Andrew Bolt: Climate primitives turning energy into a luxury

Australia is now becoming a modern primitive society, governed by the taboos of global warming zealots like Chris Bowen and Daniel Andrews.

Congratulations! We’re now becoming one of those primitive societies that our earth-worshipping Left dream lived in “harmony” with nature.

You know, living cold and even hungry to placate the earth spirits. Just like, er, some Australians already, thanks to our global warming progressives.

“Progressives”? What a laugh.

No, they’re in fact like pre-colonialism Tasmanian Aborigines, who for some bizarre reason gave up fishing 4000 years ago, even though it often meant going hungry in winter.

Or like people living in parts of Nigeria who won’t feed their growing children meat or eggs for fear the spirits will make them grow evil.

Or like the Kiriwina Islanders, who banned pregnant women from eating bananas and mangoes – the kinds of foods they needed most.

But let’s not sneer at such primitive superstitions, because look at our own.

Look at what our own “progressive” primitives have now done to Australia, where many of our poor shiver in the freezing cold, too scared to heat their homes, thanks to the taboos of these global warming zealots.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has shut down suggestions of nuclear energy. Picture: Martin Ollman

One of our modern primitives is Chris Bowen, our new federal Climate Change Minister, who shouted in fury when a journalist last Thursday suggested a nuclear power station could save us: “Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy … It’s a complete joke!”

Then there’s Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, a green extremist who glowered angrily at suggestions we reopen a coal-fired power station that his global warming policies had helped force shut: “It’s wrong to be doing anything else other than forging ahead.”

But don’t forget preening NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, another climate catastrophist, who two years ago announced gas had no future in his state: “Those people arguing for coal or nuclear or for gas, they’re actually arguing more expensive, dirtier forms of energy.”

Yes, these modern primitives – along with the Greens, Teals and other tribes of shiny-eyed climate mystics – have said gas, coal, oil and nuclear power are all taboo. Sins against nature.

Australia, so rich in these four great sources of reliable power, must now – or soon – use none.

We must instead use something “clean”, like wind or solar – which actually fail when the wind dies or the sun dims.

What happens to turbines when wind dies? Picture: Tom Huntley

Or batteries, which cost a fortune and last just hours at best. Or hydrogen, a technology we haven’t even yet proved works.

Honestly, if you dressed Andrews, Bowen and Kean in animal skins and stuck them around a fire, you’d seen more clearly what is going on.

This is a back-to-the caves primitivism, driven not by reason but the latest earth-worshipping faith. Nothing these people say makes sense.

Take Bowen, yelling that nuclear power is the world’s most expensive energy.

Really? So why does Denmark, which relies most on wind power, have Europe’s highest electricity prices (including taxes), while France, with 56 nuclear reactors, is back at number 13, at just two thirds the price?

Yes, wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear power, just like a bike is cheaper than a truck. Great for when it’s all downhill with the wind at your back, and no load to carry.

But when you’ve finished building forests of wind farms and deserts of solar panels, you still need to build a web of expensive transmission wires to hook them all up, plus a separate power supply to switch on when the wind and sun don’t perform.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is another green extremist. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

They often don’t. A week after Labor, the Greens and the Teal climate independents smashed the Morrison government, wind and solar one day slumped to just 7 per cent of Australia’s entire electricity supply.

Or take Andrews and Kean, wrapped in their animal skins and cursing coal, gas and oil as crimes against the angry planet.

Seriously, where is this climate “catastrophe” they keep ballyhooing? We’ve posted record harvests, and get fewer cyclones. We’re living longer and have never been less likely to die in a climate disaster.

What’s more, instead of getting the “permanent drought” and empty dams that catastrophists like Tim Flannery once predicted, the rains are back and the dams filling, often to overflowing.

And even if Australia did get rid of all its coal, gas and oil, the difference we’d make to the climate is about zero – but the difference we’d make to our lives would be the true catastrophe.

Already our climate primitives have turned electricity into a luxury for the poor, some of whom must now choose between eating and heating.

What next in this march back to the caves?