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The Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner has a sole focus on receiving complaints about wind, solar, pumped hydro, battery and power line projects among others.

If you have been affected by a project underway or even one that is proposed you need to submit a complaint by following the steps at https://www.aeic.gov.au/making-a-complaint

Transcript

Chair: Senator Roberts.

Senator Roberts: Thank you for being here this morning. I understand one of my staff called you yesterday?

Mr Dyer: Yes.

Senator Roberts: He had a very pleasant talk. Thank you very much for opening the door. Is it accurate to say that you are the national commissioner for complaints about wind and solar projects?

Mr Dyer: I’d like to characterise it as the ombudsman of first and last resort. If you have a concern about a powerline, a wind farm or whatever that might be in our jurisdiction and you don’t know how to get it solved, you can come to us and we’ll figure out the right process to get the concern addressed.

Senator Roberts: When you say ‘you’, that was used in a colloquial sense. This is open to any citizen in Australia?

Mr Dyer: Yes. We’re a national service and we get complaints from around the country.

Senator Roberts: That’s wonderful to hear. So anyone who has a complaint about wind projects, solar projects, batteries or transmission can make a complaint to you?

Mr Dyer: Yes. If you go to our website, which is aeic.gov.au, the second or third tab along says ‘making a complaint’. There’s the process, the form and the policy. You can call us, you can mail us, you can email us or you can arrange to meet with us.

Senator Roberts: How many are in your office? I understand you have a small office.

Mr Dyer: We’re a very efficient team.

Senator Roberts: I wasn’t being critical.

Mr Dyer: We have, I think, five people.

Senator Roberts: And you’re meant to take care of people’s complaints about solar and wind. And you work with the state government, with the federal government, with private entities?

Mr Dyer: Yes.

Senator Roberts: Thank you.

Mr Dyer: The respondent is usually the developer to a concern. But sometimes it’s a planning process or an EPBC issue. It’s not always the developer, but usually that’s the case.

Senator Roberts: So it could get pretty complex?

Mr Dyer: Yes. We’ve had some of them going for a long time, but we get through them.

Senator Roberts: Can you perhaps talk a bit more about what you can do for someone who has a complaint that you can look at, because people are not aware. Talk to everyday Australians.

Mr Dyer: I don’t have the budget for a front page ad in the Sydney Morning Herald. But people do find us. If you’ve got constituents who have concerns, we should talk about how they can come to us. The best thing to do is promote our website, and that has all of the details. Typically our process is that, if we get a complaint, we’ll do some research on the project and the proponent, and what is going on. If we don’t already know the proponent, and in many cases we do, we will go and get a briefing or open the door, and sometimes the complainant is known to the proponent. Often they’re not known, and so we’re able to build and bridge a relationship between the complainant and the proponent to work through whatever the concerns are. Many concerns are solved by just provision of factual information. It’s often a misunderstanding or misperception that has caused them to come to us.

Senator Roberts: I certainly agree with that. I would like to ask whether you’ve received any complaints in relation to the proposed Eungella or Burdekin Pioneer pumped hydro project in the hinterland near Mackay and the proposed Borumba Dam pumped hydro and the transmission lines around Widgee, which is near Gympie in Queensland.

Mr Dyer: No.

Senator Roberts: Not any?

Mr Dyer: No.

Senator Roberts: There’s a massive community movement in both cases.

Mr Dyer: Then feel free to connect them to us and we’ll work through it.

Senator Roberts: Okay. It’s shocking to me that, in both of those projects, it appears there has been an appalling level of community consultation. This is entirely from the Queensland government. In Eungella, for example, people who were going to have their houses compulsorily resumed and flooded for the new pumped hydro dam found out via media release. Then they found out that they couldn’t get loans for their business, renovations or sell their house, because their land is now jeopardised. Transmission lines for the Borumba project near Gympie are currently proposed over prime agricultural land, which would be again compulsorily resumed despite the community pointing out that there are state-owned land corridors available nearby. Does this lack of consultation sound like it meets the needs for best practice that your office would recommend?

Mr Dyer: We find that most proponents need help in some way, shape or form. I did have a look last night at the Queensland hydro website, and it didn’t jump out to me how you might make a complaint, for example. So, it’s possible that we may need to help them get their complaint process in place. We’ve had to do that with all the TNSPs, and help them get that in place, and the policies put in place, make it transparent on the project website, and away they go.

Senator Roberts: Thank you. What does the best practice consultation look like?

Mr Dyer: It’s a long topic, but it’s about knowing who your stakeholders are and being fairly well advanced in your thinking about what you’re trying to do. If I reflect on a call I had last night, it’s don’t go about it in secret. We often get developers that want to have one-on-one discussions with the landholder to sign them up for hosting the wind farm or the solar farm and say, ‘This is very confidential. We can’t let you talk to your neighbours.’  Before the developers leave the front gate, the whole street knows what the deal is.

Senator Roberts: And they know that these guys are wanting to cover it up?

Mr Dyer: Yes.

Senator Roberts: Which doesn’t build trust.

Mr Dyer: Yes.

Senator Roberts: To build trust, developers need to listen first and then talk once they understand people’s needs?

Mr Dyer: Yes. It’s, for want of a better word, not a crude word, it’s a professional sales role that they’re in. But it’s got to be done with ethics and transparency and thinking like a landholder will think—how you go about matters.

Senator Roberts: I’ve been up to both projects, but already there are many constituents who are saying that this will never be built. It’s just going to do enormous damage. It’s just the Queensland government diverting attention in the media and in the community from serious problems like the Mackay Base Hospital. That straightaway has destroyed any trust in that community.

Mr Dyer: It sounds like they might need some help, so I’ll approach the chair and we’ll start the process.

Senator Roberts: We’ll get your website and your name and we’ll send it to—

Mr Dyer: I’ve got a card here for you. You can take that after the session.

Senator Roberts: I’m intrigued about bonds on solar and wind generators. In the coal industry, for every acre that a surface mine uncovers the coal company has to provide a bond to the government, and then it doesn’t get that bond back until the land is fully reclaimed. Sometimes the reclaimed land is far more productive and far cleaner than the original scrub. What is the bond on solar and wind generators?

Mr Dyer: It’s up to the commercial arrangement between the landholder and the proponent. It’s no different from you owning the milk bar as a commercial landlord down the main street of town. If the tenant defaults and leaves the building, you’re stuck with the bain-marie.

Senator Roberts: So, without a bond, at the end of life, solar and wind generators can just walk away from it? Where are the funds to ensure remediation?

Mr Dyer: Some landholders are quite savvy, and I have seen everything from bank guarantees to bonds being in place, but it’s not across the board. That’s not to say it’s not happening and not being done, but it needs to be a standard practice.

Senator Roberts: There is a standard in the coalmining industry, but there’s no standard in the solar and wind industry?

Mr Dyer: It’s something I’ve advocated for a long time. It’s in section 8 of my report in appendix A, that is, the need to have licensed developers accredited to have the skills to carry out the process, as we are doing in offshore wind, and also that the area being prospected has been sanctioned ahead of time.

Senator Roberts: I want to put on the record that I appreciate Mr Dyer’s frank and complete comments and his openness. It’s much appreciated. Thank you.

Chair: I think we would all agree.

Mr Dyer: Thank you.

The ASX200 is the Australian benchmark for investment returns, if you’re not matching it many people will ask why you even bothered.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation “invests” your taxes into pipe dream “renewable” projects. We’re told that these investments are some of the best things in finance, in reality I think they are a scam.

My question was simple, if the CEFC is making such good investments, why would putting money into the ASX200 have made a 22% better profit over the last 10 years?

Click here for Transcript

Senator Roberts: At the last Senate estimates, I submitted some questions on notice asking for how the returns for wind and solar investments compare to other financial investments or benchmarks. The CEFC answered very vaguely and essentially said, ‘Depends.’ The number for that question and response is SQ23-000642. In your annual report, you are happy to tout a percentage but not in your answer to me, apparently. In your report you say, since the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s inception you have achieved an annualised return of 4.48 per cent, which adds up to 55 per cent in total over 10 years. The ASX 200 over the same period has returned 67 per cent. That’s 27 April 2012 to 20 May 2023. An investment in the Australian benchmark would have returned a 22 per cent better profit than the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Why are your investments in supposedly clean energy, which is not clean—just have a look at what happens when heavy metals out of abandoned solar panels get into the water supply or oil from a malfunctioning wind turbine leaks into the ocean—so poor compared to the Australian benchmark?

Mr Learmonth: There are a few things in there. Firstly, that 4.48 that you refer to doesn’t just cover renewable energy of wind and solar, if that’s what’s going to be in your sights; it covers the whole portfolio, and that’s everything from green bonds, loans to industrial companies to reduce emissions, technology investments with venture capital, limited partnership interests in funds in sectors like the built environment, agriculture and infrastructure. So it’s very, very broad. You can’t possibly hone it in just around wind and solar.

The other thing I would note is you’re making the point that our returns appear inadequate or are below what other commercial benchmarks should be. The CEFC’s capital is about driving policy outcomes as well as making appropriate return, so it’s about decarbonising the electricity sector. It’s about fuel switching and energy efficiency. In many cases, we may make a below-market return because that’s what’s needed to bring a project online or take a technology down a learning curve. So I don’t think you can use those very sweeping references to apply to the CEFC.

Senator Roberts: Let me interpret that. You’re saying that the subpar performance is a cost of subsidising government policy objectives?

Mr Learmonth: I wouldn’t put it like that. I would say that if you felt that we weren’t reaching some kind of commercial benchmark, that’s probably a reflection of the way that we are using our capital to deliver on the policy objectives of the CEFC. But, equally, we are a lender. Today 70 per cent, broadly, of our portfolio is debt. So you can’t compare it to an index like the ASX or some ETF or whatever it might be, because a secured loan is a relatively low yielding investment compared to putting money into a technology company where you might expect 25 per cent. So, again, I don’t think we are comparing apples with apples.

Senator Roberts: That’s fair enough. I’m asking for more details, because the response to the question on notice was not detailed and not respectful, in my opinion. It was very vague.

Mr Learmonth: I’m happy to provide you with more information around that and break it down by sectors to demonstrate that and give you a bit more background to the return, the 4.48 that you refer to.

Senator Roberts: Can you take that on notice?

Mr Learmonth: I can do that, very happily.

Senator Roberts: Perhaps something else you could take on notice is: why should Australian taxpayers be giving you the extra $20.5 billion Labor has given you in this budget, given you are not even close to the Australian benchmark. You can explain why you’re not close to the benchmark. That’s fair enough. But why should the Australian taxpayers be giving you an extra $20.5 billion?

Mr Learmonth: I can start, and I’m sure others may have views on this. The money is being appropriated and delivered to the CEFC to help deliver on some very defined policy objectives, like Rewiring the Nation, like Household Energy Upgrades and, thirdly, investing in growing technology companies here in Australia. We were proven to have done a very good job over the last 10 years on investing, lending and using capital to achieve these environmental outcomes. One can only assume that’s why the government was prepared to back us into doing more.

Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, obviously you fundamentally don’t believe that it is necessary to reduce carbon emissions.

Senator Roberts: I know so.

Senator McAllister: It is a difference of opinion between you and the Australian government. As I understand it, it is also a difference opinion—

Senator Roberts: Minister, you have repeatedly failed to provide the evidence for your policies.

Senator McAllister: between you and the opposition, as I understand their policy.

Senator Roberts: I think the opposition wouldn’t agree with me.

Senator McAllister: Putting that to one side, having agreed that our policy is to reduce Australia’s emissions, we therefore have to look at the policy levers that are available to us. One of the very successful levers, in my opinion, in the Australian landscape has been the CEFC. It is a different model to one that might conventionally be adopted using grants or direct funding to proponents, and instead seeks to increase financial flows into the clean energy sector, as Mr Learmonth has explained to you. It is one of a number of tools that the Australian government seeks to use to drive investment in the clean energy sector, and it has met that objective.

Senator Roberts: I understand that, but, repeatedly, you have failed to provide the specific effect of human carbon dioxide on any climate factor—temperature, storms, rainfall. You’ve repeatedly failed to provide that basis for policy. The whole thing is just running on fluff.

Let’s continue the questions. I asked you on notice at the last Senate estimates if you had done modelling on what percentage of your returns are attributable to government subsidies and policies. Your answer to me was ‘yes’, as part of your due diligence. It is question No. 2 from the question on notice that I asked before. Question No. 2 says: Have you done any modelling or investigation to find what percentage of these returns are attributable to government subsidies or policies?

Your answer was: All revenue streams are taken into account as part of transaction assessment and due diligence. So your answer to me was to say yes, as part of your due diligence. Given you’ve done that analysis, what percentage of returns for investments are attributable to government subsidies and policies?

Mr Learmonth: I’m just trying to understand your question, Senator. Our returns come from using government dollars—taxpayer dollars—that are either lent or invested by the CEFC. Therefore, using those dollars, we either receive interest or dividends, or, potentially, we might sell an equity investment and make a gain. That’s where our revenue comes from. When you ask what percentage of that is coming from government subsidies, all our capital is coming from the government. All our returns come from the deployment of government capital. I’m just trying to understand what you mean by ‘subsidies’ there.

Senator Roberts: Do you get a return on your investment?

Mr Learmonth: Absolutely—

Senator Roberts: So what percentage—

Mr Learmonth: You inquired about it earlier, and that’s correct.

Senator Roberts: Right. So what percentage of that is due to government subsidies?

Mr Learmonth: Again, I don’t quite understand your question because all our capital is provided by the government. Someone might say, ‘Well, that’s not really a subsidy, it’s a provision of capital from Treasury.’

Senator Roberts: Accept that.

