Have you been “infected by this woke climate hysteria”? Would you like some reheated climate tropes to go with your anti-renewables populist rhetoric?
If your answer is yes, then the conservative activist group Advance Australia has a campaign for you.
Advance Australia is the group behind one of the most prominent campaigns asking Australians to vote no to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament in a referendum later this year. The group was accused of running a racist advert in a newspaper, forcing an apology from the publisher.
But for months, the same group has been running a campaign attacking and undermining policies to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
The campaign – dubbed “Not Zero” – is heavy on the rhetoric but light on facts, linking rising energy prices with policies to reach net zero without ever mentioning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that pushed up fossil fuel prices and electricity costs in Australia.
Instead, the campaign claims all sides of politics are “infected with this woke climate hysteria” and then offers a set of alternative “facts” that the “climate elites don’t want you to know”.
Lots of the “facts” are repurposed tropes, such as the assertion that Australia’s emissions are tiny when compared to China’s (they are, but Australia, like everyone else, has signed international agreements to cut emissions regardless of their size). The impacts of the climate crisis are never mentioned.
Alongside a dedicated website and social media posts, data from Facebook owner Meta’s ad library shows Advance Australia spent about $10,000 running a dozen different “Not Zero” adverts on Facebook and Instagram in February and March that were seen about a million times.
Clicking on links in the ads sent people to a petition page targeting Liberal leader Peter Dutton.
‘Net zero nonsense’
The Not Zero Facebook ads included images of various people in an assortment of grumpy poses – a mum carrying a child, a young woman filling up a car and several people gazing sorrowfully at a power bill – with the words: “Don’t let their net zero nonsense send you broke.”
Conservatives have been desperate to blame net zero policies on rising electricity prices, despite energy analysts saying the causes have been rising international gas and coal prices and the war in Ukraine.
Prof Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, said the transition to renewable energy would need “significant investment” but “even more would be required to sustain fossil fuel production”.
Renewables push prices down in the short term because the electricity costs little to produce, Mountain said.
The energy from the sun and wind are free for panels and turbines to collect, but coal and gas isn’t free for power plants.
“There seems to be little room to doubt that renewables firmed through storage is the cheapest alternative [to fossil fuel power] even if we ignored emission costs,” Mountain said.
Unpopular opinion
The campaign relies heavily on material produced by the right-wing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs – a group that has long promoted climate science denial.
One example is a campaign claim that “most Australians do not support net zero” – a claim based on an IPA-commissioned survey of 1,000 people described by polling expert Prof Murray Goot as “advocacy polling”.
Goot has told this column the questions in the IPA’s poll were written in a way that would “encourage responses favourable to the position adopted by the poll’s sponsor” and were presented in a way that would “encourage acquiescence”.”
“Polls that encourage responses favourable to a particular position in a debate cannot be considered to fairly represent public opinion,” Goot said.
A far larger poll of 15,000 Australians conducted by YouGov for the Australian Conservation Foundation found 70% of Australians thought reaching net zero by 2050 was either doing enough on climate change, or was “too little too late”.
A Lowy Institute poll says 89% of Australians think climate change is either a “critical” or “important” threat over the next decade.
Another Lowy poll says 56% of Australians believe global warming is a “serious and pressing problem” and the country should take significant steps now, even if it involved significant costs.
Dr Simon Bradshaw, director of research at the Climate Council, said: “Over the past decade in Australia, multiple, reputable, large national polls have explored the question of support for net zero and climate action. Consistently, this support has been in the majority.”
He described the campaign’s fact-sheet as a “ridiculous pamphlet that should’ve been printed in Comic Sans”, saying it was a collection of “well-debunked myths, cobbled together with a laundry list of fundamental scientific and economic inaccuracies”.
Not net zero
One of the stranger claims in the campaign is that Australia is “already at net zero” – an assertion from climate science denier and mining figure Prof Ian Plimer, who claims it has “never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming”.
The claim first surfaced in a column from Plimer in the Spectator and repeated by Plimer on Sky News but later debunked by several experts in a fact check by news agency Australian Associated Press.
Plimer’s argument is that if all the natural sinks of CO2 – such as trees, grasslands and coastal systems – were included in calculations, then Australia sequesters five times as much CO2 as it emits.
Except, international agreements on climate change – including net zero pledges – only include changes in the amount of CO2 emitted or sequestered that are caused by humans, such as chopping down trees or burning coal. This applies to all countries, not just Australia.
Dr Jamie Cleverley of James Cook University is director of a research network that examines how carbon moves in and out of landscapes.
She said Plimer’s claim that Australia absorbed five times more than it emitted was “misleading” and forgot to include how landscapes and forests also naturally emitted greenhouse gas.
Once this was included, she said, Australia’s ecosystems were roughly balanced between CO2 sequestered and emitted.
Land-based ecosystems likely sequestered only about a third of the carbon emitted by human activities, she said.
No difference?
The Not Zero campaign also quotes Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who has said if every country in the OECD went to net zero today, this would only shave 0.5C off global heating by 2100.
Lomborg compared the assumption that all OECD countries remained at net zero to a scenario (known as SSP2) that Carbon Brief has explained would deliver global heating of somewhere between 3.75C and more than 4C – a result that would probably deliver catastrophic impacts on societies around the globe.
But analysis of long-term commitments from all countries by Climate Action Tracker suggests these pledges should keep global heating to about 2C – well below the levels assumed in Lomborg’s analysis, but also likely disastrous.
A 0.5C reduction in heating might appear less dramatic in a world that warmed by 4C, but scientists have said the difference between 1.5C of global heating and 2C is significant. For example, the UN climate panel has said the Arctic Ocean would likely be ice-free one summer per century at 1.5C of warming, but once a decade under 2C. Almost all coral reefs are predicted to be lost at 2C, compared to a 70-90% loss at 1.5C.
China and India – both non-OECD countries – together make up about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions currently.
So what impact will rich countries in the OECD have if they cut their emissions?
Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, said if CO2 emissions were held constant from now until the end of the century, this would deliver an extra 1.1-1.8C of global heating “with the OECD responsible for about a third of this”.
“But countries have committed to reach net zero by about 2050,” Hare said. “This would reduce the warming from constant emissions by 0.9-1.4C. The OECD would have contributed to 0.3-0.5C of this reduction and non-OECD 0.6-1.1C.
“The OECD reaching net zero CO2 by 2050 would do about a third of the warming reduction from constant CO2 emissions, whereas its share of global GDP is just under 50%.”
