Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The lawfare operation Good Law Project has demanded the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom stop the Murdoch-owned Talk station broadcasting “climate misinformation”. In campaign literature it claims that “toxic channel” Talk, “regularly spouts misinformation about the climate crisis”, using a headline claim that a guest recently said climate science “doesn’t add up to a row of beans”. Alas, this is wholly incorrect.
The lawfare operation Good Law Project has demanded the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom stop the Murdoch-owned Talk station broadcasting “climate misinformation”. In campaign literature it claims that “toxic channel” Talk, “regularly spouts misinformation about the climate crisis”, using a headline claim that a guest recently said climate science “doesn’t add up to a row of beans”. Alas, this is wholly incorrect. Your correspondent should know, I am supposed to have said it. What in fact I observed last November to presenter Ian Collins (here, at one hour 15 minutes) was that Net Zero promoters “were backing it up with science that doesn’t add up to a row of beans”.
As an independent journalist covering climate and Net Zero for a number of years, I would never dismiss the entirety of climate science in this childish way. A check via Grok confirms this statement. There is some good science around climate and there is a great deal of bad, at times fraudulent, work. Misrepresenting my words could be considered highly damaging, libellous even, although on this occasion I am inclined to discount malevolence in favour of incompetence. I could demand a correction, but on the other hand, who gives a toss.
The Good Law Project is an activist operation promoting what are described as progressive causes. It receives funding from individual donations, but also collects cash from foundations such as Joseph Rowntree, the hard-Left money tree. Also listed as a donor is Dale Vince, owner of the state-subsidy dependent Ecotricity. This latest attack on science and political free speech also involves an outfit called Stop Funding Heat (SFH). This is a small band of activists that recently persuaded Damian Carrington of the Guardian to take up its cause. He quoted campaigners who claimed Ofcom was allowing GB News and others to “flout” accuracy rules and broadcast “climate change denial”. Just two broadcast media in the UK offer any critical perspective on climate change. The rest hide behind the preposterous notion that the science is ‘settled’ and use this convenient bias to promote the Net Zero fantasy.
In a letter dated January 26th on behalf of SFH to Ofcom, the Good Law Project says its client has submitted 71 complaints since April 2024 about “climate misinformation and bias broadcasting” by GB News and Talk. Except for two still under review, all are noted to have been dismissed. It further states that information from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Guardian reveals 1,221 complaints about the alleged misinformation were submitted to Ofcom over the last five years. Each of these complaints was rejected.
Five specific Talk broadcasts are singled out for attack. Many of the comments complained about are simply political opinions protected, one might still hope, under freedom of expression laws. For instance, on November 27th last year, presenter Mark Dolan said that “if we didn’t have this insane, self-destructive, zealous approach to Net Zero, the crazy, unsustainable target – then many of those tax rises, if not all of them yesterday would simply not have been necessary”. Here we have robust commentary on a Labour Government driving the country’s finances off a cliff – last time anyone looked, it was allowed. On the same broadcast, Daily Sceptic contributor Ben Pile commented that electric vehicles were” an attempt to make people obedient, not an attempt to offer a climate solution”. Those who know Ben are aware that he is perfectly capable of making an intellectual argument that forcing people to buy EVs is making them obey a political command.
In addition to the “row of beans” quote, I was also accused of stating that people had been “crying wolf” about climate change. Forty years of constant climate scares that never occur is the unanswerable proof that backs up this claim. I am also said to have “misrepresented facts” and cited false claims. Needless to say, I am obliged for the lecture on misrepresentation from this particular source.
The political writer Brendan O’Neill offered the opinion that Labour’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”. For Exhibit A in consideration of unfalsifiable pseudoscience, we need look no further than the media and lawfare friendly field of weather attribution. Author Rupert Darwall referred to claims of climate breakdown and said it was “absolutely outrageous that they are scaring children about something that is not going to happen”. Exhibit B might be the numerous reports of children and young adults needing therapy for so-called climate anxiety.
Green activists and lawfare merchants are encouraged to tittle tattle to Ofcom because the state regulator still holds that the scientific principles behind what it falsely claims is a ‘theory’ of anthropogenic global warming are broadly settled. The legal case is advanced that alternative explanations and opinions must be inaccurate and are therefore in breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code. But as Eric Worrall recently pointed out, the problem with enforced agreement on the facts is that in science, “there is no such thing as a fact which cannot be challenged”. Perhaps these wise words could influence any ‘sod off’ reply that Ofcom makes to the complaining letter.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
The poor suffering Blob experts are losing the information war
They can’t seem to get a break, even with all the Governments, bankers, media, universities and the United Nations to help them.
If only they had truth on their side, they could just explain it, but since they don’t — the next best thing is publishing concocted studies demonizing the truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists, and blaming profiteering Big-tech. Free speech is so dangerous, they warn, that “Elon Musk-owned X lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 99% of the posts”. Ninety nine percent! Clearly, The Blob wants warnings and labels on every single damn tweet. No moment in the public town square can be left unguarded.
We can’t have adults thinking for themselves! And that’s the thing isn’t it, there is something profoundly condescending and undemocratic about those who believe adults can’t be trusted to have conversations that no one corrects, live, one tweet at a time. The incredible unbridled smuggery of the Blobocrats is there for all to see, (as is the desperation) yet so rarely mocked, tarred and feathered as required.
But it’s true, climate misinformation (put out by Professors) puts lives at risk — right now people are dying because they can’t afford air conditioning or heating. Climate sorcerers at universities took public money and told them the “science was settled” and they needed to redirect jet-streams with solar panels and windmills. It was a wanton electro-weather experiment that pushed the price of electricity up.
Censorship is the real killer
Climate misinformation can always be fixed if the skeptics are not censored
Major social media platforms are enabling and profiting from misinformation around extreme weather events, endangering lives and impeding emergency response efforts, a research group said Tuesday.
The report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)—which analyzed 100 viral posts on each of three leading platforms during recent natural disasters including deadly Texas floods—highlights how their algorithms amplify conspiracy theorists while sidelining life-saving information.
Just name-calling:
“The influence of high-profile conspiracy theorists during climate disasters is drowning out emergency response efforts,” the report said, adding that the trend was “putting lives at risk.”
The crime of writing something un-fact-checked!
Nearly all of the analyzed posts on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram lacked fact-checks or Community Notes, a crowd-sourced verification system increasingly being adopted as an alternative to professional fact-checkers, the report said.
DeSmog are now “reporters on climate misinformation” (and prophets too):
Following natural disasters, misinformation tends to surge across social media—fueled by accounts from across the political spectrum—as many platforms scale back content moderation and reduce reliance on human fact-checkers, often accused by conservative advocates of a liberal bias.
“Climate disinformation costs lives,” said Sam Bright of DeSmog, which reports on climate misinformation campaigns.
“As extreme weather events become more and more frequent, these falsehoods will only get more dangerous.”
Converting power stations to global air conditioners costs a trillion or two, and the price is not just money, but blood, sweat and tears.
Mortality increases in rooms that are too cold or too hot, and financial stress increases death rates. For example…
Cumulative hazards for mortality across each level of financial strain are shown. The light blue line indicates severe financial strain, or those who reported not having enough monthly income to make ends meet. The orange line indicates moderate financial strain, or those who reported having just enough to make ends meet. The dark blue line indicates those with no financial strain, or those who had more than enough money to make ends meet.
It ranks only tied 5th as the hottest, behind 1846, 1676, 1826 and 1822.
But to admit that would destroy their global warming narrative, which their article predictably wheels out:
They can’t even claim that Central England is not representative of the country as a whole. Their own data shows that the central region had some of the highest anomalies.
Their UK and England datasets are in any event worthless, filled as they are with so many junk stations, with temperatures increased by as much as 5C because of poor siting. Even the CET includes two near junk Class 4 sites and could therefore be overstated by at least 1C.
If proper error margins were applied, June 2025 would only rank as 31st warmest.
The Met Office know full well that none of these junk sites are supposed to be used for climatological purposes. The fact they continue proves they are more interested in political propaganda than science.
Rampant climate misinformation is turning the crisis into a catastrophe, according to the authors of a new report.
…
The researchers found climate denialism has evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.
…
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.
…
She said states should “criminalise misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” and “criminalise media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies”. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called in June 2024 for a ban on advertising by fossil fuel companies, calling the firms the “godfathers of climate chaos”.
The Guardian confusingly conflates two separate events, a new report by our old friend John Cook, and a UN report presented by Elisa Morgera.
On this occasion, UN rapporteur Elisa Morgera actually produced a more extreme report than John Cook. The UN report includes a demand to immediately cancel all fossil fuel exploration. From Morgera’s UN report;
The imperative of defossilizing our economies
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, Elisa Morgera*
…
58. States should adopt and enforce explicit and time-bound legislative measures:
(a) expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure;
To prohibit new fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, as well as any
(b) To revoke licences for existing fossil fuel exploration and exploitation,163 including for captive and on-grid coal plants;164
(c) To strictly regulate the import and export of fossil fuels;
(d) To prohibit the abandonment of fossil fuel infrastructure without remediation, requiring financial guarantees to cover costs for the environmental management of facility closure and subsequent phases, including regarding extraterritorial impacts;
(e) To clarify how energy services will be maintained and improved through other sources, prioritizing the energy needs of rights holders in vulnerable situations domestically and abroad.
…
73. States should:
(a) Inform the public about the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate contributions to the planetary crises and about their human rights impacts over decades;
(b) Ensure that accurate, science-based information is made available to the public on defossilization plans, including the underlying economic and technological assumptions, fossil fuel subsidies inventories, emissions embedded in fossil fuel exports, and plans for the decommissioning of infrastructure;
(c) Avoid loopholes in responsible decommissioning,190 and require independent verification of defossilization and decommissioning plans, and of their implementation;
(d) cross-border advertising;
Ban fossil fuel advertisements, promotion and sponsorship, including
(e) Ensure access to comprehensive education on the human rights risks of fossil fuels, and on the benefits of fossil fuel-free production, consumption and lifestyles; 191
(f) Prohibit lobbying by the fossil fuel industry;
(g) Require private financial institutions and universities to disclose publicly, including on social media, funding amounts, durations and any conditions from the fossil fuel industry;
(h) Criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry, including failure to disclose corporate lobbying activities or to provide remedies for harm;
(i) Criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies;
(j) Criminalize attacks against environmental human rights defenders, including from judicial harassment tactics,192 in addition to enhancing environmental human rights defenders’ protection and access to justice and effective remedies.193
Morgera’s report is available here. Cook’s report, Recommendations for Improving Information Integrity about Climate Issues, is available here.
Cook’s report also calls for more censorship, of course, but you have to wade through over 100 pages of what looks like AI generated gibberish to get to the censorship call;
Legislation and regulation. Legislation represents collectively agreed rules of social and human coexistence, including principles and procedures governing the exchange of information and the expression of opinion. While digital platforms and other media of communication, to an extent, regulate themselves internally and in dialogue with their users, the record regarding information integrity about climate science, as documented in this report, indicates the need for enhanced governance in the public interest.Read more: John Cook’s report
Despite the absurdity of UN demands for a total stoppage of fossil fuel exploitation, and John Cook’s ongoing global conspiracy claims, the climate censorship movement is a very real threat to our freedom. The censorship movement is much bigger than a bunch of disgruntled academics and big oil conspiracy theorists, and may even threaten free speech in the USA.
In 2024 Elon Musk accused the European Union of offering a secret deal to X, where X would be immune from prosecution for violating Europe’s Digital Services Act, in return for allowing European officials to secretly censor the entire X platform – including content US citizens produce and read. Musk claimed other major social media platforms accepted the secret deal.
I applaud people like Musk, Trump and Vance for standing against the forces of global censorship and tyranny, I just wish more global leaders were standing next to them.
Retired physicist leading new Trump effort to question climate threat to security
President Donald Trump’s administration found a way to formally question climate science after almost 2 years of false starts.
William Happer, a prominent opponent of climate science in the Trump administration, is heading a new White House effort to downplay the national security risks posed by climate change. It resembles the “red team” approach promoted by scandal-plagued former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
William Happer: Trump aide pushing climate denial inside the White House – Happer, now 79, remembers standing from his seat in the back of a meeting and telling Gore, ‘What you’ve said is absolutely incorrect,’ according to Caleb Rossiter, who Happer helped recruit to run an organization he founded that questions climate science.
There is an old saying from WW2, when you are taking flack, you know you are over the target.
Who else would like to see Dr. Will Happer once again in a position to jolt academia out of its comfort zone? I hear there are still a few positions vacant in the Trump administration.
The Academy’s acceleration will up our net-zero cost of $3 trillion , but whether it doubles it or quadruples it I have no idea. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 has already had a five-fold cost blow-out to $10 billion-and-rising.
Is the Labor government’s drive for 43 per cent CO2 emission cuts by 2030 — and net-zero by 2050 — a tad unrealistic? As Climate Minister Chris Bowen has mentioned, the CO2 cuts require 22,000 more 500W solar panels each day from now till 2030, and at least one new 7MW wind turbine every day to 2030.[1] We are to hook all this gear up with more than 10,000km of high voltage pylons. That’s about seven times the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane, as the rather exhausted crow flies.
Unrealistic? Not at all, according to the experts at the Australian Academy of Science. In a submission to government on July 14, the Academy wants the targets close to doubled. It says the emission cuts by 2030 should be 74 per cent[2] and net-zero should be brought forward 15 years to 2035, 12 years hence. So make that roughly 40,000 new solar panels every day – bought from China, I assume- and daily installation of about three 7MW turbines until 2030.
The Academy’s acceleration will up our net-zero cost of $3 trillion , but whether it doubles it or quadruples it I have no idea. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 has already had a five-fold cost blow-out to $10 billion-and-rising.
What’s a 7MW turbine involve? The 180 biggies for the Macintyre windfarm in Queensland are only 5.7MW. A turbine of 7MW is a 110m tower of steel and concrete on a vast concrete base, with total height, including 160m blade diameter, close to 200m. (These blades defy recycling). Each turbine involves about 200 hectares of cleared land, along with rare and highly-toxic minerals and lubricants and more than 20 tonnes of copper.
So what, says the Academy climate experts, pencilling in more than 5000 of these beasts by 2030! I hope all the construction isn’t wasted – the turbines’ output is zero during the wind droughts across the Eastern States that can last for days, lulls overlooked by turbine advocates.
The Academy is, ahem, apolitical. Its science policy director, Chris Anderson, has his name on the July submission. He has a Monash University honours degree in history and a Melbourne University Master’s in Public Policy. Pre-Academy, he had been adviser and then chief of staff for six years to Labor Senator, Rudd-Gillard minister and factional warriorKim Carr. Mr Anderson reports to Academy CEO Anna-Maria Arabia who attained Academy leadership in 2016 after three years part-time as policy director/principal adviser for then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.[3]
The submission says,
The Academy supports building to this more ambitious target – noting the effort and behavioural changes that must be made to get even close.
To give you a feel for the “behavioural changes”, there’s some overseas reports. A UK government-funded report from Cambridge University engineerslate last year says that to dump CO2 by 2050 – never mind by the Academy’s 2035 – UK construction sites would have to do without CO2-intensive bricks, glass and cement. The group’s previous report said that for the UK to get to zero-2050, all flying and shipping must stop, beef and lamb are to be severely rationed, along with home cooking and heating. Car traffic (even when it’s all electric) must fall by 60 per cent. These two reports, sensibly, don’t assume that presently untried or half-baked technologies will come to the rescue of our comfortable lifestyle.[4]Our Academy’s submissions swarm with such get-out-of-jail-free cards.
But this net-zero push is all impracticable anyway, because the world’s mining industry can’t possibly output the extra metals and materials needed, as the International Energy Association (IEA) has indicated. To meet the theorised demand for “clean energy technologies” by 2040, the IEA says key minerals supply must increase between two and four times. Electric vehicles and battery materials alone (graphite, copper, nickel etc) must increase by ten to thirty times.[5] But finding and developing even one new ore body involves a decade or more, assuming green lawfare doesn’t strangle such a project at birth.Adam Creighton in The Australian this week wrote,
Indeed, to accommodate the desired rollout of electric vehicles, the mining and processing of the minerals that underpin them, such as cobalt, nickel and lithium, would need to increase by several thousand per cent by 2040, according to Mark Mills, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute. “If it were to be achievable, it would be the largest single increase in demand or the supply of metals in all of human history,” he said.
Undeterred, the Academy’s submission begins pamphlet-style: “It is beyond dispute that climate change is one of the greatest threats to Australia’s social, economic, and ecological well-being.” Beyond dispute? Well, Australia’s crop output and wheat yields, and global yields, were at record or near-record levels last year after a century of healthy global warming plus CO2 fertilisation. And Australia’s social well-being has never been higher, thanks to $244 billion earnings from our energy exports last year. These economic foundations are threatened not by climate change but by green fatwas and lawfare against fossil-fuel production, abetted by the Academy, GetUp, the Greens and the metropolitan Aboriginal Industry. And ecologically, added CO2 has greened the planet and shrunk deserts equivalent to two and a half times the Australian land mass,according to peer-reviewed research co-authored by the CSIRO.
The Academy submission continues, avoiding mention of that emissions powerhouse China,
While we have a real need for action, Australians cannot do what needs to be done on our own; we share one planet and atmosphere. Along with every other citizen of every other country, Australians need action to be taken – locally and globally.
It is imperative, therefore, that Australia work with all members of the global community to achieve more ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction than those that have been announced so far.
As a rich, developed country, Australia should play a leadership role in mitigation and adaptation to climate change. We should lead by example; our actions should be clear and our ambitions achieved. We should pursue a ‘do as we do’ style of leadership, not a ‘do as we say.’
The unmentioned China is not only dwarfing the emissions of the entire Western world, but last year was approving two new coal-fired electricity plants a week, for a year’s increase that is four times Australia’s total coal-fired electricity of 23GW. In mid-July, dictator Xi Jin-ping brutally rebuffed Biden climate envoy John F. Kerry in Beijing. Xi announced that China would generate energy at a rate and type to suit itself, regardless of Paris Accord pieties.[6]With China heading for record-high emissions this year, I doubt Xi will notice Australia “leading by example”. Across Europe, governments and voters are now pushing back against net-zero folly and expense.
Further perusal of Academy work turned up its surprising point (if I read the woozy syntax correctly)that being critical of the Chinese communist dictatorship smacks of “McCarthyism”.[7] The paper was co-authored by the Policy Director Anderson and specifically endorsed by the Academy president and CEO. McCarthyism is a 70-year-old term obscuring that Cold War US institutions were indeed riddled with Communist spies, traitors and sympathisers, as proven by the Venona code-breakers.[8]
The Academy’s July submission continues that Australians should not only blitz their own emissions, but “embrace our responsibility” and “intensify efforts” to measure and cut indirect emissions from our huge coal and gas exports (“Scope 3” emissions) and indeed from “all sources”, which might mean farm fertilisers and cow belches (probably harmless anyway).
By taking these actions, Australia can contribute to a comprehensive and better global response to climate change, managing our own future and that of the planet.
Intrigued by the Academy’s style, I’ve been checking out its other submissions and policies – including its “Yes” support last June for the referendum which does some dogmatic re-writing of history.[9] It has not yet submitted on PM Albanese’s draft censorship bill threatening $2.75 million fines (or 2 per cent of turnover, whichever is higher) for tech giants who host “misinformation” causing “serious harm” on their platforms.[10] But here’s from the Academy’s submission last August, which urged amendments to the Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation to make the tech giants harass and censor unwelcome media.
The Code currently excludes professional news content that is published under a publicly available editorial code, except where a platform determines that specific instances fall within the scope of disinformation. However, some Australian news outlets are havens for climate science misinformation – so this exclusion undermines the ability of the Code to guard against such denialism.
This exclusion allows climate science denialism and other misinformation to flourish, either through lack of enforcement of the disinformation provision of the Code or failure of news outlets’ misinformation to meet the higher bar of being considered disinformation. For example, a UK report recently found that Sky News Australia and its media personalities are a key source of climate science misinformation globally, including during the late 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference … Clearly, the Code was not sufficient to address the traction of climate misinformation from Sky News Australia during this time.
