With no defined benefit and undisclosed costs, net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets amount to an assisted economic suicide pact.
Countries serious about their economic future – eg China, India, Russia, Brazil and countless others – have no interest in signing up to a scheme that will merely enrich rent-seekers and crony capitalists but guarantee subsidies for the existing wind and solar scam and the soon to exist giant battery and ‘green’ hydrogen scam.
These are countries that understand that the only way of dragging their people out of poverty and into the modern, industrial age is to provide them with access to reliable and affordable power.
Next time you’re dealing with a net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions proponent, quiz him/her about what happens to the climate when we reach net-zero: when droughts, storms and floods might end; when bushfires and heatwaves might end? Then see if they can guarantee you that crops will never fail, rivers never run dry and the dams will always be full. There has to be some identifiable consequence for all that noble economic suffering, surely?
See if they can point to one discernible benefit of playing accounting tricks about the volume of carbon dioxide gas emissions generated by human activity.
The nature of the scam is best recognised in the fact that those demanding a net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions target are not demanding nuclear power generation in an effort to meet any such target.
That class includes Australia’s PM Scott Morrison and his Energy Minister, Angus Taylor. It’s a position that will not wash with voters at the next Federal election (due in April/May next year) and means that the Liberal/National Coalition will ultimately hand government to a Green/Labor Alliance. Ironically, by running on a policy which is, in substance, indistinguishable from that run by the Green/Labor Alliance.
By signing up to net-zero emissions and simultaneously ruling out nuclear power generation, Scott Morrison has pretty much ruled out his chances of holding government. His political base is both confused and irate.
Terry McCrann is equally perplexed at how a notionally conservative government can so readily sacrifice its core principles on the altar of weather-worrier-wokeness.
Our energy suicide note – now on steroids
The Australian
Terry McCrann
25 October 2021
It really is quite extraordinary – the way almost the entire political class has declared economic war on their own country and not just the current 26m Australians but all future generations as well.
By ‘political class’, I most certainly do not mean only the politicians.
The term also encompasses big business, the business lobbies, almost all so-called think tanks, academia, almost the entire media, social media techno-dictators, the ‘twitterati twerps’ that infest their platforms, mixed assorted commentators, and of course all those main-chancers greedily eyeing the tens, maybe even hundreds, of billions of dollars of your money that will mandatorily be channelled their way.
They are all united in seeking to attack the Australian economy, plain and simple; to permanently and significantly reduce the standard of living of all present and future Australians.
It is bad enough that with a handful of very honourable exceptions, the entire political class has signed up to the national suicide note that I wrote about first with Kevin Rudd’s carbon tax, by abandoning the use of fossil fuels which have provided the plentiful, cheap and reliable power on which not only all economic progress but indeed our very civilisation has been built.
But it has now become an exercise of criminally irresponsible suicide-on-steroids by refusing to aggressively embrace the only mitigating alternative to the mindless mass hysterical stupidity – the nuclear power that I wrote about last week. If we are to, mindlessly, abandon coal and gas, we have to – we have to – embrace nuclear power and do so very quickly and by sweeping away the unnecessary road-blocks that render nuclear supposedly ‘uneconomic’ by turning what should be 6-10 year builds into 20-25 year ones, and so impossible.
Historical analogies – especially those built on a certain former German dictator – tend to be the first resort of the simple-minded sloganeer and fraught with non-sequiturs.
But in this case it is hard to avoid the comparison with the 1930s. That what almost the entirety of the world has embarked on is the energy equivalent of that decade’s appeasement.
Indeed, worse than appeasement: across the developed world, it’s unilateral energy disarmament in the face of the 2020s version of Hitler’s Germany – President Xi’s China.
Back then, the political class turned a blind eye to Germany’s re-arming; now the far more numerous – and believe me, greater numbers do not spell greater cognisance – political class turns a similar blind eye to China’s energy re-arming.
This is a China which not only already has the world’s biggest ‘fossil fuel armoury’, so to speak – emitting close to 30 per cent of all global CO2 emissions.
But a China which is intent on building its ‘fossil fuel armoury’ ever bigger; is embarked on building, according to Global Coal Plant Tracker’s mid-year analysis, a further 88GW of coal-fired power.
Not planning, not ‘thinking about’, but building, right now – more than three times the entire generation capacity of Australia’s brown and black coal fired power stations.
According to Global Tracker – to emphasise, an anti-coal site – China had another 159GW proposed for construction. And behind China, follows India, Indonesia and Vietnam – a total of more than 250GW (around 10 times Australia’s fleet) either constructing or planned outside China.
And let’s not forget Vladimir Putin’s Russia, maybe prepared to pump a lot more gas, to fill, so to speak, the depleted energy armouries of western Europe as they’ve energy-disarmed themselves.
Maybe, pump more gas; and at a price – at least financial and potentially also political.
The developed world’s energy suicide pacts is all built – in the absence of nuclear – on fantasies; the newest of which is hydrogen, supposedly in turn produced by massive wind or solar installations.
Ah, like so many have sung: The Windmills of your Mind-less.
The Australian
via STOP THESE THINGS
November 4, 2021
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