From Watts Up With That?

Michael Kile

Religion was once described as the opium of the people. Our drug of choice today is climate change. It seduces the addict with a promise of euphoria and treasure: a pot of gold, a grant or some carbon credits at the end of an alarmist rainbow. Monetizing atmospheric carbon dioxide has never been so easy and rewarding. Too much money is being made and influence peddled by too many folk claiming they can control our weather and ‘protect’ the climate.

Many countries are demanding ‘proper reparations’ and ‘climate justice’ too, with much ‘saving the planet’ hyperbole. They are part of the entrenched international racket pursuing a new utopia: ‘climate stability’. We live in an age where this fantasy destination is promoted as both desirable and achievable. Everyone must worship at the shrine of ‘decarbonisation’; everyone except China. Climate change has become a lucrative playground for countless activist lawyers, bureaucrats, computer modellers, green crusaders and politicians.

An alarming “scientists say” media post appears at least every week. Something somewhere is “happening at abnormal times of the year due to climate change”, from summer heatwaves to shark attacks, melting glaciers and sea ice. Yet as blogger Nova noted this month:  every hottest day ever record today is nothing compared to what has already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago. The past is the key to the present and future.

United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, recently warned that a severe El Niño will form soon in the Pacific Ocean. It will “pour fuel on the fire of a warming world”, increasing global temperatures and the risk of ‘super weather’.  What if the cause of any meteorological mayhem is not, as the Secretary-General claims, the world’s “addiction to fossil fuels”, but its addiction to climate catastrophism?

Natural variability is a fact of life. Take this simple test: look in a mirror at least once a decade. Change is what nature does, without our help or influence. As George Orwell once lamented: “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle”. Given the stench around dodgy climate causation, add a nose peg too. Atmospheric water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide. And so on and so forth. 

Karl Marx’s metaphor came to mind on seeing the Minister of Climate Change and Energy defending his $150m climate presidency budget on Sunrise last month: $50 million to prepare for the thirty-first annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP) in Antalya, Turkiye, this November; and $100 million for “broader Pacific engagement”.

Mr Bowen and his “Pacific family” are high on noble-cause euphoria. Over 100 bureaucrats are involved here, presumably to reassure our Australian family that the money will be well spent. Chasing a climate chimera is an expensive exercise.

He indicated last November a pre-COP meeting would be held “at a location to be determined by our Pacific family friends”. The Prime Minister added that the presidency would enable Australia “to invite world leaders to make sure that the issues confronting this region – the very existence of Pacific island states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, the issue of our oceans – all of those issues will be front and centre.”

A cynic might ask whether the $100m is ministerial payback for the region’s critical support in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) vote that elected Minister Bowen President of Negotiations for COP31, and on other environmental and climate votes.

COP31 was on the agenda when he visited Fiji in late August 2023 to discuss “cooperation on climate action” and how the region “could maximise the opportunities of the clean energy transformation.”

Australia’s bid for the Pacific to co-host COP31 will also be a topic of discussion, with a strong focus on maximising opportunities for the entire region.  (Department of Climate Change and Energy media release, 21 August 2023)

Australia hopefully is not funding quixotic quests to control El Nino frequency and intensity; to lower sea-levels in an ocean that is almost half the planet’s total water surface area; to “enhance carbon sequestration of ecosystems”, or other dubious schemes.

Whatever the case, the government currently has several agreements with  “Pacific family friends” as part of an ambitious international climate action program.  

 It signed the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty on 9 November 2023 Described as the world’s “first bilateral agreement on climate migration”, it created a “special human mobility pathway” for Tuvalu citizens to live, work, and study permanently in Australia.  The Treaty came into force on 28 August 2024.Tuvalu comprises four reef islands and five coral atolls in Oceania. It has a population of about 10,000 people.

In November 2024, Minister Bowen launched the Australia-Pacific Partnership for Energy Transition (APPET) at COP29. This $50 million grant is “to support Pacific nations transitioning away from fossil fuels, improve energy security, reduce electricity costs and build the skills and tools to support the energy transition”.

There is also a 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Our Pacific family wants to create a “future-ready” region by “anticipating and preparing for hazardous climate events while advocating for urgent global action.”

The Blue Pacific Continent continues to experience damaging impacts of climate change and requires timely access to scaled-up, effective and sustainable climate finance.

