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.

Feel like the grocery and fuel bill has gone up? Working just as hard and feel like you’re going backwards?

It’s because you are. The major parties are the cause.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I speak to this matter of public importance—and it is a crucial and real matter of public importance. Well may a former assistant minister in the previous government debate the cost of living. This cost-of-living crisis now facing everyday Australian families and small businesses rests on the shoulders of both sides of this chamber. For more than two years, the Liberal and National government and the then Labor Party opposition were on a unity ticket to conjure money through electronic ledger entries and spend for short-term electoral benefit. They conjured up $500 billion and spent it on recurring government expenditure. These turned out to be handouts to Liberal, Labor and National party sponsors. Much of it went into corporate profits, not job support. Now we have runaway inflation. Who pays for the government’s mistakes, the Labor Party’s mistakes? The people, as always.

Let me be clear. It’s possible to conjure up money through electronic journal entries and not create inflation. It’s been done for centuries. In these cases, the spending must be on something that will grow the economy, grow our productive capacity and absorb the extra money—something like infrastructure. It’s impossible to get the tired old parties or the new climate mafia to talk about important infrastructure projects like the Bradfield Scheme, Copper String 2.0, Tully-Millstream hydro, Big Buffalo dam, the national rail circuit and the boomerang steel project, amongst other One Nation priorities. Meanwhile, the climate mafia are setting out to destroy our standard of living through many ill-conceived policies not based on science, contradicting the evidence.

Let me start with high electricity prices. Electricity prices are an input to business costs right through the production cycle, from the farmer running a cold room to the manufacturer running a factory to the wholesaler running a warehouse to supermarkets trying to keep their fridges cold and their lights on. When the cost of electricity rises, the cost of everything rises. Food, clothing, hardware, consumer goods, services, energy, and service sector examples such as optometrists, hairdressers, solicitors—pick a service, any service. All have electricity as a business expense. The cost of living is going up because the price of electricity is going up. Australian wholesale electricity prices are up 300 per cent in the last year. And what is the reason? It is unsustainable, unreliable wind and solar paying subsidies to billionaires in the Chinese Communist Party who are running these things. They’re the owners. The majority of large wind and solar complexes are owned by foreigners, including China and the Chinese Communist Party. Those who laugh are ignorant and condemned to suffer more.

This is combined with manipulation of the energy market by unscrupulous energy companies that should never have been allowed to buy important infrastructure. The National Electricity Market is actually a national electricity racket run by bureaucrats; it’s not a market at all.

The third element of higher electricity prices is the cost of transmission lines, poles and wires, to bring power from where the industrial solar and wind blight complexes are located to where the electricity is needed.

Our immigration rate affects prices. The more new Australians arrive, the more electricity, water, medical care and education they consume. These things are supply and demand. The more demand, the higher the price. Of course, governments can plan ahead and build out extra power generation, extra hospitals, extra dams and schools, but we don’t. Long-term planning in Australian politics means the next election, or nowadays, in the last decade or so, it means the next budget. This is no way to run a country. When One Nation talks about reducing immigration to net zero, we mean bringing in around 100,000 new arrivals each year to balance out the 100,000 who leave. Net zero is zero total immigration, easing the strain on infrastructure. This takes pressure off our economy, reducing demand and inflation, and making the essentials of life cheaper.

The climate mafia do not want to allow new dams and new electricity generation to be built, while at the same time wanting to bring in half the world as immigrants. Talk about inflation! You haven’t anything yet. Agriculture is under threat. A 43 per cent carbon dioxide reduction means culling livestock and shutting down cropping, returning that land to nature in a process called rewilding. What they call rewilding One Nation calls ‘starving people’. The less food that gets grown, the higher the price will be. One Nation will stop the madness and return Australia to good government.

We are one community, we are one nation.

I spoke this week on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Self-Employment Programs and Other Measures) Bill 2022. Bills like this are only bandaids.

The only way to really support small business and make the country flourish is to have cheap electricity and simple regulation, two things Australia is in desperate need of.

Transcript

As servants to the people of Queensland and Australia, One Nation stands for veterans and small business. But I want to address the root cause. This is a bandaid; it’s very necessary but it’s not addressing the root cause.

Senator Gallagher has stated that self-employment is ‘an excellent alternative to traditional employment for Australians who want to use their existing skills and experience in a work environment of their choice’. We agree. Yet Labor is really anti-self-employment and soon intends to stifle small business and self-employed Australians under gig laws that could strangle the sector. They devastated California, for example, and sent people interstate. There’s nowhere to go beyond the shores of this country if Labor gets its way.

I remember what Labor, the union bosses and some dishonest, disrespectful, antihuman multinational corporations did in the Hunter Valley. Labor joined them in enabling the exploitation and abuse of casual coalminers in the Hunter, and when I tried to stand up for them the Labor member of parliament for the Hunter at the time, Mr Joel Fitzgibbon, misrepresented me and the problems, apparently to hide the problems. That perpetuated the abuse of workers and the hurting of workers. Labor does not care about workers. Modern Labor cares about getting Green votes in the inner cities.

Everyday Australians are now suffering from 2½ years of COVID mismanagement, and it is ongoing. Labor wasn’t the federal government during that time, but Labor was in power in the states, and the states and the federal government worked together, hand in hand, to destroy the productive capacity of this country, not only over the last 2½ years but over the last 78 years, since 1944. Labor wants to phase out the coal industry and jobs in the coal sector and related sectors. The Labor-Greens coalition in the Senate is hell-bent on doing that. Labor is in favour of eroding our rights and freedoms and increasing rents, house prices, energy prices and debt. There is a lack of much-needed tax reform and economic reform. That needs to be comprehensive reform. As I said a minute ago, Australia’s productive capacity is being destroyed and has been in the process of being destroyed for 78 years.

In uncertain times, such as I’ve just described, much, much more needs to be done to support small business and the self-employed. Yes, we agree that starting a new enterprise or a self-employment assistance program is a help to some people, particularly hardworking vets who have earned the support, but they’re up against it in the form of the taxation system, energy prices, lack of infrastructure and capricious overregulation. All workers—not just vets—are suffering because the productive capacity of our beautiful country has been destroyed.

The economic environment has been destroyed. The government’s job is not to employ people. The government’s job is to create an environment that favours employment through people taking risks with investment and hiring workers. That’s where real jobs—sustainable jobs—come from. That’s known throughout civilisation. We must give Australians the opportunity to be free, to be their own boss and to own a business that offers them secure work and financial independence. They should be free to create, initiate and innovate, and that requires cheap energy. Labor, with its mates in the Labor-Greens coalition, are raising energy prices. We went from having the cheapest electricity sources in the world to having amongst the highest electricity prices in the world. It’s not due to resources and it’s not due to Mother Nature; it’s due entirely to mismanagement under the Liberal-Labor-Nats-Greens circus.

Not only do we need affordable, reliable and secure energy but also we need fair reward. That means we need a comprehensive reform of the tax system. Why are we letting multinational corporations off the hook, as we did with Robert Menzies’s bill in 1953 and Prime Minister Hawke’s legislation on the petroleum rent resource tax in the 1980s? Both sides have done it. Jim Killaly, the former deputy assistant commissioner of taxation in this country, who was responsible for large companies and international matters, said—and he said it in 1996 and in 2010—that 90 per cent of Australia’s large companies are foreign owned and, since 1953, have paid little or no company tax.

Meanwhile individuals in this country are paying exorbitant tax rates. The median income in this country now is $51,000. After tax, that’s around $45,000 or $46,000. The additional cost of Labor, Greens, Nationals and Liberals policy on energy—the additional cost of solar and wind subsidies and climate subsidies—is a staggering $1,300 per year. How the hell can someone earning $45,000 or $46,000 a year afford that additional cost? That’s not the cost of electricity; that’s an additional cost for solar and wind subsidies. We’re sending the country broke because of the people in this building lacking the courage to do what is right and tell the truth. Veterans need more support, and this bill is just not enough. When will Labor and the Greens do something about housing, rent, veteran suicide, agriculture, energy and inflation? Who will protect the economy and jobs? Who will create the economic environment that will enable people to invest, innovate, create and to be entrepreneurs? Who will do that? When will Labor and the Greens do something about this very issue? Who will restore the productive capacity of our country, the economic environment of our country? Labor and the Greens don’t understand.

In fact, while I enjoyed listening to Senator Allman-Payne yesterday, sharing her emotions freely, she was crying at the plight of the poor and then congratulating Senator Larissa Waters for her 12 years in the Senate when Senator Waters is directly responsible for raising the cost of electricity which is destroying the poor and raising prices through the roof in terms of inflation. That’s what’s going on: it’s complete ignorance. Contrary to that, we understand. One Nation understand the root causes and the solutions to the root causes of these problems. We are one people, we are one community and we are one magnificent country with enormous potential. We just need to become, again, one nation.

In the election campaign Anthony Albanese promised Australians he would cut power bills by $275 a year. Not only did he say he hoped to do that, he said he knew it would happen. Now he’s walking away from his election promise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Parliament is back. It’s time for Australian politicians to put Australia first.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, this is One Nation’s address in reply to the Governor-General’s opening speech for the 47th Parliament, a speech on behalf of his government. The reviews on social media were underwhelming. Everyday Australians struggling with cost of living were looking to the government for a real plan to bring inflation under control. None was forthcoming. No plan.

The truth is we have a new government that has a long list of sponsors that it needs to placate. Everyday Australians, sadly, are not on the government’s list. One Nation is ready with bold nation-building ideas to deliver breadwinner jobs, lower inflation, and energy security. So let me start where all good governments should start, with the people.

If everyday Australians today feel like they’re working harder and going backwards, it’s because people are.

This month’s Treasury financial data shows that the share of our GDP going to people, that’s wages and salaries, is at an all-time low. Yet the percentage going to corporate profits is at an all-time high. Over the last 30 years, education, healthcare, and housing have increased 300%, far outstripping wages growth.

Next, One Nation continues to pursue our commitment to workers’ rights across the course of this Parliament. Today we re-introduced our Fair Work Amendment Equal Pay for Equal Work Bill 2022. This bill ensures casuals on labour hire contracts in industries that do not have provision for casual employment receive the same pay as the full-time worker alongside doing the same job. Our bill covers black coal, airline crew, and stevedoring. In anticipation of any future exploitation of workers, the bill is worded to allow additional awards to be added.

Next, energy. It’s unbelievable that a nation as resource rich as Australia has plunged its people into an energy crisis. Our governments should be able to guarantee affordable and reliable energy, yet in 2022, state and federal governments are failing. I remind the Senate, Australia has enough coal and uranium reserves to last hundreds of years, yet we have the highest electricity prices in the world. The highest in the world.

We’re the world’s largest exporters of energy. Number one in gas, number two in coal.

Yet due to government subsidies for unreliable wind and solar, we have the world’s highest domestic prices of gas and electricity. Australian families bear the cost of the unreliable wind and solar fairytales with our living standards declining and electricity bills climbing.

The inefficiencies and consequences of unreliable and expensive wind and solar are breathtaking, devastating, and totally unchecked against reality. Small and medium businesses are struggling to keep the doors open in the face of frightening electricity bills causing supply chain inflation. Large corporations with dominant market power are able to simply pass on higher energy prices. Small businesses are not. Small business employs 4.7 million Australians who are struggling because their employers are struggling.

