Australian living standards have slipped 40% and we have deindistrialized, because our ruling class didn’t do due diligence on net-zero. By Alan Moran in The Spectator.
Australian governments’ annualised subsidy to renewables is $25 billion (equivalent to about 40 per cent of the Defence budget). This includes just under $7 billion in state government subsidies. … [It] does not include the subsidies (over $700 million per year) to aluminium and other energy-intensive operations, made uncompetitive by Net Zero policies; nor does it include the subsidies to EVs, which amount to about $1.4 billion annually. It also excludes the annual costs, first imposed by the Howard government 20 years ago, of meeting greenhouse gas emission targets by locking up land from development.
Nearly all the reduction in Australia’s greenhouse emissions come in land use change — principally by stopping land clearing, but that’s only because nearly all the desirable land had been cleared by 2005 anyway. (By the way, that was measured by a government program called FullCAM, which I wrote and largely designed.)
Australia’s claimed total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 94 per cent have come from land-use restraints, which Barnaby Joyce claimed have cost landowners $100 billion. …
And for this minor effect, Australia de-industrialized and has world-leading electricity prices? Yep:
In real terms, Australia’s electricity prices rose 50-80 per cent over the past 20 years. Countries with much less rigorous emission control policies saw only modest increases (the US), no increase (Vietnam), or lower prices (India).
And far from becoming a magnet for industries seeking cheap power, the latest being AI, Australia has seen much of its manufacturing and refining capacity close down, with previously world-beating smelters now in government hospital care. …
The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong — no one in the Western ruling class did any due diligence, and it is only supported by climate models made by government-funded scientists. As Sir Humphrey explained in Yes Minister, never hold an inquiry unless you know what the answer is going to be:
And the easiest way to ensure the outcome is to control who is doing the inquiring. Climate scientists who disagreed with the carbon dioxide theory were sacked starting in 1982 (with Sherwood Idso), and within a decade only yes-men remained. Those of us who disagreed have been side-lined, kept out of the public eye, ignored, fired, denigrated and silenced.
You don’t have to be climate scientist to notice that:
- The predictions of the alarmists have not come true (snow in Britain, Arctic, Kilimanjaro, etc.). So many failed predictions.
- Climate history was rewritten to suit the carbon dioxide theory. (Not sure? Just check the past temperature record in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 against its 2003 Third Assessment Report and what passes for the past now.)
- The measurement of global temperature is performed by the bodies pushing the carbon dioxide theory, and their methods are opaque. (Yet even so, the rate of temperature increase they have supposedly measured is considerably less than the minimum predicted in the First Assessment Report in 1990.)
And how much has Australia’s ruling class sunk on this junk theory?
Over the past 20 years, in $2025 terms, Australia has spent between $200 and 240 billion on renewable energy. Without subsidies, none of this would likely have happened. Misallocating what would otherwise be income-enhancing investment capital has contributed to lower investment levels in recent years, resulting in, at best, sluggish economic growth.
Had the money instead been spent on conventional, reliable power stations, it would have bought 40 2GW coal generators – actually twice the current national capacity – or 15 2GW nuclear generators. With coal, our lowest-in-the-world costs provides a comparative advantage.
Now we are poorer:
Per capita income is now declining and, as a nation, our living standards have slipped over the past decade from parity with the US average to levels 40 per cent lower.
Stupidity and intellectual laziness have consequences.
The public however, like with The Voice, have shown good sense. With the exception of 2007, we have voted against net zero at every single Federal election. Whenever there was a significant difference in policy, we voted against the warmers.