The government is the largest spreader of misinformation, and its Chief of Propaganda is Chris Bowen. There’s no limit to the lies he’ll tell to push the Net-Zero pipe-dream that’s making everyone’s bills higher.
Transcript
Chris Smith: Let’s get on to energy. Now, a report from the US Energy Department is saying that with nuclear electricity, prices will drop 37%. Chris Bowen says renewables will always be cheaper. This is basically a blatant lie, isn’t it, Malcolm?
Senator ROBERTS: Well, you stole the word right out of my mouth. It is a lie. It is fraud. Fraud is the presentation of something as it is not for personal gain. Chris Bowen has been pushing this bandwagon, the lies fraudulently to get political capital. He is telling lie after lie. Solar and wind are the most expensive forms of energy, that’s repeated everywhere. You know, AEMO doesn’t even cost the lowest price system. What they did with, relying on GenCost in the first place was false assumptions underpinning their calculations for solar and wind to make them look favorable and negative assumptions under coal to make it look unaffordable. That is completely false. And now we’ve got a circular argument that’s beaten back to us all the time. AEMO doesn’t cost the lowest price systems. It’s forced to exclude the cost of calculating coal or nuclear. This is rubbish – the stuff that comes out of the south end of north bound bull.
Chris Smith: Yeah, well, the CSIRO should be condemned completely for their reliance on that GenCost report. Malcolm.
Senator ROBERTS: That is fraud as well Chris. That was a deliberate misrepresentation of the energy structure. It was politically driven to achieve a political objective, the same as their climate. The CSIRO has admitted to me that the politician’s quoting them as saying that there’s a danger in carbon dioxide from human activity, the CSIRO has denied ever saying that and they said they would never say it. They admitted to me that the temperatures today was not unusual, not unprecedented. So the whole thing is based on the stuff that comes out of the south end of north bound bull. The CSIRO is guilty of misrepresenting climate science, misrepresenting nature and misrepresenting climate, misrepresenting energy. It’s just a fraud to extract money, to make billionaires richer, and to make, foreign multinationals richer.
The greatest lie told to Australians is that “wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy”.
Politicians and journalists, who should know better, are using a report of models from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) GenCost to try to justify this claim. In recent decades, CSIRO has completely destroyed its once stellar reputation for scientific research. It has now allowed its name to be used for political agendas rather than real science. The underlying assumptions and inputs used for the GenCost model must be subject to scrutiny.
I voiced these comments in support of a Senate Inquiry to do that, which Labor and the greens voted down. What are they trying to hide?
Transcript
Yesterday in question time I asked the minister representing the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Senator Wong a simple question: exactly how many wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and kilometres of transmission lines were built last month? You’d think that, as the cornerstone of the Labor Party’s policy in government, the answer would be obvious and clear and given to me straightaway. To her credit—and I have a lot of regard for Senator Wong’s capability and think she’s one of the most capable senators in parliament—she said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s the key policy for the Labor government, and they’re flying blind.
Here’s what I told her in the second question. ‘Minister, the government’s own figures to meet your net zero target show that over the next eight years you need to install and connect more than 40 wind turbines per month, 22,000 solar panels a day, 48 gigawatt hours of batteries and 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines. I pointed out to her that the government is building nothing like that.
The government’s wind and solar pipedream is going to be a nightmare. We are being driven off a cliff by the energy minister, Chris Bowen—
Senator Fawcett: Order, Senator Roberts. Remember to use the correct title.
Senator ROBERTS: Minister Bowen. This is a gargantuan task. This has been labelled by some people as the biggest transition since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It’s fundamental because energy has primacy in our society. Labor cannot tell us the cost of this transition of dumping affordable, lowest cost, reliable, stable and secure energy independent of nature’s vagaries and transitioning to an unreliable, high cost, unstable energy that is weather dependent and not secure. This is madness. But to do it without any costing is doubly mad.
Think about it. We are giving parasitic billionaires and major corporations from around the world—many of them from China—subsidies for installing solar and wind. Those subsidies drive up the cost of electricity, and then we ship our manufacturing to China. China wins in two ways. We have got a National Electricity Market forcing out coal with unfavourable regulations—just driving coal out by making it impossible to feed the market. But it’s not a market; it’s a so-called market that bureaucrats control. It’s a national electricity racket that was introduced by John Howard’s coalition government.
While they’re driving out coal and subsidising solar and wind, they now admit they need to keep Eraring Power Station open. They were going to shut it. They’re now offering subsidies to the owners and operators of Eraring to keep it open, so we’re subsidising them to shut it and we’re subsidising them to open it and then we’re giving $275 relief in power prices to consumers across Australia. Why? Because the energy policy has failed.
By the way, I need to mention that on the night of the incoming Minns government, the new energy minister said that they would have to look at the closure of Eraring. She was laying a signal there—a hint—that they’d keep it open. That’s exactly what they must do because they’re terrified. The Australian Energy Market Operator has identified severe blackouts around December this year. The No. 1 factor that has driven our standard of living for the last 170 years since the start of the industrial revolution has been relentless reduction in energy prices, the unit cost of energy. It’s been a relentless reduction in the real cost of energy. That was until John Howard’s government introduced the renewable energy target and other measures, and since then it has relentlessly increased. Australia has gone from having the cheapest coal and the cheapest electricity prices, thanks to our wonderful coal assets—high-quality, clean coal—to now having amongst the most expensive electricity.
So let’s have a look at the terms of reference for the inquiry that Senator Colbeck has proposed. I thank Senator Colbeck for his motion. It says:
That the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation GenCost 2023-24 report be referred to the Economics References Committee for inquiry and report … to explore assumptions and costings made in the report, including but not limited to—
the CSIRO has been criticised for every one of these things I’m about to read out—
a. asset lifecycles;
b. capacity factors;
c. energy type costings;
d. financing costs;
e. fuel costs;
f. augmentation requirements of transmission systems;
g. data standards techniques; and
h. other related matters.
CSIRO has been belted by experts on every one of these. We badly need this inquiry. These are the fundamentals of the biggest transition since the industrial revolution.
CSIRO used to be a highly respected organisation. It was internationally respected. It has now come to mean ‘corrupted science is really obvious’. It lost its way distorting and omitting science to fabricate support for the UN’s climate fraud. The CSIRO has never presented the basis of science which is empirical scientific data—measurements and observations—within logical scientific points that prove cause and effect. The CSIRO has been integral in working with the UN climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in pushing distortions of science.
I have had three meetings with the CSIRO at 2½ hours each and, under cross-examination, it has admitted that it has never said that there has been any danger due to human carbon dioxide. It has admitted that, even though climate change was based initially on global warming claims, temperatures are not unprecedented. It has claimed the rate of temperature change is unprecedented, but the rate of temperature change is almost negligible since 1995. It’s almost flat. That’s according to NASA’s scientific satellite measuring temperatures. The CSIRO gave us not one solid paper to back up its claims. What it did give us was two papers we tore to shreds. Then they gave us another two, and we tore them to shreds. There are 24,000 datasets that I have access to that have been scraped from sites all over the world, including CSIRO’s and BOM’s case studies, and there is not one that shows any change in any climate factor—not one. It’s just inherent natural variation with cycles superimposed. Not only that but the CSIRO has never provided bases for policy and neither has any department or the alphabet soup of energy agencies. They have all failed to answer my question: what’s the specific effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on climate, on any aspect of climate or on any factor of climate? What is the quantified specific effect per unit of carbon dioxide from human activity? Ocean heat content, air temperatures, ocean temperatures, storm frequency, severity and duration—not one of them can give me any answers on those at all. That is the basis for policy. Without that, you cannot understand or evaluate the options for reducing human carbon dioxide, you cannot track the progress of the measures and you cannot cost the alternatives. This is flying blind over a cliff. Electricity prices in every country with significant solar and wind have increased dramatically. Labor is simply continuing the policy that John Howard started, Tony Abbott continued, Malcolm Turnbull accelerated, Scott Morrison continued and Peter Dutton now propagates by confirming net zero.
Let’s turn specifically to the CSIRO report, GenCost. CSIRO used to be a respected scientific organisation, advancing our country’s technology. I refer to Senator Fawcett’s speech a minute ago. Now the CSIRO is a blatantly political organisation. It’s more interested in pushing the agenda of the government than in providing impartial, evidence-based research. Ideology is infecting most of CSIRO’s work like a virus. The GenCost report is shocking evidence of just how biased this once-respected institution has become. The methodology used in GenCost is so flawed that there are multiple hours of podcast series explaining all of its deficiencies, and I give a compliment Aidan Morrison for some of his work.
Let’s start with the cost of wind and solar. Many people, including some politicians, think GenCost says what it costs for wind and solar to deliver a kilowatt of power today. It doesn’t! It fundamentally doesn’t tell us the cost. GenCost imagines some fairytale dreamtime half-a-dozen years in the future and projects what they think wind and solar will cost, with no accurate, solid assumptions underpinning that. CSIRO even admits that this prediction they come up with is not the actual cost, but this is what policy relies on. CSIRO completely excludes the cost of every single power project up until 2030. They’re free! They’re free, according to this mob.
