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There’s no great mystery about what Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s net-zero-by-2050 emissions announcement last weekend will cost. The answer: trillions galore. How do I know? Because Dr Brian Fisher, former head of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, who has no political allegiance and no vested interest, last May in the run-up to the federal election costed a much weaker version of Albanese’s plan. These costs were astronomic: a maximum $540 billion by 2030.
Then-opposition leader Bill Shorten’s plan was for a 45 per cent cut in CO2 emissions on 2005 levels by 2030. Note, firstly, how much less stringent is this compared with Albanese’s net-zero by 2050, especially as the initial work plucks the low-hanging fruit and thereafter the abatement costs rise exponentially.
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, last year announced carbon neutrality by 2050. In a rare but commendable bit of sanity, she asked a respected economics institute to estimate the cost. This revealed that getting to 50 per cent below 1990-levels in 2050 would cost at least 5 per cent of GDP annually by 2050. The cost would be similar to the current entire NZ expenditure on socialised education and health care.
Back home, as they say on the TV news, Labor’s pre-election 2030 plans involved some undetailed pledges to protect “emissions intensive trade-exposed industries (EITEs)” but also a ban on using Kyoto credits arising from over-achievement of previous emissions reductions. Fisher allowed for these factors plus varying use of international emissions permits. Such use of international permits would greatly lower costs of Labor’s 2030 plan, but Blind Freddy knows that such permits are rife with rorting and mere virtue-posturing. As Fisher says hopefully, the permits would have to involve best-practice “independent measurement, verification and audit.”[1]
You want costings? Here we go[2]:
# Labor’s target of a 45 per cent cut by 2030 would involve the equivalent of a carbon tax of between $67 and $405 a tonne of CO2 in 2030. Julia Gillard, eat your heart out. ABCTV News’ presenter Tamara Oudyn last night (Feb 23) quoted Albanese as saying that Labor could meet net-zero-2050 “without putting a price on carbon”.[3] Go figure.
# Fisher: Cumulative GNP losses from 2021-30 are estimated at $542 billion for a scenario in which Labor pursues its climate policy by restricting trade in international emissions permits to 25 per cent of the abatement task while protecting EITEs (emissions intensive trade-exposed industries). These losses can be more than halved, to $264 billion under a scenario in which there are no restrictions on trade in international permits, while still protecting EITEs.
To get these $264b-$542b losses in perspective, Australia’s entire annual economic output is currently about $1400 billion.
# However, the more Labor protects the emissions-exposed trade sectors, the worse cost burden falls on unprotected sectors and households (that is, on you and me).
# Fisher: Negative consequences for real wages and employment are projected under all scenarios, with a minimum 3 per cent reduction in real wages and 167,000 less jobs in 2030 compared to what otherwise would have occurred.
Sadly, the maximum would be more than 10 per cent reduction in real wages and about 320,000 jobs lost. Australia’s working class, with friends like Labor, doesn’t need enemies. Don’t forget that we’re talking here about quite a mild Labor target compared with Albanese’s net-zero-2050.
# Wholesale electricity prices as things stand are likely to rise 1.5 per cent a year this decade in real terms. “Each of the [Labor] policy scenarios considered here results in a far greater growth rate in electricity prices,” Fisher wrote. In numbers, the price rise would be from 36 per cent to 67 per cent. Suppose your household power bill these days is $2000. Labor would bring you a different bill of between $2700 and $3340. And that’s the Opposition Leader’s first installment of increases in his quest for net-zero-emissions. Albanese’s line is that renewables are cheaper. Yeah, right, Albo.
# The 45 per cent emissions-cut plan by 2030 would lower the output of the Land Transport sector by 2.1 per cent to 11.3 per cent by 2030. Other reductions would be Water and Air Transport down 1.8 – 8 per cent, Construction down 2.1 -7.2, per cent, Services 2.1 – 4.9 per cent, and Iron & Steel, 2.0 –10.6 per cent, compared to no-policy-change.
When the Business Council of Australia trumpets its love for zero-by-2050 policies, members ought to ask in whose interest the BCA is speaking.
The numbers above may all look big, but keep in mind that green ambitions don’t come cheap. Globally, spending on emissions reduction runs now at about $US1.5 trillion, i.e. $US1,500,000,000,000 per year.
All but a trifle of this is being spent by the West. China, India and Africa are going hell-bent for cheap, reliable coal-fired electricity and their emissions growth will continue to swamp utterly whatever cuts are made, at such fearsome costs, by Europe and its fellow travellers like us.