This government has signalled their intention to use unreliable wind and solar to lead an attack on the living standards of everyday Australians. Or more accurately, unreliable, unstable, unscientific electricity. Let me break it down for you. It’s simply impossible to build the volume of wind and solar and batteries needed to meet the 2030 deadline. Wind and solar constructed so far in Australia operate at just 23% of rated capacity because relying on nature’s variability gets you just 23%, not 100%.

To meet the Prime Minister’s 43% target,

for every one megawatt of reliable baseload coal power that’s shut down, Australia will need to build 4.3 megawatts of unreliable wind and solar power.

For example, replacing the 2,000-megawatt Liddell coal-fired power station will require 8,600 megawatts of wind or solar. Even this will only deliver power reliably if matched with a big battery having a similar capacity. Absurd.

To build the volume of unreliable wind and solar and batteries needed by 2030 is simply impossible. So the 2030 carbon dioxide reduction target of 43% is not a target for the construction of unreliable wind and solar electricity generation. We know that’s impossible. Rather, it’s a sneaky target for reducing electricity usage. In 2010, Australia’s electricity consumption was 213 terawatts. It’s already fallen in 2021 to 188 terawatts, 11% decrease, despite Australia’s population growing from 22 million to 26 million, almost a 24% increase.

At 10,071 kilowatt hours per capita, Australia ranks 14th in per capita electricity consumption. Now, it’s a legitimate argument to say that Australia should reduce our electricity consumption further only once the rest of the world reduces theirs. Anyway, why should we reduce electricity consumption? High prices are not an unintended or transitional outcome of unreliable energy. High prices are designed to deliberately reduce electricity consumption. That’s why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already abandoned his campaign promise to cut electricity bills.

That was never real. It was hollow tokenism. A deliberate lie. Parliamentarians, corporate leaders, and their media mouthpiece in protected ivory towers live in a parallel reality where cost of living price hikes like fuel and electricity are a mild inconvenience, not the bloody difference between eating dinner or staying warm that confronts many people in Australia today. Destroying baseload power with reckless abandon is hurting the people who must make the choice between food and warmth. Where’s the humanity in that? Where is the care?

The fairytale climate contradictions making electricity production dependent on nature’s variable wind and solar is a nightmare. There’s no happy ending.

Increasing numbers of businesses are failing, jobs are vanishing, families are being torn apart, and communities, especially regional centres, are being destroyed.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that there are currently 24,000 people directly employed in unreliable energy. To contend that these same unreliables will cause an increase in jobs of 600,000 is the lie of the century.

It will never happen. Indeed, the reverse will be true because studies overseas show that for every unreliable wind and solar job, there are 2.2 jobs lost in the real economy. They are facts. One only has to understand the inherent inefficiency of wind and solar and the low energy density to understand, and their high consumption of resources in being built. That is basic.

Baseload power, though, and jobs go hand in hand. The Prime Minister and the Labour Party, after nine years in opposition, have admitted they have no idea how to create jobs for everyday Australians. Instead, the Prime Minister will host a stage-managed talkfest on job creation. Why? Where’s his plan we heard so much about before the election? The Albanese plan is revealed to be a plan to ask other people what the plan should be. One Nation, though, does know how to create jobs. Get back to basics. Today, the biggest cost in manufacturing is electricity, not the cost of employing workers, not the labour cost. High energy prices have destroyed jobs, and with that, gutted workers’ power. And what drives wages? Supply and demand drives wages.

Australia has significant reserves of iron ore, bauxite, copper, and rare earths, yet we import our electronics, our whitegoods, our finished products made from these same materials.

If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was serious about job creation, he only needs to safeguard our baseload power through coal and nuclear.

That will bring down energy prices and supercharge our manufacturing sector.

A One Nation government will do that. Get back to proven, common-sense basics, fundamentals. Why has the Albanese government agreed to increase immigration when the Prime Minister has admitted to having no idea how to create the jobs for these people? High immigration without addressing jobs, housing, and energy sells out workers. It sells them short and creates disadvantaged groups. It’s that simple.

So let’s turn to infrastructure. An ambitious infrastructure programme will deliver the jobs growth needed to restore workers’ rights and restore secure employment. Real infrastructure, not the green fairytales that we hear from the government and the previous government. One Nation will advocate for: a national rail circuit; North West Queensland’s CopperString 2.0 high-voltage power transmission; the Tully-Millstream hydro project; Urannah Dam; the Bradfield Scheme conditional on the business case; and many more nation-building projects.

Let’s turn to the Reserve Bank. During COVID, the Reserve Bank admitted conjuring up $500 billion using electronic ledger entries called quantitative easing. The Reserve Bank’s words, electronic journal entries.

We now have, as a result, the highest inflation since the 1980s. Quantitative easing is undoubtedly related to the current spike in inflation. It’s driving it.

Money conjured out of thin air and spent on recurring expenses rather than nation building is inflationary. Both sides of this chamber took the decision to conjure so much money and spread it on economic, and spend it on economic sherbet.

Now we have the Albanese Labor Party, while in opposition, was complicit in this economic catastrophe, so they inherit the consequences of their complicity. But don’t point fingers across the chamber on this. Work together. If this Parliament gets it wrong, everyday Australians will suffer through inflation, or worse, stagflation, for decades.

And instead of working together to push Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum plan based on United Nations policies, work together instead for our country. Klaus Schwab’s life by subscription, quote, is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire globalist corporations will own everything, homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture, and everyday citizens will rent what they need if their social credit score allows.

The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. To pull off this evil plan, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum will need to take more than just material possessions from Australians. Senators in this very chamber today who support the Great Reset threaten our privacy, freedom, and dignity. Yes, they’re in this senate chamber.

One Nation vehemently opposes the Great Reset, the Digital Identity Bill, theft of agricultural land use forcing farmers off their land, and all of the Great Reset. One Nation has a comprehensive plan to bring our beautiful country back to sustainable prosperity. And in the months ahead, we will be rolling that plan out. Instead of Lib-Lab pushing Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset with the tagline, you will own nothing and be happy,

One Nation advocates the Great Resist.

We stand for a world where individuals and communities have primacy over predatory globalist billionaires and their quisling bureaucrats, politicians, and mouthpiece media. One Nation accepts the challenge to provide a better future for everyday Australians.

We have one flag, we are one community, and we are One Nation.

Alan Finkel is right when he says we are at a turning point in history. There are two paths for Australia to choose between. One leads to a country where manufacturing thrives and everyone, including the poor, enjoys better living standards on the back of affordable and reliable power. On the other, power prices continue to rise, and the stability of our grid is at risk.

With the highest amount of wind, solar and battery power feeding into the grid in history, Australia’s wholesale power prices have never been higher. All Australians are going to feel the brunt of these price increases. This is a primary cause of our current inflation and it will only get worse, as I have been warning for two years.

Despite net-zero rhetoric, there is an unavoidable truth. Wind and solar cannot solve high power prices and inflation.

Committing to net-zero means that  Government has signed a blank cheque to the wind, solar and battery industry whose only solution is more of the same power shortages and high prices.

For example, the closure of the Liddell coal fired power station will be a loss of 2000MW of dispatchable power.

With unreliable renewables operating on average at 23% of their rated capacity because wind and solar take days off, Australia will need hundreds of square kilometres of solar panels to replace Liddell.[1]

Those hundreds of square kilometres of panels, even running at full capacity, won’t guarantee power is being made when needed. Solar power peaks at midday, far away from the peak demand in the early morning and evening. Wind droughts lasting months have wreaked havoc in Europe.[2] Batteries cannot and won’t fix the gap.

The largest battery in Australia can supply 300MW for an hour and a half, a pittance compared to the 2000MW Liddell could produce.[3] That’s even before we consider that because of transmission and power conversion, battery storage might waste around 20% of the power we use to charge them.[4]

What does all this mean? Wind and solar subsidies force other, more reliable sources of power out of the market. Coal generators are forced into early retirement. Nuclear can’t even be investigated.

Wind and solar are inefficient and intermittent. There is less supply of electricity and it is more unreliable. That makes power more expensive and risky for businesses, employers and wage-earners.

Wind, solar and battery advocates claim that a ‘plan to transition the grid’ can solve all this. What is rarely said is that the plan to ditch coal could cost $320 billion, a cost that one way or another Australians will have to pay from their hip pocket.[5]

Australia is facing down the barrel of a cost of living and inflation crisis. We must abandon the ill-advised forced uptake of wind and solar that is going to keep making power bills more expensive.

Instead, we must stop demonizing coal and build coal fired power stations to cover our transition. Power companies must know that the government won’t force coal to go broke so they can freely invest to maintain their existing assets and build more.

Wherever possible we must build dams with hydro power and retro fit hydro. Snowy Hydro 2.0 has laid bare the false promises of pumped hydro.[6]

And finally, we must investigate nuclear power. Australia has had a nuclear reactor running in Lucas Heights, Sydney since 1958.[7] Australia’s ban on nuclear power is no longer fit for purpose. Everything must be on the table to be investigated if it means bringing Australia’s power bills down.

Although electricity from nuclear is typically more expensive than coal and hydro, in places such as South Australia with its massive uranium reserves and low thermal value coal, nuclear needs to be considered.

It may be years before some of these solutions take effect, but it will be even longer if we do not start them now. Decades of politicians making decisions for the next election instead of the next generation has left Australia with this cost of living and inflation crisis. We must act today with a vision for the future, rooted in reality and with the sole focus of making Australian living cheaper and easier while being environmentally responsible.


[1] For example, 1800Mw Liddell output at 90%, 10-30% capacity factor of solar, estimated 2-3ha (0.02-.03sqkm) per MW of solar power

[2] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135

[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/victorian-big-battery-australias-biggest-battery-storage-system-at-450mwh-is-online/#:~:text=The%20Victorian%20Big%20Battery%2C%20a,for%20the%20state%20of%20Victoria.

[4] https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1y&interval=1w Battery (Charging) vs. Battery (Discharging)

[5] https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/why-it-will-cost-320b-to-ditch-coal-in-three-maps-and-a-chart-20220608-p5as3t

[6] https://www.smh.com.au/national/five-years-on-snowy-2-0-emerges-as-a-10-billion-white-elephant-20220310-p5a3ge.html

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Flux_Australian_Reactor


All Australians should be free to choose the vehicle (diesel, petrol, electric or hybrid) that suits them without additional government costs. A government funded study has sounded the alarm bells about the government’s forced Electric Vehicle rollout.

From The Australian, ‘if Australians start buying electric vehicles in big numbers, the power grid will come under enormous stress, with EVs potentially increasing demand by between 30 and 100 per cent, according to recent trials conducted by Origin Energy.’[1]

“At the moment, our electricity grid is not coping at all. If we were to add another 30 per cent of peak load to the grid during those periods of high prices and constraints on the network, this would require significant investment to increase capacity,”[2]. That’s a friendly way to say the electricity grid will collapse without billions in upgrades which we can’t afford.

The solution being offered is deceptively friendly sounding ‘smart chargers’. They allow someone else to take over the charging cycle, deciding whether the vehicle charges or not at certain times.

In the trial, Origin gave users the ability to override the charging takeover, but do we believe the user will always be trusted with this override in times of peak demand?

All it would take is one flick of the switch and you are no longer able to charge your car as the government cites peak power demand or risk of blackouts.

This wouldn’t be a problem if we could trust the government to build adequate electricity infrastructure, but the blackout risks of the last few weeks have destroyed that trust.

Australians should be able to choose whatever car fits their budget and needs, electric, petrol, diesel or hybrid. The premature forcing of electric vehicles with subsidies, taxes and talk of banning petrol and diesel engines isn’t living in reality.

