Reality starting to bite on lifestyle cost of renewables

Federal Resources Minister Madeleine King is worried about voters losing their lifestyles if gas isn’t included in Labor’s renewable energy transition (“Explaining the facts of lifestyle”, 20/1). King says: “You quickly lose support for an energy transition if people can’t maintain their lifestyle.” If gas is so important, when it comes to the upcoming election why is Labor refusing to put the Greens last on its how-to-vote cards?

The Greens couldn’t care less about ordinary Australians losing their livelihoods and lifestyles, such is their contempt for fossil fuels. Take a look at their energy policy: no new coal-fired power stations, gas mines and oil wells, and no expansions to any existing coal or gas-fired power stations or mines.

The Greens want the end of the industries underpinning Australia’s lifestyle, which is envied around the world. And still Labor refuses to put these extremists last. With opinion polls showing Labor’s sliding approval rating, minority government is a near certainty. Yet Anthony Albanese and his Resources Minister would be comfortable in a power-sharing arrangement with the Greens. And that would be the worst possible outcome for the country.

Dale Ellis, Innisfail, Qld

Madeleine King warns voters will go off green power if lifestyles change. The Resources Minister has been open enough to admit that reducing people’s standard of living will not go down well with the electorate.

The recent power crisis in Broken Hill was the perfect opportunity for renewable power to flex its muscles and demonstrate how it can power a population. Instead, we had quite a sobering lesson in reality and a glimpse of the future in a renewables-only world. Transgrid finally came to the rescue with diesel generators, with residents also having to fend for themselves and purchase their own generators. The instability of the grid in NSW in November led to the Premier requesting residents not to use their First World white goods and pool pumps to save power.

Now we all understand that an Australia powered by renewables-only will lead to a reduction in the high standard of living we have all become accustomed to. With data centres requiring increasing amounts of power, how on earth are we going to be able to satisfy industry, technology and the domestic market? Yet the Climate Change and Energy Minister breezily reassures us that everything is going to plan.

Caroline Thomson, Kew, Vic

So let me get this right. Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have come up with $2bn for aluminium smelters to use renewables when the core problem is that physics and the science of energy tell us renewables cannot provide the energy required for smelters to be competitive in the world market; that not one major aluminium smelter in the world runs on renewables; and that the economics of government handouts distorts markets, not to mention that governments and the public sector have woeful records at picking commercial winners in any market. I obviously need to get with the program.

Arthur Alexander, Camp Mountain, Qld

Question everything

The connection between Melanie Phillips’s thesis that there is a waning of support for democracy among the young (“Loss of faith in democracy endangers us all”, 14/1) and Henry Ergas’s brilliant “vanishing question mark” (“Principles of freedom crushed by intolerance”, 17/1) is as enlightening as it is alarming.

For it is abundantly clear that without the question mark, a people will believe that there is only one correct viewpoint. That their path is uniquely moral. And that to attempt to question the dogma that they and their cohort have been taught is both heretical and costly.

With no instinct to debate, and accustomed to the idea of power trumping discussion, the need for democracy seems an unnecessary, messy affair.

An authoritarian leader, backed by a bureaucracy thoroughly steeped in the dominant orthodoxy, appears infinitely more efficient, ensuring that any deniers are themselves denied a chance to steer a different course. In fact, if the ideology is completely baked into the nation’s institutions, and if the population is censored, be it by self or by other, then there is no need for actual authoritarianism.

A self-imposed tyranny is a wasteland. It is a land in which the question mark is a fossil, a relic, a curiosity. Any one of the many madnesses brewing today thrives for the want of a question mark.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

Censoring the past

Censorship should target old movies and TV shows that depict normal Australian families owning their own homes (“Censor seeks new ‘cancel culture’ powers”, 20/1).

If young Australians fully apprehended the degree to which standards of living have declined, they would lose faith in the “social contract” and seek to overthrow the established order.

James Cottee, Petersham, NSW