No, Abbott is right (pity he wasn't right when in office) and, if coal is "dead", then we are all dead because whizzy gig windmills, the sun and batteries are NEVER going to provide base-load power.

Politicians need to get their heads put of their backsides, stop listening to climate activists, and start building HELE coal-fired power plants like sensible countries are. If they won't do nuclear, they must do coal. The silliness - the treason - that is killng Australia has to stop.

Sorry Huon Hoogesteger but Abbott is right as ttbn just said. Your article simply repeats all the mistakes made by many of those in the media - notably the assumption that because renewable power hardware is falling in price, as it is, then it must become competitive with dispatchable power (coal, gas, nuclear, hydro). Intermittent power can never compete head to head with conventional, no matter how cheap it gets. There are many reasons for this but one of the major ones is that the grid has to be planned for the times when renewables deliver very little or nothing at all, and conventional has to take over. So basically all, or mostly all, renewable power has to be duplicated by conventional, and most of the cost is in capital depreciation, not fuel. The cost comparisons you are basing your arguments don't take grid costs into account. That said, Australia seems to be taking a different route of demand management rather than duplication - that is paying heavy users to drop out when the demand soars on those hot summer days - rather than expect the grid to deliver power. But just in case, gas plants have also been recommissioned and big, diesel generators installed.
As for coal declining, a glance at the figures shows that brown coal in Australia may be on the way out, but that's part of the electricity industry, not big energy (brown coal is not exported, and almost all the coal plants close to date have been brown coal). Black coal is still around, the bulk of which is exported. Sorry Huon, but your article is flat wrong

FINALLY! Someone who gets it!

While I agree with most of what the Author is saying. It can't be left to a race to the bottom between renewables. Unless they can produce an unsubsidised 1.98 cents PKH!

Because that's the promise of unsubsidised, walk away safe, molten salt thorium power!

What sort of manufacturing sector we could have, if the median price of power was just 1.98 cents PKH!?

If you think that's a wild claim? then have a butchers at, Making safe nuclear power from thorium/Thomas Jam Pedersen/TedxCopenhagen.

Then Super Fuel, subtitled, green energy.

Then a highly rated peer reviewed, top documentary film from Google tech talks, and under the heading, the case for thorium.

Where lead presenter,Kirk Sorensen, makes an incontrovertible case for thorium!

I believe it was John Howard who made the first deal to sell our gas to China and Anna bligh who privatised Queensland gas.

The first result of this hidebound, extremely autocratic stupidity?
A 400% rise in the cost of household gas up here.

Anna, the natural cost of recovering our gas from our ground, is the cost of drilling the holes, laying the pipeline and treating the gas to remove the free LPG condensates that often accompany the gas!

Natural cost doesn't include debt and dividend servicing by private players, nor the hidden commissions taken by the finance industry!?

Furthermore, one cubic metre of NG has the same calorific value as one litre of petrol. and nearly every conventional engine can be retuned to run on it as CNG!

We under our brilliant leaders, instead decided to become the world's largest exporters of this, and for half the domestic price, while we continue to import fully refined products from competing economies!
As we the people, lose billions both ways!?

As lamb chop chewing Sam kekovich would say, You know it makes perfect sense!?

Yeah Sam , but only if you the dullest chisel in the toolbox and just trying to maximise personal profit/retirement returns?

Even as the country is sold down the river of no return!
Alan B.

'Is coal today’s tobacco? ' Just shows you that even some conservatives have been so dumbed down they are unable to think. Obviously nothing to do with Huon's benefits from the solar farce.

So there you are Mr Turnbull, this alternative hot shot has just said coal can't compete. Obviously from this is agreement for all alternate subsidies, & ridiculous feed in pricing, to be removed, & a level playing field reinstalled immediately if not sooner.

No more waffle old man, you have to do it now, right now, or the Liberal members might even grow a backbone, & chuck you out on the scrap heap, where you belong. Surely they now know that the member for Goldman Sachs profitability is leading them to destruction.

Meanwhile let's take these self interest articles with the grain of salt they deserve.

Meanwhile, watch out for missionaries like Alan. They are often half right, but that means they are half wrong too. I'm not sure if Alan wants thorium or algae to fuel our world, & they may, but not in our lifetime. Lets just be stick in the mud practical people, & settle for the proven cheap technology of coal, & keep greening the Sahara desert with plant fertiliser.

Meanwhile perhaps Mr Hoogesteger could explain why other more practical countries are building 1000 coal fired generation plants, particularly China, who have cornered the market on windmills.

Our energy paradigm is the one you get, when the inmates are in charge of the asylum?

On the one side, you have one group their eyes covered, complaining they can't see past the "coal" dust in their eyes, at the other solutions?

Another screaming, we'll shine a searchlight and you lot can escape by sliding down the beam!

With the third lot cunning in comparison? Saying, we might be new here and a little green? But you know what? We're just not that stupid! We'd get halfway down and you'd cut the power!?

Levity aside, if you never ever look, you'll never ever see!

Nor can you advance so much as a single inch by refusing to budge or be first to move, if you're glued to the blocks, like a deer caught in the spotlight! Waiting for someone else to react to the starter's gun!

It's the one you don't hear, that's the one to worry about!

We have a two trillion dollar super fund! What we've never ever had is tax free self terminating thirty year investment bonds!

And we assiduously dissembled as much of our cooperative capitalism entities as we could, John!

And because of the absolute necessity to obey the self imposed ideological imperatives that brooked no opposition!? John, Tony!?

Put together, cooperative capitalism and our super, and see what we as one people, united behind common purpose, and median 1.98 cents PKH power, can actually achieve!
Alan B.