Read the Academy’s full horror-show here: “Shut Them Up, Argues the Academy of Science“. And recall how much alleged “misinformation” during COVID turned out to be valid and vice-versa.
I suppose the views of last year’s Nobel Laureate in physics John Clauser are suppression-worthy. His favoured climate model has cumulus-cloud feedbacks as a dominant thermostatic control. He told a Korean quantum conference (see transcript) this month that there is no climate crisis; the peer review checks have broken down. “In my opinion,” he has said, “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” His views also include that “misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience” . As a result the IMF abruptly cancelled his seminar talk scheduled for July 25. Obviously the Australian Academy would not want ‘misinformation’ from Nobel physics laureates to cast doubt on its climate papers like “The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world” (2021).[11]
The Academy did make an interesting, albeit timid, submission last January on Australia’s legislative ban on nuclear energy. It complained that Australia needs more nuclear experts – “there are as few as three permanent experimental nuclear physics researchers in Australia … These nuclear science capability gaps affect a broad range of fields, including medicine, space radiation, quantum technologies, and defence.” The submission strangely omits mention of emissions-free baseload nuclear power generation, which is unpalatable to the Albanese government.
However the Academy does say its position is unchanged since its 2019 submission on nuclear power by then-president John Shine to the Morrison government.
I looked that up to find Professor Shine calling for an end to government bans on nuclear power plants and strongly endorsing small modular reactors (SMRs) as “a low carbon option that can potentially enable Australia to meet its emission-reduction obligations while providing affordable and safer electricity”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Nationals, who are also advocating SMRs, can be thankful they’ve got the Academy on their side in this stoush with Prime Minister Albanese.[12] Other submissions include:
Clean Energy Superpower-dom
On December 20, 2022, the Academy made a submission to the parliamentary inquiry on “Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower” (whatever that is). The Academy extolled “opportunities to export electricity to South-East Asia via undersea high voltage direct current cables”. Just three weeks later the $35 billion Sun Cable solar project near Darwin, for Singapore’s benefit, went into voluntary administration in a welter of acrimony. For a laugh, visit the scheme’s vainglorious and still-active website, redolent with the pong of over-ripe hype and bovine extrusion. Over-spending and failure to meet milestones were reportedly behind the collapse. (On July 26 the Canadian ATCO group scrapped its small “green hydrogen” project in WA, taxpayers kissing goodbye to $29 million in subsidies from the Renewable Energy Agency).
Noting the harmful impacts of wind/solar electricity on the countryside and on biodiversity, the submission found a vague solution in “social licensing” to operate, thus mollifying farmers, land-owners and Aborigines. It urges, in a new variety of federal socialism, that
Strong national leadership, for example, through a Green Energy Commissioner or existing body such as Infrastructure Australia, can coordinate investment, development, and use of green energy infrastructure and resources to eliminate wasteful duplication and ensure competitiveness.
The submission supported what it calls “a just transition” of workers from officially-condemned fossil-fuel industries into “green energy jobs”. It followed the Academy’s Future Earth conference in 2021 to work out the “just adaptation” strategies. What Future Earth actually delivered as opening plenary speaker was fake Aborigine Bruce Pascoe discussing how whales circa 12,000BC warned his mob in Bass Strait about sea-rises, upon which his peace-loving people joined their peace-loving mainland cousins (shields an optional fashion accessory).
Carbon Capture, August 2022 and July 2023:
The Academy knows emission-cutting sums don’t reach its targets for saving the planet. It has explained,
There is a compelling need to identify what novel scientific and technological approaches might be possible, as well as improving the scalability of existing technologies to address this critical challenge.
It wants to balance the climate ledger by getting CO2 pulled out of the air on a massive scale through “Carbon Capture & Storage” (CCS), and storing it safely for hundreds of years. In itself this requires enormous energy. In 2022 worldwide there were 30 such plants in operation, capturing 42 million tonnes of CO2. In Australia there’s 4-6 million tonnes operational with another 9 million tonnes in prospect in 2025-26. Not much of a ‘wow!’ given that energy-related Co2 emissions are running at 37 billiontonnes a year. The Academy complains that
Australia has no policy to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. In its April 2022 Report, the IPCC identifies that meeting the modelled 1.5°C pathways requires a net negative carbon dioxide emissions volume of 20-660 gigatons by 2100.
