Antinuclear

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who gave the world PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, recently secured the bid to build the world’s largest battery-storage plant in South Australia. English billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, whose family fortune was made in good old-fashioned steel, recently bought the Whyalla steelworks. Either these businessmen didn’t do their due diligence or what conservative politicians tell us about South Australia is utter nonsense. I know which way I’d lean.

Before Tony Abbott began his 23 years as a public servant, he dabbled with being a priest and a journalist. And while he clearly knows how to tell a simple story based on blind faith, there is nothing in his education or experience to suggest he knows anything about how to run a power station or a steel mill. But in Australia the ability to “cut through” trumps the ability to talk sense. And Abbott excels at simplifying complex issues into three-word slogans.

Abbott isn’t an engineer or an economist, but he claims you can’t have a modern economy without coal-fired steam engines. Musk, who is an engineer, is betting a lot of his own money that the future of energy is renewable sources linked to battery storage and smart grids. Gupta, who has a masters in economics and owns the only steel mill in the world powered by waste fish oil, just spent his own money buying a steel mill in the state with the most renewable sources. Someone is completely wrong………

Chaos may be Abbott’s best chance to return to the top job but it won’t lead to business certainty or lower electricity prices. Abbott has variously supported, and opposed, carbon taxes, emissions-trading schemes and renewable-energy targets. He once described himself as “a bit of a weathervane” on climate change. He’s more like a field of landmines that periodically explodes as Turnbull tries to tiptoe through it. It’s a waste of time to try to placate Abbott and the coal industry – you can’t negotiate with a landmine.

Australia’s Parliament is settling in for another long fight about what not to do about climate change while the rest of the world continues its march away from the age of coal towards energy systems based on renewables and storage.

Leaving aside that Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and that we will soon be the world’s largest exporter of gas, the risks to Australia are not just that we will exacerbate dangerous climate change, but that we will be left behind domestically and left surrounded by big piles of coal that the rest of the world doesn’t want.

Last year, China’s economy grew by 6.7 per cent and its coal consumption fell by 4.7 per cent. That’s the third year in a row that China’s coal consumption fell. …….

India is on a similar trajectory. Despite claims made by those who are desperate to bail out the Adani coal mine in North Queensland, Indian coal consumption and imports are declining……..

But as new entrepreneurs, technologies and ideas bust up the complacency of much of our political debate, there is no doubt the old guard will fight till the end. Abbott told us the carbon price would wipe out Whyalla. It didn’t. He told us that scrapping the carbon price would give us cheap energy. It didn’t. And while Abbott tells us that you can’t run an industrial economy on renewable energy, Gupta is betting you can.

Just as facts don’t get in the way of Malcolm Roberts’ beliefs about his citizenship (or anything else), facts won’t slow down Abbott and the coal industry’s political war against renewable energy. The problem is that, even if Abbott wins, the Australian economy loses. Again.

Richard Denniss is The Australia Institute’s chief economist. Twitter: @RDNS_TAI https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/tony-abbotts-gut-v-elon-musks-brain-and-billions-which-would-you-follow-20170922-gymn0s.html