Blind Milton could see net-zero is a lost cause

in 2024 the world burned more coal, oil and gas than in any previous year, surpassing the record set in 2023. Picture: istock

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Words are the tools of public life, and how a politician chooses and uses them says a lot. Some words are designed to illuminate, some to disguise and some to deceive.

Communicating clearly should be the aim of anyone who works in public service. Sift the wheat from the chaff of a politician’s words, and you can weigh their worth. If they speak plainly, then you can benchmark their pledges against their deeds. In a subjective world, pointing to the gap between the two is often the only thing that still chastens them.

If a politician’s words are obscure or confusing, then the intent is to build a thicket of them and hide in plain sight.

That’s not to say that communicating complex ideas is easy. Sending a clear message from one mind to many is a constant struggle with language. How do you pick exactly the right word and put it in the perfect place to transmit meaning?

Nowhere is the search to find the right words more powerfully evoked than in the opening stanzas of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Poet John Milton (1608-1674).

The poet begins with an exhortation to the Holy Spirit to “sing Heavenly Muse” as Milton seeks “thy aid to my adventurous song” because his ambition for this work is: “That with no middle flight intends to soar … while it pursues things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”.

He prays “what in me is dark illumine, what is low raise and support” because he has a mighty purpose to “justify the ways of God to men”.

Milton’s words and his example are inspirational. How did a blind poet, who lent his voice to the republican revolution led by Oliver Cromwell and narrowly escaped execution after the return of a king, conceive and dictate the greatest epic poem in the English language as he set his sightless eyes on the heavens?

In dramatising Lucifer’s rebellion against God, his battalions of angels being hurled into hell, Satan’s defiant rise, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and humanity’s exile from Eden, Milton weaves a vast tapestry from the threads of Genesis, classical mythology, and Christian theology.

But at its heart lies a single, urgent question: how can evil exist in a world created by a just God?

Milton’s radical answer is that God gave angels and humans the gift of true freedom. That includes the freedom to defy God. It is why Satan’s defiance has a tragic grandeur and why the fall of humanity, though catastrophic, opens the path to redemption.

Paradise Lost is not merely a tale of rebellion and ruin; it is a profound meditation on the dignity and danger of freedom. As one of history’s great defenders of liberty, especially freedom of the press, Milton understood the peril that came with free speech.

You do not need to be a believer to admire the genius of Milton or to appreciate that attempting to justify the ways of God to men in blank verse is beyond the reach of just about everyone but him.

The only lesson here is that all of us should aim high in trying to express ourselves, and all should endeavour to use words to illuminate, not conceal. As Milton could attest, the truth will set you free.

Given the cause of most politicians is much lower than trying to explain the ways of God, the battle to find the right words to communicate thorny problems is not that high. A middle flight would be perfectly adequate.

So why do so many fail even the most modest of tasks?

Here, let’s descend from the heights of Milton’s poetry to ponder a single prose sentence buried deep in the text of a speech to the National Press Club by Jim Chalmers: “The global net-zero transition will also reshape our revenue from resources.”

This line didn’t attract much media interest at the time, probably because it sounds so bland. But is it? What could it mean? To measure the true weight of these words, we first need to decode them because they are written to conceal.

The “global net-zero transition” means, among many things, eliminating the trade in fossil fuels. Let’s assume that’s what the Treasurer meant when he used the word resources. For Australia, the fossil fuels that count are coal and liquefied natural gas.

Now let’s turn to the word revenue. In 2024, coal and LNG were Australia’s second and third biggest sources of export income, raking in a combined $160bn. That money creates jobs and wealth. It also helps fill government coffers.

In 2023-24, Australian state and federal governments collected about $28bn from coal and LNG through royalties, company taxes and resource rent levies. The flow of this cash is now directly threatened by the political decision to eliminate fossil fuels. That’s a big hole to fill.

That’s why the use of the word reshape is intriguing. Obliterate would seem more appropriate.

So, seeking the Muse’s aid to illum­ine what is dark in the Treasurer’s words, let’s recast this sentence as: “By agreeing to eliminate fossil fuels, the government has signed up to exterminating Australia’s coal and gas exports, which will shake the economy’s foundations and blow a multibillion-dollar hole in the federal budget.”

If the Treasurer had said this, it’s a fair bet his speech would have generated more headlines. The more literary among you might be able to render this statement in blank verse. Feel free to have a crack in the comments section.

His next sentence was: “This evolution in our revenue base is one of the reasons tax reform is so crucial to budget sustainability, on top of restraining spending, finding savings and working on longer term spending pressures.”

In a nutshell, this means the government is going to have to raise taxes and cut services to fill the yawning gap left by torching our resource revenue as we hurtle into the abyss of a permanent structural deficit.

Note the use of the word evolution, which makes it sound like we have no choice in abandoning our resources because there is a global Darwinian reordering of energy.

Is that true? Well, no.

The Energy Institute has just released its annual Statistical Review of World Energy, a publication that for more than 70 years – first under BP and now independently – has served as the gold standard in documenting global energy production and consumption across every nation and fuel type.

And what did it show? That in 2024 the world burned more coal, oil and gas than in any previous year, surpassing the record set in 2023. That about 82 per cent of the world’s total primary energy demand was met by fossil fuels. That the rapid growth in wind and solar generation is not replacing hydrocarbons but merely adding to the world’s ever-increasing demand for power.

It also recorded that global carbon dioxide emissions rose again in 2024, reaching yet another all-time high. Whether you choose to deplore or ignore this finding does not change the cold, hard fact.

The numbers have their own eloquence and they don’t lie. They show there is no “global net-zero transition”. There is no evolution away from fossil fuel. There is an energy addition, as the globe consumes more of everything.

The world’s politicians have been committed to cutting carbon emissions for more than a quarter of a century. Trillions of dollars have been torched in the quest for this solitary goal. Trillions more are dedicated to the task and, measured against achievement, it is an abject failure.

At some point everyone will stop even pretending that this goal is achievable.

So Australia is making a deliberate decision to destroy its own revenue base and trash its electricity system in the process. This is a deliberate act of self-harm, with zero benefit to the planet. This is no small matter because energy is the master resource. Everything else in the economy depends on it.

The Treasurer needs to start making the link between productivity and cheap, abundant power. One will not flow without the other.

Everywhere, the lights on the government’s “transition” are flashing red. It comes in now near-daily reports of rising electricity prices, business collapse and the evaporation of green hydrogen dreams.

Australia is deliberately squandering its wealth in pursuit of a false god. A blind poet could tell you that we are on a highway to hell.