GWPF Newsletter: Australia’s Left Loses An Election It Was Sure To Win

Around The World, Backlash Against Expensive Climate Change Policies

In this newsletter:

1) A Climate-Change Drubbing In Australia
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019
 
2) Tom Switzer: Australia’s Left Loses An Election It Was Sure To Win
The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019

 
3) Adrian Papst: Why The Australian Labor Party Suffered A Crushing Defeat
New Statesman, 19 May 2019
 
4) Around The World, Backlash Against Expensive Climate Change Policies
The Washington Examiner, 18 May 2019
 
5) China’s Green Efforts Hit By Fake Data And Corruption
The South China Morning Post, 19 May 2019
 
6) Brace Yourself: EU Faces “Massive Flood Of Plastic Waste” After UN Export Restrictions
Packing Insights, 18 May 2019
 
7) And Finally: A Waste Of 1,000 Research Papers
The Atlantic, 17 May 2019

Full details:

1) A Climate-Change Drubbing In Australia
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019

The right in Australia won on the sharp contrast with the left on taxes, growth and climate change.

If American Democrats want a warning about the consequences of embracing the Green New Deal, look no further than Saturday’s election shocker in Australia. The opposition center-left Labor Party had led in the polls for months but lost as voters rejected its move left on taxes, spending and above all on climate change.

The ruling Liberal-National Coalition had been divided and tossed out two prime ministers during its nearly six years in power. Scott Morrison, the compromise choice as Prime Minister last year, managed to unite conservatives around a platform that stressed economic growth, tax cuts and support for the country’s energy producers.

Labor leader Bill Shorten promised to raise taxes on the “wealthy,” but his main theme was curbing climate change. Labor promised to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels while subsidizing wind and solar. Mr. Shorten and Labor refused to support a job-producing coal mine in Queensland, and their candidates were routed in the resource-rich province.

The result is another lesson that the politics of climate change isn’t as simple as Western cultural elites claim. Labor thought that droughts, heat waves and brush fires would cause voters to embrace its climate solutions. Young people say they care about the issue, often as virtue-signaling. Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott lost his seat after 25 years in a tony Sydney district, where the green message resonated with affluent moderates.

But caring in the abstract isn’t the same as doing something that has tangible costs. Faced with lost jobs, higher taxes and a higher cost of living, voters in democracies time and again have rejected climate-change policies that wouldn’t in the end matter all that much to the climate. Joe Biden, take note.

The Liberal-National coalition will have at least 75 seats in Parliament, one short of a majority, to 65 for Labor, with votes still to be counted. Mr. Morrison may need splinter parties to form a government, but he’ll have the added credibility of a victory that was in many ways personal as he stumped around the country in the final weeks. Not known for charisma and derided by progressive elites, Mr. Morrison offered an Everyman persona that made the case for opportunity for all Australians.

The Liberal-National victory shows again the importance of the economic growth message to center-right politics. Some on the American right want to abandon pro-growth policies in favor of lite versions of the left’s income redistribution schemes. That rarely works, and it didn’t for Mr. Morrison when his proposal for loan guarantees for some first-time home buyers was quickly adopted by Labor. The right in Australia won on the sharp contrast with the left on taxes, growth and climate change.

Full editorial
 
2) Tom Switzer: Australia’s Left Loses An Election It Was Sure To Win
The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019

Sydney: There’s nothing like a shock election result to force media sophisticates to eat their words. The triumph of the center-right Liberal-National Coalition government in Australia has caused plenty of verbal indigestion.

A few days ago, polls and betting markets pointed to a Labor victory. Journalists and intellectuals insisted that ordinary Aussies wanted government to fight climate change and soak the rich. Prime Minister Scott Morrison couldn’t possibly win. The 51-year-old evangelical coal-cuddler was the wrong man for his times.

But on Saturday the government, which has had three leaders in six years, tightened its hold on Parliament while a humiliated Labor Party lost crucial marginal seats in the eastern states of Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales. The election will go down as the most dramatic failure of discernment in the history of Australian punditry. Sound familiar?

Shy voters now shape Australian politics. During the past three years, television and social-media outlets created a climate of opinion in which it was politically incorrect to oppose identity politics, high taxes, wealth redistribution and costly climate-mitigation policies. In the privacy of the voting booth, “quiet Australians,” as Mr. Morrison calls them, decided that their interests lay in a low-tax and resource-rich market economy.

Mr. Morrison’s path to victory was about as narrow as Donald Trump’s road to the White House. But he was helped by his opponents’ lurch to the left. The Labor Party, which did much to deregulate the Australian economy in the 1980s, was now pledging high taxes on property investors, self-funded retirees and high-earning wealth creators….