Just look at the tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission projects assumed to be free: EnergyConnect, $2.3 billion; Marinus Link, $3 billion. All are assumed to be free. Free, free, free! Santa Claus is giving them to us! There’s Central-West Orana, $3.2 billion, and HumeLink, $5 billion. It doesn’t sound like much when you rattle off a billion, does it! There are dozens more major projects.
Let’s look at the pumped hydro that’s assumed to be free. There’s Snowy 2.0, $12 billion plus and counting. That’s not included. There’s the Battery of the Nation in Tasmania, our biggest island. That’s $3 billion. It’s not included. There’s the Borumba pump hydro, $14 billion. It’s not included. There’s the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro, $12 billion. It’s not included. The list goes on and on and on. Tens of billions of dollars is excluded from the cost of wind and solar, but we’ll all pay for it—some people with their jobs when they’re shipped off overseas, some people for whom the cost of living will drive these out of reach.
Almost all of these projects, especially the pump hydro, are only being planned because of wind and solar, yet CSIRO excludes them from the cost of wind and solar completely. It’s like saying a Ferrari is the cheapest car you can buy, as long as you take out the cost of the sunroof, the air conditioning, the wheels, the gearbox and the engine.
Then there are their calculations on the cost of coal. They added an extra five per cent cost to the finance figures with no basis whatsoever. CSIRO just says, ‘Well, no-one likes coal anymore,’ and, whack, a completely unfounded hurdle is added on top. Then there’s the capacity factor. That’s the percentage of time the station is running. It has a huge impact on the calculated cost of power, if you assume a billion-dollar power station is running for only half the time it actually is on and can be on. They’re destroying the viability of coal with lies.
CSIRO also says:
In 2030, we project forward including all existing state renewable energy targets resulting in a 64% renewable share and 56% variable renewable share …
They just assume that we’re going to press ahead with variable renewable energy, regardless of what happens and without any costings. They just assume it’s going to go ahead. It doesn’t sound like impartial modelling to me, because it’s not impartial modelling.
But the people of Australia will pay for this. They will pay for it with their jobs. They will pay for it with their livelihoods. They will pay for it with their family budgets. What sensitivities have been applied for political risk? Policy will almost certainly change and you may have a government elected that ditches false targets. What percentage of chance do they give that? The United Kingdom is abandoning net zero. The Prime Minister has said so. Japan is switching back to coal. It is already using a lot of coal. Germany is scrapping wind turbines to extend coalmines. It is tearing down wind turbines that were installed so that they can mine the coal underneath them. China is producing 4½ billion tonnes of coal. We produce 560 tonnes, and we export most of that overseas, and China is buying coal from us. Indonesia is now the world’s largest exporter of coal. India has well over a billion tonnes of coal.
This report, the GenCost report from CSIRO, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, yet it’s being used to justify one of the largest destructions of our economy in Australia’s history. Even if you naively believe we need to run the grid on solar and wind, this GenCost report deserves scrutiny and the Australian people deserve transparency. CSIRO has repeatedly shown it is dishonest on climate and energy. We need an inquiry. In refusing or opposing, the government shows it fears its assumptions will be shown to be flawed. If I’m wrong, CSIRO would be vindicated. So CSIRO, if it had any courage, would stand up and say, ‘Bring on the inquiry.’ Thank you, Senator Colbeck. We support this motion.
Recently, I spoke in the Senate regarding the impact of this summer’s flooding on the coral reef. Coral polyps are saltwater creatures. When floodwaters impact the reef, it introduces fresh water, cold temperatures and sediment, all of which cause coral bleaching. El Niño (ENSO cycles) causes a reduction in clouds, resulting in higher solar radiation, higher temperatures, and coral bleaching.
Both of these are cyclical and not caused by human activity. Yet the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) appear to be focusing solely on the “climate change is causing warming temperatures and coral bleaching” argument instead of presenting the broader picture.
I was reassured that the GBRMPA accepts that ENSO cycles play a role in coral bleaching. I look forward to more honesty and transparency on this issue from the BOM, CSIRO and the globalist controlled Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing tonight. Let me start with a simple question: can floodwaters entering the reef from the 28 river systems that discharge onto the reef in a rain event, such as a tropical cyclone, cause coral bleaching, either through fresh water itself, through very low floodwater temperature, or through high nutrient levels or turbidity or sediment?
Mr Thomas: There can certainly be initial freshwater bleaching from flood events.
Mr Quincey: And we did see some of that this year with the cyclones in the north.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s true that corals also bleach from water that is too cold, isn’t it? I can remember that in June 2008 that there were record cold temperatures in various parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory, including southern Queensland, and the southern Great Barrier Reef bleached because of the cold weather.
Mr Thomas: I’m not sure of that particular example. But, yes, bleaching is certainly a stress response that can be triggered by a range of different things. Most recently, though, our biggest concerns have been about warmer waters, not colder waters.
Senator ROBERTS: Was any of the coral bleaching that was evident on the reef in the first quarter of 2024 caused by freshwater and salt intrusion?
Mr Thomas: Yes, as Mr Quincey said. Probably because of flood events prior to and post Christmas in in the north, there would have been some initial freshwater bleaching. I don’t have specific details of that in front of me, though.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Was any of the coral bleaching in the first quarter caused by pesticides or other chemical run-off from farming areas?
Mr Thomas: Direct attribution of those impacts would be difficult for me to provide here today, but we could take some of that question on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: Please. According to a paper from the University of Queensland, simplified: The most devastating mass coral bleaching has occurred during El Niño events … However, El Niño itself does not cause SSTs— sea surface temperatures— to rise in all regions that experience bleaching. Nor is the upper ocean warming trend of 0.11°C per decade since 1971 … sufficient alone to exceed the thermal tolerance of corals. This paper shows that a major contributing factor is El Nino reducing cloud cover, causing ‘higher than average air temperatures and higher than average atmospheric pressures’ and playing ‘a crucial role in determining the extent and location of coral bleaching’ on the reef. Is that a fair statement?
Mr Thomas: I’m not aware of that particular paper. Did you say it was the University of Queensland?
Senator ROBERTS: Yes.
Mr Thomas: I’m not aware of it. I’m sorry. But we would be very interested to read more about it.
Senator ROBERTS: We can get it to you.
Mr Thomas: Yes, please.
Senator ROBERTS: Do you accept natural, cyclical ENSO events play a crucial role in coral bleaching?
Mr Thomas: We would have to defer to climate scientists around the particular localised impacts and how they’ve played out on the Great Barrier Reef.
Senator ROBERTS: Localised impacts, not global?
Mr Thomas: For how those significant meteorological phenomena impact the Great Barrier Reef in particular, I would need to consult with other relevant experts.
Senator ROBERTS: According to the Bureau of Meteorology document ‘124 years of Australian rainfall’, there’s no trend. There’s no pattern. It’s just cyclical. There’s no trend whatsoever, down or up. It’s just natural variation, influenced by cycles. In the last five years, we’ve had three La Ninas. Your website, under the heading ‘What causes coral bleaching?’, makes the comment: The biggest cause of coral bleaching in the past 20 years has been rising water temperatures. On notice if you wish, please provide how much water temperature has increased in the last 20 years, including average and range, showing any spikes that may have occurred.
Mr Thomas: Thank you. We will take that on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: Something like that, maybe?
Mr Thomas: I’m not sure I can reproduce that exactly, but we’ll certainly take that—
Senator ROBERTS: No, I wouldn’t expect you to reproduce it.
Mr Thomas: We will certainly try to take an—
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Have you tested those spike temperatures that may have led to bleaching against the ENSO cycle? Have you correlated them?
Mr Quincey: I couldn’t answer now, but we would most likely consult with our colleagues not only in the Bureau of Meteorology but in the CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, who do some of that work.
Mr Thomas: We’re not the authors of some of these reports. We work with those relevant institutions. We pull that information together. We try to synthesise it and make the best assessments we can on how we can hone our programs and better manage the Great Barrier Reef into the future. With some of the specificity and science you’re referring to, we really would need to speak to some of our experts.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. This is the last question. The bleaching impact statement on your website, which you describe as ‘a framework to describe and categorise coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef’, only includes one factor: heat stress, which you attribute to climate change, ignoring these other crucially important factors. Is this about blaming bleaching on climate change, which is well-funded, and ignoring the role of natural cycles, which carries no funding? We’ve heard the United Nations say that the planet is now boiling.
Mr Thomas: Is your question about whether our framework for understanding coral bleaching is limited to heat stress?
Senator ROBERTS: Yes, it seems that it’s only limited to heat stress.
