The left just love Scandinavian countries. Mostly because they fondly imagine, no matter how many times Scandinavian leaders try to correct them, that Scandinavian countries are ‘socialist’. But leftists fall conspicuously silent about their beloved Scandinavian countries whenever Scandinavian countries do such inconvenient things as slashing immigration, booting out Muslim “asylum seekers” and asserting that Islam is incompatible with Scandinavian values.
And when Scandinavians turn their backs on “Net Zero”, you better believe the left doesn’t want to know about it.
Two days ago, the new centre-right Swedish government announced an energy policy U-turn.
You won’t have read about it in the mainstream media, of course, because the policy they ditched was the current dogma of ‘Net Zero by 2040’.
Even worse for the left: Sweden is embracing nuclear.
In a statement, Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said wind and solar were too “unstable” to meet a modern economy’s 24/7 energy requirements. Although the government still wants a “clean” energy system, this no longer will be based on renewables but on the nuclear power that currently provides about 30 per cent of Sweden’s total electricity.
“We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system,” she said, adding: “In substantial industrialised economies … only a gas to nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialised and competitive.”
You can almost hear Greta Thunberg bellowing, “How dare you!” from here.
This is a stunning turnaround by a country formerly fully signed up to the Climate Cult dogma. The significance of Sweden’s sudden outbreak of sanity is even more profound when you consider that Sweden is one of the few countries sufficiently gifted with abundant hydro-electric resources and therefore better placed than anyone to go ‘100 per cent renewable’.
Sweden’s move is the biggest step so far towards climate realism, but it’s also just the latest move away from the “transition at any cost via renewables” mindset that has dominated Western governments’ thinking for the past two decades.
Far from diminishing its reliance on nuclear, France is now set on increasing it.
Germany can virtue-signal and close its own nuclear plants while bragging about its “energiewende”, but the simple fact is that Germany is conning the green left. Because, for all its blatherskite, the simple fact is that Germany has simply outsourced its emissions. First, by relying on vast imports of Russian gas, and now by importing abundant nuclear energy from France.
And now that the Russian gas has dried up, Germany is re-opening its brown coal mines.
In Austria, the government recently moved to revive closed coal-fired power generation. And a sizeable ginger group of British Conservative MPs thinks the only way to create a winnable contest with Labour at the next election is to drop the bans on new petrol and diesel-powered car sales from 2030, stop the looming ban on new gas boilers for domestic heating, and allow more exploration and extraction of North Sea oil and gas.
There’s no such sign of plain sanity here in the Antipodes. The Labour-Greens government is forging ahead with its lunatic plans to cripple New Zealand’s energy supplies and its agricultural industry. In Australia, the Albanese government is every bit as blindly demented.
Meanwhile, here at home, our government is doubling down on the green dream, despite more and more energy experts arguing the transition is going too far and too fast, threatening all the businesses and jobs that depend on reliable and affordable 24/7 power.
In an extraordinary article, Alan Finkel recently extolled his vision splendid of forests of wind turbines and fields of solar panels stretching as far as the eye can see. But instead of recoiling from this dystopia, the former chief scientist expected us to embrace it as a necessary element in the supposedly essential move to net zero.
It’s not as if they’re completely unaware of exactly what ‘Net Zero’ entails.
In a revealing speech last year, Energy Minister Chris Bowen enthused about the scale of the challenge ahead.
Getting to the government’s now-mandatory legal target of 82 per cent renewable power generation by 2030, he declared, would require the installation of 22,000 solar panels every day, and the erection of 40 large wind turbines every month for the next seven years. Plus, 28,000km of new transmission lines would have to be constructed for the resultant decentralised grid – even though, given the intermittency of wind and solar, these would be active only 30 per cent of the time on average.
The Australian
How absolutely mental must you be, to acknowledge all the above and yet plough on regardless?
Perhaps, instead of forcing them to declare their pecuniary interest, prospective politicians should be subjected to a mental health assessment. Because the only explanation for their behaviour of late is that they’re simply barking mad.