Chamber: Senate on 8/09/2022
Item: BILLS – Climate Change Bill 2022, Climate Change (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2022 – In Committee
Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (10:48): It’s great to address the chamber on this very important bill. I’d like to address Senator Canavan’s concerns about the environment as a result of these renewables because that is what really concerns me about the path that we are taking. If we continue down the path of constantly getting rid of our base-load energy in this country, like coal, and replacing it with wind, solar, lithium batteries and transmission lines, we are going to create an environmental catastrophe. I touched on this last night. It is well known that wind farms kill millions and millions of birds and bats. They kill apex birds. They kill lots and lots of bats. Many people probably don’t know that bats, along with bees, are one of the major pollinators in our environment.
Then we’ve got the issue with batteries. Batteries come from rare earth minerals like lithium, for example. Lithium is a one per cent ore body. You have to mine a hundred tonnes of ore to get one tonne of metal. That involves an intensive electrolysis process that in itself requires lots and lots of energy. However, these rare-earths mines—it’s just not that simple to go in and get the ore; you have to mine around and around and around. So, quite often you’re going to have a stripping ratio of something like 10 to one, so you might have to move 1,000 tonnes of dirt just to end up with one tonne of metal. That metal, after it’s been extracted through an extremely energy-intensive process, will then get shipped over to China, where it’s put into a car battery, and that car battery is then shipped to the States, where it’s put into a Tesla, and then the Tesla comes back to Australia, where basically you have to charge the battery by sticking it into the wall and using energy from coal.
We’ve also got solar panels. I just put an article up on my Facebook page this morning about the environmental catastrophe that is going on in California at the moment, and we’ll have the same catastrophe here, whereby we’ll have dangerous substances leaking from these solar panels once they are taken to the trash. This is concerning, because, as the head of the CSIRO said to me in estimates, it costs three times as much to recycle a lithium battery as it does to actually produce a battery. So, the big concern is, how are we going to afford—and what is the Labor Party going to do about this—recycling all these rare-earths batteries?
The other thing we need to touch on is the transmission lines. We are going to have to have hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines. The Labor Party have already earmarked a $20 billion Rewiring Australia Fund. But it’s not ‘rewiring’; it’s additional transmission lines that are going to have to connect all these tiny solar panels and windfarms, because these solar panels and windfarms don’t produce anywhere near the same amount of energy as a coal-fired power station does. Going back to the nineties, when 70 or 80 per cent of the east coast was powered by coal-fired power, there were only about 30 stations, and only a limited number of transmission lines were needed in order to get the power to the home.
However, what I really want to do today is address the issue from yesterday, when Senator Wong couldn’t actually define what net zero is. I spoke to her about it this morning, and she said, ‘Senator Rennick, why do you think so many scientists have all got it wrong?’ Well, I don’t actually follow scientists. I follow the mathematics behind the science and, in particular, the algorithms that underpin good science. Last night—and I’ll do this again, because I can see Senator Chisholm sitting over there with a silly grin on his face—the first scientist I referred to—
The TEMPORARY CHAIR ( Senator Chandler ): Order! Senator Rennick, please direct your comments through the chair.
Senator RENNICK: the first paper I raised was none other than Albert Einstein’s 1917 quantum theory on radiation. He himself said that radiation is so insignificant that it drops out.
This is the thing about the whole science argument about how we’re living in a greenhouse effect et cetera. At the end of the day, the two strongest forces of heat transfer in the environment are convection and conduction. Climate change theory wants you to believe that the atmosphere is a closed environment. The way a greenhouse works is that it traps convection. So, during the day, as the sun heats up the greenhouse, the air rises—
The TEMPORARY CHAIR: Minister, a point of order?
Senator McAllister: The tradition in our chamber is to have a wide-ranging debate. However, there is a motion before the chair from Senator Waters, and an amendment before the chair, and I do wonder whether Senator Rennick is being relevant. He may be, but I wonder if you might remind him of the question before the chair.
