Dark echoes of the past have surfaced with calls from the Coalition’s far right to scrap the renewable energy target. The timing coincides with the newly installed backwards-looking US administration which, with a sweep of the pen, is dismantling clean energy initiatives as fast as it is ushering in a series of dubious coal and gas projects. The last thing Australian industry needs is a return to uncertainty over clean energy targets caused by a marginalised, embittered past PM with a small band of flat earth supporters.

Greens energy and climate spokesperson Adam Bandt says the government should ignore that faction in the Coalition and instead extend the Renewable Energy Target. To ensure continued investment in new energy, it is not enough for the government to maintain the present target, he said. “The Prime Minister needs to tell the Trumps and flat earthers like Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott to take a hike and [take action to] extend the renewable energy target.”

“As dirty old power stations close, the energy transition is inevitable, but without investor confidence the transition will be rough. Only an extended Renewable Energy Target will ensure continuing growing investment into wind and large scale solar over the next decade.”

The Electrical Trades Union has also weighed into the debate saying the internal bickering between Coalition factions over the future of Australia’s renewable energy target has the capacity for disastrous ramifications if the anti-renewables argument triumphs.

The union representing workers in the energy sector says Australia desperately needs the work that would be created by a surging renewables industry over future decades.

National secretary Allen Hicks warned that modelling shows up to 28,000 full-time positions are at risk by 2030 should Turnbull “cave to the far right and walks back from his renewables commitment”.

Shadow Energy Minister Mark Butler has also served up his views. Referencing the PM’s silence on the RET and Barnaby Joyce’s inability to endorse it, Butler – a long-term proponent of renewables who advocates 50 per cent clean energy by 2030 – told reporters “Energy policy in this country is becoming a shambles and a real threat to the economy and Australian households and businesses under this Government.”

He added that the existing 23 per cent RET can be achieved without posing a threat to energy security and can be carried out in a reliable way, pointing out that experts agreed with that, as did the Chief Scientist and the industry, with jobs and the investment “just waiting”.
But the ominous direction now being pursued in the US is bolstering Australia’s far right with its calls to scrap the RET. The situation is the US is disturbing: soon after the new president took the reins references to climate change on the White House website were obliterated – shades of Orwell’s 1984* – and the ‘America First Energy Plan’ announced. Moves, the president said, that would benefit US workers by up to $30 billion, totally disregarding the real cost of damage created by carbon emissions including ill health and natural disasters caused by extreme weather. Cost estimates sit around $36 per ton but scientists believe the real figure is closer to $220.Obama used the latter figure when drafting clean air and other environmental regulations.

Trump is hell bent on developing US oil and gas projects to “maximise use of natural resources to America’s benefit.”
Evidently solar and wind are not natural resources in the US.
Back to the likewise bizarre situation unfolding in Australia, where ETU’s Hicks commented “Abbott, Bernardi and Christensen are trying to fly the plane from the cargo hold where they’ve been stashed so voters don’t have to look at them.
“And they think they can get away with it because they’ve used conservative hysteria about renewable energy to roll Malcolm once before … we need a government that will support and nurture our energy future, not one that is bickering and creating uncertainty for investors.

“A healthy renewables sector and a properly planned and managed transition will see more jobs created, and further career opportunities for those who are affected by the shift to renewables.

“Australians know the future of our energy is renewable.”

*Wiki extract from Orwell’s 1984:

Ministry of Truth worker Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite past newspaper articles, so that the historical record always supports the party line. The instructions that the workers receive specify the corrections as fixing misquotations and never as what they really are: forgeries and falsifications. A large part of the Ministry also actively destroys all documents that have been edited and do not contain the revisions; in this way, no proof exists that the government is lying.