Labor’s renewables plan is driving Australia over a cliff
Chris Bowen told Labor colleague Ged Kearney we need to keep ‘our foot on the accelerator’ for renewables. If I remember it correctly, that is pretty much what Thelma said to Louise.
The pandemic we will never defeat is the virus of government overreach and stupidity. The clowns got away with telling us to confine ourselves to our homes, not to walk in the park or visit dying relatives, and now they tell us not to use airconditioners on hot days.
They tried to appear flippant, to give the impression this power rationing on a warm day was acceptable and all part of the plan. NSW Premier Chris Minns, his Energy Minister Penny Sharpe and federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen asked us to refrain from washing clothes or dishes for a few hours and to dial up the thermostat on the aircon – according to them, we do not need to be as cool as we would like to be.
Wouldn’t you love to see their thermostats? They mentioned the pool filter, too; it should be flicked to off – perhaps splashing in the pool and cranking up the aircon can be saved until winter.
A First World country. An energy-rich country, nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
The ever-so-smug Bowen tells us we are on track to be a “renewable energy superpower”, which sounds about as plausible as a midget Goliath or a feeble strongman. Bowen is like a man who has spent all his money on a parasol, convinced it is an umbrella, and it works just fine until he needs it.
Labor and the Greens (and, let us be frank, too many Liberals over the years) have given us an energy grid that works well enough as long as there is not strong demand for electricity. It is like a bucket with holes halfway up the side, or a fence with a gap – next I suppose they will design a tunnel that is too narrow for the trains or a ferry that can’t squeeze under the bridge. (I know, I know, governments have already given us these innovations.)
Our energy-rich nation now nobbles itself by artificially creating an energy crisis and Bowen giggles like a schoolboy on Sky News this week trying to pretend that Labor is meeting its promise to reduce annual electricity bills by $275 because its electricity rebates are cutting costs by $75 a quarter. Labor promised its renewables push – “the cheapest form of electricity”– would deliver lower prices but instead it is spending $3.5bn of taxpayer money to fiddle them a little lower for a year before they jump again when the rebates end, after the election of course.
Truth and reality have long ceased being relevant to the renewables zealots. Bowen blamed this week’s electricity shortage on a “massive heatwave” when the temperature across most of Sydney was in the mid-30s for two days. No matter how much burnt orange and deep purple the weather bureau lathers on to its heatwave maps it can’t shift the mercury higher (even after it “homogenised” earlier temperature records downwards).
Most media chimed in, predicting turmoil and providing ingenious tips about drinking water and seeking shade. It makes you wonder how the early settlers survived without social media survival tips.
The willingness of Labor, Greens, teals and other true believers to twist reality to suit their ideological fervour is a marvel to watch. They deliberately dismantle our secure energy grid in a delusional attempt to improve the global climate, then blame their energy supply crisis on the same global warming they claim to be tackling.
This is a virtue-signalling feedback loop. The justification for every action is climate change, and climate change gets the blame for every misstep.
So far the only measurable change in Australia’s climate has come about through our home climate controls. On hot days a decade ago we would crank up our airconditioners, and now we are told to turn them down or face blackouts.
Bowen turns up in parliament and on television with all the faux confidence of a used parasol salesman in a downpour. Summer is only just beginning and after a couple of mild summers perhaps we will get a normal one – you know, with the odd heatwave – and Anthony Albanese, Bowen and Labor face an election soon afterwards.
I tried to warn them in these pages back in March: “One of the key considerations on election timing will be energy – can Labor risk an election early next year if there is a threat of blackouts from December through to March?” Come February, I think Labor supporters may need to switch off all their appliances and sweat it out for the team; you know, solidarity and all that.
Not content with telling voters that renewables are the cheapest form of energy as they force prices up, and that they are reliable as we are warned of blackouts and spruiking a couple of warm days as a heatwave, Bowen also has inverted reality on coal. “The least reliable part of our energy grid at the moment is coal-fired power, that’s just a statement of fact,” he said, emphasising a falsehood with an untruth.
On the day he uttered those words coal provided about 60 per cent of the national electricity market’s power, with gas taking the fossil fuel share to more than 70 per cent. Without coal we would have been cooked – wind generation at times provided about 10 per cent of its maximum output and a similar share of total supply.
Bowen seems to hate facts as much as he loathes coal, so let me share some clear realities that underscore the mismanagement at play. For decades now, taxpayers have forked out tens of billions of dollars in renewables subsidies designed to drive coal-fired power out of the market, but now so much coal generation has been closed that we do not have enough reliable energy, so taxpayers also are subsidising coal-fired generation in Victoria and NSW to keep it online.
Yes, our taxes are paying subsidies to kill coal. And we are paying separate subsidies to keep it.
Such madness is par for the course in this field. Bowen was fresh back from the UN COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the host president created a scandal by referring to fossil fuel resources as a “gift from God” and where the first seminar at the Australian stand began with a non-Indigenous woman providing an Indigenous acknowledgment of country – yes, an Australian Indigenous acknowledgement of country in Azerbaijan.
The climate conference, of course, could not limit itself to climate, it touched all the woke causes. Indigenous issues were brought in with mention of a “holistic approach to climate solutions” and talk of “their rich, distinct values, world views and knowledge systems cultivated through generations of close relationship with Mother Nature”. You cannot help but think science might be more appropriate than “Mother Nature” emotionalism.
Gender got a run, too – but of course. A paper focused on the “disproportionate impact of climate change on the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls” – I kid you not.
In Baku they also advocated for taxes on meat and dairy produce to turn us all vegan. But footage showed the delegates queuing up for meat dishes while the vegan stalls were avoided – climate conferences demonstrate an ethos of “do as I say, not as I do”.
Bowen helped to lead the main agenda – that is, tripling the amount of money developed countries such as ours should pay to developing nations such as China – from $US100bn annually to $US300bn ($461.6bn). The UN calls this an “insurance policy for humanity” but it looks more like wealth redistribution – the best thing we could do for developing nations would be to help them generate the same affordable and reliable energy that created our prosperity.
Also in Baku was South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, spruiking Adelaide to host COP31 in 2026. His promotional video mentions that his state is leading in solar, leading in wind, leading in batteries and leading in hydrogen, but it forgets to mention that it also leads on pricing, with the highest electricity costs, and it is the only state to have had a statewide blackout because its interconnector tripped, starving the state of interstate coal-fired power. South Australia is now establishing a scheme for taxpayers to subsidise gas generation, so it might have electricity when the wind is not blowing.
If Adelaide does host COP31 they should schedule it for February. If it coincides with an old-fashioned heatwave we might get to see the delegates cope with a 42C day without airconditioning. It will teach them about the value of energy reliability and affordability.
Australian consumers might get a similar wake-up call this summer. For many of them it will be a shock because the energy denialism we hear from Bowen is echoed daily in much of the media.
The ABC’s Media Watch program this week ran a propaganda piece dissing the apolitical and technologically agnostic assessments of entrepreneur and environmentalist Dick Smith. The ABC preferred the renewables zealotry and anti-nuclear advocacy of renewables investor and teals political sponsor Simon Holmes a Court. Only two things will cut through to people inclined to believe this spin – power bills and blackouts.
Power bills are already a serious problem, although perhaps not so much for the wealthier people in the teal seats. But we are being warned about blackouts, and they will hurt everyone.
Yet when Bowen delivered his annual climate statement this week he claimed we were “on track” with the renewables rollout, prices and emissions reductions. In a social media video, he told Labor colleague Ged Kearney we need to keep “our foot on the accelerator” for renewables – which, if I remember it correctly, is pretty much what Thelma said to Louise.
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