The war front is closer than you might like

There is a green-left fantasy that there is somewhere you can go to buy all the renewables you need, and that you can and should therefore junk all your current assets. It's not true. There is an economic cost to closing, say, a power station well before its end of life. And there is just no economic alternative to, say, natural gas, to manufacture plastics.

Even if there were, the physical resources are not there to replace them all at the same time. Acting as though there is will lead to increased commodity prices (as we are seeing at the moment), and a rise in poverty and misery (which we are about to see in Europe) as well as excess deaths.

It's ironic that the same people who say 'one life lost to Covid is one life too many', and we should 'spend all we have to protect that life', are so cavalier when it comes to the deaths that occur through lack of access to affordable energy and goods.

We also need gas to firm-up unreliable electricity generation in the network. The batteries aren't available, and neither is the pumped-hydro. So, while we persist with the solar and wind fantasies, we'll need open-cycle gas power generation.

Of course we need to significantly increase gas exports. Our allies, even those like Germany and the UK, which the Greens would have you believe are far ahead of us in decarbonising, need gas because there is no alternative.

This means releasing much more land for exploration in NSW and Victoria, as well as expediting the building of new gas pipelines to bring already existing reserves closer to market and lowering the cost.

The Deep Greens are already piling in spreading the furphy that the Ukrainian war proves the need for 'cheap renewables'. We need to meet them with facts, figures, and emotion. Many of them are funded in part by Russian and Chinese organisations. The war front is not as far away as you might like.