If I had been a musician, I reckon I would have been a percussionist. Because here I am again banging on a drum that I have been beating since 2015, and which I most recently discussed in these pages back in May: ‘Net Zero by 2050: nothing but a marketing slogan’.

Recently, Paul Kelly opined in the Australian that rejecting net zero will consign the Libs to electoral oblivion, writing, ‘The Liberal wipeout in urban Australia had nothing to do with the Scott Morrison/Peter Dutton stance of net zero at 2025.… The fallacy is to say that because the Liberals had a net zero policy in 2022 and 2025 and did badly, the policy should be dropped. This conflates correlation with causation. There were many reasons for the defeats of Morrison and Dutton but, to the extent climate was a factor, it was because the Liberals weren’t seen as sufficiently serious in tackling the problem. Claiming the response to the 2025 defeat is to run harder against climate action is unforgivable folly and tactical madness.’

Memo to Kelly: Canavan, Joyce, McCormack et al. are not saying net zero should be dropped because adherence to it led to the 2025 defeat. They are saying it should be dropped because it is staggeringly bad policy.  They are well aware this poses an electoral problem for them. But they are up for the fight. This makes them, on this issue at least, conviction politicians. I seem to recall Paul Kelly, over many years, lamenting a lack of conviction politicians among the coterie of rent-seekers and time-servers that now bestows upon us what laughingly passes for government.

I have been arguing for years that net zero by 2050 is nothing more than a marketing slogan, because it bears no relationship to the putative aim of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, or at most 2°C, above pre-industrial levels. In my last article I noted that the latest IPCC Assessment Report, told us that in order to have an 83-per-cent chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C the world could not emit any more than 120 GtCO2 in total, regardless of timeframe. Tellingly, given such a limited budget, there has been no attempt whatsoever to apportion that budget amongst nations. It is a free-for-all. So much for science.

There is no timeframe associated with this budget. Getting to net zero by 2050 makes no difference if we expend the carbon budget before we get there.

I recently thought to revisit that carbon budget and, since the IPCC has not released an updated report, I resorted to Dr Google.  The best information I could find was generated by AI: ‘The remaining global carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C is critically low. For a 50 per cent chance of staying within this limit, the remaining budget is estimated at 130 gigatonnes of CO2, projected to be exhausted by 2028. For an 83-per-cent chance, the budget is even smaller, at 30 gigatonnes, and projected to be exhausted this year. At current emission rates, the 1.5°C limit could be passed within the next 10 years for all likelihoods.’

It turns out I was overly optimistic – ‘projected to be exhausted this year’. Take that for what it’s worth. It is based on data from the Climate Change Tracker website.

Two things emerge from this. From the climate alarmist’s point of view, if we get to net zero by 2050, it will be decades too late. The damage – if damage there be – will already have been done.  If AI is right, whatever the consequences of breaching the 1.5°C limit may be, they are already inevitable.

And the inescapable conclusion from this is that there is absolutely no point in squandering further eye-watering sums of money in an attempt to avert the inevitable.

That is why you never hear Bowen, or any of the others, talking about 1.5°C or 2°C.  They don’t care about that particular piece of ‘science’. They employ two tactics to avoid confronting this inconvenient truth. The first is to speak always as if net zero by 2050 is the ultimate aim. Get there – job done. And they know the vast bulk of the public just eat it up. A very dishonest ploy by that supposed scourge of ‘disinformation’, the Albanese government.

And their second tactic is to insist that, because ‘renewables are the cheapest form of energy’ we would want to make this transition anyway. We know that is not true and this is the ground that the Coalition rebels are concentrating on. But this is the low hanging fruit, as each successive power bill will convince more and more voters that they are being lied to about the cost of renewables.

The harder fight – the essential one – is to convince those people that their pain is for nothing. We know that a majority of Australians are, to some extent or another, worried about climate change but will not volunteer a personal monetary contribution, e.g., in the form of minimal flight offsets. But they do seem to accept having it forced upon them, in spades, by government. So, Joyce et al. need to offer an alternative. I accept that for them to now publicly disavow the possibility of catastrophic man-made global warming is a big ask. The ‘science’ has too much momentum.

So, they have to wean themselves off it.  What better way to start than by prosecuting the case, as I have here, that net zero is an illusion. And that, regardless of whether or not you believe in global warming, we have passed the point of no return. The climate will do what it will do.  And, therefore, whatever funds we have left after the current climate spendathon, the NDIS, childcare subsidies, etc, would be better spent in adaptation measures such as building dams and implementing better fire prevention and suppression regimes. All of which we will need even if global warming proves to be a myth. They cannot sustain a campaign based on a tacit concession that global warming might be a problem, but they will fight to prevent it less enthusiastically than Labor. They need to get the debate back to that magic figure of 1.5°C.

From the World Economic Forum website: ‘Scientists have long warned that 1.5°C is a physical limit, not a political target. Tipping points are critical thresholds beyond which a system reorganises, often abruptly and/or irreversibly, according to the IPCC. Breaching 1.5°C has a domino effect – triggering critical changes in Earth systems that reinforce rather than reduce warming – with cascading consequences for economies and societies.’

I do not hold to that belief. But that is the ‘science’ that Bowen and Albanese profess to accept. It is clear that 1.5°C will be breached. The cavalier dismissal by Bowen of recent admonitions by climate czar Simon Stiell cannot be construed as anything other than ‘climate denialism’.

In summary:

– Professor Ross Garnaut tells us the government will miss its carbon reduction target of 82-per-cent renewables by 2030 by ‘a big margin’,

– Therefore, Australia achieving net zero by 2050 looks increasingly improbable,

– But, even if we do make it, without nuclear it will be economy destroying,

– In any case, it will be decades too late because the climate damage will already have been done, and:

– In a climate-ravaged world, how stable will a grid that relies on hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and thousands of kilometres of transmission lines be when exposed to unprecedented storms?

Joyce et al. should bang this drum at every Question Time. How does the Bowen ‘plan’ contribute to the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C? What percentage of the IPCC’s global carbon budget has the government appropriated for Australia? And what is its back-up plan for when, not if, 1.5°C is breached?