BEN HARVEY: The road to net zero is littered with the bodies of politicians, Barnaby Joyce is next in line

And we all thought polar bears were going to be the first casualties of global warming.

By demanding the Liberal and National parties abandon net zero, Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Hastie seem determined to ensure that conservative politicians are the primary victims of climate change.

They should turn on their Google because it’ll show them that carbon and methane have conspired to ruin more parliamentary careers than just about any other single issue.

The road to net zero is littered with the bodies of prime ministers.

Our last six leaders have gone from rooster to feather duster, at least in part because they misjudged the public, or their party room, on the issue.

We first got serious (ish) about this issue in John Howard’s final term in office, soon after Al Gore scared the living bejesus out of us with the release of An Inconvenient Truth.

The mass pearl-clutching forced a sceptical Howard to confront an issue he and his party had been studiously ducking since they won the 1996 election.

Anyone remember the Kyoto Protocol? Nope? That’s exactly what Howard wanted.

With polls leading to the 2007 election suggesting net zero would be the number of seats held by the Coalition if the conservatives didn’t take the matter seriously, Howard hurriedly constructed a climate change policy.

The electorate saw it was being held together by snot and dental floss and threw in behind Australia’s freshly minted, self-professed climate saviour — a Queenslander called Kevin, who was here to help.

The age of Rudd ushered in the age of the emission trading scheme.

Cap and trade — remember that?

You were allowed to emit a certain amount of carbon and then you bought credits at some kind of international pollution auction house.

It was a complete debacle because nobody understood it and, with then Liberal leader Tony Abbott warning at every opportunity of a “great big new tax”, Labor saw the writing on the wall. Rudd was knifed.

After wiping blood from her dagger, newbie PM Julia Gillard made it clear that she was unequivocal about her position about having no carbon tax in a government she led.

The subsequent about-face contributed to the second coming of Rudd, which contributed to the first coming of Abbott.

A lover of budgie smugglers who likely welcomed the prospect of global warming because it limited the prospect of shrinkage, Abbott found himself out of step with a critical mass of his party room.

His intransigence on the issue facilitated Malcolm Turnbull’s second coming as Liberal leader and first coming as prime minister.

Saint Malcolm’s inability to convince his colleagues that man-made climate change was real led to the election of Scott Morrison — a man so enamoured by fossil fuel he once brought a lump of coal into the House of Representatives.

Scotty from marketing quickly realised his administration was out of step with the average Australian voter, who was growing weary of fireside chats about whether climate change was real or not because the fire was out of control and burning down their houses.

Morrison needed a policy, and in 2021 he came up with a road map to net zero that was put together so haphazardly it made Howard’s snot-and-floss offering 14 years prior look like the Marshall Plan.

Morrison’s “plan” stated that Australia’s reduction targets would be 85 per cent achieved by “strategies already announced”, with the remaining 15 per cent coming from “further breakthrough technologies”.

The Coalition was going to invent its way to net zero.

The public quickly saw through that nonsense and installed Anthony Albanese, partly on the back of his promise that our power bills would be $270 cheaper under his green energy regime.

Voters knew he was selling them magic beans with that one but Australians had got to the point where they preferred a plan that was patently bulls..t to no plan at all.

And that is the reason Barnaby Joyce’s latest dummy spit won’t wash.

The beetrooter says net zero is economically unprincipled. Maybe, but will Australia take a moral cue from a bloke who knocked up a staff member and was filmed drunk on a pavement?

History suggests his political body will end up as another speed bump on the climate change highway.