If you want an electric vehicle no one should get in the way, but if the artificial EV push continues from Government, Australians will suffer.


[1] Australian Renewable Energy Agency, ‘Origin Energy Electric Vehicles Smart Charging Trial Lessons Learnt 2’ May 2022 https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/origin-energy-electric-vehicles-smart-charging-trial-lessons-learnt-2/

[2] James Jennings, ‘EVs may soon threaten the security of the power grid’ 4 July 2022 The Australian https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/evs-may-soon-threaten-the-security-of-the-power-grid/news-story/f7e7539ed00f1cb70cb17420e59defb8

Part 1

Part 2

Alan Moran was the Director of the Deregulation Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs from 1996 until 2014.   He was previously a senior official in Australia’s Productivity Commission and Director of the Commonwealth’s Office of Regulation Review.  He has also played a leading role in the development of energy policy and competition policy review as the Deputy Secretary (Energy) in the Victorian Government.

He was educated in the UK and has a PhD in transport economics from the University of Liverpool and degrees from the University of Salford and the London School of Economics.

Alan has published extensively on regulatory issues, particularly focusing on environmental issues, housing, network industries, and electricity and gas market matters. He has also contributed Australian chapters in a series of books on world electricity markets, edited by Fereidoon Sioshansi.

Alan’s most recent book is “Climate Change: Treaties and Policies in the Trump Era” published in 2017.  He also assembled and contributed to a compendium Climate Change: the Facts published in 2015

Transcript

Part 1

Speaker 1:

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

Malcolm Roberts:

Well G’day, it’s Today’s News Talk Radio, tntradio.live. Thank you very much for having me as your guest, whether it’s in your lounge room, your kitchen, your shed, your car, or wherever you are right now. Thank you very much for listening. And I remind you before we get into our programme, we’ve got a wonderful programme again today.

Malcolm Roberts:

The two most important themes for all my programmes are freedom, specifically freedom versus control, the eternal human battle. And secondly, personal responsibility and integrity. Both freedom and responsibility and integrity are fundamental for human progress and for people’s livelihoods, and we’re going to be discussing them today.

Malcolm Roberts:

Did you just hear on the news that the Ukrainians have been asked to ignore their need for warmth? Australians are also being asked to ignore our need for warmth. We now face in a country that had the world’s most reliable electricity and the world’s cheapest electricity, we now face blackouts. The new term though sorry is demand management. There are so many politically correct terms being bandied around to hide the mismanagement and destruction of our electricity sector.

Malcolm Roberts:

Before going there, I want to share with everyone that I had two wonderful days in Brisbane in the last week. Thursday evening I met with and spoke at and listened to many doctors and health professionals at the Australian Medical Practitioners Society AMPS, A-M-P-S. The summit on Thursday evening was astounding. We had people from all over the world, literally experts, but we most importantly we had homegrown Aussie experts and they did a phenomenal job. It was an honour to be on the stage with them speaking, because what they want to do is to restore our health practitioners independence. They restore the doctor, patient relationship, restore informed consent, restore fair and objective oversight and accreditation.

Malcolm Roberts:

Then the next day, I had two wonderful meetings in my office, one after the other. Firstly, some of the doctors who spoke and these doctors, their courage is amazing. They’ve given up their jobs rather than get injected under mandates from state bodies. They’ve given up their jobs and some of them have had their jobs and livelihoods and professional careers, decades in the making ripped from their lives because they have dared to tell the truth when it comes to informing their patients about the injections and about the adverse effects.

Malcolm Roberts:

We learned about the adverse effects and there are millions of people threatened. So I had two meetings, one with the doctors and then with Senator Gerard Rennick who continues with us to restore health and restore safety for the people of Australia and restore fairness and good governance for the doctors and the health professionals, including the nurses. Ambulance workers were there. Paramedics were there. And we also had two very, very credentialed medical experts; one a retired doctor and the other, a retired former American doctor who’s been in Australia 30 years working with the TGA and he told us what was going on there. And it’s shocking.

Malcolm Roberts:

So there’ll be more about that in coming months. And then last night, my wife and I went to the AMPS, the Australian Medical Professional Society dance. It was really an opportunity for people to let their hair down and talk. And we had the same doctors there. We had many, many people from the public coming in and just appreciating what those doctors are doing. The courage of these men and women, the stress that they have been under, unfairly, dishonestly, inhumanely, and immorally as they try to protect their patients.

Malcolm Roberts:

I was blessed and honoured Thursday and Friday four times by these people. Thank you so much for what you are doing and we will back you. We will hound the people that have been hounding you. We will get them to stop and leave you alone and let you get on with truthful medicine to protect people’s lives to bring safety to people. There are enormous number of people with long COVID and even more, many, many more with severe, serious injection injuries, adverse effects, and we need to protect these people and we’ll be there helping them.

Malcolm Roberts:

But coming back to the topic of energy today, the primacy of energy at the moment, and I’ll ask my guess today to explain more about this, but there are strikes going on in Britain and parts of Europe because people are without their power or because they’re facing huge increases in energy costs, huge increases. And this is in the so-called third world. And these disastrous conditions, threatening conditions are due to neglect, dishonesty, deceit and our guest will explain that.

Malcolm Roberts:

Before we go on to discussing the primacy of energy, our whole standard of living today depends upon modern energy, reliable energy, affordable energy, stable energy, secure energy, environmentally responsible energy and energy price itself is not only significant for our standard of living, it’s a price multiplier because everything is affected by electricity, our raw materials, our agriculture, our food processing, our transport and our jobs. That’s why we’ve exported our jobs to China.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’ll be talking about the benefits to the environment of having affordable, reliable, secure, safe, and environmentally responsible energy. We’ll be talking if we have time about the absurdities that are going on with our so-called modern electricity sector, which is a return to being dependent on nature. Australia has gone from the lowest price electricity to the highest price, despite having the world’s largest gas exports and the second largest coal exports. We have abundant resources. We’re the number one exporters of energy, and yet we can’t keep the lights on at home and people can’t afford to use electricity. Now my guest is Dr. Alan Moran. He was the director of the deregulation unit at the Institute of Public Affairs from 1996 until 2014.

Malcolm Roberts:

He was previously a senior official in Australia’s productivity commission when it was really doing a very, very good job, and director of the Commonwealth’s Office of Regulation Review. He has played a leading role in the development of energy policy and competition policy review as a Deputy Secretary of Energy in the Victorian government, previous Victorian government I’m sure he’ll hasten to add. He was educated in the UK and has a PhD in transport economics from the University of Liverpool and degrees from the University of Salford and the London School of Economics. Alan has published extensively on regulatory issues, particularly focusing on environmental issues, housing, network industries, and electricity and gas market matters.

Malcolm Roberts:

This man knows energy. He knows government. He knows how the bureaucrats work. He has contributed Australian chapters in a series of books on world electricity markets edited by [inaudible 00:08:27]. Dr. Moran’s most recent book is Climate Change: Treaties and Policies in the Trump Era published in 2017. He assembled and contributed to a compendium climate change, the facts published in 2015. This man knows his stuff and he’s got a diverse background. Welcome Alan.

Alan Moran:

Hi Malcolm. Thank you for that intro.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well thank you for coming on TNTradio.live. Let’s start with something you appreciate, mate.

Alan Moran:

That I appreciate.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. Anything at all, just to get the heart and mind synchronised.

Alan Moran:

Well, I think I appreciate living in comfort and being able to turn on the television, being warm, going and playing tennis and having a hot shower afterwards. All of these things are a variation of what we all I think appreciate in the civilised world and what we’ve become accustomed to thinking is just the norm. But of course it wasn’t always the norm and may not be the norm in the future.

Malcolm Roberts:

What do you mean by that, it wasn’t the norm in the past? What would we rely upon for energy before our modern sources?

Alan Moran:

Yeah, well, we probably used per capita at least a hundred times as much energy as we used before, say the 15th century humans per capita. Really energy defines our abilities to enjoy life, our income levels and whatever else. If you think in terms of the development of humanity from out of Africa, et cetera, we basically became somewhat better off when we managed to get forms of energy in terms of harnessing oxen to plough fields, in terms of sales ships to trade, et cetera. And this was, I guess, the first start of rising above just the hunter gatherer stage into something which we would now call civilization. And of course, if we think in terms…

Alan Moran:

If we think in terms of the progression from that early civilization with oxen and sailboats, et cetera, it was quite slow until the 15th or 16th century. The oxens became horses and we bred them better. The sailboats became more sophisticated sailboat, which traversed the world. And all of that contributed to a basic increase in our living standards, not only contributed, without it, we couldn’t have had that increase in the living standards. And this is in the sort of prior to the modern era, which I guess would’ve started maybe in the 19th century and with the ability to harness bigger licks of energy, which meant coal, oil and gas, and allowed us then to move very quickly from harnessing oxen and horses and sailboats into an era where we were using oil and gas and diesel, both to power our homes and light our streets and cook our meals and to traverse the world.

Alan Moran:

A manyfold increase in our productivity resulted from this increased use and the development of energy which we now call fossil fuel energy and has become since then expanded into nuclear energy and hydro energy, but basically the modern forms of energy until we discovered or thought we discovered an ability to go back to wind with windmills and to sun with sun farms and, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later, has partly crippled and may well much more fully cripple our ability to enjoy those quite obvious and universal pleasures that we have as a result of our consumption of energy.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, it’s a very important point you make and I want to extend it. You say we released animals from being a burden on animals to produce our energy for us. And we all need to understand that what energy does when we get it from somewhere else other than their own body, what energy does is it leverages our productivity. It enables us to be more productive and therefore have an easier life. And I loved your term there, energy defines our ability to enjoy life. But it also increases our wealth. And many centuries ago, people would harness another man’s energy called slavery. People would harness animals, and now those animals and slaves fortunately have been liberated because we found other forms of energy, which are more moral and cleaner and much, much more effective and much higher productivity. And that’s why coal and oil and natural gas came in, correct?

Alan Moran:

That’s right. Yeah. And many, many times more efficient.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. And the other thing, Alan, is that nature is very variable in its production of energy, sources of energy. We used to have sailing ships, but they were unreliable. We used to have windmills, but they were unreliable. And so what the hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil and natural gas did was they made us independent of nature for our energy. And that’s extremely important, isn’t it? Because it enabled us to end the famines. It enabled us to minimise the impact of droughts, floods, not by changing the climate, but by adapting to it by using energy to make us more productive regardless of the climate. So that is extremely important for our wealth, for our ease of living, for our longevity. And the key point you’ve made is that that remarkable transition has occurred in 170 years, but has been due to hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, correct?

Alan Moran:

That’s right. And of course, without those assets that we now have developed, we would be back to a very primitive living standard and to ability on the vagaries of weather, we would see the sorts of things that mankind throughout most of his history has faced which is famines and droughts and mass near extinctions of people as a result of that weather dependency. The weather is something we talk about, we ramble about, but it was something which was so vital to living before we actually managed to harness it.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. And let’s talk about the fundamentals of energy so everyone understands it and sees where we’re going with our conversation. Correct me if I’m wrong, the fundamentals of energy are cost or affordability. That enables accessibility for everyone if it’s cheaper energy. The very important thing though is as energy prices decrease, productivity increases because we can spend more on energy. So it’s very important for productivity.

