Wrong Bet: Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Really About Lunatics Gambling With Your Money

Those pushing the wind and solar transition exhibit the kind of moral turpitude you’d expect from lunatics gambling with other people’s money.

Politicians might have been forgiven a decade ago, but not now.

Europe’s self-inflicted wind and solar calamity clearly hasn’t registered with Australia’s political class. The worst (but not the only) offenders are the Greens and Labor, who continue to peddle the delusional nonsense that retail power prices will soon fall, just as soon as we make a complete transition to an all-wind and sun-powered future.

As if to make the point, and right on cue, Victoria’s Premier, Dan Andrews has conjured up a policy straight out of the neo-Marxist textbook.

Daniel Wild from the Institute of Public Affairs explains what’s on ‘offer’ and what’s at stake in this interview with Alan Jones.

Gambling on Energy
ADH TV
Alan Jones and Dan WIld
20 October 2022

Transcript

Alan Jones: Let’s go to Daniel Wild, the articulate and always informed deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs. A staggering development in Victoria, Daniel Andrews wants to return Victoria’s Electricity Commission to government ownership. Now Victorians, if you need my advice, that above everything else is one reason not to vote for Daniel Andrews. Now, only in the last week we’ve learned of rorts in the government-owned Medicare, massive cost blowouts in the government-run and owned NDIS, more money to be tipped into the government-owned NBN, and don’t start me on Snowy Hydro 2, billions and billions of dollars over budget.

All of those government-owned. For all its weaknesses, the private sector, when it’s not choked by bureaucracy and wokeism, is infinitely more efficient than government. But on top of this, Daniel Andrews has announced a renewable energy target of 95% by 2035 and a 2030 target of 65%. To use the language of the pub, the bloke is off his rocker. Daniel Wild joins me. Daniel, this Andrews bloke is kidding, isn’t he?

Daniel Wild: Well, I wish he was Alan, but I don’t think he’s kidding. Look, this goes to an important point. This is an admission of failure by Daniel Andrews. This shows that renewables don’t work. You’ve been saying this for years and years and years, and we’ve been saying this for years, that you cannot have an energy system run on intermittent unreliable wind and solar. We were told that this would work. We were told that all the smart money is going into wind and solar. But the fact now that Daniel Andrews has admitted that the government needs to take this over shows that the so-called transition to renewables is simply not working.

It’s obvious for anyone to see. We’ve got prices going up. We’ve got reliability going down. This is a massive national security risk. Coal fired power stations are closing down. As we’ve been saying for years, and as you’ve been saying for years, Alan, there is nothing to replace this base load power that’s coming off the system. That’s why Andrews is proposing for the government to take over the system. As I say, this is an admission of monumental public policy failure.

Alan Jones: There’s another agenda here I suspect as well, and that is that if he takes charge of these electricity generation companies, they won’t be able to, when they see themselves heading over the cliff, turn back. He’s scared that these electricity will one day wake up in private sector, instead of all these me too, wokeism nonsense because they’re as much to blame as Daniel Andrews as we stand today. But take them all over because when they see themselves going over the cliff, they might be saying, “Hang on, hang on. We’re going back to coal fired power.” He will neutralise that entirely by seeking to own them.

Daniel Wild: I think that you’re spot on there, Alan, with your analysis. This is all political.

Alan Jones: Definitely.

Daniel Wild: They know how to use the levers of power to their own advantage and they do it shamelessly. Nowhere else is that the case than in Victoria. Let me make another point about the politics. Daniel Andrews buried the report into the deaths caused by the woeful emergency system in Victoria. He released the report on grand final day. Daniel Andrews refused to talk to Virginia Trioli, on the ABC of all places, about politics.

He only wanted to talk about the floods even though we’ve just got an election around the corner, and now he’s using the floods and emergency here in regional Victoria as cover to announce this takeover of the energy system. So this is not about public policy. It’s not about informing the Victorian public of what’s going on. This is all a political play. It’s all about power. Now, the issue that we face here in Victoria and also around Australia is that there is so far been very little political opposition to what is happening.

