The Greens set up a senate inquiry to track down the funds for misinformation in climate change

By Jo Nova

It hurts the Greens when skepticism rises in polls and they have no good answers

It must drive them wild when backward redneck farmers refuse to see the bat killing wind turbines as the shiny totems against bad weather. The ingratitude! (How could they not like high voltage lines!)

So The Greens set up a Senate Inquiry on “Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy” convinced that there are buckets of money washing around for astroturfing farmers and paid jobs for bloggers and commentators to spread climate misinformation.

It’s as if they think they’re only losing the battle because voters are too stupid to figure out the truth if they accidentally hear both sides of the argument. They have to be fed a pure stream of  “the green information”. And thus the caring compassionate Greens turn out to be arrogant, condescending and profoundly undemocratic status seekers yet again.

The Greens recite their own religious hymn:

“For decades, vested interests have been waging a global war of disinformation against the clean energy transition, including environmental and climate legislation, and these vested interests have recently achieved significant political success in nations such as the US.

The craziest thing is that after “climate change” approved agitprop has been shoveled out through every media outlet and school for twenty years, the Greens can still pretend that somehow a few dissenting voices can confuse half the country.

They fool themselves that they are the little guys bravely fighting the Big-Oil powers of the world, while they hold hands with Big Bankers and One World Government wannabees. If it’s honest, this inquiry to follow the money will lead right back to their own team. Nearly all the vested interests in this debate are stacked 6 feet high on the side of the Greens. They stand with The United Nations, global academia, the media, the bankers, the pension funds, industrial wind and solar power, the battery manufacturers, the climate modelers, the Bureaus of Meteorology, and to round it all off, the Chinese Communist Party too.

Speaking of bankers, at one point GFANZ — the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero had 500 members which controlled some $130 trillion dollars of assets. There is no bigger “vested interest” in the world than 500 financial houses, insurance groups and asset managers. They were managing funds six times larger than the GDP of the most powerful nation on Earth. They openly colluded to change energy policy around the world, despite the wishes of voters, and to undermine the free market. It looked, acted, and smelled like a cartel. So much so, that 19 Republican states in the US launched legal proceedings on antitrust and fiduciary duty. At that point many of the banking houses backed away obviously recognizing the legal danger they were in.

UPDATE: My submission has been accepted and published at #155.

Submissions close today, (Friday 12th September.) My draft follows with rough edges. I will polish later, thanks for suggestions…

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Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy

The Terms of Reference

A Draft submission from Jo Nova

1.a. “the prevalence of, motivations behind and impacts of misinformation and disinformation related to climate change and energy;“

The Prevalence of  misinformation is rife — mostly through lies-by-omission

The most powerful and pervasive misinformation is that of the lie of omission. Australian people have been subject to misinformation in the form of half-truths and the suppression of relevant facts, without the context that renders the point irrelevant, minor or not so frightening.

1. Water is the most powerful greenhouse gas — absorbing across a broader range, and 10 to 100 times more abundant. The word games pleading that it is “not a driver” are mere assertion based on climate models that we know don’t work.
2. The world was hotter 5 to 10,000 years ago in the Holocene, and 120,000 years ago during the Eemian, and for most of the last 500 million years. Life on Earth evolved during hotter periods that lasted hundreds of millions of years.
3. Seas have been falling for 7,000 years since the Holocene optimum. Australian seas were 1 to 1.5m higher. (Lewis et al)
4. Temperatures of 50°C were recorded all over Australia in the 1800s. (Trove, NLA) The BOM would say these were not done on certified official equipment (because there was none at the time) but this is Australian history, and some of these temperatures were recorded at observatories by trained staff. Shouldn’t Australians at least know this?
5. Most Pacific Islands have grown in size in the last 50 years. 89% of 709 Pacific Islands were found to be the same in size or growing (Duvat et al). There are no inhabited islands, not one, that is smaller now than it was in 1970. (Kench et al).
6. Nobel Prize winners and astronauts are silenced? While the media will tell us a high school activist’s opinion on climate change they would not phone up and interview Nobel Prize winners who were skeptics — like Ivar Gievar (now deceased), Robert Laughlin,  or John Clauser. They would not talk to men who walked on the moon and ask them why they were skeptical. Isn’t the opinion of Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmidt, and Charles Duke worthy of reporting?

For thirty years all media outlets have misinformed Australians about what science is:

The media have given Australians the impression that science is done by a kind of religious “expert” decree which must not be questioned, when the truth is the exact opposite. Tragically, the CSIRO, and most of our universities have sat quietly by allowing this (they have a vested interest and motivation in doing so, don’t they?)

