RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last chapter of Donald Horne’s 1964 classic The Lucky Country opened with the prophetic statement that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. Much has been written over the last 60 years about what Horne intended to convey with his book title, and the source of the luck, including Horne’s own explanation in his 1976 sequel Death of the Lucky Country; but it is a common theme that Australia’s relative prosperity is and has been despite the quality of its leadership, not because of it.While there have of course been interludes of reasonable government, at both Federal and State levels, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are now at a low ebb in Canberra (and in Victoria); it is such a low ebb that the Lucky Country is now better described as a Kakistocracy, which is loosely defined as “a state or society governed by its least competent or suitable citizens.” The term derives from the Greek word for “the worst”, kakistos; it is of course tempting to speculate a shared origin with the colloquial English and Dutch (amongst others’) word for excrement!

The atrocities in current government policies are nowhere more evident than in the area of energy policy. Let us look at just a few examples.

Government initiatives to stop the use of gas in households is an excellent example. Gas is currently delivered with very little energy loss into homes, where it is efficiently converted for heating, cooking or whatever. Governments are now saying this same gas has to be delivered to a gas-fired power station, where it is converted into electricity at, at best, 60% efficiency. This electricity is then delivered to homes, after suffering further unavoidable transmission losses, where it is converted into heat energy.

So, to get the same amount of heat energy into the homes we are now using close to one and a half times as much gas! And gas is clearly a scarce commodity, as now widely acknowledged by governments, essential to underpin the supposed energy transition to renewables. You could not make this up!

The scarcity of gas, particularly in places where it is most needed, like New South Wales, highlights another policy (or lack of policy) atrocity. It appears likely that it will be necessary to import LNG, and expose users to international pricing as well as higher delivery costs. This, in NSW, where a proven gas reserve sufficient for 20+ years of supply at current consumption rates remains mostly undeveloped because of government weakness and inaction.

The over-arching policy atrocity is to be observed in any and all of the measures designed to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero”. A bizarre concept when natural emissions – for instance from volcanoes and oceans disgorging absorbed carbon dioxide in a currently warming climate – greatly exceed anthropogenic emissions and, of course, cannot be abated. The policy vehicle to achieve net zero is to replace energy generated by fossil fuels with so-called renewables. There is nothing (well, not much) wrong with renewable energy in some applications — solar cells operating water pumps and the like in remote locations, for instance.

But nobody hailing from local institutions and businesses that have the government’s ear, nor the international associations to which they pander, seems to have told the government that electricity costs increase logarithmically with increasing percentage of renewables in base-load supply. This is because large-scale renewables incur massive costs avoided by conventional fossil fuel (nuclear too) energy sources, including (but not limited to) the costs of very large tracts of land; of distributed transmission systems; and of back-up supply and storage to cover for intermittency. With this in mind one wonders how the government’s latest policy atrocity, in promoting a “green aluminium” smelter fuelled by renewables, has any hope of flying?

It is a common feature of renewables that the “energy return on energy invested” (EROEI) is much lower, by an order of magnitude, than for fossil fuels. The higher the EROEI the more surplus energy to drive economic growth; the lower the EROEI the higher the environmental and economic cost . Estimates of EROEI vary significantly, but for oil and gas it is typically 30+, for coal ~45, for hydro and nuclear ~80, and for wind and solar less than 10 (and arguably as low as 3.5). 

Hydrogen (other than so-called naturally occurring “gold hydrogen”, which some brave souls are exploring for) has an EROEI close to 1, so it is difficult to see it ever making any material impact on energy supply. It should be obvious that as a consequence of the low EROEIs, the scale of  renewables necessary to replace fossil fuels is so large that it must make electricity costs higher (and substantially higher), not lower. There is already clear evidence for this in Australia – a death knell for manufacturing industries — as I noted in Quadrant’s November 23, 2024, issue.

But it must not be all doom and gloom. While there is growing evidence that the net-zero obsession is abating worldwide (with Australia a laggard, courtesy of the kakistocracy, and rampant misinformation in much of the local media and the schools), the physics of atmospheric carbon dioxide has come to the rescue. A group of eminent physicists have recently demonstrated that because the absorption spectrum of atmospheric carbon dioxide is already saturated, a doubling of current atmospheric carbon dioxide will have no material effect on temperatures. Further, they calculate that the temperature increase avoided by the whole world achieving net zero by 2050 would be only 0.07 degrees centigrade – close to the uncertainty in measured temperatures. (Even assuming a warming four times larger, because of positive feedback effects as asserted, with little basis,  by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the temperature effect avoided would be only 0.28 degrees centigrade.)

Even more recently, two of these authors (Professors Wijngaarden and Happer) have shown that a decrease in cloud cover of a few percent has a much greater effect on earth temperatures than even doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Radiation Transport in Clouds). Of course, the effects of variations in cloud cover are not included in all the climate modelling which underpins the net zero obsession, and explains why these models have predicted much greater temperature increases than have been observed. Further proof, if more proof were needed, that net zero is an exercise in futility. Much of the world seems to be waking up to this reality, but not Australia.

If increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a bad thing for the climate, and demonstrably a good thing as it promotes the greening of the planet (food growth), government efforts to promote “carbon capture and storage” are revealed as just one more policy atrocity. 

The most disturbing aspect of all the current energy policies is that they totally undermine Australia’s energy security. A nation endowed with enormous energy riches has something like two weeks of refined liquid fuel reserves on hand at any one time,  and minuscule refining capacity, and so is totally dependent on imported product. If for whatever reason our source of supply in Singapore should be cut off, the consequences for our food supplies, and our defence forces, would be catastrophic. Again, you could not make this up.

It is easy to rationalize the plethora of untenable energy policies on the dearth of talent in government, but some blame must lie with the sycophantic institutions, both scientific and corporate/financial, which have stayed silent on the sidelines in the face of these policy shortcomings. Whether we remain as a kakistocracy, or recover our lucky country status, will very much depend on repairing and strengthening the interface between science and government. A good start might be for the government to commission a panel of appropriately qualified distinguished scientists to conduct an up to date review of the science of net zero?

Dr David King, a geophysicist, lives in Sydney