This article is taken from the article “Peter Dutton’s nuclear policy gives renewables investors a shock” in The Australian Monday 24th June 2024.
If renewable energy was the cheapest electricity source and nuclear the most expensive, the green energy barons would have nothing to fear from a nuclear competitor. Yet the market reaction to Dutton’s intervention proved investors don’t buy the government’s spin. They know that in a competitive market, nuclear generation will eat renewables’ lunch, just as coal once did before wind and solar were showered with subsidies and the market rules were altered in renewables’ favour.
However, the Clean Energy Investor Group is hardly a disinterested observer. It is the peak body for major renewable investors, including Macquarie, Blackrock, Neoen, and Tilt Energy. Together, they own 76 clean energy assets worth $38bn. The present value of those assets is now hostage to the electoral fortunes of Anthony Albanese (current Prime Minister), which is why cashed-up renewable energy investors are accumulating a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Labor in power.
The influence of this powerful, crony-capitalist enterprise is one reason Dutton has only an outside chance of turning nuclear into an election-winning issue. However, polling on public support for nuclear has been trending Dutton’s way, and the evidence from around the world is stacked in his favour. Bearing in mind, Australia already has a Nuclear Reactor. The High Flux Reactor was Australia’s first nuclear reactor. It was built at the Australian Atomic Energy Commission Research Establishment at Lucas Heights, Sydney. The reactor was in operation between 1958 and 2007 without incident, when it was superseded by the Open-pool Australian lightwater reactor, also at Lucas Heights and it is still in operation today.
However, the history of bad ideas shows them to be most potent when entrepreneurs discover ways of making a buck out of them. The influence of the cashed-up renewable energy sector in global politics and cultural institutions has made the net-zero narrative all but impossible to dislodge.
Protecting the present value of trillions of dollars of global capital rests on maintaining the fiction that wind and solar power, backed up by numberless batteries yet to be built and pumped hydro yet to be installed, is the key to rescuing the planet. Trillions of dollars of capital have been misallocated to this purpose thanks to perverse incentives provided by politicians whose most pressing concern is not to save the planet but to survive the next election.
Australia is not the only country caught up in the exuberance of the 2019 Paris climate conference and promised more than it could possibly achieve. It is hard to find a single Western economy remotely on track to meet 2030 commitments, let alone the big one in 2050. I will shortly put up a post entitled “Germany Failed to Achieve Clean Energy Transition Without Nuclear”
In a report published last month by the Fraser Institute, Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil outlined the task ahead. More than 4 terawatts of electricity-generating capacity must be replaced, and almost 1.5 billion gasoline and diesel vehicle engines must be converted to electricity. Almost all the world’s agricultural and crop-processing machinery must be replaced, including 50 million tractors and more than 100 million irrigation pumps. New heat sources must be developed to smelt iron, manufacture cement and glass, process chemicals and preserve food. More than half a billion domestic, industrial, and institutional gas furnaces must be abandoned. Novel forms of motive power must be found for 120,000 merchant vessels, and we’ll need to develop a carbon-free way of keeping 25,000 jetliners in the air. Not to mention, the AI revolution is gobbling up power. AI, the Cloud, and decentralized currencies like Bitcoin require enormous energy at a time when the world is trying to transition to solar and wind which are totally unpredictable power sources.
For Vaclav Smil, the most disturbing thing about the net-zero fallacy is what it tells us about the economic, numerical, and scientific illiteracy of a generation that is, on paper, the most educated in history. As Smil told American author Robert Bryce in an email exchange, we live in a fully post-factual world.
The net-zero fallacy has taken root “because the soil is receptive: utterly brainless mass of mobile-bound individuals devoid of any historical perspective and any kindergarten commonsense understanding”.
The cartoonish reaction to Dutton’s nuclear announcement last week was evidence of Vaclav Smil’s point. If there is a solid argument against legalising nuclear power in Australia, Chris Bowen failed to produce it. Bearing in mind we have had a nuclear power plant operating safely in Sydney for decades. Until he does, Dutton can safely regard the debate as won.
Yet politicians are not rewarded for winning fact-based arguments. They are rewarded by winning elections. As Thomas Sowell points out, one of the differences between economics and politics is that politicians are not forced to pay attention to long-term consequences.
“An elected official whose policies keep the public happy up through election day stands a good chance of being voted another term in office, even if those policies will have ruinous consequences in later years,” Sowell wrote in Basic Economics.
Yet the test of Dutton’s policy is whether it will increase competition in the market, offering a credible alternative to the untrodden renewable-only path on which we are embarked.
The squeals from the renewable energy establishment last week suggest he is on the right track.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre, a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, and a columnist with The Australian. He is a former editor of The Weekend Australian and a former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of The Lucky Culture published by Harper Collins.
We are living in the Biblical prophesied end-times world: God and His laws have been jettisoned, many churches have compromised with the world on homosexuality, gay marriage, and even transgenderism. Government debt is not sustainable so people’s confidence in politicians is at an all-time low, anarchy is next as energy supplies fail. Other, prophesied end times signs such as earthquakes, pestilences, and famine are already evident. The fact that the major Biblical end-times prophecy was already fulfilled over 70 years ago: the re-establishment of Israel as a nation, should give every Christian confidence that Jesus’ prophesied return to Earth is near.
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 