1. Science is not done by consensus. Professors of Science don’t vote for gravity. The truth is revealed through observations and measurements, not via opinion polls.
2. The science is not “settled”  — if it was, we’d know if next year would have a barbecue summer, or wet winter. We’d be able to predict El Niños & La Niñas. There would be only one Climate model, and expert modelers would not be “surprised” that the Antarctic sea ice is suddenly melting, while the Arctic hasn’t shrunk in the last 20 years.  They wouldn’t have said that warming in the upper troposphere was a “fingerprint” of man-made climate change only to find that 28 million weather balloons showed the fingerprint wasn’t there.
3. All scientific theories must be falsifiable. If a theory can never be proven wrong, it isn’t science but religion. Both warm and cold extremes “prove” climate change, as does both droughts and floods, more cyclones, less cyclones, faster and slower winds, more sea ice, less sea ice, and also completely stable sea ice for twenty years.
4. Peer Review is neither essential for science nor proof of anything. Einstein’s great works were not peer reviewed.
5. It’s not science unless all methods, and all data are published in full. The Bureau of Meteorology homogenizes temperatures by an in-house subjective process that they admit they cannot explain to outsiders. (The BOM Technical Advisory Forum report. 2015) This is more like a medieval guild than a scientific institute. They will not publish the side-by-side temperatures recorded with two different types of thermometers (electronic sensors versus  liquid in glass) even under FOI, and it shouldn’t require an FOI in the first place.
6. Wind and solar power are not cheap in any meaningful sense — there are few uses of intermittent or random electricity, so it is misinformation to report short term prices for wind and solar as if they are comparable to prices for reliable stable supply. Australians need to know the cost of 24 hour reliable electricity, which is what they have been paying for, for decades. This includes storage, back-up, frequency stability, transmission, and network costs. Since intermittent supply

The motivations are obvious (but unreported)

There are many vested interests in the climate debate and most of them profit from promoting Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Bankers can act as brokers in buying and selling carbon credits (but only if the governments force people to buy them). If they are also heavily invested in renewables, or EVs, or insurance, or want to do business in China, they have many ways to profit from climate change fears and the quest for Net Zero.

• Global finance: GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) claimed in 2021 to represent 500 firms with US $130 trillion in assets under management — six times larger than the GDP of the USA. While these funds were not invested in “climate change” per se, the point of the GFANZ group was to use their market power to advance Net Zero policies and industries. This dwarfs any fossil fuel lobby. As I reported at the time, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg admitted they pushed through a Net Zero Target for Australia in November 2021, not because Australians voted for it, but because the bankers threatened to raise interest rates by 1.5% which would cause market chaos, and raise payments on national debt.

• The Global Carbon Market was worth $909 billion USD two years ago. Several forecasts (e.g. in the carbon credit market) project values of ~US$2 trillion by 2030 under current growth trajectories.(Fairfield )

• The Australian government: The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has committed over $18 billion in taxpayer-backed funds, heavily tilted to wind, solar, and storage. ARENA (Australian Renewable Energy Agency) has provided over $2 billion in grants. If it turned out that there was no catastrophe, many careers would be lost, and politicians reputations ruined.

• Universities: Billions in research grants flow to projects aligned with catastrophic climate messaging, while skeptical proposals receive effectively zero support. Skeptical researchers are often sacked for speaking out (see Peter Ridd or exiled like Prof Bob Carter and Murry Salby). In addition, University superannuation funds are often invested in renewable or green funds, and thus, benefit from promoting climate fears. This is a direct conflict of interest.

  • Unisuper —  is the dedicated super fund for the higher education and research sector in Australia.It manages over $135 billion (as of 2024) for ~600,000 members (university staff, researchers, etc.). UniSuper publicly states its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 across its portfolio, with interim 2030 targets. It has invested in renewable energy developers, infrastructure, and green bonds. Example: In 2021 UniSuper joined other big funds in Climate Action 100+, a global investor initiative pressuring companies to decarbonise.
  • And there is also AustralianSuper, HESTA, and AwareSuper all who have made NetZero pledges.

• Subsidies: In the last ten years renewable subsidies are estimated to add up to $29 billion (CIS). But the total burden on households is much larger. Dr Alan Moran’s broader estimate is $1,300 per household or $13 billion a year.

• China is also a supermassive vested interest that benefits from the climate fear campaign — selling 80% of the worlds solar PV, much of the wind power, and more than half of the EVs. It is not surprising that China has funded eco-lawfare suits in the USA which would impose burdens on US Energy companies, making them less competitive and indirectly making US manufacturing less competitive due to it’s reliance on energy that is not so cheap. Chinese money found it’s way into New York activist groups in the US to push for the climate “SuperFund Law” which may force US Companies to pay $75 billion in climate damages to New York. Meanwhile the Chinese branch of the Energy Foundation has funnelled $12 million to US universities and non-profits to promote green energy and tax reform since 2020.

There is a large asymmetry in motivation — while fossil fuels are in high long term demand which is remarkably inelastic, there is only a small voluntary market for carbon credits, wind power, solar power, or green steel as a fashion item. Without the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change the subsidies, entire profit margin, even industry would evaporate overnight. Hence the motivation of people 100% dependent on the theory is a life or death type of commitment. Despite twenty years of subsidies, global coal production and use is still rising.  Coal companies don’t need to advertise to find customers.

The United Nations gains power, funding, and status with annual giant Olympic size junckets. Every year between 10,000 and 100,000 people fly to meetings that last as long as two weeks. The UN wrings money and favours out of states by threatening to rate their wilderness or reefs as “endangered” and demanding they sacrifice part of their economic advantage to satisfy the

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Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy

 

REFERENCES

BOM Technical Advisory Forum report. 2015 — http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/2015_TAF_report.pdf

Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557

FairField Market Research, https://www.fairfieldmarketresearch.com/report/carbon-credit-market, August 2023.

Kench, P.S., Liang, C., Ford, M.R. et al. (2023) Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. Nat Commun 14, 508  doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2

Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract].

Trove (NLA) — For exact references to the many 50C recorded days and locations see the list at https://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/forgotten-history-50-degrees-everywhere-right-across-australia-in-the-1800s/

Wu, Michael (2024) Counting the cost: Subsidies for Renewable Energy, Analysis Paper 70, Centre for Independent Studies (CIS)