Andrew L. Urban
Late in the 1993 Federal election campaign, one simple question turned what seemed like the unlosable election for the Coalition into victory for Labor. The question was about a hypothetical birthday cake: reporter Mike Willesee asked Opposition Leader John Hewson whether his ‘Fightback’ tax reforms, including the GST, would make a birthday cake cost more or less. Hewson fumbled…he had no clear answer. The moment is regarded as a major contributor to the subsequent election loss.
It’s time (as Gough Whitlam famously said to launch Labor’s 1972 election campaign) for Opposition leader Peter Dutton to return the favour. Labor’s massive, costly, disruptive climate change zealotry-driven policies are based on assumptions, computer models and politically driven propaganda. There is no scientific basis for pursuing them, despite claims to the contrary. And there’s an election due soon …
These days it is just assumed by all that burning fossil fuels produced harmful emissions. The weight of time and unquestioned propaganda has established a mind set that does not question the underlying assumptions and theories which underpin the entire energy policy framework. Evidence based policy it ain’t. Yet it is the ruling orthodoxy. So much so that even Bjorn Lomborg*, the bad boy of climate change science, who was refused accommodation at all Australian universities for his anti-alarmist views (author of False Alarm), finds it necessary to wear the modesty cloth of orthodoxy.
Just the other day, his column in The Australian included this get-out clause: “The main problem is that wealthy countries – responsible for most emissions leading to climate change – want to cut emissions, while poorer countries mainly want to eradicate poverty through growth that remains largely reliant on fossil fuels. To get poorer countries to act against their own interest, the West started offering cash two decades ago.”
That simple phrase paying lip service to evil emissions, seems to be Lomborg’s safety shield, enabling him to question climate change policies without being censored for denialism, while arguing for alternative policies, a hand brake on the transition to renewables and more focused research on energy sources that create no emissions.
Bjorg’s column proposes that “governments should focus on spending much less but much more efficiently on innovation. Spending tens of billions of dollars annually on low-CO research and development to innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels will drive down the price of future green energy, eventually making it rational for all countries, and especially the world’s poor, to switch.
“Such a sensible proposal is what politicians should agree on at the UN climate summit. Unfortunately, the global climate process has lost its way. Most of the focus this week will instead be on the need for huge transfers of wealth. These were never going to happen, even before Trump’s election – but now they are utterly unrealistic.”
So today’s Birthday Cake question might be along the following lines:
Can Labor point to peer reviewed research that shows how the 3% of total CO2 produced by fossil fuel emissions drives warming but the 97% naturally occurring CO2 does not?
This is the core issue on which the entire façade of energy, climate alarm and renewables is based. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen should be required to present any evidence he can find to parliament – with all that implies regarding the risks of misleading parliament.
*Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.