Data centres could consume 13 per cent of National Electricity Market power by 2036. Australia should require them to bring new firmed renewable energy rather than add pressure to the grid.

We all saw the shocking scenes last week as a glacier collapse in the Himalayas produced a biblical flash flood on the Nepal-Tibet border, obliterating everything in its path. The impact was such that it triggered seismic activity signalling an earthquake. Panicked people tried desperately to outrun a churning wall of water metres high. At the time of writing, over 900 are dead, swept away in the raging torrent, with thousands missing, villages and infrastructure destroyed, and scores of Australians unaccounted for.

Like the heatwaves, drought and fires in Europe and Canada this northern summer, this is yet another of the consequences of the rampant destructiveness of the fossil fuel industry, privatising massive profits while socialising the existential costs of climate catastrophe in a relentless cascade of globe-spanning disasters, abetted by spineless political puppets.

The time for excuses is long over. Yet back home, on the same day as the Nepal disaster, media reports suggested that at a national cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had walked back his government’s commitment to legislate that Australia’s rapidly burgeoning data centre rollout will be powered with 100 per cent renewable energy as a condition of approval, capitulating to the Northern Territory and Queensland governments’ demands for exemptions. It was understood that the prime minister had granted those states carve-outs from the clean energy........

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