Tag Archives: Climate Wars

The Climate Wars ignited again in Australia and Labor’s best argument is just scorn and derision

From JoNova

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

Climate Wars Heating Up in Rural Australia

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Billboard Batallion speaker Wade Northausen visiting from Victoria

To say tempers are running hot over climate policy related bullying and abuse of rural landowners would be an understatement.

I attended an action meeting on the 28th September in Gympie.

Katy McCallum (Kilkivan Action Group – she has featured before in WUWT) along with Jim Willmott presented disturbing footage of wholesale destruction of wilderness areas to make way for the industrial scale wind farm and solar development – vast swathes of trees cut down, corridors 10s of miles long through formerly pristine wilderness.

Wade Northausen of Billboard Battalion along with Michael Griffith of Cafe Locked Out discussed the issues they were facing in rural Victoria.

One of the most disturbing issues raised was about crowd control weapons used against EPIC freedom protestors in 2022.

The Aussie government has admitted to using LRADS, sonic weapons, to disperse the anti-vaccine mandate protest, though they claim the LRADs were not configured as weapons.

But the people I spoke to claim they were burned – burns which took weeks to heal. Sonic LRAD weapons don’t cause burns, they hurt your ears.

Perhaps something other than an LRAD was deployed. The US military developed a microwave radiation crowd dispersal weapon a decade ago, dubbed the “pain ray” in some popular press articles. The microwave weapon looks a lot like the LRAD weapon, the antenna superficially has a similar shape. The microwaves projected by the ADS weapon are not the same as your microwave oven, they are designed to be far less penetrating, to minimise the risk of injury – but they can still reportedly cause second degree burns.

Left LRAD sound cannon. author: Adam Kliczek, http://memoriesstay.com (CC-BY-SA-3.0), CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, via Wikimedia Commons. Right ADS Microwave weapon. Source US Air Force.

I don’t know for sure what happened that day, I wasn’t there – but I was horrified at first hand accounts I listened to from protestors who claim they suffered inexplicable burns.

The meeting speakers also mentioned the need to avoid excessive organisational centralisation. I contributed a little to the discussion on this issue, I said “the one thing they can’t cope with is a brush fire”. I also pointed out the tendency of European populist leaders of centralised activist groups to have unfortunate automobile accidents, which got a round of applause from the audience. The leaders I was thinking of were Austrian politician Jörg Haider, who died in an automobile accident in 2008, after his party unexpectedly won almost a third of the vote in national elections, and Britain’s Nigel Farage, who also suffered a suspicious automobile accident while campaigning for Brexit, though thankfully Farage’s accident was not fatal.

The speakers were (thanks to Marie):

Allona Lahn – No Jab No Play

Marleen Owen – Feed the homeless

Michael Griffith – Cafe Locked Out

Wade Northausen – Billboard Battalion (Victoria)

Katy McCallum & Jim Willmott – Kilkivan Action Group

Craig McManus – My Place Gympie

All the speakers were very careful to insist that everyone should remain within the law.

My overall impression – these are ordinary people, law abiding rural folk, who are being bullied and disrespected by government backed big green, mixed in with some vaccine freedom protestors. Some fiery things were said, but nobody, not a single person I saw speaking or spoke to afterwards, advocated any form of law breaking – other than the lockdown freedom marches they participated in. Most of the speakers very explicitly advised people not to break the law or make people feel threatened, and there were also explicit warnings from speakers to respect the privacy and families of politicians and other protest targets, and not to approach the private homes of politicians, only their official offices, if people wanted to conduct any form of protest.

Leave law breaking and violence to the greens.

There was some merchandise available. I bought a hat with 8:32 written on it, full marks if you know what it means.

4.8

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The beginning of the end of Net Zero?

By JoNova

The seismic shift in UK politics that started with the Uxbridge byelection continues apace. It’s the dawning realization that anyone who tries to gift wrap Climate Pain at the election is a sitting duck if their opponents only oppose it. As fast as Rishi Sunak backtracks on Green sacred promises, the Labor Party is working out that their green flank is exposed to election winning missives.

