"facts, figures, and emotion' won't work on the Dark Greens .

They are zealots .

Best ignored.

Interesting points Graham Y. Thanks for the article. Kudos.

Agree with most of this. However, on the topic of gas, every Australian family creates enough organic waste, that put through a two tank digestor system will create enough biogas (methane) to power their homes 24/7! And create a saleable surplus by adding food scraps and waste. Or if the gas is first scrubbed then fed into a ceramic fuel cell, the amount of saleable surplus goes over 50%. And becomes a source of energy we can never ever run out of!

Then there are some easily farmed algae that are up to 60% ready to use oil/biodiesel, at an estimated cost of 44 cents retail!

Your point about nuclear power is well made and while SMR's are now available and deployable, MSR thorium is superior and would be available in less than 12 short months and needs far less technical expertise to run. Moreover, nuclear power allows us to convert seawater into all manner of alternative fuels and at costs that more than compete with more expensive imports!

Then as you say we need to ramp up manufacture here. And we could more than compete with cheap imports if we rely on MSR thorium and energy price as low as 1 cent PKWH. And couple that sanity to real tax reform, manifesting as a flat tax of just 15%! And jettison the current two tax system in favour of long overdue sanity.

I mean, labour costs are just 16% in manufacturing. The other cost are energy, transport and cascading front loaded tax! And as dumb as it gets economically! And tountamont to shooting oneself in the economic foot! Transport costs are related to energy costs and rail transport is the easiest to electrify to reduce transport costs by as much as two thirds.

And can be kept down if we eliminate the sweetheart deals between ministers and trucking operators! Besides, reducing heavy transport off of our roads will reduce maintenance and repair costs! TBC.
Alan B.

Interesting discussion. A few facts get ignored in most discussions
on energy.
1. Peak Crude oil did occur in 2005.
2. Everyone ignores what the oil companies are saying.
The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell anounced at the 2015 AGM to shareholders
that the company had formed a group within the company to study how to
exit the company from the oil industry.
BP changed its motto to "Beyond Oil". It also has a "Future" policy.
Why are they doing this ? Because the cost of finding new fields and
developing them to production level is uneconomic these days.
A further straw in the wind is a couple of years later all the motor manufacturers started announcing that they will produce electric cars.
Do you think someone had a word in their ears ?
Shell announced that every service station in the world will be
equipped with chargers. Already in Europe some service stations are
being closed and converted in charging stations with multiple chargers.

3. Check the financial status of fracking companies, they have poor
ratings on performance after a year or two of operation.

As cars change the availability of oil will extend in time.

People and governments are still talking like oil will be cheap
forever. It will eventually be reserved for plastics.

most of what I've advocated is very doable if we eliminate the naysayers in government. The only impediment to the sanity and the essential cooperative capitalism required to get all of this up and running in turbocharged overdrive.

Because that is what's required to get manufacturing up and competing with the cheap imports.

That all too often have a two way transport component that could be eliminated along with the paper shuffling profit demanding middlemen who all but double the cost of living and doing business in this country! And more than halved again with direct sales and enabled (finance and facilitated) co-ops doing the manufacturing/import replacement. And given small (overlapping) co-ops competing for your dollar!

[Lincoln Welders an excellent template to emulate, when it was still an employee owned co-op!]

At prices below any imports! Just need to get the ministers with their share portfolios in current energy provision out of the picture! And if that costs them a fortune? Too bad!

Given that personal (coal-fired) investment stratergy was never ever in the national interest. And explains the (bloody-minded) reluctance to foster and promote change!?
Alan B.

We must have transport fuel, & we must have reliable transport fuel. We have seen by the dilemma in Europe. We can not depend on overseas refined oil, & shipping bringing it to us, without it city populations starve, with in a few weeks.

We have 100 years of shale oil supplies here, & perhaps much more. The very first thing we must do is start harvesting that oil & refining it here. We must make it mandatory that all transport fuels must be refined here. Time to tell the oil companies, & Coles & Woolworths we won't accept Singapore refined any longer.

Then of course we must sit on the greenies who would make this difficult to achieve quickly. World events, read China & Russia, are not going to wait for us to be ready to start exploiting our stupidity, at least equal to that of Europe.

With fuel supplied domesticated we must then arm, & that doesn't mean subs in a decade or three, again China is not going to give us that luxury. If we can waste a trillion on wind farms, & another on Covid vaccines, surely we can beg, borrow or steal another to buy right now the nuclear missiles, cruise & ICBM, that make us no longer a sitting duck. Currently it is obvious that just one election cycle in the US can see us basically defenseless.

Finally coal is our natural strategic advantage. Play with gas & nuclear generation all you want, we will need both in the future, but we must return to exploiting our coal, to return to the once wealthy "lucky country" we once were.