Queensland Premier Dr. Steven Miles. By ChastityArgyle - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, link
COALGOVERNMENT IDIOCYINTERMITTENT WIND AND SOLAR
Aussie Coal State Premier Promotes the End of Coal
Essay by Eric Worrall
Queensland’s long reigning premier Annastacia Palaszczuk may have cut and run in the face of negative polls and a looming election, but her successor’s plan to accelerate coal job losses will help?
‘My job to convince them’: Steven Miles knows climate change is coming for Queensland
Exclusive: New premier hopes to navigate path to transition in disaster-prone state that makes billions from coal
Andrew Messenger Sun 24 Dec 2023 01.00 AEDT
Even for an incoming state premier, Steven Miles has had a busy first week.
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Miles had already set out to make climate change one of the themes of his first week in office, even before ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper flooded the state’s north. Two Fridays running, the student of Al Gore has rolled out major green announcements: doubling the state’s emissions reduction target to 75% by 2035 in his first announcement as premier and banning new gas developments from the state’s far western river systems, an election promise dating to 2015.
Miles is eager to build a consensus around the economics of the transition: a link between city and bush, right and left.
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Miles hopes he has found the answer.
“It’s my job to convince [people] that addressing climate change isn’t a threat to jobs, it’s actually a way to protect jobs,” Miles says.
“If you look at the high-emitting industries in places like Gladstone and Townsville, they’re going to lose their global customers if they continue to be reliant on such high levels of fossil fuel energy.
“So the best way we can protect those jobs is by providing them with renewable energy so that they can sell their products into markets that increasingly want green, aluminium, green steel, green products. And similarly, if we get it right, we can also attract new industries.
“In the past, they we’re attracted to our cheap, plentiful fossil fuel-based energy. In the future we will have cheap, plentiful, firmed renewable energy.”
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The problem with this plan is cheap, plentiful, firmed renewable energy does not exist.
Batteries are impossibly expensive. Available dam sites are way too distant and wouldn’t provide enough capacity. And if the plan is to firm using natural gas or coal, there is no need to build the renewables – it would always be cheaper just to build the natural gas or coal, and forget the renewables.
Net Zero cannot and will not happen, with current technology choices.
Sadly Queensland’s mainstream political opponents, the Liberal National Party, are also committed to Net Zero, just on a slightly slower timeframe – so they are almost as bad.
Why is my home state of Queensland cursed with such a parade of economic fools? If international demand for coal drops, the industry will scale back and realign on its own. There is no need to talk coal down and try to kill it off.
The one hope of political sanity in Queensland, Queensland is also home to One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party. Katter is aligned with remote rural regions, and supports ethanol mandates, but they also oppose emissions reductions. One Nation has a sound climate policy. Both have more palatable energy ideas than any of the current mainstream parties.
On the international stage, there is no evidence of a long term drop in coal demand, quite the opposite. The IEA keeps predicting a drop in demand on the basis of the expected Net Zero transition, but in 2022 and 2023 coal use reached all time highs, and 2024 demand is also expected to be high. None of the renewable energy systems being created by green obsessed governments are delivering. The only threat to long term coal demand is nuclear energy, which enjoyed a boost in profile and popularity at the recent COP28.
Personally I expect a significant short to medium term drop in demand, but not because of Net Zero. The economically incompetent Xi Jinping Chinese Communist regime is doing every wrong move you can imagine in the face of their realestate sector collapse, their government is pouring money into well connected but already failed industries, and doubling down on useless infrastructure projects – all the failed policies which made the 2008 GFC so painful in the west, and more. But nobody can predict when that circus act will come unstuck.