Even old lefty Graham Richardson says we'll be using coal for a long, long time. All the common sense went out of Labor a long, long time ago. Ditto Liberal party, who are now indistinguishable from Labor.

Why do so many not realise that renewables as they are available at this stage are just way too polluting from raw material to disposal !
The only clean energy is hydro ! Nuclear is second !
Nr 1 problem is over-demand, Nr 2 problem are the people using more than they need !

Another thing about renewables in Australia is that they are making China rich, China can produce them cheaply using cheap, reliable coal. Are we even selling them any coal these days, or are they getting it cheaper from the BRICS countries, which all export the things Australia does, but at lower prices.

We can take other folks nuclear waste and be paid annual millions to store it! And if we build mass produced SMR, MSR thorium we can task a number of these safest of all reactors to burn this waste and produce retail prices for industry that are all but free and with carbon-free power! No renewable, hydro or coal can produce power at 1 cent PKWH and still produce a handsome profit! And what we need do to become an energy super power!

But I'm not advising Ministers, the green dreamers are and if their pie in the sky simple cost effective advice is followed, we will not become and energy super power just a bankrupt debt riddled banana republic.

Solar thermal is something we can do here with Australian steel, the mirrors and Australian stainless steel the heat tower and vacuum vessels. And the fuel is forever free! The steel and Nickle required sure to given mining/refining a significant boost and construction of the solar thermal plants as well as the Graphene transmission and cost effective sand batteries.

Solar voltaic only good for 25 years, comes with mountains of toxic waste and we need to import them from China and will need thousands of hectares, pumped hydro and community battery backup.

Coal may be reliable but the price is through the roof and it still produces carbon and a number of nasty toxins in the smokestack, arsenic, mercury, sulfides/sulfur dioxin (acid rain) and uranium.

Once the war in Ukraine ends the world will be flooded with cheap as fossil fuels and we won't be able to give our coal away! We need to make hay while the sun shines and use the extra export income t0 transition to MSR thorium as the only rational choice on the table!
Alan B.

One of the things that make windmills very polluting in instillation is the very large amount of cement used in their instillation.

Don't forget Indyvidual that dam construction uses really huge amounts of cement. If CO2 is a pollutant, just like windmills, some dams may never produce enough power to compensate for the amount of CO2 produced in the manufacture of that cement.

I wonder if anyone has ever done the math on that, or the tunneling involved in things like Snowy 2.0?

Mad edicts trumpeted from the mummy’s boy Temple, where our proud English flag lives in the dustbin while the sniffling maggot stands compliantly before the Aboriginal symbol of revolt, the new National emblem!

No choice but to tolerate the insult to intelligence, while the circus of clowns drag us to the bottom.

Dan