Our ambition is that all Pacific peoples remain resilient to the impacts of climate change and disasters and are able to lead safe, secure and prosperous lives. In addition, the region continues to play a leadership role in global climate action.

In 2023 a Pacific Resilience Facility was established as “a financing institution and vehicle for funding climate change adaptation, increased resilience and disaster risk initiatives in the Pacific region, including grants for so-called “loss and damage projects”. To justify building ‘resilience’ in the climate context also requires sustainable alarmist rhetoric.

A mantra often heard in Canberra is that Australia “punches above its weight.”  It certainly does so with coal, gas and iron ore exports; and solar panel, wind turbine and battery imports.

WA is already a “world leader in battery storage capacity”, according to Synergy CEO, Kurt Baker. Perth’s two-billion dollar plus Kwinana batteries can power 354,000 homes for four hours.  What happens after 240 minutes is unclear, at least to me.

Roman Loosen, chief operating officer at Fluence, a battery technology company controlled by Siemens and AES, agrees with him: “Australia is clearly leading the worldwide agenda and being a lighthouse basically regarding the renewables transition.”

Few folk, however, are prepared to speculate on precisely what impact the so-called “renewables transition” will have on our weather and climate. Could it be that the expensive Net Zero projects will have zero effect? Surely not.

Has Australia punched above its weight in the climate ring? History suggests otherwise. It is “our Pacific family” of 14 islands, together with another 25 pugilistic countries that comprise the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), that have played the long game here.

How did AOSIS, with less than one percent of global GDP, territory and population, become so influential? The answer: the Alliance’s significant voting power in the UNGA. Small Island States make up 20 percent of the 193 UN member states. Each state has only one vote. Tuvalu has the same vote as Australia or the USA. UNGA voting is by consensus. When the UN was created in 1945 only 51 countries joined as founding members.  Another 142 countries have joined it in the past 81 years.

AOSIS formed as an intergovernmental group in 1990, just before the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva. It emerged from a 1989 Small State Conference on Sea Level Rise in the Maldives, where a decision was taken to fight the “threats of global warming and rising sea levels”. No small island developing state has vanished under the ocean in the past 36 years.

AOSIS’s primary goal in global climate policy is ensuring the physical survival of its member nations by aggressively combating global warming and its resulting sea-level rise. Because small island developing states (SIDS) are disproportionately vulnerable to environmental destruction while contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse emissions, their unified diplomatic platform prioritizes two main areas within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC):

Limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C, the “1.5 to Stay Alive” standard: AOSIS pioneered the push to strictly cap global temperature increases at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, warning that a 2°C rise represents an existential threat to low-lying countries; and

Ambitious mitigation targets: AOSIS demands rapid and legally binding emission reductions from major industrialized nations, arguing that those most responsible for environmental damage must bear the greatest responsibility.

On May 20, 2026, AOSIS achieved one of its goals. UNGA passed a resolution (Draft Resolution A/80/L.65) backing the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 23 July 2025: Obligations of States with respect to Climate Change.

Nations now have obligations under international law to ensure “protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.” Some of them, including Australia, may one day have to pay “reparations” to allegedly climate-vulnerable Pacific communities.

The resolution was supported by 141 states, including Australia, the EU and most developing nations.  Eight states voted against it, including some of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers: USA, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Israel and Yemen. There were 28 abstentions, including India and Türkiye.

While the UNGA resolution and ICJ advisory opinion are not legally binding, they are important. UN Secretary-General António Guterres praised the vote as a “powerful affirmation” of climate justice and international law.

Ironically, the diplomatic push here came from our Pacific family punching above its weight. Vanuatu‘s prime minister, Jotham Napat, said the resolution was the start of a “new chapter” in climate action. “The task before all of us now is to translate legal clarity into meaningful action, stronger cooperation, and greater protection for present and future generations.”

Will climate litigation now become the most lucrative game on the planet after AI and the World Cup? The so-called “climate-vulnerable” communities, the small island states and other developing countries are dancing a resilience-and-reparations tango with renewed vigour. 

In our age of post-normal science monetizing climate change clearly continues to corrupt research, governments and international agencies. Orwell again: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”  A pot of gold at the end of an alarmist rainbow corrupts language and thought too.

The above essay was first published in Australia at Quadrant Online on 19 June, 2026

Michael Kile is the author of The Devil’s Dictionary of Climate Change.