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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
What makes doctors and nurses members of a community? Can you get a second opinion from a member of a group that thinks the same way?
Using medical professionals of the NHS like priests to deliver a catechism to the congregant opens the possibility of irretrievably damaging that profession’s credibility.
The ‘on-message’ communicators have been deployed to administer ‘anaesthetic to the community’ in these recent race riots. I once heard a nurse declare that anyone who is a racist should be denied healthcare. It has been suggested at the highest level in response to these riots that a racist should be turned away from hospital. An off-message person faces not only de-banking but de-NHS-ing.
As Ronald Reagan said to the doctors when he was shot: “I sure hope you guys are Republican”.
Mark Steyn was denied healthcare in a hospital in America because of his conservative views.
“Thus, the WHO publication states, “Health professionals wear many hats in society – one of which is a trusted community voice.”
In the UK, that time has already passed.
They are agents of the state.
I know better estate agents: they kept me up-to-date.
Every time there’s a mass stabbing of children in Britain, Ireland or Continental Europe the immediate default reaction is “we must stop the (mythical) “Far Right” taking advantage of this and crack down on social media.”
Many people think that scientists in white coats are busy all day studying the climate with barely time to make a cheese roll, and then they run off to government with their findings, and the government then have no choice but to “act now”. —–In reality ofcourse it is government who decided to throw hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money at any and all who could be remotely classed as a scientist, and who would present “studies” from everything to pigs farting a semi tone higher to frogs bursting wide open all entirely due to our use of fossil fuels. ——–But with no empirical evidence.
My understanding is that there are about 420ppm of carbon dioxide (C02) in the atmosphere, or 0.04%. That can also be expressed as 1 molecule of C02 to about 2,400 molecules of everything else. Presumably that is why it is referred to as a trace gas.
Humanity produces an estimated 3 – 4% of global C02 emmisions so for every molecule that we, the whole human race, produce there are around 60 – 80 thousand molecules of everything else.
Given the immense forces at play with the climate, e.g. the continents (comprising mountain ranges, plains, deserts, forests, the ice caps etc), the seas and oceans (70% of the earths surface), the earth’s trajectory around the sun (which changes in long term cycles) and the behaviour of the sun itself, it seems to me to be utterly absurd that the contribution of humanity’s C02 to the atmosphere of 1 to 60-80k can possibly have any impact on our climate whatsoever.
But fret not the Brits will save the day! Our atmospheric contribution of C02, at 1% of human emissions, stands at a heroically muscular 1 molecule in around 6 – 8 million!
In 1841 Charles Mackay published his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. Today’s obsession with ‘controlling’ the climate would surely be included in any update.
Michie The B1tchie in photo ,a proper Communist , moved to the WHO to carry on nudging !!
Herefordshire Sky yesterday afternoon ! Climate Change in full view
It was a nice day, eventually, and hot. You’re not suggesting that the contrails are something else are you?
Don’t be daft I’ve just had a new front door
Can The Panel shed some light on the following questions , WHY is Iz-lamb the Religion of choice to be constantly protected by HMG , WHY does HMG seem to think that Iz-lamb is / or would be easier to live with than us the indigenous ?????
ANYONE ??
Hi Freddy. I’ll have a go if no-one else will.
The case for mass immigration is that we’re not having enough babies and that we need to import more people who are going to generate the wealth that pays for people’s pensions.
Thanks to various geopolitical issues, like Tony Blair’s reckless Iraq war, poking our noses into Afghanistan, and Cameron’s interference in Libya, a lot of the new arrivals are from Islamic countries.
Blair actually believed that these arrivals would become secularised, and that in turn this would lead to the secularisation of the whole Islamic world, complete fool that he is.
It’s a typical fault of the Left, seeing the world as they’d like it to be rather than how it actually is.
If you add to that factors like sensible Islamic countries like Morocco and Algeria making it hot for their troublemakers so that they emigrate to France and Belgium, you can see how it can only lead to trouble for the West generally.