So the West’s anti-emission crusade, let alone Australia’s, will make not a jot of difference to the climate, even assuming that CO2 is the climate’s control-knob, which is kindergarten science given the unknowns and complexities of the climate system and solar forces.
There’s another way to come at Albanese’s zero-by-2050 target, based on technologies required.
Simply put, to get to the net zero by 2050 would involve phasing out fossil fuels and replacing them with emissions-free nuclear power. Obviously wind and solar power can’t do the job alone or at all.
Albanese’s target would require the deployment of a new nuclear-power plant each 65 days until January 2051, each of about the scale of Florida’s Turkey Point nuclear plant (1400MW) or Victoria’s Hazelwood coal-fired plant (1600MW). That’s five and half new nukes per year. This equation can be simply calculated from data from the International Energy Agency (see formulae below).
Keep in mind that one nuclear plant could cost at least $13 billion, based on overseas best-practice. Just imagine how the CFMMEU and State Premiers like Dan Andrews could amplify that cost. (Premier Dan in 2015 incurred a net $640m costs to taxpayers just to break the contract for Melbourne’s desperately-needed East-West tunnel because he needed some green-electorate NIMBY votes). But to be conservative, in a perfect world the cost of Australia’s required wholesale transition to nuclear power plants would be about $2 trillion, compared with our annual GDP of $1.4 trillion.[4]
The maths are also exciting for those with faith in wind power. For the same output of a Turkey Point US nuclear plant (1400MW) substitute 1500 state-of-the-art 2.5MW wind turbines, each 130 metres tall.
Albanese’s plan would require 23 of these wind turbines per day coming on-line, or 161 a week or 250,000 in total to January 2051. A giant farm of 1500 turbines needs close to 800 square kilometres of ground, so pity help the bats and birds. Wind turbines installed in penny packets would squander even more land. Conservatively, Australia’s quarter of a million turbines would need about 130,000 square kilometres — twice the area of Tasmania. Not in my backyard? If we assume 80 backyards per street, that would mean two 130-metre wind towers for every street in Australia.[5]
Albanese’s plan must involve a giant leap in our engineering and technology sectors. To get real, the Opposition leader ought to demand that every Arts student at universities, including those writing PhD theses on LGBTI Dance Theory, must transfer to science and technology faculties. Greenies also need to suck up that their transition to renewables will require a vast increase in the mining and processing sectors to acquire the resources needed. (If we shut down coal and gas exports, as Greenies demand, the impact on the Australian dollar exchange rate will make imported resource materials pricey indeed).
Albanese is flat-out deluded: “The private sector has taken up the challenge which is there, because they recognise that action on climate change isn’t just a challenge, it’s an opportunity.” Some opportunity, mate.
The formulae:
I’ve provided the Australian maths courtesy of a template from Dr Roger J. Pielke Jr, writing in Forbes and published on September 30, 2019. He’s a long-term IPCC author on weather disasters and his degrees include one in maths. Incidentally, he’s also a research expert on cheating in world elite sports.
Pielke’s simple formulae go like this:
Global fossil-fuel consumption, 2018 – 11,743 MTOE (million tonnes of oil equivalent)[6]. Output of Florida’s Turkey Point 1400MW nuclear plant, 1 MTOE. Days left till end-2050 – 11,037. Global deployment of nuclear power required by 2050 in Turkey Point units, more than one per day. To include forecast energy growth of 5800 MTOE (1.25% a year to 2040), add half a Turkey Point per day. One Turkey Point nuclear output equals 1500 wind turbines of 2.5MW each.
The recent BP Statistical Review of World Energy has fossil fuel energy use for US and Australia. BP put Australia in 2018 at 133 MTOE. With assumed 20 years growth of usage at 1.25 per cent p.a., the task by 2050 is to get rid of 170 MTOE. Divide 11,000 days by 170 = one nuclear plant per 65 days. Concurrently, we’d also need to be decommissioning the equivalent in fossil-fuel power sources.
It’s not as though any meaningful global switch from fossil fuels is already underway. As I mentioned here, each day humanity is moving in the other direction: more fossil fuels. In 2018 the world added more than 280 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE) of fossil fuel consumption compared with 106 MTOE of carbon-free consumption, says Pielke, citing BP. To move towards net-zero, all of those 400 MTOE additions ought to be carbon-free, while replacing and retiring 400 MTOE of existing fossil fuel consumption. “In a round number,” he remarks., “the deployment rate of carbon-free energy would need to increase by about 800 per cent.”
