Why Barnaby's war on net zero's already sunk

The Age

2 days ago

The abiding image of the first day of the new parliament will not be the horde of new Labor MPs spilling into the depleted opposition benches, nor of Sussan Ley asking her first question as the first female Liberal leader.
It will be of a Barnaby Joyce sideshow in a parliamentary corridor in which he announced he would introduce a private member's bill to dump Australia's goal to reach net zero by 2050. Joyce and his former political foe Michael McCormack had apparently arrived in Canberra having cooked up a plan to carve up the spoils of the Coalition's comprehensive election loss.
'This is a hell of crowd,' Joyce chirped as he lobbed up to the press pack he had gathered. He gave three main reasons for dumping the target, all of which are wrong.
First, he said, net zero and the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure are to blame for the rise in Australia's electricity prices over recent years. Nonsense, says Tony Wood, energy and climate change senior fellow at the Grattan Institute.
Energy prices surged in the first years of the 2020s because Australia's clapped-out fleet of coal-fired power stations kept on failing, Wood explains. In central Queensland, a unit of the Callide power station blew up in May 2021, causing an immediate loss of power to half a million people and prolonged shortages across the east coast. In June, flooding in the Latrobe Valley saw power production cut at the Yallourn power station, causing more long-term east coast shortages. The nearby Hazelwood plant had closed a few years earlier after a fire.
Across the grid, the operators of coal power stations stepped up their maintenance schedules, decreasing supply and increasing cost. With coal-generated electricity scarce, gas was tapped as a replacement at prices driven up by a global shortage caused by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, in turn inflating household electricity bills. Australia is in the process of replacing these coal plants with renewables – backed by gas, hydro and batteries – not just to reach net zero, but because wind and solar power are now far cheaper than coal power.
Second, Joyce says most of the world has abandoned the effort to reach net zero under the Paris Agreement, citing as examples countries including China, Brazil, Indonesia and the United States. Nonsense, says Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance.
China's staggering deployment of renewable energy continues to shock analysts around the world, Buckley says.