Akerman: Writing’s on the wall for our energy and economic future

Proponents of renewable energy policies may not understand how they have failed the nation until blackouts force them to recognise the reality of their folly, writes Piers Akerman.

There is stupid and there is stupider. There is Labor and there are the Greens. Illogical and irrational parties rapidly running the nation into the ground with wishy-hopey policies sprinkled with fairy dust.

Using the crudest fear politics on climate change – and as yet no one anywhere has produced scientifically valid proof that humans are responsible for changes in the weather – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has condemned the nation to economic collapse with his embrace of an impossible net-zero emissions target.

The energy policy which Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen agreed with Greens leader Adam Bandt is environmentally and economically disastrous.

Bandt’s boast that “in balance of power, the Greens have stopped many of the 116 coal and gas projects in the pipeline from proceeding, and now we’re coming after the rest” should set the klaxons wailing.

The Greens, Labor and the green-left propagandists are fond of the hysterical prefaces “crisis” and “catastrophe” when mentioning the climate but it is Australia and the global environment which will be devastated by their policy to cap emissions by penalising gas producers and manufacturers reliant on reasonably priced, reliable energy supplies.

The use of coal and gas to supply energy have proved essential to the Australian economy. Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

By putting impediments in the path of further gas and coal use in Australia and phasing out future developments of these industries which have proved essential to our economy, these useful idiots will ensure a cascading disaster will unfold.

It should be obvious to all but the most obtuse ideologues that the loss of export income will be truly catastrophic, as will job losses in regional areas of Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, NSW and South Australia.

Victorian Premier Dan. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Valeriu Campan

“Shanghai Dan”, Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews, may believe his state doesn’t need natural gas to provide essential energy but already he is pleading for more gas from states which haven’t followed his lunatic lead and banned gas production.

While the Greens plead an environmental case for their bans on both fossil fuels and nuclear energy which their European counterparts have already abandoned, sending Australian manufacturing offshore to countries with virtually no environmental safeguards will guarantee that any imports we can still afford will be made using far more environmentally dirty fuels emitting greater emissions than they would have had they been able to maintain production in Australia.

It’s another case of the Greens defeating their own purpose as they strive to grandstand before their inner-urban acolytes.

They and their Labor partners are the greatest environmental vandals in the nation.

ACTU president Michele O'Neil. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

AWU national secretary Daniel Walton. Picture: Grant Wells

They can’t help shooting themselves in their feet either.

ACTU president Michele O’Neil’s bald claim that the union movement was implacably opposed to “nuclear power, nuclear waste and proliferation” was met with undisguised contempt from Dan Walton, the head of the AWU, and a vice-president of the ACTU.

Walton, whose members are found in the power industry and across a swathe of manufacturing and other sectors of the economy, has never hidden his disdain for the unpragmatic Greens and the Labor left. Unlike the pooh-bahs of big business, Walton preaches to his audiences across the nation that the green-left dependence on unreliable so-called renewable energy sources spells doom for such essential industries as cement and fertiliser manufacturing, as well as glass, steel and aluminium which require products derived from carbon or the energy fossil fuels or nuclear could provide.

The current anti-nuclear power position the Albanese government and the Greens are wedded to categorically rules out the firming base-load power that would keep the lights on and keep industries in Australia rather than see them go to unregulated nations reliant on dirty energy.

These klutzes also ignore the reality that most Australians will rely on one or more nuclear medicines in their lives, and that the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement will provide work opportunities for thousands of Australians in coming decades.

Their incoherent energy policy effectively undermines the security of the nation and should be challenged on this basis as well as the obvious threat it poses to jobs and average household consumers faced with ever-increasing power bills.

The government will find it necessary to pay for the vast fields of solar panels and the forests of wind turbines which have already removed immense areas from vital food production.

So dumb are the proponents of these dangerous policies that they may not understand how they have failed the nation until blackouts force them to recognise the reality of their folly.

Dumb and dumber – on display in Canberra. The electorate has been warned.