The Grand Delusion of the Elite

Nothing speaks louder of the complete derangement of the elite classes than their uniform obsession with the bonkers scam of “Net Zero”. On few other issues, apart from immigration, are the political, media, and chattering classes so out of touch with we hoi polloi.

“Climate change” might be a monomania for the useless, parasitic wealthy, but it barely scrapes in to the top ten voter concerns. Polling shows that this is a global truism. Consequently, climate activism has never been an election-winner in Australia; by contrast, politicians who’ve explicitly campaigned against climate alarmism have won bigly.

Unfortunately, the last politician to explicitly campaign against climate activism and win a landslide election was nearly a decade ago. Nowadays, the derangement of the elite class is so complete that the best we can get is an opposition chasing the same delusion, but in a different padded cell.

The climate wars are set to be ­revived as Labor and the Coalition prepare radically different pathways to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, with Anthony Albanese moving to win back working-class voters through funding for green jobs in seats dependent on fossil fuels.

We’ve all seen how these promises of “green jobs” pans out in the real world, not just in Australia, but the US, too. Both Julia Gillard and Barack Obama made big promises on “green jobs” — and they were both disasters. A handful of make-work jobs, propped up by the taxpayer at ludicrous expense.

By contrast, the Coalition are almost talking sense. Almost.

With the Prime Minister to visit the NSW Hunter Valley on Friday to talk up renewables and critical minerals jobs in coal ­regions, Coalition MPs are calling for the life of coal-fired power ­stations to be extended until ­nuclear can be brought online in the 2030s […]

Coalition MPs attacked Mr Albanese’s renewable plans and warned of mass blackouts, with new analysis showing about 16,000 megawatts out of the current 21,000MW coal fleet will be retired by 2040. The reduction in generation would be even larger under the Queensland government’s vow to close the Callide C power station by 2035, despite its natural life being more than 15 years longer.

Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien, who is expected to release Mr Dutton’s energy policy within months, warned on Thursday that Labor’s renewables-only approach was a “road to ruin”.

Anyone who babbles about “Net Zero” is on the road to ruin, but at least going nuclear is a detour from the cliff’s edge. Because anyone who thinks we can replace fossil fuels with any current technology is either a liar, a fool, or a snake-oil salesman. Probably all three at once.

Nuclear will at least keep the lights on (take note, Victoria), but the elephant in the room is that electricity is just a small part of the energy usage of a modern, industrialised society. Household electricity is even smaller. One of the biggest slices of the energy usage pie is transport — and we all know what an environmental and logistical nightmare electric cars really are.

The Coalition climate and ­energy policy, positioning nuclear energy as Australia’s long-term baseload power source to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, will be pitched as technologically ­agnostic and embrace a role for renewables […]

“Next-generation, zero-emissions nuclear energy is one of the safest forms of energy generation the world has ever seen. It produces zero emissions and is kind to the local environment with a tiny footprint.”

The Australian

The only thing that can be said about the Coalition is that they’ve at least got half a brain, while Labor and the Greens have barely got a neuron between them.

The last politician with the guts to state the bleeding obvious was Tony Abbott — and he won by a landslide. The only problem is that, in government, he blew it — and there’s nobody with Abbott’s pure mongrel left. All we’ve got now is a choice between dripping wet and slightly damp.