A humanitarian disaster in the Himalayas should be an occasion for sympathy, not politics. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux said he was saddened, but not surprised, that climate campaigners had seized on the Nepal avalanche as fresh justification for net zero, and he pushed back hard.
A Terrible, Natural Event
Jeremy began with the human toll. As the show recorded, he said, 43 Australians were still missing in the disaster across Nepal and Tibet, near the border with China, with the prospect of tens of thousands of casualties. Our thoughts are with you, he said.
But he was firm about what the tragedy was: a natural event. When nature decides to demonstrate how feeble mankind is, he said, she does, whether through a volcano, an earthquake, a hurricane, a tsunami, a bushfire or an avalanche. All humanity can do, in his view, is watch in awe and pick up the pieces.
Do Not Politicise A Disaster
What concerned Jeremy was the speed with which, he said, the climate warriors came out swinging, presenting the avalanche as somehow justifying net zero and, in his phrase, turning our lives upside down to save the world. That, he argued, is absolute rubbish.
To use a disaster in which dozens of Australians are missing as a debating point for climate policy struck him as both wrong and opportunistic. A natural catastrophe, he insisted, is not evidence for a policy; it is a reminder of nature’s indiscriminate power.
The Climate Always Changes
Jeremy restated his long-held view on the underlying science as he sees it. The climate is changing, he agreed, but it always has and always will; he could watch the seasons shift, he said, day by day through his own garage door. Change, in his telling, is normal and natural.
These people, he argued, cannot accept the simple facts of life, that the global climate has always been in flux. Treating ordinary, natural variation as an emergency requiring the upending of society was, to him, the core error of the net zero movement.
Australia’s Contribution Is Nothing
The heart of Jeremy’s economic argument was one he has made before. Australia’s contribution to global emissions, he said, is effectively nothing. We could turn everything off, every light, every power station, and it would make no measurable difference to the climate.
Yet the pursuit of net zero, he argued, threatens jobs, prosperity, living standards and the convenience of modern life, all for what he called a mantra or mania, backed by some $22 billion of taxpayers’ money to date. I resent it intensely, he said, simply because it is stupid. Sympathy for Nepal, in Jeremy’s view, should never be turned into a lever for a policy he regards as all cost and no benefit.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
