Sign here for a lifetime supply of renewable rhetoric

Peta Credlin’s opinion piece provides lots of food for thought (“PM’s switch to net zero leaves us in the dark”, 14/10). The National Party has rightly drawn attention to the implications for regional Australia.

We are still waiting for the details of Labor’s emissions and jobs compact. Short of costings and employment impacts, the PM is acting like the proverbial snake oil salesman, trying to sell us the virtues of unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage.

At the same time he rejects nuclear, a proven technology used throughout the EU, because the opposition doesn’t agree. This is transactional politics at its worst.

It’s absurd we export our huge reserves of uranium while banning its use here. Regrettably the opposition is trapped in a technology time warp. They fail to appreciate that the new modular nuclear technologies have made Chernobyl a grim museum reminder of the past, not a reflection of the present. Community sentiment has moved on, too, as recent polls have shown.

It’s great to see the Australian Workers Union at the forefront in supporting nuclear possibilities for Australia. They realise the twin objectives of emissions reduction while preserving industry and jobs with affordable, reliable baseload power. The electorate is ready for a serious debate. The politicians should facilitate it instead of closing it down.

Jennie George, Mollymook, NSW

Peta Credlin can see the future. Boris Johnson has brought semi-controlled chaos to Britain while Joe Biden is out of control as they vie for the greenest credentials. But I can see the future, too. In an energy crisis, people in China are having to walk up 10 floors because of power outages.

As an over-70, I was thinking of downsizing, but not now. I won’t be moving into an apartment anytime soon because the future is renewables – and I don’t want to be walking up 10 flights of stairs if the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.

Paul Everingham, Hamilton, Qld

The basis of National Party economics is that it’s the duty of a select few to produce things and the duty of everybody else to buy it. Yet the party is opposed to anything like government subsidies or communism. This hypocritical madness once wrecked the wool industry, but the Nationals have rabbited on in the same old way ever since. Now they want to wreck the country by way of a $250bn subsidy for all the coal that nobody wants any more.

We know who would get almost all of this money: the mining companies. They can’t get real finance in the usual way because their industry is now too big a risk for any real financiers to take on.

GTW Agnew, Coopers Plains, Qld

And people wonder why voters are confused. Tony Abbott had a smashing election win on repudiating a carbon tax. Mutterings continued for a few years, mainly promulgated by a forever-preening Malcolm Turnbull, but he was smacked down by his colleagues and a frothing-at-the-mouth business group that wouldn’t abide the faintest whiff of dedicated climate change action.

Come 2019, Scott Morrison and his backers triumphed over an emissions-reduction dabbler in Bill Shorten. Don’t even fast-forward, just trickle-forward a few short years in the scheme of things, and Morrison, his wheedling ministers and a panicked business sector have been hit, almost overnight, by the climate-change love bunny.

Many from the conservative voting bloc are staggered. I could say thank Christ for Matt Canavan, and actually mean it, but you know, religion’s about as popular as a coalmine.

Rosemary O’Brien, Ashfield, NSW

Although Peta Credlin makes admirable sense in the main, she has allowed her idealism to trump the reality of climate change politics. None of the delegates to the Glasgow conference will be remotely connected with politics in 29 years; they all know that a carbon-free world is unachievable; and none of them will be held accountable.

The mantra of “emissions free by 2050” is just that and no more. For Australia to survive internationally, it must agree to the prevailing orthodoxy while pushing on with the process of supplying energy from renewable sources, in which endeavour it is in advance of most of the world. And it may be wise to include nuclear power in the mix.

David Morgan, Ivanhoe, Vic