Alan Jones: Correct.

Daniel Wild: A big part of that is because the Coalition in Victoria supports these kinds of policies. It’s supported the renewables policies. It supports the policy of net zero. It supports more wind and solar. It won’t defend coal fired power. It’s not speaking up for working class regional Victorians and Australians. So this is what happens. You cannot out-left the left. It never works.

Alan Jones: Good on you. Look, I’m going to say to my viewers, you’ll get this tired argument that the privatised coal power plants are getting old and they’re breaking down and they’re closing, all of which is true. That is a consequence of coal fired generation being demonised and governments playing picking winners, massive subsidies for renewable energy. Daniel, why would you invest in the maintenance of a coal fired power station or a new coal fired power station when it’s clear that the lefties like Andrews want them out of the energy equation?

Daniel Wild: Well, you wouldn’t invest in it and they’re not and that’s the problem.

Alan Jones: It is. It is the problem.

Daniel Wild: You’ve got so much red tape, regulation, billions of billions of dollars of red tape being heaped on the resources sector, on the coal fired power sector. You’ve got policies like net zero which are explicitly designed to get rid of coal fired power stations. I mean, we know under the policy of net zero emissions, at least six further large coal fired power stations will close by the end of the decade. So this is the intent of those policies. Of course if you’re an investor, you can read the writing on the wall and we’ve got governments at the federal and state level putting up a big sign saying, “You’re not welcome here.”

Alan Jones: That’s true.

Daniel Wild: “We don’t want your investment. We don’t want coal fired power. Take your money somewhere else.” As you say, in addition to all of that, the billions of billions of dollars going into wind and solar energy generation and they also get preference into the market. So that’s pushing out coal, it’s pushing out gas.

Alan Jones: Oh, it’s totally distorting the market.

Daniel Wild: So Alan, this is all the doing of the government. You’re right, distorting the market completely.

Alan Jones: Now, you are a Victorian. I mean, is there anyone who believes Andrews when he has said today, and I quote, “Only Labor has a plan to keep the lights on, bring bills down and create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.” I mean, this bloke thinks we’re completely stupid. Perhaps we are. Look, I spoke yesterday to Michael Shellenberger, who for 20 years has sprouted this climate change nonsense with ideological zeal like no other, till at the end he said he woke up and he apologised in his book quote, “For the climate scare we’ve created over the past 30 years.”

He said that climate change is, “Not even our most serious environmental problem.” He said, “Once you realise how badly misinformed we’ve been, it’s hard not to feel duped.” Daniel, do you think the Victorian Premier can read and how many voters in Victoria are going to be duped?

Daniel Wild: Well, Michael Shellenberger is one of international leading academics and public intellectuals on this issue. What he said is very significant because the misinformation, if I could use that term, around climate change is so prevalent in our schools and in our universities that there are millions of young Australians right now who truly believe the earth is going to end unless we put more money into wind and solar. They truly believe it to the core of their being. It’s an absolute tragedy that they’re getting all of this anxiety and depression about the end of the world. So they truly believe it.

Yes, unfortunately, there are a lot of people in Victoria and around Australia who do believe this nonsense. Now, I don’t think it’s a majority, but there is a not insignificant minority who believe this rubbish because they’re taught it in schools. The elite media ram it down their throats. You’ve got woke corporations that use all their communications power to put this information out there. I said in addition to that, we’ve essentially got bipartisan support for these kind of policies. So we’re not getting a lot of political sense.

Alan Jones: Yes. Morrison. Morrison trotted off to Glasgow to say, “Me too.” He trotted off to Glasgow. Fails to understand that’s why he lost the election. Now, Andrews is saying, “To all you Victorians out there,” now this will be wonderful, “you will own all of this and every benefit will go to you.” I mean this is unadulterated rubbish. So we’re now going to renationalize the power sector. We’ve had that commitment virtually from the Albanese government, the Queensland government.

