Andrew Bolt: All pain, no gain in Labor’s Budget’s global warming spending

Jim Chalmers has pledged to splash another $25bn on indulging the global warming madness that’s wrecking our electricity system — but the real pain is to come.

I’m not unfair. I don’t blame Anthony Albanese for not instantly cutting our electricity prices and stopping the inflation he admits will make Australians poorer for another two years.

What I blame the Prime Minister for are his lies. How dare he steal the last election with a promise to cut your electricity bill by $275?

How dare he promise 97 times to do something he must have known was a hoax?

How dare he keep Australians ignorant of the danger we’re in from our global warming hysteria?

Now – five months after Albanese’s lie made him Prime Minister – we know the truth, hidden deep in the Budget papers on Tuesday.

The average electricity bill will not fall by $275. It will instead rise by $1000 over the next year and a half – a rise of 56 per cent. The average gas bill will go up $600.

That won’t be the only hit. Everything you buy that needs electricity or gas to make, move, chill or sell will also go up. Many poor people won’t be able to afford to heat their homes next winter, and some will die of hypothermia in their freezing homes.

How dare Anthony Albanese steal the last election with a promise to cut your electricity bill by $275? Picture: Gary Ramage

This is just part of the price of the global warming madness that is destroying our electricity system – a madness that Treasurer Jim Chalmers promised on Tuesday to splash another $25bn on indulging and promoting.

We still haven’t suffered the real pain. Our politicians, state and federal, have already helped to drive a third of our coal-fired power stations out of business in just the past decade. Most of the remaining generators will be gone by 2035, including all Victoria’s, under Premier Daniel Andrews’ insane plans last week.

Wait to see the mayhem then. The Australian Energy Market Operator is already warning of blackouts in Victoria and South Australia in two years, with worse to come.

The Prime Minister likes to blame the war in Ukraine for the soaring prices, but that’s just more fantasy.

The real problem is our politicians destroying the coal-fired electricity system that worked without having anything good to replace the fossil fuels that have made us so rich and comfortable.

They’ve made coal-fired power stations uneconomic by subsidising the wind and solar plants that pick the eyes out of the market when it’s sunny and windy. They’ve also blocked or delayed new coal mines, and banned fracking for gas in Victoria and parts of NSW and South Australia.

Don’t believe the ravings of Albanese’s Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, surely the most dangerous man in parliament.

“Renewable energy is the cheapest energy,” he babbles, because “the sun and wind don’t send a bill”.

Well, Chris, coal doesn’t send a bill, either, and is as free as the wind, lying there in mountains under our feet.

The problem is that if you want an electricity system driven by wind and solar, you’ll need to string massive powerlines all around the country to link them up, plus build a whole new second system for when it’s dark or the wind dies.

Chris Bowen is surely the most dangerous man in Parliament. Picture: Gary Ramage

Many green journalists refuse to see or report this truth, but the people who make our electricity know it.

One is Jeff Dimery, head of Alinta Energy, who is closing Victoria’s giant Loy Yang coal-fired generator a decade early and is trying to find the wind and pumped hydro power meant to take its place.

“What cost $1 billion to acquire is going to cost me $8 billion to replace,” he protested two weeks ago.

“So let’s talk about that and still explain to me how energy prices come down – I don’t get it … It’s horrendous.”

And this is our future, hurtling towards us.

Why can’t Albanese see it? Why is he insisting we’ll be saved by more of the same that’s got us into this catastrophe?

It’s as if being green is an excuse to say or do any mad thing and still feel virtuous, even as the world collapses around you.

Check some of the global warming spending in the government’s budget. Tax breaks so the rich can buy electric cars that – oops – still rely on coal-fired power. Handouts to build hydrogen refuelling stations for the hydrogen cars that nobody at all bought last month.

And none of it – not a dollar of the $25 billion Labor promises to spend, or the $500 billion the CSIRO says going renewable will actually cost – will change the weather at all. We’re too small.

It’s all for moral show. No gain, just pain.