By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
SO-CALLED “Liberal moderate” NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean is a threat to Australia’s farming and industrial sectors by reason of his support for every hare-brained green scheme under the sun and his hypocritical support for synthetic meat production.

Green Mr Kean is closely following the examples being set by the Labor-Green regimes of Victoria and South Australia, who are hellbent on destroying the energy-dense coal-fired electricity that built Australia’s modern, industrial economy. They are even targeting petrol/diesel vehicles in order to transform their states into some sort of “renewable energy” utopia complete with rainbow unicorns and ponies prancing through pristine pastures free of cow poo because traditional farming will be sidelined.

Kean frequently pops up on media with a silly grin, gleefully spouting the latest anti-economy project such as his plan to have NSW cut its emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, a plan he believes will have the “dual benefit” of protecting the environment and “growing the economy”.

Kean is also proposing a $750 million “Industry and Innovation Fund” to help the state’s heavy industries “transition across to a cleaner future” i.e. get rid of the steel, mining, forestry and other “dirty industries” and make the state even more reliant on Chinese imports.

Kean and his starry-eyed advisers fresh out of university environment faculties believe they can launch “the most ambitious electric vehicle strategy in the country” while at the same time switching the entire grid over to “renewables”, what he calls “the biggest renewable energy plan in the country’s history”.

By its nature, wind and solar electricity is much less reliable than the current mix with coal-fired backup to do all the heavy lifting on peak load periods. But the massive influx of electric vehicles (Kean wants 50% of all NSW vehicles electric by 2030) will also put unprecedented demand on the power supply system – let alone the motoring nightmares that come with these vehicles such as the kilometre-long queues seen at recharging stations in California.

Kean’s “renewable” system will rely on gas (fossil fuel) fired power stations to fill in for base load periods at night-time and overcast or low-wind periods when renewables stop working. It will also involve the use of giant batteries that are gaining notoriety for fierce fires, such as the one in Victoria at the Tesla battery site near Geelong last year, which burned for nearly four days before it could be brought under control.

Kean’s big green scheme will cost the state multiple billions in lost industry and send the price of electricity even higher than it has been with the demonization of coal and deliberate neglect of coal-fired power stations by state governments infiltrated by the environmentalist cult and their anti-carbon paranoia.

Regardless, the Kean actually believes this fruitloop plan will cut household energy costs by $130 a year and business energy costs by $430 per annum. We keep hearing of these promises about renewables creating “cheaper power”, when the opposite is the reality. As coal and gas-fired electricity supply is squeezed and prices forced up, renewables only appear “cheaper”. The real cost of renewables however, is in their unrealiability.

Back in 2017, the apparently green and woke Catherine Tanna, CEO of Energy Australia “joined the chorus of big business, unions, welfare and environmental groups calling for an end to Canberra’s blame game over renewables” and said the solution to rising power prices high prices was a national plan to “transition to the future of energy into renewables”. Catherine Tanna’s video message is no longer available and we don’t wonder why.

Tanner, coincidentally, was the chairwoman at British Gas in Australia along with senior positions in BHP Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. She was also on the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia to March 2021 and was then appointed to Scott Morrison’s National Covid19 Commission. (What were all these corporate high fliers doing on a “commission” overseeing the Covid scam, we wonder?)

What we do know is that Tanna is one of the global “big oil” corporate elite and is likely playing a game involving the restriction and boosting of fossil fuel prices for the benefit of the big corporations she is beholden to. With Russian gas cut off from Europe by Biden and Nato’s war games, the price of natural gas has gone sky high. Victoria’s socialist left government is playing this game too by pushing to shut off gas from it’s massive gas fields for domestic use and make the state entirely electric.

Come April 2022, after five more years of attacks on coal and building of more wind and solar farms, electricity prices are spiraling upwards out of control. “The report from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) shows wholesale electricity jumped 141 per cent to $87 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in the first quarter of 2022, compared to $36 MWh at the same time last year,” Sky News reported.

“In Queensland alone record demand saw wholesale prices surge to $150 MWh for the quarter – the second highest rate the state has seen for any quarter in over 20 years. The prices are expected to flow onto consumers with the wholesale price of energy accounting for 30 to 40 per cent of a household’s power bill.”

But now the “blame game” has fully shifted to fossil fuels, with the AEMO saying coal generator outages, an increase in demand due to heatwaves and “costly fossil fuel production” were behind the latest price hikes. Is it any wonder that coal electricity outages are frequent and hurting supply when governments are actively working to shut stations down with no promises of support for investment or replacement.

Regardless of this neglect, coal-fired electricity is still the backbone of Australian electricity supply and without it the economy will simply break down. In 2017, when Catherine Tanna and others were promising their glorious new renewable energy future, coal still provided 62.7% of Australia’s electricity, according to World Energy Data.org. With gas (19.6%) and oil (2%), the fossil fuel total was 84%.

As Cairns News stories have repeatedly shown, the key to national economic well-being is energy density, as brilliantly elucidated by the Scottish academic Robert Wilson PhD. Fossil fuels happen to have very high energy density orders of magnitude higher than solar and wind, which is why they have become the backbone of all modern economies. Nuclear power is also energy-dense, which is why it plays such a big role in the Europe, Russia, China and North America.

But with Russian gas gone from Europe through the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, economic warning signals are flashing for Europe with only Norwegian pipeline gas and US shipped gas available to fill the huge deficit.

Meanwhile the green Mr Kean is talking up “the transition” of farming to adopt “new technologies and practices” in line with the green virtue signalling by their corporate masters in the National Farmers Federation and Meat & Livestock Australia. “This is not about hurting our farmers, but making them more productive and profitable,” Kean spouted to ABC Radio in September, 2021.

Kean claims his big green dream is forecast to attract $32 billion in private investment over a decade in “renewable energy zones” and most of this will go to rural and regional NSW, for instance, New England, where plans are afoot to cover the landscape – no longer needed for livestock production – in solar and wind farms allegedly capable of producing (when its running) 8000mW of new electricity.

Kean breathlessly bragged to the ABC that this plan was oversubscribed four times with schemes that would produce 32000mW worth $40 billion, which apparently would be the economic saviour of the regions. No doubt the 1000s of hectares of windmills and solar panels would require a big workforce for the endless maintenance needed to keep these facilities operating. And of course Kean is particularly excited that these energy farms will “halve the state’s emissions” by that magic year 2030 – when we will all own nothing but be happy.

Kean’s green dream clearly doesn’t have the long-term future of livestock farming in its sights. Like Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum, Kean is helping push synthetic meat, such as that illegal product being made by the NSW company Vow, a name which makes one wonder just what the people behind it are thinking. A vow to create a livestock-free landscape perhaps? Or is it a totally vegan food supply? Or did they vow to make real meat so expensive, it will be only for the ruling elites?

Vow’s first factory in Alexandria, Sydney, aims to produce 30 tons of their “cultured meat” per year. And then their second factory will be churning 100 times the amount of this gunk in 2024. Kean’s “vision for farming” is shaping up, right in the middle of urban Sydney where high-density Agenda 20-30 style shoebox apartment buildings are popping up like mushrooms.

In the meantime Vow plans to sell their “cultivated chicken, beef, and pork” in Singapore before the end of the year, because Singapore is the only nation that has approved cultivated meat for sale. Other companies pushing this synthetic, mass produced sludge include the “Good Meat” company, an offshoot of Eat Just.

Upside Foods in California (of course) has opened its EPIC factory, capable of producing 400,000 pounds of cultivated protein sludge annually. “Cultivated meat” is grown in labs via media fed to cells, replacing the need to raise and slaughter animals. And that no doubt sends a warm and fuzzy virtue signal to warm the hearts of Kean and his legions of inner-Sydney Green left climate cultists.