The main reason it’s unwise to believe the Greens is that they lie. As evidence, examine Greens’ policies and pronouncements for their tug on emotion to win supporters, rather than reliance on facts. Condemnation rains from an assumed position of moral superiority

Having won the war to raise awareness about caring for the planet, Greens have no plan for having attained success. Like any good idea taken too far, environmental activism has become extreme, dishonest and destructive. From chaining themselves to trees and blockading mining and development sites, inner city Greens have moved upmarket to pressuring banks, corporations and superannuation funds to prevent projects being financed, denying opportunities, jobs and taxes that fund essential services, even environmental services.

Invariably Greens’ policies capture the agenda on emotion, cranking up fear and concern: the world will end in (x) years from global warming; the Great Barrier Reef will be destroyed; Pacific Islands will be under water, dams will never fill again, frequency and intensity of cyclones and bushfires will increase due to global warming. All proven false!

At a basic level just how dishonest are the Greens was brought home to me while handing out how-to-vote flyers during a federal election. A schoolteacher, a Greens member standing in front of a wonderful poster of a turtle on the Great Barrier Reef, was denouncing the Adani mine because of the damage the mine would do to the GBR, as well as contribute to the global warming catastrophe.

People love turtles and don’t want to see them harmed. Seeking to do the right thing, they respond at an emotional level to what is presented as a moral, virtuous choice promising personal satisfaction and conspicuous virtue signalling by voting Green.

Green lies about the Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is a real global heart tugger. On a plane travelling from London to Rome I found myself allaying concerns of the scientist in the seat next to me. He had come from a conference where premature destruction of the GBR was a pre-eminent topic of discussion. The scientist had no idea of the scale or geography of the reef.

My hope was that the activist teacher handing out how-to-vote flyers was not in charge of geography or social studies. Factually, we know that geographically the Adani mine is 400km from the coast, with another 100km to the reef, which is kilometres wide in parts. Furthermore the 3,000 reefs stretch around 2,400km long, crossing many degrees of latitude and temperature, from Lady Elliot Island off Bundaberg in the south, to Torres Strait north of Australia, rendering claims of bleaching from “warming” irrelevant. Science shows amazing resilience of the reef to recover from cyclical bleaching events.

Nor does agricultural run-off have a major long term negative impact on the reef as Greens claimed for years, influencing agricultural policy. Professor Peter Ridd denounced previously touted claims demonising farmers for runoff. Farmers have bent over backwards to improve farming practices and foster riparian vegetation to slow farm impact on waterways. Ridd’s study found only 3% of inner reef was temporarily affected by runoff after flood events, and then only on the inner reefs. The Green Shirts movement of ethical farmers has begun to fight back against Greens’ lies to defend their right to produce.

Greens’ lies about Bushfires

Cyclically various parts of Australia are damaged by bushfires, which Greens now claim are increasing in frequency and intensity because mining fossil fuels for electricity hasn’t been shut down to prevent global warming. Never mind the facts that bushfires have been a part of Australian ecology forever.

Aborigines traditionally cool burned undergrowth to conserve their food sources, 183 arson charges have been issued in relation to the 2020 fires, punitive fines have prevented farmers from widening fire breaks to protect their properties and governments at all levels have failed to clear undergrowth in National Parks and state property in keeping with best practice recommendations of previous Royal Commissions into catastrophic fires.

As mentioned in an earlier blog Confidence of the hunt, two old blokes with 100 years forestry and bushfire management experience explained, forests here differ from northern hemisphere forests in that in Australia trees shed leaves and bark which build up. Drought dries out the fuel burden. Normal fuel build up is one ton per hectare per year. Double that and the fire risk rates four times higher; double again and it becomes 16 times, and so on. A fire in a 50 ton/hectare burden cannot be stopped. As the Aborigines before them knew, hazard reduction burns work.

Under normal bush fire conditions, a fire burns at 3 megawatts per metre. During Black Saturday, fires reached 70 mw/m.  Fire intensity of 100 mw/m and fuel loads have never been higher as a result of a 30 year build up. At that intensity, heat is so great it is impossible to withstand.

Greens claim to support hazard reduction and backburning to reduce the impact of bushfires, guided by scientific expertise. Yet under pressure from Greens, government regulation preventing any vegetation removal, combined with 183 arson charges, was far more damaging in the 2020 bushfires than fake claims of global warming.

Facts, even about an issue as relevant to Australia as the cause of bushfires, don’t fit the Greens’ emotional narrative. Their lies perpetuate.

Greens’ lies about renewables

At first glance, renewable energy seems like a good idea worth exploring and possibly introducing, ostensibly to replace fossil fuel generated reliable energy using coal or gas. Fossil fuels have been demonised as destroying the planet raising CO2 levels, causing global warming. Never mind that CO2 comprises less than 4% of the global atmosphere and is an essential plant food pumped into greenhouses to accelerate plant growth. Scary stuff if we care for our children’s future. Scary for children if they believe Greens pundits that they will fry and die all too soon. See them weep in the streets and dare us to action from global platforms! Strong moral and emotional motivation for taking up renewables!

Yet on any reasonable factual environmental or business analysis renewables fail:

• Inputs require extensive despised mining – hundreds of tons of concrete, steel, nickel and lithium for each windmill; materials for solar panels and batteries
• Relatively short life span: deteriorating in effectiveness after 10 years
• No known way of recycling materials once defunct; US$200k to dispose of just one windmill which must be buried in landfill.
• Extensive area for solar and wind farms destroys environmental aesthetics and ecology; causes inescapable noise pollution
• Uncompetitive without taxpayer subsidies, paid by disadvantaging the poorest people with higher energy prices
• Incur significant transmission loss at great expense because of long distance from remote locations to grid/use; uneven supply disrupts flow to the grid
•  Unreliable when sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow
• Increased energy prices for renewables have forced early retirement of reliable coal-fired power and manufacturing, at enormous cost to the country’s productive manufacturing and business base.

