We have a carbon dioxide crisis in Australia. There is not enough of the gas produced locally. We import carbon dioxide from China, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand and Italy yet we bury carbon dioxide in old hydrocarbon wells. Food grade carbon dioxide with more than 99.9 per cent carbon dioxide is used for carbonated drinks and food preservation and normally is a by-product from ammonia manufactured for fertilisers and explosives. Industrial grades of carbon dioxide are used to create an inert blanket for grain storage, welding and metal working, fire extinguishers, life jackets, foaming rubber and plastics, water treatment, and immobilising animals before slaughter. Carbon dioxide is used to decaffeinate coffee: solid carbon dioxide (‘dry ice’) is used as a coolant.

There are some vital facts that drinkers need to know. Fermentation of sugars releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and drinks such as beer, champagne and cider have added food-grade carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has an inverse solubility. The colder your carbonated drink, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved. As your carbonated alcoholic drink warms, which in my world is a heinous sin, it exsolves carbon dioxide and keeps bubbling well after its drink by time. The gas to push keg beer along the lines is carbon dioxide but Guinness uses nitrogen thereby creating a creamy texture and the surge and settle effect by bubbles one hundredth the size of carbon dioxide bubbles. Try telling a drinker in the embrace of Bacchus that they should lead a net zero life and see how far you get.

Food and industrial grade carbon dioxide in Australia is produced from wells in the Otway Basin. Carbon dioxide from old oil wells needs compression, purification, dehydration and cooling to make easily transportable liquid carbon dioxide. Caroline-1 well near Mount Gambier was an abandoned oil well that produced 811,000 tonnes of liquefied carbon dioxide from 1967 until 2017. It has been replaced by Boggy Creek-1 in Victoria drilled as a wildcat oil well in 1992. The Langwarrin-1 well in South Australia was drilled in 2019, is not in production and could produce 100 tonnes per day of liquefied carbon dioxide. Water and carbon dioxide are extracted from coal-seam gas and conventional gas from oilfields. The Longford gas plant in Gippsland produces about 60,000 tonnes per annum of liquefied carbon dioxide for the Australian and New Zealand beverage industry. Liquid carbon dioxide is pumped down old wells to push out the last remaining oil and gas and it is also sequestered underground in abandoned oil and gas fields to ‘save the planet’.

Worldwide every day 1.7 billion cans of Coca-Cola are consumed. Each can contains about 6.5 grams per litre of carbon dioxide. Mineral water contains 6.1 grams per litre and beer contains 2.3 to 2.8 grams per litre. Guinness contains only 1.2 grams per litre of carbon dioxide and, if you think carbon dioxide creates climate chaos, it is your moral duty to drink Guinness to save the planet.

Water vapour is more than 100 times more abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and is the main atmospheric greenhouse gas. We should demand net zero for water vapour, devapourise the planet, sell water vapour emission certificates and reclassify water vapour as a pollutant. However, carbon dioxide has been demonised as the greenhouse gas villain. Restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions are a mechanism of deindustrialising Western society.

All plants use carbon dioxide as food. Compared to the past, the atmosphere currently doesn’t contain enough carbon dioxide for plant life to flourish as it did in the past. Horticulturalists burn hydrocarbon gas to release the warm carbon dioxide and water vapour exhaust gas into glasshouses. The atmosphere contains 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide whereas the exhaust gas contains over 0.1 per cent carbon dioxide. With increased carbon dioxide, the breathing holes in leaves close and reduce in number, plant growth is accelerated and water loss is reduced. Satellite imagery shows that over the last 40 years, the planet has greened due to a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Crop yields have increased due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, better farming practices and synthetic fertilisers. This has resulted in no increase in cultivated land, a longer growing season and more drought resistance. If you are frightened by a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-poisonous plant food mainly released from ocean degassing, you should stop your personal carbon dioxide emissions in an attempt to reach net zero by not eating plants or plant-derived meat, not eating bread, not drinking soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, not exhaling 100 times the carbon dioxide content that is inhaled and not using any of the 6,000 daily products made from fossil fuels.

We had global warming in Minoan, Roman, medieval and modern times but, according to the mantra, it is only the modern warming that has resulted from human emissions of carbon dioxide. During these past warm times, people had more food and lived longer, populations increased, economies boomed, great empires arose and there were fewer wars. The current warming has not reached the temperatures of previous warmings.

Over the last 300 years of warming, 169 glaciers shortened before humans started to release carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last glaciation 14,400 years ago and has no relationship to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Extreme weather has always been with us, there is no increase in flooding and wildfires however there has been an increase in hysterical reporting of natural variability in the occurrence of floods and wildfires. Polar bear populations have increased over the last seven decades, mainly from less hunting.

There is a new ascientific religion that claims that carbon dioxide caused by humans burning fossil fuels is a deadly sin; that we humans can absolve our sinful behaviour by buying indulgences called carbon credits or burying carbon dioxide which could have fed plants; apocalyptic scenarios are promoted by the high priests in the UN and IPCC; heretics are pilloried as deniers and metaphorically burnt at the stake; the truth is held by the ennobled cardinals who are the climate ‘scientists’ who feed off our taxes and are blindly supported by the modern-day preachers called journalists; bureaucrats have reclassified the gas of life as a pollutant; the Bible has been renamed Wikipedia which names and shames deniers and promotes the IPCC narrative; and we can obtain salvation with net zero, decarbonisation and renewable energy.

Politicians tell us that we can change the global climate by spending money taken from taxpayers and electricity consumers and, without reference to emissions from China, emitters of carbon dioxide in Australia can change a major planetary process. The effect on Australia of this new religion is that good money is thrown after bad, debt increases to a crippling level, energy becomes unreliable and expensive, education has changed from scholarship to propaganda and Australia loses competitiveness and sovereignty.

There is neither a carbon crisis nor a climate catastrophe. There is a crisis in common sense, basic knowledge and education.