In March, Greens MP Michael Berkman introduced a Private Member’s Bill, the Queensland Climate Transition Bill 2023.

The proposed legislation seeks to:

• Ban new coal, oil, and gas resources projects in Queensland
• Set a 75 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, to reach Net Zero by 2035
• Legislate a target to phase out fossil fuel exports by 2030
• Create a new Queensland Climate Transition Authority, to consult and work with affected workers and communities on a fair transition plan

This Bill, which will be debated in the Queensland Parliament in 2024, glorifies the role that ‘renewables’ are expected to play in Australia’s energy future.

The term ‘renewables’ refers to energy resources such as wind and sunbeams which are being proposed as a substitution for fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and gas. In this article, the term ‘unreliables’ will be used instead, replacing the deceptive term ‘renewables’. This is because ‘renewables’ still need to rely on fossil fuels to harvest dispersed, intermittent, and weak forms of energy. They also require dependable, immediately available backup power currently supplied by the very fossil fuels that they are supposed to replace.

From inception, the entire unreliables story has contributed to confusion and disinformation by unjustly vilifying fossil fuels and stigmatising carbon dioxide (CO2) gas as the enemy of mankind for supposedly increasing the surface temperature on Earth. However, recent scientific studies have shown that the trace gas CO2 does not depend on, and does not drive, surface temperatures. For example, the World Climate Declaration, signed by scores of scientists, unequivocally states:

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial. CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. More CO2 is favourable for nature, greening our planet. Additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass.

Similarly, Ian L. K. McNaughton, a physicist, mathematician, and IT manager, in a study entitled Temperature Measurements versus Population Growth & Carbon Dioxide Concentrations has recently concluded, ‘the relationship between increasing global concentrations of CO2 and increasing global temperatures … has been shown to be tenuous at least, and likely absent’ and that ‘the increasing concentrations of global atmospheric CO2, regardless of its sources, should no longer be of such global concern to humanity into the future’.

In demonising CO2, the Bill’s climate change misinformation has richly contributed to the English vocabulary. For example, the quaint, innocuous-sounding term ‘firming’ involves total backup and consequent duplication of the existing network of transmission lines and distribution systems. Other terms such as ‘decarbonisation’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘carbon tax’, ‘carbon trading’, ‘carbon capture and storage (CCS)’, and ‘carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS)’ are deceptively simple, but their content harbours misinformation which is repeated ad nauseam.

Joseph Goebbels would have admired the Net Zero wordsmithing effort as another confirmation of the validity of the big lie strategy attributed to him:

‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.’

This sentiment was also expressed by Sir Walter Scott who, early in the 19th Century, wrote the celebrated aphorism, ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.’ The aphorism communicates the idea that people who lie or act dishonestly create or, at least, initiate problems that have a domino effect, the consequences of which cannot be controlled. At the time of writing his aphorism, he could not have imagined the enormity of the tangled web of climate change ideology, woven by the swarm of spin doctors surrounding policymakers.

Driving what can only be described as mass hysteria, powerbrokers in the United Nations (UN), an organisation that has failed abysmally in its primary objective of maintaining peace on Earth, have created a political climate that threatens the economies of the Western world. Based on Luddite-like objections to industrial development, an unfounded fear of carbon dioxide, a clean, non-polluting by-product of burning hydrocarbon fuels (particularly fossil fuels), has been built up over generations of misinformation via the education system, the media, and governments.

In exploiting an innate fear that has been lurking in the background since the days of William Blake’s’ Dark Satanic Mills, the UN created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the mission of which is to assess options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse emissions – a classic case of ‘emissions impossible’! The IPCC issues regular Assessment Reports. Their latest, AR6, issued in 2023, is a remarkable tour through the wilderness of ‘what if’. What if climate change cannot be mitigated through limiting or regulating greenhouse emissions? Indeed, while the report concentrates on human emissions of a demonised trace gas, the hippopotamus in the bathtub is water vapour, and the oceans that cover 70 per cent of daily breathe in and out quantities of carbon dioxide that put coal-fired power stations in the shade.

There is an indisputable correlation between volcanic eruptions, particularly through hundreds of thousands of sub-sea cracks in the Earth’s crust where the crust is thinnest, and consequent ocean current heat exchange effects such as La Niña and El Niño that dictate floods and drought regardless of any trace gas in the atmosphere. This close link between subsea volcanic activity and resultant weather patterns makes up the global climate – totally independent of carbon dioxide, natural or anthropogenic. In January 2022, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted, triggering a tsunami, and sending ash through space. NASA reports show that the Tongan event blasted a vast amount of water vapour into the stratosphere. Remnants of that shot of greenhouse gas to where it is most potent are still up there affecting climates around the world and are probably responsible for the early appearance in the North Queensland wet season of Cyclone Jasper, currently bringing rain that was not predicted using conventional modelling. Also, work by other eminent scientists demonstrate the need for more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not less as demanded by Net Zero ideologues.

The annual Conferences of Parties, the 28th of which recently met in Dubai, was created as a platform for promoting the IPCC’s fanciful models, and their annual reports are more to do with wealth distribution than the exchange of scientific ideas. Reports of independent observers of this year’s event are becoming increasingly cynical as the real issues of energy security and affordability are addressed. One referred to the ‘high priests of hypocrisy’ – certainly, an appropriate soubriquet for the COP partygoers. ‘High priests of hysteria’ could equally apply as the UN Secretary-General terrified the children with claims that ‘the Earth is boiling’. Ominously, the partygoers of COP28 have decided to transition more vigorously out of fossil fuels – a decision enthusiastically endorsed by the Australian delegation, thereby threatening to kill off one of the most essential industries of Australia. It is a recipe for economic ruin.

Despite trillions of dollars being wasted on unreliables, coal continues to bridge the gap between the need for cheap, reliable energy to alleviate poverty and the ability to service that need. Hence, the Queensland Climate Transition Bill certainly does not represent the interests of Queenslanders and promises only increased power costs and assured power outages in the near future if coal, oil, and gas are phased out, new hydrocarbon projects banned, and a new layer of bureaucracy, a Queensland Climate Transition Authority, blankets and further suffocates economic activity in Queensland. The Bill should unceremoniously be dumped before valuable parliamentary time is wasted on this fundamentally flawed proposal.

It is appropriate to conclude with a poem, written by Jock McPoet, that sums up the blighted vision of the high priests of the world’s eco-religion.

COP28: A requiem

I loathe a glass-clad landscape, a land of shiny panes

That all need window cleaners, and don’t work, when it rains.

But when it hails it’s worser, when those panels are finito

And plains of plenty perish under imports known as cheapo.

Wind turbines may look splendid with their subsidies unended.

But the wind gusts that they harvest have some outcomes unintended.

Without the coal that feeds them with the steel and concrete needed

They wouldn’t even be there to need back-up, unimpeded.

Beneath our feet lie solar cells in volumes yet to measure

Those coal deposits in the bank are mankind’s buried treasure

All fully charged and ready, concentrated power

Made from CO2 and sunlight, these can make the deserts flower.