Labor’s energy policy, meanwhile, pledged a 45% emissions reductions target and 50% renewables by 2030. The green agenda resonated in a few metropolitan seats in Victoria, Australia’s most liberal state, but fizzled elsewhere. Australia is a coal-producing powerhouse where command-and-control mechanisms lack broad public support. Mr. Morrison, famous for posing in Parliament holding a lump of coal, reminded voters that no renewable energy source is as efficient as carbon and that China’s annual emissions rise is greater than Australia’s total emissions each year.

Full post
 
3) Adrian Papst: Why The Australian Labor Party Suffered A Crushing Defeat
New Statesman, 19 May 2019

Rather than staking its platform on workers and their jobs, Labor instead defended a position on climate change that appeals largely to middle-class voters.

After three years of being ahead in the opinion polls, the Australian Labor Party lost Saturday’s election that had been billed as “unlosable”. Much like David Cameron’s surprise victory over Ed Miliband in Britain’s 2015 general election, the ALP looked set to win but suffered a crushing defeat. It is one of the most spectacular results in Australia’s political history, which few predicted and nobody in Labor expected.

With more popular votes and more seats in the lower house, the Morrison government, which is formed of the Liberal Party and the National Party, will either have a small majority or be able to count on the support from a number of independent MPs.

Mohamad Ali once said thatt “You never get knocked out by a punch you see coming”. The ALP did not anticipate this result. Leaving aside the state of Victoria, where it picked up a couple of seats, Labor lost everywhere to everyone: to the Liberals, but also smaller parties and independents.

The Liberal Party held virtually all its marginal seats and won five from the ALP, mostly in Tasmania and New South Wales. Neither Western nor Southern Australia delivered the extra seats Labor needed to win.

But it was in Queensland where the election was ultimately lost. The primary popular vote for the ALP was a paltry 26 per cent. After counting all the votes (Australia has a preferential voting system, where voters score candidates in order of preference), the swing to the Liberals ended Labor’s hope of becoming the largest party and ultimately forming a government.

There are some stark lessons for the ALP and other social-democratic parties in Western countries. The first and most important is that the centre-left cannot win without cultivating working class support. Rather than staking its platform on workers and their jobs, Labor instead defended a position on climate change that appeals largely to middle-class voters.

Full post
 
4) Around The World, Backlash Against Expensive Climate Change Policies
The Washington Examiner, 18 May 2019
H. Sterling Burnett

From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France, and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to purportedly fight human-caused climate change.

Skepticism over whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in America than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and other developed areas are much farther along the energy rationing path, cutting carbon dioxide emissions as required. However, residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under due to high taxes on fossil fuels and mandates to use expensive renewable energy.

This is what originally prompted protesters in France to don yellow vests and take to the streets in 2018. They were protesting scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron had claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement. After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government canceled the climate action plan.

Also in 2018, in part as a reaction against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premier in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.

And in August 2018, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to resign over carbon dioxide restrictions he had planned to meet the country’s Paris climate commitments. His successor announced that new goals of reducing energy prices and improving reliability, not fighting climate change, would be the government’s priority going forward. Subsequently, Australia’s deputy prime minister and environment minister announced the country would continue using coal for electricity and expand coal mining and exports.

But 2018 was just a prelude for the political climate revolt to come.

In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections. FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate change hysteria.”

In Finland, climate change policies became the dominant issue in the April 14 election, as support for climate skepticism suddenly surged. While all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit energy use, when all the votes had been counted, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, came out the big winner with the second-highest number of seats in Parliament.

Just two months prior to the election, polls showed the Finns Party's support hovering below 10%. But after the the party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared, delivering it the second-most seats in Finland’s legislature — 39, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party, with 40 seats. Even the New York Times noted the Finns Party’s electoral surge was based on its expressed climate skepticism.

In Alberta, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Trudeau’s climate policies were enacted, voters on April 16 threw out the reigning Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party, which supported federal climate policies. The United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, took over after vowing to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan. As part of that effort, Kenney said he would reverse plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants and its cap on emissions from the oil sands. In addition, Kenney says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering the province’s critical oil and gas industry and pipeline construction.

As daily headlines become ever more shrill, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the international public is becoming increasingly wary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom. Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices that punish the most vulnerable but do nothing to control the weather.
 
