Well, another week and another plan, scheme, thought bubble on climate and energy. Despite the fact that even Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel said in senate estimates that even if we took Australia back to pre-first fleet days and shut the entire place down, it would make virtually no difference to the world’s temperature. (INSERT AUDIO)
On top of that Russia, China and India haven’t signed on to the Paris accord and the US have pulled out all together. In effect we are wasting our time.
Whatever Australia does whatever self-flagellation we put ourselves through we are wasting our time.
But none of that matters to our political class of both sides. Some like the Greens and GetUp simply want take Australia back to the dark ages and some kind of theoretical socialist utopia. They just don’t care.
To them it’s purely about political point scoring, posturing and preening.
They have absolutely no skin in the game and are no better than fly in, fly out protesting pests.
Years ago H L Menken made the observations that:
“…The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary..”
Remember that. That is what the Green left is all about. Keeping YOU alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety.
Or as former Labor Member of Parliament Gary Johns wrote earlier this week:
“…Greens are shallow, short-term and anti-democratic, precisely the opposite of the ideals they claim to champion: deep, long-term thinking with liberal democratic souls and pure of heart.
Instead, Greens are shallow because they spend their lives campaigning on the basis of crises that never eventuate. The world refuses to succumb to the calamity du jour.
But Greens need a calamity to thrive. When one calamity fails to materialise, they invent another….”
All the average Australian wants is what until recent times we’ve always had: Cheap affordable electricity that has been central to Australia economic comparative advantage.
The government should follow the lead laid down in the Hippocratic oath:
That is “first, do no harm.” In other words in certain cases, it may be better to do nothing rather than intervening and potentially causing more harm than good.
That’s exactly what the government has done with energy policy in Australia, interfering unnecessarily and doing more harm than good and totally and unnecessarily wrecking, trashing and vandalising industry and the economy. As Ronald Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
As was written up only last week, by Bjorn Lomborg, the findings from the major climate models are clear: achieving the 1.5C target would require nothing less than the entire planet abandoning the use of every single fossil fuel in less than four years.
That is, we would have no new iron or steel, which undergird global construction, but still lack a “green” alternative. No more fossil fuel-based cement, which at about four billion tonnes annually is the building block of the modern age. Almost no plastics, which permeate modern life. And unless an effective, scalable alternative replaces the present way of making fertiliser, we would be looking at half of humanity starving. This promise is so lightly delivered by politicians, but achieving a 1.5C decrease requires us to shut down the power sources for more than four-fifths (80%) of the planet’s economy in less than 40 months.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — the organisation in charge of the Paris meeting — estimates that if every country makes every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030 to the fullest extent possible and there is no carbon leakage, it will be equivalent to cutting carbon dioxide by 60 gigatonnes by 2030. BUT it is widely acknowledged that to keep temperature rises below 2C, we must reduce CO2 equivalent emissions by nearly 6000Gt.
This means that even in an implausibly optimistic best-case scenario, Paris leaves 99 per cent of the problem in place.
And according to the UN’s own climate model, the difference between a world with all the promised Paris cuts and one without them is just 0.05C. Even if every nation including the US extended its carbon cut promises past 2030 and kept them going throughout the century, temperatures would drop by less than 0.2C.
So there you have it. It is a pointless and futile exercise. And the elephant not in the room? The Pachyderm not on the porch?
Nuclear power….
The jury over many decades has returned its verdict with nuclear operating flawlessly in Europe the U.K. and the US for sixty years with 450 nuclear power facilities worldwide and 60 or so under construction.
The US has 99, France 58, Sweden 10 and even Switzerland has 5 nuclear facilities for example.
For decades nuclear energy in Australia has been used as a means of scary, boogie man, political product differentiation to the nations detriment and even before Chernobyl and Fukushima the Green left was anti-nuclear because of WW2 and Hiroshima and prosecuted their case against a backdrop of death and war.
In those countries that have nuclear power and using that same 60 year time frame, how many people, comparatively, have been killed or suffered horrendous injuries by motor vehicles not to mention the health problems associated with exhaust pollution?
Using the same hard wired, Green left, visceral, knee jerk emotional measure to nuclear, there should be a review of cars with consideration of an immediate ban.
The ultimate irony in this Green hypocrisy is that reliable base load power doesn’t get any greener than nuclear.
Apart from that, because of our geological and political stability and our vast, remote areas, at a million dollars a tonne, Australia could pretty much fund the national debt by becoming a repository for the world’s nuclear waste.
This is dog in the manger in reverse.
That is, a person who prevents others from having or using things even though he or she doesn’t want or need them, themselves.
No country with the uranium reserves of Australia has the right to complain of an energy crisis. The only obstacle to developing a nuclear power industry is ignorance and the need for political posturing, preening and moralising.
As of July 1 this year, South Australia had the world’s highest power prices AND the world’s most unreliable.
This is the stuff of Rome burning. And the political class are pleased with their work as they go about vandalising the economy.
The irony in this is mind blowing when you consider that in the pursuit of low co2 emissions, or in this case NO co2 emissions, it is South Australia that is sitting on one of the world’s largest uranium deposits that, just like our enormous deposits of coal deposits, we are all too happy to mine and export for others to use, but not use ourselves.
There’s something morally corrupt and morally perverse in Australia’s position.
It’s not so much that Australia, the lucky country, is running out of luck, but in fact is trashing that luck and our heritage.
And one last thing on this. The UN’s largest global poll of nearly 10 million people’s priorities reveals climate change comes last for most of the world’s population, behind education, health, food and 12 other, more pressing, issues…