Malcolm Roberts:

And as we increase productivity, we increase prosperity. As we increase prosperity, we increase wealth, not just for a few, but for many because one of the things oil, coal and natural gas have done, have put slaves, mechanical slaves at our disposal for carting us around, for transporting our food, for refrigerating our food, for cooking our food, doing our dishes. So we’ve become much more productive and that’s gone down to ever lower income levels. So cost, affordability. Second one is reliability. Third one is security of supply. And the fourth is stability. And I’d add a fifth one there, and that is environmental responsibility. Any others you can think of and do you have any comments on those? Am I right?

Alan Moran:

No, I think you’re dead right. I think that’s all covers the gamut of energy, of what we mean by energy by its ability to enhance our human happiness and ability to live high standard of living. And indeed the great thing about the increase in energy supply is that it allowed what is sometimes called a trickle down effect, whereas gradually if we think in a modern economy today, there are very rich people, but there’s not very many very poor people. The energy that, or they may be very poor in terms of relative to, but compared to the historical poor, they’re immensely rich. And that’s largely because we have harnessed energy and we’ve technologically developed it and we’ve actually put it through wires to our homes, through pipes to our homes, et cetera, in factories.

Alan Moran:

And we’ve done so in ways that by and large have allowed it to become reliable, to be available when we want it, not when it becomes available. And that’s something which we may talk about later is the difference between energy developed by and controlled by humans, which is the fossil fuels, hydroelectricity and nuclear, and that which is not controlled by humans, but which is determined by nature. And which in the past, we made immense advances in harnessing nature in terms of animal power, in terms of shipping or sail ships, et cetera. But those advances were nothing like the ones that we’ve made in the last couple of centuries in terms of harnessing the fossil fuels and hydro and more recently nuclear.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’re on TNTradio.live. I’m Senator Malcolm Roberts. I’m the host. And I’ve got a wonderful guest on right now, an internationally accomplished economist, Dr. Alan Moran and we’re talking about energy. So we need to go to a break in a couple of minutes, Alan, so could you tell us why hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, what you call fossil fuels, it’s a term I refuse to use, but you can use it. Why are hydrocarbon fuels superior? Isn’t it because of the energy density, they provide high energy density?

Alan Moran:

Yeah, that’s in a nutshell what it means. There’s very low energy density with animal power, with human power, et cetera. And the denser the energy is, that is the more compact it is per the biggest bang per buck if you like it is then the better off we are. Now I’ve got to say the densest energy is nuclear, but nuclear is [inaudible 00:20:24] form of energy, but it’s not, certainly in Australia anyway, it’s not the cheapest form of energy because its density is such that it’s, well, it’s explosive, more explosive than other energy and therefore does require a great deal of sheltering from that to actually operate it. So nuclear, at least for the present is more expensive than other energies, which are less dense than the hydrocarbons and hydropower. But yeah, the energy density defines its cost, its basic cost.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you. And perhaps before we go to the break, I’ll just mention that you’ve raised an important point in that nuclear is even more dense than hydrocarbons coal, oil and natural gas, but it needs elaborate protection, which raises the cost. And fundamental to cost is the amount of resources going into produce the energy. So in a coal fired power station for the unit of energy that it produces, it’s on average $35, sorry, 35 tonnes of steel per unit of electricity produced.

Malcolm Roberts:

Alex Epstein has produced the figures in the states showing that wind, a wind turbine, requires a 546 tonnes of steel for the same amount of energy. Huge increase in resources, not only because it is a larger use of resources in developing wind power, but also much, much less energy comes out. So we’ve got very high cost of energy per unit of energy produced.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’re with Alan Moran and we’ve just established the superiority of hydrocarbon fuels and the benefits that they have blessed on humanity. We’ll have a quick ad break and then we’ll be back to listen to Alan Moran on what is happening to our energy sector.

Malcolm Roberts:

The voice of freedom is TNTradio.live. And we’ve been talking about a topic that I don’t think you’d hear about on the ABC, Alan or on channel 7, 9, 10, a topic that would be banned on many or downplayed or distorted and misrepresented many stations around the world.

Malcolm Roberts:

So let’s move to the replacements for hydrocarbon energy. Why are unreliable intermittents like solar and wind inherently inferior and fundamentally will never work because of their lower energy density and high resource consumption? Can you explain that to people?

Alan Moran:

Yeah. You start with the first base is you say, okay, well, the cost of the fuel inputs for solar and for wind is zero more or less. So basically the air’s free and the sun’s free. So building upon that, many then argue, “Well, this is the fuel of the future. It’s zero cost as an input.” But as you point out with quoting Epstein’s estimates on the amount of raw materials in harnessing that solar and wind, by the time you’ve actually produced it, it’s obviously far more than zero. But there’s been tremendous advances in terms of the ability to produce from wind and solar. It’s much more than halved over the past 20 years. And probably it will reduce a little bit further in the future, but it follows a kind of a trajectory of diminishing improvements in efficiency and it’s difficult to see major additional ones.

Alan Moran:

But if you look in terms of crude for Australia and other countries are slightly different, but for Australia, if you’re producing wind, by the time you put all the costs of capital involved and that’s from the wind generator, it might cost about 60 or $70 per megawatt hour. Solar would probably cost a bit more, about a hundred. But 60 or $70 isn’t that much more expensive than the cheapest form of sustainable power, which is with coal based, would be about the same amount.

Alan Moran:

So many people would draw off that and then say, “Well, this is obviously the future, and there’s no pollution involved” and we might want to talk about what pollution means here. And it’s going to get cheaper in the past. People have been saying that for 30 years since I’ve been involved in it, but the answer is that for some reason or another, it doesn’t quite cut the mustard that we have never come from a situation where these solar and wind resources are able to be produced and installed in any numbers without a subsidy.

Alan Moran:

And there’s a very good reason for that. Although you might be able to get wind at 60 or $70 per megawatt hour, which is fine, you get it A, from the factory, which is unlikely to be located in your backyard and B, you get it when the wind blows, not when you want it. So in order to actually bring that wind to factories, which produce goods to households which want heating and lighting, et cetera, you’ve got to spend a lot more money. And clearly one aspect of it is that, well, you’re only going to get the wind and solar when the suns shining and the winds blowing. So you’ve got to find out ways to, they call it firming that power by utilising other power to supplement it when it’s not available.

Malcolm Roberts:

So what you’re saying then is that with wind and solar, you still have to have other sources of power or storage devices. So that’s additional cost.

Alan Moran:

Right. Yeah. And not only that, but you talked about density before and because this is the less dense form of power, in other words, you think in terms of huge power stations, they pump out electricity and it then goes through the wires to the town and to the factories. This is far more dispersed as power. So there’s a lot more wires required. And I think this is graphically illustrated by the Labour parties policy in Australia, which is to say that they’re going to spend $20 billion of taxpayers money and another 70 billion or 60 billion in terms of private sector money to replace the grid. In other words, they call re-powering the future. So that grid today, the grid of tomorrow, which they envisioned would cost $80 billion. Now you can contrast that with the grid we have at present, which cost only $20 billion.

Alan Moran:

In other words, so you’re not only going to have this firming power, but you’re going to have a lot more poles and wires around the place to ensure it is delivered. And even then, you’re unlikely to ever have enough firming power to actually cope for situations where there are lengthy, what’s known as wind droughts. And these can go for weeks on end where there’s hardly any wind at all. And in that case you very quickly run out of any kind of [inaudible 00:28:56] that would be feasibly constructed batteries or pump hydro or whatever you quickly run out of that.

Alan Moran:

So you never get the degree of security. So it’s got the three strikes against it is A, you’ve got to firm it up. And that $50 very quickly becomes doubled or more, far more. And B, you’ve got to transport it to where people need it and that adds another 30 or 40%. So even before you started thinking about what the implications are for ensuring a hundred percent availability, which is what we have with fossil fuels and nuclear and hydro, you’re into a situation where the energy costs three or four times what it would cost under the previous systems or present systems of coal, oil, gas, et cetera.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s startling. So can you just answer and explain to me please and our listeners, you said that you have to get the power from the power generation at the solar panels or the wind turbines to the industrial areas, to the residential areas. You’d have to do the same with coal and nuclear and hydro. Why is it so much greater for solar and wind?

Alan Moran:

Yeah. If you’ve got a hydro or station, it’s compact. The energy is produced in a compact way. You just send it down a wire. Whereas if it’s from a wind farm, you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of turbines you’ve got to actually link together and push that power into where it’s needed into the households and into the factories where it’s needed. Hence the reason why the consultants who did the report for the Labour party in Australia came to the conclusion that you would need four times the amount of transmission that we need with the present system.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you. That’s a great explanation. And firming is just backup power for wind, solar and wind are unavailable due to nature’s variability. So that’s an additional cost that, excuse me, coal, hydro, and nuclear don’t face. There’s also the matter of stability isn’t there? There, I think it’s called synchronous power. Coal, hydro, and nuclear have synchronous power. They’re very, very stable. Whereas solar and wind are highly unstable because they’re asynchronous.

Alan Moran:

Right. So you have to spend a lot more money in terms of the grid in terms of capacity and various devices along the grid to actually allow the operations of this electricity without installing the whole system. It’s a bit like an air block in a peshel pipe in the car. You’ve got to prevent against that. And that does cost quite a lot of money and is an additional cost which you have to incur through a wind rich system, which is not there with the systems which are mechanical systems, a lot of heavy electricity and they continue churning along. Even if you stop the coal, they continue churn along. Whereas the wind farms, as soon as the wind stops blowing, they virtually stop straight away.

Alan Moran:

So you have this system where you’ve got to discontinuity, an immediate discontinuity, and you have to spend a lot more money in terms of either supplementing that and the modern way I suppose is batteries or adjusting the way it’s transmitted in the system to allow that continuity. Because of course, if you lose a continuity in [inaudible 00:32:51] a blackout and it’s quite a serious event to actually reconnect.

Malcolm Roberts:

Especially in some industries like aluminous melting and the whole thing is ruined.

Alan Moran:

Yes. Yeah. Aluminous melters have worked the way towards allowing cessations of power for some time, usually about an hour before they totally seize up. But aluminous melters could not survive more than an hour or so without constant power.

Malcolm Roberts:

Let’s just summarise quickly the various costs. Hydro, my understanding is hydro’s the cheapest.

Alan Moran:

It is the cheapest, but hydro typically only works for about quarter of the time. It’s not necessarily like that if you’re in a country like Norway, basically it’s a lot of water and not many people. So the hydro is operating for about maybe 80% of the time. But in Australia, even if we hadn’t stopped doing more hydro, hydro would never supply more than about 10% of our electricity.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. I accept the unreliability, except in areas where there’s constant rain and there aren’t many areas like that in Australia. We’ve got high rainfall areas, but they’re not necessarily constant. So places like Quebec in Canada, Norway like you said. So hydro in a pure sense is the cheapest by far, but it’s not always suitable. And in Australia it may not be reliable.

Malcolm Roberts:

The next cheapest, as I understand it, overall is coal. Then the next cheapest is nuclear. And it’s interesting by the way, they now classify hydro as renewable. And it seems to me that’s done to pump up the amount of renewables, give people confidence that they’re coming when they’re not. So hydro, coal, nuclear, and then a long way behind comes solar and wind. Is that correct?

Alan Moran:

Yeah, I think hydro is a special case, at least in any country other than say Norway and some degree in New Zealand as well, which you’ve got immense resources of hydro compared to the population. Hydro is only ever going to be used intermittently, but is controllable. So you’d only use it when for peak periods. Basically, that’s what it’s designed for. But in Australian terms, coal electricity would be 50, say $50 per megawatt hour when you’re going to quantify all this.