5) China’s Green Efforts Hit By Fake Data And Corruption
The South China Morning Post, 19 May 2019

Local officials have devised creative ways to cover up their lack of action on tackling pollution

China’s efforts to cut pollution are being hampered by local officials who use creative methods to hide their lack of action. Photo: Simon Song

China’s notoriously lax local government officials and polluting companies are finding creative ways to fudge their environmental responsibilities and outsmart Beijing’s pollution inspectors, despite stern warnings and tough penalties.

Recent audit reports covering the past two years released by the environment ministry showed its inspectors were frequently presented with fake data and fabricated documents, as local officials – sometimes working in league with companies – have devised multiple ways to cheat and cover up their lack of action.

Local governments have been under pressure to meet environmental protection targets since Chinese President Xi Jinping made it one of his top three policy pledges in late 2017. The performance of leading local officials is now partly assessed by how good a job they have done in cleaning up China’s much depleted environment.

According to the reports released this month by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, pollution inspectors have found evidence in a number of city environmental protection bureaus of made-up meeting notes and even instructions to local companies to forge materials.

Full story
 
6) Brace Yourself: EU Faces “Massive Flood Of Plastic Waste” After UN Export Restrictions
Packing Insights, 18 May 2019

Finnish public health expert stresses the need for increased incineration capacity to prevent a disaster

Dr. Mikko Paunio of the University of Helsinki has warned that the UN’s decision to regulate waste plastic as hazardous and restrict exports will unleash a “surge of waste” on many EU countries. Paunio urges a rapid expansion of waste incineration capacity to stop the plastic waste problem turning into a public disaster.

Last Friday, a total of 187 countries voted to add hard-to-recycle plastic waste to the Basel Convention, a UN-led treaty that controls the movement of hazardous waste from one country to another. Exporters will now be required to obtain consent from recipient countries before shipping plastic waste that cannot be readily recycled. It is a strategy designed to curb the overwhelming buildup of plastic waste in Global South nations, particularly in Southeast Asia.

The new restrictions are a “major victory for the natural environment” – particularly the rivers and oceans of Asia – in the eyes of Paunio, but a victory that will leave the EU with a drastically increased and unmanageable volume of plastic waste.

After China banned the import of most plastic waste in 2018, developing countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have received huge influxes of contaminated and mixed plastic waste that is difficult or even impossible to recycle. Norway’s proposed amendments to the Basel Convention provide countries with the right to refuse unwanted or unmanageable plastic waste.

According to Paunio, the new restrictions will mean that exports of plastic consumer waste to developing countries will largely come to a halt and EU nations will “finally be left to face the reality” of a failed recycling system.

“It goes without saying that most of the recycling industry has vehemently opposed Norway’s proposal, and the US, a major recycler of plastic waste, was also opposed, although it is not a party to the Basel Convention. China may well have supported the initiative because it no longer imports recyclates. Finland and some other EU member states may have done so too,” Paunio notes.

Green NGOs were predictably in favor of the amendments, although Paunio believes they remained low-key actors in the process due to concerns that the problems caused by plastic recycling might become more widely known. […]

Paunio sets out his concerns in a new paper entitled Saving the Oceans and the Plastic Recycling Crisis, which the Global Warming Policy Foundation published this week.

Full story
 
7) And Finally: A Waste Of 1,000 Research Papers
The Atlantic, 17 May 2019

“How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?”

Decades of early research on the genetics of depression is actually a house of cards, built on nonexistent foundations.

In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression.

It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 people who had mood disorders than in 570 who did not. In theory, anyone who had this particular gene variant could be at higher risk for depression, and that finding, they said, might help in diagnosing such disorders, assessing suicidal behavior, or even predicting a person’s response to antidepressants.

Back then, tools for sequencing DNA weren’t as cheap or powerful as they are today. When researchers wanted to work out which genes might affect a disease or trait, they made educated guesses, and picked likely “candidate genes.” For depression, SLC6A4 seemed like a great candidate: It’s responsible for getting a chemical called serotonin into brain cells, and serotonin had already been linked to mood and depression. Over two decades, this one gene inspired at least 450 research papers.

But a new study—the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind yet—shows that this seemingly sturdy mountain of research is actually a house of cards, built on nonexistent foundations.

Richard Border from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his colleagues picked the 18 candidate genes that have been most commonly linked to depression—SLC6A4 chief among them. Using data from large groups of volunteers, ranging from 62,000 to 443,000 people, the team checked if any versions of these genes were more common among people with depression. “We didn’t find a smidge of evidence,” says Matthew Keller, who led the project.

Between them, these 18 genes have been the subject of more than 1,000 research papers, on depression alone. And for what? If the new study is right, these genes have nothing to do with depression. “This should be a real cautionary tale,” Keller adds. “How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?”

Full story

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.