Has there ever been a minister in an Australian government as stump-dumb clueless as Labor’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen? I mean, we’ve had no shortage of dunces in parliament, from Sarah ‘Sea-Patrol’ Hanson-Young, to Lidia Thorpe. But no one ever deluded themselves that those clowns were ministerial material.
Who on earth ever thought to put ‘Boofhead’ in charge of Australia’s energy infrastructure? Oh, right: Anthony Albanese. ’Nuff said.
Why, with one per cent of global CO2 emissions and tiny historical emissions, is Bowen determined to push an entire continent harder on renewables than the world’s biggest emitters are proposing for themselves?
China releases more carbon dioxide in a fortnight than Australia does in a year. Yet China has no intention of reducing its emissions. Probably because its leaders might be communist bastards, but they’re not complete and utter idiots.
Won’t Australia just be destroying its own power-intensive industries for almost no benefit to the planet?
The only people in Australia dumber than cretinous politicians like Bowen are the media idiots cheering him on.
Media advocates for renewables at the Nine papers, the Guardian Australia and the ABC say renewables are the fastest growing source of electricity.
True, but at only 13.9 per cent of global power these are rises off very small bases at a time when total electricity consumption is rising, as is fossil fuel use.
These media sources like to point to countries with higher penetrations of renewables than Australia but almost never mention most of these depend on hydro-electric power.
Nor will they ever admit that the penetration of renewables is invariably correlated with soaring electricity prices.
How can so many in the media allow Bowen to pretend renewables are the cheapest form of power in the face of all the facts globally about electricity price rises as renewables penetration increase?
The other thing they will never, ever, talk about is the sheer, mind-boggling amounts of money their lunatic green follies will cost. By contrast, here at the Good Oil, I’ve done the maths several times. For all that stupendous spending, though, emissions are still rising.
This column pointed out on December 15 that despite spending $US2 trillion on renewable infrastructure across the world in 2024, CO2 emissions actually rose. A fact check by the Nine papers on February 11 confirmed Australian emissions, which had been falling, rose here by 1.2 million tonnes under Bowen in the 12 months to last September.
Other countries are at least lucky enough to be blessed with politicians far smarter or, at least, far less under the thrall of climate dementia, than we are.
Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on his first day in office this year, has banned offshore wind farms and proposes to expand oil and gas production. The US is already the largest producer of both.
Number three emitter, India, plans to be 50 per cent renewable by 2030 but is rapidly expanding coal-fired power station construction.
Even the activist EU has a 2030 binding renewables target of only 42.5 per cent.
At the latest climate beano, the global elite only took time out from playing with their private jets and bumming trannies in their Davos motel rooms to erupt in laughter at Bowen’s anti-nuclear fulminating. The plain fact is that the world has realised that nuclear energy is our energy future.
The International Energy Agency on January 15, referring to its latest paper on nuclear energy titled ‘‘The Path to a New Era for Nuclear Energy’’, said: “It’s clear today that the strong comeback for nuclear energy that the IEA predicted several years ago is well under way, with nuclear set to generate a record level of electricity in 2025.”
The IEA says “more than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally”, and more than 40 countries plan to expand nuclear power.
The IEA paper flagged the potential of small modular nuclear reactors, which Bowen has bagged, and says “as the world’s second largest source of low emissions electricity after hydro power, nuclear today produces just under 10 per cent of global electricity supply”.
Note here that nuclear and hydro each produce more power than either wind or solar separately.
He really is a complete and utter… well, you know the great Australian phrase I’m thinking of.
