Clover Moore’s gas-free utopia will ring disaster for city businesses

Interfering with restaurant kitchens is just a part of Clover Moore’s utopian scheme to cut Sydney’s emissions to essentially nil, even if it means crushing businesses in the process, writes James Morrow.

Vladimir Lenin, commenting on the appalling human cost of the Soviet project, once supposedly said that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

Fast forward a hundred or so years to Clover Moore’s Sydney and it seems that you also can’t make a proper egg fried rice, full stop.

Because to do that might require a restaurant to use one of those really high powered gas jet burners for its woks.

Never mind the unique flavour that sort of heat can provide, using natural gas is just not on for the planet.

Interfering with restaurant kitchens is just a small part of Moore’s utopian scheme – more about which in a moment – to crash through on a program to cut Sydney’s emissions to essentially nil, even if it means crushing the city’s businesses in the process.

And crush them it will.

Interfering with restaurant kitchens is just a small part of Moore’s utopian scheme. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gaye Gerard

A small list of businesses that will be in the frame if Moore’s plans to ban new gas connections gets up include restaurants (particularly Asian joints that demand high heat for their woks), breweries (who often use natural gas burners in the beer making process), a variety of creative arts studios, and more.

The fact is gas is simply better for a lot of things.

It is also as such things go relatively clean, and if only policy makers and bureaucrats would get out of the way, it would also be incredibly cheap.

Yet here we are, with the Lord Mayor of what is supposed to be Australia’s most cosmopolitan city wanting to meddle in how its citizens and visitors eat.

This at a time when, thanks to similar utopian ideas at the national level, we are less and less sure where any of that electricity is supposed to come from.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is already sounding the alarm that the push to renewables – the cheapest form of energy for everyone except those paying a power bill – is leaving the grid dangerously exposed.

No wonder a review of the closure of Eraring has suggested keeping the power station going past its scheduled close date.

Sydneysiders will not be able to hand back their gas cooktops and make peace with the Net Zero mob.

And in these circumstances we are supposed to be putting more demand on the grid?

But the really important thing to remember is that none of this will not stop here.

Sydneysiders will not be able to hand back their gas cooktops and make peace with the Net Zero mob, which wants to hold a modern bonfire of the vanities (with the emissions properly offset, of course) to rid of us all the sinful conveniences that make modern life nice.

Some years ago Moore signed Sydney signed up to be a “C40 City”, committing its residents to a program of radical environmental utopianism that would see every aspect of its citizens’ lives monitored and controlled to ensure they did not emit too much carbon.

In 2016 she even flew all the way across the Pacific (hope she offset her emissions) to accept a sustainability award at a C40 Cities summit in Mexico.

But while it’s all very well and good for Moore and her fellow mayors to go on jaunts around the world, what the C40 mob has in mind for you and me is a little less luxurious.

A 2019 report on the C40 website entitled “The future of urban consumption in a 1.5C world” reveals some of the group’s aspirations for how the rest of us might appease the angry weather gods.

Among other things, it tells us that we city dwellers are eating too much, and should one way or the other have our calories cut. They say that while ideally no one should eat animal products, they would like to see people top out at 16kg of meat consumed a year, or about 300g a week.

A review of the closure of Eraring has suggested keeping the power station going past its scheduled close date.

Not surprisingly, the group also wants us to buy fewer clothing items, ditch our cars, and limit ourselves to one return short-haul flight every two to three years.

Won’t that be a boon for the city’s tourism operators!

It’s all a bit like Covid, but without the fun of bingeing.

Now, the C40 website is careful to say things like the plan is “an invitation, not a prescription.”

But cynics will be forgiven for noting that those who are determined to save the planet their way never seem to really believe people should have much choice in the matter.

One of the great ironies of the past fifty years is the way the left has gone from demanding the government stay out of the bedroom to insisting the government meddle in every other room of the house, from the kitchen to the garage.

Then again, the impulse has always been there.

The great American conservative William F Buckley once noted that a liberal (in the US sense of the term) is someone who wants to reach into your shower and fiddle with the temperature.

Today, they don’t just want to tell you the temperature of your shower but determine how you heat the water as well.