Posted By Bernard Gaynor on Monday, October 16, 2017 3:06 pm | 6 comments

Imagine, for a second, that a bunch of brain-dead monkeys were running the joint instead of the mob of politicians we currently have in Canberra and various state capitals.

How much better the world would be.

For a start, even brain-dead monkeys would not have made such a massive mess of this nation’s power policies.

We now have states hastily installing emergency generators, state premiers calling for us to turn the air-con off and federal governments paying us to do so.

Australia is progressing to third world status on the back of expensive solar power that has been sold to us on the promise that it comes free from the sun.

It doesn’t.

To highlight the sheer scale of the policy failure, consider this: power prices have increased by 63% in real terms over the past decade according to a report released today by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission. This occurred even though the government has poured billions of dollars into projects to subsidise the cost of power.

If the object of government subsidies was to make things cheaper, then the politicians are clearly doing whatever they’re doing wrong.

To make matters even worse, despite the approximately $10.5 billion directly spent on renewable energy between 2011 and 2016, Australia has not increased its capacity to generate electricity over the past seven years and it is actually producing less electricity now than it was in 2007.

In the same time period, Australia’s population has increased by almost 3.5 million people.

As a nation we have more people with less power and much higher costs.

This has all occurred because we are making power policy decisions on the basis of a belief in a green religion rather than on the basis of facts.

Australia could basically shut up shop and it would make no difference to carbon levels in the atmosphere. Alternatively, we could burn brown coal 24/7 just for the fun of it and the impact would be about the same.

In other words, whether you believe that human beings are the cause of climate change or not, nothing Australia does will make any difference to the end of the world anyway.

So all the green, clean power schemes are a waste of time and money.

They don’t even give people a consistent sense of self-satisfaction: voters feel warm and fuzzy at election time but they get all hot and sweaty when it comes to bill payin’ time.

So even if you look at power policies as nothing more than a political vote-winning tool, the politicians are still doing whatever they’re doing wrong.

All up, Australian governments will spend about $60 billion on green power schemes by 2030.

For that cost, it should be possible to install, free of charge, a 5kW solar system on every single home in Australia. If you’re in the game of buying votes that’s gotta be a better bet than the complicated subsidy and rebate systems that are currently in place.

The truth is that coal remains the cheapest source of reliable base-load power in Australia. Even if all the predictions about falling wind and solar costs are true, these forms of power are not projected to become cheaper until 2050 (for wind) and 2030 (for solar).

But the predictions might not be true and in any case solar and wind will still not be able to provide base-load power. As such, there will remain a requirement for coal power stations or other forms of base-load power.

Yet coal power plants are being shut down and we are building a bunch of more expensive and often unreliable power stations. When they fail, entire states shut down.

Why are we doing this? Because governments are pushing clean energy targets to meet some pointless international agreement on the dubious belief that Australia can do something to delay the mythical end of the world by carbon dioxide.

When it comes to fixing our power problems, the best thing the government can do is nothing.

No subsidies. No renewable energy targets. No wasteful spending.

If we had brain-dead monkeys in charge doing nothing for the last decade it’s likely the average Australian household would have saved about $4,ooo in power bills.

And state governments that continue to own power assets should focus on cheap and reliable: coal remains king.

There may come a day when solar panels are cheaper. There may come a day when warm and fuzzy thoughts can deliver baseload power. At that point in time there will be a case to leave coal behind.

But we ain’t there yet and don’t even look like getting close in this lifetime. So it would be best for all if we put the monkeys in charge…