Australia's ex-PM Abbott Attacks Climate Policies

Australia's energy supply is becoming ever more ramshackle as a result of misguided policies including unthinking support for renewables, the country’s former prime minister Tony Abbott said as he gave the annual lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London October 9. The text may be found here.

Preaching to the (no doubt mostly) converted on what he saw as the science and myths surrounding climate change, he told his audience that it was now apparent that "perverse economics that subsidised renewables on a large scale have injected [instability] into our power supply."

Australia "has the world’s largest readily available supplies of coal, gas and uranium, yet thanks to a decade of policy based more on green ideology than common sense, we can’t be sure of keeping the lights on this summer; and, in the policy-induced shift from having the world’s lowest power prices to amongst the highest, our manufacturing industry has lost its one, big, comparative economic advantage," he said.

"Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial scale batteries, it always needs matching capacity from dependable coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear energy. This should always have been obvious.

"Not only is demand variable but there’s a vast and unpredictable difference between potential and dispatch-able capacity at any one time. Having to turn coal fired power stations up or down as the wind changes makes them much less profitable even though coal remains by far the cheapest source of reliable power.

"A market that’s driven by subsidies rather than by economics always fails. Subsidy begets subsidy until the system collapses into absurdity. In Australia’s case, having subsidised renewables, allegedly to save the planet; we’re now faced with subsidising coal, just to keep the lights on."

He blamed successive federal governments for trying to reduce emissions rather than ensure reliable and affordable power. Instead of giving farmers a fairer return, state governments have given in to green lobbyists and banned or heavily restricted gas exploration and extraction; and shareholder activists have scared power companies out of new investment in fossil fuel power generation, "even though you can’t run a modern economy without it," he said.

To avoid blackouts in the short-term, he said: "We have to get mothballed or under-utilised gas back into the system. In the medium term, there must be – first – no subsidies, none, for new intermittent power... second, given the nervousness of private investors, there must be a government-built coal-fired power station to overcome political risk; third, the gas bans [referring to hydraulic fracturing in many Australian states] must go; and fourth, the ban on nuclear power must go too in case a dry country ever needs base load power with zero emissions."

In the longer term, he said, "we need less theology and more common sense about emissions reduction. It matters but not more than everything else. As Clive James has suggested in a celebrated recent essay, we need to get back to evidence based policy rather than 'policy based evidence'.”

The federal government has been considering limiting LNG exports in order to divert gas into the domestic market, where prices have risen as there is a shortage of supply. The large shale gas reserves are beyond reach of exploration, as governments have imposed moratoria or bans, despite some states such as Western Australia and the Northern Territory, having already commissioned studies that found the activity to be safe if done under strict conditions.

Abbott was prime minister from September 2013 to September 2015.

William Powell