Woodside’s 2050 aide-memoire: fake ‘net-zero’ is another scam for the political classes

This UN net-zero fallacy has swept the world

Education and wokeness, al-Gharbi observes, correlate with high-minded environmentalism:

Symbolic capitalists are among the primary beneficiaries of the environmental devastation they conspicuously condemn.

This irony lurked, at 2007 Australian National University S.T. Lee Lecture. A federal security-agency had me there, researching environmental fraud/crime.

Disciples flocked to hear Labor climate-guru Ross Garnaut, of today's Superpower Institute . Will Climate Change Bring an End to the Platinum Age, he mused.

Commending endless (Chinese) growth, riffing on EU emissions-trading, Ross could "remove" the growth-to-emissions nexus, his elixir being carbon-pricing within an emissions-budget.

Developed nations should be first-movers – blessed being Australia's mega "endowment" of carbon "capture" sites. Trading carbon-units, we'd calibrate carbon-prices to "optimally" deplete our multi-decades budget, an "independent" regulator sorting emissions-intensive industry. This needn't impose substantial "costs" on economy/households - only poor "climate" responses could undo Platinum Age.

More fool me – this malarkey was the good-old-days. Promulgated over 2016-18, climate-action for net-zero took carbon-narrative next level. Parlayed by self-described green lionesses into global UN gospel.

Proselytised by corporates, world religions, politicians, economists/scientists/planners, media and thinktanks, youth, universities/academics, net-zero unity-ticket swept the world. Then Coalition PM, woke Malcolm Turnbull, "committed" us to the new religion. Even among top scientists heresy's still rare.

Though UN Millennium (Sustainable) Development Goals or SDGs tick climate-boxes, do good works, they shirk the obvious link between booming population and environmental degradation. UN's feelgood alternative is "guilty" global-north compensating developing nations for climate loss and damage.

Ordinary Australians like renewables – but would like affordable-energy ahead of "net-zero". The latter implies, tech-advances can shrink human greenhouse-gas emissions, ratcheting up elusive carbon-captures. In utopia, this geoengineering can sequester as many emissions (B) as get pumped out (A).

A – B = 0? Though Earth's "natural" carbon-cycle is ten times human emissions, lands/seas only absorb half said emissions, writes US Climate.Gov. Forget about Albanese "netting" Woodside to zero, depleted Earth's trying to dent our thick-skulls, haul back on the overpopulation and ecological overshoot.