Mr Quincey: It has it there as heat stress, but the exposure blocks the subtleties of exactly what you’re talking about—about light intensity and exposure and cloud cover. Also, on our website, we really try to convey that local and regional weather in particular places has a large bearing on the outcomes that we see each summer, and those factors play into that.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/K_nVTjOJQus/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2024-06-06 10:02:002024-06-10 15:33:54Natural Cyclical Events Impact More Than Human Activity
Politicians keep telling Australia that “wind and solar are the cheapest form of energy” while they force Net-Zero down our throats. As proof, they point to a CSIRO document called GenCost, which supposedly estimates the cost of different types of electricity. Yet, it doesn’t estimate the costs of electricity today.
GenCost uses a whole bunch of assumptions that are favorable to wind and solar to claim they will be the cheapest… in 2030. GenCost doesn’t even include the cost of transmission, one of the largest expenses for wind and solar. Huge transmission costs are the reason wind and solar projects are sitting stranded in the outback connected to nothing. This is the same CSIRO that seemingly knows nothing about Snowy 2.0, which has blown out from $2 billion to over $20 billion for the project and associated infrastructure. They forecast the cost of pumped hydro storage will average less than a quarter of the current estimates for Snowy, the pumped hydro that’s actually being built.
To say I don’t trust CSIRO have the right answers on the actual cost of “renewables” is an understatement. The claim that wind and solar are the cheapest is simply a lie that ignores storage, transmission and intermittency. GenCost is just a fairy tale about the future, not an impartial analysis of what wind and solar costs today.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Welcome, Professor Hilton. I will put some questions on notice about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human production. I would like to question the expert spokesman on GenCost.
Prof. Hilton: We are delighted you are asking questions about GenCost. One of the greatest challenges facing Australia is the transition of our energy sector. I am proud of the contribution that the GenCost report makes in this area. The report has been generated annually since 2018. It has evolved over time to take account of the changing technology landscape and the availability of new data. I anticipate that the report will continue to evolve.
Senator ROBERTS: I want to get to the heart of some of the issues that I see with GenCost. What was the cost first budgeted for pumped hydro energy storage Snowy 2?
Mr Graham: I might take that on notice. I am aware of the recent update to the cost, but I don’t have the original figure on me.
Senator ROBERTS: The original figure was $2 billion. What is it currently budgeted at?
Mr Graham: It is in the order of $12 billion.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s correct. How long are the tunnels for it?
Mr Graham: I don’t have that on hand.
Senator ROBERTS: It is 27 kilometres. How much of the tunnel have they bored so far in the last year, or just over a year?
Mr Graham: I am not tracking that measurement.
Senator ROBERTS: It is 150 metres. It has been bogged for about a year. When was it initially scheduled for completion?
Mr Graham: I don’t have that on me.
Senator ROBERTS: It was 2021. What has that blown out to now?
Mr Graham: Around 2029.
Senator ROBERTS: Earlier; 2028.
Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, the official is indicating to you that he is happy to accommodate your line of questioning. However, detailed questions about the project details for Snowy Hydro are best dealt with in the environment estimates. I know you addressed these kinds of questions to Mr Barnes, the CEO of Snowy. You might direct questions to CSIRO which they can assist with. You mentioned your interest in the GenCost report— you might get better answers about that from the official.
Senator ROBERTS: Sure. They are now estimating the cost of the transmission infrastructure—which was left out of the original package—at $10 billion for it to be connected to the grid and be useful. That now makes it up to $22 billion for 2,200 megawatts of pumped hydro energy storage, which is $10 million per megawatt, or $10,000 per kilowatt. We won’t even get into the fact that it is only forecast to put out that capacity for an average of 26 minutes a day. What is the cost per kilowatt of pumped hydro you provided in GenCost?
Mr Graham: The Snowy 2.0 project is incredibly unique. It was approximately 170 hours duration for 2 gigawatts originally, but it is higher than that now: 2.2 to 2.5.
Senator ROBERTS: It is 2.2.
Mr Graham: No other project on the books in Australia that we are looking at has that type of profile. In GenCost we report pumped hydro projects more in the order of 12 to 48 hours, that kind of duration, which is nowhere near the 170 hours for Snowy 2.0.
Senator ROBERTS: What is your capacity?
Mr Graham: We have a table in GenCost with a series of figures on the cost of pumped hydro. I’ll get the exact data for you.
Senator McAllister: Are you asking what role Mr Graham performs—
Senator ROBERTS: No: what is the cost per kilowatt-hour of pumped hydro you have provided in GenCost?
Mr Graham: I didn’t bring that table with me. I’ll have to get back to you with that on notice. That cost isn’t related to Snowy 2.0. It is related to other projects, which are much smaller.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s what I understand. In GenCost, what would it be, roughly? I won’t hold you to it.
Mr Graham: It is of the order of $2,500 a kilowatt.
Senator ROBERTS: Snowy 2, which is a real-life project that is not even finished yet, is $10,000. GenCost is built on modelling based on assumptions projected out to the future; is that correct, broadly?
Mr Graham: That’s correct.
Senator ROBERTS: We don’t know from GenCost what it would cost to replace our coal-fired fleet with solar and wind today, and all the transmission lines and back-up storage. How useful is GenCost?
Mr Graham: We made the decision to focus GenCost on new-build generation and storage and some hydrogen technologies. There are other processes for, and reports that deal with, transmission. We don’t deal with transmission. GenCost is designed for people to calculate the cost of building and replacing existing generation. But you can’t go to GenCost necessarily to look at issues around transmission.
Senator ROBERTS: Some of your opponents argue that GenCost is detached from reality. If we look at Snowy 2—I am not implying that you have anything to do with Snowy 2—right from the start, Minister, the decision to build Snowy 2 was made without a cost-benefit analysis, and with a heavily redacted business case that could not be scrutinised. You have acknowledged that you are basically building models based on assumptions and projecting them into the future. I don’t think the government has anything on what is going on right now. Is that right, Minister?
Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, I might get the official to revisit the evidence he has just provided about the way the calculations are developed for understanding the cost of hydro because I don’t think it is as you have described.
Senator ROBERTS: Minister, we have major solar and wind installations, industrial complexes, which are not connected to the grid. This is the level of planning that is going on at state and federal. They are not connected but they have been paid for, and I think that they are earning revenue. That is the reality.
Senator McAllister: I am not aware of the particular projects you are referring to, but they are certainly not things this agency can assist you with.
Senator ROBERTS: My question to you is: something that is projected into the future based on models and assumptions now is divorced from reality, and we need to know the cost now. Why are we embarking on this journey with so much uncertainty?
Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, you are asking me about energy policy. We have talked about it earlier in the week. We consistently have advice from a very wide range of sources—
Senator ROBERTS: Can you name some of them?
Senator McAllister: about firmed renewables being the lowest cost form of new energy in the Australian context. When AEMO looks at what is required to replace all of thermal generation that is coming to the end of its life over the next decade, they try to model—because they need to—the transmission that will optimally connect the optimal configuration of new generation. That AEMO work is not principally led by CSIRO. CSIRO have a capacity to contribute; I think the official can speak to the ways they do. I don’t wish to frustrate your efforts to have this discussion, but it is not in this portfolio.
Senator ROBERTS: Thanks, Minister. Thank you, Chair.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/Oz82ESaCY74/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2023-11-03 17:24:512023-12-20 08:34:45CSIRO’s GenCost is Just a Wind and Solar Fairy-tale!
Scott Morrison won the last election by bashing Bill Shorten on his climate policies, especially a net-zero emissions commitment. After getting elected for not buying into the climate nonsense, Scott Morrison unexplainably signed us up to net zero despite CSIRO confirming there was no change in the ‘Science’™.
There’s still no proof that human produced carbon dioxide affects the climate and needs to be cut. By signing up to net-zero, Scott Morrison has given a death kiss to productive agriculture, mining and every Australians power bills with no justification..
Transcript
If you could be as quick as you could.
[Roberts] Thank you. And thank you all for attending. My questions are gonna be initially to the minister. And then if there’s time to the Chief Executive, of CSIRO. Minister, referring to the government’s change in its 2050 net zero policy in the 2019 election, the government’s opposition to the UN’s 2050 net zero carbon dioxide policy gained you many votes and a lot of political traction and you used the the policy, Labor’s adoption of the policy to really smash the opposition leader Bill Shorten. Just two years later, after emphatically repeatedly and thoroughly criticising Labor and the Greens, there was an unexplained reversal last year and the government adopted the UN’s 2015 net zero carbon dioxide policy. What is the specific change in climate science in which the government’s change of policy is based?
Oh, well, thank you. I think to answer that question in detail I think it will probably be best for the environment minister, but I would simply say that I don’t accept the premise of all of what you’ve said in terms of-
[Roberts] What do you disagree with?
