The biggest challenges to Australia’s green energy transition are often described as questions about policy, access to capital, equipment and skilled labour, and how to manage some of the engineering hurdles of moving from a system based around synchronous machines to inverter based technologies.
But what if the main obstacles were not financial or technological, but ideological? What if the biggest threats to the green energy transition in Australia, and its future prosperity, were mainstream media and right wing think tanks, and those who fund them?
It’s been a constant issue, but it was brought into focus once again last week, as the landmark COP28 climate conference agreed, for the first time, to transition away from fossil fuels, and the Australian Energy Market Operator laid out its 30-year planning blueprint of how Australia could do exactly that in its main grid.
At the same time, the Australian Financial Review was hosting its Business Person of the Year awards, which in many ways highlighted the forces that are lined up against the green energy transition, and who are regaled and rewarded by the nation’s business daily.
The gong for the Business Person of the Year was handed to Australia’s richest person, the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who makes no secret of her horror of climate change policies and the switch to green energy.
Rinehart is open about her antipathy to renewables, and solar in particular. She had a good crack at it in an article in the Murdoch Media’s Daily Telegraph in 2021, and she repeated those views in a 10-minute speech to accept the AFR award.
According to the AFR, Rinehart described solar panels as an “eye sore” that should only be installed in “city parks and rivers” rather than rural areas, although a transcript of her speech posted on the AFR website suggests she was referring to both solar panels and wind turbines.
“It is estimated that one-third of prime agricultural land will be taken over. What do you think this will mean to fresh quality food availability, and prices?” Rinehart said.
“Maybe some more of these eyesores should be placed in city parks, rivers and city beaches – for us city dwellers to get a better idea, and to lessen the impact on agricultural land.”
That claim of losing one-third of prime agricultural land is significant, because it comes directly from the extreme right wing “think tank”, the Institute of Public Affairs, that Rinehart funds (or at least has funded), and which now boasts Tony Abbott as one of its distinguished fellows.
Of course, it’s nonsense. Wind and solar farms are usually sited on less productive land, and as has been pointed out at the country’s biggest solar project, and by a Tasmanian farming dynasty that is building that state’s first large scale solar farm, they do not prevent grazing or other activities – in fact they encourage it.
The IPA is now embarking on another scare campaign against renewables in regional Victoria, adding to others it has undertaken elsewhere around the country, a continuation from the Murdoch media’s Bush Summit, that turned into an anti-renewable rant across the country and was partly funded by Rinehart.
The award to Rinehart – whose other major contribution to public debate was her support of the “no” campaign in this year’s referendum, and joining the celebrations when it was rejected – was not the only eyebrow-raising choice in the AFR’s Business Person of the Year awards.
Also nominated was Mark Delaney, the man at Australian Super who, the AFR noted with some glee, masterminded the shooting down of the Brookfield bid for Origin Energy, scuppering a planned investment of more than $30 billion to roll out more wind, solar and storage.
This, the AFR inferred, was Delaney’s crowning glory, and its coverage of his award mentioned no other achievement of his during the year.
Delaney described the battle for Origin Energy as an example of the “democratisation of capitalism” by super funds. “We came up against the big end of town,” said the man who manages more than $300 billion. “But it was clear where our duties and responsibilities were.”
No, really, that is actually what the AFR reported him saying. No doubt the consumer champions who littered the audience stood as one and cheered him on uproariously.
Also cited were the Boral CEO Vic Bansal, who says net zero is really very hard and is pushing back against his company’s renewable obligations, and whose biggest decision since assuming the role earlier this year was to dial back the company’s previous cement-industry leading emission reduction targets.
Those targets are now just a fraction of what they were. The company is still aiming for 2050 to reach net zero, but that’s one of the weaknesses of the 2050 target – some people and politicians thinks it gives them permission to kick the ball down the road for another generation to solve.
Were they really Australia’s best business people of the year, or just those who fitted in with the AFR’s view of the world?
Andrew Forrest, for instance, has been spending much of the last year, like Rinehart, making squillions of dollars out of iron ore, but also launching an extraordinary campaign against the fossil fuels that Rinehart and others find so dear.
Forrest has taken that message across the world, daring to challenge the most powerful incumbents of all – even on their home turf – and has been described as being a bit loopy because of it.
Many in the business world think he’s nuts because he’s apparently prepared to accept a slightly lower return on investment over the short term. Oh, the horror of it all. What about my bonus?
But it is clear the AFR doesn’t get out as much as it should. Its guest speaker at the event was the now disgraced former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, whose most palatable piece of political philosophy is that net zero is actually a good thing, for all the obvious reasons.
But the AFR seemed taken aback that he should say so, or that anyone in its highly privileged audience would agree.
“Former British prime minister Boris Johnson surprised many in the audience by saying that ‘net zero is unequivocally the right way to go’,” the AFR reported (our emphasis).
Seriously?
The renewable energy industry, net zero champions and climate activists should have no doubt of the challenges that lie ahead. The indifference of much of mainstream media, and indeed its hostility to the science and new technologies, is well known.
But the fossil fuel forces are digging in, even as the science and the technology options become crystal clear.
The federal Coalition’s energy policy is now – quite explicitly, and at the urging of the likes of Rinehart – to stop renewables in their tracks, and wait for technology, small modular nuclear reactors, that does not yet exist in commercial form. Like Boral, the idea is to put off now what you may or may not do sometime later.
These powerful people have the ear, and the backing of so much of mainstream media, and not just Murdoch and Sky after Dark. If they are not visibly onside, they are simply cowered into submission.
And with the right wing think tanks lined up to prosecute their case – the IPA, the Centre for Independent Studies and the Menzies Research Institute, to name just a few – and a ferocious and sometimes nasty and evidently well-funded campaign on social media, it’s going to be a rocky road.
Merry Christmas!
Note: For an insight into the links between the fossil fuel industry, mainstream media and right wing think tanks, this piece on the secretive Atlas Network is worth reading.
