Andrew L. Urban
Whether driven by the stated ideology of climate alarm or the hidden agenda of destabilising our market capitalism, the dedication to choking fossil fuels in favour of renewables is approved by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and executed (with fervour) by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
We should not be surprised that Bowen is defiant in the face of evidence and world behaviour that challenge his policies. Aside from his hubris, the intensity of his dedication has removed the brakes. There is no off ramp for the Bowen mega lorry. He has repeatedly doubled down on his policies and heated up his rhetoric on the cheapest form of energy as if it were a mantra that mobilises the faithful.
Like a diver once in the air above the pool, he cannot change or reverse policy course now. Can you imagine a scenario in which he abandons his renewables crusade? It is the hill on which he has chosen to die (politically speaking). That means (to switch metaphors) Australia is the train on the fixed rails that lead to a hard ending. That could come in a variety of ways.
One : Labor loses the next election and policies are overturned or radically amended.
Two: the global unravelling of net zero policies gathers intensity and reaches an irresistible, crushing crescendo.
Three: an ‘event’ (broadly defined) that debunks the underlying hypothesis about fossil fuels driving warming.
Four: a civil uprising led by farmers against the invasion of wind farms and solar panels on their lands.
Two and Three are the most likely scenarios. The undermining of Net Zero (Two) is paving the way for Three.
What remains the most challenging question is how climate alarm over fossil fuels has survived decades when it was always, at best, an untested hypothesis. Climate models (now largely debunked) proliferated the hype and drove the policies. No hard evidence has emerged to prove that scenario. Indeed, climate scientists not captured by the ruling orthodoxy (one way or another) continue to assert the uncertainty around the possible causes of global warming (such as it is), beyond natural variability.
As climate scientist Judith Curry has pointed out, in a Madrid newspaper coinciding with COP25, the December 2019 UN Climate Change Conference, “the climate policy ‘cart’ has been way out in front of the scientific ‘horse’. The 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.
“Fossil fuel emissions as the climate ‘control knob’ is a simple and seductive idea … We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming.
“We have been told that the science of climate change is ‘settled’. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific ‘consensus’ to support policy making, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterized by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st century climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty.
“Extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously.”
Of course in this context, her use of the phrase climate change is a handle for the climate change alarmist scenario.
Such scientific uncertainty flies in the face of Labor’s dogmatic certainty as characterised by Chris Bowen’s zealotry.
Memo to Chris Bowen: “There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right,” said Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867), the British chemist and physicist.
He was echoed by Mark Twain (1835 – 1910): “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”