Alan Moran:

Gas, well, it depends on what the price of gas is, but when the gas price, before it took off like mad in the last few months, gas would be about $70. Now it would be three or $400. Nuclear is always difficult to place because my reading of it, nuclear would be rather more than that, more like $80, but the price could come down and we might talk about that a little bit later.

Alan Moran:

But yes, solar, firmed solar to the main grid, to the main demand nodes, you’re probably talking about 150 and wind about 120, 130, 140. And that’s before you actually start talking about some of the issues which you mentioned in terms of stability where they do cost a lot more management to actually offset their inherent disadvantages in terms of abilities to supply things which are called reactive power, for example. Inability to do that cost a lot more. So you’re talking again about that kind of hierarchy of costs. Now in terms of the future… Sorry, yeah.

Malcolm Roberts:

So just summarising there, Alan. Coal, about $50 per megawatt hour. Gas around about 70 if you take away the current blip, but if we return to gas prices they were several months ago, then $70 per megawatt hour. Nuclear may be around $80 per megawatt hour, many variables. Solar wind, when they’re firmed, then they’re $150 per megawatt hour, which is three times the price of coal. And plus, on top of that, stability factors for managing their instability. What about storage? If we wanted to go to complete solar or even 70% solar and wind, wouldn’t we need to have mammoth storage capacity?

Alan Moran:

Oh yeah. Many more times the Snowy 2 proposal, which of course is a proposal which proposes-

Malcolm Roberts:

We can talk about that. We can talk about that later.

Alan Moran:

Yeah. The amount of stories from batteries… See, it would not even be conceivable to do it through batteries in the present technologies. Batteries can perform quite a useful task in a wind rich and solar rich environment which we have right now, but it’s just basically for seconds, rather than hours. Even the most comprehensive battery system you would conceive of in Australia, which would cost billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, even that would only give you a few hours supply if you were doing without fossil fuels and hydro, well, with some limited hydro and batteries, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but that would only give you a buffer of about a couple of hours. So batteries aren’t a solution in the end for the so-called wind droughts, which can go for days.

Malcolm Roberts:

Right. And solar droughts that can go for days in the same way with heavy cloud cover. So not only is solar and wind three times the price of coal, it is highly unreliable and very insecure and very unstable. So what the hell are we doing?

Alan Moran:

Well, and this is the irony where some of the detractors of coal will say, “Oh, all the coal power stations broke down and that caused a problem.” The irony is that wind breaks down every minute. It sort of varies almost by the minute, certainly by the hour. And solar varies quite considerably during the day as a result of cloud cover and of course [inaudible 00:39:51] varies from possibly a hundred percent capacity factor to zero in the night times. So the reliability issue of the renewables is massively understated in terms of its dangers by its adherents.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, on TNT Radio, we are free to actually tell that truth because the only thing TNT Radio mandates is truth.

Alan Moran:

Right.

Malcolm Roberts:

So let’s go to an ad break. And when we come back, we’ll talk about the term pollution and we’ll talk about the cost so far to Australia and to Australians and families and businesses and jobs and employment of this mad swing to solar and wind. And we’ll talk about how much it will cost to continue to a hundred percent of world energy coming from solar and wind. It’s fundamentally impossible. We know that. But if we were to do it, it would cost a huge amount. So you’re on TNTradio.live with economist, internationally renowned economist, Dr. Alan Moran and this is Senator Malcolm Roberts. Stay right there, come right back in a minute or so and we’ll have more of this amazing economist telling us the truth about energy.

Malcolm Roberts:

Welcome back. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts with my guest, Dr. Alan Moran, internationally renowned economist. And we’re talking about energy, something that is really starting to come into people’s hearts and minds and lives and livelihoods these days. Alan, you raised the word pollution. Now in response, I would say two things. First of all, the word pollution comes to mean something like sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, particulates, toxins that impact life. Now, carbon dioxide is a trace gas essential for all life on this planet. And the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not affect climate. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not affected by humans. So carbon dioxide is in no way a pollutant. We do not control the level of it when we produce it at the levels we do produce, it’s nothing like a threat to us.

Malcolm Roberts:

In fact, the CSIRO’s climate science team when I’ve put them under a scrutiny under cross examination, they have admitted that they have never said that carbon dioxide from human activity is a danger and needs to be cut. They’ve never said it, yet politicians tell us it is. Politicians also say that this gas that they’re exhaling is supposed to be a pollutant. So koala bears are polluting our planet according to them. Am I on track with that definition of pollutant? Because the real pollution, the sulphur dioxides and nitrous oxides and particulates and others that used to come out of coal-fired power stations no longer do because they’re scrubbed out. We’re basically pollution free and all we’re producing from a coal-fired power station is water vapour and carbon dioxide, both essential for life on this planet. Am I right?

Alan Moran:

That’s right. We’ve sort of gone into new speak in terms of what is pollution. It used to be, as you say, carbon monoxide or sulphates or whatever, and it’s now shorthand, everybody says, “Oh, highly polluting fossil fuel stations.” Well, the only pollution, and it’s not pollution, of course, is you just said, it’s carbon dioxide emerging from them. And the levels of people saying that this is a dangerous pollution, well, it’s a trace gas, and we’re talking about 300 parts per million that is gone up to more than 400 parts per million, was a lower 300. It’s been-

Malcolm Roberts:

400 parts per million is just 0.04%. It’s 4/100 of 1%. It’s a trace gas because it’s bugger all of it.

Alan Moran:

Yeah. If there was like 10 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is now, you might start feeling a bit sleepy occasionally. Certainly that amounts people, some Mariners, for example, have that much carbon dioxide in their atmosphere and ships and appear operate, well, obviously operate successfully. It’s not a poison in that sense, in any conceivable amounts that it would reach or has reached in the past. The higher levels of carbon dioxide are associated with different climates.

Alan Moran:

Now whether the cause and the effects of this is debatable still. But it is argued that if carbon dioxide levels double in the atmosphere, which they may well do in the next a hundred years, that this will increase temperatures by about one degree Celsius and others then go on to argue that want to have a feedback of this through water vapour, then the temperatures could increase by more 2%, 3%, some even say 4% degrees. I’m talking Celsius.

Alan Moran:

All of which is said to be disadvantageous, although if you do the sums on that, you can’t really find any net disadvantage. And a lot of people would prefer to living in warmer climates than in colder climates, most people indeed. It is not a pollutant in that sense. The amount of additional carbon dioxide that could conceivably be put in the atmosphere is limited. And if there is a relationship between that and temperature, it’s a relationship that tails off with each increment until it becomes virtually zero.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, I know that professor Ian Plimer, wonderful geologist and award-winning geologist, an Australian who’s worked overseas, worked in many fields, knows his stuff, he said that when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, many millions of years ago, were five times what they are today. Instead of being 0.04%, they were 0.2%, that life flourished because carbon dioxide is a stimulant for life. It’s a fertiliser for plants and it’s essential for all animal and plant life on this planet. And the other thing, we don’t need to discuss this here because I’d like to move to another topic about carbon dioxide in regard to the environment, humans do not control the level. Some people have said, and I’ve cross-examined the CSIRO, they have never been able to provide me with any effect of carbon dioxide on climate.

Malcolm Roberts:

None at all. Not even temperature. None at all. And there isn’t any. But we’ve had an experiment twice now in recent years following the global financial crisis in 2008. 2009 was a major recession around the world because of the global financial crisis and there was less hydrocarbon fuel, coal, oil, natural gas used in 2009 then in 2008. And carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to increase, even though we had a massive cut in human production of carbon dioxide, which is what the UN wants and our governments want, but it had no impact on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Malcolm Roberts:

The next experiment was in 2020 when we had an almost depression around the world because of government COVID restrictions and the level of carbon dioxide produced by humans decreased dramatically due to reduced use of hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil and natural gas. And what happened to the level of carbon dioxide and atmosphere? Continued increasing. So we have no effect on that and that’s what the science shows as well. But there is another aspect and that is recycling. A coal fired power station lasts what, 50 years. A nuclear power station, I don’t know how long that lasts, perhaps you could explain. A dam lasts for many, many decades. Solar and wind installations last for about 10 to 15 years under current technology and then they can’t be recycled. Is that correct?

Alan Moran:

Yeah. More or less. Certainly coal power stations last a minimum 50 years. Some of them last much longer than that. I don’t know how long nuclear lasts because they’ve not been around that long, but certainly 50 years. And as you say, the best you could expect from wind and solar would be 30 years, but more likely far less than that, more likely 20 years. And yeah, there are issues because the raw materials in which their base can’t just be recycled or can’t be added onto, they’re totally different [inaudible 00:50:47] so you got to get rid of them and dump them. And there are a lot of suggestions, well, more than suggestions, there’s a knowledge that they’ve got highly toxic ingredients, which certainly need to be carefully treated to avoid getting into the water supply and polluting the land generally.

Alan Moran:

As you say, there’s no pollution from nuclear or fossil fuel plants or virtually no pollution at all. So yes, there are huge costs of actually eradicating the materials, which are longer used. And actually, unfortunately it is around the world is there are no bonds required of wind farm, solar farms.

Malcolm Roberts:

Good point.

Alan Moran:

Whereas, if you want to open a mine anyway, you’re paying a bond up front for electrification and certainly-

Malcolm Roberts:

So could you explain what that bond is?

Alan Moran:

The bond basically says… The authorities say, well, you built a mine, you built a power station, whatever else. And when it’s finished and whatever it is year’s time, you basically got to rectify the land so that people don’t fall down shafts or people that don’t live on what may be some toxic materials. You post a bond. Basically, it’s a requirement. Sometimes it’s a cash requirement, but it’s always enforceable on the power station or the mine. As far as I know, anywhere in the world, there are no bonds on wind farms or solar farms. There’s certainly none in Australia. And so basically we are coming to a situation where these facilities, many of them are 20 years old now, will be required to be removed and stored and dismantled. And it’s not quite clear how that will be covered-

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s being kind, not quite clear.

Alan Moran:

[inaudible 00:53:00] problem.

Malcolm Roberts:

I was just saying that’s being very kind. It’s not quite clear how they’ll be recovered and reclaimed. They’ve got no idea. And there’s no responsibility. As you said, when a mine owner clears some land, he or she must pay a bond to the government and they get the bond back if they reclaim the land and they’re supposed to reclaim the land. And that’s fair enough. But there’s no such bond for solar and wind, which gives them even more an unfair advantage. So there are many unfair advantages and yet, despite that, despite the fact that the society gives them a crutch, solar and wind now account for 2% of the world’s energy after decades and claims of price reductions. We’ve got 2%. And that’s cost us, I’ve forgotten the figures, but it’s many billions of dollars, Alan.

Alan Moran:

Yeah. Well, we know how much it’s costing us in Australia and Germany. I think we’re talking trillions of dollars there. It’s costing us somewhere north of $10 billion a year, we’re spending every year in terms of the subsidies for wind and solar. And we have more than 2%, it’s more like 15% of supply in Australia. But it’s a colossal cost, which isn’t present in hydrocarbons, which of course, as you pointed out, are not only cheaper as a result, but more reliable.

Malcolm Roberts:

Right. And we are coming to the top of the hour and we’ll be having a break for the news and some advertisements, then we’ll be coming right back. So stay right here because Alan Moran will be back. We’ll continue the talk about energy. We’ll talk about the moral case for hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil and natural gas and current policies. Because Dr. Moran, to give you an inclination, has done a comprehensive report on the cost of solar and wind. $13 billion a year additional costs. $1,300 for each family on average. $19 billion to the economy. And for every so-called solar and wind job, there are 2.3 jobs in the real economy that have been destroyed and lost.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’ll be right back after the news to hear more from this wonderful economist talking the facts and the truth accurately about something that is so important to human life, the primacy of energy.

