While the West Surrenders its Energy Security on the Altar of Net Zero, China Secures 80% of the World's Solar Market With its Coal-Fired Economy

Nick Cater, a senior research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre, “a think-tank that champions Liberal principles and advocates a free, just and prosperous Australia”, has written another excoriating piece for the Australian about Australia’s Net Zero plans.

Cater starts outside by pointing out that while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was keen to castigate the then PM, Scott Morrison, first for not planning to go to COP26 in Glasgow but when he changed his mind and did, for not increasing Australia’s 2030 target. But as it’s turned out, now he’s PM himself, Albanese didn’t roll up to COP28, and nor has he yet made it to COP29.

Cater dives in to turn the knife in the wound:

Could it be embarrassment keeping Albanese away? Indeed, he has reason to feel sheepish, judging from the latest quarterly National Greenhouse Accounts published by the Department of Climate Change and Energy.

Australia’s annual CO₂ emissions have flatlined under Labour. We were responsible for 438 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions in the year to June 2022, a 28% reduction on 2005 emissions. Emissions in the year to June 2024 totalled 440 million tonnes.

So, despite Labour’s bragging and despite all the pain, it has yet to make a gram of progress towards reaching its target of a 35% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Energy prices have rocketed, thousands of hectares of remnant vegetation have been despoiled, the ugly stick has hit landscapes, and farmers have been trussed with green tape. Yet there has been zero progress towards Net Zero in a mere 26 years.

The Government might trot out excuses such as the post-Covid boost to the economy or the self-inflicted surge in immigration. The underlying explanation, however, is that reducing carbon in the atmosphere is extraordinarily difficult. Setting targets is one thing, achieving them quite another.

The electricity sector was responsible for 39.8 million tonnes of emissions in the March quarter of 2022 under Angus Taylor’s watch. In the March quarter this year under Chris Bowen, the total was 39.2 million, a fall of a miserly 1.5%. We can safely say Labour’s 2030 target of an 82% carbon-free electricity grid will not be met. Neither will it hit its overall emissions reduction target of 35% without a moratorium on immigration coupled with a humungous economic recession and a few pandemics.

Australia isn’t the only country struggling to meet the absurd expectations of the global climate elite. In 1995, when the first Conference of the Parties was held in Berlin, the world was emitting 23.5 billion tonnes of carbon. Last year’s total was 37.5 billion tonnes, an increase of 60%.

Cater says COP has been a total failure and left nations with compromised energy security:

The annual nagfest has been hijacked by groups with divergent political agendas, like the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor nations. It is a honey pot for renewable energy rent-seekers, who want governments to skew energy markets in their favour, squeeze out their competitors, subsidise their businesses and fatten their profits.

If the 67,000 delegates at COP29 had an ounce of shame, they’d polish off the caviar and head home with their tails between their legs. The vanity targets set under the Paris accord won’t be met.

The unintended consequences of the zero-2050 fantasy have been severe. Trillions of dollars in global capital have been allocated towards achieving a singular, unachievable goal using unproven technology. It has distracted Western governments from the strategic challenge of energy security. Many European countries were deeply exposed to the disruption of oil and gas imports after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Even worse, the headlong dash towards renewables has only really benefited China, “which processes 67% of the world’s lithium and has cornered 80% of the global solar market”.

Paradoxically, China, the heaviest carbon emitter by some way, is on track to become the world’s only green energy superpower. Yet the heavy manufacturing involved has increased the country’s consumption of coal. A notional reduction of emissions in the Californian transport sector from switching to electric vehicles, for example, will correspond to a rise in emissions in China’s manufacturing sector.

With UN Secretary-General António Guterres screaming for the floodgates of public spending to be torn open, “It is little wonder pulling out of the Paris accord is one of the priorities of Donald Trump’s second Presidency, along with scrapping EV mandates and green energy welfare subsidies.”

With the U.S. withdrawal, none of the world’s four largest emitters – China, the U.S., India and Russia – will be on board with the 2050 target and, given that they produce 60% of the world’s emissions, zero 2050 must be recognised as an ex-target, nailed to the perch like a Norwegian blue parrot whose days of pining for the fjords have expired.

As for the U.K.’s own ludicrous and unmeetable ambitions to reduce us to total energy insecurity, isn’t it about time we all registered a complaint?

Worth reading in full.