Sorry, shock jocks, but the public isn't buying into a renewable energy panic

Extract from The Guardian

Peter Lewis

Despite a concerted effort to create a panic about renewable energy following the South Australian storm, public support for ambitious renewable energy targets remains high

‘If renewables are popular with the public, have not been blamed for the blackout by any authoritative source and, by definition are better for the environment, where is all the vitriol coming from?’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Wednesday 19 October 2016 06.00 AEDT 

The lights had not even come back on in South Australia after the freak storm that blacked out the state last month when the latest front in the climate wars was breaking out.
The pushback against the state’s 41% reliance on renewables, notably wind farms, has attracted a gumbo of opportunists seeking to push their particular carbon barrows.
There was the federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, attempting to justify his less-than ambitious renewable energy target, there was the king of South Australian populism, Nick Xenophon, jumping on the nearest bandwagon and there was the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who just hates wind farms.
Close behind them and was the peak industry group, ACCI, calling for an independent review of the state’s energy mix while rightwing shock jocks across the nation took up the opportunity to move beyond the increasingly settled debate on climate science to find a new target for their vitriol.
And presiding over it all was a prime minister who appears to have ceased to even realise when he is trashing his own political integrity.
If it all looked like a pre-prepared and coordinated campaign by the Coal Club, that’s because it probably was.
Essential has been following the issue over recent weeks to monitor whether the SA blackouts have the capacity to spark another climate panic, not so much the Big New Tax On Everything, as much as the Big Black Out.
The short answer is that the public isn’t buying the renewable panic.

Yes, a quarter of Coalition voters reject the experts and see a causal relationship that even the prime minister and his energy minister didn’t really assert. But the 60% figure who don’t represents a significant rebuff.
And those findings are reflected in broader attitudes towards renewables – when asked to choose between threat or solution, the signals are clear if not unanimous.

So if renewables are popular with the public, have not been blamed for the blackout by any authoritative source and, by definition are better for the environment, where is all the vitriol coming from?
Early every year, the commonwealth publishes the Energy in Australia report giving a snapshot of the industry. The numbers provide a compelling context to this debate.

• Energy occupies a central place in the Australian economy. It’s 6% of the economy or about $100bn value add, and responsible 155,000 jobs.
• Nearly three-quarters of that value comes from coal mining, oil and gas extraction, and petroleum and coal product manufacturing, most of it for export.
• Australia produces three times as much energy as we consume: we are number eight in the world for production versus number 20 in the world for consumption.
• We have 100 years of coal reserves and 50 years of gas reserves.
• And despite the emerging consensus on climate change, growth in Australian energy production in the decade to 2013-14 was twice as fast for black coal and gas as it was for renewables.

It’s hardly a surprise then that the owners and other beneficiaries of those future earnings – that’s the corporates and the government – are seeking to defend these future earnings.
Clean energy threatens their international markets for electricity fuel and production and also for transport where the substitution of clean electricity for liquid fuels is only constrained by fast-evolving battery technology.
Any serious view on de-carbonisation implies a massive downgrade in expectations of future earnings and thus market value for these players.
That’s where South Australia is one of the world’s biggest challenges to the market value of those bedrock Australian industries because it has moved fastest in shifting its energy mix.
But while it is an early adapter it is not an outlier. According to Navigant research for US industry association Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), global “advanced energy” revenues went from $1.08tn in 2011 to $1.35tn in 2015. That’s up 25% in four years.
Quoting the World Bank, Navigant says that from 2014 to 2015, advanced energy revenue grew at more than three times the rate of the world economy overall.
That’s a global market of $2tn by 2020 or soon after. Even if you discount for some debatable AEE inclusions such as nuclear, that’s a massive global market.
The size and speed of the national and state renewable energy targets are key drivers of Australia building its own “advanced energy” market, albeit at the cost of the existing Australian energy players.
The difference in ambition is becoming one of the fault lines of the major political parties, with Labor’s national 50% target more than double the current Coalition position.
Again our figures show the public is backing a fundamental energy transition.

But there’s a caution to these numbers.

There was a time when support for a market response to climate change seemed almost as universal. Through the final term of the Howard government, the consensus developed until support for an emissions trading scheme was bi-partisan.
The rest is history. Rudd spends too long designing the mechanism, fails to steward a global deal. Turnbull loses his base and his job, Rudd drops the “great moral challenge of the time” and his job too. Then Gillard spills the drinks.
“The big new tax on everything” becomes political poison, the exaggerated price is too high and the consensus collapses along with faith in the science, leaving Tony Abbott to sup on the spoils.
The lesson of climate politics of the past decade has been never to under-estimate self interest.
While the mood may be right for Labor and Australia’s emerging clean energy industry, they would be foolish to under-estimate the fossil fuel industry’s capacity to slow down what seems inevitable.