Andrew Bolt: Anthony Albanese’s green-mad government is leaving Australia powerless

Consider this. The Albanese government is wasting $8.7bn trying to develop green hydrogen, a hugely expensive fuel used by fewer than 100 cars and trucks. Most of its schemes have flopped.

Yet Australians driving the 20 million vehicles needing petrol and diesel can’t find enough of these despised fossil fuels, and face possible rationing.

And that’s when we have more than 40 years of proven shale oil reserves that governments have made almost illegal to use. Think of the environment! Of Aboriginal songlines!

So we have oil we won’t use, and couldn’t refine anyway after closing most of our refineries. Just 4 per cent of our petrol is now made from Australian oil refined in Australia.

We’re reduced instead to scanning the horizon for tankers to sail in from the Middle East and Asia to give us what we refuse to make for ourselves. How suicidal.

See, we fell for two spectacular conceits. One is that Australia had the world’s biggest moat, and foreign wars wouldn’t touch us.

Wrong. The war in Ukraine caused our electricity to explode, while farmers ran short of fertiliser, made from gas, because that’s one more critical import after we closed our own production.

Now this war in Iran threatens our supplies of petrol and even resin for plastic packaging, while prices for gas and fertiliser are again rising.

Far worse still threatens us. China’s dictatorship has ordered its military to be prepared for a war for Taiwan by next year. Such a war would probably cut most of our critical sea lanes, including ones bringing most of our petrol from Asian refineries.

The world is getting much more dangerous, and you’d be a mug to bet our country on there being peace.

Yet our government did just that, even running down the military so badly that it cannot send a ship that could protect oil tankers from Iranian missiles in the Strait of Hormuz.

The other conceit? Our political class crusades claims the energy sources that made us rich are actually evil.

It claimed our gas, coal and oil cause a climate catastrophe that’s actually impossible to see.

It’s said uranium — a zero emissions source of power — can’t be used either because it’s too dangerous, even though 31 other countries have nuclear generators producing 9 per cent of the world’s electricity.

These taboos — more religious than scientific — now look frankly insane.

Never has it been more critical that we become energy self-sufficient. A country that relies on foreigners to send it energy is not in charge of its destiny.

Ursula von der Leyen, the visiting president of the European Union, on Tuesday recommended we all become energy independent by electrifying our economies, to cut our dependency on oil. The Greens claim this crisis proves we need “energy independence through renewables” like wind and solar.

Sounds so easy.

But where are the electric tractors?

The electric aeroplanes?

We could get rid of every petrol and diesel car, at enormous cost, and would cut our oil use by just 25 per cent.

And where will we get all the extra electricity?

Transgrid estimates we’d need some 50 per cent more just to power electric passenger cars, if we got rid of most petrol ones by 2050. Worse, most would probably charge up at the same time — just after work — causing a massive surge in demand.

Wind and solar won’t offer the guaranteed and steady power we’ll need. And see what happens to power systems built on the false assumption they would.

Spain suffered a countrywide blackout because depending on 60 per cent wind and solar left it without the system inertia to ride over fluctuations.

The Netherlands also went for green, but now 12,000 businesses can’t hook up to the grid to get more power. It can’t cope: the grid was built like ours, with very big power lines close to big fossil-fuel power plants, and increasingly smaller lines to people’s homes.

It’s now struggling to handle more power coming the other way, from solar units and offshore wind farms on the fringes. Fixing it is estimated to cost nearly $300bn.

Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem here if Australia used Australian uranium to make Australian electricity where old coal plants are. We’d have more energy independence, and all the steady power for hungry new industries such as data centres.

But we’ve banned nuclear, haven’t we? How crazy.