Conservative commentator Erin Molan digs herself into a hole in defence of coal
When you’re in a bit of a tight hole, it’s quite good advice to first stop digging while you work out how to climb out. But over the past week, the advice from conservative commentators on tackling Australia’s rising energy prices while lowering emissions has been to keep digging (and drilling).
In Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, columnist Erin Molan turned the caps lock on to declare “WE NEED COAL”.
It’s tempting to respond with “NO WE DON’T” and leave it at that. But there are certain expectations from a fact-checking column.
Molan argued clean and renewable alternatives to fossil fuels with the “infrastructure in place” to support them did not currently exist. Let’s test that.
Alison Reeve, an energy and climate expert at the Grattan Institute, said in the electricity market “coal has been doing two things”.
“Providing electrons and system stability. The renewables can substitute the electrons and we can use other things – like storage and demand management – to find system stability.
“So you only need coal to the extent that you don’t have those other things lined up yet.”
She said while there were legitimate concerns about the pace that storage and other measures were being added, “that’s not a case for keeping coal”.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s blueprint for the expected future of the electricity market – a plan released after consulting more than 15,000 analysts and stakeholders – also disagrees with Molan.
That plan includes several scenarios for the future, but the one Aemo says experts think is most likely sees 60% of coal generating capacity gone by 2030. Why?
“Competition, climate change and operational pressures will intensify [for coal] with the ever-increasing penetration of firmed renewable generation,” the plan says.
Oh yes, climate change. Burning coal is the biggest single contributor to the climate emergency.
Since Aemo’s blueprint was released in late June, both the Queensland and Victoria state governments have announced major energy plans mapping the exit route for coal that are broadly in line with Aemo’s plans.
Neither state sees a future in burning coal, with the polluting fuel practically gone in both states by 2035.
Coalmining is also responsible for about one fifth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions from methane, according to official figures.
The actual number, according to data from the International Energy Agency, could be double that.
As the Albanese government this week signed a global pledge to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, mining more coal will make those targets – nonbinding, but geopolitically significant – harder to reach.
Molan claimed in her column there was “ample evidence in recent years of times and occasions when renewables just haven’t been able to supply our energy needs”, but didn’t actually offer any evidence.
This is a strange interpretation of how the electricity market works. Reeve was puzzled.
“It’s a mixed system and you will always have the generation you need to meet the demand.
“The percentage provided by renewables fluctuates, but I’m not aware of any time where we have had a blackout because renewable energy hasn’t supplied sufficient electricity.”
Foot on the gas
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, international gas prices were pushing up the cost of gas and electricity in Australia.
In the Australian Financial Review, Indigenous business figure and failed Liberal candidate Warren Mundine offered his own solution to rising gas prices.
“There’s a very simple way to reduce natural gas prices. Drill more gas. It doesn’t require governments spending billions of dollars; they just have to get out of the way and allow gas exploration,” Mundine wrote.
Australia does not have a shortage of gas. According to the government’s figures, some 75% of all the gas produced in Australia is exported as LNG (if you count the gas burned in the process of compressing gas to LNG, this overall figure rises to 82%).
“Let’s think this through,” says Reeve. “Say we drill for more gas. International prices are very high, so that gas is sold overseas and we continue to pay high prices. It’s not actually a solution.”
Reeve says the cost of energy in Australia is strongly linked to the international price of gas and coal.
“Those commodities are suffering a lot of price volatility,” she says. “So long term, if you want to insulate yourself from the impacts of wars overseas and what they do to commodity markets, then you try and have as little coal and gas in your system as possible.”
What seems odd here is the open advocacy for the very same fuels that are behind two of the country’s greatest challenges: sharply rising electricity prices and the climate crisis.
Gas and coal are the problem, not the solution.
The unanointed
In the middle of a rant about how climate activists who like to throw food at artworks and stick themselves to pavements are really just “bullies”, Sky News Australia host Andrew Bolt this week referred to the Swedish teenage climate campaigner that conservatives love to hate.
“Teenager Greta Thunberg is another catastrophist, with one Swedish church even anointing her as a successor to Jesus Christ,” said Bolt.
This claimed anointing never happened. The basis for the claim was a 2018 tweet from a parish church in Sweden, for which the church apologised soon after.