It’s symptomatic of the madness besetting Australia that the States (Labor and conservative-led) have all subscribed to the net-zero-2050 mantra. So has the clueless Australian Academy of Science. So have scores of nations. Where will it all end?
Tony Thomas new book of essays, Come to think of it – essays to tickle the brain, can be pre-ordered here for March publication. All welcome to the launch in Carlton Vic on March 10, rsvp here
[1] Moreover, the UN climate zealots are unlikely to agree to unrestricted emissions trading, as Fisher concedes.
[2] Fisher was not doing a cost-benefit analysis as he said he didn’t know what the benefits of emissions reductions would bring. Since Australia’s impact on global emissions is effectively zero vis a vis emissions growth by China, India and the sensible Third World, our impact on the climate would also be zero. Further, the climate impact of all the Paris pledges would also be in significant or effectively zero, according to Bjorn Lomberg’s estimates based on IPCC formulae. In any event, some mild further warming could be beneficial rather than detrimental. And no-one knows if global climate trends might revert to natural cooling.
[3] ABC didn’t show the quote directly
[4] I’ll cite this just for fun, but Extinction Rebellion’s local demands for zero-net emissions by 2025 would require a new Australian nuclear plant every 11 days, or 33 nukes per year.
[5] Calculation based on 9 million Australian households
A new Australian nuclear plant every 11 days, or 33 nukes per year! Sounds good to me. On the nuclear energy issue, we have thrown away a great opportunity to build a high tech hi value add industry that would have had a wonderful supply chain and leveraged exports. But no, we listened to the economic vandals lead by Caldicott on the pretext of nuclear war, with the subtext being a Luddite disdain for progress.
Read the views of a lucid, literate, top class, top of the world Professor of Meteorology. His language is precise, accurate and eminently accessible; his depth of knowledge unsurpassed; his integrity unassailable. All of this so much so, that the only pushback comprises ad homs.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018-GWPF-Lecture.pdf
The costings related here by Tony Thomas – is there, I do so hope, a direct link or publication reference to Brian Fisher’s report from autumn 2019 ? I know what happened to him and his family as a result of the “doxxing” from Simon Holmes a Court, but I do hope Brian’s efforts are not wasted.
Love your work Tony. I remain optimistic as despite the deluge of propaganda they face, kids still want to live with air con and reliable power.
Llajd, yes they want all that. Most do not practice what they preach at all! At least Greta took a sailing yacht to cross the Atlantic, but that’s rare. I rented a flat in London, sharing with my sister and her friends. The all raved on about using resources, CO2 emissions and all that. Yet I was forever turning off lights after they’d left rooms, closing fridge doors properly; walking distances where they insisted a cab was needed etc. They’re in good company (Suzuki “I’m not going to travel to Australia again to save emissions”; Al “Gulfstream” Gore and the rest), but they couldn’t see the contradiction! They will create a mindset that leads politicians to back this stuff. Once this is institutionalised (see faux aboriginal ceremonies like “Welcome to Country”) it’s very difficult to remove them.
I’ve been alerted to this comment by the Mathematical Modelling Company (Corp) Paris,
http://www.scmsa.eu/archives/SCM_LBRCV2_2015_12_EN.pdf
in the second of two reports explaining the absurdity of the anti-emissions crusade:
“How have policymakers managed to make such absurd decisions, to blinker themselves to such a degree, when so many means of scientific investigation are available? The answer is simple: as soon as something is seen as being green, as being good for the planet, all discussion comes to an end and any scientific analysis becomes pointless or counterproductive. The policymakers will not listen to anyone or anything; they take all sorts of hasty, contradictory, damaging and absurd decisions. When will they finally be held to account?”
We seem to be back in a world which even Jonathan Swift would find hard to satirise.
Gullible’s Travails, perhaps?
DG–I agree.
What Tony Thomas does not do here, is compare this costing of carbon neutrality with the cost of doing nothing, and of proceeding with business-as-usual.
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This is understandable, testified to by a swarm of articles in this very same journal denouncing the IPCC, renewable energy, mainstream science (not all of it; just selections from the climatology bit) and those who endorse it, like the CSIRO, the AAAS, the Royal Society and a few other scientific organisations (195 to be precise) all of which articles show that the cost of doing nothing will be a big, fat zero. That is, zero dollars, zero yen, zero euros or zero any other currency one cares to name.
