Energy woes can’t be a cry in the wilderness
THERE is a terrific series on the History Channel and SBS called Alone where a dozen survivalists are dumped in brutal wilderness conditions in places such as Canada, the Arctic Circle and Patagonia and left to fend for themselves.
They are given no food, no shelter, and can only take 10 items such as axes, fish hooks and bows and arrows, with the person who survives the longest winning $500k. They can tap out at any time via a GPS buzzer which dispatches a rescue team to retrieve them. They have no contact with anyone the entire time, save for a routine weekly medical check.
The most remarkable episode comes in season three where a survivalist called Dave Nessia from Salt Lake City almost dies from malnutrition.
He has spent 73 days in Patagonia and has lost more than 25kg. This fit and athletic bloke becomes a hollowed-out wreck and the medical team is so alarmed they force him to quit because all his organs are about to shut down.
The remarkable thing is that in his shelter Dave has 72 fillets of salmon which he caught and smoked, but is only eating one fillet a week, deludedly believing that the longer he keeps his stockpile of fish, the greater his chances of extending his stay.
I was thinking about Dave this week in a very tangential way while reading about the parlous state of Australia’s energy market and the fact that families and businesses will be hit next year with bill increases of 35 per cent.
Can someone please explain to us plebs how it is that a country groaning under the weight of natural resources can be experiencing anything resembling an energy crisis?
You cannot dig a hole in Australia without finding something of value.
We are blessed with coal, gas and uranium. Yet for all sorts of reasons we have decided that an increasing number of these items must never be used, even though we are quite happy to export them elsewhere, putting us on the same moral plane as the reformed heroin addict who has kicked the habit, but makes a living dealing smack to other people.
To be clear from the get-go I am not a climate sceptic. I think we should defer to the scientific mainstream and recognise the fact that the planet is warming and that something has to be done.
What troubles me though is the question of what that “something” is, and also the timeline within which that “something” must be achieved. It feels now that in terms of energy policy in Australia that we are being guided by the more extreme elements within the climate debate.
And as someone who regards human well-being as equally important as that of the planet, I would argue the real emergency facing households and businesses is the prospect next year of power bills that will send people broke.
The reason for this crisis seems clear – while solar and wind might be our future, they are not yet our present in terms of reliability and affordability. We cannot produce, store and distribute enough baseload power through renewables to the same level and cost of fossil fuel energy. As such, we need to have a proper discussion about how we manage our use of coal, gas and uranium.
Let’s deal with uranium first.
It is a legacy of Cold War thinking that we refuse to mine uranium in this country with a view to processing it for our own domestic needs.
Labor and the Greens should be hounded over this absurdity, given they are determined to shape public policy around the impending doom of the planet, when a carbon neutral alternative sits in front of our faces.
On the question of gas – long regarded as a vastly acceptable alternative to coal – the political mainstream needs to do a much more forceful job of resisting Extinction Rebellion-fuelled attempts to paint gas as a comparable form of evil to coal.
Then there is coal. While the race might be run in terms of keeping coal-fired power stations, I think it is fair to ask whether the globally small contribution made by our small number of plants was such a huge issue that it required immediate action with no regard for the human economic toll.
Maybe we need a few whopping power bills to start landing in the
Teal seats before that part of the conversation changes.
It’s an important conversation. It is also the exact conversation that no-one in politics is having.