Thanks, Tom, useful background.

If you read the IPCC reports carefully, they also confess shyly, that "population and economic growth" are the major emissions drivers. In other words, "net zero" as it is currently formulated is nonsense.

It's one thing for a conservative leader like Peter Dutton to advocate nuclear power. But it is disheartening, that his professed or main motivation is a better means to "get to net zero". Where's the pushback?

It is an embarrassment to me just how little modern so-called conservatives in Australia are achieving. Conservatives are doing OK in the U.S and parts of Europe, but not in Australia, where they drone on, being polite and, frankly, gutless.

A group calling itself the LIBERAL Party is not conservative.

This Leftist party signed up to the Net Zero scam.

Its contribution to the climate “debate” has been to come up with hideously expensive nuclear power when we have cheap coal and gas that has given us advantages over other countries and would continue to do so for centuries.

Whatever nonsense the two arm-in-arm Leftist parties come up with, it will not make a jot of difference to the climate; but it will surely bring us to our knees and under the control of countries like Communist China with, at least, the intelligence to look after themselves.

There are genuine conservative options in Australia; Australians are too prissy and unimaginative to give them a go. They prefer to vote for the same bad actors and expect different results, moaning all the time about what is being ‘done to them’.

Rightly or wrongly the public puts a lot of the blame for the LA fires on climate change. OK it was really arsonists so how come they didn't come out in rainy weather? I'm not sure blaming the coal hate-on is really holding back the Third World. Some countries went straight to mobile phones and skipped landlines. They can skip coal and go straight to nuclear and stored renewables. There's no argument that more energy = more economic wellbeing.

Somewhat under underplayed is the fact SE Australian gas is running out with Sydney, Geelong and Adelaide to build import terminals, no doubt followed by Hobart and Auckland. If there's a punchup between northern oil producers we'll also be in strife. Decarbonising sooner rather than later is a good strategy.

WTF?

The author states " today the left control vast swaths ..... and of course mainstream media."

I have to agree that the mainstream media is a major weapon used for disseminating information and shaping the direction of debate around the discussion of many things science related.

In Australia the main stream media includes, but is not restricted to:
The Australian and Weekend Australian
The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
The Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun
The Courier Mail and Sunday Mail
The Advertiser
The Mercury
Northern Territory News
Website News.com.au

But perhaps when the author says that some people are "relying almost entirely on mainstream media coverage" he was thinking about that bastion of Wokeness:

Sky News Australia

As we know, all of the above examples of main stream media as well as many others are all owned by woke News Corp Australia.

No wonder conservatives feel they have lost control of the media.