Dick Smith vs CSIRO and ABC misses critical energy question

By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
WHEN the ABC-RMIT fact checkers recently tried to refute Dick Smith’s statements about renewable energy versus nuclear energy, the depth of political and academic delusion over energy reality was starkly revealed.

Smith, in an interview on 2GB with Ben Fordham, accused Australia’s peak scientific body, the CSIRO, of spreading a lie, namely that countries could run entirely on renewable energy. He also accused the Labor Party of hypocrisy by opposing nuclear power in Australia yet allowing the country to operate as the world’s third-largest uranium exporter.

The fact checkers cited a US Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson, that four countries running on 100 per cent WWS (hydro, wind and solar) in 2021 were Albania, Bhutan, Nepal and Paraguay – hardly stunning examples of leading economies. But they also all use fossil fuel.

Nepal, with it’s population of 30 million, uses a lot of wood and other biomass for energy production and according to one Oxford study, 69% of Nepalese households still rely on solid fuels for cooking today. Switch those households to gas and you not only save labour but improve health.

Fordham had noted that Jenny George, a former ACTU president and Labor Party MP, had come out in favour of nuclear energy in Australia, saying “we need to look at nuclear because you can’t run a first-world economy on renewables alone”.

Smith responded by saying that the Finland Green Party had become the first green party in the world to embrace nuclear power. “Look, I can tell you that this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie. It is not true, they are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables. That’s impossible, so we should be making a decision to go nuclear now.”

The “big mistake” of the fact checkers was to claim that Smith said he was opposed to renewables and Smith got an apology from the ABC for saying that. Somehow Smith saw it as defamatory to be called anti-renewable, and he wanted to be clear he was “pro-renewable”.

Jenny George is absolutely right. As an old-Labor unionist, she sees the rapid de-industrialisation happening in Australia as we “transition” from cheap and reliable coal-fired electricty to a horrendously expensive network of wind and solar that relies on new gas-fired power stations to fill the frequent wind and solar generation gaps.

Maybe George also sees the virtue-signalling stupidity of turning NSW’s Eraring Power station into a solar panel factory, as being pushed by the Labor Party, as a sop to it’s increasingly jobless coal and heavy industry worker base at Newcastle, where like Tasmania, the biggest employment sector is now “health care and social assistance”.

Surely Ms George is not the only unionist to understand that without 24×7 base-load electricity you simply can’t run steelworks, aluminium smelters and other heavy industry – let alone the energy needs of any modern city.

The big claim of those who endlessly spout the “transition to renewables”, which is the modern empire’s equivalent of a holy crusade, is that solar is “cheaper” than nuclear or coal. Oh sure it’s cheaper to buy a stack of solar panels from China and hook them up on some acreage somewhere.

But it’s not so cheap to link them all up with thousands of kilometres of connectors, or to switch to wind, gas or coal when the sun goes down or wet or cloudy weather sets in. And then there’s maintenance and replacement costs if a hail storm hits.

On March 5, at 10.30am, with wet weather across most of NSW, black coal was the source of a massive 68% of the state’s power useage and solar a mere 7%. Wind was providing 25%. To know that our leading politicians and bureaucrats want to shut down that black coal generation in the next decade is truly alarming.

What very few people are looking at is the big picture of energy and economics, as economist Chris Martenson points out on his educational website Peak Prosperity. One of Martenson’s key charts is the one we feature. It shows how in fact so-called fossil fuels correlate directly and causatively with economic performance of nations.

It also shows the very small role of renewables across the bigger picture, regardless of the fact that in the right conditions, states like Tasmania and South Australia can run on 100% wind, solar and hydro at certain times. But in drought conditions Tasmania’s hydro power falls far short while still and/or stormy and wet weather severely cuts South Australia’s wind and solar.

Meanwhile the Liberal Party’s escape route from the renewables they have been pushing, is nuclear power, and the new small modular reactor (SMR) technology. These are just another form of the small reactors used in nuclear submarines and can be quite rapidly built with many pre-fabricated components. One has already been built in Russia, according to the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC).

The US state of Idaho is also embarking on a plan to build an SMR at the Idaho National Laboratory. The US Department of Energy has also co-opted the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) and NuScale Power to develop the Joint Use Modular Plant (JUMP).

Nuclear power has advantages in that it runs 24×7 and requires relatively small amounts of fuel from the plentiful uranium that Australia currently mines and exports. Importantly, it has high power density, that is, unlike wind and solar it produces intense energy output from a small area.

Coal fired power is the same, although it of course requires large mines to supply the fuel, which again, we export in large quantities. The followers of renewable religion all conveniently forget that it was coal that basically turned Australia into a first-world economy and that still ensures the bulk of our electricity supply, especially the critical base load power.

We made steel and aluminium, built machinery, tools, cars, trains and thousands of kilometres of rail and roadways. This could not have been done without the cheap and abundant electricity from our coal-fired power stations across the country. Snowy and other hydro helped but that was also about water management and irrigation.

Some readers may recall the days when electricity bills weren’t an issue. The only windmills were those on farms used to pump water from wells where no electricity was available. Irrigators soon found diesel pumps did the job much more efficiently and still do.

Meanwhile thousands of young academics worldwide are co-opted into the hundreds of NGOs like Our World In Data, whose entire economic outlook is shaped by the phoney “carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change” narrative. Yet this same organisation produces informative charts showing the dominant reality of hydrocarbon energy.

Regardless, they publish palpable baloney like the following: “Not only is energy production the largest driver of climate change, but the burning of fossil fuels and biomass also comes at a large cost to human health: at least five million deaths are attributed to air pollution each year.”

It takes about 20 seconds of thought to work out that energy production saves millions of lives annually, from the coal and oil that powers city electricity plants that heat and cool the population, to petrol or diesel that runs ambulances and standby generators at hospitals, to the lights and medical equipment for operations and births, to the electricity-driven pumps for water and sewage, to gas and electric stoves in homes, restaurants and workplaces – energy provides life-saving and life-extending services on a daily basis.

As pointed out by Chris Martenson, energy is economics. Mess with energy efficiency and supply and you mess with the economic functioning of your city and state. It’s a basic principle that Chris Bowen and the rest of the climate clowns need to learn, urgently.

Martenson’s only mistake is that he categorizes “fossil fuels” as finite. That might be the case for coal but growing opinion is that oil actually is a renewable source of energy in that it forms naturally in the earth’s surface.