JUNK SCIENCE: Activists mangle laws with CO2 mandates that don't help the environment
Science is done by evidence, not consensus.
It is humble. It questions assumptions and corrects them so future work isn’t built on mistakes.
Yet here we are.
Burning fossil fuels doesn’t cause climate change, because carbon dioxide doesn’t cause climate change.
It’s not an agreed fact. It was only ever a disputed claim.
It was amplified by the media which is always hungry for clickbait that comes with a great free photo, supplied by activists.
Martin Durkin’s excellent new documentary, Climate: The Movie (backup here) features evidence that it isn’t true.
But Australia’s climate empire of politicians, academics, activists and “green” industries all have jobs and status that depend on this claim.
As with covid, they ignored and silenced the dissidents and moved on with diverting bulk tax dollars to projects that will not help, because the premise is wrong.
They are now coming at the statute books: changing our laws in serious ways, based on an assumption they never questioned.
Federal Member for Wentworth Allegra Spender (Teal) is hosting March Net Zero Month with the three councils that control Sydney’s influential east: Waverley, Woollahra and Randwick.
On March 17 she hosted a panel at Bondi Pavilion with Environmental Defenders Office Head of Policy and Law Reform Rachel Walmsley and Australia’s own Greta Thunberg, 19-year-old law student Anjali Sharma.
Here are some of the laws they’re ruining
Federal Government
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act).
Australia’s national environmental law is more than 1000 pages of complex legislation plus 400 pages of regulations that forces developments to be ecologically sustainable. The key decision maker is the Federal Environment Minister, who is answerable to us voters.
“In 1000 pages guess how many times it mentions climate change? Zero,” Ms Walmsley told the panel.
“It’s under review and we have a wonderful opportunity to reform it, hopefully this year.”
Ms Walmsley wants laws changed at national, state and territory levels to make climate change a mandatory consideration for decision-makers. So they can’t refuse.
She wants an independent Environmental Protection Agency to be the key decision maker, instead of the minister. She calls this “nature positive legislation”, but it means sidelining democracy as regulatory bodies are not answerable to voters the way ministers are.
Ms Walmsley calls the 20-year-old law “out of date” as though lawmakers had never heard of global boiling in 2000.
It’s not new. The Kyoto Protocol was in 1997. Thousands of respected scientists signed a petition against it at that time, saying there is no evidence that carbon dioxide would disrupt Earth’s climate.
The Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023 - (Duty of Care Bill)
This Bill alters the Climate Change Act 2022, to prevent decision-makers from making significant decisions involving the exploration or extraction of coal, oil or gas where “greenhouse gas emissions” are likely to pose a material risk of harm to “the health and wellbeing of current and future Australian children”.
Institute of Public Affairs research fellow Saxon Davidson wrote that it would soon force electricity users onto boutique, intermittent, solar and wind.
“This would effectively ban the future use of three major sources of baseload power,” he wrote in Submission 89.
It would also open the door to weaponised court action.
“Requiring ministers or regulators to consider the indirect results of their decision on the health and wellbeing of future children is an exceptionally vague duty that would invite endless litigation, give green groups expanded opportunities to engage in lawfare, and put more major projects at risk of delay and cancellation.”
This Bill comes from teen activist Anjali Sharma’s failed class action lawsuit. As a schoolgirl, Anjali tried to prevent a coal mine expansion by alleging the Federal Environment Minister owed a duty of care to Australian children to avoid causing personal injury or death arising from the emissions of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a poison. You breathe it out, plants breathe it in. It’s essential to life. Anjali has been misinformed.
CO2 was 412 parts per million (ppm) in 2019 according to NASA. At 150ppm plants die from CO2 starvation. The optimum level for plants to thrive is 1000ppm. That is why governments recommend commercial growers pump CO2 into their greenhouses.
Five hundred million years ago life flourished on Earth, when estimates of CO2 levels range from 9000ppm to 2000ppm. So we’re not going to drop dead if it increases, nor will the planet boil.
It is understood the courts did not question the claim that atmospheric carbon dioxide “may cause injury or death”. The case foundered on legalities around “duty of care”, which is why this Bill is now before Parliament.
Interestingly, QUT Law School associate professor Lucy Cradduck wrote in Submission 77 that the Bill as drafted does not actually create any duty of care, and that failure to comply with the obligations wouldn’t support an action against the Commonwealth, either.
The committee looking at the Duty of Care Bill is due to report back on March 27 (Wednesday). The Bill has already had its first reading in Parliament.
Submissions, now closed, are exactly as you’d expect. A raft of supporting environmental and activist groups, and this:
“Today in The Guardian there is an article: EARTH’S VITAL SIGNS WORSE THAN AT ANY TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, SCIENTISTS WARN. Read this article please. This is the scientific truth, we are in danger of making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves, our children and all of life,” - retired physicist Dr James Butler, Submission 160.
As Ms Sharma herself wrote in The Guardian: “We’re children who have read the news”.
Indeed, you have.
Climate Change Act 2022, introduced with the Climate Change (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2022
These laws attempt to force Australia to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” by 43 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve “net zero” by 2050.
The minister must prepare and table an annual climate change statement and take advice from the new Climate Change Authority.
Rachel Walmsley loves this bill.
“It sets up a climate authority, it has climate statements, and Allegra was fantastic in getting that Bill strengthened and it went through Parliament,” she told the panel.
Scientists looking at carbon dioxide levels over the last 500 million years ascribe its fluctuations to weathering and volcanic activity, and have found no correlation with the geologic record of climate variations.
There is literally no point to these carbon cuts, it will not affect the climate.
NSW Government:
Climate Change (Net Zero Future) Bill 2023
This Bill became law in December.
It establishes yet another climate authority, the Net Zero Commission which is not subject to Ministerial control, and thus doesn’t have to care about the will of the voters. This body will monitor, review and report on “progress” towards the new carbon-cutting targets.
The new targets cut “greenhouse gas emissions” in NSW by 50 percent from net 2005 emissions by 2030, 70 percent by 2035 and net zero by 2050.
They want to take your gas cooktop away
For good measure, Allegra Spender also wants to take away your cheap, reliable gas hot water, cooktop and stove as well.
Spender wants to subsidise electric appliances with tax money, while encouraging the councils to ban gas connections in new builds. She calls it “electrification” like you live in Tanzania and burn charcoal to cook. She’s bringing electricity!
Spender claims this is helping ordinary folk struggling with cost of living because gas is “expensive” compared to “cheap” renewables (tax-subsidised).
In one of many expensive schemes, $3 billion in taxes will be diverted from the National Reconstruction Fund to wind turbine and solar battery manufacturing. That’s “cheap”.
The Australian Office of Financial Management has a summary from November 2022 of a bunch of wasteful programs here.
Did they ask if carbon dioxide causes climate change? No
After the panel discussion, Letters From Australia asked Rachel Walmsley if she had ever questioned the key assumption that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.
No, because all scientists agree, it’s a consensus, she said. When I told her plenty of scientists do not, she pursed her lips and said we’d have to agree to disagree.
Records are not being broken
Ms Sharma told the audience that schoolchildren are fearful because they see records being broken all the time.
The only reason young people think records are being broken is because the Bureau of Meteorology is ignoring older records.
The Bureau still says the nation’s hottest temperature ever recorded was 50.7C in January, 2022, at Western Australia’s Onslow Airport.
This is not true.
The official weather station at the opal-mining town of White Cliffs, 255km northeast of Broken Hill, NSW, recorded 124F (51.1C) on 12 January, 1939. The Sydney Morning Herald reported it on 13 January, 1939 (clipping below).
This was re-discovered by United Australia Party national director Craig Kelly who found the original paper entry in the National Archives (below).
But that wasn’t even the hottest temperature. The record was set in 1909, at Bourke, 800km northwest of Sydney, when the mercury climbed to 125F (51.7C).
One full degree celsius hotter than the BoM’s “record high”.
The Bureau says they can’t “validate” the White Cliffs observations as they were not recorded using modern standardised equipment.
This is insulting to the Australians of 1939 and 1909, who diligently kept accurate records. These people were so sophisticated that in 1939 they invented degaussing, reducing the magnetic field around ships to avoid World War II sea-mines. The BoM wants to say these people couldn’t accurately measure and record a simple temperature? For more BoM shenanigans see this story here.
Young people have no idea what a hard life is
The Daily Telegraph reported that the terrible heatwave of 1939 killed 60 people over three days in NSW.
They had no air conditioning and no refrigeration. They just dropped dead of the heat, especially in country areas like Broken Hill.
It was so hot that birds fell lifeless from the sky, the Telegraph reported.
Fires broke out across Victoria killing scores of people who tried to flee, melting the metal off the Model-T Fords.
Global boiling is dismantling democracy
It was UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who said that “the era of global boiling has arrived”. Doing his best to scare the public, the UN reported Mr Guterres as saying it would be “terrifying”, resulting in “families running from the flames (and) workers collapsing in scorching heat”.
The fear-based “global boiling” agenda is pushed by globalists at the United Nations, corporate lobby group World Economic Forum (WEF), and billionaires such as Bill Gates because it serves two functions.
First, it diverts young activists away from causes that would help the environment but hurt corporate interests, such as demanding the end of plastic packaging or the break-up of Monsanto, Raytheon, Bayer or Pfizer.
Instead they scream about the air that plants breathe while Australia’s energy resources are exported wholesale to Japan, China, South Korea and India.
Second, it allows globalists to empower themselves with “global governance” at the expense of national sovereignty, in response to a vague global problem. That means more money and power for them - and the advance of the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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"Martin Durkin’s excellent new documentary" - yes it is. Should be required viewing by all the climate change idiots, but of course they'll dismiss just like the authors of the GBD were.
BTW, still waiting for the "cheaper renewables" to kick in and see my electricity bill lowered. Any idea when that will happen Chris Bowen ?
This is an interesting article, but one thing that is often ignored is the effect on the health of the planet due to pollutants from coal oil and gas….