Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I have never seen a debate where there is so much hot air and so little science. I do not know why people do not actually sit down with scientists and go over this in detail. Madam Deputy Speaker, imagine that four of my Akubra hats are up on the ceiling and that the ceiling above us is a giant fluorescent light. Would those four Akubra hats stop this room from being illuminated? Clearly, they are going to have virtually no effect at all. But that is what you are saying. You are saying that 400 parts per million of carbon is going to reflect light back to earth. Let us have a look at the science of this. You have CO2 molecules floating around and you have photons—light—going upwards from the earth. The photons from the sun’s rays rebound and go back up again, and they hit the CO2 molecules.

A tiny bit of that energy is absorbed by the molecule, but basically the photon is deflected. It continues on to outer space. If you throw a rock at a boulder that is poking up, the rock will continue to go forward unless you actually hit the boulder right in the centre—otherwise, it will continue its forward momentum. It will not come back down to earth; it will continue in forward momentum. You do not have to be a scientist to work all of this out.

I am not a global warming sceptic; I am a global warming anti, as I have said on many occasions in this place. If you do not like that position, then for heaven’s sake argue the science of it in this place. This is where it needs to be argued. Having said that, we have a dramatic increase, and that is occurring at an increasing rate. We have an exponential growth here in the problem. So, whilst there is no global warming now—and I could not really see a serious problem arising for another century or two centuries, as far as global warming goes; and it is not the case in the oceans—if you increase the CO2 level of the atmosphere, you will increase the CO2 level in the oceans by exactly the same rate.

I scouted around and found out that Dr Katrina Fabricius at the Institute of Marine Science is one of the world’s renowned scientists in this field. I was told she is one of the top scientists in the world in this field—she is a very self-deprecating person and she denied that, but I think it may be true. We know the pH levels in the earth are seven—seven is neutral. Seawater is 8.1. It has a logarithmic change. A change of only 0.1 of a pH unit will result in a 30 per cent increase in hydrogen ions. They are ionic and I think they would be referred to as free radicals. Whilst I do not want to get too carried away with the science, if you have CO2 plus H2O you end up with H plus ions plus HCO3, moving on to CO3, CO2 minus, plus 2H plus.

What that means to a layman like me is that at this pH level there is a decreased number of CO3 ions because they have now become HCO3. No CO3 is available to form calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate comes from the shell of shellfish. A vast area of all ocean biodiversity is in fact shellfish. The food supply chain has at its very basis biovalves, if you like, which are shellfish. They cannot be seen by the naked eye. We can dig up eugaries under the bridge, but biovalves are very small particles—the same sort of thing but infinitely smaller. I asked: has any hard research been done? Dr Fabricius said yes. She pulled out a study, which I refer to the House: ‘Marine biocalcifiers exhibit mixed response to CO2 induced ocean acidification’. Justin Ries, Anne Cohen and Daniel McCorkle are the authors of the paper. It was in Geology, in December 2009. It is a very honest document in so far as five of the sea life that have been analysed do not show any negative response as a result of increasing carbon dioxide in the seawater, but, of the 18, the rest of them do. There is a very serious change in calcium carbonate growth as a result of the increasing carbon dioxide in the ocean.

What all that means is that we do have a problem that we may have to look at seriously in the immediate future. I think that every member of parliament in this place—even a person who may be described as being at one extreme of the debate—would say, and even I would say, that we need to take a bit of a pull on the reins. How would you do that? I had the privilege of being the mines and energy minister in the Queensland government. No greenie am I—I can assure you. I am just the opposite of a greenie and my government was an anti-greens government. We resolved to go to solar hot water systems in all of the government houses in Queensland. If we did that, over the next 10 years—and I think it was more likely to be over the next six or seven years—we would not have to build a 1,000-megawatt power station, which was about one-fifth of our generating capacity in Queensland at that stage. So what I was doing was saving the taxpayers of Queensland $1,000 million.

You might well ask: ‘Hold on a minute. You’ve got the cost of the solar hot water systems.’ They were government houses. If you added the rent and the electricity charges together, we would increase the rent to pay for the solar hot water system and of course the electricity costs would come down. The net result would be a reduction in the cost to the householder. This may sound like magic but it was no magic. We were a very hard-nosed government that could add up—almost all of us were people from private business; some of us made a lot of money and some of us had lost a lot of money as well as having made a lot of money. We knew what it was like to make an economic decision. The economic decision was taken that we would move to solar hot water systems. Very regretfully, we lost government the next year and the scheme was abandoned by the incoming Labor government—the people who come in here and preach to us about how we should be saving the planet! A CSIRO gentleman—I think it was Dr Sacher; I may stand corrected on that—got a lot of publicity for saying that the government proposal will not work. The government proposal being put up here simply will not work. It will not work because you cannot avoid being honest at some stage in government.

