Has the Australian government decided to sign the Paris agreement (whatever it is)?

Does Ove Hoegh-Guldberg know something about Paris that hasn’t been announced?

Last week his office sent out an email to all pollies, inviting them to a propaganda event for the climate machine (all paid for by the taxpayer, as usual). Not only were we told that Greg Hunt apparently supports this event (whatever that means), we are also told that

“leading Australian climate scientists will discuss the impact of Australia’s decision to sign the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the upcoming COP21.”

That sentence is ambiguous, but potentially loaded. We definitely have decided to endorse the UN goals for 2030 (whatever that means, and who knows?). Julie Bishop did it last week. But have we also decided to sign the Paris agreement? That would be news. Either Ove is forward projecting his fantasies, or he’s just let slip something that Hunt told him privately.

Who knows what is on offer at Paris anyway? I think the real scandal is that Australians have no idea what either the UN goals or the Paris document means. The nation ought to get to look at the fine print before anything is signed. How much sovereign power will Bishop and Turnbull give away to unelected UN bureaucrats?

As far as the UN Goals go, do the Australian voters get to see what we signed? The  17 UN goals are glorious motherhood statements like Goal 1: No poverty, and Goal 2: Zero hunger, and all supposedly achieved by 2030. Perhaps endorsing them is equivalent to giving the UN a “like” on facebook, or maybe it will cost us billions.

As far as Paris goes, we are taking an obscenely high commitment already. For a mining-industrial country with the highest population growth in the West, no capacity for more hydro, no willingness to do nuclear, and huge transport costs domestically and internationally, we shouldn’t be in “the middle of the pack”. John Howard was a tough negotiator for Australia getting our (pointless) Kyoto commitment to be an 8% increase when most of the other nations were cajoled into tougher targets (generally a 5% decrease).  As negotiators in the international arena, it appears Bishop and Turnbull are pushovers.

As usual, buckets of money go to those who push the narrative. The “Leading Climate Scientists” attending include Chris-stuck-in-the-ice-Turney, David Karoly,  John Church, Nathan Bindoff (oceanography), Dave Griggs (sustainability) and a bunch of hanger-oner-ers who’ve never looked under the hood of a climate model once. People like Jean Palutikof (impacts and adaption), Frank Jotzo (economics), Mark Howden (impacts), and Justine Bell (lawyer). Most of their jobs, like Ove Hoegh-Guldberg’s, depend on assuming the broken climate models do something useful.

The leaked email below, for the event next Tuesday: