Economic reality bites the net zero faithful

Here’s a wicked political dilemma: When faced with the choice, do you tell a hard truth and risk losing votes, or mouth a popular mantra and lose your soul? The Coalition now finds itself trapped between physics, economics and geopolitics, which expose the net zero by 2050 target as a fantasy, and the iron law of political numbers, which shows abandoning this empty pledge risks electoral damnation. Mishandle this moment and things could get worse, particularly for the Liberals.

So, once again, the remnant opposition finds itself headlining the energy debate, while the real story is that the Albanese government’s energy transition is falling apart.

The government will not meet its 2030 targets, and trying to hit them will waste billions, weaken our electricity grid, destroy businesses and beggar the already poor. Benefits, such as grants for batteries and rooftop solar, will flow to the rich. Despite this, sometime soon, even less credible targets will be set as the government rebrands a fool’s errand as progress.

To argue net zero cannot and will not be achieved is not to deny climate change, but it does defy a powerful orthodoxy. And history has not been kind to heretics.

But how do you ignore glaring, inconvenient facts? After more than a quarter of a century of global pledges to cut fossil fuel use, last year the world burned more coal, oil and gas than in any other year in human history. Global carbon emissions rose again, as they do every year there isn’t a financial crash or a pandemic. Trillions have been spent, trillions more will be demanded, and the one metric that matters keeps pointing to abject failure. That’s not an opinion.

That’s the record. To say nations are not serious about net zero is not a conservative talking point, it simply describes the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Former British Labour prime minister Tony Blair was accused of heresy when he called out climate policies as “unrealistic and therefore unworkable”.

“Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working,” Blair wrote in the foreword to a paper from his institute calling for a reset in climate policy.

Dr Varun Sivaram, an American physicist who was managing director for clean-energy innovation in the Biden-Kerry climate team, has described the global target of net zero emissions by 2050 as “utterly implausible”. He now heads the Council on Foreign Relations’ Climate Realism Initiative.

Both men believe burning fossil fuels is driving climate change.

Both also recognise target-driven policy has failed, because the world’s energy systems are run on the rules of physics, not politics.

But facts don’t matter, because the climate change debate runs on faith, not reason. Net zero is now a central part of the liturgy, a climate communion wafer transubstantiated into salvation through a process no one can explain. Recite the climate creed and anything you say after that, no matter how mad, will be met with cries of amen.

This week, Australian billionaire iron ore magnate and green energy evangelist Andrew Forrest declared in these pages: “The propagation of oil and gas is hurting every person on this planet.”

Except that coal, oil and gas delivered a civilisational leap in human prosperity. For nearly two millennia, global economic growth was glacial. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, world GDP in the year 1 AD was about $182bn (in 1990 international dollars). By 1800, it had risen to $695bn, a fourfold increase over 1800 years. Then came coal, which fuelled the Industrial Revolution.

Between 1800 and 1900, world GDP nearly tripled to $1.9 trillion.

In the 20th century, oil and gas supercharged the transformation, with GDP surging to $41 trillion, a 21-fold rise in just 100 years.

Rich nations are energy rich.

Your standard of living is directly linked to the amount of heat you get to waste, whether you see it or not. The average Australian has around 63,000 kilowatt-hours of energy at their disposal each year.

In the 20th century, life expectancy in Australia rose from about 55 to 77 for men, and 59 to 82 for women, because wealth improves health. But the role of oil and gas in human wellbeing runs deeper still.

These fuels provide the petrochemical building blocks used to make almost all of our essential drugs.

Here let’s bring in UN climate chief Simon Stiell, who, true to his agency’s hysterical form, wound the dial to catastrophe this week as he warned that without stronger climate action, fruit and vegetables could become a once-a-year treat.

It is interesting to note that the data behind this dire fortune-telling does not come from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, which do not forecast megadroughts or food scarcity for Australia. Stiell mixed the most extreme scenarios he could muster into a B-grade schlock-horror script designed to terrify the kiddies into submission.

And the evidence shows fossil fuels don’t starve the planet, they feed it.

Global food production exploded in the 20th century, driven by a surge in yields. Between 1960 and 1997, cropland increased by less than 10 per cent, yet food production nearly tripled thanks to synthetic fertilisers, mechanised farming and oil-powered transport.

At the core of the Green Revolution was the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to pull nitrogen from the atmosphere to make fertiliser. Without gas, half the world’s population would starve.

Before moving on, it’s worth noting Forrest’s condemnation of gas jars with the fact he owns Squadron Energy, the company building a liquefied natural gas import terminal in NSW. The unkind, but not unreasonable, might call this rank hypocrisy. This column will simply observe that the Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

When it comes to divine intervention, the Coalition could use some. One of Australia’s greatest theologians once wisely observed that God’s will is what you make it, so the first step might be to stop making yourself the target. Why not declare a 12-month truce on fighting with each other over targets and direct all that energy outward by spending every waking moment pointing to the high cost, multiple failures and profound risks of the system under construction? Nail down the numbers on every subsidy, expose the massive green grift, point to the deeds of the rest of the world. Pray that the government gets its wish of having tens of thousands descend on Adelaide in 2026 for the global UN climate jamboree and highlight the rank hypocrisy of the most carbon-intensive show on Earth.

Abandoning net zero might well be the goal, but in order to win a war you need to raise an army, and the population is a long way from being recruited to that cause.

But the same polls that show a majority wanting action on climate change also show that people aren’t prepared to pay a high price for it, particularly when advocates promised them it would be cheap.

If people start making the connection between soaring power bills and the true cost of overbuilding a grid with weather-dependent generation, their view on the transition will sour.

Educate the public. Most people have no idea where their power, food or wealth comes from, and they need to make the connection between their lifestyle and what fuels it. Champion getting new gas projects going in NSW and Victoria, which the Greens, the teals and most of Labor will find hard to do because their base has been conditioned to hating all fossil fuel. Champion carbon capture and storage. And stay the course on nuclear energy, which the rest of the world is embracing.

The argument should simply be “lift the ban, have the debate”.

Read the reports of the IPCC and point to the large gaps between what they say about climate change and extreme weather and how they are portrayed by politicians.

Climate change is a problem, but it is not an existential threat.

Net zero is a slogan, not a solution.

If the world is not acting in unison, then nothing Australia does will make a jot’s worth of difference.

We can spend trillions on abatement and then have to spend trillions on adaptation. What sense is there in that? Australia needs to stay wealthy and spend its limited resources where they can do most good. With enough work, what sounds like heresy today may one day look like wisdom.