Andrew L. Urban
The mother of all unchallenged false premises, that fossil fuel emissions drive global warming, has delivered a bastard of policy settings, dumped on a gullible (stupid?) Australia, to nurture. After 30-plus years of wealth-draining activism, the stupidity of ‘climate change’ policy makers is fully exposed.
Of all countries, Australia (it’s zealot-in-chief, at least) has fallen most in love with the fossil fuel fantasy, turbo charging stupid policies one after the other. Sell off our natural resources, close off our refineries, criminalise nuclear energy, buy up Chinese made wind turbines and solar panels en masse (more on that later) and spend the children’s inheritance rampaging and desecrating the land for renewable infrastructure. Stupid.
Atmosphere
“With Labor’s commitment to an energy transition based on intermittent, weather-dependent renewables, a strategic fuel reserve should have been a priority. In December 2025, we had reserved just 49 days, compared with an average 141 days for comparable import nations. Australia stood out as the only laggard.” Stupid.
Yet it is a former president of the ACTU and Labor MP for Throsby, Jennie George pointing it out. And she adds: “Labor’s attitude to international obligations reflects its ideological priorities. The Paris Agreement is sacrosanct, even though we contribute just 1.15 per cent of global emissions. The billions spent subsidising the renewables transition are often off-budget, kept from public scrutiny, despite Labor’s promised transparency. We have the resources to be energy self-sufficient. What we lack is not capacity but political will and direction.”
I am quoting from Jennie George’s column in The Australian (2 May, 2026) to make the point that these opinions are not mere conservative talking points.
The anthropogenic global warming scenario was launched on June 23, 1988 in the US Senate committee with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA. Hansen later compared coal freight trains to trains carrying victims to extermination camps.)
The scenario was born in dishonesty and has been characterised by it ever since. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session, Hansen’s Democrat ally, Senator Tim Wirth, scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer. In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras could show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth later told Deborah Amos (NPR News) how he did it: “What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot … The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table …”
That dishonesty ushered in an age of stupidity. Among the five Basic Laws of Stupidity, Law No 3 is the most damning; it is the one applicable to the policy activities of CC&E Minister Chris Bowen. It states: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while him/herself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. (That’s our boy.)
Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla in 1976, who died in 2000, gave us an invaluable tool with his Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. He detailed these laws in a 40 page booklet to help explain human behaviour in a way that makes perfect sense of the variety of stupidity we encounter on a daily basis, in all walks of life. These Basic Laws apply equally to groups, as well as to individuals.
Here is a summary of the other four Basic Laws:
1st Basic Law:
Always and inevitably everyone under-estimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Stupid people exist, but according to Cipolla you may be deeply underestimating their number and influence in our society. He was so strongly convinced about this that he asserted that “any numerical assumption would turn out to be an underestimate”.
2nd Basic Law:
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. Cipolla considered stupidity as a human characteristic, like having blond hair or blue eyes. Consequently, it is unavoidably distributed roughly equally in all walks of society, regardless of people’s level of education.
4th Basic Law:
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake. To make this law clearer, Carlo Cipolla added that “stupid people are deadly dangerous because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand stupid behaviour”. In such a view, stupid people’s attacks always catch intelligent ones by surprise. This makes it even more difficult to come up with a rational defence. On the other hand, this would be of little use since illogic actions cannot be understood using logic.
5th Basic Law:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit. This law comes as a natural consequence of the fourth basic law. Of the five laws seen so far, this should be the most understandable and reasonable. In fact, common sense tells us that intelligent people, no matter how hostile they may be, are predictable. In contrast, stupid people are not. This subtle difference makes stupid people incredibly more fearsome than intelligent people.
Let me scare you even more. See if you can think of anyone about whom the following can be said in this context. Here’s a clue: he is mentioned in this article. “Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
That’s a quote from Letters & Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for his involvement in the resistance against the Nazi regime, particularly for his connections to a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and remained in prison until his execution in April 1945. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic.
And finally, about those Chinese made wind turbines and solar panels: when Minister Bowen declares with his hubris face that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, he not only cheats himself of the obvious facts that deny his claim (and which are well known now) he also fails to account for the unavoidable costs of the clean up & replacement of solar panels and wind turbines. (Will the recipients of renewables subsidies pay for any of it?) Below are informed estimates based on current capacity data, waste projections, and cost trends from industry/government sources.
As of late 2025/early 2026, Australia has approximately 45 GW of total installed solar PV capacity across more than 4.29 million installations (systems). That’s roughly 110-115 million solar panels. Australia has about 15.4 GW of installed wind capacity, or 3,800 – 5,100 turbines. That’s today. By the time these items will need to be replaced at the end of their useful life, the clean up numbers will be even more staggering.
Total estimated costs for recycling/decommissioning the current Australian fleet (as of early 2026) at end-of-life around 2046, is some $2–5 billion (rough range, in 2040s dollars). And then would come the cost of replacements … between $20 and $40 billion for panels and about the same for turbines, for a total of $40 – $80 billion. That’s how cheap renewables are.