By Andrew Bolt – Herald Sun

KEVIN Rudd’s global warming guru has finally – and reluctantly – exposed the con. Ignore everything the Government has told you.
The truth, conceded Professor Ross Garnaut last week, is that it really is cheaper for Australians to do nothing about global warming.

And, no, it’s not immoral to figure there’s no point spending big money to “stop” this warming when it won’t make a blind bit of difference.

No wonder the Rudd Government refuses to comment on Garnaut’s latest report, released on Friday. Much of the argument for its grand plan to make us slash emissions from 2010 has just been destroyed.

I guess it’s just hoping no journalists, most of whom are warming believers, will care to notice what Garnaut has just admitted through gritted teeth. As far as I can tell, only the Daily Telegraph’s Piers Akerman has drawn the unmistakable conclusions.

Let’s assume just for now that man’s carbon dioxide emissions really are heating the world. Let’s also assume that heating would be bad, and wouldn’t actually help crops grow. Let’s also ignore that the world has in fact cooled since 2002.

Even given all that, it’s bizarre to think Australia should lead the world in slashing emissions, losing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

What difference to the world could Australia make, when we pump out less than 1.5 per cent of all man’s greenhouse gases? Why make such sacrifices when giants such as China and India are stamping on the growth pedal, getting gassier by the week, and have vowed not to stop until they’re rich? It’s brainless, of course.

And to that argument, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has had one glib response: panic now or pay later.

Or as he put it on June 23, and again on June 26: “The economic cost of inaction on climate change is far greater than the economic cost of action.”

One government minister, from Treasurer Wayne Swan to Environment Minister Peter Garrett, after another repeated the mantra — that we must pay now or pay more later.

Here, for instance, is Climate Change Minister Penny Wong on June 24: “The economic costs of inaction are far greater than the costs of responsible action now.

But is all this actually true?

As Akerman has pointed out, Garnaut in his draft report in July calculated the cost if we did nothing about “climate change” and just adapted to whatever turned up.

The cost by 2020, he estimated then, would be a cut of 0.7 per cent in the GDP we’d normally expect.

Now compare that claimed cost with what we’d pay if we actually tried to stop global warming.

In his report last week, Garnaut says if we cut our emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, and the rest of the world somehow agreed to do likewise, our GDP would fall 1.6 per cent.

If we cut emissions by 10 per cent, we’d lose 1.1 per cent.

And if we simply adopted the weakest version of the Government’s planned emissions trading scheme, even without actually cutting gases, we’d still lose 0.9 per cent.

That is: doing nothing about global warming turns out to be cheaper than “doing something” every single time.

So Rudd is exactly wrong: the economic costs of action are far greater than the economic costs of inaction.

That’s according to Garnaut’s own reports, which, incidentally, point out that whatever happens, we’re still likely to be seven times richer in 2100 than we are today. That’s assuming that any reliance can be placed on his models, which haven’t been checked by anyone outside the loop.

Now before you dismiss Garnaut as just another evil sceptic, consider this. He’s actually the deepest believer in the theory that man is heating the world to hell. In fact, he even asked the City of Yarra Council for permission to build a steel roof on his home on the grounds that global warming would cause “severe and more frequent hailstorms”.

And, like so many devout believers in global warming, Garnaut skips over inconvenient truths — such as the fact that even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s four assessment reports admit that “decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne”.

So Garnaut is a believer and confirmed catastrophist, but even he is now wondering how sane it is to slash our emissions when we’re so irrelevant on our own.

He now recommends that the Rudd Government promise only to cut our emissions by 10 per cent by 2020, a target that has horrified the green movement and warming scientists. Greens leader Bob Brown in particular is apoplectic, saying cuts of at least 40 per cent are needed to save us from Armageddon.

Labor itself was thought to be toying with promising cuts of 20 per cent.

But now Garnaut says just 10 per cent is the most we can realistically hope to cut without sending jobs overseas for no real gain to the climate.

Yet even that (relatively) modest target comes with a catch. Garnaut says that if the rest of the world doesn’t promise at next year’s Copenhagen Conference to make some cuts of their own — even ones much less than ours — we shouldn’t even bother to cut our emissions by 10 per cent.

Just half that would do, and even that would be just to set an inspiring example to the rest of the world
that would “keep hopes alive of an international agreement, at reasonable cost”.
Yeah, right. Like China and India are just waiting for a cue from Australia.

Why is Garnaut’s concession so devastating to the Government?
Because he’s admitting that nothing we do on our own makes the slightest difference to the climate.

Whether we cut our emissions by 5 per cent or 100, if the rest of the world, China and India in particular, keep gassing on, then the Great Barrier Reef will still die, polar bears still drown and St Kilda Beach will move to Fitzroy.

So much for Rudd’s deceitful claim that, “if we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands”.

Rudd’s own climate guru doesn’t agree. And rightly so.
(Oh, and relax: all that doom will only happen if man’s gases are indeed frying the world, and even Garnaut admits “there is a large uncertainty” about that. He’s not wrong.)

And here’s the other damaging thing about Garnaut’s report. He’s suggesting it’s not immoral to balance gain against pain, and to work out whether cutting emissions is a price worth paying for what little it achieves.

Why, Garnaut is asking, must we add to our climate woes by cutting our economic throats as well?
A good question. And I’d go still further than Garnaut yet dares, even though his own figures say he should: Why try to stop global warming, when doing nothing is cheaper?

Indeed, why spend billions to stop a warming that in fact seems to have stopped already?