Editorial: PM powers ahead with bold plan Opinion The AustralianBut in Victoria, Steve Bracks just blows with the breeze
JOHN Howard and Steve Bracks agree on the need to address the world's energy needs in the context of climate change. It's just the scale of their visions that differs. On the weekend, the Victorian Premier detailed his strategy for reducing carbon emissions at the same time as underpinning energy needs into the future. On Monday, the Prime Minister followed with a plan of his own. The contrast was stark. Mr Howard's vision is optimistic, upbeat and outward-looking. He offers Australians security of energy supplies and enhanced prosperity as energy exporters. Mr Bracks's vision is the opposite: it is based on a pessimistic plan that assumes existing power sources are suspect. Where the Premier's vision is insular, the Prime Minister is acting locally because he is thinking globally.
Addressing the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, Mr Howard spoke in expansive terms about the opportunity for the nation to become an energy superpower. As a stable, resource-rich democracy, Australia is ideally placed to do so – indeed we have no moral choice. It is all very well for environmental activists to argue that much of the energy we are able to export produces unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gas and that the solution is not for us to increase our sales but for people all over the world to use less power. But this is not an answer China and India will accept. Nor should they. And with Australia having 30 per cent of the world's coal export trade, the potential to become the globe's second-largest liquefied natural gas producer in just a decade, plus 40 per cent of the planet's low-cost recovery uranium, it is in neither our economic nor diplomatic interests to see energy exports as evil. For a start we need the export income. And we also need the friendship of India, and of China, our second-largest trading partner. The International Energy Agency estimates global requirements will grow by more than 50 per cent in the next 25 years. Australia must increase exports to help meet this demand. This does not mean our energy mix will stay the same, that there is no middle way between prodigiously polluting coal-driven power plants and the green dream of electricity generated by solar power, wind and biomass. Research into clean coal is gathering pace. Canberra supports, albeit modestly, wind and solar research, and is keen on ethanol. And while the economics are unclear, if Australia really wants to reduce greenhouse emissions, the nuclear option is ever-ready.
The Victorian Government plans to more than double its renewable energy target, to 10 per cent of power within a decade, with wind power playing a major role. Of the other inititatives, some are sensible, such as the plan to introduce smart electricity meters so people know when to use power when it costs least. Others are just tokenism, such as the undertaking to buy 150 hybrid cars. There is nothing wrong with some of this, although given the outrage that greets the announcement of every windfarm, the possibility of many more being built without electoral anger is doubtful. Nor is the Bracks Government really all that green. It may embrace alternative energy, but it still relies on coal to pump out the power. Last year the Government extended the life of the coalfields that feed the Hazelwood power station, a plant environmentalists want replaced with gas-fired generators. In the broader picture, the Prime Minister is cooking with gas. But when it comes to the energy generated by big ideas, Mr Bracks is running closer to empty.