Translating deep thinking into common sense
Is Your Political Party Positioned for a Net Zero Collapse?
By Vinay Kolhatkar
June 4, 2025
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“Plato is my friend—Aristotle is my friend—but my greatest friend is truth.”
Editor’s Note: This piece is written from an Australian perspective, but the lessons are globally applicable.
The Net Zero accord is the result of the second-largest swindle of all time. It’s not a question of how, or if, but only of when it will collapse.
Collapse it must, because it is scientifically indefensible—in theory as well as in evidence. It will cause rising energy prices and diminishing reliability. The trend is discernible now. In the UK, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch has already declared Net Zero by 2050 as “impossible.” The US exited the Paris Accord in January 2025, as per President Trump’s campaign promise. President Javier Milei is considering an exit for Argentina. Indonesia, too, is deliberating a withdrawal. Last week, New Zealand abandoned Net Zero in a Trump-like turn toward “drill, baby, drill.” Earlier this year, Radio New Zealand announced that several NZ-based companies were “quietly” ditching their climate schemes.
This writer forecasts that somewhere around 2030, there could be a stampede for the exit doors. Why? The confluence of brownouts, blackouts, economics, and elections. The next UK general election should be in 2029, because Sir Keir Starmer would not dare to go early as UK polls gravitate toward the Reform Party, which has openly recognized the Net Zero creed’s claims as “garbage.”
It’s possible that there would be more conservative victories in Europe and elsewhere, and this will make the Australian Coalition finally take notice. In Australia, the two major political parties are the Labor Party (the Left) and the Coalition, which is an alliance between the Liberal Party (supposedly classical liberal, but increasingly less so) and the National Party (also increasingly inching toward the Left).
For now, though, the neo-Marxists have won. Gen Y and Gen Z were schooled in the upside-down world of a ‘scientific consensus’ manufactured by controlling research funds, prestige, money, and the threat of cancellation. In May 2022, Australia committed climate suicide with the surge of the “Teals.” In May 2025, the blackhole in which subsidies get sucked into, deepened.
Today, it seems like only two Coalition voices—Nationals senator Matt Canavan and Liberal senator Alex Antic—are openly against Net Zero. But even Canavan and Antic often understate the reality of a scientific racket. Yet a head-on confrontation of this hoax is now overdue.
Liberalism in the classical liberal sense is a value because it’s true that autonomous humans perform better and are happier.
Liberalism in the classical liberal sense is a value because it’s true that autonomous humans perform better and are happier. It’s true that autonomy is a source of energy and passion for us, the “rational animals.” This is why it’s true that economies that facilitate autonomy far outperform centrally planned socialist economies or the fascist economies which hide the government manipulation levers from public view.
That’s why for us freedom lovers, Newton (science) is our dear friend, Aristotle (philosophy) is our dearer friend, but truth is our dearest friend. The truth will out one day, but the Coalition is nowhere near able to say: “I told you so.” Many of them are still signing up to the climate alarm with a nuclear-power solution, and those that are not either fail pre-selection, or are silenced. Eventually they must choose between gagging themselves and losing, or, speaking truth to power and losing nevertheless, for now, but set the stage for a big win later. Now whittled to around half of Labor in the lower house it will take considerable courage to openly challenge the climate racket. Tony Abbott never did, not when he was prime minister. Even Donald Trump did not. They dog-whistled to a victory with slogans—”Scrap the Carbon Tax,” or “Drill, baby, drill.” Before the May 2022 federal election, we warned then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison to heed Liberal voters, over half of whom did not buy that climate change was caused by human activity, but he didn’t listen.
In no election campaign in Australia has the actual scientific argument (that fossil fuels do not have any significant effect on global warming, that the planet’s surface temperatures are not controllable anyway, that some warming is good for the planet, that we are in a millennia-long climate cycle controlled by our star, the Sun, that carbon dioxide concentrations were far higher in previous cycles and temperature rises precede CO2 rises) taken precedence over the economic argument (that serious economic damage results from a foolish Net Zero commitment. Very few dismiss the foundational claim like Reform UK leader Richard Tice did, or as Ted Cruz has. In April 2024, however, the libertarians said that global warming alarmism is a “scam,” in the federal by-election for Cook in NSW, Australia. Other outspoken voices also included Senator Malcolm Roberts (One Nation) and Senator Gerard Rennick (ex-Liberal).
Czech president Vaclav Klaus was the last president or prime minister (while in the role, whereas Tony Abbott only began truth-telling when he was no longer in parliament) to call the bluff. Klaus said this a decade and a half ago:
It seems to me that the widespread acceptance of the global warming dogma has become one of the main, most costly and most undemocratic public policy mistakes in generations. The previous one was communism.
–Vaclav Klaus, October 19, 2010 (Klaus was the president of the Czech Republic from March 2003 to March 2013.)
As petrophysicist Andy May explains:
Federal money allows unelected bureaucrats to control scientific research. They dictate the projects, and often the outcomes. They use selective leaks to the press to embarrass anyone who tries to interfere with their control. They trade in fear and relish it. Anyone who disagrees with them is suppressing “science.”
