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Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Mike's Minute: The climate advice is bordering on nutty


I listened to Rod Carr yesterday, post the release of his Climate Commission's advice to the Government 2036-2040.

He is unfailingly polite. When it was put to him that the Government, who have launched their own inquiry into methane might be cutting across his work, he was having none of it, despite the fact that is exactly what the Government are doing.

Every time I have asked him whether he gets sick of Governments ignoring or amending what he advises, his answer is always the same. He says they are set up to give the best knowledge currently available and it's up to the Government of the day to do what they will with it.

It’s a weird old business, mainly because I couldn’t do a job where I knew what I was saying was going to get messed about with for political reasons or ignored.

Anyway, he made two critical points. The first is that if we miss our target, which we may well do, we can get there by buying our way out of it. Like the carbon credit market for business, we will simply purchase credits from someone else who has done better than us.

That's a big unknown as we speak because we don’t know if we won't make it. We most likely won't, but how far short will we be and what it will cost to buy credits to solve the problem, and from who? But it will be billions.

The second and bigger point is there is no one to pay the penalty to. In other words, we signed an agreement but there is no head office and no one to write the cheque to.

All that happens is we are in breach of an international agreement. If a lot of other people are in breach, and my bet is they will be, then no one will care.

If we stand alone globally as the only country that didn’t make it, then we are a pariah of sorts.

Rod made the point that we like international agreements because they are what makes the world go round, we sign a lot of them, and it allows us to do things like trade.

But it brings us back to a cold, hard reality. We can almost certainly state many countries won't make it; therefore, we won't save the world.

Should that be a reason for us not to try. I'd say no. I'd say let's do what we can.

But that’s your next reality. The Commission advice is bordering now on nutty. No petrol cars to be imported is now a real policy.

A renewable energy base that we don’t stand a hope in hell of achieving, given we can't build a thing in this country to budget or time and no one wants a wind farm in their backyard? That's not a real policy.

The advantage of this is as we draw closer to 2050 the advice will get weirder, and the outcomes will become clearer. In other words, they will be increasingly obvious as to how undoable they all are.

Then what? That’s your next big question

And how alarmist do the ideologues become before their heads explode.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.

4 comments:

Concerned said...

It’s not bordering on nutty, it is nutty.
Down right mental. Yet sane people give this guy oxygen and nod their heads in concern.
Blame the shutting down of the oil and gas industry on this guys head.
Dodo Ardern didn’t dream that idea up it was put in her vacuum for a head. And out it popped out of her mouth.
NZIER report on the loss to NZ from closing the oil and gas industry. $50Billion.
So let’s put this together. We close the oil and gas industry, lose $50billion on the advice of some nut job who says we will have to pay a big bill to someone, somewhere, eventually.
My heads exploding on the stupidity

DeeM said...

Maybe you should have asked him why there is no historical relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, Mike? It's been known for decades and is in many published paleoclimatic scientific papers.
Or is that just another of your conspiracy theories, Mike?

Anonymous said...

Climate Change Con-Job I
“The Sky is falling" -- Chicken Little

What happened next?

After an acorn fell on her head, Chicken Little raced around in a flap until she had all the other animals believing her misplaced fearmongering that the world was going to end.

So they sent a delegation to the King, demanding he do something about it, and save them all.

The classic homily against surrendering personal autonomy to Big Government based on manufactured moral panic.

As HL Mencken reminds us:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Al Gore, the man behind the widely shown climate alarmist documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” reveals the con-job:

“The language that the [UN] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used in presenting it [global ‘warming’] was torqued up a little bit, appropriately – how [else] do they get the attention of policy-makers around the world?”

The same alarmist fabrications peddled by Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II IPCC Third Assessment Report, the late climate doomster, Dr Steven Schneider:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination.

“That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

The ‘scientist’ as politician partisan creating hobgoblins.

Clearly, the UN Panel for Climate Change is simply a political body posing as a scientific institution.

Anonymous said...

All NZ needs to do is include native forest and farming grassland into our Climate model, we would then be so positive with carbon credits that other countries who are short could buying Carbon credit from us... NZ would make a lot of new money.