Australian Government living in a net-zero fantasy. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.
Because the Albanese government now never talks of its “net-zero” energy commitments, the IGR [Intergenerational Report] has been given a free pass for its ludicrous passages on net zero…
The IGR contains plenty of government propaganda that simply contradicts reality, such as: “Australia’s energy transition is well under way, with cleaner, cheaper, renewable energy …”
But the passages on net zero deserve special mention for they perfectly reprise one of the very worst dynamics in contemporary policy. There is a fantasy that much of the world will reach net zero by 2050, and the rest of the world not too long after. …
By pretending that what is at best an impossible aspiration is actually going to happen, the government and its subservient institutions create a toxic feedback loop of bad information that justifies terrible policy today. …
Look at what they believe:
A foundational sentence in the IGR reads: “Progress is expected to continue over the coming decades as the world continues to transition towards net-zero emissions. Around 170 countries accounting for around 80 per cent of global domestic product have adopted net-zero commitments.”
This is one of the worst sentences you could ever read in any Australian government policy document because it does not make any attempt to assess the reality of those commitments. It was never the case that the majority of the world economy was seriously committed to getting to net zero. But even the majority of the small number of countries that were taking some serious action towards that goal have now mostly backed off. …
- China is notionally committed to net zero by 2060. That is utterly meaningless. Its emissions may have peaked as its population is now in decline and it’s using cleaner coal and some renewables. It’s still commissioning and building new coal-fired power plants and will not seriously reduce emissions for many years, if not decades. It will never go anywhere near net zero. It’s responsible for 30 per cent of global emissions.
- The second-biggest emitter, the US, has no net-zero commitment at all.
- Nation number three, India, has a notional commitment to net zero by 2070! Yes, 2070. India, where hundreds of millions of people need electricity, will certainly carbonise long before it thinks about decarbonising.
- Russia has not the slightest interest in net zero.
That’s way over 50 per cent of global emissions that have no effective net-zero commitment at all — exactly the reverse of what the IGR claims, and bases Australian policy on. …
In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, global greenhouse emissions rose, as they do every year. That’s not a world moving to net zero. …
The world will pay us? Don’t think so mate:
Aidan Morrison, energy program director at the Centre for Independent Studies, says Treasury falsely [expects] the world will pay whatever it takes to decarbonise, and therefore hugely expensive notional green exports from Australia will become competitive: “In reality, markets for expensive substitutes for carbon-based fuels and materials have not materialised. So we’re living in a fantasy world.”
And let’s not get started on how the Australian Government was hoodwinked by modern bureaucratically funded “science.” The climate models are based on an assumption about how convection and water vapor change when carbon dioxide increases. That assumption was made in 1963 when the modellers and climate scientists had simply no clue, so they made a convenient guess. By the time the empirical evidence was in, around 2005 — showing the assumption to be violently wrong — the “science” was already set in political stone.










