Watch the video!

While this horrific abuse of children is going on, all the talk here is about getting ISIS brides and their terror-ready whelps into Australia.

I must be blunt. Every claim in this piece is true and widely known. Electricity is the one product of fossil fuels easily made without them. Most other fossil fuel products can’t be.

Without fossil fuels there will truly be catastrophe, genuine suffering. Why is it so hard to get this simple fact across? Plainly it must be a communication problem. And it's not what's being communicated, or how, but who is doing the communicating.

It will require the leaders of the world's biggest manufacturing businesses to declare flatly and loudly that at some point when they must stop using fossil fuel feedstocks they will no longer be able to supply their critical products. And the leaders of their biggest customers will need to back them up.

All of those leaders must be prepared to respond to the flood of critics who will simply assert they are wrong and that the endless wonders of scientific research will bring the answers. Indeed, the message coming for years from the world's most prominent writer in these matters, Bjorn Lomborg, is precisely that the marvels of scientific research will always ride to the rescue -- we just have to fund more research.

Sorry, a cavalry of white coated researchers might be nice but cannot perform miracles. We'd better believe it before it’s too late.

The article is wrong on just about every substantial point and hinges on a basic category error: wind turbines don't "make products," and neither do coal plants, they generate electricity that powers industry.

Conflating fossil fuels as an energy source with fossil fuels as chemical feedstock creates a false choice between permanent oil dependence and civilisational collapse. No serious net-zero policy proposes eliminating every petrochemical tomorrow. The focus is on reducing combustion in power and transport - which drive most emissions.

As valid as the moral outrage over cobalt mining is, it's hardly consistent to then ignore oil's environmental damage and petro-state corruption.

The authors get the physics wrong, the chemistry wrong, the economics wrong, the trajectory of technology wrong, and the nature of decarbonisation policy wrong. And all while conflating energy generation, material feedstocks, industrial processes, poverty alleviation, and geopolitics.

An atrocious article all round.