Taking the mid-point of that vast range as 320 gigatonnes, that’s nearly ten times current annual human-caused emissions. In 2008 Labor’s PM Kevin Rudd, to make a good impression at an international conference, announced $100 million a year in research dollars for his Global Carbon Capture & Storage Institute, literally more money than its execs knew what to do with. (Rather like PM Turnbull’s $444m out of the blue in 2017 for studying the non-threatened Barrier Reef). Rudd’s vision was for CCS by 2050 to be grabbing 9 billion tonnes of airy CO2. After 15 years the results are derisory.
Electric Vehicles
In a submission on National Electric Vehicle Strategy last October the Academy urged that people be forced out of their petrol/diesel vehicles as “an integral part of our national emissions reduction imperative.” How the grid is to cope with the extra EV demands, doesn’t trouble the Academy. In this case its pipedream is for Australian-designed and produced batteries for next-generation EVs. It acknowledges that current lithium EV batteries are horrid environmentally (just ask the poor kids who mine the minerals in Africa), vulnerable to ageing and prone to annoying fires.
So Australia should pursue creation of next-gen batteries of sodium-ion, along with “fibre batteries and liquid solar-generated fuels such as hydrogen.” If you’re wondering, fibre batteries are millimeters-thin and feeble additions to wearable “smart clothing” and electronics. The global market by 2031 is estimated at a minuscule $US420 million. The Academy concluded, “Australia can develop an end-to-end battery production supply chain, from fundamental research, built in Australia, for the benefit of Australians and the world.” I hope so, notwithstanding that China already has a 60 per cent global dominance of EV battery production.
The July submission with which I started, finishes with a rhapsody in green:
Australia has a lot of strengths; all we have to do is develop them and use them wisely. We are not a superpower but we can be a voice for good.
With that flourish, the writers probably e-scootered to Manuka in quest for a CO2-free celebratory beer.
Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 on-line from Connor Court here.
[3] I don’t know if other ex-Labor alumni are ensconsed at the Academy.
[4] “We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track. For twenty years we’ve been trying to solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting new technology options are being developed, it will take a long time to deploy them, and they won’t be operating at scale within thirty years.”
[5] IEA: “However, a concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (climate stabilisation at “well below 2°C global temperature rise”) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.”
[6] According to the China-dominated United Nations, China continues to get climate concessions as a “developing” nation. Xi said, “the pathway and means for reaching this goal, and the tempo and intensity, should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others.”
[7] Academy: “Rising concerns about Chinese technological advancements have resulted in investigations into links between US-based scientists and China, leading to Chinese claims of McCarthyism—a claim familiar to Australians.”
[8] I’ve yet to see the movie Oppenheimer and how it handles that fact.
[9] “The Academy recognises that this continent was falsely declared terra nullius, or nobody’s land, to legitimise British settlement, and this was corrected only in 1992 when the High Court of Australia recognised the continuous connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the land. The Academy observes that the adoption of terra nullius was profoundly detrimental to generations of Indigenous peoples.” See Michael Connor on the terra nullius fiction.
[10] Plus, “ACMA would be able to establish and enforce its own industry standard. Violations of this standard could lead to companies being fined up to $6.8 million or five per cent of their global turnover.”
[11] It’s a vanity project, with the authors citing their own works multiple times, especially chair Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (16 self-citations), Mark Howden (11 times) Lesley Hughes (10 times), Will Steffen (10 times), and David Karoly and John Church (8 times). Even Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, who is supposed to be reviewing the document, is reviewing herself as she’s cited seven times in the references.[2] Reviewer Jason Evans is cited nine times. Another reviewer is Martin Rice, who works for Tim Flannery’s propaganda outfit Climate Council, but he features only four times in the body of the report.
[12] The plan followed what The Australian on Dec 5, 2022 (paywalled) reported : “Anthony Albanese has scotched a push by South Australian [Labor] Premier Peter Malinauskas to restart the nuclear debate in Australia, citing waste and safety concerns as key reasons nuclear should not be considered as an energy option.”
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