Well, you said unexplained. I mean, obviously we went through quite a detailed process. The prime minister spoke on a number of occasions about his desire to get to a net zero position if it can be done in a way that protects Australian jobs and continues to see industries thrive. And that’s what Minister Taylor worked on. Now we’re not obviously in the space where we have the detail in terms of those portfolios, but it was explained over a period of time. The government made the decision. Obviously, it played out publicly where there was a conversation, I think, with the Australian people. And obviously, there was a live debate that you were aware of that the coalition went through when the government came to a conclusion.
[Roberts] Okay. It wasn’t explained in terms of some change in science. There was no references. There was no document. No publications referred to no specific page numbers of the change in the data or the cause. So there was nothing to change the policy.
Well, as I say, the government was not prepared to commit to such a policy without being able to do the work as to how we would get there and how we would do so in a responsible way. And that was the the job that Minister Taylor in particular was tasked with. And that was the the work that fed into the government decision. Now, in terms of the detail, the various portfolio parts of that, I think that’s probably for another part of estimates.
[Roberts] Okay.
I think that summarises the government’s position.
[Roberts] Well, let’s go back a step further. What’s the basis of the government’s climate policy and ensuring policies on consequent policies on energy, agriculture, manufacturing, social policy and other aspects that the UN’s climate and associated policies impact? What’s the overall basis?
Sorry. I might just get you to repeat that question, sorry.
[Roberts] What is the basis of the government’s climate policy and the consequent policies that stumble on from that on energy agriculture, manufacturing, social policy and other aspects that the UN’s climate and associated policies impact?
Well, look, it’s a fairly broad question.
[Roberts] It is.
I might ask officials if they can assist.
[Man] There are appearing in my data.
Yeah. [Joe Evans] Miss Evans.
Very quickly, Joe Evans, the deputy secretary in the department and Senator, the basis is really the globally agreed science on climate change, which is articulated through the International Panel on Climate Change reports
[Roberts] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
That’s the one. Yeah.
[Roberts] Okay. Thank you. That was nice and quick. Back to the minister. Cutting human carbon dioxide output has had huge costly impacts across our society, especially on fundamentals for productivity and prosperity, for example, energy. Surely the only sound basis for a policy with such economic consequences is the specific effect of changing human carbon dioxide output. The impact for example of a specified change in human output of carbon dioxide, what specific impact would it have on climate factors such as temperature, rainfall, droughts, wind? So the specific impact. Then when the effect is quantified, only then can we do a cost benefit analysis of the cost of doing that and the benefits that come from that. And significantly, we can’t do any measurement of progress as we implement the policy unless we’ve got that specific impact of carbon dioxide. What is that specific impact of carbon dioxide on various climate factors?
Well, I’m happy for officials to elaborate, but I mean, in terms of what the government’s approach has been, it has been to be part of The Paris Agreement. So part of collective action across the world where we are doing our part, and we’ve been doing that obviously with our emissions reductions to date, which have been tracking, in fact, ahead of many comparable OECD nations and many sort of comparable resource-rich nations, such as Canada.
[Roberts] So what would be the extra impact of tracking?
But if I can also go to your question, and in the preamble to your question around, you talked about other economic impacts or impacts in relation to higher energy prices and the like. What we’ve seen under our government in the last few years is actually energy prices coming down year on year and coming down quarter on quarter. So we as a government never look at these issues in isolation. We look at it as part of that collective response and taking our responsibilities to the environment seriously, but never taking our eye off the ball, in terms of the need for affordable and reliable energy for instance. And that’s something that we’ve been delivering and that’s been our track record.
Senator Roberts, we got to go to the office of the chief scientist at 6:25. So I know you did want to ask some questions to the Chief Executive Officer, of CSIRO. So I just wanted to give you that chance.
[Roberts] Thank you. So essentially what you’re saying, Senator Seselja, is that your answer is the same as the one Senator Cormann gave me repeatedly when I asked questions in the Senate and wrote him letters? That was, we’ve got to do our part of global agreements.
I’m not aware of exactly what former Minister Cormann-
[Roberts] That’s the gist.
Well, as I say, I’ll take you take your word for that.
[Roberts] I can show you his letters.
Sure. I’m not disputing. All I’m saying is I’m not aware of exactly what Minister Cormann told you, but my evidence is the evidence I’ve just given.
[Roberts] Assuming what I’ve said to you of Senator Cormann’s responses, you’re agreeing with it.
Well, look, it’s a difficult question to answer without seeing all the detail of what you’ve said but I think my evidence speaks for itself.
[Roberts] Okay. Bob Hawke’s Labor government first introduced the climate topic in the eighties. Then in 1996, the Howard Anderson Liberal-National’s government first made it policy. On what specific quantified effect did they base that policy? Do you know?
Well, look, I think you’re talking about history of before I was in this place. And so I would prefer without having been involved in those discussions, I don’t feel qualified to give a detail answer on that.
[Roberts] No, I understand. It’s okay. Are you aware that the Howard-Anderson Liberal-National’s government implemented their renewable energy target that is gutting electricity and industry, generally? That they stole farmer’s property rights to use their land. And they did that deceitfully going around the constitution, section 51, clause 31. And that John Howard was the first leader of a large party to adopt an emissions trading scheme, which Tony Abbott rightly called a carbon dioxide tax. Are you aware of those major policies that are now still in play? And John Howard actually said that the renewable energy target has gone too far now?
Well, I certainly wouldn’t accept your characterisation of some of those policies in the way you’ve framed them, and certainly in relation to those fine leaders of our nation that you’ve sort of characterised their policies in a certain way. So no, I wouldn’t agree with that.
[Roberts] Okay. Thank you.
Sorry. Senator Roberts, I’m sorry-
[Roberts] I just got one thing to follow up.
Well, it’s gotta be very quick.
[Roberts] It will be very quick. Are you aware that six years after being booted from office in 2007, in 2013, John Howard admitted, at a global warming sceptics annual address in London, that on climate science he was agnostic yet he introduced these policies?
https://img.youtube.com/vi/25wrsuzXz8Q/0.jpg360480Harriet Blackhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngHarriet Black2022-03-03 09:42:572022-03-04 10:45:34What changed to make the Coalition adopt country-killing net-zero?
Father of the Senate Ian Macdonald said there has never been a debate on climate science, and he’s correct.
Transcript
Contradictions erupt and abound in climate and energy policies, because no politician has ever provided the logical scientific points as evidence.
John Howard’s government introduced the Renewable Energy Target and stole farmers’ property rights to use their property. Yet, six years after being booted from office, he confessed in London in 2013 that on climate science he was agnostic. He had no science to support what has become the gutting of our electricity sector and our productive capacity.
In 2016, father of the Senate Ian Macdonald said there has never been a debate on climate science, and he’s correct. Two months ago 10 federal politicians confirmed in writing to me that they have never been provided with the scientific evidence. I’ll name those people; they showed integrity and courage. In August last year, 19 federal politicians advocating climate alarm and climate policies failed to provide me with the scientific evidence. I’ll name them too.
In 2007 and 2008, Kevin Rudd claimed that 4,000 scientists supported the claim that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate and needs to be cut. The UN climate body’s own data shows that only five endorsed the claim, and there’s doubt they were even scientists. Mathias Cormann, instead of providing evidence as requested many times, says, ‘We must meet global obligations’—to the same organisations that Prime Minister Morrison rightly describes as ‘unelected international bureaucrats’.
My own freedom of information requests and Parliamentary Library searches show that no evidence has ever been given to members of parliament—Senate and House of Representatives—that would require these policies. Yet both the Labor-Greens coalition and the Liberal-Nationals coalition have climate and energy policies that are not based on empirical scientific evidence. Come clean with the people of Australia. Unshackle our nation! Give the people a go. Restore freedom.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/qIMM6cb8Cz8/0.jpg360480Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2021-11-24 18:30:002021-11-24 12:32:49No one has the evidence – Climate Urgency
I have always said I will debate anyone in the country or overseas about the evidence on climate change. The truth is, there is no evidence that CO2 from human production directly causes changes in the climate and needs to be cut.
Transcript
Forward to this all weekend, all week, the great climate change debate. Gee, I’m nervous. I shouldn’t be, I know. But I’m a little nervous. The first time I’ve ever done something like this, live on this programme. Malcolm Roberts from One Nation and also regular caller, Mark. Mark’s the only one, it seems, with the kahunas to take on Malcolm, particularly on a live radio debate. We put it to some Labour MPs to come on, I won’t shame them at the moment by naming them, and they said, “Nope, nope!” But Mark is up to the challenge. Gentleman, are you both there?
G’day, Marcus.
Hi.
G’day, Mark.
All right, now this is the way this is going to work, gentlemen. You will both have two minutes to start. So Malcolm you’ll go first. You’ll plead your case against climate change using, no doubt, your empirical data, all the rest of it. Then Mark, you will respond. You’ll get two minutes. You’ll be on a clock. And then after that, you’ll get two minutes again each for a rebuttal, okay? That sounds okay to you?
Yep.
Sounds good.