A big irony is that a lot of the arrivals are pretty secular to begin with, but when they find out that life in the West isn’t a bed of roses, they become easy to radicalise.
As for HMG, there’s a deeply embedded post-colonial guilt syndrome built into our establishment, despite the fact that we never colonised any Islamic countries, in the real sense that we never attempted to settle white people there. Plus they’re just too frit to take radical Islamists on.
HTH
Foreshadowed, as always, in H.G.Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
From Book the Fifth, The Modern State in Control of Life, Section 4 Changes in the Control of Behaviour
(*) Gustave de Windt is the original behavioural psychologist who gives the World State the keys to controlling the population.
As they say in the DS, worth reading in full.
Thank you Howard. This sentence jumped out for me: “The alternative was a relapse through chaotic barbarism to animal casualness and final extinction.”
Interestingly some of the worst barbarians have been well educated – Bin Laden, A. H., Pol Pot, and some of the best people have been self taught. Slightly related – I recall an individual asserting the need to people to be controlled otherwise there would be chaos, or something like that. He gave an example of an orchestra which he said ‘would play all over the place if the conductor wasn’t there’. Obviously this person has never played in an orchestra. I was a free-lance musician for 20 odd years and the first professional orchestra I played in I was instructed not to look at the conductor, because he wasn’t that good and it would fall apart if we did. My feeling is it is the learning of a profession that can temper and provide focus for the individual, but this is a much larger topic than my comment can cover here.
Clearly the work is of its time. The first part deals with what led up to the Great War, and it was widely thought that unconstrained individualism, allied to technological advance and the extension of capitalism, leading to competition between nations, was the root cause. Not only that, but the problems hadn’t gone away, so it had already become clear that a catastrophic second world war would be unavoidable, hence the “relapse through chaotic barbarism to animal casualness and final extinction” in the aftermath idea.
It’s the proposed solution through the establishment of a socialistic World State which is the alarming thing from today’s perspective. You can find all the current developments in the pages of the book: technocratic government by “experts”, control of population through pandemics, elimination of national identities and religions, and a limit on the global population.
With Wells it’s never entirely clear whether he was writing a blueprint, a warning, or a satire, or actually all three at the same time, but the flawed nature of the highly educated experts is one of the themes.
Of course the teaching profession will also be used as a “trusted messenger”:
UK children to be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online | Education | The Guardian
“Children will be taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online under planned changes to the school curriculum, the education secretary said.
Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”.”
What if they ended up pointing out the Guardian and the BBC?
Sadly, though they would not would they, they would not be allowed to think quite that critically. Any individual standing out from the crowd would be very quickly ostracised. Just imagine Lord of the Flies …
The effect of this hinges in what is meant by “critical thinking”: if it means that children will be taught to look at the evidence, evaluate it and come to an independent conclusion, all well and good; if, as seems more likely, they are taught to look at the media and adopt the “consensus” view, down the hill we go.
Very well put
The flaw in their scheme is that a very great number of people who don’t believe the Climate Change bollocks, since the Covid Tyranny, also don’t believe a word their low-information doctors say either.
If you switch off the MSM you won’t have to listen to their moronic nudges. And if you ignore the legacy Print Dinosaurs, you won’t have to read them either.
I was talking to a retired GP last week and the subject of the riots came up. According to the ex GP…”it’s amazing really, the person organising the riots is lying on a sunbed in Cyprus.”
For a moment I was lost for words and then I understood. My reply … “you are away with the faeries” ended the conversation. Over the last couple of years that I have known this guy I have come to the conclusion that he is actually bloody thick. He spouts all the covid crap, all the vaccine crap and last week was pushing the shingles vaccine bollox. Two of the group, graduates and retired teachers both, proudly announced that they had recently rolled their sleeves up for the shingles gunk. Actually they are boosted to the hilt and I am surprised they are still with us.
A microbiologist colleague recently advised I take a PCR test as I had been plagued with a horrible cough for over six weeks. The response began with F and ended with Off. Crude I know but these idiots, the intelligent stupid as we call them, really do get me down.