Ms Learmonth: Therefore, we’re not the recipients of subsidies. I might see if my—

Senator Roberts: Let me—

Chair: Mr Learmonth, I wonder if you could, in a very pithy fashion, outline the kind of organisation you are and its intent, because I think the senator has misunderstood that.

Senator Roberts: Perhaps I could clarify something: what part of your returns from your borrowers enables them to succeed because of government subsidies? They wouldn’t have provided a return without those subsidies.

Mr Every: Are you thinking about matters such as the large-scale generation certificates, which the Renewable Energy Target—

Senator Roberts: No, I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about the actual return—the income that a person who is the borrower of your money, or our money, is able to make because of subsidies for solar and wind.  Without those subsidies, would you have got a return?

Mr Learmonth: Oh, so you’re referring to, say, a household subsidy for having solar panels, for example—

Senator Roberts: More to the point: you don’t lend to households, I take it?

Mr Learmonth: We do via intermediaries; we actually do. We use—

Senator Roberts: But most of your lending is to large—

Mr Learmonth: Yes, a substantial portion is to large projects, large companies. That’s part of it, but we also use intermediaries and partners like large Australian banks, for example, to provide mortgages for people to stimulate people to make their houses more energy efficient or to buy a more efficient home. They might access a green mortgage, so there’s a very broad range of borrowers. They pay back the loans out of the money that they’re generating in their business. That might be a small manufacturing company, it might be an agricultural company, or it might be a solar farm. Whether they are entitled through their businesses to subsidies, discounts or benefits through state and federal governments, one can only speculate about that.

Senator Roberts: Your mission and values say that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a specialist investor with a deep sense of purpose to invest as Australia’s green bank to help achieve our national goal of net zero emissions by 2050. How many of your borrowers make a return because of government subsidies for solar and wind? In other words, without those subsidies, you would not be getting a return.

Ms Learmonth: I’m not sure about that. Let’s talk about a solar or wind farm. We may lend them money to help them build out the generation plant, the wind turbines, the solar panels, for example. They either sell the electricity into the spot market, or they might have a contracting arrangement, so they generate income through that. Yes, a large utility-scale renewables project will also receive a generation certificate, a renewable certificate, which traces its way back to a different government policy, the RET, Renewable Energy Target, so some component of the income of a renewable energy project does come through a former government policy. But the majority of income comes from the sale of those electrons either to someone who wants them or into a market like the NEM spot market. They make that money, and, if we’re the senior lender, we’re the first person they’ll pay.  They’ll pay us back interest and principal through those revenues.

Senator Roberts: Do you have any idea why, when we’re told that solar and wind are now the cheapest form, we still need subsidies?

Mr Learmonth: We know that wind and solar, based on the cost of it and what they can produce, is today the lowest cost of energy.

Click here for Transcript

Senator Roberts: You told me in the answers to questions on notice that you’ve done the analysis. Now you’re telling me that we can only speculate on what those businesses are receiving in terms of subsidies that contribute to your returns. What is it?

Mr Learmonth: I guess I’m just trying to use some examples to try and flesh out what you mean by subsidies. Are they subsidies that are being provided to our borrowers?

Senator Roberts: Yes. You understand their money streams. What is the proportion of subsidies in there?  In other words, the government is paying to help you get a return on your loans.

Mr Learmonth: In some cases there are companies we have lent to that are recipients of state government benefits. And for some reason they might—

Senator Roberts: The point is you’re investing in something that needs subsidies to survive, so we’ve got the government giving money under a loan and then relying upon other subsidies, from the same taxpayers—maybe state, maybe federal—to get a return back.

Mr Learmonth: Just in terms of wind and solar, even if you backed out the subsidy around the generation certificate, they would in most cases still be able to pay their debt. We don’t come up with the subsidies. We are there looking at projects and companies—

Senator Roberts: I’m not accusing you of coming up with the subsidies. I’m saying that your borrowers cannot pay it back without those subsidies.

Mr Learmonth: I don’t think that’s right.

Senator Roberts: Could you give me the figures that show that, please? You’ve said you’ve got the analysis.

Mr Learmonth: The only borrowers that we have where a part of their direct revenue source or generation may have some form of government subsidy is probably wind and solar, because they are recipients, but there are other ones that have no government subsidies.

Senator Roberts: Let’s move on to something that’s associated, because you don’t know the income streams. I also asked you in Senate estimates, on notice, what the risk to wind and solar investments was from a change in government policy. You didn’t answer what the risk was. You just said that you have assessed the risk, like any prudent investor.

I asked: Political risk is one of the most basic elements of a assessing a business case. What is the risk to wind and solar investments if the government were to abandon their net-zero policy?  Which some jurisdictions around the world are discussing right now. The answer I got was: The question is a hypothetical but suffice to say, like any prudent investor, the CEFC undertakes due diligence into risks to any revenue stream, and structures its investments to ensure that it is not unduly exposed to risk, including policy risk. If you have assessed the risk, what is the risk?

Mr Learmonth: What is the risk of a government abandoning—

Senator Roberts: Financial risk—what is the risk to your loan?

Mr Learmonth: It’s hard to speculate. We would look—

Senator Roberts: But you’ve assessed it.

Mr Learmonth: Yes, because we would have looked at it and we would have gone: What sort of generation would this wind or solar farm produce? Do we estimate that power prices over the term of our loan—it might be five years; it might be seven years—will introduce some element of risk to those cash flows? And then we would have looked at whether or not our debt could be paid back. If a future government changed policies around net zero, it would take some while before that potentially would have any impact. I think it’s not a risk that we would be factoring into it, because we’re looking at the more immediate and realistic options.

Senator Roberts: You’ve said you’ve done your due diligence but you can’t put a handle on the risk. I put it to you that the government abandoning net zero targets would be catastrophic for your investments. Without targets, there are no subsidies, and the generators couldn’t produce a return and pay back the loan.

Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, I think the problem with the line of questioning you’re pursuing with Mr Learmonth is that you assume that investments in the National Electricity Market are driven by subsidies, which you have not identified. All over the world renewable energy is increasing because of its technological advantages and because of the cost profile of alternatives—

Senator Roberts: Hydrocarbons after—

Senator McAllister: May I finish?

Senator Roberts: Yes.

Senator McAllister: Particularly where either the overall demand in an electricity system is growing or assets need to be replaced. I think you have repeatedly mischaracterised Mr Learmonth’s answers to you and then put the question back to him in a form that misrepresents the position he has just put to you. To be fair to the officer, he is doing a good job at describing to you the processes that the CEFC go through in examining investment opportunities.

Senator Roberts: Well, combining what you’ve said—

Chair: Senator Roberts, I’m going to have to make this your last question.

Senator Roberts: I’ll move on. I note that, as you said in those same answers, you don’t screen any investments for connections to political donations. Don’t you think that some basic due diligence is needed?  Shouldn’t you be bringing it to the attention of the minister if you are about to give a company hundreds of millions of dollars and it has made a political donation?

Mr Learmonth: We undertake very significant due diligence on all our borrowers or investee companies. We would look at whether there was some overt political connection—

Mr Every: We’re actually required to under the AML/CTF laws, the anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing laws. We are required to identify politically exposed persons, and that is part of the due diligence.

Senator Roberts: Senator McAllister, in response to your comments: the world has globally invested trillions of dollars—I think the figure may be $150 trillion, but I may be wrong on that—and the share of energy used on the planet from hydrocarbons has gone from 82 per cent to 81 over the last 10 to 20 years, despite trillions of dollars going into solar and wind.

Chair: I’ll take that one as a comment.

Senator Roberts: Yes. It’s not a question; it’s a fact.

This week I talk to Ian Plimer for a full two hours and dive even deeper into the global warming fraud.

Transcript part 1 (click here to go to part 2)

Speaker 1:

This is the Malcolm Roberts Show.

Speaker 2:

On Today’s News Talk radio, TNT.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, good afternoon or good morning or good evening or good night, wherever you are around this marvellous world of ours, this is Senator Malcolm Roberts on Today’s News Talk radio, tntradio.live. Thank you for having me as your guest. Whether it’s in your car, your kitchen, your shed, or your lounge room, wherever you are right now, whichever continent, whichever country, whichever region, whichever state, thank you so much for having me as your guest. We are going to continue in a minute with continuation of last week’s show.

Malcolm Roberts:

We had two hours with the fabulous professor, Ian Plimer. He is back, as I promised, and we’re going to try and finish it. There’s so much material to cover. We may not get through it all, but we’re going to have some fun doing it. I’m just going to remind everyone that there are two themes to my show. Firstly, freedom, specifically freedom versus control, the age old human battle. And secondly, personal responsibility and integrity.

Malcolm Roberts:

And this man, Ian Plimer, Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer shows both, and he’s been a passionate defender and protector of freedom and shows personal responsibility and integrity. He’s a marvellous guest. Both freedom and personal responsibility are fundamental for human progress and people’s livelihoods. Before welcoming Ian back, let’s just recap some of the things that happened this week. First of all, the Great Barrier Reef. I’m going to ask again about this.

Malcolm Roberts:

We see now that the Australian Institute of Marine Science is telling us that, sorry, the Central Barrier Reef and the Northern Barrier Reef have got record levels of coral cover, record levels of coral cover. And he won’t be surprised, I am not surprised. And the Southern Barrier Reef, the Southern Region, there are three regions, the third doesn’t have record, but it has very high coral cover. The only reason it’s not record is because there’s a cyclical crown of thorns, starfish infestation. These come and go. We’ve known that for a long time.

Malcolm Roberts:

The other thing I would mention is that despite all the raving on about bleaching for the last few years rather, bleaching is entirely natural event response to, sorry, low cold temperatures and high warm temperatures, entirely natural. And people who understand barrier reefs understand that perfectly. And I remind people that Queensland had record cold temperatures, not in 1888, not in 1988, in 2008. And in that record, cold temperatures in 2008, the Southern Barrier Reef bleached in places. It’s a natural response.

Malcolm Roberts:

And then we have the lunatics in Canberra, and I’m part of that bloody zoo. We’re doing our best to try and turn the zoo around, but they passed in the lower house. It’s got to come to the Senate now, the labor’s climate change bill. Or should I say, the labour Greens coalition’s climate change bill, along with the tills. What a disgrace that is. Currently, unreliables, that’s wind and solar, are at 9% and 9% each. Both wind is 9% and solar at 9%. That’s 2020 and 2021.

Malcolm Roberts:

Labour wants to shoot that target up to 43% and unreliable’s solar and wind will make up 43%, more than doubling our solar and wind. Electricity prices have already trebled in the last three decades. We’ve gone from having the lowest electricity prices in the world to among the highest. Why? Because of wind and solar. The noted economist, Dr. Alan Moran, tells us in a especially commissioned report and he gets these figures, by the way, from government reports, government budget statements, state and federal. They can’t be argued.

Malcolm Roberts:

You cannot put a sensible argument to refute his figures. The levelized prices per megawatt hour of electricity hydrate is the cheapest. But the capacity in this country is very limited because we’re wasting the water up north. Let’s get onto the viable alternatives. Coal, $50 per megawatt hour. Gas, currently because of high gas prices, it’s around $80 to $100 per megawatt hour. It has been usually around $60 per megawatt hour. Nuclear, $70 to $80 per megawatt hour.

Malcolm Roberts:

And by the way, the coal prices are legit because there was recently another coal fired power station built in Vietnam to burn our coal. Wind, $100 per megawatt hour. Solar, $120 per megawatt hour firm. And of course, they need the batteries for wind and solar, and the batteries are impossible. Coal is half the price of wind and about 45% of the price of solar. That’s why our electricity prices skyrocketed. Now, what Ian Plimer and I are going to be discussing is my letter to the four amigos. That’s what I call them.

Malcolm Roberts:

The former prime minister, when he was prime minister, my letter was sent to Scott Morrison on the 27th of October 2021. It was sent at the same time and address to Barnaby Joyce, the deputy prime minister, head of the national party at the time. And also too, at the same time, the one letter went to these four people, went to Anthony Albanese, the then leader of the opposition and now the prime minister. And the fourth of the four amigos was Adam Bandt, the leader of the Greens. The letter can be found at the website, my website, malcolmrobertsqld.com.au, M-A-L-C-O-L-M-R-O-B-E-R-T-S-Q-L-D.com.au. And we’ll be discussing that letter. Ian has a copy of it. It’s not kept secret, but we’ll be going through that. Welcome, Ian.

Ian Plimer:

Good day to you. How are you?

Malcolm Roberts:

I’m very well, thanks, mate. How are you?

Ian Plimer:

Oh, struggling through life with the greatest of ease.

Malcolm Roberts:

Can you struggle with ease? Well, tell me something you-

Ian Plimer:

Oh, that was a pretty good [inaudible 00:06:18] about the week.

Malcolm Roberts:

The zoo, the zoo, the excellent zoo. All this is fabricated.

Ian Plimer:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So-

Malcolm Roberts:

All this climate hysteria.

Ian Plimer:

What a week it’s been. We have known from tourist operators for a long, long time, but the Great Barrier Reef was not in trouble. And they were using one of the fundamental criteria of science, and that is to observe. And they observe time and time and time again, that the Great Barrier Reef wasn’t in trouble. And finally, we get the Australian Institute of Marine Science tells us, it’s not in trouble. It’s, in fact, at best that’s been for a long, long. Now, how dare they? Now, if you’re employed in the climate industry, how dare someone say the planet’s okay?

Ian Plimer:

Because what that really means is you put people out of work. These people who are bludging grants from the government, these people who are imminently unemployable, working in these organisations that are trying to scare us and then in return, we give them money. They are now showing that it’s a total waste of oxygen and a total waste of money to keep these people alive. The Australian Institute of Marine Science has told us what we already knew, that coral reefs come, coral reefs go. There are many, many reasons.

