is someone else. Until catastrophic climate change becomes salient to the average person, very few will be exercised to radically diminish the quality of their lives to try to stop it.
Climate change zealotry is a luxury pastime of the rich world – a narrative that flatters elites and justifies bigger government. Notice how demands for “action” on climate change are stronger on the left than the right?
Ordinary voters sense the fraud. They’ll recycle, maybe buy an EV if they are rich enough, but they won’t give up airconditioning or meat, endure blackouts or stop international travel, which will be required of them if governments want to get serious about achieving their unattainable “net zero” goals. And they certainly won’t put up with being censored for pointing this out. The real question isn’t whether climate change is happening, but why so many of its loudest prophets behave as if it isn’t.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
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