Part 2

Speaker 1:

This is the Malcolm Roberts Show on today’s news talk radio, TNT.

Malcolm Roberts:

Welcome back. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts, and I’ve got my guest today, Dr. Alan Moran, an economist who specialises in understanding how governments waste money and what to do about stopping them from wasting money. And he’s a specialist on the cost of energy and the generation and supply of energy and its importance in society. Now, before the break, I mentioned four figures. The cost of subsidies and policies for solar and wind poses an additional $13 billion a year on the Australian economy. That’s the additional cost to our electricity sector, not the cost, the additional cost of solar and wind. That averages out at around $1,300 per household.

Malcolm Roberts:

Now, Australia’s median income, perhaps Alan will correct me, but Australia’s median income, I understand, is about $49,000 a year. Half the people in Australia earn more than 49,000. Half earn less than 49,000. After tax, what’s that? Around, say, 39,000, $40,000. $1,300 a year is one hell of an impost to put on people earning less than $49,000 a year. The subsidies on solar and wind are a highly regressive tax. The poor are the ones who pay proportionately more for this government largess. And who benefits? Billionaires, Chinese multinationals, other multinationals, because we’re subsidising them to destroy our power sector with subsidies from solar and wind.

Malcolm Roberts:

Third figure, the additional cost to the economy is $19 billion a year. And I’ll ask Alan to explain these in a minute. And for every wind or solar job supposedly created, there are 2.3 jobs in the real economy lost. Australia has the highest level of subsidies for solar and wind in the world. Everywhere, as solar and wind subsidies increased, the price of electricity has increased dramatically. We have gone from being the lowest priced electricity in the world to the highest price. And in addition, the United States is the second. I think that’s correct, isn’t it, Alan? The United States has the second highest level of subsidies, and they’re half Australia’s levels. So, we are going crazy in this country supporting something that costs three times the cost of a coal fired power station to produce electricity. Solar and wind is three times the price. What the hell is happening, Alan?

Alan Moran:

Well, I mean, you can estimate those numbers a different way, but they’re certainly of that order. The actual costs that I’d estimate, the tax, the direct tax effects of the subsidies, is about $7 billion a year, but that has an effect in boosting the cost of electricity considerably, and perhaps to the level of 19 billion that you mentioned there. But whatever that taxes level was, the $19 billion has being demonstrated now to be a massive underestimate, because that was at a time when it was boosting the price of electricity from, say, it’s underlying value of $60, that’s a ex-generator, to something of the order of $100 ex-generator.

Alan Moran:

Well, since April of this year, well, right now, it’s 300, even though the market seems to have recovered. In other words, it’s three times as much as it was not long ago. And when we were in the crisis and the market was suspended, it was 10 times as much. Now, so, there’s issues about the subsidy as such, which is bad enough. You can figure what that is. But essentially, it’s poisoning the whole of the energy market. And repercussions of that is that the price goes shooting through the roof as a result. And I mean, not only is it hardship for individuals, indeed, it’s almost certain that in the next few months that the average price of electricity to households will double. I mean, it’s just the pure arithmetic.

Malcolm Roberts:

What?

Alan Moran:

They will double. The pure arithmetic is that the generation component is now three or four times what it was at Christmas time. That will have to pass through. There is no other way of doing it. It’s basically, here is the cost to the retailer, essentially, and that cost gets passed on to the consumer. So, they will do. This has already happened in the UK. UK doubled in 1st of June of this year as a result of these same factors. It will increase there again by another 50% in September. So, not only do we have this high cost imposed through the subsidies, which we all pay, but the subsidies are driving out the lowest cost available generation, which in our case is coal, and raising the aggregate price of electricity to astronomical levels, which are a real burden on the household in just of themselves, but then that burden is passed along the lines through it being incorporated in the goods and services we buy as well. So, we-

Malcolm Roberts:

So, let me just understand that. So, what you’re saying is that by themselves, the subsidies for solar and wind dramatically increase the price of electricity. I get that. But there’s an additional factor, and that is that solar and wind destroy the investment in coal. So, coal pulls out, which, because it’s the cheapest form, further raises the price of electricity.

Alan Moran:

Right. Well, I mean, basically, we first saw this in 2017 in Australia, with the loss of two major power stations, one in South Australia and one in Victoria. We saw then the price of electricity ratchet up by double. That’s with the ex-generators, which is a third of the total cost to the household, if you like. But we saw that cost double. And it came down because of COVID when we stopped using as much electricity, but with the recovery from COVID, we’ve now seen the prices escalate through the roof. And the reason is quite simple, because we’ve got subsidised renewables, which operate… The marginal cost of them is zero, more or less. We know that the cost of them is high, but the government subsidise them and sank costs in there. So, they will always make themselves available whenever they’re available at zero cost.

Alan Moran:

And that plays havoc with the economics of coal and gas, to some degree, and certainly uranium as well. And it’s forcing these into unprofitability. And when they’re unprofitable, they close. And when they close, the price shoots up again. And so you have this zigzag ratchet effect of the price of electricity going up and up and up as the poison in the system, which is the renewables, takes out the more efficient fossil fuel or nuclear plants and raises costs. And that’s happened. The nuclear plants, of course, are being taken out in the US and even in France, which has other problems with its nuclear plant, but even in France, and certainly Germany where the Greens are now in control and are closing nuclear as fast as they’re closing coal, in fact, faster than they’re closing coal. So-

Malcolm Roberts:

Germany’s actually opening coal.

Alan Moran:

They’re opening some new coal now, so they’re resurrecting coal. Actually, the irony is we can’t do that because when we closed ours, the state premiers arranged for them to be dynamited, which was just the most-

Malcolm Roberts:

Yeah, crazy.

Alan Moran:

… criminal action you can imagine.

Malcolm Roberts:

Terrorism.

Alan Moran:

They’ll probably get away with it. But at least in Germany, being Germans, when they closed it on ideological grounds, they left the plant basically available to be resurrected. But yeah, so we’ve got these situations. It’s difficult to see the cost, the aggregate cost. I know there’s a McKinsey’s report came out recently saying, “Well, the cost of going net zero in Europe will be a 5% reduction in everyone’s incomes.” I mean, that seems much smaller than you would imagine given the fact, basically, that energy, as we’ve discussed, is so much a part of our ability to live comfortably and our ability to produce efficiently that if we are abolishing this low cost energy, which we’ve developed painstakingly over the last 100 years and replacing by a superior form of the wind that drove us until the middle of the 19th century, then we basically are going to be losing an awful lot more than that.

Alan Moran:

And we’ve got this malaise throughout the Western world. It’s hard to find a Western country which is bucking the trend. Certainly, President Trump’s America was at the time being, and certainly other countries are bucking it like India, like China, like Russia, like Indonesia. These countries basically pay lip service to the notions that the Western politically correct people require about the importance of renewables, but basically don’t know about it.

Speaker 4:

I’m learning how to choose the right audio apps for you.

Malcolm Roberts:

So, let’s have some idea of what it would cost to go 100% solar and wind. Because can you recall, I can’t recall it, the number of billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars that it has cost to get 2% of the world’s energy onto solar and wind? Do you know that figure?

Alan Moran:

Well, I think there’s a trillion dollar actually being mentioned, but that may have just been Europe. So, it’s probably a bit more than that. And the Germans have higher proportion of wind and solar than we do, a little bit higher anyway now. As you say, we have spent more per capita than anybody else. It’s difficult to know. It’s difficult to disaggregate what the taxes are because there are different local taxes and federal tax. It’s difficult enough in Australia for the work which you’ve cited before, where you’ve got to find out how much state governments are paying, how much federal governments are paying and that some of them aren’t. Obviously, they’re not just from the government budgets, they’re from the regulatory budgets. And the governments make it very difficult to actually estimate those sorts of numbers. Although, I’m sure they’re known internally how much they would be, they don’t publish them. They used to, actually. They used to publish back 15 years ago how much was being spent to assist renewables, but it became less fashionable once the cost became apparent.

Malcolm Roberts:

Oh, that was the other figure from that report too. Governments are telling us that the proportion of our electricity bill that we can attribute to solar and wind is just six and half percent. In fact, government’s own figures, state and federal, show it’s 39% of a power bill. So, we can lop off 40%, basically, off our power bill if we stop these stupid subsidies that are just killing our industry. So, let me tell everyone a story. This is a true story. Pauline Hanson, Senator Pauline Hanson, and I received phone calls from some farmers living in the valley of Neera Creek near Kilcoy, which is not far from Brisbane. And Neera Creek, the water flows into Brisbane River, which flows into Wivenhoe Dam, which is a storage for water that goes to two and a half million people in Southeastern Queensland, including all Brisbane people.

Malcolm Roberts:

Now, Neera Creek, we got the call because farmers there were upset that the Chinese appeared to be convincing the state government, the state Labour government, to convert the area into a solar complex. I won’t call it a solar farm because that’s a cute term. That’s why they’ve used it. Solar and wind pushers are using the term “farm.” It’s a solar industrial complex. Neera Valley, Neera Creek, has very good agricultural land, tillable land for crops in the valley floor. On the lower slopes, prime beef country. They wanted to build the biggest solar industrial complex in the Southern hemisphere and possibly the world. There’d be 10 kilometres of a hillside completely covered in solar panels.

Malcolm Roberts:

Now, think of the consequences. The farmers there know that in flooding, the solar panels in the lower parts of the valley would be seven metres underwater. We know that there are carcinogens coming off solar panels. I think it’s cadmium and two other toxins, and also lead. So, this water, and then this whole area is under threat from hail storms. And so what would happen is we would have these carcinogens going into Neera Creek, going into the Brisbane River, into Wivenhoe Dam and throughout Southeast Queensland, into drinking water. So, that’s the first impact. The second impact, sterilising wonderful land, increasing the erosion of top soil. The third aspect is that we users of electricity in Queensland would subsidise the Chinese. And I’ve got nothing against the Chinese. They’re savvy business people. We’re the mugs with voting the governments in that we’ve got. We would be subsidising the Chinese to instal these solar panels in Neera Valley.

Malcolm Roberts:

That would then raise the price of electricity in Queensland. That would then shut some manufacturing facilities. It would impact the livelihoods of many Australians. It even has stopped the pumping of water in agricultural land. So in a drought, there were some farmers in Central and Southern Queensland saying that they would not be planting fodder crops because of the price of pumping water due to electricity prices. Then it goes on. We take our coal, which is the best in the world, and we can’t burn it here because of the green policies, but we can export it to China. So it goes over land, then it goes over the sea thousands of kilometres, then over to China, then over land again to a power station in China. The Chinese use coal, and they produce nine times the amount of coal Australia produces. We produce 500 million. The Chinese produce 4.5 billion tonnes of coal a year, nine times what we produce.

Malcolm Roberts:

When they import our coal, they feed it into power stations and they produce coal reportedly at eight cents a kilowatt hour, and that’s what they sell it for. Australia sells it for 25 cents a kilowatt hour. So, the largest cost component of manufacturing used to be labour. It is now electricity because we’re using machines that use electricity instead of humans in manufacturing a lot. So, that means we are destroying our manufacturing sector and that goes to China. So, we dig up our coal and send it to China to make solar panels. We dig up our coal and send it to China to make wind turbines. They ship it back here. We pay them subsidies to do so. Then we pay some Chinese companies and other multinationals subsidies to run this, to destroy our energy sector. This is insane, Alan.