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That is because there is no heating effect, and no possible global warming role played by that wonderful plant-food of a gas known as carbon dioxide. The cost of doing nothing will itself be negative, and thus a welcome positive addition to the economy. The CO2 It is a lucky and beneficial by-product of the burning of fossil carbon, which benefits the said [choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!*] renewables can only diminish, along with the profits rightly accruing to the present owners of coal, and to all those who mine it, transport it, use it and worship it up to the point of carrying lumps of it into parliamentary chambers.
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Please let it be understood: the intention behind this comment is to make good repair of any trivial problem in this otherwise excellent article resulting from this quite understandable minor oversight on the part of Tony Thomas.
It appears there are two catastrophes occurring on the planet at the moment, i.e. coronavirus and climate change. It is interesting to observe humanity’s reaction to these two disasters. Re the first: I am not sure what it is like in other capitals, but in Perth, you can’t buy face masks and/or hand sanitiser. They have all been bought out by the hoi polloi. I am certainly getting ready to “run for the hills” if Perth becomes a coronavirus hot spot. Re the second: the same hoi polloi are taking no notice of the climate change catastrophe. They are using their fossil fueled cars, phones, air con units, and all the other labour saving devices that fossil fuels have visited upon us, with impunity. They are not cutting back on air travel, train travel. They are virtually not adjusting their lifestyles in any way at all. Why is this so? Why does one invisible virus bring about such fear, while another invisible molecule is treated with disdain. Methinks the reason is the hoi polloi, in the main, don’t believe a word of it when it comes to CO2. They might sit around at dinner parties and criticise governments or exclaim “rest my beating heart” over the climate change so-called disaster, but they don’t really believe it.
Ian Mac, show us these alleged costs of doing nothing?
Exactly which of the IPCC’s and other hysterical warmist predictions over the past 20 years or so have actually come to pass, or show any credible signs of having met any of the doom-laden deadlines so beloved of the likes of Al Gore, Prince Charles, David Attenborough, and the horde of rent seekers riding on their coat tails.
Please spare us the long discredited links between “climate change née global warming” and things that have been in progress for centuries since the end of the Little Ice Age, eg sea level rise, melting glaciers and other such nonsense.
As was said above:
“Brian Fisher’s report from autumn 2019 ? ” Where ?
Thanks for your link to Prof Lindzen, ianl. Here he is in lighter vein a few years ago; “When it comes to unusual climate, which always occurs somewhere, most claims of evidence for global warming are guilty of the Prosecutor’s Fallacy. For example, this confuses the near-certainty of the fact that if A shot B, there will be evidence of gunpowder on A’s hands, with the assertion that if C has evidence of gunpowder on his hands, then C shot B! However, with global warming, the line of argument is even sillier. It generally amounts to something like; if A kicked up some dirt, leaving an indentation in the ground into which a rock fell, and B tripped on this rock and bumped into C who was carrying a carton of eggs which fell and broke, then if some broken eggs are found that shows that A kicked up some dirt! These days we go even further and decide that the best way to prevent eggs being broken is to ban dirt kicking”.
Finally:
http://www.baeconomics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Economic-Consequences-of-Labors-Climate-Change-Action-Plan-1May19.pdf
Author Brian S Fisher, May 1 2019
Note that the ignorant pushbacks are from the ABC, SMH, Guardian. This report contains peer-reviewed data on costs that the leftoids cannot cope with … cognisant conflict of the highest order.
‘Doubting Thomas’:
“…things that have been in progress for centuries since the end of the Little Ice Age, eg sea level rise, melting glaciers and other such nonsense.”
So you would in your case for coal maintain that no matter how much CO2 is added to the atmospheric and oceanic systems, no adverse changes can possibly result.
Interesting….
Rumpole: M’Lud, we tender as evidence…..
Judge: Evidence? Evidence?
Prosecution Counsel: Evidence? Objection My Lord! This is most irregular!
Judge: Sustained. Mr Rumpole! I have warned you before! This court hears no evidence, and will hear none! Is that clear?
Rumpole: Then what will you hear M’Lud?
Judge: Wishes. Please confine yourself to them and them alone. And remember where you are: in the Court of Unreason, Denial and Wishes.
