Once you cut through the green-tinted fog, you realise that Australia’s headlong rush toward net zero emissions by 2050 isn’t just ambitious, it’s a national exercise in self-sabotage.
The numbers don’t lie, and neither should we.
This agenda, sold as a moral imperative, is delivering nothing but higher bills, gutted industries, lost jobs, and a prosperity drain that’s bleeding us dry.
And for what? A temperature change so vanishingly small it wouldn’t register on a thermometer in the outback.
Start with power prices. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s own projections show that forcing renewables to dominate the grid—while mothballing reliable coal and gas—will push wholesale electricity costs up by at least 50 per cent in real terms over the next decade.
Households are already copping $300–$500 annual hikes in New South Wales and Victoria, courtesy of intermittent wind and solar needing endless backup. The Grattan Institute, hardly a hotbed of climate sceptics, estimates that reaching net zero without nuclear will add $1,200 to the average family’s yearly power bill by 2030.
That’s not a transition; that’s a tax on living.
Industry feels the pain harder. Our aluminium smelters, steelworks, and refineries run on baseload power... cheap, dispatchable, 24/7. Shutter coal plants prematurely, and you’re left praying for the wind to blow or the sun to shine when a furnace needs 400 megawatts at 3 a.m.
Tomago Aluminium in the Hunter Valley has already warned it could close if prices spike again. That’s 1,000 direct jobs gone, plus thousands more in supply chains.
Portland’s smelter in Victoria? On life support.
Meanwhile, China builds a new coal plant every week, laughing as we export our bauxite to be smelted with their dirtier juice.
Employment follows the same grim script. The Australian Bureau of Statistics counts 250,000 direct jobs in coal mining and gas extraction—real wages, regional towns, apprenticeships.
Net zero’s “just transition” promises green jobs, but the Clean Energy Council’s own data shows renewable construction employs a fraction of the workforce, and most roles vanish once the turbines are up.
The Latrobe Valley didn’t get a boom in solar panel polishing after Hazelwood closed; it got welfare queues.
Treasury’s intergenerational report admits regional unemployment could double in coal-dependent electorates. Prosperity? We’re trading high-value manufacturing for subsidised wind farms that need importing from—guess where—China.
Now, the kicker: none of this moves the global thermostat. Australia emits 1.1 per cent of the world's CO₂. Even if we slashed that to zero tomorrow, an economic suicide note, global emissions models from the IPCC’s own AR6 show it would shave less than 0.02°C off warming by 2100.
That’s two hundredths of a degree, within the margin of error for a weather station in Alice Springs. China, India, and the developing world will emit 80 per cent of the growth in CO₂ this century.
Our sacrifice is a rounding error.
This isn’t leadership; it’s vanity. We’re dismantling a competitive advantage, abundant, low-cost energy, for a virtue signal that changes nothing.
The sensible path? Keep coal and gas in the mix, embrace nuclear for baseload, and let market-driven innovation cut emissions without torching the economy.
Otherwise, net zero 2050 won’t save the planet; it’ll just make us poorer, darker, and colder in winter.
Thought for the Day
“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” Donald J Trump
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
