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brexit was a rejection of the british as well as of the european establishments yes the centrist macron won in france but only by sidelining the parties that had ruled from the start of the fifth republic and while the german chancellor was re elected seemingly it s at the head of an unstable coalition after losing a quarter of her vote everywhere there s a breakdown of public trust between voters and their leaders for misdiagnosing problems for making excuses about who s to blame and for denying the damage that s been done since the global financial crisis at least in the west growth has been slow wages stagnant opportunities limited and economic and cultural disruption unprecedented within countries and between them old pecking orders are changing civilizational self doubt is everywhere we believe in everyone but ourselves and everything is taken seriously except that which used to be just a few years ago history was supposed to have ended in the triumph of the western liberal order yet far from becoming universal western values are less and less accepted even in the west itself we still more or less accept that every human being is born with innate dignity with rights certainly but we re less sure about the corresponding duties we still accept the golden rule of human conduct to treat others as we would have them treat us or to use the gospel formula to love your neighbour as you love yourself but we re running on empty in britain and australia scarcely 50 describe themselves as christian down from 90 a generation back for decades we ve been losing our religious faith but we re fast losing our religious knowledge too we re less a post christian society than a non christian or even an anti christian one it hasn t left us less susceptible to dogma though because we still need things to believe in and causes to fight for it s just that believers can now be found for almost anything and everything climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the west still only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia that have forgotten the scriptures about man created in the image and likeness of god and charged with subduing the earth and all its creatures could have made such a religion out of it there s no certain way to regain cultural self confidence the heart of any recovery though has to be an honest facing of facts and an insistence upon intellectual rigour more than ever the challenge of leadership is to say what you mean and do what you say the lesson i ve taken from being in government and then out of it is simply to speak my mind the risk when people know where you stand is losing their support the certainty when people don t know where you stand is losing their respect of course we re all nostalgic for the days when governments and oppositions could agree on the big issues but pleading for bi partisanship won t create it as my government shewed on border protection policy the only way to create a new consensus is to argue the case to make a decision and then to let the subsequent facts speak for themselves the modern world after all is not the product of a successful search for consensus it s what s emerged from centuries of critical enquiry and hard clash without the constant curiosity and endless questioning that has driven our scientists and engineers and the constant striving for improvement that s long guided our planners and policy makers there d be no cures for disease no labour saving appliances no sanitation no urban improvement no votes for women no respect for minorities in other words no modern world that may not actually bother some green activists whose ideal is an amish existence only without reference to god but it should bother anyone and everyone who wants longer safer more comfortable and more prosperous lives beware the pronouncement the science is settled it s the spirit of the inquisition the thought police down the ages almost as bad is the claim that 99 of scientists believe as if scientific truth were determined by votes rather than facts there are laws of physics there are objective facts there are moral and ethical truths but there is almost nothing important where no further enquiry is needed what the science is settled brigade want is to close down investigation by equating questioning with superstition it s an aspect of the wider weakening of the western mind which poses such dangers to the world s future physics suggests all other things being equal that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would indeed warm the planet even so the atmosphere is an almost infinitely complex mechanism that s far from fully understood palaeontology indicates that over millions of years there have been warmer periods and cooler periods that don t correlate with carbon dioxide concentrations the jurassic warm period and the ice ages occurred without any human contribution at all the medieval warm period when crops were grown in greenland and the mini ice age when the thames froze over occurred well before industrial activities added to atmospheric carbon dioxide prudence and respect for the planet would suggest taking care not lightly to increase carbon dioxide emissions but the evidence suggests that other factors such as sun spot cycles and oscillations in the earth s orbit are at least as important for climate change as this trace gas which far from being pollution is actually essential for life to exist certainly no big change has accompanied the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the past century from roughly 300 to roughly 400 parts per million or from 0 03 to 0 04 contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event in australia the floods are not bigger the bushfires are not worse the droughts are not deeper or longer and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s sometimes they do more damage but that s because there s more to destroy not because their intensity has increased more than one hundred years of photography at manly beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent it may be that a tipping point will be reached soon and that the world might start to warm rapidly but so far reality has stubbornly refused to conform to the intergovernmental panel on climate change s computer modelling even the high priests of climate change now seem to concede that there was a pause in warming between the 1990s and 2014 so far though there s no concession that their models might require revision even though unadjusted data suggests that the 1930s were actually the warmest decade in the united states and that temperatures in australia have only increased by 0 3 degrees over the past century not the one degree usually claimed the growing evidence that records have been adjusted that the impact of urban heat islands has been downplayed and that data sets have been slanted in order to fit the theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming does not make it false but it should produce much caution about basing drastic action upon it then there s the evidence that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide which is a plant food after all are actually greening the planet and helping to lift agricultural yields in most countries far more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves so a gradual lift in global temperatures especially if it be accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change