Bolt: Global warming extremists in charge of our energy supplies

It’s an embarrassment and a scandal that a country with hundreds of years’ supply of coal and reserves of gas and uranium is critically short of electricity.

Chris Bowen has the perfect face for the poster idiot of our times, as eastern Australia runs out electricity to heat our freezing homes.

Look at our new Climate Change Minister, eyes bright with holy fervour in his crusade to get rid of even more of the coal-fired power plants that once gave us cheap and reliable electricity.

Look as he radiates smug certainty that he’s on the road to a green Jerusalem, even as he instructed Australians on Tuesday to stop blackouts by checking every electrical appliance in their homes and “think about switching it off”.

Dear God. How can this global warming extremist also be in charge of our energy supplies?

Check the devastation caused already by global warming policies of past Liberal governments and the states.

It’s an embarrassment – a scandal – that a country with hundreds of years’ supply of coal and massive reserves of gas and uranium is critically short of electricity, even paying some businesses NOT to use power.

Who’d invest in this country? If you wanted to build a new steel mill, say, knowing it needed lots of electricity, would you build it in switch-off Australia or in China, which is building 172 new coal-fired power plants, plus nuclear ones that we’ve foolishly outlawed here?

We’re now suffering the consequences of massive stupidity – a mixture of fantasy thinking, holy rapture and total indifference to the consequences of destroying a great electricity system without having something to replace it.

We have this shortage largely because green policies did exactly what they were meant to do: drive coal-fired power stations out of business to supposedly save us from a climate catastrophe.

One third of those generators were destroyed in a decade as governments subsidised wind and solar instead, and owners of the rest realised it was nuts to invest millions to keep them going. That’s why so many are now failing or closing early.

So the real catastrophe Australians face isn’t from global warming but global warming policies.

The warming we’ve seen so far has actually been overwhelmingly good. We’ve had record crops, lots of rain and fewer cyclones, and we’ve never been less likely to die in a climate disaster.

But global warming policies are now a direct threat to poor Australians, including pensioners who now cannot afford to heat their homes.

Even the warmist ABC is now interviewing people such as Zeinab Akil, a single mother, who says she’s trying to keep her four children warm by offering them “two or three times hot drink, hot chocolate … to avoid the heater as much as I can”.

Try telling her that her children must freeze to stop the planet warming, when scrapping every power station in the country will still make about zero difference to the climate anyway.

But Albanese, like Bowen, is still in denial. He this week insisted Labor would fix this crisis by giving “certainty” to people wanting to invest in more wind and solar plants.

What idiocy. The only “certainty” Labor offers is that our remaining coal-fired generators will go broke faster and shut down sooner.

Labor plans to make 82 per cent of our electricity come from renewable power like wind and solar farms, and in just eight years.

But when the wind dies, it hardly matters if you have 10 wind farms or a 1000 in the same area. You’ll still get no power. And a million solar panels in the dark still won’t light a candle.

So the more wind and solar you have, the more you must spend on a whole separate electricity system to just sit there and jump in whenever the wind drops or clouds gather. Coal generators can’t switch on and off like that.

Result: countries with the most wind and solar – like Denmark and Germany – tend to have the highest prices.

Then there’s the taxes needed to pay for Labor’s plan. Even Anna Collyer, head of the Energy Security Board, was staggered: “We need to build eight times as much renewable energy than we have right now.”

We’d also need to invest $14bn for a web of transmission lines to all these new wind and solar farms – two-thirds again of the lines we have now.

“It’s actually mind-boggling,” said Collyer.

How can an honest person not see Labor’s plan exactly for what it is: a massively expensive con to make electricity a luxury for the poor, so the smug rich can pretend to save the planet from a fake “climate crisis”.