Flashback to 2001. The Liberal Party has introduced Australia’s Mandatory Renewable Energy Target within the Renewable Energy (electricity) Act 2000. It is an idea that will fester, mutate, and dig into the Treasury like a tapeworm.
The MRET is ground zero for the de-industrialisation of Australia, but the story of how politicians chased popular ‘science’ rather than responsible pragmatism is where the true betrayal took place.
In reading the story from John Howard’s account, it is surprising that he harbours such distaste for the populist President Donald Trump when Howard immersed himself in an earlier version of the movement, albeit fundamentally of the Left rather than the later reactive response of the Right which culminated in MAGA.
John Howard said in 2007:
‘We are not antagonistic to renewables. We’re all in favour of them but it’s a question of balance and that’s what we’re trying to do. We want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but we want to do it in a way that doesn’t damage the Australian economy.’
The flirtation with renewable energy followed the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.
As with most ideas that test world peace, the path to Kyoto started with the United Nations, particularly the UN Conference on the Environment and Development 1992 and the corresponding Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC is a treaty that has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Program. The WMO is a very old organisation originally interested in standardising weather and climate data. UNEP was the brainchild of Maurice Strong in 1972.
It was here, in the 70s, that environmentalism began to degrade into a subversive corporate religion.
As soon as organisations, individuals, and groups openly ignored genuine problems with renewable technology that ran contrary to their self-enforced climate coals, or even dismissed failures in their modelling, Climate Change detached from environmentalism and became … something else.
For lack of a political translation, it was considered ‘cool’ for global leaders to pander to the existential theatre of Climate Change. Howard was not the only leader who felt pressured by media attention and his developed-nation peers to accept the narrative of human progress creating negative side effects for the environment.
To be fair, it was a clever con.
Civilisation does create pollution. That is a visible, measurable, tangible fact. It is easy to argue for an invisible pollutant causing an equally unseen future disaster. However, it is a con that should have ended when the Doomsday predictions failed to materialise.
Why Howard, now remembered as one of the greatest figures in Australian political history, would need to lean on popular opinion about the niche concern of Climate Change has to be understood in the context of political upheaval.
The year 2000 placed Australia at the height of global attention for the Sydney Olympics. Our reputation as a crocodile-hunting, snake-infested land of beaches and babes had given way to a trendy world leader finally allowed to throw a bit of weight around. This almost immediately meant Pacific nations wanted money and military help. Doubly so, as Australia under Howard was fresh from the success of East Timor’s independence.
2001 was the year of September 11 and the Tampa crisis. 2002 would bring the Bali Bombing and later, the Iraq war. For many years, leaders like Howard were searching for good news stories to keep the Opposition at bay. Becoming a climate saviour, on paper, made sense politically.
Howard himself wrote in Lazarus Rising, ‘A symbolic act seemed the perfect answer, and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol satisfied the desire to “do something”. That there was no immediate cost involved made the action even more attractive.’
It is a deeply shameful admission from a political class far too used to empty words and an ignorance of consequence.
A bad idea or a convenient untruth should never be given validation as the validation itself is used as justification and, eventually, proof of a truth that never existed.
In 2006, Al Gore was wandering around with his film, An Inconvenient Truth and Howard decided that ‘the government would need to shift its position on climate change’ to catch up with public opinion. Labor pressured this point by continuing to weaponise natural disasters, such as the Victorian bushfire season, as a political issue. It was around this time we saw the rise of the Emissions Trading Scheme when the ‘sensible’ idea of being ‘technological’ was seen as a way to play around with climate goals.
Much later in 2019, the gravity of Howard’s error appeared to weigh on him, with the former Prime Minister describing Climate Change as a ‘substitute religion’ and criticised the government for creating ‘too many incentives for renewable energy’.
His words appeared in print earlier in 2010 when he wrote:
‘While I am agnostic rather than a sceptic on climate change, instinctively I doubt many of the more alarming predictions. What makes me suspicious are the constant declarations from the climate change enthusiasts that the science is all in, the debate is over, and no further objections to received wisdom will even be considered. First principles teach us that no debate is ever concluded, and it can never be said of a scientifically contestable proposition that all the science is in. For many, it has become a substitute religion. Most of the mass media has boarded the climate change train; arguments to the contrary are dismissed as extremist. Moral bullying has been employed to silence those who question the conventional wisdom.’
