Renewable Energy Is NOT Cheaper Or Greener — Chris Uhlmann

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: All I'll say is that my grandfather was born in 1899 into a house on the outskirts of Brisbane, which had no running water. It had no electricity. There were lamps that gave it light. There was wood burned in the stove. They had a nice box. They had no refrigerator. They had a toilet outside. When he died in 1967, he had a Ford Zephyr in the garage. He had a refrigerator, television set, a telephone. He had an indoor toilet and that's all fossil fuel. He was two years away from the moonshot. He could have in his lifetime met the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong. That is all fossil fuel, particularly oil. If you think about the industrial revolution, we were burning wood for millions of years and the economy never really shifted. We get to the industrial revolution, we find a fuel source which is really dense, which gives us more power than we've ever had before and it starts to turn the big wheels of industry. And we actually get that to move across the landscape and then across the seas. But then we get oil, which is the dentist, densest, lightest fuel we have ever discovered and we harness it. And with that, we lift off from the face of the earth and we make it all the way to the moon. We did not burn fossil fuel because we wanted to destroy the environment. We did it because it gave us wealth beyond our wildest dreams. Your lifestyle is directly connected to the amount of heat you waste, whether you see it or not. And what we've done is essentially recruit an invisible workforce of billions of people which work alongside us every single day. What we are attempting to do now is going from dense energy sources to dispersed energy sources. It'll be the first time consciously in human history that we've decided we'll use worse energy sources than the ones that we just came from. And we have made this decision deliberately. We have 800 years supply of coal in Australia and we have decided we are not going to use it. We have abundant gas in Australia and the governments of Victoria and New South Wales decided they were not going to look for it. And guess what? That system that's been described does not work without gas. We're not building one electricity system, we're building two because of what Aidan told you because we have to move it through space and through time. We can shift electricity from the middle of the day when there's a lot of sun to the end of the day, maybe a few hours across that. We can't move it across season and we can't move it across weeks. There will be times when the energy system that's being built will deliver zero power. Four days. When those days come, we'll need an entirely different energy system, one that burns fuel and delivers it to us on time in order for us to continue to function as a society. We are depowering and when you think about the amount of this stuff that's got to be built in order to replace the energy system that we had to deliver the same amount of electricity without data centres, is it any wonder that Australia's productivity has been declining in lockstep with the fact that we are building massive, unproductive assets. We are deliberately, willfully destroying the energy system that made us rich. Now, this is not to say that we should not be considering doing something about climate change, but we are one percent of the world's carbon emissions. We export eight times more coal than we burn in Australia. All we've done is moved where the coal is burnt from here to somewhere else. Now, no matter what you hear about China building more renewable energy than anyone else on earth, China now burns 56% of the world's coal and last year we burned more coal, oil and gas than ever before in human history. The world is not doing net zero. Last year, carbon emissions rose again. 2024, I should say, we'll have the figures in next year, every single year. I interviewed Ros Kelly in 1993 before she went to the Earth Summit. It was the first time, and she was the then Environment Minister of the Labor Party, I've ever heard about climate change. Carbon emissions have risen every single year since then. Yes, we are putting some more renewable energy on top of an ever-growing pile of coal, oil and gas. Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be doing our fair share, but what we're going to do is we're going to have to face the adaptation. The question is how much money we expect to spend on mitigation? And do we become a poor nation in the meantime? And I can tell you, poor nations don't care about the environment. If we want to stay rich, we need to use all the natural resources at our disposal, and one of those is uranium. We export a third of the world's uranium, and yet this government's actual stated policy is we're not going to, we're going to have wind, solar and batteries as a main energy source. They were dubious, they don't want any coal, they were dubious about using gas as a transmission fuel, now they know that they need it. But we're not going to use uranium at all, nuclear energy, even though we're going to have nuclear submarines. So if you could park that nuclear submarine in Sydney, you couldn't run an extension cord into the city. It makes no sense. What we are doing is willfully destroying our own economy, and it is incumbent on those of us who are beginning to see what the outcomes of this stuff are to say something about it. I'll finish here. They said it would be greener. They said it would be cheaper. It is neither of those things, and we are destroying our environment to save the planet, and the rest of the world is not on this pathway. Thank you. [00:06:05] Speaker ?: Thank you.