Vikki Campion: Green Cate Faehrmann’s ‘solution’ to energy transition is rolled gold ridiculous
Could we really melt down our grandmother’s engagement rings for the renewable revolution? That’s what Cate Faehrmann appears to think, writes VIKKI CAMPION
Opinion
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More than 100 years have passed since the birth of Russia’s disastrous chapter of communism, but it appears some NSW politicians still have a sweet spot for it.
After the Bolsheviks won the revolution, the newly formed Communist state seized family heirlooms, stockpiling hundreds of tonnes of gold and precious metals to fund the Soviet government.
In an inquiry in the NSW Upper House last week, Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann appeared to suggest that instead of mining gold and silver to make essential componentry in solar panels and electric vehicles, we could all melt down our grandmother’s engagement rings. “We can do the energy transition without, like, opening up a new McPhillamys (gold) mine and silver (mine) in Bowdens,” she said. “With the existing gold supply and gold bullions lying around, surely that could be used instead.”
Ms Faehrmann, adorned with an Apple Watch, using an iPad and an iPhone containing gold components, told the inquiry: “How about we not produce as much of that jewellery, for example, we won’t need to open up those mines?”
Apparently, the only hole in the ground the Greens believe in is a cave.
Demand in silver is through the roof – 50 per cent of which goes into solar panels, which need regular replacement. Gold is in every smartphone. And zinc is used to protect wind and solar factories from corrosion.
Welcome to the Greens-Teal utopia. You can buy the new “carbon neutral” iPhone with a clean conscience every year; just don’t ask where the cobalt comes from. You can make a virtue of buying water from farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin and sending it out to sea; don’t ask where the food will come from.
Close forests to loggers, and fix the housing crisis without timber; ban irrigated cotton and clothe the world.
And change the earth’s temperature by shutting down NSW’s mining industry. Just don’t ask how the wind turbines and solar panels, locked in a 20-year build-break-build cycle, are made.
The consequence of this net zero 2050 utopia that both sides of politics yearned for is a spread of new mines, old forests chopped down for wind power plants and transmission lines, and more environmental damage than any benefit they claim to create.
There are 17 greenfield metals and minerals projects on the drawing board in NSW, proposals to mine scandium, cobalt, zinc, and lithium, and plans to expand existing gold, copper and silver mining operations attracting the ire of the Greens. But nine solar power plants committed and 55 proposed, and more than 50 wind power plants, set for NSW attract no comment from them at all.
Manufacturers only buy expensive minerals if they have to. It defies logic that any business would rely on gold, silver, copper and zinc for any other reason than necessity.
The 2019 Responsible Minerals Sourcing for Renewable Energy report by the University of Technology Sydney says “annual demand from solar PV for silver could reach more than 40 per cent of current production rates”, while citing annual demand from renewable energy and storage technologies exceeds current production levels for nearly half of the metals required and “will need to rapidly increase supply”.
But according to the Greens, the war is on that 7.5gm of gold in your engagement ring, not the 4.7 tonnes of copper in each wind turbine.
More problematic than the Greens’ rage is that other people, surrounded by concrete, asphalt and office towers, go along with this philosophy.
The chapel of this movement is the Environmental Defenders Office, which believes songlines of whale dreaming should end offshore gas – but has yet to apply whale dreaming on any federal plans for offshore wind factories. Maybe because whales will not dream around wind factories.
There is no alternative to this so-called net-zero nirvana but to clear the country for transmission lines, wind turbines and mines for the materials to go into PVs, batteries and power lines.
This week, federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen assured Central Queensland locals that a massive lithium-ion Tesla battery station fire wasn’t a big deal. All the while, firefighters were warning residents not to open their windows, to keep medications close to hand and be ready for a police door-knock.
It’s not clean and green; it’s toxic.
Demand for metals – and mining to dig them up – will spike every few years when new panels and turbines need to be built or need replacing. And for each turbine comes the ships, trucks, cranes and habitat sacrifice.
In Cammeray, Sydney, the locals who elected Climate-200-backed MP Kylea Tink are now beating down her door in protest at having to do their bit for the 80 per cent renewable target, campaigning against a community battery being built in their neighbourhood.
If the people who voted out the Liberal party for no new coal and gas and a fully electrified community target of 2035, won’t even allow a battery to store their excess solar, imagine asking them to melt down the family heirlooms for solar panels.
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