Australia, my country, has abundant resources. Abundant oil and gas. Abundant uranium. Abundant sun. Abundant wind. Abundant coal.
Yet we're now short of energy. The price of electricity is the highest in the world. We have to import naturan gas to terminals where we used to export it from. Ditto oil and petroleum products.
This is all the result of POLICY. Not of some kind of weird natural accident. But of policy. Of decisions taken by politicians. In the pursuit of a chimera. Of the crazy notion of Net Zero.
For which the "rationales" are:
We must set an example. But no one follows the example. They only laugh at us. Look at China, increasing its CO2 emissions year after year. In part because of the emissions that Australia has exported to them.
And: we matter. NO. We don't. Barely 1% of world CO2 emissions are from Australia. And if you think it's like a voting system and we all must vote, then also NO. Because there's voting blocks out there, the US, China and Europe that have 75% of the "votes". So our vote matters not one jot.
This is all so depressing.
If you could imagine a case in which the politicians took no part in decision making, we'd be in a much better place, I bet. We'd have nuclear power, gas power and some renewables and our CO2 emissions would be one third of what they are now. That's the case with where I live now, in Hong Kong. Where our power comes from Nuclear and Gas, our CO2 emissions are 4.2 tonnes per person per year, vs 16 in Australia, despite Australia going gangbusters for renewables and impovereshing itself in the process.
Sigh...
