Strewth! Australia to Become a ‘Clean Energy Superpower’. Just Like Self-Bankrupting Britain

The craziest climate story of the last few months must be the shenanigans at Chinese-owned ‘British’ Steel. In order to reduce the company’s carbon emissions to save the planet from non-existent ‘global boiling’, our useless ‘Conservative’ government is giving ‘British’ Steel’s Chinese owners around £500m of our money to close down its blast furnaces, replace them with supposedly ‘environmentally-friendly’ electric arc furnaces and, in the process, fire over 2,000 skilled British workers. As blast furnaces can melt raw iron ore as well as recycled metal, while electric arc furnaces can only melt recycled or scrap metal, British Steel seems to be turning into a glorified scrap metal merchant. Perhaps we should rename British Steel ‘Steptoe & Son Steel’? Moreover, a cynic might wonder how much effect the expensive closure of these blast furnaces and the associated job losses will actually have on the Earth’s climate.

When questioned about the ‘wisdom’ of this decision, the Business and Trade Secretary, Kemi Badenoch laughably claimed: “The U.K. Government is backing our steel sector. This proposal will secure a sustainable future for Welsh steel and is expected to save thousands of jobs in the long term.”

The only possibly amusing part of this disaster is that the Labour-supporting unions are beginning to see the catastrophic real-life consequences of their party’s (Ed Miliband’s) ludicrous Climate Change Act on the sad remnants of the British economy. 

“This deal will have devastating consequences for jobs and workers,” said Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB. “It will rip the heart out of the Port Talbot community.”

I’d like to write more about this, but the stupidity is so mindbogglingly obvious, there’s really not much more to add.

This leads on to a rather entertaining (for all of us who have given up any hope of having intelligent politicians) story from Down Under. Our U.K. politicians are forever telling us that by abandoning cheap, reliable coal and gas energy and replacing it with unreliable and expensive supposedly ‘clean renewables’ like wind and solar, Britain will somehow become a ‘clean energy superpower’. While doing so, they seem to forget to explain how we will get our energy when the sun doesn’t shine – for example in the evening and at night – and the wind is either too weak or too strong for wind turbines to work.

Our Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has said: “We need to move further and faster to transition to renewable energy, and I will ensure the U.K. is at the forefront of this global movement as a clean energy superpower.“

And here’s a quote from the Labour Party’s current 2024 promises to Britain: “Labour’s fourth mission in Government will be to make Britain a clean energy superpower. We will make energy cheap and secure, so that the British public never again face spiralling bills; boost jobs and investment in every region and nation of the country; and grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”

Of course, this is complete nonsense. As I have explained in a previous article for the Daily Sceptic – ‘Britain is leading the world in committing economic suicide‘ – the more renewable (‘clean’) energy a country relies on, the higher its energy costs and therefore the less competitive its industries are. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand that. So the phrase ‘clean energy superpower’ is a brobdingnagian-sized oxymoron. If you have gloriously cheap, reliable fossil-fuel energy, you can become a manufacturing superpower like China is and India soon will be. If you are reliant on hideously expensive and unreliable supposedly ‘clean’ energy, you bankrupt your country.

Well, it appears that our friends from Down Under are making the same ludicrous promises to their long-suffering population as, just as in Britain, their few remaining industries are crushed by Australia’s ever-more-clean, ever-increasing energy costs. Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy recently explained: “Our Government is laying out the roadmap for our nation to become a renewable energy superpower’. And the Australian Treasury proudly announced: “The Albanese Government’s second Budget will help to unlock Australia’s potential as a renewable energy superpower with significant investments in clean energy industries and jobs.”

If you had to choose one developed country which could have seen what nonsense the climate-catastrophists’ Greta-worshipping global boiling narrative is, you’d probably have chosen the down-to-earth, say-it-as-it-is Aussies. That they too seem to have fallen for the unhinged Net Zero climate doom-mongering is a worrying sign of how mass delusion can so easily spread.

You’ve got to laugh, otherwise you’d cry.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.