Manufacturing reality in the fourth industrial revolution

The first three industrial revolutions, even the digital one, were mostly concerned with the process of transforming physical resources into things.

The fourth industrial revolution looks to be unshackling itself from the physical world altogether. Not only is there a growth in “bullshit” jobs, but there is a whole industry laundering bullshit from the crap that it is into “actionable” evidence.

Leading innovators in this field in Australia are the Australia Institute. Founded by Clive Hamilton it was originally modestly wrong, and tried conscientiously to argue factually for issues of concern to the left.

Under the leadership of Richard Denniss it has untethered itself from reality and ethics, and now shamelessly manufactures facts out of manure and thin air to justify the fantasies of left-wing policy makers.

Every year the institute puts out a media release claiming that the fossil fuel industries in Australia are subsidised to the tune of $X billion. Last year the figure was $11.6 Bn (the year before it was $10.3, but the figure varies, depending on what they invent).

This is cobbled together principally by misrepresenting the diesel rebate as a “subsidy”, and one which is apportioned entirely to the fossil fuel industry.

Fuel excise is meant to pay for road usage, and businesses which buy diesel for offroad use are not required to pay it. However, it is too difficult to differentiate between users at the pump, so the Commonwealth Government rebates the excise to the off-road users after sale.

That this is not a subsidy would be pretty clear if the government removed the excise and replaced it with a per kilometre usage charge instead.

And only a proportion of it goes to fossil fuel companies anyway, as the AI shows in its own documents.

The diesel rebate represented $8.072 Bn in the 2021/23 budget. The balance of $3.5 Bn approx. claimed by the Institute was made up of a series of howlers, including state-owned, and profitable, power stations, railways and ports.

They even included a federal government investment of $200 M in the Kurri Kurri gas-fired power station which it is being forced to build to provide firming for the flood of “renewables” being jammed into the system.

Once the BS has been turned into a product various retailers, like near-Teal independent Zali Steggall, “purchase” from the wholesaler and further refine it into memes on their Twitter feed claiming that “$22,000 every single minute” goes to “prop up the fossil fuel industry”.

Once upon a time there were competing manufacturers of fact, honest toilers like the Australian Productivity Commission, who could be relied upon to do solid research based on solid facts and, for example in this case, point out that the real level of subsidy is $365.1 M.

Alas, they were nominated in the Treasurer’s The Monthly exegesis for re-aligning from “rationalism” to something else.

There also used to be international voices of reason, but it appears that these are also being retooled. The latest is the International Energy Agency, a body which has been notable for its predictions that, for example, coal will be a substantial part of the energy mix until well-past 2040.

A recent headline semaphored that they have also been retooled for the new revolution: “Fossil fuel consumption subsidies globally rose above USD 1 trillion for the first time in 2022”

This shocked me. I was aware that some emerging economies subsidised fossil fuels to some extent, but why would it be so high when the prices of oil, gas and coal are currently leading to “super profits”?

Turns out the IEA is using the same manufacturing technique of reversing the normal meaning of words to produce a product useful to the ideologues. So they define anything which allows a consumer to pay less than the price of the fuel as a subsidy.

Price caps, which actually penalise the producer, are a subsidy, as are other mechanisms to stabilise prices or supply, like a reservation policy. As we fall deeper into the energy morass and Albanese and Bowen use pea and thimble tricks with government revenues to convince us that prices aren’t increasing, the headlines will grow wilder.

There has been a steady erosion of language used by governments of all stripes.

In the discussion about superannuation, for example, we are told that a lower tax rate is “concessional”, rather than it being appropriate.

It’s not a concession that we tax companies at a different rate to people, or capital gains at a different rate to income, it’s just the rate at which the tax is levied. Likewise a tax of 15% on compulsory savings is not a concession just because it is lower than some other tax.

The flip side of this is that a tax increase is represented as a “saving” to the government. No, a “saving” is when it spends less, not taxes more.

The fourth industrial revolution was on full display during the COVID crisis when organisations like Doherty and Grattan ran cover for inept, dishonest or corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. Numerical models are powerful “spinning Jennies” and “power looms” when you want to weave a difficult-to-rebut tapestry of doom and destruction. How many were going to catch COVID if we lifted lockdowns and mask mandates? 200,000?

Climate change was the industry, appropriately one that purports to measure hot air, that first developed the techniques to turn a scintilla of supposition into a mullock heap of “truth”, but COVID has pushed the bounds of what is possible much further out.

It helped to shape not just the manufacturers, but the distributors and enablers. Once it was only Google who tweaked its searches to conform to left-wing and official fantasies, but under COVID the range of co-opted search engines grew, and the control spread to social media as well.

I don’t think this fourth revolution can last, because I think reality is “real” and diverging from it is catastrophic in the long run, but along with JM Keynes, in the long run I may be dead.

Our current political ruling class is heavily invested in it on both sides. In the meantime, there is honour and cause in redefining one word at least - “Luddism” - and taking analytical sledge hammers to the wheels and cogs of the BS industry. It was the wrong thing for Ned Ludd to take on the first Industrial Revolution but it’s a sacred duty to take on the fourth.