In just three weeks, the Albanese government has been thoroughly mugged by political reality. The party who boasted of a vague “plan” to “fix it” are body-slammed with simultaneous energy and cost-of-living crises, including the biggest interest rate hike in 22 years — and suddenly, the “plan” is nowhere to be seen. Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers is suddenly admitting that there’s not only no plan, but things are going to get a lot worse.
If Labor have been mugged by reality, one-third of Australian voters are beginning to dimly twig that they were played for mugs. Especially on the monomania of “Net Zero”.
It hasn’t helped that the media have consistently lied and obfuscated on the reality of “renewables”.
The Greens and teals […] have been wallowing in hubris but are now being mugged by the reality of power politics, a reality on show all year in Europe as consumers there learned renewables really are unreliable and are not as cheap as advocates claim.
Remember, Europe’s power problems started before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when a winter wind drought struck the continent. It’s a renewables lesson many journalists still do not understand. As Andrew Bolt pointed out in the News Corp tabloids last Thursday, Germany has spent $750bn to get half its electricity from renewables but needs its coal and gas generators on permanent standby for when the wind does not blow or the sun shine. It now has Europe’s highest power prices.
Climate writers, duped by renewables advocates and investors, keep wrongly claiming renewables are cheaper than coal and gas. It’s true only if you are happy with an unreliable power system.
It’s not even true then. The truth of renewables is that they are staggeringly expensive and woefully unreliable.
Even the spruikers of dodgy renewables, like Energy Security Board chairwoman Kerry Schott, admit that relying on renewables essentially means a vast expansion of generation and transmission, just to keep the lights on. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation yields stunning results: vast swathes of the country covered in solar panels and wind turbines. It would be an environmental disaster.
Climate writers regularly repeat another left-wing lie: that Australia needs to phase out reliance on coal and gas exports because fossil fuels will soon be stranded assets as the world moves to 100 per cent renewables. Yet thermal coal and gas prices are at all-time record highs. The two fastest-growing carbon dioxide emitters, China and India, plan to keep lifting coal generation (China by 300 million tonnes a year and India from one billion to 1.5 billion tonnes a year).
As the ongoing energy crisis is demonstrating in the starkest terms, fossil fuels are as essential as ever. It’s become so obvious that even the Teals — with not the least blush of shame — are suddenly, hypocritically, demanding more gas (a fossil fuel) for the Australian market.
Reflect on the hypocritical campaign by the ABC and Guardian Australia over the past two years against the Coalition’s Kurri Kurri gas generation plans in the NSW Hunter Valley and compare that with the past week’s overblown reporting about the east coast gas shortage.
As Dennis Shanahan pointed out in The Australian on Wednesday, the gas crisis is in part the result of a deliberate decision by the Gillard government in 2012 not to introduce a national domestic gas reservation policy.
The Australian
These people have no shame. Their followers have no memories.