Sandra Bourke
The Daily Sceptic
What happens to a Green when he photographs the renewables industry’s damage to Australian rainforests?
The Greens turn their backs.
In August 2025, Steven Nowakowski took my husband, Bruce, and me on an incursion into a wind turbine installation on a ridge in Australia’s wild far north, to show us what they ignore.
The roads hit us first. The developer had cut 39 kilometres through the forest to carry turbine blades longer than a jumbo jet’s wingspan. Bulldozers had shoved the old growth trees aside into long rows, and crews had blasted the ridgelines flat.
Twenty-eight turbines stood over us, each 226 metres tall, 91 metres taller than the London Eye. Around their concrete footings lay dead bats and birds.
Steven crouched beside them. “They light the turbines up at night,” he told us. “The lights pull in the insects, and the insects pull in the bats. Nobody is really even counting.”
Steven is a renowned wilderness photographer. He sells his calendars at a Sunday market for $20 each. He ran as an Australian Greens candidate in 2006 and backed the party’s push for 100 per cent renewables until he photographed the turbines’ impact on the rainforest. He co-founded a volunteer group that defends biodiversity in court.
Ravenshoe, a timber town, sits below that ridge. When the tropical forests won World Heritage listing in 1988, the logging stopped, and the Greens celebrated a victory. Nearly 40 years later, the bulldozers are back on the same ridgelines, and those same Greens back the machines because they are “renewable”.
Bob Brown, who founded the Australian Greens Party, spent decades protecting old-growth forests and opposing dam projects. His party now champions the reckless rollout of industrial-scale renewables, destroying the natural world.
Chris Uhlmann, one of Australia’s best-known political journalists, wrote the foreword to my book. He observes that this clash arises from two very different ways of seeing the environment.
“One begins with the particular,” he writes. “This beach. This forest. This paddock. This bird. This river. This view. This community.”
“The other starts with the general. Global temperature. Atmospheric carbon dioxide. National emissions targets. Renewable energy percentages. Gigawatts of generation.”
Steven and I belong to the first: an environmental movement that protects places.
The Labor Government and the Australian Greens belong to the second. They count tonnes of carbon dioxide, and any renewable project that claims to cut emissions counts as ‘good’. Labor and the Greens try to sell it all in one sentence, which the Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen repeats over and over: “Renewables are the cheapest form of energy.” Their sums leave out the flattened forests, the displaced or dead native animals and the hundreds of host communities now divided. They leave out the cost of the whole system, including the transmission towers, batteries and backup that keep hospitals and factories running after dark when the wind drops. They forget that energy security is national security.
Uhlmann sums it up in one sentence: “We are trying to solve the environmental problem of carbon emissions by creating another: the industrialisation of the natural world.”
Australia is running an experiment no other country is attempting. The left-wing Labor government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has legislated a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050, with 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030. Nuclear power remains banned by law, an option most major economies pursuing Net Zero – or simply affordable, reliable energy – retain.
Australia produces just over one per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If our entire electricity sector fell to zero tomorrow, the change in world emissions would be too small to detect.
The book calls for a national debate: how much should a family, a bakery, a factory or a farm sacrifice for 82 per cent renewables, with nuclear power banned?
Labor promised every household a $275 cut to its power bill. The regulated price of household electricity rose by up to 14 per cent in one year and by up to 25 per cent the next. In May 2026, Labor refused in parliament to say whether its Capacity Investment Scheme, which underwrites renewable projects, would cost taxpayers under $1 billion or more than $10 billion.
A government that withholds that information, that cost, cannot claim Australians consented.
I live near Hawks Nest beach, two hours north of Sydney. In 2023, Bowen declared the Hunter Offshore Wind Zone, 1,854 square kilometres of sea – larger than Greater London – open to developers for hundreds of floating turbines. The zone covers the feeding waters of a rare seabird, the Gould’s petrel, and a migration route for around 40,000 whales. My community’s Progress Association, which had never taken a position on any energy project in 70 years, voted unanimously to oppose this one.
Bruce and I hired a campervan and drove 5,000 kilometres along Australia’s main electricity grid to record the stories of Australians on the front line of every type of renewable project.
Katy, a former police officer who now runs a shop, faces a pumped hydro dam and transmission towers in the pristine hills near her town. “It was Net Zero that sealed our fate,” she says.
Nathan, a fifth-generation farmer, is fighting steel towers up to 80 metres high, on a cleared strip 100 metres wide for 190 kilometres across his district, through prime potato-growing land and hundreds of other farms. He has driven in six tractor convoys and fought two rounds in his state’s Supreme Court. Labor in Victoria changed the law to let power companies enter his farm with a court order and reasonable force.