All right, now. A couple of rules, no name calling in the rebuttals. All right. Straightaway that’s a no-no. No name calling,
Okay.
Obviously not that you will, but we just have to be a little clear here. No name calling. And if I think you’re getting a little off topic, I’ll pull you up. Are we ready to go?
Yup, we’re ready.
Yeah.
All right, gentlemen. Thank you, the great climate change debate is underway. Malcolm, you’re going to go first, okay? Because I say so, and I will roll your two minutes from now. Climate change, you say, is not real. Tell me why.
I don’t say climate change is not real, Marcus. I say that carbon dioxide from the use of hydrocarbon fuels does not change climate. That’s the core point. What people have to understand that the core point is that they want to tax and cut our carbon dioxide from human activity, farming, agriculture, driving, transport, industry, power stations. So what has to happen? Always, science is decided by the empirical evidence in logical scientific points. What that means is that you have to have empirical data, hard data, within a logical framework that proves cause and effect. And empirical means measured or observed. Actual solid data. So before we can justify cutting human agriculture, driving, industry, power stations, electricity, raise their prices, we have to have hard evidence that temperatures today have been unusually high and continue to rise unusually.
One minute left.
There is no such evidence. Secondly, the cause of any temperature rise is increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Third thing, they have to prove that the carbon dioxide rising in the atmosphere is due to human production of carbon dioxide. There is no evidence to that effect. Number four, even if everything is correct, and someone provides the data that shows that temperatures are rising unusually in continuing to rise, and that it’s due to human carbon dioxide, they then have to prove that warmer temperatures are harmful to humans, harmful to the planet. Scientists classify earth’s past far warmer periods
20 seconds.
far warmer periods as climate optimums, because warmer periods have been booms for human civilization, nature, and individuals. Cold periods kill more people than warmer periods.
10.
So the next thing I point out is that I’ve done extensive work with the Parliamentary Library, with freedom of information bills, with parliamentarians-
Three.
Themselves. No one is able to
Two. provide that evidence. No one.
All right, okay. Okay. So Malcolm stated his points. Mark, are you ready, mate? You’ll get two minutes on the clock.
Just before I start-
Oh god.
on time.
Yes.
Do you recycle Malcolm? Or do you put it all in the same bin?
Hey Mark, we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that.
No, just out of curiosity. We’ll get to that. Your two minutes is up and in your rebuttal, that’s when you can ask questions of each other, okay?
All right.
All right. All right, Mark. Your two minutes starts now.
Righto. Let’s go back 450 million years. The earth was barren. It’s being bombarded by solar radiation. There was fissures and cracks pumping out carbon dioxide and methane gas. I’ve got a Kelpie chewing up my foot while I’m talking to you. The seas were swarming with jellyfish, and fish, and sharks with big bony plates. The first algae, at that time, began to creep up onto the rocks. Come forward another 50 or 60 million years. They’d turned what they call the Gilboa Forest. They were about five metres high. They had a base like a palm tree with multiple roots. They had a straight trunk. They had fronds like a tree fern. There’s fossil evidence of these from Belgium to New York state, a town called Gilboa funnily enough. Then go back to to about 349 million years ago. We started the Carboniferous Forest. These massive forest. These huge rainstorms, probably like we’ve never seen before, that filled up swamps, carved out canyons, rivers flowing up and everywhere it was just to intense-
One minute. One minute.
And then glaciers begin form ’cause there’s so much oxygen in the atmosphere. But the downside of that was every time there’s an electrical storm, because there’s so much oxygen, there’s these massive fires. And that’s what they reckon kept the forest going because forests, obviously, need carbon dioxide. Then by the end of that time, 299 million years ago, the begin to split up.
30 seconds.
And then we got back to now. Now we’ve got, the atmosphere has changed. In 200 years we’ve dug up so much carbon and burnt it, we’ve changed back to what it was 3 million years ago. So what you’re saying is, Malcolm, it took 200 years to go back to what it was 3 million years ago.
10.
And now you’re saying it doesn’t really matter because we’ve changed 3 million years in atmosphere in 200 years. That doesn’t compute.
All right. All right. Well said. All right. I think that’s pretty good from both of you. Great for a start. So the way this now works, you both had your opening arguments. Now it’s time for rebuttal. Another two minutes for any of the points that Mark’s brought up, Malcolm, you get to rebut. Then Mark, you get your chances as well. You ready to go there, Malcolm?
I am, Marcus.
All right. The clock starts now two more minutes, off you go.
I’ll say it again. What determines science is the use of logical scientific points and that’s the beauty of science. It gets rid of all the crap, all of the opinions, all living emotions, and just says, “Show me your data.” And that data, hard empirical data, has to be provided within a logical framework that proves cause and effect. Mark has done none of that. He has not proven the temperatures are higher than in the past. He has not shown that the carbon dioxide that man produces drives temperature. He has not shown that higher temperatures are dangerous to humans. Now, he’s then talked about carbon dioxide levels. In the earth’s past, fairly recent past by earth standards, carbon dioxide levels were 130 times higher than today. Carbon dioxide levels today are closer to the limit of 0.015% in the atmosphere where plants shut down. We need far more carbon dioxide, not less.
One minute. One minute, Malcolm.
Now, I’m the only person in the world from a Congress or a Parliament who has cross-examined the government science agency. I’ve cross-examined CSIRO over a period of five years. They have admitted to me that they have never said that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger. Never. They have failed to show me, in the last 10,000 years, anything unprecedented in climate. Not just temperatures, anything at all, rainfall, snowfall, etc, nothing at all. They have failed to show me
30 seconds. any statistically significant change in climate. None that all. The chief scientist, after I questioned him, broke down and said to me, he is not a climate scientist, and he doesn’t understand it. Yet, that man was around the country spreading this misrepresentation of carbon dioxide and climate.
10.
No one anywhere has identified any quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity and climate. And thus, there is no basis for policy whatsoever.
All right. Well done. Malcolm. That’s your rebuttal. How you feeling Mark, by the way? You feeling okay? What was that?
Bored.
Bored!
I’ve heard it all before.
Oh really? Okay.
So start the clock.
Hang on there. I’ve just got to re set it. Give me two seconds. Here we go. All right, you’re ready, boss? And again, you’ll have two minutes to state your rebuttal and off we go. By the way, gentlemen, I won’t be making a decision on who wins this. My listeners will. Both on air and online. So we’ll put it up a little later for those who aren’t listening live. They can listen back to it, etc. We’ll leave it up for a while. Malcolm, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps share it as well. And we’ll get some feedback from your followers. Mark, off you go.
Okay. Now what I was getting at there is all those processes took millions and millions of years to happen.
Yeah.
Now what we’re doing now, we’re clearing land the size of the United Kingdom, every year. We’ve got this corrupt fool in Brazil that’s cleared a fifth of the Amazon jungle, which pumps out oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide. Now in 1857, a scientist named Eunice Newton Foote, a lady scientist, she couldn’t understand why when the carbon dioxide was in… Looking at the earth’s history, everything began to heat up. So she did an experiment. She put a sealed jar of oxygen, a jar of, I think it was hydrogen or helium, I can’t remember what it was, and a jar of carbon dioxide and put them in the sun. And she noticed when she took measurements, the carbon dioxide absorbed, and attracted, and retained the heat, more than the other gases in the atmosphere. They were three sealed jars.
One minute.
And then years gone by. In the late ’70s, the Nixon government, they started making warnings about climate change caused by carbon dioxide. All the insurance companies in the US all got together and said, “We’re going to have to do something about this. It’s going to cost us a heap.” Now, the track were going on now, we’re clearing so much land, and we’re cutting down all the trees, it’s turning into heat sinks. I noticed that Rob Stokes this morning, announced a thing where no more houses with black roofs ’cause the cities are taking the heat sinks.
30.
If you look at new housing develops now, they’re hot because there’s no trees, all got black roofs, and because we’re pumping out so much carbon dioxide now that it’s getting hotter and hotter. Systems are starting to collapse all around the world now. And if you take any notice or if you care, we need nature.
10.
Nature doesn’t need us. We need nature. And the thing is all these right wing gits all around the place say, “Oh, so what, who cares? It’s not our problem.” I heard some fool yesterday on the radio say, “Who cares what happens in 30 years.”
All right. That’s it. Mark, all right. Well done. Well done to both you gentlemen. Any questions between each other, let’s be respectful. You had a question of Malcolm just before, Mark. You can ask it now.
Do you recycle, Malcolm?
Yeah, I recycle.
Well, hello. That’s what the earth’s atmosphere does. We have forests to recycle carbon dioxide and turn it back into oxygen.
That’s right, and-
Yay!
Nature alone produces 32 times, every year, 32 times the amount of carbon dioxide than in the entire human production around the planet. And whats more, Data shows that the-
Hang on.
Human production cannot-
We’re burning so much-
And does not change the-
fossil fuel we’re changing-
Level of carbon dioxide-
The balance.
In the atmosphere.
Okay. I think you spoke over each other. Malcolm, just again.
Again what?
Just repeat what you were saying ’cause Mark, I think, spoke over you. We couldn’t hear you properly.
I believe in recycling and-
Yeah.
Nature itself recycles through the carbon cycle, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon is essential to all life in this planet. Every cell in Mark’s body contains carbon. Carbon dioxide is essential for life on this planet. It and water vapour are essential for life. All forms of life on this planet. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas at 0.04% of earth’s atmosphere. It has no physical effect on temperatures at all.
All right, Mark?
Air, and also oxygen, blankets out the heat that’s being bombarded into the planet. We’re just changing the balance so much. These people just don’t get it. I just can’t believe people can be so thick as a society.
Hang on, lets be nice.
We need more carbon dioxide.
Let’s be respectful. It’s not about being thick. We’re talking ideology, we’re talking science, we’re talking-
All right.
It’s an important debate because it’s effectively divided our-
I’ll finish up with this.
Yeah?
I’ll finish up with this. Remember the smoking debate. They used to trot out all these people with white coats and clipboards saying “Oh, it’s not smoking. Two twins, one smoked and the other one didn’t. The one that smoked didn’t die, but the other one that died had cancer, so explain that.” They try and confuse you with figures. That’s what it is. But we’re changing the balance. And as I said before, all these things happened over millions of years, not the rate we’re doing. Not 200 years-
Yeah.
Millions of years.
All right, Malcolm?
Yeah, sure. Marcus, the use of any label like thick indicates that Mark-
Yeah.
Hasn’t got an argument that he can put together to counter the data.
Well, I think he did put an argument together, but.
The second thing, Marcus, is that raising smoking, which has got nothing to do with this. just shows that he hasn’t got an argument. Temperatures today are cooler than the 1880s and 1890s, when they were warmer 140 years ago. The longest temperature trend in the last 160 years was from the 1930s to 1976 when temperatures cooled. Since 1995, for 26 years, that’s more than a quarter of a century, temperatures have been flat yet China, India, America, Brazil, Russia are producing record quantities of carbon dioxide. When you consider nature’s El Nino cycles, there has been no warming trend at all for 26 years. And that conclusion is confirmed in NASA satellite temperature data.
All right, Mark? There is nothing unusual happening.
Mark?
Look at the extreme weather events that we’re getting now. As we talk, did you know last week in Canada, a place called Merit City, they had to evacuate 7,000 people because of the floods. Do you know in India last week they evacuated 200,000 people because the floods? This is what’s happening here. All these extreme weather events, and these people keep living in denial.
So Malcolm, Mark is suggesting climate changes has led into catastrophic floods, and we look here in Australia at the fires. Are you suggesting, Malcolm, that climate change has nothing to do with these severe climb of the severe environmental challenges faced by flood, fire, and?
Mark himself has failed to provide the evidence.
But there is evidence there.
Hang on, Marcus, I’m answering your question. The area of land burned-
Yeah. In the 2019 fires was much, much smaller than in the past. Even in the 1970s and much smaller than a hundred years ago. Much, much smaller. That’s the first point. The second point is that Antarctica has just had the record coldest six month period in its records, ever, ever.
Yeah.
And you can’t just go off… You notice, I don’t raise things like that, because that is weather. And the same with Canada having floods, we’ve always had floods. And if you look at the records from the Bureau of Meteorology, and you hear it on the news every night, oh, this is the heaviest flooding since in the last 50 years, what happened 51 years ago?
All right.
It was greater.
30 seconds each, just to finish. Mark, you first.
The weather events are getting more extreme because the oceans… I’ll just tell you. Okay, we’re in Australia. This is what’s happening. Up in Queensland they’ve cleared so much land the fertilizer’s washing into the water, feeding the Fido plankton. Fido meaning floating, plankton meaning plant life. That’s feeding the crown-of-thorns starfish. They’re munching their way through the barrier reef. Up in the gulf you’ve got hundreds of kilometres of the, what do you call them, mangroves have died off because it’s so hot. You’ve got Leeuwin Current floating in the coast of Western Australia was five degrees warmer-
All right.
than what it usually was. Five degrees!
Malcolm, last 30 seconds please.
Mark has failed to provide any evidence. Look, before we can provide any policy, you need to be able to quantify the impact of carbon dioxide from human activity on climate. No one anywhere in the world has done that. No one anywhere has quantified any effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on climate. And thus, there is no basis for policy. Mark is just clutching at straws. Crown-of-thorn starfish come and go in cycles. And we’ve known that for decades and decades and decades.
All right.
We need to respect nature, not vilify nature.
Gentleman, thank you both. This has been very enlightening. Very interesting. I hope the people listening at home, and those that listen back to the podcast online, enjoy it. Thank you, Mark, and both of you for being a really good sport. I think Mark deserves kudos for taking you on, Malcolm considering others, including federal members of parliament, have refused to do so. So I think kudos to him.
I agree. I agree. Kudos to Mark. But one of the sad things is that Mark has failed to provide the evidence. What we need, Marcus-
All right.
Is to understand-
Yes.
That you need to provide the empirical data, proving the link between the human carbon dioxide and climate variability.
All right, guys.
No one has done that anywhere in the world.
All right, I have to go. We’ve got the news coming up. Thank you, gentlemen, both for your time. That’s the great climate debate.
Yet again, the Prime Minister is bowing to unelected overseas elites and forcing unnecessary, broken climate policies on Australia. Our entire economy and your job is at risk so that the elites can have more control and money.
Transcript
[Marcus Paul] Well Malcolm Roberts says that parliament has lost it’s way under the two major parties. He made this impassioned speech just the other day.
[Malcolm Roberts] The issue that is of utmost importance is the integrity of this parliament, the integrity of this country, the integrity of state parliaments, the integrity of the people of this country, and their jobs and their livelihoods. That is of utmost importance to our nation and I wish it was of utmost importance to every single person in this senate. But clearly it’s not.
[Marcus] Well.
[Malcolm] The issue that is of utmost importance is the integrity of this parliament.
[Marcus] There we go Malcolm Roberts. Good morning to you Senator.
[Malcolm] Good morning Marcus. How are you mate?
[Marcus] Alright thank you. You looked pretty annoyed when you made that speech just the other day.
[Malcolm] I’m very very annoyed because I’ve always been a passionate person for the honesty and for the truth. Integrity is extremely important to me and Pauline, and accountability is too. And you know the people of Australia are now paying 19 billion dollars a year in nonsensical rubbish commitments for these parasitic mal investments. Unreliable energy that’s destroying our energy sector. We went from the cheapest energy in the world to now amongst the most expensive.
[Marcus] Alright.
[Malcolm] And the typical family household is now paying an extra 1,300 dollars a year for this rubbish.
[Marcus] Okay but I’d love to know how much we’re paying in subsidies to fossil fuel industries. You always talk about how much money we’re subsidising renewable energy. What about the fossil fuel industry that’s making billions out of our resources, many from overseas corporations that pay little to no tax, Malcolm. And all the rest of it. Are there any figures for, ya know, how much subsidy we’re providing fossil fuel companies?
[Malcolm] The Greens claim that, that the Greens have never ever provided any evidence saying what these circle subsidies are. The closest the Greens have come is to say that depreciation and amortisation on our subsidies. That applies to every single industry, and that applies to the taxation system. So that’s nonsense.
[Marcus] Okay so what you’re suggesting
[Malcolm] The clear
[Marcus] Hang on you’re suggesting we
don’t pay subsidies
[Malcolm] Correct. to the fossil fuel industry?
[Malcolm] We’ll let’s get two things straight.
[Malcolm] First of all,
[Marcus] Course we do.
[Malcolm] It’s not fossil fuels, they’re hydrocarbons. They’re compounds of hydrocarbons.
[Marcus] Semantics.
[Malcolm] No no no no. No it’s semantics. It’s extremely important they’re hydrocarbons. Now what happens with the coal sector, coal fired power section I should say, coal fired power section is now subsidising the other forms of electricity. Because coal fired power sections are competing with subsidised wind and solar and they can’t compete on that basis. So their prices of coal fired power sections are going up because of that. But if you look at the basic costs of coal fired power sections, we can build a new power station in this country and generate electricity for 45 dollars a megawatt hour. 45. There’s nothing comes close. Wind and solar are many times that.
[Marcus] What about the affect that will cause on climate change in the longer term, Malcolm?
[Malcolm] There is no evidence anywhere in the world that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate. And remember they’ve tried to tax us on this. And the tax was beaten by attorney Evan. One of the good things he did. Think about this Marcus.
[Marcus] Yeah.
[Malcolm] The production of carbon dioxide in 2009 after the global financial crisis decreased. Decreased. And yet the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased. Because nature alone determines the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We don’t control it. Second point, in the last 19 months with the COVID shutdown around the world, we had almost a depression. Yet the level of carbon dioxide reduced from humans using hydrocarbon fuels. Cars,
Power stations
[Marcus] Yep.
