Australia’s energy policy had the country on a “pathway to poverty”, says journalist Chris Uhlmann.
Uhlmann, member of a recent WA Mining Club lunch panel, is presenter of Sky News documentary The Real Cost of Net Zero: The shocking truth of the renewable energy push.
He told the lunch the Federal Government needed to live in the real world “and not in some green wishing fantasy land”.
“The Australian Government's policy on energy as far as I understand it goes something like this:
“We actually do believe in nuclear energy for submarines over the distant horizon that will cost billions of dollars but don't believe that we should use it to generate electricity.
“We do believe that we should export uranium, but we shouldn't use it ourselves.
“We do believe that we should export six times more coal than we burn but shouldn't burn here for electricity even though a ton of carbon produced anywhere is apparently a problem everywhere for the environment.
“We're building an electricity grid on the East Coast which is based around the whims of wind and solar power which cannot function without gas and yet we've made it impossible to tap gas from under our feet in Victoria and New South Wales so we're now building liquefied natural gas import terminals on
the east coast of Australia even though there's gas in Victoria and in New South Wales and at the same time we're pushing for a target of Net Zero when
China's not doing it, India's not doing it, Russia's not doing it.
“And now the United States is not doing it and I've interviewed the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and he said that he thinks Net Zero is a sinister target.
“So what on earth is Australia doing in terms of our energy policy? A group of six-year-olds with crayon would struggle to come up with something more incoherent.
“I would just urge the Government to look at the world as it is not as they wish it would be otherwise we are on a pathway to poverty.”
He said in countries such as Germany, and the UK, and states including California, and South “where they have tried to force large scale wind and solar
onto the grid the price of electricity has gone up, reliability of the grid has gone down”.
“Red lights are flashing everywhere but an environmental movement which is cashed up with money from wind and solar industry is driving the debate and it's
time that other people raised their voices,” he said.
“Sure, we'll use wind, we'll use solar but in amounts that make sense and for the time being it makes sense for us to use the resources under our feet.
“The argument is being dominated by people who are pushing a particular line and the economics and the energy system realism is not there.
“It needs people who know what they're talking about to join the argument.”
On nuclear energy he said: “If we continue on the path we are on, the only way that you're going to get anywhere near Net Zero is ... nuclear energy at some stage.
“There is there's a massive business opportunity for Australia. The rest of the world is doing it. China is going to build 150 nuclear reactors; the United States is building 198.
“Microsoft has just reopened Three Mile Island so that it can supply energy for its data centres and data centres are going to chew up more energy than most cities in the world.
“We can either be in it or we can be out of it. I think eventually we probably get there but not before we’ve made every dumb decision we possibly can along the way.”
Uhlman said Canberra, where he lived, was “now so disconnected from its sources of energy, its sources of food and its sources of wealth that it's actually voting against them”.
“In Western Australia you understand where those things come from, and it is incumbent upon people (to) go out and test the facts yourself,” he said.
“You're engineers, you are practitioners, you know the way that the world works, you need to speak up, you need to be raising your voices if you believe that we
are on a path that is leading us essentially to poverty then people need to speak up now.
“Too many people have been cowed into silence. People want to shout you out of the debate.”