Read this extract from David Flint’s column in Wednesdays Daily Telegraph and then read the extract below from Chris Kenny’s column in today’s Australian below. It makes and reinforces Flints comments in spades. Although the subject matters and contexts of each column were different, Flint’s observation cuts through both.
FIRST, David Flint
“….As to trusting politicians, it’s hard to think of even one of today’s problems which, if it weren’t created by them, they’ve not made significantly worse. From replacing the lowest ¬energy costs in the world with the world’s highest, from declining educational standards to the way the criminal justice system better protects the criminal than the victim, today’s politicians have hardly earned our confidence…”
NOW, Chris Kenny
“….In the blink of an eye we are confronted by a national energy pricing and supply crisis. This is the cost of virtue signalling — that propensity for those on the political left, including moderates in the Liberal Party, to advocate policies aimed more at demonstrating their moral superiority than delivering practical results.
This nation’s most pressing economic challenge, it is also the most volatile political dilemma that threatens to derail Malcolm Turnbull’s career for a second time. (It cost him the Liberal leadership in 2009.) Climate and energy are set to define the next decade of national affairs just as they have plagued us since 2007.
While we happily export our energy advantage, we have deliberately sacrificed it at home. Households are paying some of the highest electricity prices in the world and manufacturing industries have been closing or downscaling because of cost pressures created in part by rapidly rising power prices. Energy bills are also creating commercial hardship for struggling retailers as well as hospitality and other sectors.
The largest single factor in the power crisis is the renewable energy target demanding 23 per cent of electricity be supplied by renewables, which are subsidised by consumers. When the renewables (mainly wind turbines) supply power they can do so at zero cost, thereby undercutting the viability of baseload generators and hastening their demise. The trouble is renewable energy can’t supply all our needs at any time and, crucially, is intermittent and unreliable. So we still need all of the baseload and peaking generation….” Dumping green folly will secure energy future, reboot economy