might even be beneficial in what might be described as ridley s paradox after the distinguished british commentator at least so far it s climate change policy that s doing harm climate change itself is probably doing good or at least more good than harm australia for instance has the world s largest readily available supplies of coal gas and uranium yet thanks to a decade of policy based more on green ideology than common sense we can t be sure of keeping the lights on this summer and in the policy induced shift from having the world s lowest power prices to amongst the highest our manufacturing industry has lost its one big comparative economic advantage about 20 years ago in australia limiting carbon dioxide emissions first became a goal of public policy it was the howard government back in 1997 that originally introduced the renewable energy target a stealth carbon tax requiring energy suppliers to source a percentage of their power from new renewable generation but in those far off days it was just two per cent during the energy discussions around the howard cabinet table i recall thinking why not encourage more solar hot water systems to reduce power use and why not incentivise the installation of solar panels to help power people s homes way back in the 1980s in my final provost s collection at the queen s college lord blake had observed mr abbott needs to temper his robust common sense with a certain philosophic doubt if only more of us had realised sooner how easy it was with renewable power to have too much of a good thing unsurprisingly a conservative cabinet did indeed respond to farmers worries about the drought then gripping eastern australia and the public s then eagerness to support environmental gestures with other people s money we thought we could reduce emissions or at least limit their increase without much disruption to everyday life hence these gestures to the zeitgeist where the subsidy was modest and the impact on the power system minimal our thinking ran why not accommodate the feel good urge to be responsible global citizens in its last few months the howard government even agreed in principle to support an emissions trading scheme but howard was shrewd enough to know how the most important consequences of any policy were often the unintended ones his government s refusal to ratify the kyoto climate change treaty even though we d secured a good deal for australia shewed his caution about the impact of emissions reduction on power prices and the wider economy for the incoming labor prime minister after 2007 though climate change was nothing less than the greatest moral challenge of our time the rudd gillard government believed in an emissions trading scheme no ifs no buts and in a ten fold increase in the mandatory use of renewables for a while the liberal national opposition was inclined to go along with it my own leaning for the first year or so was not to oppose it but my doubts about the theory of climate change were growing and my sense that an ets would turn out to be a great big new tax on everything was hardening to a party audience in country victoria in october 2009 i observed that the so called settled science of climate change was absolute crap and after winning the opposition leadership had a secret party room ballot to oppose an ets because it was not our job to enter into weak compromises with a bad government as it happened the 2010 election was more about power prices than about saving the planet under great political pressure then prime minister julia gillard declared there will be no carbon tax under the government i lead but early in 2011 as part of her minority government s deal with the greens she committed to a carbon tax that would put wholesale power prices up by 40 the 2013 election was a referendum on labor s carbon tax as well as labor s complete loss of control over our maritime borders with a thumping win to the liberal national coalition in july 2014 the abbott government abolished the carbon tax saving the average household about 500 a year in early 2015 we reduced the renewable energy target from 28 to 23 it wasn t enough but it was the best that we could get through the senate my cabinet always had some ministers focussed on jobs and cost of living and others more concerned with emissions reduction even though our contribution to global emissions was barely one per cent inevitably our paris agreement to a 26 to 28 emissions reduction was a compromise based on the advice that we could achieve it largely through efficiencies without additional environmental imposts using the highly successful emissions reduction fund because as i said at the time the last thing we want to do is strengthen the environment but damage our economy at last year s election the government chose not to campaign on power prices even though labor was promising a 50 renewable energy target requiring a 50 thousand million over build of wind farms and a 45 reduction in emissions by 2030 requiring a new carbon tax after a net gain of twenty five seats at the previous two elections when we had campaigned on power prices we had a net loss of fourteen when we didn t and subsequent events have made the politics of power once more the central battleground between and within the two main parties although manufacturing agriculture and transport are also large carbon dioxide emitters the politics of emissions reduction has always focussed on power generation because shifting to renewables has always been more saleable to voters than closing down industry giving up cars and not eating beef as a badge of environmental virtue the south australian state labor government had been boasting that on average almost 50 of its power was wind generated although at any moment it could vary from almost zero to almost 100 it had even ostentatiously blown up its one coal fired power station in september last year though the wind blew so hard that the turbines had to shut down and the inter connector with victoria and its reliable coal fired power failed too for twenty four hours there was a state wide blackout for nearly two million people the lights were off cash registers didn t work traffic lights went down lifts stopped and patients were sent home from hospitals throughout last summer there were further blackouts and brownouts across eastern australia requiring hundreds of millions in repairs to the plant of energy intensive industries despite this in a display of virtue signalling to flaunt its environmental credentials and to boost prices for its other coal fired plants last march the french government part owned multinational engie closed down the giant hazelwood coal fired station that had supplied a quarter of victoria s power the australian energy market operator is now sufficiently alarmed to have just issued an official warning of further blackouts this summer in victoria and south australia and severe medium term power shortfalls but in yet more virtue signalling energy giant agl is still threatening to close the massive liddell coal fired power station in nsw and replace it with a subsidised solar farm and a much smaller gas fired power station relying on gas supplies that don t currently exist were it not rational behaviour based on irrational government policy this deliberate elimination of an essential service could only be described as a form of econ...
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