‘Don Harwin’s climate virtue signalling is a recipe for disaster’
NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin may have believed he was distancing the NSW government from the PM when he challenged his federal counterpart to act on emissions but he was actually white-anting the federal government’s strategy to bring down power prices, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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From Malcolm Turnbull to Don Harwin, members of the so-called Moderate faction of the NSW Liberal Party have acted like a fifth column against the best interests of their party, the nation and the state in their vain attempts to signal their virtue.
Mr Harwin, the NSW Energy Minister, may have believed he was distancing the NSW government from Prime Minister Scott Morrison when he challenged his federal counterpart Angus Taylor to act on emissions last week but he was actually white-anting the federal government’s strategy to bring down power prices.
Mr Harwin’s attempt to upstage Mr Taylor was a futile grandstanding endeavour tellingly supported only by ministers from Labor states. When a NSW minister, even one as ineffectual as Mr Harwin, finds his political support coming from the left, it says a lot about his values and intelligence deficit.
That NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, a member of the same faction as Mr Harwin, failed to rebuke him for his outlandish stunt demonstrates how determined she is to let the rot in the NSW party continue.
On energy, the NSW government is taking its lead from the ill-informed, brainwashed children who played truant a few weeks ago to please their left-leaning teachers and claim with zero understanding of the nature of the atmosphere that carbon dioxide is a poison responsible for global warming.
Weaponising ignorant kids is a favoured tactic of those who wish to silence debate — just ask those who suffered at the hands of children when Mao launched his anti-intellectual book-burning Cultural Revolution in China.
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It’s the same today in much of the West where ignoramuses like Mr Harwin and his Labor backers attempt to paint those who believe in science and not supposition and modelling as climate deniers.
Yet, universally, the carbon pricing emissions controls he and the Labor Party support are regarded as failures because they are confected and government-controlled markets that bear no resemblance to genuine markets.
In reality, the so-called renewable industry can’t exist without billions in subsidies from taxpayers.
For the benefit of Mr Harwin, and his stablemate on green ideology, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, here are some important numbers — since 2016, almost 11GW of new large-scale capacity has been firmly announced, far exceeding the 6.4GW needed to meet the 2020 target.
Further to the Clean Energy Regulator’s publicly available pipeline, there is additional capacity of approximately 7.2GW (across the country), to be developed in the near future.
This would suggest 18GW of large-scale wind and solar coming online in the next three or so years around the country.
However, South Australia provides a prime example of a market in distress. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) intervened 25 times in the past year to keep the lights on — more than the previous seven years combined.
In the third quarter of 2018, 10 per cent of electricity generated from wind in SA was “dumped” or “spilled” — $14 million worth of electricity, in order to maintain the stability of the grid. This dismal state has approximately 40 per cent renewable energy. Labor wants 50 per cent nationally — and they don’t have a plan to stabilise the grid and keep the lights on. The claim by GetUp! and Greenpeace, the ALP and the Greens, that coal is a dead end industry is just not sustainable.
In fact, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, coal will be the nation’s most valuable export this financial year, surpassing iron ore because of supply concerns.
The demand for our coal internationally is pushing the value to $67 billion in 2018-19, ahead of iron ore’s $61 billion export value.
Don’t expect Mr Harwin or Mr Shorten to understand though. Neither seems to understand most ordinary Australians just want reliable energy at a reasonable cost.
Because of the inane antics of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and others who’ve drunk the Green Kool-Aid, Australians are paying more for their power than almost everyone else in the world, although we have greater energy resources than almost every country.
We are paying more simply because energy producers like AGL, a client of the NSW Moderate faction’s godfather Michael Photios’s lobbying firm, are shutting reliable coal-fired power plants in favour of subsidised unreliable and expensive renewable energy farms.
The ABC, which is as active as Mr Photios in lobbying for inefficient renewable energy, was thwarted by Mr Taylor when it challenged him over emissions reduction targets last week.
He told the ABC’s obviously frustrated presenter Hamish Macdonald that Australia will not only reach its current 26 per cent emissions reduction target in the electricity market in just five years’ time, in 2023 — seven years ahead of the 2030 deadline — but will exceed the target with a 28 per cent reduction.
To reduce emissions across every sector, including transport and agriculture, as demanded by the ABC, Labor, the Greens, GetUp! and Mr Harwin, would demand massive culling of livestock and bring the trucking industry to a standstill.
If this is what the Berejiklian government intends to campaign on before next March 23’s election, they can kiss National Party supporters goodbye and every rural seat they hold. Their dwindling band of supporters can gather to munch carrots collectively by candlelight in the inner-urban suburbs as they huddle together for warmth.
It goes almost without saying that Labor’s policies are not only a lot worse, they are potentially more lethal. Under Labor, installers of solar units are going to risk death, according to the Clean Energy Regulator — which has warned more than 30 installation companies about their dicey practices.
Labor’s pink batts scheme was lethal, and the solar racket threatens to be even riskier.
With the best will in the world— and Lord protect us from the well-intentioned — all of the flawed suggestions for emissions trading systems in Australia will not alter the climate any more than a spit in the ocean is going to make the seas rise.
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