I think this extract from the film Brazil seems almost apt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4KFNhxibec
What is wrong with the NHS? Malcolm Kendrick’s brilliant analysis made the same point as Gary Sidley when arguing that doctors are no longer trusted to use their own professional judgements when deciding what is best for a patient.
Over the last four years my skepticism of medical professionals has gone off the chart. My go-to position when dealing with them is to take everything they say with a large pinch of salt. Furthermore, if I don’t agree with them I tell them. Recently that has resulted in a cardiologist dismissing me from his caseload because I refuse to take statins. Remarkably, as an alternative he offered a twice yearly injection. I had never heard of such. Some interweb searching when I got home revealed that the injections were experimental and had not yet been cleared by the UKHSA, not that that confers any legitimacy. Further discussions with a cardiac nurse last week revealed said injections had been cancelled / abandoned as not proven. Clearly the cardiologist has a lot of reading to catch up on.
During the insane COVID years, face masks were the most obvious symbol of state control of the minds of the sheep-like public. But that experiment unexpectedly worked most satisfactorily, so now it’s moved on to a more blatant extension, apparently to calm public unrest over a number of new issues.
Thousands of conveniently portable and perfectly printed protest banners, with carefully chosen attention-grabbing red and yellow backgrounds, are brandished in every unorthodox public gathering. They’re everywhere. Their messages vary according to the circumstances, and the banners even appear to have identical sticks, to raise them more visibly above the crowds. They instantly appear, supposedly ‘spontaneously’, wherever crowds are induced to gather, apparently reinforcing whatever politically message favours manipulation of the currently fashionable state objectives in controlling public behaviour.
Surely these banners cannot be randomly printed, at incredibly short notice, by numerous print shops all around the country? Or am I being naive again?
Just like all the Convid stickers etc , they must be made and ordered before hand !
No you are not being naïve. The naïvity attaches to those carrying the banners although I would prefer to call them THICK and STUPID.
Sheepdogs nudge sheep to get them to do what the shepherd wants. The sheeple dogs hand out the banners to the sheeple, then who is the sheepleherd?
Indeed.
For an insight into the credulity of celebrities, recall Brass Eye. Chris Morris got several slebs to join fictitious campaigns. Cake as a ‘made-up’ Drug. An elephant called Carla slowly disappearing up its fundament trunk-first. And Pedogeddon, literally ‘Nonce-Sense’.
They lapped it up. David Ames (RIP) even took the topic of ‘Cake’ into the House of Commons.
If anyone hasn’t seen Brass Eye and The Day Today, they’re brilliant satire.
We live in a society with lowering overall IQs. Letting in millions of people feom sh1th013le countries means we are importing lower IQs. And letting DEI hires get a pass with low or no relevant qualifications is another reason. We are becoming South Africa.
It has been clear for some time that “public health” is a political discipline, not a medical one. So don’t confuse public health campaigners with doctors.
Trust me, I’m a public health campaigner.
I see Dame Sharon White on the credits at the end of the film mentioned. No wonder John Lewis has taken a dive she clearly doesn’t check her facts before making important decisions.
Excellent analysis.
Sadly those doctors and other medical professionals who spoke out during the pandemic risked their professional registration and continuing employment. Many are still suffer the consequences.
Wouldn’t surprise me if ” discussion of global boiling” doesn’t appear as a performance indicator in the GP contract and as such will attract a fee!
As a reminder, from the Cochrane mask trial report: “The pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza.”, i.e. based on the EVIDENCE of all the trials conducted before covid, there’s NO evidence face nappies make any difference.
The ‘advantage’ of “centrally constructed protocols to direct healthcare interventions” is that there’s no room for informed discussion.
It’s the difference between being a representative and a delegate: the personification of central planning. New symptoms that don’t fit are not recorded, so they haven’t happened, so the status quo is kept, and mentality coaxed towards NET Zero policies, the ultimate destroyer of the national Economy. I suppose it’s our only hope to rid ourselves of this medical authoritarianism.