CAVEAT emptor: yet another Liberal Party ratchet scam is afoot this week and it will hornswoggle many. The media rounds of shadow energy and ‘climate change’ spokesman Ted O’Brien indicate the Opposition will take a policy of grid nuclearisation to the next election – much to the delight of most conservative commentators. Being sold as a hard-headed and opportune démarche, in reality the initiative is a capitulation almost as yellow as the cake it acclaims.
That’s not because the taboo on nuclear power in Australia is sensible but because the Coalition’s rationale for advocating its repeal is spurious and lily-livered in equal measure. Doctrinally chained to net zero, the Liberals now tout small modular reactors as the most reliable way to cut (benign) carbon dioxide emissions. O’Brien’s promo column in The Australian on Wednesday concentrated more on replacing coal with SMRs and slashing “around” 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 every year than it did on families and businesses struggling to pay for electricity. Nobody sensible doubts that nuclear power should comprise some portion of the energy mix in a big, wealthy, stable, uranium-abundant and growing nation. Yielding an evilly false premise to Labor, however – namely: Global Boiling is real and Canberra can reduce the earth’s temperature – reinforces the weather cult when the goal should be to destroy it. The Opposition must insist that oil, coal and gas – plus nuclear – will together guarantee the country’s needs for decades to come.
The phenomenon of gun-shy Liberals drifting leftward in increments and staying there to sidestep noisy charges of extremism isn’t new. The party assented to the net zero con in 2021 because Scott Morrison and News Corp concluded that scientific reality was no longer saleable. That’s the ratchet that has trapped every state division of the party – to the extent that most of their lukewarmness in the 2020s is not strategic at all but heartfelt. Yes, the conversion to nuclear rationality is fare more solid than usual but it’s wise to stare a Trojan horse in the mouth.
Jeez Cassie, I thought we’d straightened out our definitions.
If I’ve swallowed a premise it’s the one that says if you increase the supply of something beneficial to human existence you tend to do good. What’s not to love about eradicating energy poverty?
I obviously don’t support anything that crimps agricultural production.
“If I’ve swallowed a premise it’s the one that says if you increase the supply of something beneficial to human existence you tend to do good. What’s not to love about eradicating energy poverty?”
The only way is with fossil fuels.
Okay. I respectfully disagree. It’s no big deal.
France runs on around 70% nuclear and exports energy. I can’t see why we can’t do the same.
We’re going to run a cable to Singapore to sell our solar power to them. We smart ‘n’ stuff.
There are plenty of ways to get to a market optimum outcome, none of them involve government putting it’s thumb on the scale to advantage wind and solar at the expense of everything else. Most egregious of the mendacity of the environmental movement is its opposition to hydro, with nuclear as a short way behind. Instead, they picked the tech that requires the largest footprint, the rarest elements and the most difficult to recycle materials and pretend that they are renewable. It’s idiocy of the highest order ordained to entrench their ability to tell everyone else what to do.
Most troublingly, the only way for it to survive in the long term is to shut up the folks who point out their insanity and they are trying hard to do that already.
Yes, before we make the kind of gargantuan misallocation of national resources into the disgrace that are renewables projects.
I think that consortium fell over due to irreconcilable differences about the best way to extract vast quantities of economic rent from the NT, WA and Australian Governments.
Buccaneer:
No, they’ve worked out how to destroy the Liberal Party – joining it, getting into the infrastructure, and pushing it Leftwards to the Uniparty.
This way, the 40% of Australians who would vote Conservative, are deprived of their voice in Parliament.
They join the libs because the ALP won’t have them.
Texas Jack:
I can’t think of too many benefits of ‘decarbonisation (a nonsense term meaning nothing apart from peoples willingness to allow the Left to set the parameters of an argument.)
In fact I can think of how much better the world would be if CO2 were 10 times higher, in terms of food production and the reforestation of the Great Sandy Desert et al.
Apparently this was actually the case with Turnbull.
There is something more than a little ridiculous about a carbon based life form, living in a world full of carbon based life forms, promoting “decarbonisation” of the planet. What next? Dehydrated water?
Peter S
Can I suggest Cassie that you actually make a post on your observations and thoughts of the event – either here or on Dover’s blog.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/benefits-small-modular-reactors-smrs
“Can I suggest Cassie that you actually make a post on your observations and thoughts of the event – either here or on Dover’s blog”
Will do Wolfman.