Australia once had cheap reliable electricity, generated mainly from coal. Not now. Electricity generated from Victorian brown coal was some of the cheapest in the world, power stations were built in the coalfields and energy-consuming manufacturing and heavy industry were located near generators.

Australia has thousands of years of coal, hundreds of years of gas, some oil and zillions of years of uranium. What is the point of drilling for oil in Australia’s current political climate? The lack of abundant local oil and refineries has created massive sovereign risk. Australia’s topography and rainfall is such that hydroelectricity cannot drive our industrial economy, as it does in Norway.

A nuclear power station on Commonwealth territory in NSW at Jervis Bay was planned in 1969. There were to be steelworks, petrochemical plants and an oil refinery in an industrial hub around the reactor. Reprocessing of spent uranium fuel would have produced weapons-grade plutonium. When PM Gorton was overthrown by the incompetent Billy McMahon, plans for a British heavy-water reactor were abandoned because electricity from coal was so cheap from plentiful coal on mainland Australia. If this reactor and newer larger reactors were operational now, Australia probably would have had nuclear weapons and the current drive-by shootings in the Tasman Sea might not have been contemplated by the PRC. Since McMahon’s time, the largest reserves of uranium in the world have been found, some is mined and yet we export only about 4,000 tonnes of uranium in yellowcake, mainly to the USA. We have no vertically integrated nuclear industry because of no long-term vision and political infighting. Even Slovenia, a country of 2 million people, has had nuclear power since 1981 and yet has no uranium resources.

In 1981-1982, there was a power crisis with coal-generated electricity in NSW, which suffered electricity restrictions, coal shortages, power rationing, blackouts and industrial troubles and had no reserve capacity using Snowy Mountains hydroelectricity because of a long drought. Eraring, Bayswater and Mt Piper power stations were built at that time after much dithering, long lead times, project postponements, strikes, budgetary restrictions, cost blowouts, capital starvation and underestimation of projected electricity demand. Labor’s Nifty Nev actually tried to persuade people to use more electricity. There were no interconnectors then and each state generated its own electricity.  The NSW electricity system was a mess, the punter paid dearly and governments kept doing what governments do: waste money, create disasters and force the public to pay time and time again for government and bureaucratic stuff-ups. Electricity generation is now in a bigger mess and the inevitable disaster looms because of ‘renewable’ energy.

Global energy use has increased tenfold from the 1925 figure of 1,420 million tonnes of oil equivalent to the 2019 figure of 14,410 million tonnes yet the global population has quadrupled. The per capita increase of energy has greatly increased as people have become wealthier and energy produced from fossil fuels has remained above 80 per cent. Old King Coal is still a merry old soul.

The embrace of so-called renewable energy has been a fruitless waste of trillions; net zero is impossibly expensive and impractical; renewable energy, battery backup and EVs are inefficient, costly, impractical and a waste of money and subsidies throw good money after bad. Both political sides are in a race to the bottom by destroying energy systems in Australia. The neocommunists are winning. It’s time for a Trumpian reversal.

In the geological past, the atmosphere had hundreds of times more carbon dioxide than the modern atmosphere yet there were numerous long intense ice ages with kilometre-thick equatorial ice sheets at sea level. In the past carbon dioxide didn’t drive climate change and, unless the laws of physics change because we happen to be alive, then it cannot drive today’s climate change. It has never been shown that human emissions of the gas of life drive global warming yet carbon dioxide propaganda has been embraced with unquestioning religious fervour.

Earth has been cooling for the last 50 million years during which time we have had warm and cold cycles related to the Sun, and Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics. We have been in the current ice age for the last 34 million years. There has been ice on Earth for less than 20 per cent of the Earth’s 4,567-million-year history, we are currently in an interglacial, the peak of which was 8,000-4,000 years ago, and we are now cooling with warming spikes in Minoan, Roman, medieval and modern times. We actually live in relatively cool times.

By studying sedimentary rocks, especially from tidal flat, beach and coastal lake sediments, we can construct the geological history of sea levels, cyclones, storms, tides and can even show that the day has lengthened from 19 hours during the last half of Earth’s history. There is no evidence that humans have affected major planetary processes such as climate yet we are told we face a climate catastrophe resulting from burning fossil fuels and emitting small amounts of an atmospheric trace gas back to the atmosphere whence it came. To stop the mythical projected climate catastrophe, there has been relentless propaganda attacking the use of fossil fuels and alternative energy systems have been promoted and constructed.

The only thing renewable about renewable intermittent energy are the subsidies. They just keep coming. Wind or no wind. Sun or no sun. Besides killing birds, bats and whales and creating human health problems, wind turbine blades shed toxic bisphenol-A, an endocrine-disrupting chemical banned in most Western countries. Blade abrasion and burying of retired blades contaminates soil and water with bisphenol-A. This is real pollution, not plant food.

Rather than having transmission lines close to the point of electricity generation, farmland is destroyed by thousands of kilometres of transmission lines criss-crossing the country from remote turbines. Technically the ideal place for wind turbines is in the cities, especially waterside areas, to reduce voltage drop and to have energy generation close to the consumer.

Cui bono? Foreign solar and wind companies, Chinese manufacturers of wind turbines and solar cells, greenish politicians and new energy businesses established to skin the consumer alive.

Qui patitur? Consumers, farmers, small business, high-energy industries such as smelters and foundries, and the nation which becomes dependent upon foreign electricity-generating machines and capital. Australia has been weakened in the race to renewables while other countries are building more and more coal-fired and nuclear power stations. Most of these countries are not Paris signatories.

Australia is blessed with large amounts of high-energy-density commodities yet our energy costs rise with every additional renewable facility. Where is the Trumpian political leader shouting that the emperor has no clothes? Where is the political leader who is not battling other factions but building a great Australia? Why should we fritter away billions on a myth and reward scamsters and China while destroying what was once a cheap, reliable electricity system?

Australia could have been an extraordinarily wealthy respected global superpower if we had not had mediocre politicians with no long-term vision, unions, green traitors, activist courts and excessive immigration.

It’s time. Build coal-fired power stations, stop subsidy scams, go nuclear, get out of Paris, increase productivity and become prosperous.