It’s the energy, stupid!

Andrew L. Urban

It took political columnist (ex ABC & Nine) Chris Uhlmann to sharpen the point that energy in the economy is the equivalent of oxygen in the air. In his May 4 column in the Weekend Australian (his new home), he wrote, “Energy is not part of the economy. It is the economy.” He might as well have repurposed Bill Clinton’s famous quip “It’s the economy, stupid!” as “It’s the energy, stupid!” Same thing.

Chris Uhlmann

In his column, “Chris Bowen mugged by the power of reality when it comes to electricity”, Uhlmann went on: “Without it everything that sustains modernity would stop and the distance between life as we know it and a return to one that is nasty, brutish and short would be measured in days.” The lights are the least of it ….

The political objective of the climate emergency agitators is not to fight global warming; it’s to fight global flourishing. It’s an attack on the energy that runs the modern world. We have it on the record, from one of the front line acolytes of the movement. Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, was quoted by the Zuricher Zeitung (November 2010): “Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” For ‘distribution of the world’s resources’ read weakening the market based economies in pursuit of a socialist agenda.

Coinciding with Uhlmann’s column, acclaimed US climate scientist Dr Judith Curry published her Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture titled Climate Uncertainty and Risk. Curry, after years of studying, lecturing and researching in the climate space, also sharpens the point that climate change is really about politics, not science. Policy is the cart before the scientific horse.

Judith Curry

“Mixing politics and science is inevitable on issues of high societal relevance, such as climate change.  However, there are some really bad ways to do this, and we’re seeing all of these with the climate change issue. Policy makers misuse science by demanding scientific arguments for desired policies, funding a narrow range of projects that support preferred policies, and using science as a vehicle to avoid ‘hot potato’ policy issues. Scientists misuse policy-relevant science by playing power politics with their expertise, conflating expert judgment with evidence, entangling disputed facts with values, and intimidating scientists whose research interferes with their political agendas.”

To Australians, these words resonate with the pain of policies playing out before our eyes. But Bowen is not the only mug on the climate change shelf.

As Curry writes, “A number of leading scientists were deeply concerned about the policy-driven science of the IPCC. Pierre Morel, Director of the World Climate Research Programme, had this to say:

“The consideration of climate change has now reached the level where it is the concern of professional foreign-affairs negotiators, and has therefore escaped the bounds of scientific knowledge (and uncertainty).” 

William Nordhaus, Nobel Laureate in economics, stated: “The strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy.”

Hell-bent on proving these accusations accurate, in early July 2022, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was commenting on the floods which had yet again devastated large regions north of Sydney. He told the media how climate change was causing ever increasing extreme weather events. Neither the media nor any of his advisers corrected him. Such false proclamations by political leaders feed into the general ignorance and misinformation about the subject. ‘The science tells us…’ has become a false claim that excuses plain ignorance and disrespects science.

In his letter of resignation from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Chris Landsea was aghast that his colleagues “would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.”

In his letter, he pointed out “All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record. Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small.”

Tribal witch-doctor Chris Bowen showing his tribe one of the magic remedies in his tool kit

Ah yes, but the energy & climate policies impacts will be quite large, if climate clamouring Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has anything to do with it. Maybe he is naïve. Maybe he doesn’t realise he is being manipulated by the unspoken agenda of climate activists. Facts and science have been overgrown by the poison ivy of the political agenda.

In their book Why scientists disagree about global warming (Heartland), Craig Idso, S. Fred Singer and Robert M. Carter (1942-2016) echo Curry’s reminder that in climate studies, uncertainty is a key factor: “The most important fact about climate science, often overlooked, is that scientists disagree about the environmental impacts of the combustion of fossil fuels on the global climate. There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues, despite frequent claims by advocates to the contrary.”

Having begun to dismantle our energy security and affordability, the Australian Government can thank their own Minister Bowen when the energy chickens come home to roost. They are on the horizon; they are called wind turbines and the farmers are squaking …

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing).