Net zero is a blueprint for poverty that repeats the folly of zero-Covid
These “experts” peddled the delusion that a global virus could be stopped at national borders, and the loudest Australian expression of that cult was OzSAGE, a self-appointed posse of academic policy prefects.
In December 2022 the group wrote an open letter to national cabinet warning that its planned easing of restrictions, after two years of wrenching intrusions into people’s lives, was “unconscionable”. It claimed that immunity from vaccination and infection could not protect the community as measures were lifted, that Covid could never be treated like other respiratory illnesses, and that the health system would buckle unless mask mandates, laboratory-based testing and a bevy of other controls were maintained.
“Australia is doomed to worsening acute and chronic disease and mortality,” the group wrote. This was said at a time when 95 per cent of Australians aged 16 and over had received two vaccine doses, one of the highest coverage rates in the world.
The hysterical predictions of OzSAGE drew the headlines it was hunting, but, happily, they were ignored. Reality was a great disinfectant. Australia reopened, the health system worked, society normalised and immunity strengthened. Not one of the apocalyptic forecasts came to pass. The OzSAGE letter now stands as a testament to the folly of believing that secular prophets are any more reliable than the fire-and-brimstone preachers they replaced.
No one can predict the future. And the past shows most of the lingering damage from Covid came from the alleged cures, not the disease. If we had continued listening to expert demagogues, even more harm would have been heaped on the community.
The Covid overreach reminded us of two old maxims: the only function of forecasting is to make astrology look respectable, and; society is probably better governed by the first hundred people in the phone book than by a roll call of academics.
But, as the energy analysts at Doomberg like to say, zero is an emotional number, and many are deeply attached to its carbon elimination iteration, net zero, though not one person in a thousand could tell you what it means. This goal is an even more insidious drive to re-engineer society than zero Covid, built on the same dogma that complex systems can be bent to political will and that populations can be coerced into compliance.
Net zero is a slogan, not a plan. The world has no credible pathway to it with existing technologies. The Albanese government will struggle to reach its near-term targets as the easy carbon cuts have been banked. Everything gets harder and more expensive from here.
Covid was a brutal illustration of what it takes to cut carbon emissions in a world that runs on fossil fuels. In the past three decades emissions have only paused their relentless upward march twice: during the global financial crisis, and when the world economy was shuttered for the disease.
Recessions cut emissions because the wealth of the world is directly linked to the energy it consumes. That is why the Goldilocks temperature set as the baseline for measuring global warming is the pre-industrial era. History teaches one iron law: nations with abundant energy get rich; those without it are poor.
The major achievement in a quarter of a century of trying to limit emissions is to shift the point of production. China grew wealthy and powerful as the West outsourced the furnaces of industry. It now consumes 56 per cent of the world’s coal. In the decade to 2024 it was responsible for more than two-thirds of global demand growth for oil and one-third of the global increase in demand for natural gas. And in 2024 the world burned more coal, oil and gas in a single year than ever before in human history.
China now produces 32 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions but that signal of energy abundance helped Beijing secure one-third of the globe’s manufacturing. According to the German Economic Institute, 150 out of 181 countries had a merchandise trade deficit with China in 2023.
So far, the energy transition is a giant Ponzi scheme and the net result is rising emissions and a strategically stupid gift of industrial, economic and military power to Beijing. Despite the evidence, highly intelligent people living in a world marinated in fossil fuel cannot make the connection between the lifestyle they enjoy and the energy that fuels it.
This week’s release of the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook underscores the absurdity of the distant target. It sets out three scenarios for the future of carbon emissions based on what governments are actually doing, what they claim they intend to do, and the net-zero world they hope to will into existence. The report says the world is not on track to hit its climate goals and its net-zero models are melting down as they strain against physics to stay within the guardrails that, allegedly, separate manageable warming from catastrophe.
“To meet the near-term emissions benchmarks necessary to avoid substantially exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, each successive edition of the Net Zero Emissions Scenario has featured more rapid near-term emissions reductions, stretching feasibility to its limits,” the report says.
How could that unfeasible target be hit? “In the Net Zero Emissions Scenario, global final energy consumption drops by four exajoules a year on average over the next decade, with 75 per cent of the decline occurring in advanced economies,” the report says.
That cut is the equivalent of erasing roughly two-thirds of Australia’s annual energy use from the globe, and doing it every year for 10 years. On this pathway, advanced economies would have to cut their final energy use by roughly one-fifth in a decade. Efficiency gains on this scale have no historical precedent, and slamming on the brakes would trigger depression-level economic trauma. In the real world, net zero by 2050 means smaller economies, deindustrialisation and falling living standards. If this is the plan, it is a blueprint for poverty.
Climate change is a problem but, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates now concedes, it is not an existential threat to human civilisation. We should try to cut emissions in a measured way, in step with what the rest of the world is prepared to do. We should not be driven by visions of the apocalypse. One of the world’s best analysts of climate scenarios, Professor Roger Pielke Jr, notes the good news that the dire projections a decade ago, which focused on scenarios of 4-6 degrees of warming by 2100, have shifted down to central estimates below 3 degrees. Alas, alarmists have simply rebased the catastrophe threshold and every weather event is now branded “unprecedented” and linked to climate change.
It is not impossible to imagine that the enthusiasm for net zero will evaporate as quickly as zero Covid when the costs become clear, the interventions in everyday activities grow and interim targets are missed. But there is no doubt the politics is hard.
Whether the Liberal Party can sell its decision to abandon the fantasy is a question of competence. Recent history suggests competence is not a muscle the party has exercised with any intent for some years so the chances of this being botched is high.
But facts and physics are on the Coalition’s side, and where there is life there is hope. As one of Australia’s leading theologians once told me: “God’s will is what you make it.” If the Liberals can set aside their deep divisions, then there is more than sufficient evidence to back their stand. The test will be if they can, finally, make the government the target.
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