Tim Blair: Australia’s net zero plan ‘on the skids’

Net zero, the ambitious plot to make society even more miserable by sucking all the carbon dioxide out of it, is in trouble, writes Tim Blair.

Net zero, the ambitious plot to make society even more miserable by sucking all the carbon dioxide out of it, is on the skids.

It turns out that decarbonising an entirely carbonised industrial world isn’t easy.

In fact, contrary to the expectations of Labor PM Anthony Albanese’s corporate-enviro elite, cashed-up luxury opinion Teals and the local Hamas Cuddles Committee, also known as the Greens, getting net zero to fly is proving remarkably difficult.

As powerful evidence of this, consider the instructive tale of the Lego toy company.

Everybody knows about Lego blocks. Kids have enjoyed attaching and detaching these dinky Danish cuboids for decades.

Adults typically locate stray examples via stepping on them.

It’d be significantly simpler and probably less expensive to create a living Lego human than to impose economically and culturally crippling net zero carbon emissions limits on the industrialised world. Picture: Getty Images

Anyway, being a good global citizen Lego vowed in 2021 that it would replace its oil-derived plastic blocks with blocks made from more acceptable materials.

As a first step Lego unveiled an experimental block carefully created in its laboratories by a 150-strong team of tireless sustainability engineers.

“The new prototype, which uses PET plastic from discarded bottles, is the first brick made from a recycled material to meet the company’s strict quality and safety requirements,” a Lego press release gushed.

“We are super excited about this breakthrough,” Lego Group president of environmental responsibility Tim Brooks added.

“The biggest challenge on our sustainability journey is rethinking and innovating new materials that are as durable, strong and high quality as our existing bricks – and fit with Lego elements made over the past 60 years.

“With this prototype we’re able to showcase the progress we’re making.”

A wind turbine installed at Clarke Creek Wind Farm. Picture: Supplied

That was back in 2021 after Lego had already spent a great deal of time and money upgrading from oil to renewables.

Net zero enthusiasts – such as Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and half-hamster, half-political liability Environment Minister Chris Bowen – might imagine that by now the entire Lego world is switched on to the renewables religion.

No more oil-based blocks for them.

And fair enough, too. From the perspective of people who believe we can Just Stop Oil and immediately thereafter run everything on sunlight and gentle breezes it shouldn’t have been much of a transition.

After all, Lego blocks have no moving parts and need only to fulfil two very basic tasks: sticking to another Lego block and then, with a tiny effort, becoming unstuck.

It’s not as though Lego was, in the manner of Labor and its international net zero comrades, attempting to re-engineer the whole of Western society.

But here’s the fun part. Lego couldn’t do it.

The company spent a total of five years and God only knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars, but it couldn’t get renewable Lego blocks to work.

At issue was what Lego engineers call “clutch power” – the flexible connecting/disconnecting property that makes a Lego block a proper Lego block. This is no problem when using oil-based plastics, but renewable sources were useless.

“In the early days the belief was that it was easier to find this magic material or this new material,” Lego chief executive Niels Christiansen told the UK’s Financial Times in September.

Sadly for Lego renewables and other non-oil variants just don’t have what it takes.

“We tested hundreds and hundreds of materials,” CEO Christiansen said. “It’s just not been possible.”

Lego sustainability boss Brooks, who was so keen on renewables back in 2021, expressed his disappointment far more lyrically.

Attempting to manufacture his company’s signature blocks from squishy and substandard renewables, he said, was “like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel”.

Which brings us again to Albanese, Chalmers and Bowen, who are trying to make an Australia out of wind chimes and sunbeams rather than oil, coal and uranium.

Chalmers last week reckoned a further $225 billion might be needed to secure his net zero dream.

“Without more decisive action, across all levels of government, working with investors, industry and communities, the energy transition could fall short of what the country needs,” Chalmers said.

“To maximise our advantages in renewable energy and the economic and industrial opportunities that will come from them we need to get more projects off the ground faster.”

Try designing a new Lego block.

Speaking of which, rumour has it the Treasurer’s childhood Legos are only seven years old and his toddler staff are banned from playing with them due to choking risks.

That’s according to sources in the wildly speculative Capital Territory connective toys community, anyway. So don’t bet your life on it.