.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
What we are seeing with this debate is one side arguing on facts and rationality (Tony et al) and others in the Media relying on the “vibe”. We used to laugh at the use of the “vibe” in the High Court case in “The Castle” but now it’s all the fashion. As I have said before – I am over this climate change/global warming thing and thought I might be able to cash in on it with a good USA style contrarian conspiracy theory book by linking a manufacturer of electric cars with going to Mars to set up human colonies from an overcrowded world after unsuccessfully trying to reduce the number of humans on earth. Some multinational secret brethren organisation tried to reduce earth’s population by convincing humans that they were responsible for the impending doom of the earth by producing too much carbon dioxide and methane – personally by exhaling carbon dioxide as a result of breathing and methane via the digestive process, as well as farm animals and industrial processes. This resulted in self flagellation by brainwashing the youth to switch to lentils and killing all the livestock (not much methane saved there). This when coupled to birth control for the young and euthanasia for all those useless oldies who don’t vote Green and other people who feel depressed or suffer from some genetic infirmity can only go so far, so it’s off to Mars where woke humans can survive in plastic tents but there is no grass for livestock. I wonder if it would be a best seller and the sales would take off?
padraic: Why not give it a go?
Ian, you never know – I just might – couldn’t be worse than some of the fiction drivel that gets published – like that produced by the late Ursula Le Guin, for instance.
And a further comprehensive overview from Dr Alan Longhurst:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/02/24/australian-fires-climate-truth-bomb/#more-25777
Actual empirical data are used, extracted from NOAA’s globally collected records. Longhurst makes no bones here – the Aus BoM (I prefer BoT, Bureau of Truth) have wilfully corrupted published data.
Ad homs will be used (are used) to try and destroy this article. An admission, of course, of the accuracy of the article.
ianl, SNAP! I was just about to post that very same link.
It’s a nasty job, this education of the chronically obtuse, but someone has to do it.
Excellent article indeed.
That Judith Curry piece is nothing more than coalar propaganda. Its author, Alan Longhurst, goes by temperature records alone.
It is high school physics. With ice at both poles and in (diminishing) mountain glaciers, temperatures will remain fairly stable, and the heat gained by the Earth’s climate system will only show up as sea level rise, due in turn to warming of oceanic water, ice melt, or both.
Loss of Arctic ice threatens to expose the far more heat-absorbing darker ocean water underneath, changing the albedo of the Earth.
To focus on thermometers and their readings is to live in a fool’s paradise. Humanity cannot dump CO2, the waste gas of combustion and a heat-trapping gas, willy-nilly into the atmosphere and oceans and not expect some changes to result: not necessarily favourable to civilisation, and without possibly crossing tipping points as yet unknown.
Still, who among the coal-proprietors and their shills will give a damn as long as the $$$$ keep flowing in?
You still haven’t answered my above question about the costs of doing nothing. You simply evaded the issue as you invariably do by yet another diversionary response.
Your snide remarks about “coal-proprietors and their shills” would be grossly offensive coming from anyone else. From you, however, they’re simply like farts in an elevator. Some people simply cannot learn manners.
Herodotus wrote that “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.” The majority if not all of the big food-bowls of the world are the gift of rivers whose waters begin as snow or glaciers, including Australia’s own Murray Valley. The big rivers of Asia: the Ganges, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtse and right around the dial to the Danube, likewise. And those of the Americas.
The cost of doing nothing could well be starvation and refugee movements unlike anything experienced before in history. The cost could be the global environment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of which is the global human economy. And there is only one way to find out for sure.
But fortunately investment in renewables is growing, while that in coal has stalled.
“Could be”?
For the last 20 years or more, despite “experts'”doom-laden deadlines that have all been passed without a single one proving accurate, the only significant costs have been the vast sums of money and national treasure diverted to dodgy research individuals and institutions, and to the rent-seeking “renewable” power industry that has defiled our landscapes and done untold damage to our precious fauna.
They are the absolutely certain, and already astronomical costs of your mindless fantasies. And you and your gullible idiot friends are willing to double down and destroy the Coal industry, and thus the national economy, on the fanciful possibility that “could be” somewhere in the as yet realistically unforeseeable future. I say realistically because, to date, none of the past doom-laden forecasts by “experts” have met their self-stated deadlines, so why would any sane person risk everything on the predictions of such demonstrable fools?
So, DT:
Precisely which “doom-laden forecasts by ‘experts'” [note scare quotes are your own] are you referring to?
