Peta Credlin: It’s time to accept the truth about so-called green power
Avid Greenies now agree that renewable energy degrades the landscape, delivers unreliable power, costs billions in subsidies and rips ordinary people off, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Isn’t it time we acknowledged the risk that climate zealotry poses to our economy given leading green activists are now apologising for their fraudulent claims?
We’ve seen $300 billion in defence hardware announced last week, all of which has to be paid for, and with Roy Morgan Research claiming the real COVID-induced unemployment is more like 15 per cent at least — rather than the official 7 per cent — it’s time to wake up.
It’s tens of thousands of years since our ancestors relied on the sun for heating, and it’s a couple of hundred years since we relied on wind for power.
We stopped relying on them because, compared to modern forms of power, they’re incredibly inefficient.
But the era before fire and before steam is what green activists want us to return to, all in the name of saving the planet by reducing the carbon dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuel. The fundamental problem is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, yet the modern world needs power 24/7.
So the current mania for solar panels and wind turbines, while possibly modestly reducing emissions, is going to drive up power prices thanks to the back-up that’s always required; and it’s going to massively increase environmental damage because of the vast resources in land and raw materials needed to have them built and installed.
Before this is pilloried as right-wing ‘climate denial’, this is the argument against renewables now being mounted by one of the ultimate green insiders, Michael Shellenberger, who has spent the previous 20 years of his life campaigning against man-caused climate change.
A long-time adviser to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Shellenberger helped to craft Barack Obama’s energy policy.
Like left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who is also speaking out about the sham that is renewable energy, Shellenberger is still worried about climate change; it’s just that he’s come to realise that the “extinction rebellion” campaign is a hoax and that so-called renewable energy is doing far more harm than good.
It’s much the same thesis we saw in Moore’s recent film, Planet of Humans (available free on YouTube), and if politicians were brave enough to read Shellenberger’s new book, Apocalypse Never, launched last week, then we might see a big rethink of energy policy because if we really do want to cut emissions, the only affordable way to do so while maintaining baseload power is nuclear.
Because quite apart from the back-up power that wind and solar need, they turn their immediate surroundings into environmental dead zones.
Shellenberger says fear of losing friends and research grants had cowed him from telling the truth; but now, aghast at the Greta Thunberg craze and schoolkids routinely having nightmares about dying from climate change, he says: “I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem”.
Look no further than the looming tragedy at Nundle in northern NSW, to see the impact of this policy dogma.
A picturesque little village of 300 people near Tamworth, Nundle is about to be transformed by a wind farm on its doorstep.
Within a few kilometres of this tourist town, and visible to almost everyone in the district, there’s a proposed $600 million wind farm with nearly eighty 220m high turbines stretching over 20 kilometres of ridge line. For comparison, Sydney’s MLC tower is just 228m tall.
Locals are understandably furious about this scar on their landscape and also at the proponent’s attempt to “divide and rule” by offering some residents up to $6000 a year to acquiesce.
I’ve been arguing for years that renewable energy degrades the landscape, delivering far less reliable power than promised, costs billions in subsidies and enables greedy energy companies to drive up the value of their remaining fossil-fuel assets.
It rips ordinary people off with less reliable and more expensive power; but now it’s not just conservative commentators pointing this out; it’s people from the heart of the green movement.
Even Bob Brown himself is having second thoughts about wind farms because they’re a blight on the landscape and a big killer of large and slow-to-breed birds such as hawks and eagles. Shellenberger points out that Germany’s power prices have increased 50 per cent in the past decade as it up-scaled renewables, while France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity.
How? Through nuclear power.
“What about all the headlines,” asks Shellenberger, “about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 per cent of the costs of building nuclear plants are upfront, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams or other forms of battery.”
Let’s not forget either that over 70 per cent of wind farms in Australia are foreign owned, and because most of the materials for renewable power — wind or solar — come from China, the renewable sector is a giant wealth transfer exercise from Australia to our greatest strategic competitor which, unlike us, has no qualms whatsoever about building power stations fired by coal from here.
If the activists on the left are speaking the truth about the lie that is so-called green power, surely, it’s time politicians on the right owned up to the truth also?