By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
A FARM organisation pushing net zero and related woke agendas is not happy with cattle industry bureaucrats abandoning their plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2030.
Farmers for Climate Action CEO Natalie Collard has told the ABC that any change to “emissions methodology must have integrity and be widely accepted”. Collard apparently would have us believe that the relentless drum beating and wailing over the alleged “climate crisis” does have integrity.
“We understand RMAC (Red Meat Advisory Council) dropping the carbon-neutral by 2030 target because most farmers won’t achieve net-zero emissions by then,” she said. “However, we’re a science-based organisation, so we can’t pretend climate neutral and GWP (global warming potential) is a credible science.”
Ms Collard should be asking why her “science-based organisation” is pretending there’s a climate crisis and pushing ludicrous schemes to “electrify farming” (i.e. end diesel use) and reduce methane burps from cattle – all based on endless theoretical climate models based on biased data input by climate alarmists looking for their next environmental research grant.
The latest example of the hysteria is Climate Council chairman Matt Kean warning that 99% of the Great Barrier Reef could disappear in the next 20 years.
John McKillop, the independent chairman of the Red Meat Advisory Council (affiliated with the Cattle Australia and other livestock industry bodies), said abandoning the net zero by 2030 goal was partly due to a better understanding of emissions reduction and a realisation they were not on track to reach the target.
“We just, quite frankly, realised we’re not going to get to carbon neutral by 2030,” he told the ABC.
Cairns News suggests that any thinking livestock producer must have long been wondering what it even means to become “carbon neutral by 2030”. Apparently, 2030 is the year that green fairies and unicorns prance about in pristine pastures on an eco-transformed planet.
The reality is that many producers can see first hand the destructive role that “renewable energy” is having on the environment as transmission lines cut across properties and wind tower projects flatten vegetation that farmers can’t touch.
For what it’s worth, to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory claims livestock contributes about 11 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions – again, another theoretical calculation that placed in context means little to nothing when put up against total emissions from vehicular traffic, or the average 29,000 barrels of jet fuel burned daily by jet flights worldwide.
And unfortunately, the beef bureaucrats haven’t yet seen the sense in following the Trump administration’s lead and entirely abandoning the net zero scam. Meat and Livestock Australia, for instance, has blown and incredible $200 million on the various emission reduction schemes.
“We’ll still be trying to reduce our emissions as much as we can, but the focus will now be on emissions intensity rather than the absolute number of tonnes of carbon emitted,” said McKillop.
Cattle producers might also consider China’s 1140 coal-fired power stations, next time they are adding some methane-reducing supplement to the cattle feed to understand what a spurious pixie dust scheme they’ve been conned into.
Of course there are some practical production benefits from more effective digestion of feed or increasing carbon levels in soil, but even the Cattle Council now realises it’s almost impossible to quantify the effects of those schemes on climate and certainly not worth the fanatical green commitment to becoming “net zero” as pushed by Farmers for Climate Action (FCA).
Collard’s organisation pushes ideas straight out of Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and the UN Environment Program. They would be better advised to focus on practical regenerative farming than pushing green globalist ideology whose intent is more anti-farming that pro-farming, as we have repeatedly shown.
The duplicitous ideological bent of FCA is clear from their own mission statement: “To influence Australia to adopt strong economy-wide climate policies and realise a prosperous and sustainable future, full of opportunity for farmers and farming communities.”
“Climate policies” are simply environmentalist policies that are already imposed by all levels of government and are indisputably an onerous burden on the farming sector and the Australian economy in general.
FCA’s “theory of change” statement is straight out the New Left environmentalist campaign manuals.
“We believe that if we grow the number of farmers, their communities and their representatives who are leading on climate-smart farming solutions and championing strong economy-wide climate policy, we can influence governments to implement climate policies that mitigate climate change and benefit rural communities.”
FCA’s “tool kit” topics reveal the green UN agenda being pushed: carbon markets, climate jargon explained, first nations land practices, international agreements, nature repair markets, reducing emissions, reducing farm energy demand, renewables etc.
The section on “international agreements” states categorically: “The science is settled – climate change is happening now, and there are things we can do to mitigate its impact.” As Cairns News readers and many others know, that statement is a lie. The science is not settled, not by a long shot.
The FCA website pontificates further: “For almost 30 years, governments around the world have committed to working together to reduce global emissions. The main way governments coordinate these efforts is through the ‘Paris Agreement’ (which has taken over from the ‘Kyoto Protocol’).
“The Paris Agreement calls on all countries to reduce their emissions with the goals of preventing the global average temperature from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C.
“Currently, 195 countries have ratified the Paris Agreement, including Australia and all of our major trading partners. A UN Climate Change Conference has been held every year since 1997 to bring parties together to progress work on agreements and targets. The latest was held across November and December 2023 in Dubai.”
So innocent Aussie meat, grain and livestock producers are urged to get on board with the UN’s global green campaign – the same global green apparatus working to make livestock production redundant with manufactured insect protein or fake meat products; the same green apparatus working to rid the landscape of “unsustainable” livestock grazing and herding human populations into digitally-controlled 15-minute urban habitat zones.
Farmers for Climate Action are at best naive and at worst duplicitous if they believe the global environmental agenda is about “a prosperous and sustainable future, full of opportunity for farmers and farming communities”.
