The climate crisis has long been defined by its lies: From the original sin of science denial, to Tony Abbott’s confected carbon tax panic, to the latest yellowcake straw man. But the most damaging porky of all might be that the transition to renewable energy will be easy.
Government messaging has propagated this myth, vacillating between the torpid technocracy of targets, acronyms and megawatt hours and the sunny spin that promises “a cheaper, cleaner energy future!”.
Both gloss over the hard truth that fundamentally changing the way Australia produces, shares and uses energy is hugely disruptive, particularly in the regions where new infrastructure is earmarked for land and sea.
The Coalition knows that if these Renewable Energy Zones designed as a glittering prize to showcase the economic benefits of the transition become a political liability, they can consolidate their rural base and build into some of Labor’s regional holdouts.
As the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, likes to say, they are kicking with the wind. While support for renewables as a general concept remains in the majority, that support is brittle, particularly outside metropolitan capitals.
And, as this week’s Guardian Essential Report shows, one of the fundamental building blocks driving this narrative is unstable: people don’t believe renewables are cheaper.
When asked to rank energy sources in order of cost, renewables are rated the most expensive. Fossil fuels are seen as a cheaper solution, while nuclear is preferred by those who don’t support the transition anyway.
These findings are hardly surprising, the result of higher electricity bills as global prices for fossil fuels soar. Energy companies, like all big corporations, clip the inflation ticket and roof-top solar incentives are phased out.
Against this backdrop, the logic of cheaper power fuelled by free sun, wind and water is contested with large renewable projects defined by their high start-up costs and environmental footprints.
In this context, the prime minister’s Future Made in Australia announcement that the centrepiece of the budget will see more active government intervention in the energy transition, could not have come soon enough.
The PM notes that direct government investment – from grid upgrades to new export industries to household electrification – is part of a global trend that rejects the capacity of free market globalisation to deal with such a profound and necessary change.
The US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and Canada are all investing eye-watering sums of money in their own industries, the signal that serious governments are not leaving their future to the vagaries of the free market.
While the economic rationalist class bemoans government picking winners, the broad package has the support of most of the electorate, with less than one in five against the idea.
Notably, A Future Made in Australia is a battle cry that Green voters rally around even more than the Labor heartland, creating a progressive unity ticket that also brings in many Coalition and independent voters.
But if it is only a case of government spending taxpayer money to induce global corporations to make their profits here rather than somewhere else, the benefits are limited. And that’s where the PM’s ambition is more compelling.
Last month a number of federal ministers – including the treasurer – hosted the rock star of social innovation Mariana Mazzucato who advocates for the organisation of government resources around bold long-term objectives that she calls “moon shots”.
When US president JFK announced the project to reach the moon within a decade in 1962, he famously proclaimed he was doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
He was not talking about “hard” in the sense of disappointing voters or standing up to vested interests, but running hard at a complex, costly challenge “because that will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”.
Of course, the difference is that unlike JFK in his prime, this particular moon shot is being launched at a time of low trust in government, perversely the result of the decades of abrogation of responsibility that now make government intervention so necessary.
The PM’s challenge is not to shy away from the degree of difficulty in the renewable transition but to embrace it; not just the technology required, but the way the new economy will be organised, actively designing the types of jobs that will be created, the communities that can be sustained and the way the costs and benefits will be distributed.
While he has yet to flesh out how he will deliver on these lofty ambitions, a final question in this week’s report shows the depth of appetite for this sort of government intervention.
Two things stand out – the strong acceptance that the pandemic showed the deficiencies in reliance on global supply chains and the repudiation of the Coalition’s decision to allow the Australian car industry to conk out a decade ago.
Wrapping government’s stewardship of the energy transition around these pillars – the need for self-sufficiency and the importance of local manufacturing – provides the government’s best chance of securing on-going social licence for this disruption, particularly among older voters who have been a big barrier to climate action.
This is the political equivalent of rolling up the nation’s sleeves, drawing up a national plan and doing the hard yards together, rather than just barking orders and expecting others to do the work.
Because here’s the truth. Energy transition is hard. Not everyone gets a pony. Jobs will change. Communities will be affected. This is the price of meeting the urgent and existential challenge of global warming. But it is also the prize for doing it well.
At a time when we have lost faith in our existing power structures, we have this one shot at building genuine self-sufficiency and sustainability where energy is a shared natural resource, not one that is hoarded and exploited.
That should be our hard ask.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
