Australia’s mad approach to climate change will do nothing but send you broke | Alexander Downer

You can call me a heretic if you want but Australia’s mad approach to the climate crisis has to change, writes Alexander Downer.

Australia is the world’s second largest exporter of LNG, has 30 per cent of the world’s uranium, is the world’s largest exporter of coal and it has among the highest energy prices in the world. It’s a shocking indictment of the way our country has been run in recent years.

It’s not as if I’m opposed to policies designed to address climate change. There is a case for

them. What we need, though, is a completely new approach.

This is the great challenge our politicians face.

At both state and federal level, the politicians who can come up with policies which will significantly reduce our astronomic electricity prices will sweep into power.

However, those politicians who are still blathering on about how if we vote for them they’ll change the global climate by pushing up energy prices with fancy renewable schemes will in the end find themselves out of a job.

And rightly so. They are fantasists.

At the moment, Australia along with many European countries thinks it can contribute to alleviating climate change by building windmills and solar panels and abandoning fossil fuels.

In every case, this has led to substantial increases in energy prices because wind and solar are intermittent and need back up. So we’ve ended up with two systems instead of one. That’s expensive.

Let’s look on the bright side.

Because we pushed up our energy prices by turning our backs on cheap gas and because manufacturing has largely closed down in Australia we have reduced by 28 per cent our CO2 emissions over the last 20 years. So take a bow.

That’s what you wanted and that’s what you’ve got. Now ask yourself another question and this is a hard one. For all the pain that we have and are still enduring, what has been the measurable effect of our climate policies on the climate?

How many degrees or fractions of a degree have our sacrifices contributed to abating global warming between now and, say, the year 2100?

I think you know the answer.

Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Our contribution will be so small that it is immeasurable.

If all the pain of high energy prices and the closure of our manufacturing sector led to fewer storms, fewer droughts and a more Camelot-style weather pattern then I think you would agree, the sacrifices are worth making.

But climate change is a global phenomenon and only the aggregate of global efforts will make any difference at all over the next century.

Nothing we do is going to make any difference.

None of that is to say we shouldn’t do anything. We should make a proportional contribution. But this is where I part company with the climate priests with their passion for closing our industries and pushing up our energy prices.

I think it is truly destructive of our living standards.

Last week the energy regulator and the federal government announced a further increase in electricity prices.

This will mean hardship for families, bankruptcy for small businesses and be yet another disincentive for anyone who may wish to invest in manufacturing in Australia.

Call me a heretic, but for what it’s worth I think the conventional approach to climate change is totally wrong.

The global consensus under the auspices of the United Nations is to get rid of fossil fuels and replace them with windmills and solar panels.

Yet if we fully implement the Paris agreement it will cost about two and a half trillion dollars a year by 2030 and reduce emissions by a mere one per cent of what they would’ve otherwise been by 2050.

In other words it will have a negligible impact on the climate but the cost will do huge damage to the global economy.

And the people who will suffer the most from this cost will be the poorest who will be denied access to the cheap energy which would not only drive improvements in their living standards but create jobs.

The truth is, we as a global community have two choices. The one is to shrink dramatically all our economies – America’s, China’s, India’s and Europe’s and our own.

Or we could spend money on adapting to global warming and investing in research into new ways to produce energy cheaply.

Above all, we should be looking for ways to reduce the cost of nuclear power. The power stations are expensive to build but they last for decades and once built are cheap to maintain.

We also need to build nuclear waste storage facilities and Australia is the perfect place for that.

This offers us long-term 24/7 power solutions without CO2 emissions.

But if we stick to the mad policies of building windmills to produce intermittent power and keep filling the gap with gas and batteries we’ll achieve almost nothing to reduce emissions and cripple our economies with rising energy prices.

What we’ll do is plunge billions of people into absolute poverty and have no money left to finance adaptation to climate change.

Originally published as Australia’s mad approach to climate change will do nothing but send you broke | Alexander Downer