Writers in both The Telegraph and The Financial Times in the UK are suggesting it’s “the end” — the political collapse of the open support for a reckless race to NetZero from both sides of politics.  CNN reports that Rishi Sunak is “stoking a culture war on Green policies”.  Hallalujuh. Since Uxbridge, “leading Conservatives have gleefully picked up the anti-green baton.” They’re taking a “populist approach to the climate”. Glory be! How dare they, in a democracy, do something that’s popular?

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

Thanks to NetZeroWatch

Starmer is about to be humiliated by the global retreat from Net Zero

SHERELLE JACOBS, The Telegraph

Tories aren’t just playing politics. The geopolitical ground is shifting beneath the eco fanatics’ feet

This could be the beginning of the end of net zero. Eight years ago, it burst into our lives, a rapturous crusade of ambitious legislation, geopolitical grandstanding and share-boosting green PR. Today, what so many have exalted as an era of rapid, momentous change looks set to go down as the biggest damp squib in Western history.

Even Tony Blair is telling the new Labor leader to back off and be sensible

His mentor, Tony Blair, has already turned up the pressure. In an interview last week, the former PM started to lay the groundwork for a net-zero row-back on the centre-Left, warning that the public should not be asked to do a “huge amount” on climate change when China is emitting so much. The intervention is unlikely to have gone down well in the Starmer camp. The current Labour leader seems to want to go down in history as the politician who delivered Britain to the net-zero promised land. He has long fancied himself as Britain’s answer to Franklin Roosevelt, delivering a shot in the arm to a zombie economy with a green jobs bonanza.

Jacobs argues that the War, the pandemic and the security threat from China have triggered the awakening:

But the real killer blow to net zero is the new Cold War with China. When Obama pushed for the Paris Agreement in 2015, the West still imagined that it could treat China as a diplomatic partner, balancing icy exchanges over trade with smiling solidarity on climate change. Today, though, Western elites are finally accepting that Beijing is a strategic enemy – and that the West would be taking an intolerable risk if it were to blindly plough ahead with net zero as China carries on with its pursuit of relentless growth. And from Washington to Westminster, it is at last dawning on politicians that Beijing has seized on net zero to gain a foothold in energy infrastructure, dominating the manufacture of everything from wind turbines to EV battery software.

But really, the anti-carbon delusion laid the foundations for its own demise. It’s too stupidly expensive to survive in the real world.

Janan Ganesh, The Financial Times

The beginning of the end of Britain’s net zero consensus 

Let us dispose of the idea that net zero is popular…. Last month, a YouGov poll found that around 70 per cent of adults support net zero. If this entailed “some additional costs for ordinary people”, however, that share falls to just over a quarter. The wonder isn’t the political faltering of net zero. The wonder is that it took until Uxbridge.

Janan Ganesh dares to imagine a Tory leader pointing out the banal truth that the UK makes only 1% of global emissions, and will spend billions to achieve nothing.

And what will that cost achieve? Not a material dent in the climate problem, but the setting of a moral example, as though India and China set their watches by us. Liberals forever accuse us on the right of overrating Britain’s sway in the world. Well, look who is grandstanding now.”

Faced with this message, what does Labour do? Allow itself to contest election after election as the expensive but righteous party? It is beyond imagining. And so the net zero consensus will break down from both sides. …

It’s hard to believe, after skeptics have said this for years, that this would finally trip up the Labor Party — perhaps the difference is that — apart from Trump — few major political leaders in the West have dared to challenge the dogma and keep hammering until they score a win.

The Climate Wars are not ending yet though. If the open battle ends, as long as believers believe, the science is corrupted, and the Big Bankers meet for Skiing Trips in Davos, the climate battles will just go underground, or morph into a slightly different version of Grifter-Gravy. It has to be cut down at the source. End the UN. Break up the EU. Mock the WEF.

 — UK Flag photo: Rian (Ree) Saunders

Picture of Rishi Sunak by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street