Here in New South Wales, the electricity infrastructure roadmap under would you believe a liberal government, and now Daniel Andrews. So basically, Andrews is telling us, Daniel, the markets can’t be trusted, the private sector can’t be trusted to deliver energy and they’ll call it clean energy. That’s what they’re saying.

Daniel Wild: There’s so much wrong with that, Alan. Because as you rightly identify, what private sector, what market. I mean, we have not had a proper functioning energy market for many, many years because of all of the government distortion. So that’s the first point that needs to be made. The second point is that reality is going to come biting us very hard very soon. The experience in Europe shows this. If you turn off your coal and if you turn off your gas, you are going to have some very serious problems, economic problems, social problems and energy security problems.

As you know, something like 80 to 90% of all of the solar panels, all of the wind turbines that we have in this country, they’re not manufactured here in Australia, they’re not manufactured in Germany or the UK or the U.S. They’re manufactured in China. So we are effectively outsourcing our critical energy infrastructure to a potentially hostile foreign power. Look at what happened in Europe when they did this. Now, we have the opportunity to avoid their fate, but unfortunately we’re going head on into the path that Europe is in and there’s no turning back once we go down this path.

Alan Jones: Absolutely. The reality, if I just say to people watching us tonight, there’s an energy crisis out there. Government through its policies, Andrews and co, and this includes Morrison and the Liberal Party, government have created this crisis, and now Daniel, they’re expecting us to believe that government can solve it.

Daniel Wild: Yeah. Look, that’s a hundred percent right, Alan. They will keep pushing this line. The reason for that is they’ve gone so far down this path that they can’t turn back. If they’re to say, “Well, renewables don’t work. We need to switch coal fired back on,” that would be to concede that everything they have said over the last one or two decades is completely wrong. So the governing class, and it’s not just the politicians, it’s the big woke corporations, it’s big tech, it’s the universities and the schools, they’re the ones that are pushing. Sporting codes, by the way, cricket.

Alan Jones: Yes, netball.

Daniel Wild: NRL, AFL, they’re all pushing this.

Alan Jones: They’re all saying it.

Daniel Wild: So this is the issue. The public are only being fed one bit of information and if you speak out against it, you’re cancelled. You’re called a climate denier. We don’t even debate these issues anymore.

Alan Jones: No, no debate.

Daniel Wild: You know this more than anyone else.

Alan Jones: Yeah. But see, what this means now viewers, I’m going to say to you, government owns it. Just supposedly they own the lot, when they get into financial trouble and all this renewable crap doesn’t pay, they go to the taxpayer and the consumer and they rob them blind to make the bottom line balance. The taxpayer and consumer need to wake up here. You’re going to be smashed under this policy, Daniel.

Daniel Wild: Well, that’s right. There’s already a massive debt problem across Australia and here in Victoria. It’s only getting worse because interest rates are going up and that means your debt payments are going up. Just like when you’ve got a mortgage and the interest rates go up, you’ve got to pay more every week or every fortnight or every month off your mortgage. That’s exactly what happens to government debt. As interest rates go up, those monthly payments and yearly payments go up. Having another government owned enterprise, another inefficient government owned enterprise, what happens when it goes under?

Alan Jones: That’s true.

Daniel Wild: Well, it’s going to be the taxpayer-

Alan Jones: And the consumer.

Daniel Wild: Footing the bill through higher taxes and more debt on top of what we already have. This is just pushing a current problem off into the future, off to next generations, and it’s completely lacking any leadership or any vision.

Alan Jones: Good on you. Good on you, Daniel. Brilliant stuff. Just remember the first point that Daniel made. The Liberals in Victoria can’t wake up and prosecute the case because they’re as pro-renewables as Daniel Andrews. The voter doesn’t have much choice.
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Lunatics in charge of the asylum.