Climate Alarmism Without Justification

The Albanese government has just released its First National Climate Risk Assessment Report. It is everything you might expect: page after page of dire predictions, speculative scenarios, and warnings of massive economic damage unless Australia acts swiftly and decisively against climate change.

The message is unmistakable — if the government does not take “serious action” to reduce emissions, the cost to the economy will be catastrophic. It is fear-mongering, plain and simple. The report is designed not to inform, but to soften the ground for the government’s upcoming release of its 2035 emission reduction targets.

But here’s the problem. Here’s the fallacy that cuts through the entire exercise.

Australia produces just 1.3% of the world’s emissions. That’s it. One point three. Even if Australia were to shut down tomorrow, wipe itself off the map, and send its population into the sea, the effect on the global climate would be negligible.

Which makes the government’s economic scare campaign utterly dishonest.

They imply that unless we act, we will suffer the costs of climate change. But whether Australia acts or not makes virtually no difference to the global climate. If China, India, the US, and other large emitters continue to grow their emissions, Australia’s sacrifice is meaningless.

And sacrifice is what it is. Every new emissions target means more cost, more subsidies, more restrictions, more distortion of the energy market, and more economic drag. Every dollar spent in the name of “mitigation” is a dollar that makes Australia poorer, without delivering any measurable benefit to the climate.

This is the central point the Albanese government never admits: there is no economic justification for emission mitigation in Australia because we cannot change the outcome. All we are doing is hobbling ourselves while the rest of the world carries on.

Sky News rightly described Labor’s climate policy con as the “biggest drag on the economy.” But the even greater con is that Australians are being told that our sacrifices will save us. They won’t.

This Climate Risk Assessment is just another political tool — a glossy report filled with scary scenarios to justify policies that will cost us dearly while achieving nothing.

It is fear without logic. Cost without benefit. Sacrifice without purpose.

And Australians should not be fooled.

Chris Kenny of Sky News covers these points in his own way in the following YouTube video, well worth a view.