James Morrow: Government’s green dreams could leave us all in the dark

From Germany to the Netherlands to Sri Lanka, we are seeing the consequences of rushing into elite green schemes, so why do we think we are immune in Australia, ask James Morrow.

Are there any more dangerous words in the English language than “it can’t happen here”?

It’s like the “hold my beer” of the political class, uttered just before doing something incredibly if impressively dumb that ends, inevitably, in disaster.

Right now the world is full of such examples and Australia would be wise to heed them.

Take Germany, which tried to phase out its nuclear plants and go green with renewables and is now, according to the Financial Times, rationing hot water, dimming street lights and shutting community pools to cope with its energy crunch.

Or Sri Lanka, which thought that it could print as much money as it wanted and not tempt the inflation genie out of the bottle while at the same time making all its farmers go organic, increasing their costs and cutting production.

German protesters demand an end to the planned German embargo against the import of Russian oil. Picture: Getty Images

Predictable hilarity — or rather tragedy — ensued.

The government and the currency have both collapsed, they can’t grow enough rice to eat or tea to sell overseas for foreign exchange and the country is now dead broke.

And then there is the case of the Netherlands.

There, the supposedly centre-right government has signed up to ambitious climate goals that have included not only carbon and nitrogen emissions but also forcing farmers to use less fertiliser, thus producing less food and even cull their herds, to slash their greenhouse gases.

Now, the produce sections of supermarkets are as bare as they have been since the war.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of farmers have taken to the highways in protest at the rules which will marginally raise costs for large agribusiness operators while forcing family farmers who have worked the same plot of earth for generations off the land.

Happily, we would never be so silly here in Australia. Or would we?

Australians risk being left in the dark due to regular blackouts.

Yes, Germany has Russia stepping on its gas supplies but for years it has been all but impossible to get more gas out of the ground in NSW and Victoria even as domestic users are forced to pay prices driven up by the export market.

And now, as other nations hit the brakes on their net zero aims to avoid slamming hard into the brick wall of reality, Australia says it is full steam ahead. The argument of Anthony Albanese and his climate and energy minister Chris Bowen is that the reality of climate change is even more urgent.

Farmers remove tractors forming a blockade during a demonstration against the Dutch government's far-reaching plans to cut nitrogen emissions. Picture: AFP

But the problem is that when the prime minister connects floods and bushfires to what he calls “the climate wars”, he is asking Australians to engage in a bit of magical thinking.

Namely, that if we could go back in time by a decade and somehow get Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme through the parliament, we wouldn’t have been scorched by bushfires in 2020 and people living in Hawkesbury and Richmond and Lismore wouldn’t keep suffering floods today. This is, of course nonsense but there is a lot of that going around.

On Tuesday the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatil Birol, said that “we are in the middle of the first global energy crisis”.

At the same time, Mr Birol reiterated his belief that countries like Australia should keep accelerating the move to renewables.

But whatever the public statements, the local energy industry knows that Australia is headed for a serious crunch.

The fact is there is not much in the way of a “plan B” to keep the lights on if old power generators come offline before new so-called renewable energy is ready to be plugged into the grid.

Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at the Sydney Energy Forum this week. Picture: AFP

And the near-religious refusal to even entertain the nuclear debate because it is supposedly too expensive even as the government prepares to tip even more billions into green energy sources suggests a lack of seriousness.

Yet this belief that somehow Australia is different and immune from these trends is naive in the extreme.

While there are plenty of differences between Australia and the Netherlands or Germany or Sri Lanka, or other nations like Canada which have also been rocked by protests against elites who have tried to achieve their own lofty goals off the back of the working class, there are plenty of similarities too.

Ralph Schoellhammer, who teaches economics and political science at Vienna’s Webster University, recently painted a picture of where this is going — and there is no reason to think Australia is immune.

“Ultimately, there is a risk that climate policies will do to Europe what Marxism did to Latin America,” he wrote at Newsweek.com.

“A continent with all the conditions for widespread prosperity and a healthy environment will impoverish and ruin itself for ideological reasons.”

But, hey, surely it can’t happen here.

Right?