You won’t be able to have a cremation because the ovens won’t be allowed to run on fossil fuels, and hospitals will be forced to shut for more than half the year because they have emitted too much CO2.
Are you terrified yet?
This is the vaguely comical and imagined world of Gina Rinehart, who wants people to think a George Orwell-style climate police state is just around the corner thanks to Australia’s decision to join more than 130 other countries in backing the need to get greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
The mining billionaire laid this all out in a column for the Herald Sun this week, as part of a News Corp series of bush summits her companies are sponsoring.
Rinehart’s article was stuffed with more straw men than a Wizard of Oz convention where the only cosplay allowed is the Scarecrow.
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Her argument – if you can call it that – is that Australia should have negotiated “carve-outs” for a whole range of industries under the Paris climate agreement and, because it didn’t, those industries will now be “forced” to either down tools or go electric to be able to operate.
Rinehart opened with a complaint that Australia had not negotiated a Paris “carve-out” for its defence industry emissions. But in fact, much of the reporting in the Paris agreement is voluntary, including emissions from warfare – and in any case, Australia does in fact exclude reporting of defence and security agency emissions in its 2030 target.
“Our hospitals, again no carve-out – nurses, doctors, technicians forced to acquire EVs to be able to see patients. Who really wants this?” she went on.
Perhaps the question should not be “who really wants this” but rather, who has ever suggested that anyone would be “forced” by climate policies to buy an electric vehicle?
The answer is absolutely nobody – except, perhaps, Australia’s richest person.
What else is going to happen in Rinehart’s alternative universe, where the imagined climate police are out to confiscate your tractor as soon as look at you? Here’s just a short list from her column.
Defence manufacturers would “be forced to close for much of the year at least”
The Royal Flying Doctor Service would not be able to collect any patients for eight months of the year “as we’ve exceeded our emissions permitted”
Cancer and maternity patients would be left to fend for themselves because “we have to close the hospitals for nine or 10 months of the year”
Funerals would be delayed because of something to do with refrigeration and “ovens” – honestly, you’ll have to work that one out for yourself
“It’s time for truth,” wrote Rinehart, signing off with not even a whiff of irony.
Big names
Other high-profile corporates sponsoring the summits include Woolworths, Optus, Commonwealth Bank and Qantas.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is due to give a keynote at one in Ballarat next Friday.
What’s really worrying farmers
Rinehart also delivered a speech for the opening of the first summit in Broome this week, promoted by The Australian newspaper.
“Many of our farmers and their families and farms are already suffering from net zero ideology,” she said. “They have more than enough to worry about with devastating droughts, floods, fires.”
After removing their heads from their desks, climate scientists will point out that the risks of worsening droughts, floods and fires can be laid at the door of rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Here’s one now.
“Fire risk has increased due to climate change with increased fire season length, number of fire danger days, intensity and area burnt and this will also worsen with further climate change,” says emeritus professor Mark Howden, of the Australian National University.
“Climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases is unequivocally increasing temperatures across Australia’s farming lands and across the southern half of the nation and is driving down growing seasonal rainfall and water availability.
“This has dragged back the productivity and profitability of broadacre farming by around 20% compared with what it would otherwise be. A huge climate-change hit already. And worse is on the way.”
Natalie Collard is the chief executive of Farmers for Climate Action – a group of more than 8,400 farmers and farming community members (the clue on what they want is in the name).
“I’m not aware of any country that is forcing anyone – let alone farmers – to change their combustion engines to EVs,” Collard pointed out.
The organisation surveyed more than 700 farmers and people working in related industries in 2023, and 92% said they had seen climate-related “on-farm impacts” in the last three years.
Collard said 55% of farmers had identified climate change as the biggest threat to the future of farming, with the next-highest threat being bureaucracy, and red tape coming in at 15%.
“We know farmers are on the frontlines of climate change and they are hurting the most,” she said.
Rinehart’s climate history
There are real concerns from farmers and environmentalists about the roll-out of renewable energy, and those concerns should be listened to.
But it is hard to see how imagined scare stories will help them negotiate the best outcomes for their future.
Some of the organised voices railing against renewable energy and net zero have a history of also rejecting the risks of climate change. Their wild fear-mongering on net zero can be seen as the other side of the climate denial coin.
Rinehart’s climate science-denialism is well known and long-standing.
In a 2021 video to students of her former girls’ school she described concerns over climate change as “propaganda”. In 2011, she wrote she was unconvinced that adding CO2 to the atmosphere could cause significant warming of the atmosphere.
Rinehart has poured millions of dollars into the Institute of Public Affairs – another outspoken critic of net zero that continues to promote fringe and contrarian views on climate change.
Her sponsorship of News Corp’s bush summits has given her a vehicle to continue her anti-science crusade.
Graham Readfearn is Guardian Australia’s environment and climate correspondent
