Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the fine people of Queensland and Australia, I want to ask a question. If you want a perfect example of how insane the UN's net zero pipedream is, look no further than this bill, the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. Why? We're going to spend billions on pulling natural trace gas out of the air and then spend billions more to try and inject it under the seabed and hope it stays there. Science and nature show that it cannot.

You may have heard of the concept of carbon capture and storage, commonly abbreviated to CCS. The climate activists claim we need carbon capture and storage to save the world. That's a lie. I'll get to that later. But no-one really talks about what storage means in these schemes. It seems our government and bureaucrats and our opposition don't want to talk about the details, because anyone who explains carbon dioxide storage out loud will immediately realise the concept is stupid and dishonest.

One might think that a bill titled 'environment protection sea dumping' would be an amendment saying, 'You can't dump things in the sea to protect the environment.' Think again! The fake environmentalists have decided that the best way to protect the environment is to dump stuff in the sea. Just like the koalas being euthanised to make way for wind turbines or damaged solar panels leaking toxic heavy metals into waterways, the United Nations net zero plan again involves killing the environment to save it.

Carbon capture and storage can be summarised by the following steps: carbon dioxide—a harmless, colourless, odourless, tasteless, natural trace, atmospheric gas that is generated from the burning of materials containing carbon atoms, including digesting food in animal guts and including our own guts, burning trees and bushfires and burning coal in power stations to produce among the cheapest forms of electricity available for human progress. In the case of carbon capture and sequestration or storage, carbon dioxide is captured at the point of production. Carbon dioxide is transported then via ship and/or pipeline to a storage location. The carbon dioxide—wait for it—is injected underneath the seabed via drilling for storage, theoretically permanently. It's theoretically permanent because there is no guarantee that the carbon dioxide will stay there.

History is full of episodes of spills where companies couldn't contain the oil they were drilling for. Natural leakage from reservoirs has been the case for nature since time immemorial. Even if it were necessary to bury carbon dioxide—and it's not—there's no guarantee it will stay there after being hit by some type of undersea seismic activity or even a very common underocean earthquake.

It's worth remembering that carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04 per cent of the Earth's atmosphere. Human beings are responsible for just three per cent of the annual production of carbon dioxide, and Australia contributes just 1.3 per cent of that three per cent. Yet the net-zero advocates tell us that, if we take a fraction of our carbon dioxide and pay an oil-drilling company to dump it in the ocean by injecting it under the seabed, we can save the world. Wow! Amazing! Obviously it's a bloody lie, an absurd lie.

Carbon capture and storage is just another scheme designed to make some multinational companies rich at the expense of Australians, and you lot are falling for it, while adding huge costs to power bills that will needlessly continue increasing, killing standards of living and raising the cost of living needlessly. That's what gets on my goat—you're doing it wilfully.

The second part of this bill deals with allowing permits for research into ocean fertilisation. Ocean fertilisation is an untested, radical experiment with our planet's natural environment. It involves dumping elements like iron, nitrogen or phosphates into the ocean in the hope that stimulated phytoplankton will take more carbon dioxide out of the air. They're shutting farms down in Queensland, where I come from, because they say farmers are putting too much nitrogen into the ocean.

One Nation supports research—scientific research, empirical data driven research. We'll never make any progress unless we test new ways of doing things. Research must be balanced though between the potential risks and the potential benefits. When it comes to ocean fertilisation, an untested form of geoengineering, the potential risks are too great and the benefits are non-existent.

Let's be clear what we are talking about here. Ocean fertilisation is the wholesale dumping of chemicals into the ocean with the intention of creating systemic changes to the ecosystem, creating unplanned systemic changes to the ocean—unknown. Unintended consequences are almost guaranteed. If it works, we have no idea how a huge systemic change will affect the environment and the ecosystem. The potential risks are unquantifiable and frightening.

The supposed benefit—sequestering more carbon dioxide out of the air—is negligible. We do not need to remove more carbon dioxide out of the air. Carbon dioxide is the lifeblood of vegetation on this planet. No-one has been able to prove to me that human produced carbon dioxide affects temperature more than natural variation does, because they can't provide that evidence. Ocean fertilisation has huge risks and no potential benefits. It should be opposed.

I'll sum up this bill for the Australian people. The UN's net-zero lunatics are yet again saying they need to kill the environment to save it. The Greens; the teals, including Senator David Pocock; the Liberals-Nationals; and Labor all blindly sign up and hurt families, industries and national security. Australia must ditch the United Nations World Economic Forum net-zero pipedream and all of its insane requirements, including the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. One Nation will be opposing this bill designed to enrich predatory globalist billionaires who donate to the Greens and the teals. Every senator, by the way, should do the same—oppose this bill.

Now I turn to the bill's underlying premise. I'll go through the carbon dioxide reality. We're exhaling it. Every one of us in this chamber is exhaling it. Every human and every animal is exhaling it. When we breathe all animals, including koalas, multiply the concentration of carbon dioxide 100 to 125 times. We take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at 0.04 per cent and we exhale it at four to five per cent. We increase the concentration 100 to 125 times.