And while we are at it, what sort of evidence would convince you that CO2 is 1. a heat-trapping gas, whose discharge into the atmosphere is: 2. warming the atmosphere and oceans and decreasing the pH of the latter, and 3. affecting the environment adversely: as, say, in the case of ‘bleaching’ of coral reefs?
“There is nothing to fear except fear itself”….and the deranged Net Zero 2050 climate fixers, who believe global “climate stability” – whatever that is – can be achieved merely by reducing – only the human component of – global carbon dioxide emissions, as if it alone controls the weather. Breathtaking hubris.
DT is sick of the sight of you.
You balk at “scare quotes” but have no problem at making up quotes of your opponents and, when pulled up, think that you can get away with it with a torrent of abuse.
Bernard, (or whatever your real name is):
“You balk at “scare quotes” but have no problem at making up quotes of your opponents and, when pulled up, think that you can get away with it with a torrent of abuse.”
Could you perhaps give an example of that? (Please try to avoid another sweeping generalisation.)
Easy. You made up a quote along the lines that the best argument against AGW was that nothing must be allowed to disrupt the coal and oil mining industries. All neatly wrapped between quotation marks, to make it look that it was an actual quote. When I asked you the details of this quote, it turned out that nobody had said it, you had just made it up as a useful tool in your armoury of poor jokes, entire sentences of capital letters (= yelling), strings of exclamation marks, posting of cheat sheets that had time and again failed to convince anyone. When I called out this bogus quote, your strategy was to send me a tirade of abuse.
End of argument.
By the way, Bernard is my name. I do not have to account to you about my name, neither does anyone else. Stop that childish nonsense.
So what thread exactly wherein this offence was committed? A url would be handy.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/02/warmists-are-feeling-a-polar-chill/
No more from me. The End.
Thanks. Have a nice day.
Please close the door on your way out.
What to do about climate change is a political question. But it seems to me that governments are responding more to the noisiest activists, however ignorant and malign, and their own desire to appear virtuous in the media, instead of genuinely seeking sensible answers. Brexit was desired by many in order to drain the Westminster swamp. That process is only now beginning and it is already proving a very messy business – clearing the Augean stables is an apt comparison. The rule of technocrats – the supra-nationalist EU’s and cultural Marxism’s alternative to democracy – has spread like cancer throughout the UK’s political system and academia and has infected much of the justice system. There is a long hard road ahead for the people of UK in rebuilding their country as a democratic self-governing sovereign nation state. Independence from the EU is only the first step. Climate change is another entire campaign but in it we find many of the same Remoaner and EU-phile people and rent-seekers undermining the independent nation state, imposing the narrowly based technocratic rule of self-interested experts, lacking understanding of people, intolerant, loathing all the old fashioned values that made nations great in the first place.
As a counter, here are just two sober assessments of the future of electric vehicles:
In the 2019 GWPF Lecture Professor Gautam Kalghatgi (FREng FSAE FIMechE FISEES) asks “Is it Really the End of the Internal Combustion Engine?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNRk4iGreSw&t=8s
Opinion by Jon Yeomans in The Telegraph (UK): “The two countries that control the fate of electric cars” – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/28/two-countries-control-fate-electric-cars/
Contrast with Dr Karl in Science Australia’s propaganda video masquerading as education:
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Faustraliascience.tv%2Fvod%2Fdr-karl-do-you-believe-in-climate-change%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0xqzQj49a_hsU2PPUEOiT_jpOPfNTHST6blQ5dzbe-g-NE3XjbGuza2bc%3A4WJkK-tk9NXTXAtUWkG5U0DIsjY&cuid=2800408
Dr Karl relies on a belief in scientific consensus. The great benefit of a claimed consensus is that anyone who disagrees with you can be dismissed as an outlier, instead of engaging with their criticism, or dismissed as a liar as Dr Karl does in this video. Towards the end he cites the example of Climeworks, a Swiss company established in 2010 following publication of six EU Climate Directives in April 2009. It develops and manufactures equipment to recycle CO2 already in the atmosphere. It is backed by wealthy private investors whose expected high profits from Climeworks are wholly dependent on CAGW being legally enforced political orthodoxy rather than scientifically proven and commercially enabled in a free market.
So Dr Karl exhorts children to grow up to become politicians so they can fix the market for these private investors.
It appears most unlikely that any of the governments embarking on swingeing green energy policies has actually thought very much about them at all.