It’s the reality, stupid

TERRY McCRANN,
December 7, 2016
Herald Sun
OH, boohoo. BHP Billiton CEO Andrew Mackenzie has been blubbering over the way the company’s big uranium-copper mine at Olympic Dam in South Australia has been blacked out twice in as many months.
Crying how terrible and unfair it was, he said the power blackouts were a “wake-up” call to politicians across Australia on energy policy failure. They are in fact a much bigger wake-up call to business leaders and CEOs like Mackenzie.
For the real and specific failure is not “energy policy,” in some generalised national context, but the very specific way the state of South Australia has rushed madly into unreliable wind power and abandoned sensible, coal-fired power generation.
It has been a strategy at least mutely accepted and even implicitly endorsed by business leaders like Mackenzie, as they’ve tried to feed the global-warming, anti-rational energy hysteria. So Andrew, let me remind you of the old biblical saying: “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
In very direct words, if he wants to know who he’s got to blame for the blackouts, he could start by looking in the mirror. He could then look around the BHPB board table at its next meeting. Then indeed, scan the massed ranks of his fellow CEOs at the Business Council of Australia.
With very few — and highly honourable — exceptions, they’ve all pandered to the global-warming hysteria, and sheer unqualified stupidity, which has set about depriving Australians of cheap, reliable and plentiful electricity.
Business leaders like Mackenzie should have been standing up and rejecting — at least as volubly as his recent blubbering outburst — and indeed ridiculing the claim that we could embrace more and more expensive, totally unreliable and scanty so-called renewable energy.
Maybe Mackenzie needs reminding that “when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine……” Or as he’s now found out, you could no more power a mine than a state electricity system, houses, hospitals and factories, on useless wind turbines.
Indeed, going along with the cult of — pointlessly — reducing emissions of life-creating, literally planet-greening carbon dioxide should have had a particular edge for a CEO like Mackenzie. This is because everything, and I mean everything, that BHPB does is about emitting CO2.
The coal it mines and sells — both energy and coking — emits CO2 when burnt. But just as equally, the iron ore and other minerals it produces can only be put to good use in the global economy via industrial processes which also emit CO2.
It is not a particularly good idea for a CEO to concede the moral trashing of what his business does in the hope that pandering to stupidity will postpone the day of reckoning.
When you start feeding the tiger, its appetite only grows; in the end it devours the feeder.
It’s even less of a good idea, when what the CEO’s business does is unequivocally good, not just in financial and economic terms, but as the fundamental underpinning of our society and indeed our civilisation.
One would have thought that Mackenzie of all people would understand and take pride in the critical roles played by a long list of his fellow countryman, from James Watt, through James Neilson, William Murdoch, Sir William Fairbairn and all the rest in enabling us to march literally out of the darkness.
Their efforts and inventions enabled the use, directly or indirectly, of hydrocarbon-based energy so fundamental to ending the Hobbesian “nasty, brutish” and short-lived experience of literally everyone who had ever lived, well into the 20th century; and still, many of the 7 billion alive today who do not have good access to hydrocarbon-based energy.
WELL, even if one doesn’t care for the two billion or so in that category — let them breathe deadly burnt dung particles or literally pedal for power, as pompous pampered Western greenies vicariously propose — a CEO of a company like BHPB should take at least some pride in its contribution to the long and difficult march of civilisation.
We’ve now reached a point at which the rubber hits the road. CEOs like Mackenzie and new BCA head and former great “carbon sinner” Grant King have to call a stop to the stupidity — and the sheer, utter pointlessness.
We can close every coal-fired power station in Australia and it will make not the slightest difference to the world’s temperature. Not when China — for all the wind turbines it might build — will have replaced our coal-fired power stations (and their CO2 emissions) within a year or two.
We can stop every single emission of CO2 from the Australian continent — not sure what we would do about human breathing — and whatever was going to happen to the Great Barrier Reef will still happen.
Mackenzie and Co seem to think you can “keep feeding the tiger” by building more interconnects — effectively, very long extension cords — between states. So South Australia — and Olympic Dam — can keep getting coal-fired power from Victoria when “the wind don’t….”
No you can’t; not when state Labor governments, first in Victoria and Queensland, and at some point in NSW, want to follow SA down the same inane, pointless and suicidal path. When they all get to “50 per cent wind” like SA, who or what do you plug the last — and very big — extension cord into?
A U-turn back towards sanity can start with the Federal Government’s so-called climate policy review — even if it’s another exercise in “feeding the tiger” pandering.
Such a U-turn starts and ends with a total rejection of the 26-28 per cent 2030 cuts to CO2 emissions.
All the other individual stupidities, like paying billions of dollars to foreigners to be allowed to keep our power stations open, like making power even more expensive by a “price on carbon” fall under that overall stupidity.
This is our Brexit, Trumpit and Renzexit (the booting of Italy’s PM, Matteo Renzi) battleground. Our elites need to be told and told very bluntly, that 24 million Australians are not going to pay for their global warming pandering and quite frankly, mindless, unknowing stupidity.