They also use an ignorant and compliant news media, to demonize privately funded scientific research as “corrupted” by “evil” corporations. Government research is “science” and privately funded research is corrupt. Using this narrative, they become the “truth,” and no contrary views are allowed.
The Obvious Solution
The perfect and easy solution, accessible to anyone with a rational mind, is to simply free the energy market. The ending of all subsidies will remove the unreliable wind and solar farms from the landscape. Removal of nuclear power bans in Australia will not be enough for genuine private-sector providers of nuclear energy to build new plants costing billions, at least not in the near term. But coal-fired generators can be refurbished quickly. For the foreseeable future, Australia will return to a national electricity market where 80-85% of power is supplied by burning brown and black coal, interim needs met by open-cycle gas turbines, and peak demand met by hydro- or jet-fuel-fired plants. Whatever that mix is, and whenever nuclear can finally make a dent in it, is nobody’s business to manage, especially not the government’s—a freed energy market will automatically gravitate toward the most cost-effective solution.
The perfect and easy solution, accessible to anyone with a rational mind, is to simply free the energy market.
It’s true that the Coalition’s voter base is diminishing. But if they wish to prevent one of the conservative minor parties from donning the mantle of Reform UK in Australia, their only hope is to attack the racket. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) cannot shut out the opposition no matter what they say without looking like a Labor lapdog. The ABC gladly shuts out single-digit minor parties from the discussion. The Overton Window is restricted. The rest of us try to widen it on social media, but only the Nationals and the Liberals in federal parliament have a voice on mainstream radio and television. They need to risk losing even more seats in May 2028. At some point, the tide will turn in favor of the actual scientific truth.
Only then can they say, “I told you so.” This may be in 2030 if we are lucky enough to have J.D. Vance or Ted Cruz or their likeness in the Oval Office then, and a Nigel Farage or his likeness at 10 Downing Street.
In fact, they have a choice as regards their entire agenda. Liberalism (classical) because it’s true. The unvarnished scientific truth because at stake is our country, nay, the whole of western civilization. It’s easier to stick to principles when power is lost anyway, to position oneself with the sails of factualism now, instead of being adrift with polls and focus-group winds.
Meanwhile, the dear reader may have wondered why I called the climate scam the second–largest swindle of all time. The longest-running and the largest ever racket is: “The Politically Correct but False Economics.”
This essay was first published by Spectator Australia and is reprinted with permission.
A Footnote About the Climate-Change Creed
Excerpted from “It’s Time to Confront the Climate Racket Head-On.”
The global-warming religion (popularly disguised in the meaningless phrase: ‘climate change’) is the creed that claims that:
(1) There is global warming (measured in surface temperatures of our planet) underway that will have catastrophic aftereffects such as rising sea levels that will submerge seaside towns and cities.
(2) Warming as little as two degrees centigrade is dangerous for humanity and some other species.
(3) That, contrary to all evidence, this warming is mostly caused by human, particularly industrial, activity.
(4) That the catastrophe is near-term, a mark that can be set permanently to about 10 years in the future no matter which year we are in (e.g., Al Gore’s 10-year catastrophe forecast was first set in 2006).
(5) It can be reversed by replacing fossil fuels in their entirety with solar and wind energy sources.
(6) Such a comprehensive replacement is feasible.
(7) To boot, such reversal is an expense that an economy can bear.
(8) Virtually any hurricane, flood, volcanic eruption, deaths of bats, excess rain, lack of rainfall, ice-cap melting, drought, excess snow, high temperatures, low temperatures, even increases in violence such as sexual assaults in any part of the globe, are offered as “concrete evidence” of climate change as if the planet never used to have any of those before WWII (note the switch of name to climate ‘change,’ a tactic that allows the creed to conveniently ignore decades of ‘pauses’ in global warming and to include any weather event. Among other myths, James Taylor notes that heat waves did not cause deaths of bats as alleged, but in fact, it’s wind power that kills half a million bats and millions of birds every year. Indeed, “extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and droughts have become less frequent and less severe as a result of the Earth’s recent modest warming,” says Taylor. Warmer weather also means less influenza and other infectious diseases.
(9) The climate creed even claims that the amazingly precise two degrees of ambient temperature rise will cause humans to commit more rapes and murders in tropical areas, based on statistical correlations found in Finland, where the average temperature is 5 degrees Celsius. Oh well, let’s just turn on the air conditioning. It will cool tempers down, too.
What Candace de Russy of NAS called climate scientology in 2009, now implicitly claims that unless we worship the Gaia gods by sacrificing fossil fuel-enabled civilization, the gods will wreak havoc on not just the planet but on our minds, too.
Note the following tactics of the creed:
(10) Only researchers who comply with the creed are to be given research funds for projects manufactured for furthering the same inferences, and
(11) Politicians, academics, bloggers, or public intellectuals who dare challenge the creed are immediately to be harassed by any means, including web-robot and media-driven multiple insults, denigration of their work, social and career ostracization, and disruption of their speaking events including by violent means. This will not cease until the outcast is exiled from the intellectual sphere.
About the Author: Vinay Kolhatkar