[Malcolm] gas heaters, has decreased. And yet the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased. Nature controls it. It wouldn’t matter how much they tax us. How much they throttled us. We will not affect the temperature. The second thing to remember is that despite the human production of carbon dioxide going up dramatically, in the last 25, 30 years, the actual temperature of the planet has stabilised since 1995. It’s been flat. It’s just natural variation, up and down from year to year. It’s been flat. So no matter which way you look at it, this is rubbish. It’s just a matter of controlling our energy,
[Marcus] Well the
[Malcolm] controlling our water,
[Malcolm] controlling our land,
[Marcus] Well okay
[Malcolm] and ripping us off in taxes.
[Marcus] Well the Prime Minister obviously doesn’t feel that way. He’s gonna sign up to net zero by 2050. He’ll drag the Nationals screaming and kicking along the way as well. And he’ll be off to Glasgow. What do you make of that?
[Malcolm] It’s another show. Another show. Look the real issue here is that we have two coalition governments vying for government. We have the Morrison Joyce government that’s currently in power as you know, and we have the Albanese Bant government. And make no mistake, the last labour government, they’ve lost so much support from their key areas that they could only govern in coalition with the Greens. And that’ll be the case
[Marcus] Whoa hold on
[Malcolm] It’ll be Albanese and Bant together.
[Marcus] No all that rubbish.
[Malcolm] The fact is that Scott Morrison has got no data. We know that. Got no data backing up his claims about having to cut down carbon dioxide from human activity.
[Marcus] Alright.
[Malcolm] What he’s doing on this is kowtowing to his globalist masters.
[Marcus] Alright I got a note here I’ll get you to comment on. It’s on the same thing. It’s from one of my listeners. Good day Marcus. Whilst the federal government dithers, bickers, and carries on developing a coherent policy for net zero emissions, the private sector is getting on with it. Rio Tinto, Big HP, the Commonwealth Bank, the CSIRO, Fortescue Metals, Mirvac, Brisbane airport, AGL, Ramsay Health Care, they’ve all pledged to slash their emissions. Atlassian’s founder says he’ll invest and donate 1.5 billion dollars for climate action. The states are all backing clean energy projects. And he concludes by saying in my view Morrison’s strategy is clear, do nothing and allow the others to do the heavy lifting. If the others succeed, as they’re likely to do so, then Morrison will take the credit. If their strategies do not work, then Morrison will not be blamed.
[Malcolm] Very very simple Marcus.
[Marcus] Hm?
[Malcolm] People, humans have a problem in that some people just follow like sheep. I challenged the chief executive officer, the head of coal division, and the chairman of BHP, several years ago, about 2014 from memory, to provide me with the evidence for their policy. They all failed. Every single, Rio Tinto failed to provide it. These people are pushing a globalist agenda. BHP you’ll notice is piling out a thermal coal because it’s mines are so damn inefficient. It’s piling out a thermal coal, steaming coal, power station coal, but it’s not saying anything about it’s coking coal. Coking coal is absolutely essential. And BHP can make money because coking coal prices are so damn high. They can’t make it in steaming coal because they’re inefficient. They’re very badly managed. I’ve challenged the chief executive officer of the ANZ bank. The head of the ANZ bank. And he can’t provide me the evidence. And what’s more, he told it’s not about evidence. It’s not about science anymore because it’s become political and the risks are too great because the globalists that are pushing this scam, and you can go back to Maurice Strong, he started this. He created this whole scam. And Maurice Strong died a criminal on the hunt from the American authority.
[Marcus] Right okay.
[Malcolm] Because of criminal activity. So this is the kind of thing we’re looking at here. And Marcus, the leadership of these companies, some of these companies, is atrocious. I can give you fine leaders who are saying it’s complete rubbish.
[Marcus] Alright.
[Malcolm] Fine leaders.
[Marcus] Okay Malcolm, always good to have you on. It’s great to get your perspective on this and I’m really interested to get your thoughts once Glasgow gets underway and we start hearing more and more about
[Malcolm] Can I?
[Marcus] action on climate, yeah?
[Malcolm] I’ll issue a challenge to you Marcus.
[Marcus Laughs] –
[Malcolm] No no
No one has been able to do this. CSRO, Bureau of Meteorology, no one. The UN panel on climate. I challenge you to provide me with the specific location of the data within a causal framework, scientific framework, and that’s what determines science. That shows we need to cut our carbon dioxide. No one has been able to do that. And what’s more I’ll issue a challenge to anyone in Australia who wants to debate me on the science and on the corruption of science. Anyone.
Governments have been making policy that is completely out of touch with reality or data for decades. It’s all based on political whims or looking good, not the facts or data. As a result, our country is broken.
We have to return to policy based on tested data, not Labor or Liberal’s feelings on the day.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I will discuss the cost of shoddy science that is crippling people, families, communities and our nation. One Nation has repeatedly called for and continues to call for an independent office of scientific integrity and quality assurance to assess the science claimed to be underpinning government policy and decisions. We want objective, independent scientific scrutiny that is protected from politicisation. Science is a not a label; it is hard, verifiable, reliable data within a framework that proves cause and effect logically. It is every senator’s responsibility to ensure that she or he makes decisions using such data.
I’ll give you some examples of the cost of shoddy science that has not been scrutinised. Climate policies and renewable subsidies cost Australian households via electricity costs $13 billion per year, every year. That’s $1,300 per household per year needlessly wasted. The median income in this country is $49,000. After tax, that’s around $34,000 or maybe a little bit higher. How can someone on $34,000 after tax afford $1,300 flushed down the toilet, for nothing? The additional costs of climate policies on our power bills is a staggering 39 per cent, not the 6½ per cent that the government claims. Renewables distort the low cost of coal based power and more than double the wholesale electricity price from coal’s $45.50 per kilowatt hour to $92.50. China and India use our coal to sell electricity at 8c a kilowatt hour, while we burn the same coal without transporting it thousands of kilometres and the price of electricity from the coal is three times as much at 25c an hour.
All Australians have the right to benefit from our rich natural resources. The true cost of electricity in this country would be $13 billion per year less if cheap, affordable, reliable coal production was not lumbered with policies that distort the market. We commissioned independent expert and respected economist Dr Alan Moran to calculate those figures, and he used the government’s own data. So it can’t be sensibly refuted. The government stopped presenting it in consolidated form to hide what government policy is doing to everyday Australians in our nation.
Every subsidised green energy job or so-called renewable job, from renewable or unreliable power, such as wind and solar, costs 2.2 jobs lost in the real economy. Parasitic unreliables are killing their host, the people of Australia and the people of Queensland.
We can go further, beyond raw data on energy costs, to look at property rights. Property rights have been stolen in this country in the name of the Kyoto Protocol. John Howard’s Howard-Anderson government started it with Rob Borbidge’s National Party government in Queensland, followed quickly by Peter Beattie’s government and every government since, with the exception of Campbell Newman, who failed to repeal it. Property rights have been stolen with no compensation. That is fundamentally wrong. We see it in water policy, with corruption in the Murray-Darling Basin when it comes to water trading. We see the stealing of water rights, all based on shoddy science. The whole Murray-Darling Basin Plan is based on shoddy science—political science. Instead of having science based policy, we now have policy based science, and both sides of this parliament are responsible.
Senator Carr, who I have a lot of regard for in many ways, raised COVID. We have not been given the scientific data on COVID. We’ve been given models. The scientific data which I got from the Chief Medical Officer points to a completely different picture and to completely different management. COVID is being mismanaged in the name of science. It is wrong. By the way, the costs of all of those examples I’ve given are not in the billions but in the tens or hundreds of billions, and the impact on our country’s economy is in the trillions, with the lost opportunity and the lack of competitiveness.
COVID exposed to us that our country has lost its economic independence. We now depend on other countries for our survival—for basics. We’ve lost our manufacturing sector because of shoddy governance from the Labor, Liberal and National parties over almost eight decades, since 1944. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen the Liberals, Labor and the Nationals squabbling at state and federal level, because there is no science being used to drive the plan. There’s no plan for COVID management. Each state is lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis, and the federal government is bypassing the Constitution and conditioning them to suck on the federal tit. That’s what’s going on.
Let’s have a look at the science. I have held CSIRO accountable at three presentations from them, plus Senate estimates. Firstly, the CSIRO has admitted under my cross-examination that the CSIRO has never said that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger—never. We asked them: ‘Who has said it? Politicians told us you said it.’ They said, ‘You’d have to ask the politicians.’ Secondly, CSIRO has admitted that today’s temperatures are not unprecedented. I’ll say that again—not unprecedented. They’ve happened before in recent times without our burning of hydrocarbon fuels.