Ian Plimer:

But the two major reasons I had been promoting, and that is runoff from agriculture and climate change just don’t affect coral ridge. And every time it warms up a little bit, a coral reef, you can hear it. You can hear it cheer because coral loves warmer water. The corals saying the Red Sea or Papua New Guinea growing much, much warmer water than the Great Barrier Reef. Coral likes it warm. Right from day one, you could not argue that warmer waters will kill off a coral reef. Now, blind Freddy knows that.

Ian Plimer:

But we have to wait till some official organisation can put their stamp of approval on it. For years, we’ve had to put up with the hypocrisy and moaning of these people. Thank God we’ve actually had a report that demonstrates that they’re tightly is this. They should go home.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, mate, can you … I normally start the show with something my guest appreciates. For something you appreciate, what is it? Anything at all? Maybe you appreciate the barrier reef, the truth being told.

Ian Plimer:

I appreciate living in a country with fresh air, with no pollution, with fresh water, something that so many countries where I work, such as in South America, Africa, Middle East, that they have got. We can actually breathe the air. Now we had the Minister for the Environment, Tanya Plibersek, a week or two ago in a national press club announcement, tell us how dreadful the pollution was in Australia. And then she finished with a tee-wee little emotional statement about how she loves to fly into Australia and see all the forests surrounding the city of Sydney, that crystal clear sparkling water and how she can see for miles.

Ian Plimer:

What she’s saying is that it’s absolutely beautiful, there is no pollution. If you want pollution, go to China, go to parts of India, go to parts of Africa. But you don’t see it in Western countries. Why? Because we have generated enough wealth to be able to clean up our act. If you want to stop pollution, get wealthy.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well said, I’ve got to just adjust my microphone here because I’m coming across too loudly. We’ll see if that makes any difference. But thank you very much, Ian.

Ian Plimer:

All of the political issues, you have to come across loudly.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’ve been trying it. Now speaking of politics, the key issue in this whole climate scam is shoddy governance. And the key issue there is the lack of integrity. And that’s what we’re focus on. Now listeners who listened to Ian and myself last two weeks ago know that we devoted the two hours to exposing the fact that there has been no one anywhere that has in politics that has provided the logical scientific points. By logical scientific points, what I mean is empirical scientific evidence, hard data, hard observations within a causal structure, a framework that proves cause and effect. No one anywhere. Not only that-

Ian Plimer:

Oh, Malcolm, that’s so many words. That’s so many words. It’s really simple. No one has ever shown too many emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Those emissions are 3% of total emission. If you did show that human emissions drive global warming, then you’d have to show that 97% of natural emissions don’t drive global warming. It’s checkmate.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yeah, exactly. Now what we then started on was the cross examination that I have done of the CSIRO, the Australian Federal Government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. They’ve been given the responsibility for the last 48 years, almost half a century, to come up with the evidence. Now, these people in the CSIRO … By the way, CSIRO has a fabulous reputation over many, many years for some marvellous inventions, made life easier for people around the world. However, in the climate area, they are absolutely disgraceful.

Malcolm Roberts:

I refuse to call them scientists because they’re basically academics who are activists. Anyway, I’m the only person anywhere in the world, I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying it to highlight a point in a minute, I am the only politician anywhere in the world, an elected representative in congresses, in parliaments to have held a government science agency accountable. And we’re going to go through that right now. Two weeks ago that we pointed out that the first thing I did when I entered the Senate, as an elected representative of the people on 2016, was to send a letter.

Malcolm Roberts:

As soon as I got sworn in, I sent a letter to the head of the CSIRO, Dr. Larry Marshall, the chief executive, requesting a presentation. Now they ducked and dodged and bobbed and weaved and tried desperately to get out of it. But we eventually pinned them down with the help of two government ministers and senators. What we found, the first question I asked was, I want a presentation on the empirical scientific evidence, the hard data that shows that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger to humans.

Malcolm Roberts:

During the two-and-a-half presentation, when we eventually nailed them down … And by the way, they could bring any evidence they wanted, anything. They gave us one paper on carbon dioxide and one paper on temperatures. After more than 40 years of research, one paper on temperatures, which was published in 2013, and we dismissed that paper, completely tore it apart. Not only that we quoted the lead author of that paper himself saying, you can’t rely on the temperature construction that they made for the 20th century.

Malcolm Roberts:

I mean, the own author was dismissed within two weeks of that paper’s released in 2013. But in the course of that cross examination, CSIRO admitted that they have never said that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger, never. We asked them, “Who has? Why do the politicians are saying that they rely on CSIRO?” And they said, “We better go and ask politicians.” Then I mentioned that we asked the chief scientists, the federal government’s chief scientist. And I think we got onto this, Ian, from memory, who at the time was-

Ian Plimer:

Yes, we did.

Malcolm Roberts:

… Dr. Alan Finkel. And we asked for a presentation from him. We opened the presentation in a little room in the science minister’s, Arthur Sinodinos’ office. And Dr. Alan Finkel started rabbiting on for about 20 minutes. And after 20 minutes, we’d had enough. And we just asked one simple question, I can’t remember what that question was. And he looked at us, he was stunned. He was suddenly realising that he couldn’t feed us crap. And he suddenly realised that we knew what the hell we were talking about.

Malcolm Roberts:

And he looked at me, and I will always remember these words, Ian. He said to me, “I am not a climate scientist and I don’t understand climate science.” And yet that man, funded with taxpayer money, was spreading the word around the countryside, advocating cuts in carbon dioxide from human activity. Ian, what do you say to that?

Ian Plimer:

Well, Malcolm, there’s couple of things here. There’s a couple of things here. You don’t have to be a climate scientist, whatever that is, to be able to see that this is total [inaudible 00:15:07].

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you.

Ian Plimer:

All you have to do is to adhere to the scientific method. And science is married to evidence. That evidence must be reproducible, it must be validated. It must be in an accord with everything else that’s been demonstrated. Now, in science, we have a body of evidence from which we construct a theory, and that’s just a way to try to understand things. And if the theory doesn’t work, you throw out the theory. What the climate activists are wanting us to do is to say, this is a theory. We, humans, drive global warming and we’ll juggle the evidence to fit it.

Ian Plimer:

Any evidence that doesn’t agree with the theory, such as my science, geology, then you just throw that out. It’s the exact inverse of how science works. And they are corrupting the scientific process. These people are not climate scientists. They are activists who are chasing your money, chasing power, chasing fortune. Yet they don’t chase an electorate as you have to do. It is not science. And it’s something that I get thrown at me quite often, because I’m an earth scientist. I’m not a climate scientist.

Ian Plimer:

These people do not realise that we have 200 years of geology textbooks where half the space of the book is arguing about climate. We, geologists, were onto climate change 200 years ago. This was from people working in the Paris basin, seeing that there was tropical flora and fauna in the Paris basin where it isn’t tropical. People in England realised from fossils that we had to have had much warmer climate. And Charles Lyell in 1833, pursue this even further. He very nearly got onto the idea of continental drift.

Ian Plimer:

We, geologists, have been struggling for centuries about how you can have tropical flora and fauna in fossils in high latitude European countries, that with climate change. The textbooks are full of it. And all of a sudden, when there’s money to be made and when people want to frighten us with this, we get a group of atmospheric mathematicians and physicists who argue that it is only a traces of a trace gas in an atmosphere that drive a whole planetary process.

Ian Plimer:

They don’t seem to realise that in the past, we’ve had huge processes where the atmosphere, the oceans, the rock and life have worked hand in hand. And that’s happened a number of times in the past. To be what is called a climate scientist, you have to basically ignore all the evidence from other sciences, ignore the scientific method, and promote your alleged science on the basis of feelings and beliefs rather than evidence.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well said. And we’re going to go to an ad break now. But when we come back, I’m going to tell you what the chief scientist did on the second presentation that we arranged. We’ll be right back for more from Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer.

Malcolm Roberts:

And this is Senator Malcolm Roberts, broadcasting from Australia with Professor Ian Plimer. And Ian, we arranged at that first presentation from the chief scientist. We said to them, this is not good enough, we want a proper presentation, and we want that to be at least four hours in length and a proper discussion. And he responded to me and he and the science minister, both agreed, we set a date for a couple of months’ time. And then as we wound up, he said to me, “Can I bring a scientist?” And I said, “You can bring anyone you like.”

Malcolm Roberts:

Ian, the second presentation, just before it was due to be held, was cancelled because Dr. Alan Finkel was overseas. Now he since come back. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. We suddenly had the CSIRO arranged to give a second presentation to us. And at this presentation, we said, “You failed the first one, so let’s have a simpler task for you. We want evidence, empirical scientific evidence of anything unprecedented in climate in the past 10,000 years and due to human carbon dioxide.”

Malcolm Roberts:

And in the course of that, they presented another paper, which we ripped apart as well and had no evidence. But in the course of that presentation, Ian, over two-and-a-half hours again, from the CSiRO’s climate science team, they looked at me and admitted, “Today’s temperatures are not unprecedented, not unprecedented.” Yet the whole climate scam started on claims of unprecedented, unusual, catastrophic, disastrous global warming. Are we warm at all, Ian?

Ian Plimer:

Well, we hear that porn word, unprecedented. There are a couple of things unprecedented in the history of our planet. The first time it rained, the first time we had life on earth, the first time we had a climate change. They were unprecedented. They didn’t happen before. They only happened once. And after that, everything is a reflection of climate cycles, which seem to get ignored. We have cycles of climate related to the pulling apart of the continent and the stitching back together every 400 million years.

Ian Plimer:

Cycles of climate related to having a bad galactic address every 143 million years, cycles of climate based on orbital cycles of the earth, which get us closer or further from the sun, cycles of climate derived with changes in the sun. And these changes are based on sun spots, but they’re also based on long cycles, 1500 years and 10,000 years. These cycles are well documented and they then affect ocean cycles, which turn out to be about every 60 years. And we also have lunar tidal cycles, pushing warmer water into the Arctic.

Ian Plimer:

And every time that happens, the Northwest Passage is open. Every time we don’t have that warmer water pushed into the Arctic, it’s closed. We’ve known this for a long time. The Chinese have known it for thousands of years because they once had a calendar based on the 60-year ocean cycles, which was related to the productivity of their crops. We never hear that we have cycles of climate and we never hear that in the past, we had very carbon dioxide rich atmospheres. This atmosphere had cyclical changes.

Ian Plimer:

And in today’s atmosphere, we have traces of carbon dioxide and humans are adding traces and traces to that atmosphere. And all of a sudden, we have to forget all the previous cycles and being that traces of a trace gas are driving all of climate change. To forget all of past science and to try to blame humans on driving a massive planetary system is just bonkers. Yet this is what we get told. Now, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, they do not talk about cycles. They talk about carbon dioxide as if this trace gas drives the whole climate. They are demonstrably wrong.

Ian Plimer:

And I don’t have opinions in my science, I have facts. I don’t let emotions get in the way of my science. Well, yes, I do. I tell a lie, I get excited. And what excites me in my science is not what I know, but what I don’t know. What excites me is when I see something and I find out something and I think, well, that’s interesting. I’m curious about that. And it’s curiosity that drives science. It’s evidence that drives science. It’s not politics. You’ve only got to look at what Lysenko did to agricultural science in the Soviet Union, ending up in 30 million people dying because the science was wrong.

Ian Plimer:

Now we are in a similar situation where the science on climate change is demonstrably wrong. It is sending countries bankrupt. It is killing people. It’s not warm weather that kills people, it’s Jack Frost that kills people. The science is to demonstrably wrong. Governments are able to skin people alive in Western countries because they’re wealthy. And when these Western countries have ultimately fritted away, large amounts of money and have ended up economically like Argentina. Some clown is going to ask the question, how did this happen?

Ian Plimer:

We’re once wealthy, we once had reliable electricity and cheap electricity. What has happened? I mean, that’s when questions like the ones you are asking in the Senate and programmes like this become important. No one has ever pursued scientific organisations in parliament on those fundamental question. You’re the only person that’s done it, and more power to you. Keep doing it.

Malcolm Roberts:

We will. We will, Ian. We’re going to bust this rubbish. Now you raised-

Ian Plimer:

Well, I’m happy to talk with you in the trenches.

Malcolm Roberts:

I’m going to ask you something about that. Maybe on air, but maybe after, it depends. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Can you explain-

Ian Plimer:

Well, it’s better if everyone can hold be accountable. I don’t mind being accountable.

Malcolm Roberts:

No, no. I mean, I’m lining up to a range of presentation, an offer of a presentation from the best scientists in the world to some of the tills and some of the other climate alarmists. And I was wondering if you’d be available for that.

Ian Plimer:

I’m certainly available for it, but it’ll takes [inaudible 00:27:52] to quiet me down. But I’m more than willing to use evidence to charge and persuade people that opinion and feelings don’t count. It is evidence and it has to be reproduced. It has to be valid.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. And the whole thrust of the programme two weeks ago for the two hours and these two hours is to do one thing, to put the onus onto the politicians who want to cut a human activity producing carbon dioxide and taxes all into oblivion, put the owners on them because they have never held onus.

Ian Plimer:

Yeah. If you come up with an extraordinary idea, you need extraordinary evidence to support it. That hasn’t been done.

Malcolm Roberts:

Correct. Tell everyone what a trace gas is because it’s a scientific term, trace gas.

Ian Plimer:

We once had an atmosphere with a very large amount of carbon dioxide. Our first atmosphere on planet earth had ammonia, methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and helium. That didn’t last long. And we got into our second atmosphere, which had nitrogen and a huge amount of carbon dioxide, maybe 20% carbon dioxide. Our third atmosphere-

Malcolm Roberts:

Roughly, when did that change occur? I mean-

Ian Plimer:

On a Tuesday and-

Malcolm Roberts:

Resident mother earth.

Ian Plimer:

Now, that was in the geological period called the Proterozoic from about 2.5 billion years ago to about 500 million years ago.

Malcolm Roberts:

Right, thank you.

Ian Plimer:

We had huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And we’ve sequestered that into the limey rocks. And the third atmosphere, which we currently enjoy, is nitrogen and oxygen dominant atmosphere. That oxygen comes from life. That oxygen comes from life consuming carbon dioxide, using the carbon and excreting the oxygen. And so, we have gone from an atmosphere that had 20% carbon dioxide in it to 1.04%. And we are worried about a slight increase in carbon dioxide. Now, during that time, we have had six great ice ages.

Ian Plimer:

Each one of those ice ages started when there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than now. You can’t try to tell me that the traces of small amounts of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere, which has only got 0.04% carbon dioxide in it, can drive global warming. Because it didn’t happen in the past. The physics and chemistry of the way the planet works hasn’t changed because you are alive. It is a trace gas in the atmosphere. It is plant food. It has very slightly increased over the last 50 years. Now we actually don’t quite know why. Because we know from ice cold drilling that once you get a temperature increase, then anything from 600 to 6,000 years later, you get a carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. We’ve had-

Malcolm Roberts:

So hang on there. That means the temperature drives the carbon dioxide, not the carbon dioxide driving the temperature.

Ian Plimer:

Yes. And we’ve only known that for 200 years in chemistry. But if you don’t know any chemistry, then, of course, that doesn’t fit your policy.

Malcolm Roberts:

Henry’s Law, right?

Ian Plimer:

Henry’s Law. And so, what we can see in the past is that once we have cold periods of time, then we get natural warming, later carbon dioxide increase. Now our last cold period finished in the minimum, just over 300 years ago. We’ve been increasing in temperature for that last 300 years. So that increase in carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere might not be due to humans emitting carbon dioxide from industry. It might be due to natural exhalation of carbon dioxide with the warming of the oceans.

Ian Plimer:

The jury is out because the methods which are used to try to tell us the proportion of human carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are dodgy at best. And I go in my latest book, Green Murder, I go into some of those calculation. And I’m arguing that it could have even be only 1% of atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions every year from humans, not the 3% which we commonly get told. There’s a whole lot of uncertainty in this science. But when we have an atmosphere that was once 20% carbon dioxide and life thrived, we had glaciations, we had climate change.

Ian Plimer:

And now we’ve got an atmosphere of 0.04% carbon dioxide. We’re having connections about a couple of parts per million increase of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere. Now we can see the effects of that because we’ve been measuring our planet from satellites since 1979. And we’ve seen that in the last 40 years or so, we’ve had a slight greening of the planet. That’s due to a very slight increase in carbon dioxide and maybe 10 or 20 parts per million carbon dioxide increase. That slight greening has done the planet good.

Ian Plimer:

The second thing is we’ve seen an increase in crop yield, partly due to increase carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, partly due to genetically modified crops, and partly due to better fertilisers. If we go the other path, you just go down the path of Sri Lanka. Carbon dioxide is good for you. It is plant food. If we didn’t have plants, we’d be dead. If we have the atmospheric carbon dioxide content kiss some part of your body and say goodbye, you’re going to be dead.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well said. We could talk for hours, and maybe we’d come back to carbon dioxide at the end of the show. But the trace gas carbon dioxide, as you pointed out, is 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere right now. And the proportion could … Well, that’s basically 4/100ths of 1%. It’s trivial. It’s minuscule. And that’s why it’s called a trace gas. And it’s not Professor Plimer or myself is calling it a trace gas. It’s a scientific category. It’s a trace gas. You also mentioned … Well, let’s go to sticking with the second CSIRO presentation.

Malcolm Roberts:

The first one, they presented after 48 years of research, they presented one paper and temperatures, which we showed was complete crap, complete crap. They presented one paper by Harris. And that first paper on temperatures was by Mark Adam. I’m putting these on the record, 2013. And the second paper was Harris et al that was on carbon dioxide, and that was shown to be completely faulty, completely faulty. The covert spoke about those two papers again.

Malcolm Roberts:

And at the second presentation, they gave us Lecavalier 2017 on temperatures and Feldman on 2015 on carbon dioxide. Again, faulty and proven to be faulty by pre-reviewed scientific papers that we presented to the CSIRO. At their third presentation, they presented five vague references. None of which specified any location where there’s proof that human carbon dioxide is affecting the climate, nothing at all, nothing scientific, nothing specified. And some of the references in the last five they gave us contradicted the earlier references.

Malcolm Roberts:

I mean, Ian, you can’t make this stuff up. They provided us with no evidence at all and then contradicted themselves and showed an abysmal understanding of science. Is that typical of the CSIRO? It doesn’t seem to be, but they’ve gone rogue.

Ian Plimer:

Well, in that particular case, they were treating you with disdain. Feed this man a bit of bullshit and he won’t understand it. He would go away. Now, that’s not the way it works. The CSIRO has been a great organisation, creating new strains of wheat that can survive our lower rainfall and high solidity soils in Australia. They’ve done some wonderful work. They’ve done some wonderful work with mineral exploration, but many of these divisions of the CSIRO now have been reduced or closed. CSIRO now has a sociologist in each division.

Ian Plimer:

And these people are there to help promote the social benefits of what the CSIRO do. And they were fobbing you off. They actually made a fundamental strategic error of warfare. They underestimated how strong and how good you work. And they said, oh, we’ll just give this clown a few papers full of gobbledygook and he’ll go away. Well, firstly, he’s like a rabid dog. He won’t go away. And the second thing is, you understand the science, you’ve got a background in engineering, you’ve practised engineering. You’ve actually seen the practical side of doing things. And that contempt that they had for you, you have exposed. And you’ve got to keep doing it.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes, and we will. And I’ll just point out something. While I’m an engineer by training and qualification, I have other statutory qualifications that also depend upon my understanding of atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide. I’ve had to keep people alive, underground in minds, based upon my knowledge of atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide. I’ve had to do that. I’ve held accountable under the most rigorous scrutiny of possible. But the work that we did holding the CSIRO accountable involved a wonderful man who’s highly objective.

Malcolm Roberts:

I won’t give you his name out at the moment. He has an order of Australia medal for his services to research in this country. And he is not only a phenomenal brain and one of the highest intellects that I’ve ever experienced, he has a complete objectivity, no emotion, whatsoever, attached to his statements. He just says it like it is and he holds people accountable. He is also a genius in statistics, a genius in computing. He wrote programmes to legally go into scientific bodies around the world and scrape off 24,000 datasets.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s what CSIRO was up against, this man with 24,000 datasets on both climate and on energy. And that’s how we smashed them. But the key thing we were doing, Ian, was putting the onus on them. They failed the first time. They failed the second time to provide any evidence that we need to cut anything at all in our output. Let’s move on to Senate estimates. Sorry, they-

Ian Plimer:

Just come back-

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes.

Ian Plimer:

Just come back to that. We are having people create policy and make statements, such that pensioners say in the UK, need to make a choice that whether they eat, have a hot shower or heat a room. These policies are-

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s happening in Australia, Ian. That’s happening in Australia.

Ian Plimer:

Yeah. These policies are killing people. Now, while you were an engineer working underground, and I go underground very regular now, we measure gases. We measure carbon monoxide. We measure carbon dioxide. We measure methane. We measure sulphur dioxide. We measure nitrogen oxides. We measure oxygen. And if you, as an engineer, underground and someone dies with a methane gas dust explosion or someone asphyxiates from carbon monoxide, it’s not only that you are responsible in the state where you worked as a mining engineer, you are criminally responsible.

Ian Plimer:

You go to a trial where there is no jury and where there’s no mechanism of appealing. You go to jail with a very hefty fine. That is the industrial law that you worked under as a mining engineer underground. We have no such industrial laws for those people who might set up a wind turbine that send people absolutely bonkers with the ultrasound that they have to suffer. We have no industrial law to make people responsible for killing people because they haven’t got enough energy to stay warm. I think that point of the consequences of your action and responsibility is an extremely important one. And this is why I called my latest book Green Murder, because these green policies knowingly kill people and there is no responsibility for that.

Malcolm Roberts:

Hear, hear. Well, we’ll go to another ad break and we’ll be right back for more with Professor Ian Plimer. And we’ll continue putting the onus on these people who are destroying humanity.

Malcolm Roberts:

And this is Senator Malcolm Roberts, coming to you from Australia, wherever you are in the world right now, with my special guest, Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer. Ian, we then had a third presentation from the CSIRO that they requested, because they were so embarrassed with what we’d done to their so-called science, their third presentation. And that’s-

Ian Plimer:

Oh, you [inaudible 00:43:12] for punishment.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. And then we had Senate estimates hearings. I was knocked out due to dual citizenship and came back in 2019. And I held these people accountable in Senate estimates. And I asked them for a really … They failed to provide anything that was any evidence of danger. They admitted that today’s temperatures are not unprecedented. They failed to provide any evidence, whatsoever, that we need to cut carbon dioxide from human activity. I asked them a really simple question. “Okay, okay.

Malcolm Roberts:

All I want from you in Senate estimates is the empirical scientific evidence, the hard data showing that there has been a statistically significant change in climate, anything, temperatures, snowfall, rainfall, drought length, severity, frequency, a flood, lengths of frequency, severity, tides. Anything at all, away you go.” And they said, “We’ve already done it,” which was a fundamental lie, which is a fundamental misrepresentation by the CSIRO’s director, one of his directors, Dr. Peter Mayfield.

Malcolm Roberts:

They have never shown us even that there’s statistically significant change in climate. In other words, Ian, there is no change of process, there is no change of climate, just as you pointed out at the very start of your contribution today, natural cycles interacting.

Ian Plimer:

Well, yes, you can’t show that human emissions drive global warming. Because you have to show that the oceanic emissions don’t. It’s checkmate. It can’t be done, and it hasn’t been done. And the arguments always fall apart with what you are doing. Really simple questions. And I think for any listeners that want to battle their local green activist, don’t argue with them. Don’t present them with facts. Ask them really simple questions. Put the owners on them to say, oh, well, that’s an interest concept. Where can I find the evidence? And wave your mobile phone around.

Ian Plimer:

And you can say, look, for the 30-second search on this phone, I can show you that the hurricane intensity hasn’t been increasing. With the 30-second search from this phone, you can see that the Great Barrier Reef isn’t being destroyed. With the 30-second search on this phone, you can actually see that sea levels are not rising catastrophically, that land levels go up and down as well as sea levels go up and down. The information is out there. Your choice is to whether you want to actually look at information.

Ian Plimer:

And for me, the most exciting thing is to put together all of the information. Some of which might grade a little bit, but put it all together to try to get an understanding. And that understanding is a model. Models are not evidence. Models are a really, really naive way of trying to understand how the world works. However, it is models that are driving the scare campaign. It is models that are telling us that in 50 or 100 years’ time, we’re going to fry and die. Yet those people promoting those models are going to be dead anyway. What value is that? There is no responsibility.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, speaking of responsibility, I take responsibility for the executive summary of the report that I wrote along with my Senate office team and our colleague with the Order of Australian medal. We published this in a report entitled, Restoring Scientific Integrity. And I’m going to read out the executive summary. And then what I’d like you to do, Ian, is to give me a comment on the 10 … Overall comment, whatever you want to say. This is the executive summary. The CSIRO has never stated that carbon dioxide from human activity is dangerous.

Malcolm Roberts:

Secondly, they admitted that today’s temperatures are not unprecedented. They withdrew, effectively withdrew by not discussing anything after we discredited the papers that they had provided as evidence of unprecedented rate of temperature change, and then failed to provide supporting empirical evidence. The CSIRO has never quantified any specific impact of carbon dioxide from human activity. That’s the fundamental basis for policy. Fifth, they rely on unvalidated models, as Ian just said, that give unverified and erroneous projections as so-called evidence.

Malcolm Roberts:

They relied on discredited and poor quality papers on temperature and carbon dioxide. They admit, they admit to not doing due diligence on reports and data from external agencies that they use. They revealed little understanding of papers they cited as evidence. They showed us papers, in fact, later that contradicted their earlier papers. These people have no clue. Second last, they allow politicians and journalists to misrepresent CSIRO’s science without correcting the journalists and the politicians. And last, they misled parliament. What a dog’s breakfast, Ian?

Ian Plimer:

Well, it is. And we have some problems here that this is a bandwagon, this is a fad. This is a fashion. This has nothing to do with science and everything to do with controlling you taking money out of your wallet and being unelected and controlling the way in which this world operates. For me, the important aspects are the lack of due diligence. Now, I spend a lot of my life doing due diligence on various projects. If I get it wrong, I actually lose my job. If I get it wrong in a public organisation, a public company, I can go to jail.

Ian Plimer:

But that doesn’t happen with these scientific organisations. And our journalists, I mean, I don’t think we have many journalists left on planet Earth. We have now people who have chosen to be activists and claim that they are journalists and are in the mainstream media trying to change people’s opinions. And most of that attempt is done by omitting information rather than providing information. The good old fashioned crusty journalist who started life as a 16-year-old cadet in the newsroom has ended up writing balanced stories. Those people don’t exist.

