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Energy and climate policy are reaching a turning pointDear , With NetZero the word of the week, at least politically, I thought I should send you a copy of our submission to the Governance, Energy and Finance Committee of the Queensland Parliament on Queensland’s Energy Roadmap. (See attached, or click on this link). While I’m at it I will also take the opportunity to remind you that Tony Abbott will be in Brisbane launching Australia, his history of our country, at an AIP function on Tuesday November 25 at Tattersall’s. Books will be available along with the author, and you can pre-order copies now. To book click here. But back to core business. The federal Coalition could learn a lot from the Roadmap as it puts economics and engineering before ideology. It doesn’t give up on emission reductions, just acknowledges that anything other than a “no regrets” approach will cause problems. This means they will keep their coal-fired power stations running for as long as it takes. This would also be good advice for the federal energy minister Chris Bowen who just announced today that he will try and solder together the cracks created by an excess of rooftop solar panels generating at a time when no one wants their energy. Our economically illiterate minister and his advisors, and presumably the federal cabinet, because surely this was OKed by them, don’t seem to realise that all this does is make peak time electricity even more expensive and shifts the cost onto those who can’t use the electricity to “[run] swimming pool cleaners and charge their electric vehicles and home batteries”. The Queensland government should be acutely aware of the risk of shutting down existing generators prematurely, given the Queensland Health payroll debacle, and now the Unify disaster, were both caused by turning-off legacy systems before the new systems had been tested in real life. Consultants are very good at designing systems that work in theory, and even better at offering to fix them for a fee when reality turns out not to align with theory. That’s a design feature with consultants, not a bug. Decision makers should therefore not uncritically accept consultants’ advice. Yet that is what we’ve been doing with climate change and the energy transition. Thank goodness the Crisafulli government has decided to pull back. While the public still backs NetZero by 2050, there are signs around the world that this timetable is being rolled back. Recently both Tony Blair and Bill Gates have said there is no chance the 2050 date will be met, and that there is no existential climate crisis. This is just a recognition that no country is meeting its targets. Of course, the USA is out of NetZero, and Argentina under the popular, and economically hyper-rational, Javier Milei, is also out. In Australia the argument is about unicorns. At the 2022 election Labor swore that electricity would be $275 cheaper a household, instead it went up by around $825. They currently have a pledge that Australia will have emissions that are 43% lower than 2005 by 2030. At the moment Australia is 28% below the 2005 baseline, and all but 4% is due to land use change. So all the maneuverings on power generation etc. has yielded virtually nothing over 20 years, and we are expected to believe that it can add 15% over the next 5 – basically a whole 20 years’ worth each year. Or we can take more farmland out of production, but there is a limit to that. NetZero by 2050 is a fantasy. All sides in the Coalition and the non-Greens minority parties should be able to agree with this and follow the lead of Queensland to have a sensible conversation about energy and climate. Kind regards, GRAHAM YOUNG 
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