Piers Akerman: Australia headed for anthropogenic catastrophe
Despite the closure of 60 per cent of current coal power sources in the next eight years, the government thinks all will be tickety-boo. This is a complete and utter fantasy, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Australians must wake up to the reality that the country is heading for an anthropogenic catastrophe – the Labor/Greens plan to crush the economy.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s boast that “getting more renewables in the system will mean lower power prices” is demonstrably false.
Denmark and Germany, often cited for their green credentials, have the second and fourth highest power prices in the world.
Bowen’s claim just doesn’t stack up and cannot come close to being true no matter how the statistics are manipulated.
This is just one of the many flaws in the net-zero fallacy being propounded by the Albanese government and its big business stooges.
Labor’s 2030 climate policy goal – to cut emissions 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and to net zero by 2050 – passed through the House of Representatives in June and through the Senate with the support of the Greens and the green-tinged ACT Senator David Pocock in July.
They clearly believe that despite the closure of 60 per cent of the current dwindling coal power generation over the next eight years, all will be tickety-boo because so-called renewables like wind and solar will have come online at an estimated cost of around $320bn. This is a complete and utter fantasy.
Without even examining the validity of the IPCC’s theories based on its flawed and manipulated global warming modelling, it is possible to demonstrate that right now Australia’s capacity to generate the electricity essential to keeping the lights on, homes heated and industry alive is in a steady decline.
We have done nothing as woke politicians cheered the premature demolition of coal-fired power stations without ensuring adequate guaranteed replacement energy sources.
Origin Energy is to close its huge Eraring power station in NSW seven years before schedule in 2025, and AGL has said it will shut the Loy Yang A plant 10 years early in 2035.
Even the Germans, who under former Russia-devoted leader Angela Merkel, rushed to close their coal-fired power plants and nuclear generators, had the foresight to mothball these valuable assets rather than gloatingly destroying them.
Faced with a real climate emergency, formerly known as winter, the Germans are hastily sending maintenance crews to bring them back online as the Russians turn off the gas in a bid to blackmail Europe into ceding Ukraine’s sovereignty over vast chunks of that nation.
The usually delusional Greta Thunberg has seen the light and now opposes green plans to thwart Germany’s nuclear revival.
Labor’s Plan A – Anthony Albanese oft-repeated election promise to reduce household power bills by $275 by 2025 – is unachievable as power bills are now forecast to rise by a minimum of 35 per cent next year.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week stated there was no energy source currently in operation which would adequately firm up renewables when coal is phased out and if there continue to be gas supply disruptions.
“The battery in South Australia lasts for 75 minutes, you’ve got hydrogen that might be a reality in a decade’s time, you’ve got some hydro in this scheme but really at the margins, and how do the lights stay on overnight?” he asked.
“If the solar panels worked overnight time, fantastic, but the fact is that they don’t, so you need to be able to firm up that energy.
“Labor is putting us on a path to not only have huge increases in electricity and gas bills, but also to make it unreliable.”
Decarbonising the nation without any Plan B makes zero sense.
Regional Australia is now waking to the threat the urban-based renewable lobby poses to valuable agricultural land.
While some hobby farmers are objecting to the loss of their views to towering wind turbines and clearways cut for giant transmission lines, concern about loss of land taken out of production to provide the vast areas needed for solar and wind is mounting.
While Green-front groups Lock the Gates and Farmers for Climate Action call for action to block gas development and for greater subsidies for renewables and batteries, rival network Save Our Surroundings, with a rapidly increasing number of independently run branches across the country, is fighting back, exposing the environmental, agricultural and community destruction being caused by the wanton rollout of wind farms, solar farms and batteries.
To reduce carbon emissions and provide reliable dispatchable power, nuclear energy technology must be included in the mix, not shut out by the slavish diktats of Labor’s ideological anti-nuke constraints.
Even the IPCC has conceded that its models for decarbonisation by 2050 include nuclear energy.
If we want to be a richer, stronger, freer nation, with zero emissions, it is clear that the ban on nuclear power must be urgently lifted.
Black Friday ahead for retailers
Let’s call this rail dispute for what it is. It’s industrial warfare that is a dagger to the heart of our city and its still struggling economy, writes Paul Nicolaou.
Transport minister Jo Haylen’s service could be terminated by train stoppage
Sydney’s train strike has not come as any surprise. The transport minister had weeks to plan for this but instead basked in the glory of a Metro she did nothing to build, writes James O’Doherty.