Piers Akerman: Fantasy of net zero emissions not possible without adding nuclear to energy mix
We have an unreliable energy supply and no plans to upgrade to the world’s best while we pursue the renewable-only option – Australia must embrace nuclear, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The East Coast is drying out after being smashed by torrential rains, but our political leaders are as wet as ever.
Tens of thousands have been left homeless, stock has drowned, and at least four people have died. Not a drop of water has been saved because not a single dam has been built in recent years and a decade of rainfall has swept destructively out to sea.
This is rain which Professor Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, said would never fall, and if it did, it would evaporate on hitting the ground. Flannery’s dire predictions have been proved to be massively wrong but that has not stopped the political class pandering to an ignorant public eager to be terrified about a non-existent threat.
The stupid on-off spat between the longtime Coalition partners, the Liberal and National parties, left the new Labor government’s critically damaging plans for the economy unchallenged but even these formerly conservative politicians still cling to the net zero cause.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen promises to double down on his plans to build even more unreliable wind and solar factories to pump intermittent energy into the already challenged grid.
Labor’s biggest lie – to provide cheaper electricity – remains and will do so throughout this term as it did during its last three years in office.
Lying and hypocrisy is now part of Labor’s DNA, a fact confirmed by the smirking national secretary of the ALP, Paul Erickson, during his smug presentation at the National Press Club in which he defended the preposterously false claim that the Coalition’s nuclear policy would cost $600bn.
Instead of wrangling over trivialities, the members of the Coalition should have been front-and-centre attacking Labor’s agenda.
Energy is the nation’s problem. Without reliable constant power we will sink further into oblivion.
Labor has ignored all the available hard evidence in its pursuit of an ideological fantasy.
There is not a single nation in the world that will ever reach the fabled goal of net zero carbon dioxide emissions without both fossil fuels and some nuclear energy.
Ted O’Brien, the new deputy Liberal Party leader, made mince meat out of Bowen when the men met in debate before the last election.
Bowen and his anti-nuclear allies are running a scare campaign based on the 1950s Ban the Bomb movement and the climate catastrophe ideology promoted by the deluded Greta Thunberg.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Bowen have repeatedly promised that Australia will achieve net zero by 2050 – that just will not happen.
CO2 is only 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere and, of that small proportion, human-made CO2 is only 3 per cent. Bowen would have us believe that human-made CO2 dominates the atmosphere.
With a third of the world’s uranium stocks – for export only – Australia is a global laughing stock.
We are a nation in decline, falling further behind on every metric by which successful nations are judged.
We have an unreliable energy supply and no plans to upgrade to the world’s best while we pursue the renewable-only option.
China plans 10 nuclear reactors for 200 billion yuan ($43bn), putting the country on track to push its nuclear power generation capacity past the US to become the world’s largest by 2030. And the US wants to quadruple its fleet of nuclear power plants by 2050.
Australia can’t meet the projected power demands of AI and 2030’s data processing centres.
How Albanese and Bowen can talk up the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal while they wilfully ignore the need for a domestic nuclear industry is hypocritical stupidity.
Australia must embrace nuclear.
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