Every one of us kept our side of the deal with the government. We wrote letters, petitions and submissions and held community meetings. Amanda, a retired school teacher, organised 2,000 people on a lighthouse hill to stop floating turbines off the Illawarra coast, south of Sydney. Labor in Canberra counted 14,211 submissions on the Illawarra zone, found 65 per cent against, and then declared the numbers had “limited validity”. The zone remains. Same party, same answer.
On February 6th 2024, more than 3,000 Australians rallied against reckless renewables at Parliament House in Canberra. No Labor or Greens politicians attended. Days later, the prime minister and his treasurer called us all “cookers”, slang for conspiracy cranks, and the national press labelled us “bug eaters”. Steven told the crowd: “The same Green activists and politicians who once fought to protect these habitats are now supporting projects that tear them apart. We cannot save the environment by destroying it.”
Steven first showed his photographs to the Greens. He expected them to be swayed by the blasted ridgelines, cleared forests and dead animals. The Greens stayed silent.
Slurs circulated: Steven’s anti-renewables now. He’s with the ‘cookers’, the ‘right-wing nutters’. He keeps his family away from his conservation work to protect them from abuse.
Anyone who questions the location, viability or cost of a renewable project is treated as if they question climate change itself.
The slurs work. After the rally, farmers asked me to take their names off submissions. At my own beach, an academic who wanted to protect the Gould’s petrel was too frightened to speak publicly. Days after our first small local rally, a staffer from our state Labor member’s office told me: “We know who you are and what you are doing. And we are watching you, Sandra.”
Bullying shuts down the questions that should have been asked. Can wind turbines, grid solar and batteries run Australia? And at what cost?
In 2025, coal alone generated more electricity than all renewable sources combined. The Australian Energy Market Operator, which runs the grid, says the replacement needs five times today’s grid-scale wind and solar, 6,000 kilometres of new transmission towers and 17 gigawatts of gas plants to stand by in case the weather fails. Dr Adi Paterson, who ran Australia’s national nuclear science agency for 11 years, sums up the problem in one sentence: “You cannot legislate your way out of physics.”
Labor should have asked those questions, but it is beholden to Net Zero ideology and drives its billion-dollar agenda harder and faster.
The Greens should have asked them too. Their 2022 election platform proposed banning all new coal, oil and gas projects, closing every coal-fired power station and forcing the grid to 100 per cent renewables. The Greens’ priorities have shifted to decriminalising illicit drugs, funding gender treatments, shutting down our Border Force and exiting from AUKUS (our defence pact with Britain and the United States). A party that began with rivers and forests is now also clashing on our streets. It started just days after the Hamas atrocity on October 7th 2023, when a crowd outside the Sydney Opera House chanted against Jews. Six days after the massacre, three Greens politicians issued a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian rally that Sunday. The rallies continue week after week.
Sharon, a leader in Melbourne’s Jewish community, sums it up: “The government and most of the media have told Jewish Australians to sit down, shut up and put up with it. The Greens help. They dress up hostility as activism and intimidation as democracy because they approve of the people doing it. It is disgraceful, and we will not be silent.”
At the polling booths of the May 2025 federal election, where I campaigned for a conservative campaign group, Greens volunteers repeatedly called our volunteers ‘cookers’ and ‘neo-Nazis’, Jewish Australians among them. I watched those volunteers hold their ground, hands shaking and voices steady. I reported two incidents to the Australian Electoral Commission. They were noted. Nothing came of either.
The Labor government was warned about the spread of antisemitism across the country and the risks to Australians. The warnings were horrifically realised, including months later at Bondi Beach on December 14th 2025, when two gunmen murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration.
The Labor government was also warned that the reckless rollout of renewables was damaging the environment, nearby communities and the nation.
The Australian Labor government’s response has been consistent since 2022: it fails to acknowledge, it fails to intervene, and it discredits and silences Australians who speak up.
I believe everyone has a place: a paddock, a valley, a ridge, a garden, a rainforest, a stretch of ocean, a backyard or a beach.
And sooner or later, when that place is threatened, the question arises: do you look away?
The people in this book do not.
To Save a Beach: The Story of Reckless Renewables by Sandra Bourke, with a foreword by Chris Uhlmann, is out now through Connor Court Publishing and the author’s website. A percentage of profits will support the Australian Biodiversity Alliance.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
