Global energy analysts Doomberg published a stinging critique of Australia’s energy policy, entitled Power Blunder Down Under.
“The country is hurtling toward a pronounced energy crisis, yet its political leaders seem deaf to the warnings and blind to its true causes”, Doomberg reported.
“Having demonized traditional sources of energy, Australia is now all but certain to run short of them just as the vulnerability of intermittent renewables reaches escape velocity”.
Doomberg was interviewed by electrical engineer Ben Beattie on the Baseload Podcast.
Doomberg questioned why Australia has chosen to export energy security to China while denying itself energy security.
Below are extracts from the discussion, supplemented by my charts.
Edited extract from Doomberg Interview
Australia is a fascinating place. With 27 million people, Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the world. You have enormous coal, gas, lithium, and basically any natural resource that the world wants, except for oil.
There’s just no excuse for the policies that have been forced upon the Australian people…
The only way you can improve your standard of living is by either harnessing more energy or, at the margins, becoming more efficient in what you do with that energy that you were able to harness…
People in the global South are more than happy to burn whatever it is that we decide to cast aside. This is why, of course, all efforts to sort of limit the combustion of fossil fuels are ultimately going to be ineffective.
Because all you’re really doing is making it cheaper for somebody else to burn it who happily will.
Local restrictions against such activities merely shift who gets to enjoy that privilege.
The case study for this is Australia and China.
If you just look at Australia’s carbon emissions compared to China’s, Australia’s carbon emissions are indistinguishable from the x-axis compared to China.
Since Australia’s emissions peaked in 2008, China has added 94 times to its emissions total what Australia has saved. It’s really remarkable…
Australia exports six to seven times more coal than it burns. Why not just burn as much as you need and export less? The planet would be no wiser.
It really is crazy that Australia has decided to only operate at the very front end of these critical supply chains and to not take advantage of its abundance of energy wealth to propel the value-added downstream manufacturing sector in the way the US has done with natural gas, for example.
Natural gas is the cheapest hydrocarbon on the planet and the US industrial complex has an enormous advantage over the rest of the world…
The sidewalks of Australia should be lined with gold. Australia definitely has all the resources—coal, gas, uranium—to become an energy superpower.
Australia exports energy security to other countries, but there has been a war on those products for at least two decades…
Nothing is going to matter until China decides that it wants to change its emissions.
If you want to be a martyr and you want to impel yourself at the altar of the Church of Carbon that’s fine. But China is laughing at you. China are taking advantage of everything.
China produces more than half the world’s coal and still imports. They are burning so much coal, which is why they have stolen everybody’s industries.
It is why the British can’t have a steel industry anymore. It is why Germany can’t have a chemical sector anymore.
It is very clear what is going on. China has a monopoly over the main supply chains that are “supplying” the renewable sector.
It is very clear what China is doing. Why have the leaders of Australia convinced themselves and used all manner of propaganda to convince the people of Australia that this is somehow a virtuous or wise thing to do when literally what you do is irrelevant to the global climate?
If you actually think carbon emissions are going to be a calamity for the planet, then my best advice to you is to brace for impact. Because it’s coming. China is going to continue to burn coal. They have hundreds of gigawatts of coal coming online.
The US is going to continue to drill for oil and gas and still mine for coal. Gas is so cheap in the US that it is going to power the AI Revolution, for example.
The tiny little bit that Australia does is going to be lost in the noise. It’s not even measurable. And yet the entire country is sacrificing its economy in this sort of religious sacrifice. It’s bizarre.
The strangest part of it all is the fact that Australia bans nuclear energy while sitting on the world’s largest uranium reserves.
You can’t truly be worried about carbon emissions and be opposed to nuclear power. The two viewpoints are incompatible. This is the undeniable irony of banning nuclear but also trying to reduce emissions.
There is no path to decarbonization that does not run through nuclear energy.
You have the largest uranium resource base in the world. You can put nuclear plants where the coal plants exist and slowly swap coal for nuclear.
You don’t really have to worry about big transmission lines and all that jazz because they’re already there.
If you just decided over the next 15 years to replace your coal baseload electricity with nuclear, you would have the problem solved.
But instead you install all this renewable wind and solar that require backup fossil fuel plants because the wind doesn’t blow sometimes and the sun doesn’t shine at night.
So all you’re doing is creating a huge expense and not really abating much in the way of carbon because all of these fossil fuel facilities need to stay online.
Australia is literally going to destroy its industry, which is one way to reduce your carbon emissions. But it’s also going to impoverish your people in the middle of a housing crisis.
