Who is denying what?

What they are really telling us about climate change, 'green friendly' mansions and carbon taxes

I believe in climate change. I have no doubt at all. It's inevitable. That's why they call me a denier.

You are called a denier if you don't accept uncritically the total package demanded by the climate gurus, who say that climate change is not inevitable. In their opinion it's anthropogenic and we can reverse it.

In the mid 90s I moved to the bush and built a house I designed to minimize my impact on the environment. I collect my own water, and I have a composting toilet, so nearly everything gets recycled. I have a 20,000 year plan to restore my small acreage to what it might have been before the miners and then the greenies reduced it to a rather infertile block of rock. I installed solar panels, with no government subsidy, and I'm not connected to the grid, so I get no government guaranteed return on my investment.

My green neighbour Bob (not his real name) reckons I'm an environmental rapist, because I actively manage my little block. In his opinion I should just let nature take its course, and thereby allow the land to revert to its natural state – a rainforest. It won't. From time to time I light a fire to reduce the fire hazard, although most of the time I clear by hand to emulate what the Aboriginal people used to achieve by fire. I thin out diseased trees and rough scrub, and the land is responding well, as I envisaged it. No longer does my soil wash down into the valley below with that of my green neighbours.

Still the greens like to tell me that what I'm doing wrong, even the girl with the 14 cats, which she has trained not to eat the local wildlife.

Bob, who is connected to the grid, took full advantage of the solar subsidies offered by the government. He reckons it's a terrific investment that will pay for itself in as little as two years. When I expressed my doubt that it will contribute in any way to reducing carbon 'pollution', he agreed. "But I'll feel a lot better about keeping my air-conditioning going all day in summer," he said.

I'm annoyed with his attitude, along with Al Gore and Cate Blanchett. Al can probably claim a lot of the credit for starting the whole thing, and he seems to use as much energy as a small country. But he pays money to a company I think he owns to plant a few trees to make up for it, and I'm sure he's got a few solar panels on some of his mansions.

Cate, the media tell us, lives in a 'green-friendly' mansion. I'm not sure how she salves her conscience over the amount of energy her lifestyle and mansion consume, but I'll bet she has a good story to tell.

But the message they are communicating is that it's OK to use as much energy as you like, as long as you pay for it, and it's even better if you can get someone else to pay. In so doing they are encouraging people like my neighbour. Not one word about actually significantly reducing the amount of energy we each use.

They say a carbon tax is needed. Perhaps such a tax might be justifiable if it would have a positive effect on reducing 'global warming', but it won't. In fact the reverse is probably true.

Here's the elephant in the room that Al, Cate and Bob are trying to ignore: millions of people in the Third World want some of the creature comforts now enjoyed by the "do as we say, not what we do" brigade, and their governments are going to try to satisfy their wishes. People in more fortunate parts of the world are not going to willingly give up any significant part of their comforts. There will be a massive increase in carbon emissions in the next few decades, and there is no way we are going to stop it.