Ian Plimer:

There are a few newspapers around the world and a few media networks where you can get this balance. This is why I think a lot of people now are not buying newspapers, they’re not looking at commercial television. They are getting their information from other source because they have realised that the art of journalism has almost died. And journalists now are trying to use a very, very limited dumbed down education to actually push their own political barrier. This is tragic. And we see them also trying to influence politicians, most of whom cannot answer simple scientific questions that when I was 12 years old, I could have answered.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay, Ian, one fundamental point. We’ve got about five minutes before the top of the hour and we go into our news. And we’ll be back after that, everyone, by the way, with Ian Plimer. One really fundamental question for politicians, scientists, and voters. The CSIRO has never presented any robust scientific evidence underpinning their policy, the government’s policy, labour and liberal. The proper basis for policy, and this is what I’d like you to comment on, please, the proper basis for policy, as I understand it, is a specific quantified impact of human carbon dioxide on any temperature factor, whether it’s temperature, rainfall, drought, snow, ocean, alkalinity, anything at all.

Malcolm Roberts:

You have got to show that for a certain unit of carbon dioxide from human activity, this is the consequence in temperature or rainfall or whatever. That’s the first thing. That is fundamental to policy. Because you cannot assess any cost benefit analysis by saying, if we put in place a mechanism for minimising that impact, what it will cost compared with the cost of doing nothing. That’s fundamental. And the third point about this is that if you haven’t got that specific quantified effect from human carbon dioxide, you cannot track, cannot measure how you’re going with implementing your policy. This is fundamental, isn’t it?

Ian Plimer:

Well, very much is. Now our politics is not driven by building the nation. It’s a populist view derived from surveys to try to guarantee that a particular politician is going to get reelected. It’s got nothing to do with making the planet a better place. It’s got nothing to do with helping people in need, and it’s not based on any knowledge, any science, or any data. Policy is to get reelected. That is what drives political views. And this is why I’ve often argued that the best politician is a frightened politician. They have to face an election.

Ian Plimer:

I’ll give you example of a true journalist in this country, Alan Jones, who asked the Minister for the Environment, Tanya Plibersek, what the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide was. She couldn’t answer it. Now, that is a question that if you are going to get into discussions about climate, you should actually know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, which allegedly drives climate change. We had a minister for the environment couldn’t answer that really simple question. What hope have we got?

Ian Plimer:

These people, listeners, you have to make your politicians scared. You have to frighten them. You have to let them know that if you follow this policy, you will not be reelected. And this is the only reason we have politicians create certain policies. It’s got nothing to do with the environment. It’s got nothing to do with saving the planet. It is to get reelected.

Malcolm Roberts:

Hear, hear. And that leads to a very simple point before I continue with another list. The simple point is this, we will never have frightened politicians in this country whenever people blindly vote for labour, liberal, nationals, or greens. Just blindly vote. We have to scrutinise politicians. We have to scrutinise their words, their behaviour, their actions, their policies, and then vote for whoever is correct, whoever aligns with you, not just go with the title party.

Malcolm Roberts:

Here are some conclusions, Ian, that I’ve got from my restoring scientific integrity as a result of our cross examination of CSIRO. CSIRO’s evidence for unprecedented change was easily refuted, and a major breakdown of the peer review system was revealed in Marc or in Lecavalier. We’ll have to come to a summary of this after the break, your comments after the break. Oh, no, no. Let’s leave that till after the break. What I’d also like to mention, Ian, is that they rely on claims of consensus. Isn’t that an admission? Just briefly, isn’t that an admission that they don’t have the science? Whenever they claim a consensus, that’s an admission they don’t have the science. Because if they had it, they would’ve presented it to me.

Ian Plimer:

Oh, yes. Science is married to scepticism. Science is often conducted by lone wolves. Science is not conducted by committees. Consensus is a word of politics, it’s not a word of science.

Malcolm Roberts:

And with that, we’re going to the break. And we’ll be back straight after the break with the news, with Professor Ian Plimer, to continue exposing more of the government’s bullshit on climate.

Transcript part 2

Speaker 1:

You’re with Senator Malcolm Roberts, on Today’s News Talk Radio, TNT.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

This is Senator Malcolm Roberts from Australia and I’m with Ian Plimer, Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer. So Ian, I’ll read the conclusions from my study, Restoring Scientific Integrity, that summarises what CSIRO has failed to do.

                “First of all, CSIRO’s evidence for unprecedented change was easily refuted and a major breakdown of the peer-review system was revealed in both Marcott and Lecavalier papers. Secondly, CSIRO provided no quantified evidence that humans are responsible for any particular amount of change in any climate factor nor any climate variable, nothing. CSIRO would not attribute danger to carbon dioxide from human activity. And have not provided evidence to allow any politicians, including ministers, to attribute danger. CSIRO stated that the determination of danger was a matter for the public or for politicians.

                Australian climate policies have never been based on empirical evidence and logical scientific reasoning. After reviewing the peer-reviewed papers that CSIRO cited, it is inconceivable that government policy should be based on the unverified assumption that a peer-reviewed paper is accurate and contains the best available research. That’s particularly so when key data has been unscientifically fabricated, as was the case in the first paper and second paper that CSIRO presented on temperature. As Australia’s premier government-funded climate science agency, CSIRO’s gross deficiencies need to be investigated to establish reasons for CSIRO’s deterioration. The fact that CSIRO abrogated claims of danger to government ministers, reveals that it has been afraid to speak out about obviously politically driven deviations from science. That includes journalists driving deviations from science.”

                Ninth point. “Integrity and accountability need to be restored for both research and for presenting scientific conclusions, as well as for scrutinising political claims and policies supposedly based on science. Next, the CSIRO climate group’s pathetic and inadequate case does not justify spending tens of billions of dollars, nor does it justify the destruction of trillions. And I mean that word sincerely, trillions of dollars of wealth as a result of climate policies that hurt families, export Australian jobs and erode our national security.

                Our ability to defend and secure our borders. The onus. Lastly, the onus is now on the federal government to scrap climate policies, unless CSIRO can provide accurate, repeatable and verifiable empirical scientific evidence. Within a logical scientific framework that proves carbon dioxide from human activity detrimentally affects climate variability and needs to be cut. The proposed cuts need to be specified in terms of the amount, the impact and effects, together with the cost of making and not making the cuts.” What do you think, mate?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, we get told that the science is settled. Now, if the science is settled, we say, “Thank you very much, we are now going to disband you. We’ll disband the climate division of the CSIRO. We’ll disband all the climate institutes at the universities. We’ll disband the climate group in the Bureau of Meteorology, but we sincerely thank you for all the work that you’ve done and demonstrating that the science is settled.” I think that’s the easiest way to solve the problem.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Well said, let’s continue on with their claims of consensus and their claims of that they haven’t provided the science. So what we then see from the government is that they claim they rely upon 97% of scientists claiming that they have the science. Yet not one of them has produced the science. What I’ve done, Ian, as you know, is I’ve interviewed world leading scientists on my findings of the CSIRO. And they have all justified and endorsed my claims about CSIRO.

                I’ll go through a list of them. Professor John Christie, Climatologist, Mathematician, University of Alabama Analyst and presenter of Global Temperature Data from NASA satellites. The man who does that. Professor David Legates, climatologist and statistician. Dr. Craig Idso as climatologists. These are state climatologists in the United States. They have been appointed climatologists for their state.

                Dr. Nils Mörner world’s number one C-level expert. The late Dr. Nils Mörner. Professor Nir Shaviv, atmospheric physicist from Israel. Professor Will HHapper, physicist. Dr. Willie Soon, atmospheric physicist. Yourself, you’ve done this. Steve McIntyre, mathematician and statistician who tore apart Marcott within two weeks of its release in 2013. Bill Kinmont, a former senior bureau of meteorology official and meteorologist. Emeritus, Professor Garth Paltridge, former CSRIO senior researcher. Dr. Howard Brady, geologist, another one of your kin Ian, and an Antarctica researcher. Dr. John McLean, a climate scientist who did the first audit on the global historical climate network, temperature data.

                It had never been audited, never until John did that. And he found glaring problems with it. And that’s the temperature data that the UN relies upon. And the CSIRO rely upon. Tony Heller, geologist and engineer auditing NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies data. Susan Crockford, polar bear researcher. Professor Lou Milan, Brazil Bureau of Meteorology and Dr. David Evans, who had been working as a climate modeller, and then has realised that it’s all rubbish. I mean, do we need anyone else? They haven’t provided the evidence and we’ve got the scientist.

Professor Ian Plimer:

You used a very interesting word, audit. Now, all public and private companies are required by law to have an audit. Are the books wrong? Is someone tickling the till? Is the company operating while in solvent? Now an audit, a scientific audit should look at very similar things. Are the claims being made, supported by evidence? Are people over icing the cake in order to get their next research grant? Are the people making these claims qualified to make those claims? So if, for example, you in the minerals business make a claim that this mineral deposit is that big or this big, you have to have certain qualifications to make such statements. So the normal due diligence processes that we have operating any other business, besides government, has an audit. Yet these government businesses are dealing with trillions of dollars and no one audits them and says, “Wait a minute folks, we might have got the fundamentals wrong.”

                And this is why I urge you to continue this line about, show me the evidence that human emissions drive global warming. Because if there is no evidence, then the whole white shoe brigade industry of subsidised solar and wind coming off that, shouldn’t be there. Then the next great subsidy stage of having subsidised hydrogen from subsidised wind and solar, shouldn’t be there. And we find that the emperor has no clothes. This to me is by far the best approach, ask simple questions, don’t make statements, ask questions. And that’s what an auditor does. And with my various roles in life at present, I’m constantly dealing with auditors under US law, Canadian law, UK law, and Australian law.

                They ask questions and you have to satisfy the auditors with your answer. If not, you have broken the law and you can be fined or go to jail. And I can’t see why the laws should be any different from someone making an extraordinary scientific claim, which requires a taxpayer to spend trillions. We need an audit and we need audits every year as every company has to have. And I can’t see why we can’t have scientific audits all the time. Now, Professor Peter Wild, did a scientific audit of what the coral reef scientist were stating. And he showed that it was wrong. There was a lot to be desired. Those audits should happen every year. We taxpayers are putting billions every year into science research. Where are the audits?

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Right. Now, I’m going to feed you a really a tender morsel Professor Plimer. We have had two natural real world experiments on these climate claims. In 2009, we had the global financial crisis. In 2009, the following year, we had a recession around the world, a very severe recession in most countries, Australia, wasn’t in recession. Thanks to our amazing exports of mineral products from this country. Every other country just about, was in a major recession, not a minor recession, a severe recession.

                When that happens, people use less hydrocarbon fuels, coal oil and natural gas, which meant that the production of carbon dioxide from human activity decreased. In 2009, there was less carbon dioxide produced from human activity than in 2008. And yet the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere continued increasing in 2020 we had COVID, almost a depression around the world. Again is very severe recession, most countries around the world. And when that happened, we again used less coal, oil and natural gas. And so the human output of carbon dioxide in 2020 was less than in 2019. And yet the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued increasing because nature alone determines the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Isn’t this a perfectly natural real world experiment professor Plimer?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, what it does is it shows us that the common figure that’s thrown around of 3% of all emissions or of human origin might actually be wrong. It might actually be 1%. And I argue this in my book, Green Murder, I argue from volcanic emissions. I argue it used, 2007, 2008 and 2020 to the present COVID crisis, that we have got these natural experiments. And it may well be that human emissions have absolutely no effect whatsoever on global climate. And if it is, it’s probably close to the order of accuracy of measurement. And if it is abled to be measured, then the effect that Australia has in emitting 1.3% of the world’s annual admissions, which is 3% of the total planetary emissions. Is nine parts of one 11th of bugger all. So why are we having conniptions about a fractional amount of carbon dioxide emitted by humans?

                Why are we having conniptions when we cannot show that this has any effect on global climate. And shouldn’t we be spending our hard earned dollars on other things rather than spending billions every year on climate research. Trillions on putting in infrastructure that we know already will fail. So I think once you get a populist idea like this, it takes a long time to grind through the system before people realise it’s wrong.

                Populous politics, isn’t very sensible. And we see that ultimately this culotte mania, which we’re undergoing, leads to tears. We’ve seen it before, South seen [inaudible 00:12:41] Dutch culotte mania, and we’re right on that path again. And there’s something rather fundamental about our opposition, our position won’t argue data. As soon as we raise a point, they attack us with hatred and with venom. And why do they do that? They do that, I think for two reasons, the first is that they’ve been beneficiaries that have dumbed to down scientific education whereby they haven’t got any science. And they can’t argue because they haven’t been taught critical thinking. So the only response they’ve got is to be angry. And the second thing is, there’s no evidence. So we are seeing all these clues that we are being fed, probably the greatest policy damaging process for a very long period of time. The one before that was communism.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Here, here, and just think about this too, everyone at home. Hard earned dollars is what professor Ian Plimer just mentioned. Our hard earned dollars. If we cannot by cutting our carbon dioxide production, human production of carbon dioxide, severely as in two major recessions in the last 14 years. If that had no impact on reducing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, why the hell do they want to steal our land, raise at taxes, impose gut wrenching regulations on us. That’s what we have to ask. The natural experiment in 2009 and 2020 showed that our massive cutting of carbon dioxide from human activity had no impact whatsoever. Neither will taxes. Neither will regulations. Neither will continue to steal. Neither will the continued stealing of farmers’ land.

                Let’s move on. This was this climate sham was first raised by a liberal politician, Baume, in federal parliament in 1975, he was the first one to raise the possibility that human or the claim that human activity, carbon dioxide from human activity affects our climate. The first prime minister to raise it was Bob Hawk. He raised it sometime after 1983. And he first raised it himself as an MP in 1980. And then we had John Howard go on the bandwagon. And what they quite often claim is that it based upon UN intergovernmental panel on climate change results. Ian, I’ve analysed the UN reports.