Carbon dioxide is essential for all life on earth. This is a fact sheet on carbon dioxide. It's just 0.04 per cent of the Earth's air—four-hundredths of one per cent. It is scientifically described as a trace gas because there's bugger all of it. It is non-toxic and not noxious. Senator Hanson-Young called it toxic. That is straight out wrong! It's highly beneficial to and essential for plants. Greenhouses inject the stuff into greenhouses to stimulate the growth of plants. In the past, when carbon dioxide levels on this planet were four times higher than today—and they have been 135 times higher than today, naturally, in the fairly recent past—it has resulted in earth flourishing as plants and animals thrive with the benefits of carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is colourless, odourless, tasteless. It's natural. Nature produces 97 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced annually on our planet. It does not discolour the air. It does not impair the quality of water or soil. It does not create light, heat, noise or radio activity. It does not distort our senses. It does not degrade the environment nor impair its usefulness nor render it offensive. It's not a pollutant. It does not harm ecosystems; it is essential for ecosystems. It does not harm plants and animals; it is essential for plants and animals. It does not cause discomfort, instability or disorder. It does not accumulate. It does not upset nature's balance. It remains in the air for only a short time before nature cycles it back into plants, animal tissue and natural accumulations—and oceans. It does not contaminate, apart from nature's extremely high and concentrated volumes close to some volcanos, and then only locally and briefly. Under rare natural conditions, when in concentrations in amounts far higher than anything humans can produce—that we can dream of producing—temporarily due to nature, that's the only time it can harm. It is not a pollutant.

As I said a minute ago, in the past it has been up to 130 times higher in concentration in our planet's current atmosphere than today. It's not listed as a pollutant. Prime Minister Gillard invoked the term 'pollutant', 'carbon pollution'—it's not even carbon. It's carbon dioxide; it's a gas. President Obama then copied Prime Minister Gillard on his visit to Australia during her tenure. That's where we got 'carbon pollution'. It doesn't exist. So koalas exhaling carbon dioxide are polluters.

We do not control the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We couldn't even if we wanted to. In 2009, after the global financial crisis, and in 2020, during the COVID mismanagement, we caused severe recessions around the world. In 2009, we actually didn't have one in Australia because we were exporting coal and iron ore, but, nonetheless, there were global recessions in 2009 and 2020. All of a sudden, the use of hydrocarbon fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—decreased dramatically. Exactly what we're being told to do by the teals, by the Greens, by the Labor Party, by the Liberal Party and by the National Party. What happened to the level of carbon dioxide outside in the atmosphere? Did it start going down? No. Did it even inflect slightly and decrease the rate of increase? No. It continued increasing. Why? Because nature controls the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

According to the UN IPCC, the fraudulent climate science mob, the oceans of the planet contain 50 to 70 times the amount of carbon dioxide in dissolved form than in the earth's entire atmosphere—50 to 70 times as much than when you invoke Henry's law of chemistry, which has been known for a couple of hundred years, and the level of carbon dioxide in the air depends on the quantity dissolved in the oceans and varies with the temperature of the oceans because solubility of carbon dioxide in the oceans varies with temperature. In the annual graph of carbon dioxide levels, you can see the seasonal variation in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere. Carbon dioxide levels follow the temperatures of the ocean, especially the sea surfaces. We do not significantly in any way affect the level, and we cannot affect the level over and above natural variation due to nature.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not determine the temperature, unlike what the Greens, the teals, Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals are telling us. There has been massive increase in human production of carbon dioxide from China, India, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Asia and America, yet temperatures have been flat—flat!—for 28 years. Not warming; not cooling; flat. The trend during the massive industrialisation during the Second World War and the post-war economic boom saw temperatures from 1936 to 1976 fall. Over 40 years of massive industrialisation, the longest temperature trend in the last 160 years was cooling. Remember the predictions that we were going to be in for an ice age? In the 1880s and 1890s in our country, temperatures were warmer by far.

Variation in everything in nature is natural. There's inherent natural variation within larger cycles of increasing and decreasing temperature, rainfall, drought cycles and storm cycles. The CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the United Nations have failed to show any change in any climate factor, just natural variation. It's not climate change; it's climate variation. Every uptick is heralded as catastrophic and every downtick is silently ignored.

What's driving this political scam, this climate fraud? Ignorant, dishonest and gutless politicians are enabling scammers making money from it. Consider John Howard. In 2007, I sent him a letter of appreciation for his role as Prime Minister before I started researching climate. During his term, he introduced the National Electricity Market and the Renewable Energy Target, the first emissions trading scheme policy for a major party, and his government stole farmers' rights to use their property. He admitted in London in 2013 that he was an agnostic on climate science. Then we have parasites like Holmes a Court, Twiggy Forrest and Turnbull keeping it alive, relying on the subsidy. What's keeping it alive? Teals such as David Pocock and Greens such as Senator Whish-Wilson and Senator Hanson-Young, invoking fear and doom, yet never providing the logical scientific points and empirical scientific evidence. I encourage people to watch their speeches and see the dearth of scientific evidence.