Although Australia was always, until the last few decades, a thoroughly Christian nation, it was never a highly, evangelically, religious nation. Not in the sense of the United States, where overt religiosity is still largely a feature of politics. Australians went to church, but they have much truck with “Bible Bashers”.
As an old folk song put it: Well, strike me pink, but I’d rather drink with a bloke sent down for arson, than a rantin’, ravin’, screechin’, preachin’, cranky, blanky parson!
Christianity may be on the decline, at least according to the Census data that the ABC can’t stop crowing about, but Australia is currently cursed with the most annoying and overbearing screechin’, preachin’ religious cult since the cat’s-arsed-mouth Methodists campaigned against beer.
That cult is Climate Change.
Climate Change as a result of carbon dioxide is a matter of faith; there is no consistent physical evidence for it and a lot of reputable scientists say that it has a minuscule effect at best.
But, like a clique of grouchy old biddies closing down the Saturday night dance in the local hall, the Climate Cultists are inflicting a winter of misery on Australians, with an energy crisis driven by their zeal for useless, unreliable wind and solar energy.
Beyond the fall in our standard of living, the threat from Climate Change is existential in that we are denying ourselves the fuel security we should have from converting our low-grade coal to diesel and petrol.
Sri Lanka is a warning to us. Their ruling politicians decided to take the country green and it has now ground to a halt. If you think Australia is better than that – that we could do something very foolish and escape the consequences, well no we aren’t.
Outbursts of religious cultism are almost always tied to calamitous events: plague, war, famine… the Climate Cult was similarly triggered by a calamitous event. Well, for the Western left, anyway: the collapse of Soviet communism.
It’s no coincidence that the Rio climate summit was born the very year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It should have been obvious, then, that communism was an economic failure whose only achievement was untold misery and death for billions.
Hold our almond kale frappaccinos, said the green-left.
Howard’s successors, both Labor and Liberal, instead twisted the market towards unreliable energy with its ultimate waste mountain of turbine blades and clapped-out photovoltaic panels. We missed out on nuclear power and instead got the worst possible outcome.
Just as communists always insist that real communism wasn’t tried, or wasn’t tried hard enough, the zealots of the Climate Cult insist that the failure of renewables thus far merely proves that we need more renewables.
Our new Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, says that our power system could be fixed by increasing the unreliable component. In interviews, he looks particularly animated and agitated, with his hands going in all directions. Despite whatever words come out of his mouth, how sunlight and rain are really the same, Bowen looks as though he knows he is selling a pile of nonsense.
Of course he does. And when even Boofhead Bowen knows it, you know it’s a bust. But, like all huckster preachers, he just waves his hands more and shouts louder. The gawping rubes in the cheap seats lap it up, as always.
The future will be either nuclear or darkness with a medieval standard of living. Power from photovoltaics and wind power isn’t cheap enough to make more solar panels and wind turbines – no further correspondence need be entered into. The ones we have at the moment are only an artefact of cheap Chinese coal power.
No-one denies that we will, eventually, run out of coal and oil. But that day is decades, if not centuries away. As the saying goes, “the Stone Age did not end because of a lack of stones; the oil and coal will end long before we run out of those”.
In the interim, we already have a replacement technology — and the Climate Cult refuses to countenance it, because it’s sinful.
For the sake of the generations of Australians who will succeed us, we need to get the best possible nuclear technology sorted out and settled down as soon as possible. Until we do that, we are at risk.
Hydrogen will have a role in the nuclear utopia to come. Nuclear power will be used to run the electrolysis machines to produce hydrogen for converting biomass into diesel and petrol. In the interim, we should convert low-grade coal, not good enough for export, into diesel and petrol. We have hundreds of billions of tonnes of the stuff, enough to make hundreds of billions of barrels of fuel. And the price of oil has risen high enough to make doing so commercial today.
Spectator Australia
Heresy!
Now, say ten “Hail Gaias” and fast on crickets and kale for a week.
