Energy elites in denial over collapse of net-zero support
“There is overwhelming support for action on climate change,” declared the Prime Minister.
Somebody forgot to tell the climate delegates gathered at the latest UN climate conference in the Amazonian city of Belem. Not that you’d know it from the dearth of local media coverage, but COP30 was supposed to set out clear plans to transition the world away from fossil fuels. All that emerged on the global warming front was a lot of hot air, and an agreement that makes no direct reference to phase out oil, gas and coal.
Ponder that: this is not a global deal in any accepted sense, not even a well-meaning aspiration bereft of any delivery mechanism. COP30 instead amounts to a massive humiliation for activists who have spent three decades preaching apocalypse to goad nations to eliminate fossil fuels.
As The Washington Post reported, the deal “represents a win for the oil, gas and coal industries and underscores the extent to which the global political environment has shifted since the same group struck the Paris agreement a decade ago”. According to the BBC World Service, one delegate at Belem said “they’d never seen so many people so underwhelmed by so little progress at a COP”.
It would be facile to blame Trump and his decision to withdraw the US from Paris. Global electricity demand is rising faster than expected and 2025 is likely to be another record year for carbon emissions. The reason is clear enough: the carbon share of the developing world is growing because fossil fuels help lift generations out of poverty and leading emitters like China and India won’t sacrifice their prosperity on the altar of Western green monomania. No wonder global media interest in UN climate gabfests, even among progressive outlets, has diminished.
A Factiva search shows that, during the fortnight period of COP21 in Paris (Nov. 30 – Dec. 13, 2015), The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times published 38 and 57 articles, respectively, about a deal that Barack Obama hailed a “historic breakthrough.”
But during the recent fortnight of COP30 (November 10-23), the Herald and Times published just one and five articles about the Belem negotiations. Neither ABC’s 730 nor AM broadcast any segments on Belem, even though both programs were fixated on the Liberal Party’s decision to ditch net-zero policy. Which raises the question: is the Coalition’s stance so odd, and so out of step with reality, when global support for net zero is collapsing?
A decade ago, US corporate executives representing some of the globe’s largest companies and brands jetted to Paris to endorse highly ambitious targets, calling on Washington to help the developing world decarbonise their economies.
This month, business leaders as well as US diplomats skipped the annual climate summit for the first time. Meanwhile, wealthy industrialised nations have failed to pony up the funds to help poor nations transition to renewable energy. It’s abundantly clear that the UN climate approach – from Berlin in 1995 and Kyoto in 1997, through Copenhagen in 2009, then Paris in 2015 and now Belem – is a nonsense. Hope of a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions is a chimera. Even UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer concedes “the consensus is gone” on fighting climate change.
And yet there are those like Albanese who still believe that global warming represents such a grave threat to humanity that nations will come together to eliminate fossil fuels. But history is not on their side. Global agreements do not guarantee practical outcomes. The Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris outlawed war about a decade before the outbreak of World War II. Test ban and anti-proliferation treaties have not stopped states bent on creating nuclear arsenals.
As if we need reminding, the UN is not a moral arbiter nor is it an effective lawmaking body. The interests of the 194 member states are too diverse. It is relevant as a forum where disputes and grievances are aired. But the agreements the UN reaches, even when they command broad support (such as they did in Paris in 2015), are all too often violated when they clash with vital national interests.
Forced to choose between what is in the best interest of nations and what is better for humankind in some indeterminate future, global leaders prioritise in favour of the former. And as all 30 COPs attest, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing nations, simply because the UN lacks the authority to address climate change satisfactorily.
None of this means that the rest of the world is in a state of climate denial. It’s just that the activists, not to mention the Prime Minister and other politicians and most of their media mates, are living in a reality vacuum.
A balance has to be struck between the climate and economic growth, and Labor’s radical approach to the former at a time when governments around the world are walking back climate commitments they made years ago will have bad consequences for the latter. Making energy supplies more expensive and less reliable will do little to fight climate change, but it will make life more miserable.
Labor’s net-zero fixations aren’t just a threat to living standards. By making us so reliant on Chinese renewables, they’re also a threat to our national security.
Instead of the orgy of rhetoric designed to make noisy climate enthusiasts feel smug, Canberra should make proper contingency plans for our own energy supplies and tread carefully in our reliance upon renewables: even if that means using coal to power generators of electricity or a renaissance of nuclear power to keep the lights on. One day, with market-driven technological breakthroughs, it might be possible to power the world without using fossil fuels. But it just isn’t possible yet, and our leaders should end the pretence it is, or will be any time soon.
Tom Switzer is author of Events, Dear Boy: Any Government Can Be Derailed (Centre for Independent Studies.)
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