ALMOST everything you’re told about Barack Obama’s “breakthrough” deal with China on global warming is a con.
But, God, listen to the spin.
President Obama told ecstatic students in Brisbane on Saturday that last week’s deal to limit carbon dioxide emissions would help save our Great Barrier Reef and “I want that there 50 years from now”.
Greens leader Christine Milne insisted it showed the Prime Minister Tony Abbott “is completely out of step with the rest of the world”.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said it recognised “human activity is already changing the world’s climate system”, and “we most certainly need to address climate change as the presidents of China and the United States have done”.
Red China was going green, agreed the warmist ABC, since “the most concrete target is to have 20 per cent of China’s energy produced from renewable sources by 2030”.
Hear all that?
Every claim is actually false, fake or overblown, as so often with the global warming scare.
Here are the five biggest falsehoods told about this “breakthrough”.
First, Labor is wrong: this deal proves nothing about global warming. In fact, there has still been no warming of the atmosphere for 16 years, contrary to almost every prediction.
Forget the excuse that the missing heat is hiding in the deep ocean. NASA researchers last month said a new study had found the “waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005”.
Nor, incidentally, have we seen the biennial bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef predicted in 1999 by Australian alarmist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Second, this is not a real deal.
China, already the world’s biggest emitter, is actually promising little more than what it always planned — to let emissions keep soaring until 2030 as it makes its people richer.
China will cap its emissions only in 2030 — the never-never — when its electricity supply is deployed and its population is set to plummet.
In exchange, Obama promises to cut US emissions by 26 per cent of 2005 levels by 2025.
But Obama’s term ends in two years and the Republicans who now control Congress say they’ll try to block his deal.
Republican Mitch McConnell, the new majority leader in the Senate, said he was “particularly distressed by the deal”, which “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years”.
And, to add to the phoniness, the deal is neither binding nor enforceable.
Third falsehood?
No, this deal doesn’t show the Abbott Government is out of step.
The Government’s own planned cuts to emissions — 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 — are not wildly behind the US ones over a similar time span.
If anyone is out of step it’s Labor, since China and the US plan to cut their emissions not with a Labor-style carbon tax but with Liberal-style direct action policies.
Fourth falsehood:
China did not promise to get 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources, as many journalists report.
The deal instead says that 20 per cent will come from “non-fossil fuels”, which in China’s case includes nuclear power.
Indeed, China plans to have at least five times more nuclear power by 2030, with Sun Qin, chairman of the China National Nuclear Corp, confirming earlier this year that “nuclear plants will play an important role in … raising the proportion of energy produced by non-fossil fuel”.
And the fifth falsehood?
The Greens and Labor don’t actually want us to follow the lead of the US and China at all.
Not when it comes to how those promises are meant to be delivered.
That’s because most of America’s cuts to emissions come from fracking, a technique that has given the US huge new supplies of natural gas, cheaper than coal and more greenhouse-friendly. But the Greens vehemently oppose fracking, and Labor wants it restricted.
As for China, it plans to have much of its non-fossil power supplied by nuclear plants and controversial dams like the massive Three Gorges project.
But, again, Labor and the Greens oppose nuclear power and fight new dams.
So without fracking, new dams or nuclear power, how could Australia possibly match the US and China?
How, given wind power is too unreliable and solar hideously expensive?
So what a con you’re being sold.
No, this isn’t a real deal.
Wait, China won’t cut emissions for another 16 years, and Congress will oppose Obama.
And reality check: Labor and the Greens actually oppose the technologies the US and China most rely upon to cut emissions.
Oh, and still the planet refuses to warm, for all Obama’s happy yammer.