Alan Moran:

Yeah. And we’re seeing the results of this in terms of the closure of many parts of manufacturing, et cetera, and in terms of some of the costs of living which we’re seeing. The interesting thing we’re seeing in Australia at the present time, we had a wages case where the Commonwealth government advocated a 5% increase in wages. Fair enough, because prices have gone up. Well, why have prices gone up 5%? Well, they’ve gone up 5% because of the energy crisis which we’ve created, and that’s only the first instalment, 5%, by the way, which has resulted in these high costs.

Alan Moran:

There’s an interesting comparison of that with Europe, which has got lots of strikes. I think there’s a rail strike in the UK now, but lots of strikes breaking out in the EU and in the UK, because basically they’re facing a situation where the energy crisis has resulted in prices increasing at about 8%, whereas wages have only increased at 2%. Why have wages only increased at 2%? Well, because that’s all that can be afforded in terms of the productivity. The costs, and therefore the productivity of European industry, has dropped about 8% over the past year as a result of this energy crisis. And it will go down even further, as will ours. So, there’s an impasse occurring where politicians, populous politicians, and nothing wrong with politicians, as you know, but-

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, I disagree with you. There’s a lot wrong with the bastards.

Alan Moran:

But politicians say, “Well, it’s unfair. It’s unfair that people should be forced to actually have their living standards reduced.” But the fact of the matter is is that living standards depend on productivity. And if your productivity goes down, so do your living standards. It’s just a law of gravity which is not possible to counter in any sense. So, we have a situation where we have purposely reduced the living standards in Australia, and in other developed countries as well, by adopting inefficient forms of energy. As a result of the Ukraine crisis, this has come to a head. It’s not caused by the Ukraine crisis, by the way, but it brought it to a head because it actually highlighted the deficiencies that we have in the economies. It’s brought it to a head and therefore then we can see that we are less well off now.

Alan Moran:

As a result of that, people are unhappy. They don’t understand why we’re less well off. Politicians told them the new world, we’re in this energy transition towards renewable energy away from the old stuff, and it’ll be great for us all. Well, wait a minute. It’s not. We’re losing a lot of dough. We’re losing productivity. If we lose productivity, your wages have to go down. There’s no alternative. So, we are facing this sort of crisis right now. And one of the answers to this is, “Oh, right, well, we’ve got to power ahead with the renewables.” And that’s a refrain we’re seeing in Australia, in the US, and in Europe. Well, this is what’s caused the problem in the first place and yet we’re going to actually double down on this problem. Essentially, the renewables have caused us to lose a lot of productivity by… It’s replaced with high prices. And we’re actually going to do more of those. It’s just crazy. And we are going to see further living standard falls as a result.

Malcolm Roberts:

I love your forthrightness. There’s one other thing that we’ll mention before going to a break, and that is that this is immoral because what’s happening is that in the developed nations, the UN basically is discouraging the use of hydrocarbon fuels. That means people have to keep burning dung, which is a heavy pollutant and a health hazard, or do without electricity, or have very expensive solar and wind, which is basically doing without electricity because they’re so unreliable.

Malcolm Roberts:

So, this is stopping humans in undeveloped countries or third world countries from actually enjoying what we used to enjoy. This is inhuman. It goes against the environment. It is destruction. It is anti-civilization, anti-environment, anti-human, and it’s all fed by deceit. When we come back, we will talk further about these matters with Alan Moran and then get onto some solutions, because this man has got some solutions. So, we’ll be right back. Stay with us. Hear from us again in a minute.

Speaker 1:

Telling the truth is the only mandate we believe in. Today’s news talk radio, TNT.

Malcolm Roberts:

This is Senator Malcolm Roberts with outstanding, internationally renowned economist Dr. Alan Moran. We’re discussing something very important for human progress, and that is the price of energy. The advertisement we just heard said, “It’s criminal to waste energy.” Alan, I would suggest it’s also criminal to destroy energy, which is what’s going on. The biggest factor in the last 170 years of unparalleled, unprecedented human progress, material, health, longevity of life, ease, comfort, security, safety, the biggest factor driving that dramatic improvement in 170 years, we were scratching around in the dirt, having being subjected to nature’s vagaries, being subjected to famines, and in the last 170 years, we’ve basically become free of that, we have been liberated, we have enormous standard of living improvements, unprecedented, and that was due to the ever decreasing real prices of energy, because that increased productivity, as you so eloquently said, that increased our prosperity, increased wealth, as you said, for everyone. And now we are reversing that with criminal, dishonest, deceitful political policies. Is that correct?

Alan Moran:

Yeah, it is. The politicians, in some respects, are leading this, but in most respects, as often happens in politics, they’re following others. And there is an ideology which is being developed through the institutions and whatever, through education institutions, that coal is bad and wind is good and that wind is cheap. And your very good friend from CSIRO produced a lot of material which purports to prove this. And when you actually ask them then, “Do you now support then the emasculation and prevention of all subsidies for wind?” they sort of hum and haw and look at their feet, in fact. So, they obviously know that’s untrue, but they hope that in future, it might be true.

Alan Moran:

And then there’s a whole lot of people who gain from this because they’re wind farm developers or whatever else, and they want the subsidies as well. And so you’ve got a mass psychosis. If you look at the last election in Australia, you call yourselves the Freedom Parties, but the Freedom Parties probably only got about 12% of the vote. We’re talking about Senate here. The Liberal Party maybe supports half of them, maybe support that, Liberals and Nationals. But you can come to a situation where 70% of people voted for, in some cases, we have this phenomenon of the Teals and the Greens, voted for an intensification of the eradication of fossil fuels, of hydrocarbons.

Alan Moran:

So with the politicians, basically, most of them were just led by the nose. There are very few political leaders in the country, and obviously you’re one, who basically call it out. The rest of them just give back what people want. And we’re seeing then, as a result of that, these very high prices which have come to a head this half year. And people are saying, “Well, that’s only a blip. The prices are going to come down.” Well, they won’t. They’ll come down from the $15,000 a megawatt hour from the $50, $15,000 a megawatt hour until recently. And then they were controlled at 300. But since they’ve become uncontrolled the last day or so, the price has stayed at $200 a megawatt hour.

Alan Moran:

Well, why is that? Well, basically, because we’ve not been investing in power stations because governments haven’t allowed it. They haven’t allowed access to new coal resources for power stations. They certainly have encouraged the attack on fossil fuels, which has come through the environmental, social governance kind of rules within finance capital. They certainly haven’t protected mines from depredations from activists. And essentially what we’ve seen is a slow down and decline and a reduction in the capital base of these very efficient producers of energy with the cataclysmic consequences we’re now seeing.

Malcolm Roberts:

And let’s go back to something you said a minute ago, people who gain from this distortion, this criminal activity. It was reported that Peabody Energy company used to be, and I think it still is, the world’s largest public company producing coal. I mean, the Indian government may produce more. It’s a state owned industry there, horribly inefficient, but it produces more. And other organisations, state owned, may produce more. But Peabody was the largest public company, privately owned, if you like, non-government. When Obama was in power, as the president, the Democratic Party really put a lot of pressure on Obama to talk down coal, to really badmouth coal. And it’s said that George Soros owns the Democratic Party. It’s basically his little puppy. It does what he says.

Malcolm Roberts:

Obama dutifully talked down coal because he said it would be banned. Basically, it would be. And the Department of Energy in the United States came up with the policies to destroy the use of coal. Such was the talk that Peabody Energy company shares went from $1,100 to 15. That’s a 98% drop. Guess who bought significant chunk of Peabody shares? George Soros became a very large shareholder in Peabody Energy company. Why would George Soros do that? This is his standard practise. It’s been reported many times that he drives down through deceit the value of an industry. And he goes in invests heavily and waits for it to come back up again. The international energy agencies, other forecasts, show that there will be dramatic increases in the use of coal in future. China is trying to make massive increases in coal production. It’s already producing nine times what Australia produces. Indonesia, to our north, produces more, sorry, exports more coal than Australia does now. It’s the world’s leading exporter of coal.

Malcolm Roberts:

So, what we’re doing is we’re destroying the crucible of human progress, and we’ve turned parasitic malinvestments in solar and wind into the destroyers of our economy. The cost of electricity is now prohibitive and hurting families, and it’ll go up higher, Dr. Moran says. It’s destroying industry. Alan Moran has already said that. Manufacturing jobs are being exported. De-industrialization means no future for Australia and no industrial security, no defence security. We don’t make our own defence provisions. It’s destroying agriculture. And then on top of that, these dopey politicians are now saying, “We want to transfer our transport fleet of cars and trucks to electricity.” So, that will add even more demand to electricity. And as we go further into solar and wind, it will destroy… So, we’ll get less production of electricity. So, with less production and doubling of demand due to the conversion of our transport fleet, what will that do to prices?

Alan Moran:

Obviously, it’ll increase them more. I mean, you opened up by talking about Obama. And I think when he first got elected, he said something like, “Now is the time when the oceans stop rising, when the wildfires have ceased and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And he also said, “Look, I won’t stop anybody investing in coal, but if you do invest in coal, you’re an idiot because the policies I have in place will kill coal as we move to this brand new world of solar and wind.” And indeed, in the Present Biden government, Granholm, I think, the Energy Minister, is saying the same sort of thing still.

Alan Moran:

So yeah, I don’t know to what degree Soros is the instigator of all this. Certainly, there are many people who would make money out of it. And certainly, that issue of the collapse in price for coal as a result of government statements is true. And one of the things, an interesting figure coming through in the last few days, is just the level of investment in gas and oil over the past four years is now one third of what it was in 2015 when, if you like, the madness came to a head with the Paris Agreement now on allegedly seeking or seeking-

Malcolm Roberts:

True.

Alan Moran:

… reductions in emission levels, and therefore the abolition of coal to some gas and oil. So, all of these things are self-inflicted. Certainly, there’s issues in the developed world. Some of them have been harassed to actually reduce their own emissions through aid, et cetera. Others, who are smarter, and you mentioned Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam, these are just sailing forward, paying lip service to the politically correct people but then building new coal power stations and gas stations and nuclear stations too. So, the smarter heads in the third world are taking advantage of the market opportunities, if you like, caused by the developing world increasing, purposely increasing, its own costs and industries migrating there. China has about 55% of the world’s steel production, coming on for 50% of aluminium, et cetera. All of this is because basically they have adopted sensible power policies in a context when the West has been retreating from those.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. And we see the absurdity of now subsidising electric vehicles, again, with a very troubling high use of resources. Electric vehicles are so much more expensive than petrol or diesel powered vehicles, simply because of their extraordinary appetite for natural resources, expensive materials, expensive metals, exotic minerals, earth, rare earths. But we also see the environmental legacy of their batteries. So, we are going in entirely the wrong direction for the environment. We are going entirely in the wrong direction for productivity because we’re feeding parasitic malinvestments. I think that was a term you coined once, Dr. Moran, parasitic malinvestments. And the instigator, I wasn’t accusing George Soros of being the instigator of this rubbish, I lay the blame firmly at the hands of Maurice Strong from the United Nations. He died in 2015, just before the Paris Agreement was signed. But that man caused all of this.

