Peta Credlin: Net Zero gigantic act of economic and environmental self-harm
Net Zero is a gigantic act of economic and environmental self-harm that must stop before our country is scarred by forests of gargantuan windmills, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Right now, we are wrecking the planet in order to save it – by covering Australia in forests of wind farms and paddocks of solar panels, in a futile bid to reduce global emissions.
We’re less than 1 per cent of the problem and yet, while the world’s biggest emitters have all but abandoned Net Zero, we’re turning our economy and country upside down.
The latest example is near Yass in NSW, around the tiny hamlets of Bowning and Binalong, the place where Banjo Paterson grew up and that inspired his poetry, where locals who love their land are fighting to stop the erection of 90 wind turbines, each 260m tall, the height of Sydney’s Barangaroo tower.
But this is the fate of much of rural Australia if the Albanese government has its way. To achieve Labor’s legislated 82 per cent target for renewable energy, Australia needs to double its renewable power generation in just five years.
Three years back, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said this would require the assembly of 40 large wind turbines every single month and the installation of 22,000 solar panels every single day for seven years – plus the construction of at least 10,000km of new transmission towers.
But because it’s all now way behind schedule, this epic desecration of some of our nation’s best agricultural land is being massively accelerated, hence this insane push to destroy the amenity of the beautiful rolling hills around Yass because the so-called climate crisis demands it, as part of transitioning away from the fossil fuels that still provide 60 per cent of our electricity.
As the people fighting similar anti-environment projects off the Illawarra and Gippsland coasts, and in the Mallee all know, it’s just going to get worse if the government has its way, because Labor’s wind and solar-power footprint will gobble up a land area about the size of Tasmania.
And this is before the government’s even more “ambitious” 2035 emissions reductions are announced later this year, that will target sectors like agriculture and transport rather than just energy. To achieve Net Zero in agriculture and transport, country people will have to massively cull their herds (because large animals are 90 per cent of agricultural emissions), stop using fertiliser (that’s mostly sourced from gas) and convert all vehicles to electric power because fossil fuels are the source of nearly all transport emissions.
So, it’s not just visual pollution and permanent scarring of the landscape that country people will have to cop but big cuts to their income, big falls in farm values, and massive changes to their lifestyles, including their diet. And yours too.
Understandably, these people are beyond angry. They feel betrayed. And why wouldn’t they? Because both sides of politics, Labor with green conviction and the Coalition half-heartedly, because they can’t decide where they stand, are conspiring to subject them to something they feel is deeply wrong.
And it IS wrong to give mostly foreign-owned renewable energy companies, using mostly Chinese made wind turbines and solar panels, an unfettered right to enter private farming land and to erect these monstrosities, all because it’s part of the so-called green transition away from cheap and reliable fossil fuels.
Those that resist are now being hit with forced access and fines in excess of $12,000 – as introduced in Victoria.
Only people living in the city, conditioned by years of green propaganda to believe there’s a climate crisis that only swiftly ending the use of fossil fuels can fix, would think it’s smart to export Australian coal and gas to China, to help make the wind turbines and solar panels, that they then sell back to us, so that we no longer use coal and gas ourselves. How does that make sense?
We are making ourselves poorer in order to make China richer, so that we can engage in climate virtue-signalling here, while total global emissions keep going up and up. Since 2005, the increase in China’s emissions have been 30 times the reduction in ours.
Yet we’ve spent some $30 billion in the past decade just on subsidies for renewable power. And as I said, 70 per cent of the largest wind and solar players in Australia are foreign owned.
Honestly, this is mad. It’s a gigantic act of economic and environmental self-harm that must stop before our country is scarred by forests of these gargantuan windmills that only turn about 30 per cent of time, and the overbuild of transmission lines needed to service the turbines, that within 20 years will all be derelict anyway and will cost at least a half a million each to dismantle, a remediation cost that landholders will almost certainly have to pay themselves.
It’s this rural revolt that’s behind the belated moves inside the National Party to scrap the Coalition’s Net Zero commitment. They know that rural Australia is at breaking point and are determined to fight it, even if it means breaking the Coalition.
Former UK Labour PM Tony Blair agrees Net Zero is madness too.
So, when will the rest of us wake up?
THUMBS UP
Barnaby Joyce for his private member’s bill to scrap Net Zero. It’s about time we debated the massive costs of reducing our emissions when other countries aren’t cutting theirs.
THUMBS DOWN
The Albanese government’s First Nations Ambassador who’s amassed a $730k travel bill over two years. Why do we need a “First Nations” ambassador anyway when we already have diplomats overseas to represent all Australians?
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm