Bob Brown, the environment needs you

Former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown in the Denison Forest, Tasmania. Picture: Matthew Newton

Bring back Bob Brown. Yep, you read that right. Bring back Bob, the former leader of the Australian Greens and committed environmentalist. The bloke who led that party when it actually stood for something. Come back, Bob, your country needs you.

This isn’t a cry for help, I promise. It’s not some kind of secret code to let you know I’ve been kidnapped.

It was an actual thought that crossed my mind during the past few days and stayed long enough for me to interrogate it. The cause? Reading over research about the devastating impact of offshore wind farms on the environment. That was the shot. The chaser? Poring over coverage of this week’s report by the European Court of Auditors that warns the EU has grossly underestimated the environmental damage these offshore monstrosities pose to the environment.

For context, the EU wants to build a giant interconnected system of offshore wind fields. Marine life? She’ll be right. Until she won’t. The auditor’s report warns of species displacement. Eradication of food sources. Interrupted migratory patterns. That’s before you get to the hotly contested topic of the impact on nursing whales and their calves.

At best, the jury is out. At worst, there are scientists who firmly assert the impact of offshore wind farms causes nursing mothers to be separated from the calves and sends them both into the path of ships at sea. And the coup de grace? Analysts say offshore wind is the highest cost, most commodity-intensive, least profitable part of the renewable spectrum. It should not exist.

They’re calling it the “green dilemma”. The gentlest of gentle euphemisms. Let me make it simple. If your energy source is resulting in this level of environmental damage, there’s nothing green about it.

Turbines installed at Cattle Hill Wind Farm in Tasmania.

I applaud the auditors for stating the obvious and spelling it out so clearly. Would that they turn their lens here to Australia, where it seems the damage of renewable energy sources are conveniently ignored by those pushing an “only renewables” agenda.

This, of course, is all happening in an environment in which the searing pain of power prices is burning Australian families and businesses. Since July, the cost of power to households such as mine and yours has risen between 20 and 30 per cent.

To fend off the inevitable attacks from the usual suspects, let me repeat what I’ve said verbatim here and in other places. Australia needs the cleanest, greenest energy mix available that doesn’t cause environmental carnage, plunge millions of people into energy poverty or send business bust. So far, we’re not really ticking that box. There is a place for renewables. A place.

That being said, put aside for one moment the empty promise of cheaper power delivered with love by the sun and the wind. It’s rubbish, we know it’s rubbish, there’s nowhere in the world it has been delivered and that’s before you remove the enormous subsidies at play and see the real cost for what it is. And I say all of that as Australia’s least enthusiastic Tesla owner, who has benefited from some of those subsidies (I’ve written about my hypocrisy previously in these pages).

The renewables industry is losing its trousers, so to speak. Some say it’s losing what we call in my day job its social licence to operate; trust and relationship with the communities in which they work. The industry has a reputation problem and it’s getting worse. All fur coat and no knickers. All the gear and no idea. You get the picture.

The primary reason for this is because of the undeniable damage to the environment renewables are causing. They’re breaking one of the basic rules of reputation management: if you can’t defend it, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Exhibit A: It was reported last month that the Cattle Hill Wind Farm in Tasmania was responsible for killing at least eight endangered wedge-tailed eagles, despite operating with industry-leading bird avoidance technology. The technology is leading edge, apparently. You can protest as much as you like but you can’t argue with a growing number of dead endangered birds. If this were a coalmine, well, you all know very well what the response would be.

Threatened: a Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.

I believe everyday Aussies have had a gutful of the spin that renewables are 100 per cent clean, there is no harm to the environment and there is glorious cheap power for all. For the sector, this amounts to a colossal reputational snafu.

Community groups are galvanising in areas where there are proposals to take large tracts of land and clear them (yes, clear the land) to put in solar farms and the like. Communities quite rightly are saying no. We like to farm animals instead. We like native species in our bushland.

The other matter that frustrates me greatly is the fact Australia has the opportunity here to learn from what has worked and what has failed spectacularly in Europe and other places. Yet we don’t seem to be learning. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen continues to shake his carbon neutral pom-poms while ignoring the fact the rollout of renewable energy is faltering around the world because an increasing number of projects aren’t financially viable. They are capital expenditure and debt heavy, hit hard by inflation and rising interest rates.

Meanwhile, in our own back yard, one in five developments threatening koala habitats is a renewable energy project. There’s more – so much more. The South Australian Nature Alliance has warned that state’s 100 per cent renewable target by 2030 (no, it’s not satire) poses a serious risk to biodiversity. In SA, solar farms were the leading cause of native vegetation clearance between 2016 and 2018. Has anyone else had enough of this? I sure have.

Energy has been the greatest area of policy failure in this country in two decades. Both major parties are responsible, the irony being that Labor and the Greens, once defenders of Australia’s environment under Brown and his cohort, are facilitating unparalleled damage via an obsession with ideology over facts and a net-zero target that’s looking less and less possible to achieve.