The TEMPORARY CHAIR: Thank you very much, Minister. Senator Rennick, I will remind you that the question before the chair is that the amendment moved by Senator Waters be agreed to, and I would direct you to be relevant to that amendment and, if you have questions for the minister, to get to them in a timely fashion. Thank you.
Senator RENNICK: I am being relevant, because at the end of the day, whether it’s a 43 per cent reduction in CO2 in the atmosphere or a 75 per cent reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, it’s convection that drives heat transfer in the atmosphere, not radiation.
Honourable senators interjecting—
Senator RENNICK: You don’t believe me? Then take Albert Einstein’s word for it, because, at the end of the day, carbon dioxide absorbs and emits photons at only two frequencies. One is at 2.8 microns, which, according to Planck’s law, has five times more energy—and that’s incoming solar radiation. And the other one is outgoing long-wave radiation at 14.8 microns. The whole point of this discussion is to debunk the junk science behind climate change. I did this last night, but I’ll just run you through the five different laws that prove that this disproves climate change.
Number 1 is the first law of thermodynamics: conduction. Basically, all carbon dioxide does is absorb and emit photons that come via the sun. That law is actually Einstein’s special theory of relativity, E equals mc squared. As I said last night, he came up with that in 1905. Interestingly enough, he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for that. He actually got a Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect, which is one of four papers he wrote in1905. The photoelectric effect impacts the fact that every molecule has a specific vibrational frequency, and it’s at that frequency that it can only absorb heat.
The other law that I used last night was Wien’s Law. That describes the frequency at which the CO2 molecule will emit heat. As I pointed out last night, that law says that carbon dioxide only emits heat at 192 degrees Kelvin, which is negative 80 degrees Celsius. So the only place where carbon dioxide will actually release heat is either at the bottom of Antarctica or about 10 kilometres up in the troposphere. This matters because this disproves the science; the science is bogus.
I’ll continue. What I have here is an energy budget from the Australian Academy of Science. They want you to believe that downwelling radiation averages on a 24-hour period over 342 watts per square metre. Funnily enough, the CSIRO says that the downwelling radiation from CO2 is 333 watts per square metre. That is a difference of nine watts per square meter. What does that tell you? These guys can’t measure downwelling radiation. They can’t even measure it. We’re told the science is settled, but they can’t even measure it. Guess what? The IPCC says that the increase in downwelling radiation since 1750, from the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, is only two watts per square metre. Get this. Their error in measurements has a margin of error of 400 per cent. You can’t even properly measure what it is you’re supposed to be spending billions of dollars on. How is that going to work? Not too well.
Here’s the other crazy thing. They want you to believe that the downwelling radiation from carbon dioxide is actually stronger than the incoming solar radiation from the sun. That’s absurd. As we know from Plank’s law from 1902, solar radiation effectively has a higher frequency of about up to 100 times in the ultraviolet range and the visible light range—the visible light range is about 30 times stronger than 14.8 microns in the infrared range. They want you to believe that infrared has more energy than ultraviolet and visible light. This stuff is pathetic.
Here’s the real doozey. What’s missing in this energy budget, people? I will tell you what it is. I’ll give you a bit of a clue here. A bloke by the name of Isaac Newton hypothesised this back in the 16th or 17th century. That, of course, is gravity. These guys want you to think that photons aren’t influenced by the gravity of the earth, which happens to be 5.6 trillion billion tonnes. They seem to think that that’s not going to have a pull on a photon. So the whole thing is totally debunked.
My question to the minister is: why are there 40 different models to calculate net zero, if the science is settled? That came from the head of the CSIRO, who said there were 40 different models used to calculate net zero. The science is not settled if the head of the CSIRO in this country says there are 40 different models. Which model are we going to use here in Australia, and how do we know there isn’t going to be arbitrage with the different models between different countries to exploit the confusion in climate change and to milk Australia dry?
