Committee for Lorne: Climate… are we on the right bandwagon?

There are already far too many words, opinions, oars in the water, bakings in the sun, and blowings in the wind … yet here I am, penning another.

You will be forgiven if you turn away now to watch the rain clouds, the gulls, the cockies, or the passing parade of visitors to our town … but I’m over all this climate stuff.

The debate—if it can be called a debate—is like a kids-in-the-schoolyard scuffle where, sooner or later, someone must step into the middle to say, “… it’s time to break this up, take a breath, and be rational”. While our kids are all being scared out of their wits—and who can blame them—the quasi-adult brains driving their anxiety are ‘out to a long lunch’!

Two things have led me to pen this piece:
[1] the annual climate talkfest [COP28] soon to conclude in Dubai.
[2] a very thoughtful, inquisitive question from Finn, my 12-year-old grandson that came out of nowhere while driving from Lorne to G’town.
Suddenly he asked: “… can you explain what nuclear power is, Codge” [Codge—or Codger—is my family sobriquet] “… and why won’t Australia use it?” Try unpacking that in an hour for a 12-year-old!

First … COP28. Historically, Australia’s light has not shone brightly at sequential COPs, our messaging being too often confused, inconsistent, and scrambled.

But at this 28th annual talkfest, our ideological one-man horror show, Chris Bowen, has eclipsed all past performances to shine ever more brightly as ‘the odd man out’.

I wonder if the man is just thick-skinned—or simply thick? I regret denigrating a Minister of the Crown, but … really!
While Australia’s position is to continue to proselytise sun and wind ‘renewables’ as the only way forward [NB: the energy they produce might be renewable, but the infrastructure they require
also has to be renewed… and every 20-25 years],the other G20 countries are wisely back-peddling from that mantra and are looking again at carbon capture and storage, at natural carbon sinks, and bright-mind technological solutions.

Above all, they are embracing a return to the nuclear power option [always my preference as the best long-term solution to base-load power] and advocating for a tripling of nuclear power generation by 2050. Bowen, meanwhile, drives his leftist Cabinet and Caucus towards a dystopian future where regional landscapes [but not teal-hued inner suburbs] are blanketed by swathes of solar panels and towering wind turbines.

This does not mean that sun and wind cannot/should not play a part, but the quite unhinged climate ideologue from Western Sydney seems blind to any alternatives. When we desperately
need a national all-options-on-the-table debate to inform rational bipartisan decisions about energy, a popsicle has been put in charge. Bowen is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking, “Anyone but …” As I write this [for me] uncharacteristic diatribe, Lorne’s temperamental spring and early summer weather continues to tease.

The high winds, sheeting rain, and swollen rivers of the Schoolies fortnight when a mud slick stained the bay from Stony Creek to the George River and sodden, flattened, and forlorn Schoolies tents dotted the camping grounds—it was a doozy of an Easterly— finally gave way to several days of gloriously warm and sunny weather. But Lorne is now cold, wet, and gloomy again, even as a heatwave has cranked up in New South Wales.

Dorothea Mackellar was spot on when, 120 years ago, she wrote her immortal poem “Core of my heart” (later known as “My Country”) … see attached excerpt copied from the original held at
the State Library of New South Wales. Australia is indeed “… a sunburnt country, a land of droughts and flooding rains”, which Bowen is now doing his best to shade [or umbrella] with solar panels.
While catastrophists cry, “Armageddon is upon us—though perhaps not quite yet—it is hard to deny the evidence that our human need and greed for energy is causing atmospheric damage.

But this threat must be met with a soberly thought out, globally agreed upon, funded, coordinated, and implemented strategy. While challenging to engineer with more than 200 nations in the room,
this time—except for Bowen and Australia—some headway is being made. The peeps are trying! A major rethink of global priorities and goals is back on the table, and the language from the meeting has changed. As Joel Fitzgibbon put it so beautifully in The Australian [8/12/23], “COP28 certainly knows how to draw an odd crowd” …

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/cop28-certainly-knowshow-to-draw-an-odd-crowd/news-story/ff6af2f18c2868f09b895fc796c79c76 “… while some still focus entirely on emissions reductions, recklessly demanding an immediate cessation of fossil fuel consumption, others have recognised the urgency and enormity of the challenge and understand that such a big task requires time, calm and multiple solutions”. Fitzgibbon adds: “… this is the sensible message business leaders and industry bodies have brought to COP28.”

Ah, Joel, if only the Labor government still had you at their climate helm and not the current ninny. Incapable of reading the room, Bowen’s unwaveringly blinkered view has shaped Australia as a ‘COP28 climate pariah’ in this global priority rethink, leaving him [and us] very much ‘out in the cold’. At least most COP delegates will take home the sentient message “…that such a big task requires time, calm and multiple solutions”. Meanwhile, the placard-waving activists here in Australia might do well to paint over their ‘Ban Nuclear Power’ messages and replace them with ‘Bring Back Joel’. Regarding the COP28 activists and their protests, Fitzgibbon also puts it well: “… the protesters [outside] seem as oblivious to the progress of the nearby climate talks as the politicians and negotiators involved in the formal talks [inside] are oblivious to them.”

Finally, to Finn, my sharp-minded, curious grandson, and his question, “… can you explain what nuclear power is, Codge, and why won’t Australia use it?” … it was a stimulating hour’s drive!
We talked about the shape and structure of atoms; about how some atoms, like uranium, are radioactive and, when split by a neutron, release more neutrons; about chain reactions [using the ping pong balls and mousetraps example]; about how uranium atoms, when split, release heat that is then used to generate power and energy. We talked about isotopes, radioactivity decay, and the anxieties surrounding disposal. We talked about how it can all go pear-shaped [as it did at Chernobyl and Fukushima] but how that technology was many decades old and newer, safer, smaller systems are the way of the future. You may tell from this piece that I am a nuclear power advocate. Hopefully, I may have just added one more during that one-hour drive!

John Agar

Feature Writer – Committee for Lorne

A word from the Chairman