Voters pay for climate posturing
The lifestyles of some prominent environmentalists suggest they don’t believe their own hype.
For my sins, I have fallen victim to an expensive family hobby: snow skiing. It has cost us a bomb but thankfully, because we don’t indulge in climate change virtue-signalling, we’ve been spared the angst of hypocrisy.
You can’t find many recreational activities as carbon-intensive as snow sports — they must be up there with drag racing. You are up in the mountains communing with nature and your carbon footprint is stomping on the snowfields like a yeti.
People fly or drive long distances to ski and they spend their days being hauled up slopes by diesel or electricity-powered lifts. Water is pumped from the valleys for artificial snow-making, accommodation is heated 24/7 and supplies are carted to the village in trucks and snowmobiles.
A study by the German department of sport economics found snow sports tourists generated average annual carbon dioxide emissions of 431.6kg (equivalent to burning a barrel of oil). Most Australian skiers would burn much more getting to the slopes. Such is the paradox that The Guardian has asked: “Can you ski and be green?” European environmentalists refer to snow sports as the “cancer of the Alps”.
You can imagine all this must give climate warrior Zali Steggall persistent pangs of guilt. The Warringah independent MP styles herself as a global-warming saviour, despite her gas-guzzling four-wheel drive, history of European skiing trips and a Winter Olympics career with a carbon footprint to rival Canberra’s Summernats. It is always “do as I say, not as I do” with these people.
Billionaire climate preacher Mike Cannon-Brookes lives in a $100m sprawling mansion on the harbour frontage of Sydney’s Double Bay, suggesting he is not overly bothered by minimising his carbon footprint or predictions of rising sea levels. British steel and renewables magnate Sanjeev Gupta is reported to have purchased a Potts Point, Sydney, mansion for $35m. Greens leader Richard Di Natale has a farm as well as a house in town.
These people are worried about everybody’s carbon footprint but their own.
It seems that when it comes to climate action I might have had the guilt dynamic the wrong way around. Rather than worry about how their actions don’t accord with their preaching, perhaps people use their climate activism to assuage their guilt for amassing their relative wealth.
Campaigning for a green, planet-saving future is a way for those replete with creature comforts to demonstrate their supra-material concerns. It is a post-material indulgence, a hobbyhorse where the people who pay the real price are working families and people on fixed incomes struggling to pay their power bills.
The virtue-signalling motivations are similar for big business. Climate activism is a way to build brand reputation and balance the bad publicity of obscene salaries and profits. It also placates the union-based superannuation fund activists, shareholder advocates and social media campaigners who rally customers, members and advertisers on global warming issues. Boards might even consider some climate action to be worthwhile as insurance against climate activists.
This helps to explain why climate policy changes increasingly are occurring not through democratic processes and government decisions but through the imposition of globally co-ordinated ideals, often framed and delivered by businesses, quangos, bureaucracies and local governments. In practical terms, this helps to drive much of the “negative globalism” that Scott Morrison railed against in his Lowy Lecture early this month.
The hysterical climate emergency push that Anthony Albanese and Labor have foolishly adopted in Canberra is being used to drive this agenda. From the green-left enclave of Darebin in inner-city Melbourne, climate emergency declarations have spread to town halls around the nation, including capital city councils such as Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
We might be tempted to laugh this off as gormless and harmless posturing at the toy-town level of governance. But the movement is much more invidious than that. Climate emergency declarations will be used to justify a range of new interventions in the many areas of our daily lives that this level of government covers, from planning approvals to waste disposal and infrastructure.
Alarmingly, the Sydney City Council successfully moved a motion at the NSW Local Government Conference this week to inject “values” into procurement practices. So the state government has been asked to change the law to end the singular focus on “best value” for purchases; instead, procurement should include a focus on “local values and strategic objectives” such as “environmental concerns”.
This is deeply worrying and has never been put to voters, state, federal or local. Such a change would allow stunts such as the climate emergency to start driving how ratepayers’ money is spent — council purchasing power might reward companies that boycott the mining industry or punish businesses that won’t support woke causes.
This is how so-called elites can drive climate action while they continue to build their own carbon footprints by flying to overseas sister-city catch-ups and climate conferences. If hypocrisy were a greenhouse gas the planet already would be deep-fried.
The websites promoting the climate emergency movement say the declarations are “the first step in mobilising government and community resources and funds that are not normally available”. The activists argue “fear is in fact a necessary tool” for their climate campaign.
Just as the UN was trumpeting its “green new deal” last month, big business was lining up to join the activism. The International Chamber of Commerce, headed by Australian lawyer John Denton, has observer status at the UN and can hardly contain its carbon reduction enthusiasm.
“During the UN Secretary-General’s landmark Climate Action Summit, I was delighted to announce that over 2100 chambers — representing more than 10 million businesses — have now signed up to the ICC/WCF Chambers Climate Coalition,” Denton said in New York this month.
This coalition talks about “tipping points” and reaching “net-zero emissions” by 2050. “Ambitious CEOs committing their companies to a 1.5C trajectory in support of a net-zero future were recognised during the UN Global Compact’s Private Sector Forum as part of the Climate Action Summit,” Denton went on.
Voters and shareholders didn’t directly vote for any of this, much less ask for it, but they will all pay for it.
Much of this activism occurs under the pretext of the sustainable development goals that Australia signed up to in 2015. This is the insidious march of the “negative globalism” our Prime Minister identified. Morrison needs to tell us how he will tame this beast, which has the potential to seep into every facet of business, bureaucracy and governance, much like The Blob.
In New York the UN announced a network of chief financial officers to direct funds towards tackling the SDGs. Last year, before Malcolm Turnbull was deposed and his national energy guarantee was scrapped, the government published our annual progress report on the SDGs.
“The government has announced it will work with Australia’s states and territories to develop a national energy guarantee to integrate climate and energy policy, deliver a more affordable energy system and drive investment in Australia’s energy sector,” it said, identifying the agenda that would bring Turnbull undone. It is an unintentionally hilarious document, spruiking South Australia’s high renewable energy share but ignoring the statewide blackout it triggered; boasting about SA’s big battery but ignoring why it was installed in a desperate hurry; and not even mentioning the diesel generators that were hurriedly imported to bolster that state’s summer supplies.
This is the bureaucracy bowing to the globalist zeitgeist at the same time the accountable and visible part of the political system is offering an entirely different take to voters.
The list of organisations and companies involving themselves in these processes is seemingly endless; a government-supported Global Compact Network Australia runs an SDG website encouraging business to support this agenda. “Leading companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange as well as smaller organisations are showing the way by using the Goals as a framework for evaluating what they are currently doing and planning for the future,” the website proclaims.
Elections can come and go, politicians can make speeches and change policies, but these wasteful and opaque agendas will still be implemented through the bureaucracy, industry groups, unions and businesses. There is a lack of democratic accountability about all this and it seems to be motivated primarily by a desire to make the right gesture rather than deliver useful outcomes.
Morrison identified part of the problem in his Lowy Lecture, reminding us of the primacy of the electorate. But he needs to appoint someone to tackle this, and start unwinding it, before we all get snowed.
Settler-colonial ethos is our least worthy export
Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. It was easy, but unfair.
What have our universities become?
A lurch towards activism and a focus on funding have desecrated our universities. They should once again become safe spaces – for the getting of wisdom.