Bowen and the three-eyed fish

Flat White I 23 June 2024 I The Spectator Australia

When it comes to the nuclear energy debate, Chris Bowen has grown a third eye.

Like the orange fish from the?Simpsons, Chris has been swimming around the political landscape, blinking in confusion.

Labor never thought they’d have to debate nuclear energy on merit, and they certainly never thought it would happen once the renewable industry dug its claws into the Treasury and colonised a sizeable number of elected MPs.

Yet here we are.

When the public voted ‘green’ they thought they were getting cheap energy and pristine landscapes. They did not expect their bills to double, the rainforests to be bulldozed, their farmland torn apart by transmission lines, and their coastlines ruined with forests of wind turbines. The?Not in My Backyard?movement has stretched to include the whole of Australia, with barely an inch left outside the reach of the renewable lobby.

The reality of renewable energy is a full-blown industrial horror with a nasty price tag.

When Dutton came along and promised a small number of ‘set and forget’ nuclear plants on existing coal-fired power stations to make all this hideous renewable infrastructure ‘go away’ well … people started listening.

The old scare-mongering lines of the Cold War era, recycled by Labor, don’t work so well when the rest of our neighbours and political allies are happily living off reliable nuclear energy. No matter how much propaganda is pumped out by the machine of Labor, the real world contradicts every single piece of misinformation they print.

While ever we still have access to social media, Labor’s peddling of false information about nuclear will be rebuffed.

On that point, we have been lectured to for months by the insufferable eSafety Commissioner about ‘misinformation and disinformation’.

Labor is ‘so concerned’ by it that they are desperate to pass a bill to police social media for ‘untruths’.

And yet last week we watched a sizeable chunk of the Labor Party, the Unions, the Greens, the Teals, along with a range of self-interested public figures run an anti-nuclear scare campaign. Forget misinformation, this has been a full-scale war on the truth.

Where is Julie Inman Grant to issue takedown orders for all these harmful posts?

Is it not dangerous to allow political misinformation to damage the future of Australia’s energy grid and environment?

I thought this was about the apocalypse, no?

Oh, that’s right.

Labor have excluded themselves from the misinformation and disinformation laws.

It’s rather convenient that the government can accuse ordinary people of ‘lying’ if they question government propaganda but citizens have no basis for appeal against the strong-arm of government censorship.

If nothing else, last week should be a reminder that no government can be trusted with censorship powers and any censorship powers that do exist are there to benefit the government. Protecting children? Ha! Only if you count Labor MPs as juveniles. Opposition Peter Dutton must learn a lesson from this and understand that censorship will be used to censor him and?his Opposition. That is, if he cannot bring it upon himself to care about the Blue Ribbon principle of freedom of speech for its own reasons. On this whole topic he has been an embarrassment.

It is reasonably clear that Labor’s panic over nuclear has nothing to do with the facts – as they never bothered to quote any – but rather the existential threat nuclear energy poses to the expensive and unreliable renewable energy grid.

Nuclear works. We know it works. And that’s the problem.

We are left to wonder if there are any MPs out there eyeing off high-paid retirement plans in the renewable energy sector – a future that won’t exist if nuclear enters the conversation.

None of this has anything to do with making sure your lights stay on or protecting the environment.

When Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen stammered and rambled about nuclear energy being a ‘fantasy’ and a ‘scam’, he ignored the 440 nuclear power plants operating in 32 countries providing 10 per cent of global power. Does he think all those countries are delusional, including China?

There are 60 nuclear plants under construction in places like Bangladesh, China, France, India, Korea, Slovakia, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, Iran, the UK, Egypt, Brazil, and Japan. There are more planned for Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Span, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA, and Uzbekistan, among others.

How terribly embarrassing that Bowen should say Australia is incapable of building a nuclear plant – and how untrue given we have built two nuclear reactors here already that are, according to some nuclear experts, more technically difficult than a power reactor. What an insult to the highly skilled men and women in this country who spent their lives in the nuclear sector.

We delivered our current reactor on time and on budget. To suggest we cannot do the same for energy generation is simply wrong.

As for costings, there’s a reason Chris Bowen never gives Australians any renewable energy costings over a hundred-year period – because they have to keep being ripped up and replaced. Nuclear energy costs are upfront and then drop to negligible amounts – renewables have to be, well,?renewed?on a continuous basis – eating through valuable resources and raw materials. It keeps mining giants wealthy. It keeps money flowing into the pockets of renewable energy barons. But it also keeps the public purse drained with an energy grid that never grows up.

To say, ‘Oh well, it’ll take 20 years to build nuclear…!’ is to forget that in 20 years, every single battery, solar panel, and wind turbine will be rotting in landfill.

Author: Flat White