Vikki Campion: Prince Charles should stay neutral on our net zero plans

Prince Charles lectured Australia on climate change this week. Vikki Campion explains why he really should keep his opinions to himself.

An exceptionally wealthy person, Mr Future King of Australia, tells us his favourite luxury Aston Martin sports car runs on wine and cheese.

This is Prince Charles’s way of convincing us to sign up for an idea to cool the planet to pay for a problem Australia can’t possibly fix.

In Glasgow, not far from his mansion, people suffering from their worst energy crisis in history will have to tolerate the climate glitterati lecturing them at the COP26 talkfest after arriving on their private jets.

We really don’t need a lecture on energy from Prince Charles, pictured with Duchess Camilla. Picture: Getty Images

At their home, they are choosing between keeping warm or buying dinner. Gas was supposed to supplement renewables, but Russia won’t give them enough gas.

The question is, how do you get yourself in the position of relying on a totalitarian regimen for a fundamental of modern living — power? How did the magic of modelling get it so wrong?

Prince Cheese forgets that the UK is lecturing us on net zero, yet only 25 per cent of their power comes from renewables — the rest comes from gas and nuclear, and, recently, crisis-recommissioned coal plants.

In the same way the ACT bleats about not having coal, even though it gets its electricity from the NSW Hunter Valley coal fields, the UK can bleat about net zero while using nuclear power from France.

If we sign up to net zero, we can only do so with a baseload power source.

Next week Mark Latham’s bill will go before NSW parliament to lift the ban on the generation of nuclear power and uranium mining.

You have Treasurer Matt Kean wanting to pursue net zero, yet it takes a One Nation MLC with the support of the Nationals to find a rational approach to achieve that hypothetical goal which can only be done if we go nuclear. Mr Latham recognises that we can destroy our economy and make no difference to the world.

Sir Joh Bielke-Petersen was expounding the miracle of hydrogen 40 years ago.

It’s easy for the Prince to say get out of coal when he is running his car on wine and cheese. Presumably he has a maid scrubbing his solar panels and a cable over the Channel to the world’s biggest energy generator.

The Queen has never let her private views be known in the course of her duty, yet her son does not follow suit.

Usually, the sovereign hears the prime minister and doesn’t interfere in the government process.

In exposing what Prime Minister Scott Morrison told him privately, the Prince sets a precedent that elected governments can be fodder for favourable media attention.

The oxymoronic thing is that Prince Charles’s biggest ally in his quest for net zero is the head of the republican movement in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull.

We support a monarchy, but after Queen Elizabeth, can we please pick a different family?

This encapsulates the whole Glasgow COP26 circus.

At home, the Nationals are about to explode. The Liberal Right are about to implode. Both their backbenches are screaming because we take the mandate seriously from an elite royal whose experience of Australia is being babysat on Bondi Beach by a swag of bodyguards after arriving on a private jet.

But the Prince wasn’t the only elitist lecturing us this week.

While Australian families are locked apart by arbitrary border controls, we are being lectured to by multibillionaire mining baron Andrew Forrest, who took a national tour in his $98 million Bombardier Global Express 7500 private jet.

He took to the Press Club to patronise Nationals Minister Bridget McKenzie. Her crime? Injecting a dose of reality on renewables jobs figures in the regions.

“You can’t fool all of the people, all of the time Bridget,” Mr Forrest said.

And did the feminazi sisterhood rebuke Mr Forrest for mansplaining to the Minister for Regionalisation, whose portfolio centres around job creation?

Just like Prince Charles, there are politically-correct billionaires beyond reproach.

Someone should ask him how his iron ore, which he built his wealth on, is converted to steel in China.

Has he put a green caveat on it, to refuse sale on iron ore unless they use green hydrogen? Of course not.

Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen talked about hydrogen in 1979 using the same language Mr Forrest uses in 2021.

The then-Queensland premier called the “clean and pollution-free” technology the “greatest breakthrough since the steam train, with potentially more application than the motor car, it would also apply to power stations”.

Four decades later the hydrogen industry still mainly consists of politicians saying how good it would be if it worked.

Mr Forrest’s green hydrogen needs to prove its viability before you bet the economy on it.

Between 2012–13 and 2021–22, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has accessed more than $2.2 billion to provide financial assistance to improve the competitiveness and supply of renewable energy in Australia.

This includes research, where ideas were binned because projects — ranging from more than $9 million on multiple plans to make biofuel from micro-algae or sugar waste, to $32.75 million in volcanic geothermal, to converting coal stations to hybrid solar thermal — weren’t economic, viable, feasible or simply closed down.

Since 2009, the government has spent more than $1 billion on carbon capture and storage, with only one plant to show.

The things that do work – coal – the government didn’t invent either.

It’s easy to lecture us to rip up our gas and coal power stations — and replace them with solar panels and the same technology that powered the Hindenburg — when you live in a nuclear-powered manor in a bill-free bubble.

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