Reality will eventually yank Labor off the destructive path towards its Net Zero nirvana. This has been said, written, broadcast, podcast, and internetted multiple times by informed journalists, economists, scientists … and too few politicians.

To the shame of the Liberal Party, the one political party whose platform officially rejects the climate change orthodoxy is One Nation. One Nation’s platform explicitly calls for repealing Net Zero and all climate-related legislation.

The Nationals, the Coalition’s junior partner, in 2023 introduced a Private Member’s bill to scrap Net Zero laws, led by MPs Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan. Katter’s Australian Party’s 2025 platform includes scrapping emissions targets to protect agriculture and energy affordability.

The notion of leadership has evaporated from the Liberal Party to such an extent that they can’t even put on a show of leadership. Leadership – you know, that’s when a person of conviction, courage, vision, and imagination argues to convince the electorate why they should undertake certain policies. To ‘lead’, in other words.

But even if they are waiting for instructions on Net Zero, there is plenty available. Start with the readily available and thoroughly reliable work of journalist Chris Uhlmann at The Australian and Sky News Australia. On August 2, 2025, he wrote:

Here’s a wicked political dilemma: When faced with the choice, do you tell a hard truth and risk losing votes, or mouth a popular mantra and lose your soul?

The Coalition now finds itself trapped between physics, economics and geopolitics, which expose the Net Zero by 2050 target as a fantasy, and the iron law of political numbers, which shows abandoning this empty pledge risks electoral damnation. Mishandle this moment and things could get worse, particularly for the Liberals.

So, once again, the remnant opposition finds itself headlining the energy debate, while the real story is that the Albanese government’s energy transition is falling apart. The government will not meet its 2030 targets, and trying to hit them will waste billions, weaken our electricity grid, destroy businesses and beggar the already poor. Benefits, such as grants for batteries and rooftop solar, will flow to the rich. Despite this, some time soon, even less credible targets will be set as the government rebrands a fool’s errand as progress.

Somewhat ironically, a Labor talking point aims to besmirch the opinion evening shows as Sky After Dark, as they inhabit the darkness of climate ignorance and dogma. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen labours under the misapprehension that you can fool all of the people all of the time. As I have written before, his title reveals the priorities of the Albanese government: harness the political and economy-damaging ambitions behind the climate change orthodoxy first, worry about energy second.

Just a suggestion, Liberals: take a page out of Tony ‘Stop the Boats’ Abbott’s playbook and create a short phrase that sells the policy. Like ‘Not Zero, Yes Energy’. Obviously, to do that you need to develop the policy to match. Write the headline encompassing what you want to say, and the writing is more focused from the start.

Once you hear the catch phrase, the mind ingests the idea, a bit like AI perhaps, and helps to formulate the matching policy. Not Zero, Yes Energy sums up in a nutshell what should be the end result: the abandonment of policies against fossil fuels and in favour of cheap, reliable energy for all – in an Australia so rich in natural resources.

When arguing against Net Zero, remember there is also a global network of over 2,000 scientists and professionals who are signatories to the World Climate Declaration, ‘There is no Climate Emergency’. It states that, ‘It is not the number of experts but the quality of arguments that counts…’

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing)