UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared ‘the era of global boiling has arrived’. Australia’s Teals and Greens no doubt eagerly grasped at the ‘terrifying’ words.

Greens Senator Nick McKim went into a state of peak catastrophism when he said, ‘Shut your mouth! People are dying because of … sociopaths like you.’ It was a comment directed toward Matt Canavan. He was swiftly asked to withdraw the remarks. ‘I withdraw, and I’m not going to cop interjections from sociopaths like Senator Canavan. I will not cop it and I won’t…’

The invective attests to blind adherence to the ideology of human-induced climate change that is failing to occur and to a solution (renewable energy) that is failing to achieve the subsidy-free competitiveness it once promised.

But perhaps there is an upside? Chris Bowen informs us:

‘Before the election, the United Nations was set to declare the Great Barrier Reef in danger. Today, that’s changed because of the work we’ve done in government on addressing climate change and protecting the environment.’

So, job done? Has the Australian Labor Party, in its vast wisdom, already stopped the seas from turning to steam? Have Albanese and Bowen recognised the science, first revealed by Peter Ridd, that the Great Barrier Reef – the icon that is the marker for the impacts of global warming – is now saved?

If so, all the other inconveniences identified by Senator McKim have also disappeared.

That means we can now stop spending $10 billion a year in subsidising the renewables industry while delivering the return to climate nirvana which is imagined to have existed in some bucolic idyll of yesteryear prior to the human race trashing the planet. This would also allow us to stop supporting visually intrusive, noisy, critter-killing, and environmentally poisonous wind blades and solar panels, with the vast expansion of transmission lines they entail.

But, if Chris Bowen, the Chairman of AEMO, and the energy accountants at the CSIRO are correct in asserting that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, abandoning renewables would come at a cost! However, this seems unlikely, since each new increment of subsidised renewables displacing coal has lifted electricity prices.

The claimed triumph of ALP policy is notwithstanding that Australia, with about 1 per cent of global emissions, can have only a trivial effect on aggregate emissions even if we totally ceased to exist. In fact, because the disappearance of Australia would deprive the rest of the world of lower-cost coal, gas, and iron ore, wiping the nation from the face of the earth would actually increase net emissions.

Of course, the government might have meant that it has really only saved the Great Barrier Reef from adverse publicity from the UN…

The government’s message may be that because it has increased the Coalition’s efforts in curbing domestic usage of low-cost carboniferous fuels and restrained fishing, mining, and agriculture the United Nations panjandrums have suspended the Sword of Damocles they were dangling over Queensland tourism, farming, and mining. This would mean that Australia, having now sworn a more forceful allegiance to the climate warming deities, has encouraged the United Nations bigwigs to call off a propaganda campaign against us.

If so, the government is accepting a role for the UN as the custodian of weapons that can be used to rein in any recalcitrants that deviate from the Book of Common Prayer that is very early Net Zero. This would mean the Albanese government is acquiescing in – indeed conspiring with – the United Nations being allowed to use its muscle to undermine Australia’s competitiveness and living standards, by preventing the use of the nation’s cheap power.

Rejecting empirical evidence that demonstrates lower costs of coal and gas compared to wind and solar is a sad epitaph for the political party that Albanese joined. The ALP of Albanese’s youth believed that socialism would outperform capitalism by eliminating the waste said to be inherent in a system reliant on atomistic decision-making with ‘wasteful’ competition.

That philosophy has been transmogrified. It is now a perversion of the goal of higher living standards into one that places a higher priority on a mystical belief that the environment is threatened by wealth creation. This is married to a rejection of years of experience demonstrating poor outcomes for renewable energy. But, as António Guterres demonstrates, Albanese is not the only blinkered socialist.

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