                1990 was the first, 1995 was the second one, 2001 was the third one, 2007 was the fourth one, 2013 was the fifth one, 2000 and… Just recently 2020 was the sixth one, sorry, 2022 was the sixth one. In each of those papers. They have one single core chapter that is supposedly showing that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate. In 2001, it was chapter 12. In 2007, it was chapter nine. In 2013, it was chapter 10. In those so chapters and in the latest one, the same applies. There has never been any evidence presented that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate. But instead, what we have is a summary for policy makers. That’s dumbed down for politicians and journalists that is full of crap. It has no evidence whatsoever in it. What about the UN IPCC, Ian?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, the UN IPCC is not a scientific organisation. It is a political organisation. It’s brief is to show that human emissions drive global warming. That brief comes out in a report, which has two parts to it. One is a summary at the beginning, and that’s the journalists and politicians, most of whom are ill educated. And it’s written in a very alarmist language. And that summary is normally totally unrelated to the scientific text, which in the latest one was just short of 4000 pages. And that is again, baffling people with bullshit. And there’s just so much information there that it’s very hard for the average person to work out what’s going on. So they have to actually trust it. Now I don’t, because there is a huge amount of information out there that has the contrary view. The book that I put out 10 years ago, Heaven and Earth. I had three and a half years-

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Oh, marvellous. Marvellous book.

Professor Ian Plimer:

… of scientific papers, which show that human emissions don’t drive global warming. And the latest book, I’ve only got 1700 scientific papers that show that humanly emissions don’t drive global warming. Those papers are not listed in the IPCC reports. Those IPCC reports omit any contrary information whatsoever. And so it is very much a partisan view, fulfilling the requirements of their brief. And that is to show we’re all going to fry and die. And it’s very much the view of an anonymous group of rather shady people who love their joints and conferences and write a few words every few years. And for that, there’s fame and fortune and there’s power. And there’s these faceless people who are creating a power structure whereby we pay.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Here, here, we’ll go to an ad break now, and then we’ll come back and we’ll listen to more from Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

This is Senator Malcolm Roberts. Welcome back. And I’ve got my special guest, Ian Plimer. Before I move on with Ian, this is TNT radio. Where the only thing we mandate is the truth and you’ll get the truth from professor Ian Plimer. Ian, we have a fabulous researcher in Australia, an IT specialist, also a climate scientist with peer-reviewed papers published. And he pointed out that in an analysis of the UN IPCCs own data, only five reviewers endorsed the claim that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger and it needs to be cut. Only five and there’s doubt they are even scientists. Yet we are told there are thousands of scientists what’s going on?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, we’re not told the truth. And I know who you’re referring to. That was a magnificent piece of work he did for his PhD. We’re not told the truth. Many of these reports are written by activists. Many of them are written by green peace officials. Few of them are written by scientists and very, very few indeed are written by eminent scientists. So this is propaganda at best, at worst it may well be indeed are written by eminent scientist. So this is propaganda at best, at worst it’s may well be part of a great reset. So you used the word truth. Now you are regarded as controversial. I am regarded as controversial. Why? Because we use facts and speak the truth. And if you speak the truth, you never have to remember what you said. And this is why when you challenge those activists, they get very, very angry because they have to argue from first principles and justify their statements, which they cannot do.

                They don’t have the methods of argument, logic analysis, and they certainly don’t have any repeatable facts. So you get called controversial because your facts do not agree with their emotional opinions and the use of language. And the capture of language now has been a major weapon in attacking the average person to make sure that they do not use certain words. Unfortunately, and I must have a lot of Broken Hill lead in my blood. And I worked at Broken Hill for decades. Unfortunately I don’t abide by those new social constraints. And I will use the vernacular to describe things that we have used those words for half a century. So part of cancelling you and cancelling me and shutting us down, is control of the language. And calling us nut cases or controversial or extreme or right wing. This demonstrates that our opponents cannot argue.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Exactly. And another thing that demonstrates our opponents cannot argue is their claims that there’s a 97% consensus of scientists who claim that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger and needs to be cut. When you look at their figures and you analyse it, and there’s been a peer-reviewed papers led by Dr. David Legette with scientists and statisticians. Who analyse this claim by John Cook, a false fabricated claim, misrepresenting science, misrepresenting nature. David Legette’s and his co-authors analysed John Cook’s 97% consensus claim and found out when you go through the actual data, there is a not a 97% consensus. There is a 0.3% smattering and not one of those 0.3% smattering has any evidence that carbon dioxide from human activity as bad.

Professor Ian Plimer:

Yes, you’re being very kind. That worked by was fraud. There were 10,000 people who were sent a survey. These are people who put bread and wine on the table from frightening witness about climate. Out of those 10,000, who received Cooks survey, only 3000 replied. He chose 77 of those 3000 replies to publish. One reply wasn’t really in agreement. And that’s was the 3%. So this was a very, very selective survey, picking out certain information and then telling us that 97% of scientists believe this or that.

                Well, belief is not a word of science. It’s a word of religion and politics. The second thing is that science is not like politics, where we all put up and say, “Yes, we believe that the earth is flat. And we believe that the sun rotates around the earth.” Science doesn’t work like that. It works on reproducible evidence. That was fraud. Now, Australia exports, a lot of black stuff. That’s called coal. A lot of that comes from your state Queensland, but John Cook was in Queensland and we exported not black coal, but he’s black soul went to another country. We’ve got rid of him. Thanks be to the Lord.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Well said, then let’s move on to the NASA’s Goddard Institute Space Studies. It’s a tiny group within NASA. And then there’s a tiny, tiny group within the Goddard Institute Space Studies that is responsible for climate studies. We’ve heard so many times that NASA is saying that this climate claims, that climate sphere is all justified. And yet I had correspondence when I entered the Senate as a Senator in Australia. And I held director Gavin Schmidt accountable for some of the work that NASA was doing in corruptly modifying temperature data to raise temperatures artificially. And in his first response back, he made a slip and he showed that inadvertently, he made serious contradictions.

                So when I held him accountable for these contradictions. He stopped writing to me. And then later they reversed their claims about Iceland, temperature data tampering, and reduce them down again. I mean, NASA itself has never said that the climate is a problem. A tiny group of people, activists within the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has said that. And these people need to be held to account. It’s just fraud again, that NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies led by Gavin Schmidt and the previous alarmist James Hansen have spread this nonsense. We’ve got letters from NASAs senior administrators, astronauts who’ve had to rely on science, stating that these guys are speaking bullshit.

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, we once used to have respect for an institution. Be that the CSIRO, be that a university, be that the church, we once had respect for an institution. We now live in a society where anything goes, this is the attack on Western civilization and climate change is only part of it. But we are attacking Christian religions. We are attacking parliament. We saw that recently in the Senate in Australia, where one Senator being sworn in, gave a Black power salute and wanted to insult the queen. This respect for institutions is disappearing. They are always under attack. And in some cases like NASA, they do it to themselves. In some cases and I would argue, it’s part, the churches have done this. They’ve done it to themselves. So we are living in a society where anything goes, where all opinions are equal. There is no informed opinion. There is no respect for anything or anyone. Yet the same people want to be respected. I think respect has to be earned. I don’t think because you are an oxygen thief that you automatically qualified to get respect.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Here, here. Let’s move on now. Some people I know you have heard about the Stern report. That’s a fraudulent document that was developed in Britain for the government to push this climate rubbish. We had our own equivalent version of the Stern report in Australia. It was the Ghana report, which from memory was released in 2008. I think it was initially a state initiative but then when Kevin Rudd entered power as a prime minister in 2000 late, 2007, he adopted it as well. And I think he pushed it. And I’ll just go to that because a lot of people in our country think that the Ghana report had scientific proof that we need to cut human carbon dioxide. So I’m going to read from chapter two of Ghana’s report, which was used to push the narrative that we need to cut carbon dioxide from human activity. Chapter two is titled, Understanding Climate Science.

                It states, key points. “The review takes as its starting point on the balance of probabilities. And not as a matter of belief,” I’m sorry, I can’t help laughing. I’ll start again. “The review takes as its starting point on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities that human activities resulted in substantial global warming from the mid 20th century. And that continued growth in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human induced emissions would generate high risk of dangerous climate change.” No evidence anywhere and yet the media, the politicians run around saying the Ghana report is scientific proof. Ian, what the hell is going on?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Oh, it’s very simple. We’ve had every major institution taken over by activists. We have activists in the church. We have activists in universities. We have activists in schools. The public service is absolutely full of activists. These people are driving the ship because politicians get reappointed every couple of years. These people can outlive them. These people can outstay them. So we’ve had the march of the left. It’s been a 40 year march into all of the institutions. The biggest damage they have done is to dumb down the education system, such that all of the people now in middle level, be they in government be, they in business, have undergone this activist education. So we’ve totally been taken over by activists. And for me, it’s not a war that you can fight. You can fight as we are doing as guerrilla fighters, but we have to wait for the inevitable. And the inevitable will be a financial crisis.

                And then ultimately people will say, “Well, wait a minute. What used to be a very wealthy nation? What happened?” So this is why it’s extremely important to keep fighting the fight. We’ve lost it. We haven’t infiltrated the system 40 or 50 years ago. The left did that, but ultimately there is a price to pay. And the price to pay is going to be very, very nasty indeed. So we have to keep these arguments on the record. We have to keep arguing. We have to fight everything. Now, for example, we have this absolute trivial argument now about the burping and farting of cattle. So just heal out a very simple argument. Grass grows by using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that cattle eat that grass and burp and fight out. Some of the carbon is methane and carbon dioxide. And the rest of the carbon ends up in the meat, in the skin and in bones. We eat that meat that’s sequestered for a little while. The bones, the carbon is sequestered for a little while and in the leather that we have, it’s sequestered for even longer, in say our footwear.

                So if cattle are so bad and eating this grass and farting out methane, belching out methane, what happens if we took the cattle off the ground? If we took the cattle off the field, then the grass would rot. And the grass would give out methane when it rots. And the same number of atoms of carbon that went into growing that grass, the same number of atoms of carbon, that either are extracted by cattle or extracted by rotting of the grass.

                Now that is a total furphy that we’re being fed by our climate activists. So what’s happened is the vegans have got in to the climate activists groups. And they’re trying to tell us we shouldn’t be eating meat and we’re destroying the climate. So we’ve got all these sorts of crazies now, have attracted themselves to the vegan groups in the climate groups. Now I’ve had a bit to do with vegans, when I used to take university field excursions. These geological field excursions were interesting because the meat eaters were the first ones to the top of the mountain. The vegetarians were about halfway up and the vegans were still trying to work out how to get out of the vehicle.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Okay, I want to continue that line in a minute, but first I’m going to go to the InterAcademy Council. If I can collect my thoughts after that, the InterAcademy Council. You’ve heard of that as a noted scientist Professor Plimer?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Yes, yes. Well, I’m in one of the major academies. But they represent my view and don’t listen to my science.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. Well, we could talk about the Australian Academy of Science, which is completely lost the plot on climate science. But anyway, the InterAcademy-

Professor Ian Plimer:

Those academies stay alive by government funding. And they have to play in the same key from the same musical script as the government, otherwise they don’t get funding. So this is not fearless and free information that the academies are giving. It’s already contaminated.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Right. And so we’ve been told many times that all the major science academies around the world support this rubbish about climate being affected by carbon dioxide from human activity. None of them have ever provided the evidence. But the InterAcademy Council, which is the combination of many of these national bodies, put out a damning report about 10 years ago. An absolutely damning report about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change. It is the UN’s climate science body, was just shown to be completely incompetent and dishonest and unscientific. And no one raised an eyebrow. Now, I also want to talk about what I call the rats nest of climate alarmist academics. These people in my mind are not scientists at all, but they’ve been paraded as scientists. They’ve been funded by government taxpayers. Funded by us to misrepresent the science. I’m going to read their names out, because these people will be very familiar to some. Tim Flannery, many faults forecasts, which have caused enormous damage, including costing people’s lives.

                Professor Will Steffen, a chemical engineer. Professor David Karoly, a former meteorologist. Ova Goldberg. And I’ve challenged Ova Goldberg and Tim Flannery to debate. And poor old Tim didn’t know which way was up. And his publisher just dragged him away from me. Ova Goldberg, would not debate me. John Cook would not debate me. Another one of these academics. They’re not scientists because they don’t follow the scientific principle. A scientist is someone who follows a scientific process. Matthew England, a climate modeller, mathematician, I believe. Leslie Hughes, Kurt Lambeck, Andy Pitman, Ross Garnaut.

                And then we have a man called Stephan Lewandowsky. And Stephan Lewandowsky is a, I think he’s got something to do with the behavioural scientist. And he made claims that if you don’t agree with these people, then you’re a nut job. So, I mean, these people have been funded by government. They’ve been appointed to the climate commission by the Gillard Government. They’ve been fated by the liberals. They have been funded to spread misrepresentations of climate. I’m trying to find a comment. Would you, if you could make a comment while I’m looking for a summary assessment of Tim Flannery’s report.

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, just the very brief comment. These people are funded to put us out of work. Therefore, the amount of revenue collected by taxation will be less. So why not save ourself the pain and not fund them now? And then we do not decrease taxation by having people put out of work by their processes. Now, can you imagine trying to run a foundry and you are trying to pour some bronze and the power goes off. If that freezes, then you have a real problem. Can you imagine how your electricity bill, which you have in an electric arc furnace, you have an electricity bill that’s just gone through the roof. Ultimately you are going to close that business and put people out of work, or you might shift the business to Thailand or somewhere like that. This is what’s happening. Those climate policies, which are catastrophic for the average person are driven by the elites, funded from the taxes of the average person. It is time to say, enough.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Right. And I’m going to read some figures before we go to the break, we’ll have the ad break the last of the hour. And then I’d like you to, when we come back, Ian, if you could talk about the fact that Australia is already at net zero and beyond it, because our sinks of carbon dioxide absorb more carbon dioxide than all of our production. But I want to read these figures, Dr. Wes Allen wrote, what is the first known detailed review of Tim Flannery’s book entitled, The Weather Makers. Dr. Allen’s review reveals that 307 statements in Tim Flannery’s book created 577 problems with some of Tim Flannery statements, creating multiple problems. This Dr. Allen as a meticulous researcher, and he’s put it out there in public, listed them, shown them.

