James Morrow: Australia’s blind to global green energy disaster
Australia’s leaders are blind to an unfolding global disaster, one that even Tesla CEO Elon Musk has readily acknowledged, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Elon Musk has a stark warning for countries like Australia that are going hell for leather in the race to zero emissions: Slow down, or face disaster.
The only question is whether or not anyone in charge in Australia is listening.
Speaking to reporters in Norway earlier this week, Musk said, “Realistically, I think we need to use oil and gas in the short term, because otherwise civilisation will crumble.”
“One of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced is the transition to sustainable energy and to a sustainable economy … that will take some decades to complete,” he said.
Indeed. Note that Musk is no “climate denier”.
Instead he is someone who has made much of his vast fortune off renewable technologies and the government subsidies that flow to them.
If anyone was going to push the barrow for a bigger and faster push to renewables, it would be him.
Looking at the carnage in energy markets around the world and particularly Europe, it is hard to disagree with what the Tesla CEO has to say.
Two days ago Europe’s benchmark power prices for a megawatt of electricity broke the 1,000 Euro mark for the first time.
In the UK, power bills have soared to the point where health authorities are worried people are turning off their freezers to save money.
Several floats reportedly had to pull out of the raucous London’s Notting Hill Carnival – returning for the first time since Covid – because their organisers couldn’t pay to power them.
Across Europe people are scrambling to save energy, treating hot showers as a luxury, and preparing for what is likely to be a long, cold, and dangerous winter ahead that could see thousands of older people freeze to death.
As if answering Musk’s call, Germany, France, Austria and the Netherlands have all announced plans to bring mothballed coal fired power plants back on line.
Germany is also keeping nuclear plants it had planned to shut in a green pique open for longer, while the UK is crashing through with a program to build its own reactors.
Now, the obvious response from renewables boosters and climate crusaders here in Australia is that none of this is the fault of the European elite’s pursuit of net zero but rather that of Vladimir Putin and his stepping on gas lines feeding the West.
But there are two things to say about that.
The first is that weakening Europe’s ability to get energy out of the ground and turn it into heat and power was always going to end in tears.
While one can speculate about ex-German chancellor Angela Merkel’s pro-Russian, anti-Western leanings thanks to her childhood in elite East German schools and her family’s communist party connections, Putin had nothing to do with her disastrous energy policies which were replicated across much of the Continent.
Today old clips of Donald Trump drawing howls of laughter at the UN when in 2018 he told the General Assembly that “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course” look not bonkers but prophetic.
The second point, and one that is more worrying for Australians, is that our own push to renewables is just as vulnerable to external shocks as Europe’s.
Speak to executives in the energy industry, which publicly acts as if it is “all in” on the net zero agenda, and they will tell you they are quietly worried that there is no “plan B” if we blow up our coal fired power plants and don’t get enough solar, hydro, wind into the system in time.
Remember, we have to essentially triple the amount of renewable power going into the grid in the next seven and a half years – something that may not even be physically possible at any cost.
That’s a minimum figure because it does not account for the question of where all the power for our new electric vehicle fleet we are supposed to adopt will come from, pushed by everyone from the Albanese government on down to the corporate utopians at the Committee for Sydney who want all new cars to be EVs by 2027.
And just as Russia provides so much of Europe’s gas, China provides around 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels – including Australia’s.
One step forward would be to build more solar panels here, but that is only part of the solution.
Shayne Jaenish, CEO of Australia’s only solar panel manufacturer Tindo Solar, points out that it would be possible to build solar panels here with half the components made in Australia.
“Domestic manufacturing of solar panels, from Australian resources, would build sovereign capability, jobs and energy security at a time when the nation needs it most.”
Meanwhile on Tuesday it was reported that an American manufacturer of small modular reactors said it could get plants here within a few years that could power as many as 700,000 homes safely and sustainably.
Yet our energy minister Chris Bowen continues to shut down debate on nuclear power while insisting that renewables are the cheapest form of power – which it is, sometimes, and only if you don’t add in all the stuff that needs to support it.
At the same time we are increasingly reliant on China for our clean energy, which ironically is producing fewer solar panels as a local drought starves it of the hydro-electric power it needs to make the “green” technologies we increasingly demand.
In other words, Australia is making itself nearly as dependent on China for the tools to make energy as Europe has become on the raw fuel itself.
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