Fiery rhetoric of climate doom raises the temperature
Alarmism is so heated now, it’s hard to tell the radical fringe from our leaders.
The political/media elite, progressive to a fault, always welcomes the arrival of a left-of-centre government, especially after spending years demonising its Coalition predecessors. This was probably exacerbated by the nation coming out of the pandemic and looking for a period of reopening and renewal.
And to give credit where it is due, Albanese and his team did not frighten the horses. On the contrary, they made a sure-footed and reassuring start on foreign policy, an area where many, myself included, feared weakness and regression.
Yet now the trajectory for this government appears clear, and it suggests a path to economic hardship and political chaos. When the scales fall from the public’s eyes – and that might be a year or two away – the reckoning will be savage.
There are two outstanding questions. How much damage will be visited upon the country? And will the Coalition make the hard decisions to present the necessary alternative for repair?
Jim Chalmers neatly summarised the nub of the problem while attacking the Coalition this week. “Before the government changed hands interest rates were rising,” the Treasurer said, “real wages were going backwards, inflation was going up and a big part of the reason for that was the electricity price and energy market chaos that the shadow treasurer should come to the dispatch box and take responsibility for.”
A reasonably factual analysis. But the missing fact was that on each measure the situation has become significantly worse since the election and, worst of all, Labor’s climate and energy policies will turbocharge the harm.
The hubris of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is extraordinary. His evangelical zeal for a renewables-plus-storage model as the enlightened path to lower prices, more supply, green jobs and a cooler planet ignores the simple fact that, despite numerous attempts, no country has achieved this.
In fact, all that have tried have ended up in an energy supply and cost crisis.
The International Energy Agency warns that net zero cannot be achieved with current technology, and even net-zero and renewables advocate Kerry Schott, the former chairwoman of the Energy Security Board, admitted this week that the government’s renewables plan might be beyond our wit.
“It may not be possible,” she told the ABC. “But I think we’ve got to try.”
That such an admission from her did not generate broad news coverage goes to just how delusional the debate has become. Media, climate advocates, politicians and diplomats are sticking to a script of unchecked climate catastrophism while promoting implausible energy solutions.
When this bubble bursts it will get ugly. For a debate that is supposed to prioritise “the science” the biggest missing elements are scientific facts and rational arguments.
As an illustration, consider these numbered quotes:
1: “We are facing an existential crisis in our region, which is climate change.”
2: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
3: “We need radical change to save the planet.”
4: “There are no actions too extreme to take at this moment to draw attention to the urgency of fixing this problem now.”
5: “We are the developed country with the most to lose from unchecked climate change and natural disasters – floods, fires, and cyclones – all of this is at stake.”
These quotes are all of a likeness but come from the most radical protesters and people charged with implementing policy. We expect hysteria and hyperbole from the radical fringe but should see factual arguments and rational approaches from responsible politicians – yet now there is no difference.
The fearmongering from those who glue their body parts to roads at protests is indistinguishable from the speeches of the UN secretary-general or our own Climate Change and Energy Minister.
For the record, those quotes belong to Bowen; UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; Mali Cooper, who locked her head on to a car’s steering wheel as she blocked the approaches to the Sydney Harbour Tunnel; retired teacher Tony Gleeson, who glued himself to a Picasso in an Extinction Rebellion protest at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; and International Development and the Pacific Minister Pat Conroy at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
It should be deeply worrying that the fact-free alarmism is indistinguishable between this lot. It is as though the nation’s energy policy is being run by Greta Thunberg. (By the way, feel free to guess which quote belongs to who; I’ll include the quiz answers at the end of this column.)
Consider what this means for this country which, like every other developed nation, has built its prosperity on the foundation of cheap, reliable energy. We are accelerating an impossible renewable energy transition that has already constricted our electricity supply and elevated prices.
Through deliberate policy choices driven by ideology, we will further damage the reliability of our supplies while continuing to increase prices.
This is an act of national self-harm not seen since Kevin Rudd surrendered our borders – but the economic consequences will be much more severe and take longer to repair.
When the power shortages hit home, most likely over coming summers, the repercussions for the government will be dramatic. Ever-increasing power prices will cause household and business trauma along the way.
Two great lies are being perpetrated – and no, this is not climate denial, this is the opposite; this is recognising the supremacy of science, facts and rational analysis.
One is the gormless idea that renewables in countries such as ours are a practical solution to global warming, even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise globally, thanks especially to China.
The other is the promotion of all natural disasters and weather events as being “unprecedented” and attributable to global warming. Scientists cannot make such links for our most recent droughts, floods or fires, but that does not stop some insinuating as much, and certainly it does not stop politicians and journalists leaping to conclusions.
This week the Prime Minister said: “We’ve had the devastating bushfires, including in areas of rainforest that had never burnt ever before – ever before!” This is typical of the alarmist claims we hear that scare our children and, presumably, help to justify radical but largely futile energy policies. They are simply wrong – yet stand uncorrected.
I have been through this in detail in these pages previously. Back in the spring of 2019 retired NSW fire commissioner and former NSW climate change councillor Greg Mullins told ABC radio that fires were “breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn … the west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
But the South Australian Chronicle of February 1915 reported lives lost and the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated.” And The Canberra Times in 1982 detailed a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest in that region.
Around the same time Mullins made his claim, Guardian Australia linked bushfires in Queensland rainforests to global warming.
“I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” asked Joelle Gergis, of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, who was then a member of the Climate Council.
“As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning,” she wrote.
Yet the Cairns Post reported on October 25, 1951: “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms. These trees were one of the features of the park. The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
We live at a time when clear, recorded, easily researched precedents do not preclude the use of the word unprecedented and do not prevent concocted hysteria. And on the back of this fabricated alarmism, we undermine the reliable energy sources that underpin our industry, agriculture, economy, health, education and prosperity.
There is a lot of science denial going on. And it is on the climate action side. Most of the media that has been complicit so far will not apologise for their role. Rather, when the reckoning comes they will pivot to the interests of their audiences and amplify the assault on governments.
There will be economic, social and political disruption. Then we will have to embrace gas generation or nuclear power, or even carbon capture and storage to reclaim our plentiful energy endowment.
Meanwhile, China will have continued its economic and military expansion, perhaps with the assistance of “reparations” from the West. Spike Milligan could not have conceived of such satire.
Of course, I could be wrong. We might see $1 trillion invested to build 28,000km of heavy transmission lines through landscapes where communities welcome them, linking tens of thousands of hectares of wind and solar farms in places where their aesthetics are appreciated, and they could be firmed up by massive battery installations yet to be invented, and all this could be delivered to us at a colossal loss to the investors so our prices do not increase dramatically. And the former coal and gas workers, and those who used to work in manufacturing, could all have jobs mowing the lawns between the rows of solar panels, or collecting bird kills from under the wind turbines.
And all the while heatwaves will subside, floods diminish, droughts will shorten and fires will be quelled. It sounds too good to be true.
Quiz answers
1: International Development and the Pacific Minister Pat Conroy; 2: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; 3: Blockade Australia’s Mali Cooper;
4: Extinction Rebellion’s Tony Gleeson; 5: Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
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