The government is being honest and says it will have to let them plant trees. I for one am desperately opposed to massive monoculture. On the scale that we are talking about here, literally millions of hectares would be required. That is what is going to happen. Madam Deputy Speaker Saffin, your area and my area are suffering as a result of tree plantations. We are losing jobs left, right and centre because of the managed investment schemes which the last government failed to control and the current government is failing to control. An awful lot of these investors are simply looking for a way not to meet their tax burden and they are putting their money into trees. To give you some idea of what is going to happen, thousands of acres were wiped out in Ingham in the last flood. People do not understand that trees take a hell of a lot of looking after. The environments in which they are being planted, where you can have millions of hectares, are not naturally kind to trees. Trees will grow there but at a very, very restricted rate of growth, unless you can apply some irrigation to them. We planted a million trees in the most wonderful tree-friendly regime in the world in Far North Queensland during the Greening Australia campaign and I am reliably informed that only 28,000 of those trees are left.

What will happen here is that you will see the Macquarie Banks and the Goldman Sachs and all of those people growing wealthy through buying and selling securities out there, because the new security will be the carbon credits that you will buy and sell. They will be a tradeable commodity worth thousands of millions of dollars, and these people will get hundreds of millions of dollars, if not thousands of millions of dollars, for trading these securities backwards and forwards. If there is something that we are absolutely notorious for in this country, it is gambling. It comes from the fact that almost all of our forebears who were here before the Second World War and all the miners before the Boer War came out during the gold rushes. There is no doubt that built into our culture is a bit of a gambling culture. If you put thousands of millions of dollars worth of securities out there, all we are going to be doing once again in Australia is playing russian roulette with securities. We are going to plant a whole stack of trees that simply will not be there in 30 or 40 years time. We will have wasted all of this time, money and effort and we will not have reduced the CO2.

The CSIRO officers—I must praise them very highly but I do not want to embarrass them by mentioning their names—believe most profoundly that their own government is on the wrong track here. They believe that the government should be taking positive action to reduce the CO2, not relying upon the marketplace. Surely in this country we have woken up to the fact that marketism is dead—and it has almost killed Australia with it. There is no doubt about that. Manufacturing has gone and agriculture in this country is two-thirds gone. There is nothing left except the mining regime, which is now going to be destroyed by having to carry a burden and a handicap that no-one else on earth has to carry. It is going to be 25 per cent of the cost of mining. I rang three of the biggest mines in Australia to confirm this figure: 25 per cent of the cost of mining is in electricity. There seems very little doubt, and no-one is denying, that the cost of electricity is going to go through the roof when this occurs.

Let us look at the options. I refer to Professor Szokolay’s book The Solar Home. It is a book that is highly respected throughout the world. It is on the reading list of many universities around the world but particularly in the United States. The book says that 40 per cent of domestic energy consumption is in the heating of water. So we could reduce by 20 or 30 per cent domestic consumption in one hit. Madam Deputy Speaker, your area and my area are quite capable of producing 20 per cent, maybe 30 per cent, of Australia’s petrol needs. I hold up to you, as I have done many times in this House, the government’s own graph of oil production and the graph shows that up until almost 2002 we were self-sufficient in oil. As the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, has pointed out in this place on numerous occasions, that graph rapidly divides now and by 2014 Australia will have only one-third of its oil requirements met by its own indigenous reserves.

Surely we are going to do something about a situation which will cause another massive blowout in the current account and make us totally dependent upon Indonesia and the Middle East for our source of oil. That can transform itself immediately into 60 per cent indigenous if we move to ethanol. We highly praise the New South Wales government for the initiatives they are taking. I am deeply depressed to tell you that no such initiatives are coming out of Queensland. There is a lot of hot air and rhetoric—they have been promising it now for about 11 years—but nothing has transpired. On the other side of the document I am holding here, as I have held up on many occasions in this House, is a picture of a very handsome fellow in a big white Akubra hat in Sao Paulo in Brazil filling up his Holden motor car at 74c a litre. The price in Australia at the same time was 124c a litre. Unfortunately, I lost the picture of me filling up a motor car in Minnesota for 84c a litre. The United States and Brazil have ethanol; this country does not. Why doesn’t it? Because the government listens to the big corporations. The political parties are in the hands of the big corporations. That is the only reason this country, which is so suited to ethanol, has not gone there.

If we switch to an ethanol regime, no less a person than Al Gore—the greenies patron saint—nominates on I think page 136 of An Inconvenient Truth the first solution as corn ethanol. Corn ethanol is only one-third the value—it is only 29 per cent—and is only one-third as good as sugar ethanol, which is available in the electorates of the honourable member for Richmond, who has just stood down from the chair, the member for Dawson and the member for Leichhardt and my electorate. We can do it tomorrow if we get the cooperation of the government. But the government is spending $120 million on building a solar energy research centre in Canberra. What in heaven’s name? The last place on earth I would put a solar energy research centre is in Canberra. I have not got time, unfortunately, to outline to the House just what dumbness has come out of this place, but let me just give you one example.

Debate interrupted.

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