30 June

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it actually implement? ZERO. It preferred to use energy as a political football, to win votes. 10 years of doing nothing has unsurprisingly left us with a disaster, at the same time as the existing generators were already falling apart. There’s talk now of expanding gas, but there are no gas plants, and no gas to feed them even if we had them. It will takes years to fix that. Renewables are cheap and fast to install, but are being stalled by culture war morons, still stuck in that 10 years of inaction, still trying to use energy to win votes. Nuclear is an outrageously expensive fantasy that won’t provide a single watt of electricty for at least 15 years, even if we decided to use it. China meanwhile is doing what we should have already been doing. Mostly because it doesn’t have social media blocking the basic work of keeping a society’s lights on. It’s building renewables (red line), at record pace. The blue line is their nuclear. Like the US, UK and France, they’ve given up on that as way too expensive and slow. Watch all sides converge on subsiding solar and batteries and electric appliances (and cars), in homes. It’s the only fast action available now to try to head off this disaster. It’s why I made this house as energy-independent as it can be, because this crisis was obvious to anybody with half a brain.