Trying to duck the climate fight has made the next election harder for the Coalition

The worst thing we can do is put an arbitrary deadline on these changes, just because someone somewhere thought the slogan "Net-Zero by 2050" sounded good.

One looming disaster is electric vehicles. It appears the Coalition is about to adopt last election's Labor policy (which I critiqued here). One of the problems with reducing emissions by driving electric is that for quite a period of time they will be mostly brown and black coal-fired vehicles, until the network becomes substantially less carbon-intensive. They also embody a lot of fossil-fuel energy in their manufacture, particularly if made in China.

EVs also bring a demand for more power infrastructure, as do a lot of the other requirements of NetZero. If we are going to electrify everything, then as Tom Biegler explains, we need to expand power generation by 200 to 300%. How long is that going to take with all the other capital works occurring at the moment, and at what cost, with shortages in materials and labour driving the cost of both up?

And if we build all this additional infrastructure around unreliables, that also creates an increased need for network-scale storage, as well as grid stabilisation. Pumped hydro is the only grid-scale storage system available, but where are the sites, and has anyone incorporated the length of time it takes to actually build a dam? (Snowy 2.0 uses existing dams, and will take 8 years to get any power flowing and will have 2 GW, the size of one very large power station). Yet going ahead with unreliables without storage will lead to disaster. If you run before you can walk you're bound to end-up on your knees.

Which leads me to conclude that without some form of new, despatchable baseload power, the Net-Zero fantasy will fail. The Coalition's plan appears to recognise this so is big on the need for new technology. With the advent of small modular reactors, and Australia's purchase of nuclear-powered submarines, we think the time is now right to start laying the groundwork for a nuclear power generation industry.

But the government shies away from nuclear in favour of hydrogen (nuclear is mentioned 17 times in the document, but hydrogen is mentioned 211). Hydrogen is a proven, and highly expensive technology, with known limitations. Even producing it from hydrocarbons (which releases CO2) it is hugely expensive. The plan is to produce it from water (H₂O), but the cost of this is fixed by the strength of the hydrogen/oxygen bond and the cost of breaking it. The idea that this cost will dramatically reduce, is magical thinking.

It's a mystery why the government is shying away from nuclear. Our polling suggests that the public is probably ready to accept it.

Rushing headlong into decarbonisation doesn't just pose engineering and economic problems but it also poses an unacceptable security risk.

Wars are seldom won by the economically weaker power and are as much contests of logistics and production as they are armed warriors on the battlefield. Not only have we exported much of our capital-intensive industries to our geopolitical rival China, increasing their wealth and robbing ourselves of the sinews of war, but if we prematurely jam unreliable forms of "renewable" energy into our grid we increase grid instability and the risk of blackouts, further decreasing our defensive ability.

The federal coalition seems intent on trying to skate through the next election on the basis that people who disagree with their new climate policy won't vote for an even worse alternative. That is short-term and wrong thinking.

Let's not forget that the federal government only won the last election through a self-confessed "miracle", and that lots of factors have moved against them since, like the collapse of the state Liberals in WA, redistributions of seats, and now a minority state government in SA, just to mention a few.

It's not that they can't stand too many things going wrong, it's that they need a few things to go right.