Malcolm Roberts:

He’s the granddaddy of climate change, the false claims on climate. He was the granddaddy of centralising a lot of the bureaucracy based upon UN policies. That’s the man who did it. Soros and other billionaires are just taking advantage of it. And it’s significant again that it’s the people who are paying. The people who are paying with loss of jobs, exported to China, with increased costs for families, increased cost for small business. And who do they pay it to? Because of the wealth transfer, it gets paid to billionaires who are benefiting from subsidies. It gets paid to Chinese and other multinationals who are benefiting from subsidies. So, we’re wrecking our economy, and we’re paying others to do it. And we’ve got billionaires in Australia and overseas who are making money out of this. That is theft. It’s fraud, because they’re presenting something as it is not for personal gain. There is no need to do this, and yet they’re doing it. So, let’s get onto some solutions. Well, before we go onto the solutions, tell us about the national electricity market, please, Alan.

Alan Moran:

Well, it’s a market which is based on trying to incentivize. It was developed about 25 years ago now, and I had something to do with it in its early days. It’s essentially to say, well, why don’t we have a situation where we inject competition? We have lots of different generators. In those days there was no wind or solar, but there were probably 50, no, more than that, 70 generation units there. Why don’t we get these bidding in how much they’re prepared to give, at different price bands, and the market cleared? It’s just the same way as happens in every other market, aluminium markets, or cotton markets, grain markets, et cetera. And it worked very well. It brought a massive reduction in prices. Partly this was also because there was quite a degree of privatisation at that time, not so much in your state of Queensland, but elsewhere around Australia. And that replaced what were essentially union controlled plants with massive overmanning by shareholder controlled plants which sought to reduce costs and increase profitability.

Alan Moran:

So, we had a situation where it worked very well. The lights stayed on. Prices fluctuated quite strongly, as they’re supposed to fluctuate strongly, but then the retailers took out contracts for different licks of power to ensure that they had insurance against this. So, we saw a massive reduction in the cost of generation in Australia, about a 50% reduction as soon as the market came into operation. And shortly afterwards, of course, the madness started, first of all by John Howard, actually, introducing a renewable requirement, which was progressively jacked up by Rudd. And Tony Abbott tried to stop it. The previous government tried to stop it as well or did something to arrest it, but essentially it ploughed its way forward until we now have 15 or 20% of our supply by this exorbitantly subsidised inefficient renewable power which has undermined the national market.

Alan Moran:

So, what happened then when this came to a head, well, this half year is suddenly, nobody had been investing in coal and we’d been disinvesting in coal. There were no incentives to do so, and, in fact, every incentive not to do so. And so once we started getting back to a reasonable degree of normality post-COVID, the price shot up. And indeed, it shot up all over the world. The gas price, because state governments, with the exception of Queensland, haven’t allowed firms to go exploring for gas, so we’re short of gas as well. They’ve put all sorts of impediments into new coal plants, not only especially domestic, but even international coal plant. We had the experience of Adani mining coal in Australia, selling it to India. It took 10 years to actually get approvals and massive increases in costs required of them.

Alan Moran:

So we are, we’re sort of tying our hands behind our backs and trying to walk forward in that way. And the upshot of once a price bubble started rising globally, we were caught in it. We haven’t developed enough gas locally, so the price of gas went up. The irony, one irony amongst many, is the Victorian Energy Minister started demanding that Queensland gas be sent south to Victoria. Whereas, when the Victorians don’t commit to any gas development whatsoever and the Queensland gas is pretty well fully acquitted in terms of contracts for supply. So this is some of the craziness, some of the stupidity we have of the people who have been elected to parliament and are running the place. So, that’s the national market. There’s nothing wrong with it, nothing wrong with the concept of it, but it can get poisoned by subsidies on some sorts of fuel which affect others.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, yeah.

Alan Moran:

And people are now looking for ways out of that.

Malcolm Roberts:

Let’s have a debate one day on this, a discussion about the privatisation and about the markets for energy, because I’m a firm believer in competition, it’s excellent, and a firm believer in getting government out, but not where there’s a monopoly. And essentially in water supply, some transport corridors, and some transport facilities like ports, and also some energy sources and energy networks, they can only be one of them. They can’t duplicate them to have real competition. So, that means we’d be giving that to a monopoly. And then we know what happens in monopolies. But your point is, so putting that aside, I’ll just invite you back for a debate one day on that, or a discussion on that, Alan, I know your views are privatisation is good. My belief, and I’m not asking you to comment on this because we need to go to an ad break, and we’ll come back and deal with the solution, so you’ve got some solutions in mind, the national electricity market has been completely destroyed because politics and bureaucrats interfere.

Malcolm Roberts:

So, it’s no longer a market. It’s a racket. It’s a national electricity racket. And what we’ve seen is that government has become the agency for wealth transfer. Citizens of this country have been duped into transferring their wealth through subsidies to millionaires and billionaires in this country. And politicians have become wealth destroyers. Government should be the crucible, create the environment in which people create wealth. What the government’s policies are doing now is increasingly destroying wealth and transferring it to billionaires. So, this is Senator Malcolm Roberts. I’ve got a wonderful guest on with Alan Moran. We’ll be back to hear the solutions from Dr. Moran as to what’s needed to put our energy sector back on track.

Announcer:

This is today’s news talk and the voice of freedom, TNT Radio.

Malcolm Roberts:

Welcome back. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts, and my guest is Dr. Alan Moran, economist. Alan, what are the solutions? Over to you. I’ve handed you-

Alan Moran:

Well-

Malcolm Roberts:

… a hospital pass here.

Alan Moran:

… thanks very much. The solutions? I’ll tell you what aren’t the solutions first off. I mean, one has been highlighted, one possible solution is that we’ve got to double down on renewables. In fact, we heard this in the Australian newspaper. Rod Sims, who used to be head of the regulator, the ACCC in Australia, a corporate regulator, talking about, “We need a carbon tax.” I mean, basically, either he wasn’t aware that we do have a carbon tax, not a very efficient one, but it’s a tax on coal and gas, which is the corollary and the subsidies we give to the carbon-free wind and solar.

Alan Moran:

So, we have a carbon tax already. I don’t know how much he wanted that tax to be. He didn’t specify it, but certainly there’s some estimates of what a carbon tax would need to be to get to net zero, one from the New Zealand Productivity Commission which was something like of the order of 160, $170 per tonne of CO2, which would be a fivefold increase in the price for electricity. So, that’s one estimate of it. There are other estimates. They’re all around that same sort of level. So, carbon taxes are ridiculous. Basically, it’s pouring oil on the troubled waters.

Alan Moran:

Others have come around. A modern one is talking about, “Well, we need a capacity market.” So, we need a market which gives specific payment to coal and to gas and to water to be available when the sun isn’t shining. So, we give them a top-up in terms of their ability to earn income. Of course, that’s complicated straight away by socialist ministers, like the minister in Victoria saying, “Well, we’re not going to give that to coal or to gas or whatever.” So, it makes it absolutely ridiculous if you don’t give it to coal and gas.

Alan Moran:

But the other thing about a capacity market is another distortion. It is the regulator coming in saying how much capacity is needed, remunerating people that way. And we’ve got capacity markets around the world. UK’s got a capacity market. It hasn’t stopped half the retailers going bankrupt. It hasn’t stopped the price of electricity to the consumer doubling. So, I mean, you don’t need a capacity market. You basically need retailers to ensure that they have supplies available. And that’s the way our present market should operate and has been operating until it became unworkable once we subsidised so many renewables in there. So, that’s a couple of solutions.

Alan Moran:

Another one, oh, a great idea, lets ban exports of gas and of coal and redirect them to the domestic market. Well, that’s like saying to firms, “Well, you went and developed this productive capacity and you got some contracts from China and Japan and India or wherever else. Now we’re going to just stop you selling that and you’re going to have to sell it to the domestic market,” presumably at a cheaper price. Well, that’s a great way to go forward in terms of a sovereign risk placed on any investments and thereby undermining the investments, putting a greater premium on them.

Alan Moran:

So, the simple solutions don’t work like that. The only solution you can do is basically we have to get away from subsidising all power, all power or, in fact, almost everything. We have to get away with saying, “Those subsidies end now. End now.” But that is not going to be a quick fix because the subsidies have taken 15 years of subsidies before they actually undermined the market. And they won’t be wound down, or their detrimental effects won’t be wound down quickly. They will gradually be wound down. Say, if we stop all subsidies, then there will be no more renewables built. Believe me, there will be no renewables built if there are no subsidies.

Alan Moran:

We also have to pair that with certain aspects like forbidding firms to discriminate. We have a situation where banks and insurance companies will not give cover, will not give funding to selective sorts of investments in terms of coal, oil, and gas. And ironically, it reduces availability of investment to financial resources in China, of all places, and India, which makes it more difficult to actually maintain and to develop new capacities. But we have to then warn firms that they must not discriminate against certain sorts of legitimate customers, and we do that generally throughout the economy, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Alan Moran:

We have to ensure that we’ve stopped any planning, reverse planning decisions, which have made it very difficult to actually get stuff off the ground. I mentioned Adani had taken 10 years getting off the ground. Others are taking just as long. The gas developments in Queensland and Northern New South Wales are taking an awful long time. Because we have planning courts, which have been staffed by activists, and they hear advice from other activists who say, “If we develop more coal here, then it’ll add to global pollution of carbon dioxide. So, you’ve got to stop it,” and all that. That eventually gets quashed, but it all takes a long time to work its way through the courts. So, we have to stop doing that. We need political leadership above all. We need men and women who understand the politics, who understand the economics of this to start coming forward and saying, “This is just crazy. This is just crazy. We can’t do this. This is being caused by these actions. We’ve got to stop doing it.” And we need to actually reduce any other legislative barriers. We’ve mentioned nuclear.

Alan Moran:

I mean, I’m not sure how remunerative nuclear would be in Australia. Probably not very much at the moment. But we certainly ought to stop people from preventing nuclear developments. It’s just about the safest source of power. It’s been demonised by various adverse effects in Ukraine and difficulties that it sometimes does. But if you look at numbers of fatalities per units of energy, it’s massively less than coal, even, certainly less than hydroelectricity, all of which have faced disasters from time to time. So, these are the measures we’ve got to do to get back on track. We’ve got to actually get rid of all the regulations and encourage the most cheapest form and most reliable forms of electricity rather than discourage them.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, that’s a very comprehensive list. So, let me just go through them. What you’re basically saying is to start telling the truth, politicians start telling the truth. Stop policies that are pushing towards UN 2050 net zero, and put policies in place for our Australian nation. Stop subsidising solar and wind. Stop market distortions, and, for example, capacity markets. Stop the bureaucratic interference that has destroyed the national electricity market. Stop subsidising solar and wind. Stop subsidising electric vehicles. Ban discrimination of finance on political grounds. Reverse planning decisions that are impeding projects. What you’re really saying is get government the hell out of industry, decrease legislative burden, and remove regulations, restore our sovereignty, economic sovereignty, and find political leadership.

Malcolm Roberts:

And, Dr. Moran, that’s a wonderful list. I was very keen. I am sincere in saying, let’s have you back for a debate on privatisation, and I can see the benefits. But I would like to thank you very much for coming on today, being so frank and forthright, sharing your knowledge, sharing your experience with government. You know the evils of government. You know the need for some sensible regulation. We’ve got about 20 seconds. Is there anything you would like to say in terms of how people can contact you, or your books?

Alan Moran:

Well, my website is Regulation Economics. I’ve got a lot of material on there on-

Malcolm Roberts:

Regulationeconomics.com. Is it regulationeconomics.-

Alan Moran:

.com, yeah.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you very much, Alan.