City NIMBYs v regions in a fight over renewables 

Tasmanian tractors line up outside Parliament House in Spring Street.

Farmers and others from regional communities will rally in Sydney’s Martin Place next week to campaign against renewable energy projects that will blight landscapes, alienate farmland, damage bushland and disrupt livelihoods.

Public protests do not come naturally to people of the land; we can be relatively confident they will not glue themselves to the road, chain themselves to critical infrastructure or block the traffic, and I doubt children will be given the day off school to join them.

But governments would be unwise to take them for granted. In August farmers from central and western Victoria drove their tractors into Melbourne’s Spring St parliament precinct to protest against transmission line projects linked to renewable schemes. In Europe farmers have been increasingly agitated and activist against climate policies that undermine their viability.

Labor governments, state and federal, already are facing regional opposition to onshore and offshore wind projects, solar installations and transmission lines. Legal challenges and community protests are in play, and federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s ridiculous, unfunded, taxpayer-guaranteed acceleration of renewable energy ambitions will make this only worse, creating political spot fires all over the country while further undermining the nation’s energy affordability and reliability.

The hubris and self-harm on display here is monumental. A nation rich in coal, gas and uranium seeks to refrain from using those resources, preferring to conduct a world-first experiment in renewables plus storage, all the while insisting this will be cheap and reliable while generating jobs and economic security. It is delusional.

The push for climate action generally comes from high-income people who live close to the city centres; a look at the electoral map bears this out. But the price paid for these policies is highest in regional areas.

There is no logical reason, bar aesthetics, that wind turbines would not be built on North Head and South Head in Sydney or on Melbourne’s St Kilda and Brighton beachfronts.

These locations would be cost effective because there would be no need for expensive transmission lines to take electricity from source to consumers. But we all know hell will freeze over before wind turbines or solar farms found their way into the teal, Greens or green-tinged Liberal or Labor seats close to the CBDs. These are places for preaching climate action, not delivering it.

Yet the aesthetics in regional areas are dismissed, as are the additional costs and the impact on land use. It is a textbook case of out of sight, out of mind – or someone else’s problem.

This goes to the increasing divide between urban dwellers and country folk. Tesla drivers and tractor owners often operate in different spheres, and this divide often seems like one between the woke and the practical, or the sanctimonious and the aspirational. These are becoming the most critical fractures in society; despite advances in communication, information and transport making it easier than ever for all of us to mix and communicate, the level of mutual understanding seems to be in decline.

In the country, kids grow up with a clear understanding of where meat, wheat, milk and wool come from and what is required to produce them. In the cities kids in their late teens see a video of an abattoir and it is enough to turn them into activist vegans, seeking to deny meat to others.

The radical vegans now insist on pet owners transitioning their dogs to vegetarian diets – animal activists at war with nature. I look forward to them taking vegetable patties to the Serengeti to wean lions off zebras.

We over-sanitise things, separate ourselves from natural processes or at least disassociate our end products from their source. A few years back, on a country trip, we had been teaching our young boys about different breeds of cattle, some dairy and some beef, and as we watched a herd being loaded on to a truck their fate dawned on my then five-year-old. “Oh, are they going to be beefed?” he asked. We still laugh at the turn of phrase. He still loves his steak.

In the inner cities people can enjoy steak tartare and Florentine all their lives without ever seeing an animal slaughtered. Likewise, they can demand clean energy and pontificate about renewables to their heart’s content without ever having to worry about jobs lost from the local coal-fired power station, or surrendering their land or neighbourhood character to wind turbines, solar farms and transmission lines.

Yet in the brutal numbers game of politics, the city folk dominate. Regional communities need to make some noise and they are about to do so.

We need governments to focus intently on the costs and benefits of everything they do. Yet Bowen this week will not even reveal the broad financial costs of the latest expansion of his renewable zealotry. He used a lame analogy about people keeping their cards close to their chest at real estate auctions, and it was enough to stop most journalists pressing him further.

Still, the previous day he announced a deal with the NSW government to underwrite six projects storing a gigawatt of power for a capital cost of $1.8bn, so it is reasonable for us to presume the full 32GW will cost 32 times that amount, or at least $57.6bn. All this investment must be covered by taxpayers or repaid through higher prices – or both.

But, according to Bowen, renewables are the cheapest form of energy because apparently “the sun doesn’t send a bill and the wind also doesn’t send an invoice”. This bloke should not be in charge of our energy grid, he should be writing lyrics for the Wiggles.

The pain in higher electricity prices and reduced reliability is increasingly obvious. South Australia has the greatest renewable penetration and it has the highest electricity prices and, a few years back, suffered its first statewide blackout.

This is the path the nation is following. But what is the gain?

Bowen suggested this week that the trade-off for regional communities concerned about renewable projects would be a more benign climate. Seriously.

“Rural people will pay a big price if we don’t deal with climate change,” Bowen said on Sky News. “You know the impact on farming, productivity in agriculture, of climate change is really severe, really strong, the farmers that I talk to know that.”

This insults the intelligence of voters and dodges reality.

There is no chance that any of Australia’s virtue-signalling and reckless energy policies can have any discernible influence on the climate. Even former national chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted that if we shut down the entire country, thereby reducing our emissions to zero, the effect on the global climate would be “virtually nothing”.

So why would Bowen pretend that his renewables transition would lead to better conditions for farmers? Is he deluded or deliberately deceitful?

This is the great lie of our contemporary politics – that the expensive, risky and unprecedented rewiring of what was a cheap and reliable energy system will improve the weather. Whatever you think of climate change, this is simply untrue – yet it is one of those big lies that public broadcasters, educators, bureaucrats, leftists, academics and virtue signallers prefer to perpetuate.

And so, for no environmental gain, we demand that regional Australian put up with unreliable, uncosted and unsightly renewable energy projects. “We all live in the country for a reason,” NSW farmer Grant Piper says. “We appreciate the country and the environment we live in, and we don’t want to see it destroyed.”

Piper is opposing transmission lines and other projects in what has been designated a Renewable Energy Zone in NSW’s Central West. “This seems like a case of destroy the village to save the village,” he says. “It’s destroying the environment right here, right now, it’s not gonna save the environment.” He is right. It is as simple as that.

Piper is helping to organise next week’s protest, bringing opponents of various projects around the country together.

Steven Nowakowski is an environmentalist and photographer from north Queensland who is distraught about almost 100 wind farm projects slated for the state’s coastal ranges which, until now, have been spared from agriculture and other development.

He has used drone footage to show the amount of land clearing and habit destruction being carried out to install wind farms in these pristine forests.

“I don’t think people really understand or consider the scale of what is involved in the green energy transition,” Nowakowski says. He may be right but the awareness is starting to build.

I have interviewed cray fishers from Port MacDonnell in South Australia worried about an offshore wind project; potato farmers near Ballarat and other farmers farther west angered by transmission lines; graziers in the NSW high country fighting transmission lines to Snowy 2.0; whale tourism operators opposing offshore wind off Newcastle; landholders near Goulbourn upset by a large solar farm; and the list goes on. Each community is torn, each project struggles against local opposition, and for every firefight around these projects now, there will be 10 more under Bowen’s plan. The battles will be noisy and passionate. The locals have lots to lose and the government has staked its future on this renewable energy strategy.

There are many imponderables about how this climate and energy policy will land. But three things are clear: many landscapes will never be the same again; our electricity will become more expensive and less reliable; and none of this will alter the climate.