                And what he’s done is he said that, “Baseless, extreme comments in Tim Flannery’s book 14. Baseless, dogmatic comments, 103. Suspect sources of his points, 51. Half truth, 85. The claims that there’s absolute no uncertainty in what he’s saying, 48. Misrepresentations seven. Misinterpretations, 26. Exaggeration, 78. Factual errors, 70. Confusing or silly statements, 43. Contradictory statements, 31. Fail predictions, 11. Mistakes, 10. A grand total of problems, 577 in a book that’s about 200 pages long. This is what passes for science amongst the labour party, the liberal party, the national party, the greens. And amongst these climate activists who are masquerading as scientists, when they’re really academics and not scientists.” So we’ll go for the break and then we’ll come back and listen to Ian Plimer.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Over to you, Ian Plimer. We’re with Ian Plimer and this is Senator Malcolm Roberts in broadcasting from Australia. We are now going to hear one of the best scientists in the world, discuss why we are already at net zero and beyond.

Professor Ian Plimer:

We are very lucky in Australia to have a continent with very, very few inhabitants. We have a large area of grasslands, rangelands and forests and a lot of crop land. And the few people that live in this country live in a coastal fringe and mainly in cities. We are not a country of Crocodile Dundee’s out in the bush. We’re a country of people who absolutely live in cities. So when we look at the amount of carbon dioxide that we release from heavy industries in Australia. And we smelt a lot of the world’s aluminium and zinc and lead and copper, that puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bulk of our energy comes from hydrocarbons, be it diesel, be it coal for electricity. And when we look at the amount of energy that we create, we could not run this country without coal.

                However, when we look at how much of a carbon dioxide is absorbed into these grasslands, rangelands, forest, crops and the continental shelf, we absorb about 10 times as much carbon dioxide than we emit. We should therefore go to Paris and say, “Pay up. We want countries like Mauritania and Chad and poor countries of the world to pay us because we are absorbing their carbon dioxide emissions.” The whole system of net zero is bonkers. Net zero is a vocabulary invented by people who want different ways of taxing you. It’s got nothing to do with the environment. It’s got everything to do with power and money.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

And that leads on to something that I want to raise. The core problem here is shitty governance, comprising gutless politicians seating our sovereignty. There is no scientific data or framework on which they base these policies. The policies today in Australia are based on looking good, not doing good. Looking after vested interest and globalist predators. And Ian, I think you are well aware that the man who started this climate fraud was Maurice Strong from Canada. I haven’t got the time to go into the details. He was a criminal who exiled himself. Wanted by American authorities, the police law enforcement agencies. He was exiled in China. He came back to Canada to die in Ottawa in 2015. His policies, his scam that he initiated. He was a part owner and a director of the Chicago Climate Exchange, where billions of dollars of carbon dioxide emissions trading system credits would be funnelled through. Al Gore, the company he owns, Generation Management Investment is also a part owner of the Chicago climate exchange.

                We are taking money from poor people asking age pensioners to make a choice between staying warm and eating. And these bastards are stealing money to live like Riley. No science, enormous crippling costs imposed on people. And the people pay with their wallets, with their jobs, with their lifestyle, with their lives. For no benefit to the environment, no benefit to humanity and these grubs steal billions of dollars. And then we’ve got other billionaires who are sponsoring people into parliament, so they can keep their subsidies for solar and wind going. This is a complete scam and it is an inhuman scam. What do you say to say Professor?

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, that’s exactly right. This is probably the biggest scam we have seen in the history of time. In terms of science, it’s probably the greatest delusional science that we’ve seen since the times, just before Galileo. In terms of morality, we have sunk to new depths and in terms of responsibility, there is none. In my scientific career, I have been working in universities and outside universities. When I was outside universities, I was funded by industry.

                If I got it wrong, I lost my job. When in a university, if I got it wrong, it didn’t matter. I was able to publish and move on. In science, if you get it wrong, there are no consequences. In sociology, if you get it wrong, you get promoted. So we have lost the ethical basis of science. And I think this structural breakdown of institutional ethics is one of the reasons why your Maurice Strong and these others have been able to thrive. And there’s a whole army of acolytes there feeding off those who pay them. And eventually they are going to kill those who pay them. This is why I called my latest book, Green Murder. This process has taken 40 or 50 years to get there. And the only way I can see we can get out of this mess is to have a deeply destructive recession.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

And that’s a very sad thing to say, because I’d like to finish on a positive, which you’ll come to in a minute. I’m with Professor Ian Rutherford Plimer, one of the world’s best scientists, highly awarded, a prolific author. We have been discussing my letter to the four Amigos on climate, the previous prime minister, the previous deputy prime minister, the previous opposition leader, and the then and current Greens leader, Adam Bandt. You can find that letter at Malcolm Roberts, qld.com.au, just scroll down to the climate fraud icon, click on that, and then scroll down to letter to the leaders, the climate change scam. And you can see what we’ve been talking about. I want to mention Professor Plimer, some from Professor Plimer’s books, these cover of huge gamut of interest, everything from serious scientific to discussions about humanity. To basic books like mineral collecting localities of the Broken Hill district, for people who are interested in rocks.

                Now I’ve got another book, Telling Lies for God. Let’s just think about the diversity of this man’s ability. Next one, A Journey Through Stone, Mineral Collecting Localities of the Broken Hill, Tibooburra and White Cliffs areas. This man gets down into the details. Milos: Geologic History, A Short History of Planet Earth, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science. How to get expelled from School, now that is a ripper. So is that Heaven and Earth. Not for Greens and then Ian has taken up the cut of protecting humanity. Heaven and Earth again, Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Rip-off, Green Murder, a life sentence of net zero with no parole, go to Connor Court Publishing. They have been your publishers, I think all the time, Professor Plimer, anything to add to that because I find your books fascinating.

Professor Ian Plimer:

Well, I’ve published a number of best sellers in the past, through major international publishers, like Random House. And I had also published stuff through the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And when I had the manuscript of Heaven and Earth ready to go, no publisher would touch me because I was questioning human induced climate change. It was eventually a very small husband and wife publisher that took it on. It made them a fortune. It was an international bestseller.

                So for those of you out there who are thinking of publishing your ideas, it’s quite often not the major publishers that will touch you. They’re not interested at all in the issue. They’re only interested in making money. And when Heaven and Earth was really humming away and selling very well. I had a publisher ring me and say, “Look, we’d like to republish your book, A Short History of Planet Earth.” And I said, “Well, that book came out 20 years ago. And the science has moved on. That some of these science that I wrote there now has been replaced by better science and there are better ideas. I’m not prepared to republish something that is knowingly wrong.” And they were persisting telling me I’d make a fortune. I wasn’t interested in that. I’m interested in facts and speaking the truth. That makes me controversial.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

And we appreciate you so much because there are so few scientists these days. So few politicians who will do that. I’m going to lead the final word to Professor Plimer. But before I do that, this is Malcolm Roberts, Senator in Australia. I am staunchly pro-human and a believer in the inherent goodness in human beings. Please remember to listen to each other, love one another, stay proud of who we are as humans. Take a minute to appreciate the abundance all around us. Ian, over to you. You have one minute to tell us why we need to get back to basics and be so positive about Australia. We have the people, the resources we have the opportunity, the potential. Mate, what do you want to say? And thank you so much.

Professor Ian Plimer:

There are very few people, very few people on this continent. We are blessed with resources. If we look at history countries or nations with very few people and a lot of resources, inevitably got invaded. Go and talk to the Carthaginians or the Thracians, go and talk to those that Alexander the Great invaded. The only way this country can be strong is to use its resources and its humans to have a vibrant economy, a big defence system and people who are great lovers and supporters of their country. And when I finally shuffle off, I just hope someone will in the eulogy say, he gave the cage a bloody good rattle.

Senator Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you so much, Professor Ian Plimer, well done.

While PM Albanese wants electricity-grid wrecking net-zero, he will never be able to deliver his promised $275 cheaper power bills. That’s why he has had to walk away from his first election promise already.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support Senator Payne’s matter of public importance. Prime Minister Albanese’s promise to reduce electricity bills by $275 and his promise to reduce carbon dioxide output by 43 per cent are mutually exclusive. High energy prices will reduce energy usage and assist Australia to reach the 43 per cent figure. Lower prices will increase energy consumption, and that will work against the Albanese government’s target. That’s why the Albanese government so quickly ran away from his promise. The Prime Minister never intended to honour the promise, making his action cynical political expediency.

One Nation believes any attempt to implement a 43 per cent carbon dioxide reduction is a policy based on lies and distortions which do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Prime Minister Albanese has already signalled, across several issues, his government will be a government based on virtue signalling, not a sensible policy. For senators with no data on their side, the only option is to sell a policy on feelings. Feelings will not keep the lights on, supermarket freezers cold or hospitals open. Feelings will not warm Australians in winter or cool us in summer. Evidence based policy will. Energy deficits in several areas of Australia have already caused blackouts. The 43 per cent target will cause many more blackouts.

Rapidly increasing electricity costs will reduce consumption of electricity and buy the government time, while it asks around for a permanent solution, which is why the government is allowing this to happen. Closing down and sabotaging baseload coal has led to the national electricity racket—sorry market—showing unprecedented wholesale power prices. The average spot price of $264 per megawatt hour last quarter is more than triple the average spot price of $85 per megawatt hour this time last year. Prime Minister Albanese knew this when he made his promise, and clearly economics is not the Prime Minister’s strong suit. If the cost of an item is up 300 per cent, the chances of being able to make it cheaper without the government paying for it are zero.

Perhaps the Prime Minister can extend his employment talkfest to more aspects of government business. Let’s see if anyone knows how to use wind and solar to replace baseload coal and save Australia from electricity and energy Armageddon, because all I’m hearing so far is, ‘Build more wind and solar.’ Building more will simply add more capacity when we don’t need it, during the day, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Solar and wind will need to be paired with some form of battery technology to move that generated electricity from the day, when we don’t need it, to the evening, when we do.

Coal sitting in hoppers ready to generate power on demand is the battery we have used successfully for 120 years. Alternatives to coal are thin on the ground. Battery storage costs are staggering and unsustainable: $1.5 million per megawatt hour. We need around 60,000 megawatt hours of energy in storage to ensure any 24-hour period is not subject to blackouts, yet batteries need 20 per cent above rated capacity to achieve full charge due to heat loss, which is why they catch fire a lot. This means we need 72,000 megawatt-hours of storage, at a cost of $108 billion every 12 years, the life of a big Tesla battery. That is $9 billion every year. The Snowy 2 big hydro battery currently under construction will provide 1,000 megawatt-hours daily for 365 a year at a cost of $5 billion. This means that pumped hydro will cost $300 billion to carry enough power for just one day. Of course, adding electric vehicle charging to the mix means a whole lot more blackouts and a whole lot more electricity price increases.

Net zero is an unaffordable fairy tale that will destroy our standard of living and destroy our lifestyle. We are one community, we are one nation and we know what the hell is needed to get back to affordable, reliable, stable electricity.

Despite promises of being one of the world’s largest batteries for only $2 billion dollars, Snowy 2.0 is shaping up to cost over $10 billion and only supply a fraction of promised capacity.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I speak about the Auditor-General’s performance audit titled, No. 33—Performance audit—Snowy 2.0 governance of early implementation: Snowy Hydro Limited.

Some background for those who may be new to this project: Snowy 2.0 is an extension of the Snowy Hydro project, hence the name. In 2017, Prime Minister Turnbull announced the cost of Snowy 2.0 as $2 billion. This report states that the cost is now $5.1 billion plus billions of other costs, totalling well over $10 billion. The completion date is out to 2025, so we can expect further cost blowouts. The project involves using electricity from unreliable sources like wind and solar to pump water from a lower reservoir, Talbingo Dam, through underground pipes to an upper reservoir, Tantangara Dam. Water is then sent back down to Talbingo Dam, generating electricity on the way. Snowy 2.0 is referred to as a ‘big battery’ because water is stored in the top reservoir until it is needed. The same turbine is either pumping water uphill or generating electricity from the water coming down. The total pipe length is 27 kilometres. Generally, water is pumped up during the day—provided the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. The water is then released down the pipe to generate electricity in the evening peak, when it’s most needed. As the sun does not shine and wind goes quiet at night, pumping water back up the hill overnight, ready for the morning peak, will need coal power. The upper reservoir may hold multiple days worth of water and, at some point, the dam must be refilled, especially as Tantangara Dam is currently only 17 per cent full.

Pumped hydro only works when the dam has water in it. For every megawatt of power generated by water coming down the hill, the turbine needs 1.3 megawatts of power to get the water back up, because of losses. In total, 30 per cent more coal is used in Snowy 2.0. Pumped hydro, put simply, entails generating electricity 2.3 times to be used by consumers once. This is not cheap electricity; it’s actually really expensive electricity. The solar and wind fairy tale needs pumped hydro as a way of storing unreliable wind and power generation, which occurs mostly during the day, and moving that capacity to the evening peek, when unreliable solar and wind can’t provide baseload power.