Thirdly, the CSIRO then fell back on one thing—one paper, after almost 50 years of research, that said that the rate of warming is now increasing. That too was falsified by the author of that paper. It was falsified and contradicted by other references which the CSIRO had to then give us. There is no evidence for the CSIRO’s sole claim that the rate of temperature rise is unprecedented. Its own papers that it cites do not show that. The CSIRO then relied upon unvalidated computer models that were already proven to be giving erroneous projections. That’s what the UN IPCC relies on. They’ve already been proven wrong many times.
The clincher is that, to have policy based upon science, you would need to quantify the amount of impact on climate variables such as weather: rainfall; storm activity, severity and frequency; and drought. You’d need to be able to quantify the impact on that of carbon dioxide from human activity. The CSIRO has never quantified any specific impact on climate, or any climate variable, from human carbon dioxide.
With us, the CSIRO has repeatedly relied on discredited and poor-quality papers on temperature and carbon dioxide. It gave us one of each, and then, when we tore them to shreds, they gave us more. We tore them to shreds. It has never given us any good-quality scientific papers. That’s their science. The CSIRO revealed little understanding of the papers they cited as evidence. That’s our scientific body in this country—they could not show understanding of the papers that they cited.
The CSIRO admits it has never done due diligence on reports and data that it cites as evidence. It just accepts peer review. What a lot of rubbish that is! That has been shown in peer-reviewed articles to be rubbish. The CSIRO allows politicians to misrepresent it without correction. It doesn’t stand up—it doesn’t have any backbone. The CSIRO has misled parliament. Independent international scientists have verified our conclusions on the CSIRO science, and they’re stunned—people like John Christy, Nir Shaviv, Nils Morner, David Legates, Ian Plimer and Will Happer. There is no climate emergency—none at all. Everything is normal. It’s completely cyclical weather.
Now I’ll move to the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, which has turned into a propaganda outfit and a mouthpiece and cheer squad for global policies. Politics has captured it and turned it into a massive bureaucracy that writes legislation rather than checks it. POST, as it’s called, comprises people, as Senator Carr said, ‘consistent with parliamentary composition’. That tells us straight away that it’s not independent. Instead of a body to drive legislation we want a body to vet it. Senator Carr mentioned the Office of the Chief Scientist. I asked the Chief Scientist for a presentation on his evidence of climate change caused by human carbon dioxide. After 20 minutes of rubbish we asked him questions and he looked at us and said that he’s not a climate scientist and he doesn’t understand it. Yet we have policies around this country based upon Dr Finkel’s advice. Some of those policies that I mentioned are based on his advice.
We’ve had activists, such as Tim Flannery, David Karoly, Will Steffen, Ross Garnaut, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Matthew England, Kurt Lambeck, Andy Pitman and Lesley Hughes, being paraded and paid by the government—both Liberal and Labor—and yet they’re nothing more than academic activists. None have provided any empirical scientific evidence in a logical framework proving cause and effect. That’s what has been paraded around this parliament as science for decades now. It’s rubbish. That’s why One Nation opposes this motion. It is wasting committee resources to send them off on a goose chase to adopt something like the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.
We invite Senator Carr to join us in legislating for an independent body of scientists to scrutinise government policy and decisions. Let the government put up the science upon which its policies are based and let the independent body scrutinise it. That requires a few things. First of all, it needs a team funded and set up to oppose the government’s position, and we’ll let them both go at it. Science, fundamentally, is about data and debate. We need the government to put up its science and let a team tear it apart—and be funded to tear it apart. Once that happens, and the science is dismissed, that will save the country billions of dollars. If it withstands the scrutiny, that’s good—we’ll know we’ve got a really solid scientific case. Another way is to have a transparency portal. Put the science out there and let anybody in the public domain tear it apart. If someone finds a chink, fix it. True scientists are not about protecting their egos; they’re about being open to the advancement of humanity. They welcome their own science being torn apart.
We need an independent view. The type of information, as the motion discusses, is simple. All we need is empirical scientific evidence in a framework proving cause and effect. We then need independent scrutiny, and I’ve given you two examples. That will replace policies—as Senator Carr has discussed, and I agree with him—based on ideology, headline-seeking, prejudice, opinions, looking after vested interests and looking after donors. This is what’s driving this country, and the people are paying for it. They’re paying for it through the neck, and we’re destroying our country. We need the ‘claimed’ science to be scrutinised and verified or rejected.
What a shameful, disgraceful incident we saw in this parliament just after midday today. We saw Senator Wong, Senator Watt and Senator Waters engaging in a screaming match. Not once did anyone raise empirical scientific evidence. This is day 701 since I asked the chief proponent of this climate change nonsense in the parliament to be accountable for her data. I asked Senator Waters. I challenged her 701 days ago—almost two years ago. I challenged her 11 years ago. She has never agreed to debate me. She refuses to debate me. She refuses to put up the scientific evidence. She refuses to discuss the corruption of climate science. Yet she espouses policies that will gut this country. Also, we’ve seen Senator Wong quoting a report from the IPCC. That’s not a report from scientists; that’s a report from political activists. She talks about what we are told—insert the catastrophe—will happen in the future. That’s not science. What we need is an honest debate. We need an honest debate to reveal the pure science and to hold people accountable in the parliament. We will not be supporting this motion because it will encourage politicisation.
I draw your attention to an article published in the Australian today[1], which states that “CSIRO and several Australian universities have engaged in at least 10 joint projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past decade, a laboratory that US intelligence has linked to the Chinese military and which is suspected of being at the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak.”
The same article states “a spokesperson for Mr Hunt said he had ordered a review of “gain-of-function” research in Australia by the National Health and Medical Research Council.”
Concerningly, this article points out the roles of CSIRO and Australian universities in research and development at, and/or with, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, roles which CSIRO at first denied in Senate Estimates.
What is worse is that the CSIRO trained Chinese infectious diseases expert Shi Zhengli’s protege, Peng Zhou, who is now head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Further, there are links into many universities, one being the University of Queensland, including Dr Hume Field[2] who is one of many academics from Australia engaged with the EcoHealth Alliance as a Science and Policy Advisor for both China and southeast Asia regions. Dr Hume has been working on emerging diseases, environmental science and infectious disease epidemiology. On 12 May 2020, the Washington Post reported that EcoHealth is a “longtime partner” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology[3].
Minister, so called “Gain-of-Function” (GoF) is a euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research:
is government funded and supported by CSIRO and Australian universities and academics.
academics may not understand the underlying political or military agendas of such research.
its focus is on enhancing the pathogens’ ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
ostensibly, GoF research is conducted for biodefense purposes in many countries.
GoF experiments are extremely dangerous and there is evidence of outbreaks[4].
these deadly science-enhanced pathogens can and do escape into the community where they infect and kill people – it is biological warfare.
Government officials and the recipients of government grants and contracts for GoF research argue that these experiments are critical for understanding the subtle changes that can make a virus a pandemic threat. GoF experiments have neither prevented a pandemic, nor provided useful information about safe and effective pandemic countermeasures.
We believe these high-risk experiments deviate from morally justifiable research, and these experimentally altered viruses and pathogens have put the entire human race at risk. Especially given the potential for a country such as China to ‘weaponise’ the products of Australian supported and funded research.
If you, and/or your government support these programs then it is time to stop.
The risks posed by influenza/virus GoF experiments include frequent documented escapes of deadly pathogens into the community, which have a potential for triggering a pandemic. These risks far outweigh any speculative benefits. What’s more, as Dr. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Dr. Alison Galvani of Yale argue:
“the creation and manipulation of potential pandemic pathogens are too risky to justify…there are safer more effective experimental approaches that are both more scientifically informative and more straightforward to translate into improved public health.” [PLoS Medicine, 2014][5]
The risk of laboratory enhanced transmissibility of influenza viruses is obvious. Dr. Andrew Pavia, Chief, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Utah stated:
“A readily transmitted H5N1 virus could be extraordinarily lethal; therefore, the risk for accidental release is significant, and deliberate misuse of the data to create a biological weapon is possible.”[6]
Many everyday Australians are asking why your government is not being proactive and protecting us from viruses by having both an end-to-end plan for managing the COVID-19 outbreak, and by cancelling support for research and collaboration with nations that may weaponise a virus and harm everyday Australians. Australians deserve to be safe.
Minister: can you advise what you and your government know about this GoF research and of the participation of CSIRO and Australian academic institutions?
Additionally, I have submitted a question on notice (QON): I have requested a copy of the terms of reference of your proposed review as well as detail on the composition of the review group, meeting times, how submissions may be made, attendance at meetings and importantly an undertaking from you that this will be a public inquiry with published results. I would be happy to discuss this matter with you further and await your advice.
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2019/08/06/12/shutterstock-editorial-4240298r.jpg?width=990&auto=webp&quality=75743990Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2021-06-25 16:05:392021-06-25 16:09:42Letter to Minister Greg Hunt: Stop Gain of Function Research