Regardless of regret, Howard-era policy amounted to a devastating market distortion which began the habit of forcing energy retailers to pursue renewable energy regardless of its value, suitability, or productivity. It was simply a mandate. You must.
Diversifying Australia’s energy mix was done purely for ideological, not practical, reasons.
Traditional energy sources were unfairly and wrongly branded as ‘dirty’ thanks to later government propaganda campaigns under Labor to justify these expensive policies and so the idea of ‘clean’ energy was born without realistic criticism of the true polluting footprint.
2007 saw the dying days of the Howard government. Solar subsidies were launched with an $8,000 rebate per household as part of the Solar Homes and Communities Plan. This would later be expanded by Kevin Rudd and continued by other Prime Ministers.
There is a lesson here for conservatives: it is never safe to entertain bad ideas.
Rooftop solar is one of the problems created by this series of events. There are over four million installations of rooftop solar. It’s impossible to know the true figure, but estimates are that this represents around 150 million individual panels.
Solar panels that are reaching the end of their (short) lifespan.
It is now expected that millions of panels every year will be decommissioned with no regulation to ensure they are recycled. Suddenly, the green revolution has become a pollution nightmare. Even the ABC dragged out the scary headlines this week.
The Smart Energy Council said of the problem:
‘There’s been investor fatigue. Right now, it can cost up to $38 per panel just to get it from a house to a landfill or recycler. Even then, the cost of extracting valuable metals like silver and copper outweighs the resale value of those materials. Recyclers can’t make it work on their own.’
According to the Scoping Study: Solar Panel end-of-life management in Australia, we are looking at a million tonnes of solar panel waste in 2034.
There’s an ‘I told you so’ in here somewhere.
Recycling is going to cost money, but there is plenty of that washing around the Renewable Energy Authority. Why don’t we shut that vanity project down and reallocate the funds to proper recycling processes? Recycling is better for the environment than a bureaucracy.
Renew Economy explains that discarded solar panels can be quite valuable.
The good news, however, is that this waste pile can be quite valuable. According to the report, recycling a typical 20kg solar panel can yield more than $20 worth of materials including aluminium, glass, silicon, silver, and copper.
I had to go and check that. 20kg of water is worth more than 20kg of solar panel. The definition of ‘valuable’ is malleable, but this hardly sounds like a valuable resource.
Here is the quote from the report:
On average, $22.6 worth of materials can be potentially recovered from a typical 20kg solar panel, resulting in a material value of over $1,000 per tonne of solar panels.
Taking into account decommissioning, labour, transport, processing, Bowen’s cheap energy, sale costs, and re-distributing let’s round that off to a value of ‘bugger all’. The reason businesses are not lining up to recycle these panels is obvious.
No one is saying solar panels cannot be recycled. There are companies around the world which specialise in the process, including in China, the UK, and Israel. The point is that the process is not cheap and that the Australian government has not prepared the country for the waste problem its policies created.
One of the reasons, no doubt, is because the end-of-life costs make the technology less attractive to customers. Particularly if those costs are put onto the consumer.
For a political class obsessed with the environment, there is a pattern of environmental recklessness going on with market interference creating an existential rubbish crisis no one wants to address.
The same is true of wind turbines. It is estimated only 10 per cent are recycled with the rest being stored (indefinitely?) or buried in landfill.
Wind turbine waste is expected to dwarf solar panels as farms reach their end of life. Then we can throw battery farms on top of that figure.
Australia’s green energy revolution is an environmental nightmare.
A nightmare, I think we can all agree, never should have happened.
While it would be easy to blame John Howard and his leadership, there have been plenty of opportunities for past and present Prime Ministers to admit the error, tear the legislation up, and tell the UN that they are no longer interested in participating.
There is nothing stopping the Albanese leadership halting the destruction of our energy grid. Nor does Opposition Leader Sussan Ley have any valid excuse to keep Net Zero in the wings ‘just in case’.
In the meantime, someone better work out what to do with the empire of renewable waste…
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
