The price of energy has been killing our industries for years, although the rate of Australia’s deindustrialisation has been scandalously unreported by official agencies.
Do you see our major power-intensive industries closing down? The dwindling number of staff working in small coffee shops and cafes? Have you read about the rate of insolvency and arrears in mortgage payments?
We urgently need cheaper energy in this country and there is only one way to get it: new coal burners can keep the lights on with cheap and reliable energy until nuclear is fully functional in a decade or three.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and the Page Research Centre spelled it out in Economic Self-Harm or a Pro-Human Future written by Gerard Holland and Gene Tunny.
The Net Zero target embraced by the major parties will inevitably wreck the economy and bring both economic and environmental ruin to our once proud, productive, and prosperous nation.
In the last decade, energy prices increased by some 60 per cent in real terms (160 per cent nominal) while renewables increased their share of the power mix from under 10 per cent to more than 40 per cent. Increasing that number won’t reduce the price of energy or even lower emissions because all of the coal capacity will have to be retained as a spinning reserve for nights when there is little or no wind.
All of the critical indicators of economic and personal wellbeing are hostages to the cost of electricity; our stagnant productivity, the declining per capita GDP, the cost of living, the inflation rate, the survival of small business and energy-intensive industries which are rapidly fading away.
Meanwhile, the number of public servants is growing to multiply the number and complexity of regulations that strangle productivity in the private sector.
Billions are spent on building materials, including concrete and steel, only to bury these investments in holes under windmills while construction lags for other kinds of essential infrastructure including houses, hospitals roads and bridges. Imagine giving houses a higher priority for resources, ahead of windmills!
None of this waste and the sacrifice of living conditions for people will make a measurable difference to the amount of CO2 in the air, or even the human contribution to it.
They chart four futures.
Starting at the bottom with the 100 per cent renewables grid, calling for $332 billion in investment. Retail electricity prices will rise by up to 70 per cent and there is no guarantee that it is achievable.
Number three is the current policy pathway, with an investment of $261 billion. Retail prices are expected to rise by 30 to 69 per cent while the destruction of forests and farmland continues.
Number two is the technology-neutral pathway or ‘all of the above’, including nuclear energy, with a capital investment of $163 billion.
Retail prices could rise 35 per cent in the short term with the possibility of a 4 per cent decrease in a decade or two. Again, forests continue to be trashed while toxins in solar panels become the asbestos of the future.
The first option is ‘No Net Zero’ with cheap and reliable power from new coal burners. Capital investment is set at $103 billion with retail prices potentially decreasing by 25 per cent. The pillage of forests and farmland stops.
We urgently have to fast-track a reliable and cost-effective energy supply that is not captive to the scientific illiteracy and ideological obsessions of the Greens and their fellow travellers in the major parties.