Net zero disaster in Sri Lanka

Are Sri Lankans about to become the world’s first net-zero refugees, and could we one day follow suit?

Sri Lanka is in chaos thanks to politicians who decided to rearrange the economy overnight in order to satisfy their fanciful green lusts. Last year the Sri Lankan government, led by 73-year-old Gotabaya Rajapaksa, decided to ban all chemical fertilisers in a bid to go completely organic. Less than 12 months later the country has gone completely downhill and Rajapaksa has gone quickly to a much-safer haven, chased away by thousands of starving citizens who stormed his presidential palace.

Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) had been doing well, rebuilding itself after decades of civil war. Before 2021 its per capita gross national income was greater than neighbours such as Indonesia and Vietnam, but then President Rajapaksa fell under the spell of Western green elites with their outrageous and unsubstantiated warnings of a looming climate crisis and their seductive whispers of 'net-zero'. In April 2021 – and without warning – Rajapaksa ordered the nation’s two million farmers to immediately stop using fertilisers and pesticides, the ban being instigated under the influence of the World Economic Forum’s push toward net-zero carbon emissions.

The decision made Rajapaksa a darling of the international community and his people the most impoverished of the region. More than 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilisers before they were banned. None of them received any training in organic crop cultivation, and crop failure was immediate. Within a period of six months rice production had fallen by 20 percent, and Sri Lanka went from exporting rice to importing $450 million worth of rice just to feed its own people. The damage to the tea industry was worse. Before 2021 tea production generated $1.3 billion in annual exports, paying for 71 percent of the nation’s food imports. In the four months between November 2021 and February this year tea exports fell by approximately 18 percent, reaching their lowest level in more than 20 years. Prices sky-rocketed by 50 percent. The government ran out of money to import fuel, food and medicines. In June private citizens were banned from buying fuel. Public transport ground to a halt. Schools were closed. Without fuel the few farmers still able to cultivate food were at a standstill. With crops failing, people starving and industries collapsing the population rioted, overrunning the president’s palace as he jumped on a plane to the Maldives.

Sri Lanka is a classic example of what happens when governments run by ideologues pursue climate change policies that have absolutely no basis in scientific fact. The same thing is happening in Europe and even New Zealand, along with forced culling of livestock in some countries to reduce methane. Farmers have been protesting all over the world, but there's been precious little media coverage. Meanwhile in Australia, citizens voted for a government with similar objectives. A Labor win will mean things like the World Health Organisation's diabolical Pandemic Treaty will be readily embraced and promoted: Scott Morrison's failure to stand up against lockdown lunacy and health fascism by the states was one of the reasons he was rejected. And if we thought things were bad on a state level – as it has been in Daniel Andrew's Victoria over the past several years – expect things to be just as bad on a national level when our new prime minister happily allows the WHO and World Economic Forum to determine our health and social policies. National defence will be weakened again, not just with numerous boats arriving with those wanting to live here but more Labor bowing to Communist China.

Economic management tends to go downhill in a big way under Labor/Green governments, and we can expect that to happen here. Given how often Anthony Albanese imitated Joe Biden on the campaign trail by being totally clueless about many economic basics, we could be in for a rough ride indeed. We can expect our new government to embrace all things green (including enthusiastic support of renewable energy) and we can expect the economy, small business and employment to be severely impacted. This would suggest that we will soon have a Schwab and Gates-driven 'climate change' tyranny: secular left outfits such as 'our' ABC will be emboldened to become even more so.

Worryingly, Australia is now led by a prime minister in possession of only average intelligence who is surrounded by a cabinet of weak, woke ministers mostly out of their depth in their respective portfolios even though many of them were front-bench ministers during the ill-fated Rudd/Gillard years. Many politicians – and not all are on the Left – simply don’t have enough experience of anything other than politics. Put another way, they do not have the hands-on practical knowledge, experience or pragmatism in managing anything that may cause serious loss or personal downsides should poor decisions be made. In addition, they do not appear to have the strength of character to admit they are wrong until disaster strikes, and even then they will try to ride it out. Even worse, they seem more worried about their international reputation than about their responsibilities to those they claim to represent. Combine those three traits – a lack of real-world experience, an inability to admit failure and a desperate desire to please people in Davos rather than in Darwin and to win praise from elites in Brussels rather than from mums and dads in Brisbane – and it’s not hard to imagine that Australia could one day suffer the same fate as Sri Lanka.

Ideology and hubris make a dangerous mix! When autocratic politicians bow to the wizards of make-believe who populate the UN, the WHO and the WEF they believe their job is to change the world from the top down, rather than embrace the well-proven concepts of evolutionary change driven by democratic free markets and consumer choice. We will suffer the same fate if we continue on the naïve net-zero path created by people who have no idea how food is grown, minerals are mined, energy is produced or economies work.