As a teenager, I was entranced with the song The Rhythm of Life from the movie Sweet Charity sung by Sammy Davis Jr. It was a fascinating and entertaining tale about how a talented but very poor musician made his fortune by inventing a new Cult Religion, ‘The Rhythm of Life’.

Speaking of new religions, it is rather unbelievable and entertaining to watch the rise of Global Warming, which later morphed into Climate Change, despite the inconvenient truth of satellite temperature records and failed predictions of disaster. Inconsistent with its former title of Global Warming are predictions such as the polar ice melting, polar bears becoming extinct, and rising seas. Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour demonstrates just how much the sea level has risen in 170 years… Quite aptly, Hanrahan cried: ‘We’ll be rooned!’

The lyrics of The Rhythm of Life now have a haunting relevance.

Daddy started out in San Francisco

Tootin’ on his trumpet loud and mean

Suddenly a voice said, ‘Go forth Daddy,

Spread the picture on a wider screen.’

And the voice said, ‘Daddy there’s a million pigeons,

Ready to get hooked on new religions,

Hit the road Daddy, leave your common-law wife.

Spread the religion of The Rhythm of Life.’

From Paganism to Judaism to Christianity to Islam, it’s apparent that human societies have a need and even an addiction to religion which, like a lot of behaviour, has its positives and negatives. The positives being the bringing together of people in a common cause. The negatives being the ostracism of those that question the beliefs and, not uncommonly, the persecution of them by the extreme adherents of the faith.

Western Civilisation has advanced so much on the positive values of Christianity, particularly the rights of the individual. Over the last few decades, with the secularisation of the West, a void appears to have emerged.

A new religion with a familiar theme of ‘evil mankind destroying the Paradise they were born into’ has started to fill the religious void. The new god Gaia needs the sinners, especially the deniers, to repent to mend their evil fossil fuelling ways to return humanity to the Paradise on Earth that was here before mankind destroyed it. Apocalyptic predictions have been issued by the High Priests, such as Gore flying around in his private jet, and palaeontologist Professor Flannery, ‘Even the rains that fall won’t fill the rivers or dams’. (circa 2007)

This religion has given the world expensive and highly inefficient and unsustainable solar farms and wind farms, as has been demonstrated in Britain and Europe in the last European Winter and continuing into the foreseeable future. Who would have thunk it? (Other than geologists, palaeontologists, and those other horrible evil ‘climate deniers’. It was predictable that a combination of a very cold winter and the deprivation of Russian gas and oil, would lead to renewable energy failing, causing blackouts and high energy bills.)

Cynics could only raise wry smiles at the news that not only were Britain and Germany restarting their coal-fired and nuclear power plants, but that Germany has started ripping down wind turbines to extract the coal underneath to burn in those power plants.

I remember, years ago, a ‘climate denier’ describing the wind turbines visually polluting the landscape around Lake George, just north of the ACT, fittingly as ‘bird slicing, bat chomping, eco crucifixes’. Perhaps a more accurate description than the faithful would ever admit. St Greta of Thunberg was years too late in sarcastically drawling ‘blah-blah-blah’. How very dare you? I seem to recall it was only in the last couple of years that our darling of the Greens, Bob Brown, attempted to have a wind farm in Tasmania banned because of the potential damage to the native bird life. Just recently I read that even Greta was protesting outside the Norwegian Embassy about them allowing bird-threatening windmills being built. I digress.

Meanwhile, back in the Land of Oz ‘the renewable superpower of the future’, according to our Energy Minister, after a very cool summer we have the national grid cutting services and rationing the flow of electricity while still relying heavily on coal-fired power from the eastern states. Fancy that, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, there ain’t much renewable power flowing into the grid…!

Now, we have our Climate Change obsessed government wanting to reintroduce a Carbon Tax, being held to ransom by the Greens unless they agree to the banning of all new coal and gas mines. I don’t know why the old saying ‘talk about the lunatics running the asylum’ resonates so much… I hope that doesn’t constitute hate speech. If it does, I defer to Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’

Laughing all the way to the bank are China and India, who between them contribute more than 40 per cent of man-made emissions, and daily are building more coal-fired power stations because they are ‘developing nations’ exempt from the Climate Club’s agreement to reduce emissions in the future. Because of the cost advantages that gives their industries, they are producing and selling more products to the grateful declining West.

The old saying ‘follow the money’ reverberates as the renewable energy carpetbaggers, the High Priests of the new religion, and the political and media elites, line their pockets with money raised mainly from taxpayer subsidies and electricity consumers that have had to cop increased bills to fund their Rhythm of Life.

Look at the litany of renewables brainwaves in Australia that have received government subsidies to the benefit of their promoters but failed (or are soon to fail):

Geothermal Hot Rocks in South Australia, the Port Kembla Wave Machine, the Snowy 2.0 Hydro Scheme, and the Northern Territory Giant Solar Farm to be linked to Singapore by a 4,000 km undersea cable, which would have made it the longest ever.

Let’s not also forget that panicked Australian states that, convinced they were facing eternal drought, built desalination plants. The NSW one at Kurnell cost millions to build and maintain as it sits idle in mothballs each year.

Meanwhile, Warragamba Dam sits at 100 per cent capacity, while the plans are to raise the dam wall by 10 m to prevent flooding downstream.

At the same time we have our esteemed Energy Minister and the Greens poo-pooing nuclear energy as the most expensive in the world. Perhaps this is the modern version of tilting at windmills? They are obviously not cognisant with the latest technology of cheap portable modular reactors that can be transported in the back of a truck and can power a city. Not to mention the fact they are CO2 emissions free and that Australia sits on roughly one-third of the world’s Uranium deposits. We now have the hypocrisy of ‘it’s okay to have nuclear submarines and a nuclear waste dumping ground in Australia, but nuclear power is taboo’. Please explain?

The new religion has infiltrated the bureaucracy. In Senate Estimates recently we had the Head of the Department of Home Affairs, with a straight face, responding to Senator Antic’s probing that Climate Change is considered a very important part of administering the Department. When a bemused Senator Antic asked him to ‘please explain’, he very earnestly proselytised that Climate Change was evident because of the increase in the severity and number of extreme weather events.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good myth. One only has to tune into Outsiders at approximately 10:48 am on Sky News Australia on a Sunday morning to learn that the frequency and strength of hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere and cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere have declined in recent years and that Europe and America are experiencing one of their coldest winters on record.

There is also the inconvenient fact that a university study has shown that of the islands in the Pacific, 43 per cent have increased in size or not changed at all. Then there is the recent study that the corals on the Great Barrier Reef are flourishing and have increased in size. Even the ABC has reluctantly acknowledged these inconvenient truths.

It was Australia’s Chief Scientist (at the time) Dr Alan Finkel, a Climate Change devotee, who a couple of years ago reluctantly conceded in Senate Estimates that the figures, that 97 per cent of CO2 emissions occur naturally and that 3 per cent are man-made of which Australia produces only 1.3 per cent. When pressed, Finkel agreed that if Australia cut all its man-made emissions the effect on the world’s atmosphere would be ‘virtually nothing’. The reality is that with its vast vegetation that absorbs and thrives on CO2, Australia is already a Net Zero emitter.

In the movie Sweet Charity, ‘Daddy’ made a fortune from pigeons who got hooked on his New Religion. The parallels with Climate Change, the religion formally known as Global Warming, is uncanny.

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