It had to happen eventually I suppose. An expert group (advising the National Health and Medical Research Council) has decreed that Australia’s official nutritional guidelines must detail the carbon dioxide footprint of each food group they cover. The implication is clear. When we reflect on our dietary habits, we need to consider not only our own health and wellbeing, but the impact of what we consume on the earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.

Man, it appears, is no longer an end in himself. For the religious, that divinely ordained creature made in the image of God. And for humanists, the starting point and destination of all ethical value and merit. He is not even Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’, ultimately signifying nothing. No, he is a pest and nuisance, a blight on the otherwise pristine environment. If, for understandable electoral reasons, he can’t be eradicated entirely, his malign footprint must at least be made smaller, according to these experts. The sooner this can be done, the better.

You might think this is peak folly for climate change madness. A veritable ‘jump the shark’ moment. But if insanity, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, is following an idea to its outermost logical consequence, it may only be the beginning.

No doubt, our food packaging will soon have to detail the contents’ carbon footprint, perhaps also the menus in our restaurants and cafes. Perhaps the nutrition experts will come up with a ‘net zero’ sustainability deduction to apply to our recommended daily calorie intake. If we all lose a little too much weight and muscle mass in the process, perhaps to the point of shortening our life spans, that’s an added bonus.

Of course, our carbon dioxide footprint is not limited to what we consume. With every exhalation, after all, we deposit this ‘pollutant’ into the atmosphere. (I will draw a veil over the specific category of human emissions which accompany indigestion.) Vigorous exercise must therefore be frowned upon. And perhaps too any kind of activity, including love-making, which increases our respiration rate.

Indeed, if human life is the problem, perhaps we need to revise our euthanasia guidelines accordingly. As a civilised community, we might still set a high bar for people wanting to take this irreversible step, but if the purely medical arguments in any particular case are finely balanced, climate experts may well argue, why not allow sustainability concerns to decide the matter? Not only would the terminally afflicted be put out of their misery, they would have the consolation, as they take their final climate-damaging breath, of knowing they were saving the planet.

While it may clothe its arguments in morality and appeal to (some confected distortion of) science, the climate change movement is ultimately concerned with power. The power of the few over the many, which Lenin famously identified as the basic question of politics. The more honest climate advocates admit this openly, arguing that no part of our lives must remain untouched in the fight against global warming. All policy and regulatory levers must be deployed in this campaign.

Just think about what this means. In the pursuit of arbitrary, ideologically-informed and utterly pointless emission reduction targets, our traditional policy and regulatory goals are being sacrificed. So too, the integrity of our traditional regulatory regimes.

Our new nutritional guidelines, we are told, will no longer be purely about our health. If this sounds shocking, it is nothing new. Our energy sector regulations long ago abandoned the objective of cheap and reliable power. Indeed, by embracing intermittent wind and solar, they are working against it. Planning and environmental regulatory regimes have been similarly corrupted, giving intermittent energy developers free rein to do their worst in the face of local protests. Even financial and corporate regulation is in play: the quaint idea of a level investment playing field for capital has given way to political incentives to plough money into green activities. History tells us that crony capitalism always ends in tears and a huge taxpayer bill, but apparently this can be disregarded.

As we rush headlong in pursuit of our brave green world, the electorates of other Western countries are starting to have doubts, including in the UK, the US and many continental European countries. And of course, China and India, who account for almost all the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions growth, never joined the crusade in the first place. Why this blindness in Australia? Why this folly?

In 1984, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, identifying the worst examples of government folly in history. Her starting point? The Trojans accepting, against all good sense, a wooden horse from their Greek enemy. Governments are guilty of folly, she explains, when they adopt policies which can only end in disaster for their people. The major cause of folly, Tuchman points out, is ‘wooden-headedness’, an insistence on ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’.

The ‘surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns’, in Tuchman’s view, was Philip II of Spain who believed he could conquer England with his Armada in 1588. For Philip, according to an unnamed historian, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. Far from a character flaw, this would seem to be an essential prerequisite for a climate change minister.

The single greatest instance of government folly in my lifetime, and there has been a great deal of competition, was our catastrophic bipartisan response to the Covid pandemic. Our health bureaucrats, both state and federal, were at the very heart of this. You would hope that they have been chastened by the experience, even if they have never (to date) been properly held to account. The experts wanting to hijack our nutritional guidelines appear to have learnt nothing however.

I always try to end my columns with a constructive suggestion. I direct this at all those in government working on climate change interventions. When announced, these should indeed include accurate information on the negative footprint they will leave. Not on the earth’s atmosphere, but on our freedoms, standard of living and quality of life.

Now that would be a public service.