Save the planet: ditch the pooch, not the internal combustion car

Studies have shown the annual carbon footprint of a family dog can match that of a car. When the climate fearmongers give up their pups I might be more inclined to listen to them.

Studies have shown the annual carbon footprint of a family dog can match that of a car, writes Chris Kenny. Picture: Getty Images

Enjoy this long weekend while you can. Perhaps drive over to a friend’s place and throw a juicy steak on the barbie because soon, if the virtue-signallers get their way, you may be walking around the city looking for a feed of locusts.

The climate alarmists want us off meat, out of cars and into eating insects. And before you scoff at the unlikelihood of crazy planet-saving rules being forced on us, just look at what we did to ourselves over Covid-19.

The same people who rail against caged chickens happily saw people confined to their homes for months. We ordered in free-range eggs for our locked-down families.

In societies that wilfully forced healthy young people to accept the risks of vaccination against a virus that posed little or no threat to them, how can we assume they will never make cockroach snacks mandatory? We have become an idiotic and contradictory society as our sanctimony, predilections and fears collide in a mash-up of social media, political grandstanding and peer pressure.

The climate alarmists virtue signal at every turn, claiming to save the planet with their emissions reduction grandstanding. They demand we stop eating beef but feed meat to their pets; they urge us to work from home while they fly overseas for holidays; and they see veganism as a morally superior lifestyle choice.

The BBC tells people how they can help the climate by reducing their meat intake and resisting chocolate bars from “deforested rainforests”. Our own CSIRO offers “four reasons insects could be a staple in Aussie diets” and tells us “edible insects are not only tasty, but also are a great source of high-quality protein”.

Only months ago Labor was scoffing at Scott Morrison for suggesting the electric vehicle push could kill the weekend. Now the International Energy Agency wants us to switch to electric vehicles, lower speed limits and ban cars on Sundays.

The IEA also wants to keep us working from home most of the time; not to stop the spread of the virus but to reduce emissions. Whatever happened to free-range people?

It all seems a bit of a laugh because we tell ourselves that none of this could possibly be forced on us. This complacency is dangerous because our recent experience of government overreach and community compliance is chilling. People who did not need or want vaccines got the jab for no community benefit. Science fell away to fear, media hysteria and unscientific, government-imposed mandates.

Melbourne was locked down for the better part of a year because of official paranoia about a virus, even though it is a modern metropolis in a First World economy with a health system the envy of most countries.

If Victoria could keep its kids from school, stop people getting vital health checks, close thousands of businesses, ban people from leaving home at night, enforce a “ring of steel” around the city, lock disadvantaged people in high-rise accommodation blocks, force workers to be vaccinated, arrest pregnant women at home for dissenting online and fire rubber bullets at protesters over a virus that was only a minor risk to almost everyone under the age of 70, then what else could liberal democracies impose on us at the behest of the climate catastrophist zeitgeist?

Think about what this country has already done to make a global statement on climate. We have voluntarily surrendered our cheap and plentiful energy advantage by demolishing coal-fired power stations and attempting a world’s first shift to renewable energy plus storage.

The result so far is an electricity price and supply crisis. And there has been no benefit to the environment because global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

We have hurt our people and undercut our economy in an act of national climate change virtue signalling. All the while we have exported our coal, gas, iron ore and bauxite to north Asia so other countries, notably China, can expand their economies, and their emissions, to manufacture goods they sell back to us. We are exporting emissions and jobs for no net gain to the planet. And we used to call ourselves the clever country.

We go along with this because just about everyone seems to agree – Labor, Liberal, Greens, teal, big business, global financiers, the UN and our trading partners. They could not all be wrong, could they? How many got Covid-19 wrong?

We might reasonably have expected that before we closed efficient, reliable coal-fired electricity generators we would have ensured there was a reliable energy replacement. When this is the level of madness afoot, it is difficult to rule out any potential policy missteps in any areas.

Logic plays a back-seat role. For the climate poseurs, at every level, only the vibe matters.

And the vibe is foisted on the population through social media, which acts like a regulator on public discussion.

Where political views were once private, most of the population now shares views on social (anti-social?) media where trends and reactions guide them along the path of least resistance.

Prevailing political fashion dominates, and what was supposed to be the democratisation of the media is revealed as its homogenisation. In the information age, we have dumbed down our public square into an omnipresent enforcer of political memes and suppressant of independent thought and dissent.

It is our brave new world. Only it is characterised by cowardice.

The level of deception and folly that politicians and the media promote or fail to expose in climate policy is extraordinary. We are told – by both major parties – that we can get to net-zero emission by 2050 when even the uber woke IEA says that cannot be achieved with existing technology.

Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese constantly tell us that renewable energy is the cheapest form of power while they invest billions in wind, solar and transmission, driving up prices and jeopardising supplies. The Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro storage project is on track to run a decade over time and 10 times over budget.

The Climate Change and Energy Minister and the Prime Minister scoff at the cost of nuclear energy, which remains illegal in this country. Yet, in Britain, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer promotes nuclear and “new nuclear” as the salvation of the British economy, helping to guarantee quality jobs.

Despite our escalating electricity price and supply crisis, governments use public money and regulation to promote electric vehicles and electric appliances. We have plentiful gas reserves but we restrict supplies and activists suggest household usage should be banned. We aim to make our reliance on electricity absolute at the same time we undercut supply. Yet a bowl of bugs for dinner is supposed to make up for this folly?

Comedian Rowan Atkinson has had the temerity to inject some inconvenient facts into the electric vehicle debate. A car enthusiast who was an early EV adopter, he pointed out in a newspaper column this week that these vehicles generate 70 per cent more emissions than internal combustion cars in construction, and that their practicality and environmental credentials are overstated.

“The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years,” he wrote in The Guardian. “It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.” No doubt Atkinson is about to be cancelled.

Clearly EVs have a role and will be convenient and practical in some circumstances. But the coercion, regulation and subsidies being provided and considered by governments must be resisted.

Most of us do not want to be told how to live our lives by governments or people who superglue themselves to roads. But the pandemic experience demonstrates our malleability in the face of an alleged crisis, and so far there has been little resistance to the extremes of climate policy.

Highlighting the hypocrisy of climate evangelists who preach restraint from large homes as they traverse the globe in jet-fuelled convenience does not seem to have worked. So, it is time to target their pets.

Anyone warning about climate doom, and advocating veganism, renewables, EVs or caterpillar diets, while keeping pets, is a fraud.

A study has shown that pet foods account for 25 to 30 per cent of meat-related greenhouse gas emissions in the US – get rid of pets and save 64 million tonnes of CO2.

The pet breeding, caring and feeding industries are massive in First World nations such as ours. Studies have shown the annual carbon footprint of a family dog can match that of a car.

Instead of dispensing with the car to save the planet, you could ditch the dog. When the climate fearmongers give up their pooches I might be more inclined to listen to their other nutty suggestions.