Forever chasing down the Greens’ CO2 induced global warming rabbit hole defies facts. The world is has warmed less than one degree since 1900, despite claims the science is settled and the Bureau of Meteorology fudging historical records to influence the narrative. Climate is always changing, largely dependent upon solar activity rather than the mere 3% of human induced CO2 (of 4%) essential plant food. What I learned from the Royal Tyrrell paleontological museum outside Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, was that we are in a late ice age. The museum holds marvellous dinosaur exhibits exposed as glaciers recede, having formerly covered all of northern America.

Industrialisation that brought hundreds of millions out of poverty and starvation using coal fired power, has responded by improving efficiencies with HELE plants’ lower emissions, now being built in countries around the world using our coal. Not here, though, because finance is not possible. Pious virtue signalling from government, spineless banks and investor groups refuse funding under ever threatening social media activists. Adani’s efforts to extend benefits of cheap energy to 300 million of India’s poor without electricity were stymied by delays over nine years from Queensland’s Labor government under Green law fare. Poor Indians dying from respiratory illness and COVID are no doubtful grateful to the Greens for holding back progress in their short, difficult lives.

Meantime scientific experts are questioning the warming claims: Chief Scientist Alan Finkel said no matter what we do it won’t make any difference; Professor Ian Plimar has written books on the falsehoods; former climate alarmist Michael Schellenberger has revised his position in a book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, in which he accuses climate activists of misleading the public and contends that policy solutions such as green energy are making matters worse. Former Obama physicist Steve Koonin’s book Unsettled debunks claims that surging sea levels are inundating the coasts, hurricanes and tornadoes are becoming fiercer and more frequent and climate change will be an economic disaster.

Greens’ lies about intentions

Despite their glossy rainforest and GBR posters, Australian Greens’ policy platform is no longer about environmental issues. Watermelon Greens have boarded the climate crisis gravy train of the global Great Reset and the Green New Deal. Red shines through. Aim is for a socialist utopia of cradle to grave care by big government funded by taxes on our 122 billionaires, “to turn around growing inequality and the climate crisis, to fight for our future”.

Greens’ push for a socialist agenda demonstrates a lack of understanding of history and business. In spite of grandiose Marxist promises, like the Greens’ fantasy, recent history shows great failures of Marxism costing the terror and death of 100 million people. Is that what you sign up for? Green folly compounds in pursuit of the unsustainable, unaffordable, unattainable (100% renewables) in response to the unprovable (human induced global warming).

Lack of business nous is evident in the absence of a lifecycle business case for ‘renewables’, including mining, manufacture, transport, establishment and maintenance, disposal, subsidies and opportunity cost. Wouldn’t pass muster in a small business application to the local bank, but seems justification for a global scam. We are left to wonder how global elites have captured the agenda and the gravy train of global funding redistribution, except, as in all socialist states, elites benefit grandly from the moralistic emotional coercion of Greens’ lies and manipulation.

Neither is there any understanding of business and capitalism in Greens’ fantastical “tax the billionaires” strategy, allegedly because the billionaires are heavily government subsidised and pay no tax. We know from experience that taxing billionaires in reality means taxing us all – in higher prices and subsidies for green initiatives. For people who have forever lived on the public teat, never risked all to start a business, never put their hand in their pocket to pay a worker, how could Greens possibly understand entrepreneurship, innovation and having a crack, as demonstrated daily by individuals starting business in a competitive environment?

Billionaires Kerry Stokes, Gina Rhinehart, Twiggy Forrest and Clive Palmer haven’t always had their own capitalist way: they have had to endure the vicissitudes of the marketplace to be where they are today. Fifteen years ago a guy started a business from a garage.  That business is now valued at $5billion. The company provides health services around the country and the world, leading in research and treatment, enhancing the lives of tens of thousands of people. In practical terms, what part of this person, business and ingenuity would the Greens clip in their objective of attaining equality? Think about it!

Telling the truth

One of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life relevant to the Greens’ policy positions, “Tell the truth – or, at least don’t lie”. Though difficult to attain, Peterson believes our lives benefit from being honest. At least we never have to look backwards. The Maturity Model described in my book Becoming specifically requires truth/facts as the basis for making sound decisions that we can live with. The alternative is fragmentation of individuals and groups at great social and financial cost.

It would be wise, therefore, to examine closely the policies of the Greens, who use misinformation and manipulation coercively to win support and influence on emotional and moral, rather than factual bases. No doubt you want to do the “right” thing, so be aware. On analysis, Greens’ policies have moved beyond environment to socialist objectives using the vehicle of orchestrated climate crisis.

Value your money and your vote. If, as the Greens claim, a change (of only) 828 votes is needed for Greens to hold balance of power, to be in a stronger position to kick the Liberals out, to tackle inequality and the climate change emergency, then it’s incumbent on us to look beyond the new environmental morality of Green gods to the facts of policy appeals.

We can do our bit environmentally and sensibly by following another of Jordan Peterson’s rules: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Dispose of rubbish promptly and appropriately; reuse and recycle; don’t waste; plant trees; reduce farting by pensioners and cows; don’t travel. Oh wait! COVID solved the last advice.

Otherwise bloated socialist bureaucracies will reach ever further into our lives to dictate where and how we can live, what we can eat, learn, say, think, do. Almost there!