By Jo Nova
Here we go again. It’s another round of the climate wars in Australia. It’s the issue that never dies, because global weather control is a stupid idea levitating on righteous indignation and a hundred billion dollars. As long as it floats, it’s the Hindenburg of National Energy Policy. It will only end when there’s nothing left to burn.
This time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said what all the grown ups already know — that the 82% renewables target by 2030 that Labor legislated is doomed and we should delay it. Two years after ignition, everyone knows the NetZero rocket is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a short hole that is meant to be a long one. Worse, we’ve already got more solar power than the grid can handle and extra solar power is so useless we’re about to start charging people who carelessly add to the glut at lunchtime.
Peter Dutton is sadly still saying we should do “Net Zero by 2050” — which will stop him mocking the whole pagan religion of weather control, but he is offering a real alternative — we can stop banging our heads on the wall for a few years.
The government meanwhile is fighting back with their best missives of scorn and damnation. Apparently this will lead to the awful affliction called “pariah status”. The world won’t want to dance with Australia, or something. Or, more likely, Sydney Harbour might drop a few spots on the Green Backpacker Holiday Guide. Like we care.
The media leapt to declare hyperbolically that “Dutton is pulling out of the Paris Agreement” because, being globalist junkies themselves, they thought this would be an insult. But instead of being a shocking misstep those headlines may have earned him fans. The EcoWorriers seemed to have forgotten that at the drop of a hat, back in 2018 48% of Australians said they’d be happy to pull out of “Paris”. That was without any discussion at all. Half the country didn’t care less. Imagine if we had a debate now with the cost-of-living-dog chewing on voters ankles?
Paris is a sacred totem for believers to dance around. But its almost all theater — China agreed to do nothing, and most nations will miss their targets. Now even the UN admits the world will crash through Paris Agreement goals by a factor of two for 2030.
The pimps for Paris can hardly threaten Australians with twice as many cyclones next year, or 20% more floods by 2025. They know, and we know, that the benefits of “Net Zero” are just social approval points on a Leftist dance card. There is no productivity growth, no cheaper electricity, no nicer weather coming our way — at least not for a hundred years (even in theory). So when someone pops the bubble, all they can fire back with are social credit costs not real ones. Dutton will make us “the Global Laughing Stock” they say, lamely. He will risk our membership of the Paris Agreement — the club which we pay for, and which includes practically every nation on Earth — (as if the UN would want to take its claws out of any wealthy donor).
As Graham Lloyd remarked: “Peer pressure is the only tool at the UN’s disposal. “
The non-binding compromise at the heart of the Paris Agreement that allowed US president Barack Obama to sign it without seeking the approval of congress makes the Paris Agreement a voluntary affair. .. Put bluntly, if countries were excised from the Paris Agreement for not meeting high expectations, it would be a gathering of none.
The Labor Party will find in the next election, like the last “climate election” in 2013, that they have very little material benefit to offer the voters. But no one will believe the “cheaper electricity bill” lie.
Labors target is a 43% emissions reduction of our 2005 emissions by 2030. Most of the reduction will come (in their dreams) from being 82% “renewable” for electricity (up from 32% renewable now).
Just to put that in perspective, here’s the graph of Australia’s total energy consumption which at the end of 2022 was 85% fossil fueled.
To reach this frivolous quest, Australia is supposedly going to install 22,000 solar panels every day and a new wind tower every night, somehow we’ll install 10,000 kilometers of high voltage power lines, and we will find $1.5 trillion spare dollars to pay for it all.
The actual “Paris Agreement” Australia signed was to reduce 2005 emissions by 26 to 28% by 2030. It was Labor in 2022 that raised the stakes and legislated the 43% cut, just to impress their friends at Davos or something.
So many political careers have died on “climate change” and yet few political commentators seem to realize why.
Image by Roy Snyder from Pixabay