Climate change coverage just lot of hot airCHRIS KENNY

The dislocation caused by the switch from baseload coal-fired generation to wind and solar has been for no benefit.

• 12:00AM OCTOBER 14, 2019
• 244 COMMENTS

The extent of daily political deception in the global warming debate is extraordinary. The most obvious and relevant facts go unreported and the most pressing questions are not asked.

It is an unspoken conspiracy of misinformation perpetrated by large elements of the media whose starting point is to demonstrate a “belief” that dangerous climate change is upon us and to identify themselves as part of the solution.

Facts and arguments are either marshalled or ignored to support an ideological position.

The most fundamental questions about climate and energy policies at this year’s election not only went unanswered but unasked. Commentators continue to advocate expensive policy action for no defined outcome. Even outfits charged with pursuing truth in journalism concoct false arguments to muddy the waters.

At the election a handful of reporters asked Bill Shorten what Labor’s bold climate policies — more than doubling the renewable energy target, almost doubling the emissions reduction target and ensuring half of all new car sales were electric vehicles — would cost. Former Channel 10 reporter Jonathon Lea famously hassled Shorten at a media conference, and I put up the key questions every day from the start of the campaign and never saw an answer or even an attempt from a Labor guest.

Voters obviously saw through all this obfuscation. But media progressives are yet to grasp the lessons.

Even now, while Labor begins public contortions over defining a new policy, costs hardly get a mention. Yet there is a much more important question that has always been ignored by journalists. Would there be any benefit from these policies? If cost is one (frightening) aspect of the equation, then benefit must be the other.

Coalition politicians don’t want to ask the question because voters might then ask about benefits from their (less) expensive policies. The grim reality, of course, is the dislocation caused by the renewable energy target and other measures, the steep power price rises, and fragility of supply caused by a government-induced switch from baseload coal-fired generation to wind and solar, has all been for no benefit.

These policies, and the enormous additional expense of other subsidies, grants and “direct action” projects, have helped Australia reduce its carbon dioxide emissions and therefore meet and/or remain on track to meet international climate commitments signed at Kyoto and Paris.

But even if you take what some like to call the scientific consensus at face value, these costly efforts have delivered no environmental gain.

Global carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise dramatically. The alarmists claim we are already experiencing the ill-effects of global warming and that the impact will only get worse, yet they demand that Australia take even more action, presumably as a gesture of our goodwill, a sort of pointless economic self-flagellation, while we wait to boil in rising oceans, regardless.

In 2017 global emissions rose by about 1.6 per cent, or more than the entirety of Australia’s emissions, and in 2018 they rose by 2.7 per cent, or more than double our total emissions.

We could shut our country down, of course, and it would make no difference to the global trajectory. But don’t expect such inconvenient facts to penetrate our debate.

In the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend Peter Hartcher wrote about Australian cities being lost “under water” and the nation being flooded by “climate refugees” and linked the current drought to climate change. He lamented how Scott Morrison had not been “forced to act” on climate.

Never mind the tens of billions of dollars already expended, or the targets met and adopted, or the killer fact that none of this will have any impact on the environment because of rising global greenhouse emissions.

This is either a grand delusion or a grand deception, or both.

The ABC’s Media Watch program last week went to a lot of trouble to suggest our Prime Minister was talking tosh on climate action. Like Hartcher, the Extinction Rebellion protesters, some Labor and Greens’ rhetoric and the line trotted out by many journalists, Media Watch’s Paul Barry was keen to propagate the false notion that this nation is not taking climate action.

These people just pretend away the RET, Kyoto Protocol, Paris targets, Direct Action, Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Emissions Reduction Fund and other schemes and projects as they push their inaction myth.

Surely anyone is free to argue that these efforts are insufficient but they cannot be denied — that would be dishonest.

Media Watch tried to disprove a rather uncontroversial statement from Morrison.

“Australia is doing our bit on climate change and we reject any suggestion to the contrary,” Morrison told the UN General Assembly last month.

Opinions will vary around the margins of “our bit”, of course, but given Kyoto and Paris and the policies undertaken to meet them, the statement is entirely valid.

Yet in order to disprove this unremarkable assertion, Barry put a different proposition to a selected group of climate experts, asking them if Australia was “doing enough to combat global warming?” Surprise, surprise, they all said “no”.

Media Watch also sought opinions from the experts about media coverage of the issue. Opinions about opinions with no attempt to draw the debate back to facts — this is typical of climate coverage.

On the ABC’s Australia Talks website too, the climate questions are based on false assumptions of current inaction, with participants given options to flag their preferred approach to climate policy: “action should be taken”; “before we take any action”; and “immediate action is necessary”.

The real question is whether current action is too little, too much or just right.

But why deal in facts when you can perpetuate a fallacy?

On Insiders and elsewhere there have been constant attempts to link the drought and climate change. Fran Kelly used some “gotcha” journalism to get Water Resources Minister David Littleproud to make the concession — not based on science but on anecdotes from farmers that “droughts are meaner” than they used to be.

Never mind pre-eminent expert Professor Andrew Pitman, the UNSW Centre for Excellence on Climate Extremes director, says there is “no link” between climate change and the drought.

Never mind that nothing we are experiencing now has not been experienced before. And never mind that the IPCC reports point to overall increases in average precipitation and river run-offs, so that even if “medium confidence” predictions of increases in both floods and droughts came to fruition, there would be more water to capture and store.

Let me suggest some questions for Hartcher, Barry, Kelly and others to put to their political, scientific and activist guests in the future. What have climate policies cost Australia so far and what have been the benefits from those policies? What would be the economic cost of doubling Australia’s climate action? What would be the environmental benefit?

If this drought was caused by human-induced global warming, what caused the Federation drought? If Australia could reduce its emissions to zero immediately, would we ever see severe droughts, bushfires and floods again? If the world could reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to zero, would Australia still be a land of droughts and flooding rains?

If Australia reduces its emissions while China increases emissions by many factors of our cuts, how does the planet benefit?

Can you name one weather or climate event of the past 30 years that was unprecedented?

Are you able to name a country that has inflicted more economic pain on itself in pursuit of climate goals than Australia?

For an issue we are constantly told is the most pressing one for the entire planet, the media is remarkably incurious.

Presented with a dilemma of immense complexity, our media approaches it with inane polarity.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/climate-coverage-just-lot-of-hot-air/news-story/087287cdc75a235e02cf5f090f2dc504