Maximum generation for Snowy 2.0 is an impressive 2,000 megawatts, but here’s the catch: annual generation is listed in this report as 350,000 megawatt hours. Running at full capacity, Snowy 2.0 will generate electricity for only 175 hours a year. To put that into perspective, my home state of Queensland used 68 million megawatt hours last year. Snowy Hydro will contribute the equivalent of half of one per cent of Queensland’s power each year, one-tenth of one per cent of Australia’s annual generation, at a cost of $5 billion and rising—and that doesn’t include all the costs. This madness will send us broke. There’s a far better way: a 2,000-megawatt coal-fired power station is able to run at 2,000 megawatts 98 per cent of the time, 24/7. Liddell in the Hunter Valley generated nine million megawatts last year.

For less than the cost of this green fairy tale called Snowy 2.0, a coal plant can produce at least 25 times the amount of electricity. That’s why Germany’s Greens coalition government is turning Germany’s coal-fired power stations back on. Shutting ours down when we see what’s happening in the rest of the world is criminal irresponsibility. Prime Minister Albanese is promising reduced electricity prices while at the same time building horribly expensive power generation. The Prime Minister’s agenda will fail, and he will take Australia down with him. Instead, One Nation will build baseload power stations, reduce the cost of electricity, restore grid reliability, restore grid stability, restore Australian manufacturing and restore the income of working Australians.

Australia has the largest amount of money (wasted) on intermittent renewables in our history, the most wind and solar feeding into the grid in history, and what is the result? Skyrocketing power prices and risk of blackouts! Ditch wind and solar subsidies. Bring back cheap, reliable power.

The CEFC holds $10 billion of taxpayer money to be used on wasteful green projects. They are meant to get a healthy return for splashing your cash at renewable pipe dreams, but their profit has gone down by 30% in a year.

All of this is to supposedly cut down on harmless CO2, which you and I breathe in and out all day. The fact that the CEFC exists is just another example of how green-left this apparently conservative government has gone.

Transcript

Senator Roberts.

[Senator Roberts] Thank you chair. Could you tell me what is clean energy? Just a quick preliminary question before we get into it.

Well, ideally Senator clean energy is one that is doesn’t produce emissions.

[Senator Roberts] Emissions of what?

Emissions of carbon dioxide or their equivalent is how we would, I guess broadly considered clinically. I mean, it’s not a technical term, but in the, in the general parlance.

[Senator Roberts] So, what’s dirty about carbon dioxide?

Well.

[Senator Roberts] ‘Cause you’re exhaling it right now.

Yeah. I mean, it’s omnipresent around us. I appreciate that, Senator. But what we’re about is is trying to decarbonize the Australian economy in the electricity sector and the ag sector and infrastructure and property and so on. So that’s, that’s what we’re about. And part of that is investing in renewables which are of course, clean energy.

[Senator Roberts] So there are a few leaps there we’ll, we’ll ignore the leaps. But if we look around inside this building and outside. Everything that we see in here has come from the use of energy and human progress over the last 170 years has been due entirely to the ever decreasing cost in real terms of energy except for the last 25 years, since 1996 where the costs have doubled and in fact more than doubled. So we’re reversing human progress on the basis that carbon dioxide is a dirty gas, correct?

In fact, power prices during the day in many states of Australia are extremely low today, and in some cases have been negative. So I don’t know if that is always the case.

[Senator Roberts] Wholesale prices and consumer prices, especially for families have increased dramatically in the last 25 years. So let’s get onto the clean energy finances claim. This is quote, we invest to lead the market operating with commercial rigor to address some of Australia’s toughest emissions challenges in agriculture, energy generation and storage infrastructure, property, transport and waste with $10 billion to invest on behalf of the Australian government. We work to hope that’s the people we work to deliver a positive return for taxpayers across our portfolio. So the clean energy finance corporation is normalised surplus. What some people might argue is a kin to a profit from operations. Excluding extenuating circumstances in 2019-20 was $100.5 million compared with 143.6 million the year before. Isn’t that a disappointing decline? And do you expect a recovery?

We’re very proud of our economic record, Senator and the you know, the operating surplus that we produced last year we think is, we think is a significant achievement. In fact, when you take away from that operating surplus net operating circles the cost of government funding we still produce a profit for the Australian taxpayers. So we, you know I think what we’ve done investing successfully across all those sectors that you mentioned it has been a terrific achievement.

[Senator Roberts] So what does it return? I would calculate it as about 1%.

Well, it depends how you, how you look at it. Senator we, we’ve directed by the government to try and achieve a portfolio benchmark return across across the whole portfolio. And if you look at our sort of cumulative return through to 31 March of this year our return is approximately 4.63%. So I, you know, I think that’s a that’s a very positive return.

[Senator Roberts] Okay. Secondly, the clean energy finance corporation impairment provision at 30th of June, 2020 was $121.1 million compared with 59.7 million in the previous year. So that’s a 100% increase and it represented 5.1% of loans and advances at amotised cost compared with 2.3% in 2018, 19. So it’s more than doubled.

Remember it’s a provision, senators. It’s no, it’s not a loss or right off of any of our assets. And we’re pleased to say that we have negligible losses in our portfolio across the course of the eight years that we have been, we’ve been investing. The increase is a reflection of some of the, you know, some of the challenges that we have taken into account in relation to wind and solar projects and the challenges with grid and marginal loss factors and curtailment. So to be prudent and conservative, we did increase in payment provision substantially last year. I’ll maybe get my CFO.

Senator, I might also just add that one of the factors that we were considering back in August when we were wrapping up the June financial year end was that everybody was projecting at that point that we were headed into a recession. And if you’re headed into a recession, your probability of default on loans will increase. So we prudently put extra money aside to provision for that event. Fortunately, with hindsight now we did not head into a recession. We were back on the way out and we’re, we’re experiencing growth now. So that prudent provision that stood there at that point in time was not needed because we did not suffer actual losses. That was just a provision —

[Senator Roberts] So the 5.1% includes the provision?

That was all provision. So it was purely a statistical calculation on the probability of default. If we had low electricity prices. We were headed into a recession and really the property market as well. People are looking at that and saying, we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen with valuations in property. And so we had to prudently provide for those things fortunately, not required in hindsight.

[Senator Roberts] Okay. Thank you. What are your projections for impairment over the next five years?

Over the next five years, it’s actually spelled out in the budget papers and I can give you that exact number but effectively we’re not projecting an increase dramatically in the provision. So if we look at, I’m on page 166. The budget papers, and we provide in there on about halfway down the page, write down an impairment of assets. There’s in the budget year, 45 million. Now that’s a combination of two things. There’s about 20 odd million dollars of true impairment provision that we allow for. And about 25 million that we’re providing in the event that we have to invest at suboptimal rates to provide some stability in the grid. One of the things that’s factored in here is the grid reliability fund. We expect that we will have to invest equity. In some cases that equity may be at less than market rates. So instead of a concessional charge, it ends up as an impairment charge. You write it down to the fair value. Now that’s to make sure that the grid can cope with the, the ongoing changes to the generation nature.

[Senator Roberts] So how much have you on another question, how much have you written off in terms of lost capital and foregone interest?

Over the entire life of the corporation? I think from memory it’s like, it may be as high as 800,000. We can take it on —

[Senator Roberts] No, it’s, it’s a bit immaterial in the scheme of the scale of the CFC.

It’s lifting the signal. I’m going to give the call to send it to McAlester.

Okay.

[Senator Roberts] Everything that you’re putting money into has a subsidy. It can’t stand on its own merits. Aren’t you lending money out and expecting to get it back?

We, I mean, as you know, as we’ve discussed all our capital expected capital has been returned with the expected income. And, and I’m not sure about your statement there that everything that we’ve invested in is is receiving a subsidy. You know, we’ve a very broad investor, right? From large scale projects to, as I say, in property you know, even, you know, things like the build to rent sector and venture capital and clean technologies. And so I, you know, I’m not sure why you think that all all the sectors and all the companies and projects we’ve invested in would be receiving subsidies.

Senator, I’m Simon Avery, head of government stakeholder relations might be of some assistance there under our act. And this goes to the question you asked earlier about a definition of clean energy technology. The three heads of definition are renewable energy technologies energy efficiency, technologies and low emissions technologies. And so while as you point out renewable energy technologies may have some subsidies. For example, through the renewable energy target for most of the energy efficiency technologies there’s no subsidy involved. And in fact, over the life of the CFC, I think we’ve we’ve made about $9.1 billion worth of commitments. And there would only be about $55 million worth of concessional subsidy that CFC has itself offered 55 million odd over 9.1 billion of lifetime commitments is a drop in the bucket.

[Senator Roberts] So last question chair, the energy minister, Mr. Taylor has cited publicly the Bloomberg graph on investment per capita in various countries around the world in solar and wind. And Australia has double the per capita investment of any other country. Number two country, I think is America. It’s with just over double with six times China’s investment in that, even though they make all of our solar most of our solar panels and wind turbines. So other than providing still further assistance wind and solar. How does this funding encourage private investment in Australia’s renewable energy sector when the evidence suggested that we’re already over investing and bringing bringing quite damaging consequences to us as we’ve heard?

Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of things in there, Senator, I mean, remember of course, Australia is a world leader in rooftop solar. So, you know, they’ve kind of in excess of two gigawatts of rooftop, solar is is installed each year at the moment in this country. So that accounts for some of the, you know the per capita figures that that you cite in terms of, you know, attracting, you know the use of the private sector and why isn’t that investing well, the good thing is that that we have been creating in private sector investment over the course of, of our life at the CFC and for every dollar that we have, in fact invested we have credited in $2.40 of third party capital. So part of what we’re about is, is coming into, you know into projects, you know, supporting companies and we at the same time are trying to attract in the private sector be they Australian banks, international equity, you know large scale infrastructure funds and so on. And so we’re about bringing in the private sector and you know, not creating any more now.

[Senator Roberts] Thank you, chair.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I need to say clearly that the climate change agenda seeks to mislead well-meaning Australians with pseudoscience to introduce and hide an economic and social agenda that Australians would otherwise reject. Senator Rice’s motion does mischief. Australia does not have a carbon budget. The Senate has not voted for a carbon budget. The coalition’s supposed climate action plan cap that underpins government policy does not include a carbon budget.

Our international agreements do not include a carbon budget. The only place one can find a climate budget is in the Greens’ own little parallel universe, where the aspiring elites in the Greens are in control of an economy that is not only green but rancid. The devastation that will be caused to our economy by the measures the Greens propose in order to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will destroy our economy, destroy jobs and steal opportunity from our children.

The insult to real scientists is that Senator Rice calls climate change a science based agenda. No, it’s not—definitely not. The argument in favour of a looming climate disaster is based on unvalidated computer models—nothing else. These are the same models that have failed repeatedly and miserably to predict temperature movement.

The largest single driver of climate is the sun, which has moved into a solar minimum that is tracking the Dalton minimum, when the Thames froze over and crops around the world failed. In fact, crops are failing now. Northern China is experiencing widespread hunger, as exceptional cold destroyed the winter cereal crop. Australia, on the other hand, has moved from a dry cycle to a wet cycle. This is not climate change; it’s a natural cycle.

I have challenged the Greens on many occasions to prove their position with empirical scientific evidence—data—and they have repeatedly been unable to. Indeed, today is day No. 502 of my challenge in the Senate to the Greens to simply provide the scientific evidence for their claims and for their alarm and to debate me on the science. Look at them all, looking at their phones; they won’t look at me. I challenged the current Greens Senate leader 10¼ years ago, and nothing.

That is more than a decade, and nothing. I notice that world-renowned scientist Tony Heller, who relies on solid data, has today challenged the Greens to a debate on social media. That’s not going to happen either. And now we see the Nats. Well, that’s another joke. So the Greens have no carbon budget and they have no idea.

Subject MPI: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansards/0cd97387-e8a2-46f1-92cb-16f6be35aee2/&sid=0148

Yesterday, Dr Alan Moran released a report I commissioned on the cost of climate policies and renewable subsidies have on Australians. Today I asked questions to Senator Birmingham representing the Minister for Energy.

Questions

I commissioned the highly respected economist Dr Alan Moran to review government economic and energy data and to calculate the true cost of climate policies and so-called renewable energy sources. He delivered his report to me last week and a copy has been sent to every member of federal parliament including Senator Birmingham and the Minister for Energy.

Dr Moran’s work cannot be sensibly refuted since he uses the government’s own data that used to be published in a consolidated form until the cost of intermittent solar and wind energy sources became so embarrassingly and devastatingly high. Is the Minister aware that the true cost of climate policies on household through electricity prices is a staggering $1,300 per year?

First Supplementary Question:

Is the Minister aware that the true cost of so-called climate policies and renewable energy on household electricity bills is not the reported 6.5%, but a whopping and devastating 39%.

Second Supplementary Question:

On average your government incentivises $8 billion of malinvestment in green energy projects which results in a net loss of jobs in the economy; analysis based on Spain’s experience indicates with every green subsidised job created, 2.2 jobs are lost. With over 1 million Australians losing their job and the unemployment numbers rising due to COVID19, shouldn’t the government be incentivising job creating rather than job losses.

Climate policies costing every household $1300 annually On Outsiders this morning, Dr Alan Moran release a report I commissioned which analysed the financial impact of climate policies and renewable subsidies on Australian households.

The report, ‘The Hidden Cost of Renewables on Electricity Prices’ uncovers blatant distortions and key facts that are excluded from reporting on the costs of climate policies. Here are the secrets the government has been hiding from you

  • Climate policies account for 39% of your electricity bills not 6.5% as reported.
  • Climate policies are costing you $13 billion a year through higher electricity prices
  • Renewable subsidies and policies cause a net loss of jobs in the economy, as every subsidised “green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy.

Read the report:

Press Release: