Labor came to power and quickly established their energy policy.
Paul1405,
Lol, Labor's policy is at best a frail hope that the destruction & pollution of the environment will worsen weather patterns i.e. increasingly severe storms that can keep the wind farms turning faster !

Indyvidual,

You say you've been arguing about trade-offs all along - great. Then you should know that every energy source, including coal, has lifecycle costs, waste, and long-term impacts. But only one still pumps out carbon every single day it operates.

You criticise renewables for end-of-life waste, yut fossil fuels create ongoing pollution every single day they're used, and that pollution isn't just theoretical - it’s killing people. The air pollution from coal, oil, and gas contributes to millions of premature deaths globally every year. That’s not future landfill we’re talking about - it’s real harm, happening now.

And as for your “non-renewable renewables” line - yes, components wear out, get replaced, and need recycling. So do turbines in coal plants, oil rigs, pipelines, and pretty much every other piece of industrial infrastructure. That’s not a renewables problem - that’s an engineering reality.

You demand perfection from everything new, yet you expect nothing from the status quo.

So do turbines in coal plants, oil rigs, pipelines, and pretty much every other piece of industrial infrastructure.
John Daysh,
Against my better judgement I'll reply again. All of these on your list are metal & metal can be recycled. Wind generators & Solar panels can not, they'll be pollution forever & they use up way too much land !
In my opinion, the alternative energy movement would be of much more use if they focussed on recycling & using recyclable materials than littering the country side with fibreglass & plastics.
A focus on using less electricity to satisfy frivolous demands would also help a lot more.
I'm all for finding better means of creating energy but I draw the line at billons of dollars worth of clearly unsustainable practices & experiments to line the pockets of investors who only want money !

Far from ending in this backward country, Net Zero is alive and well. The ‘Net Zero Economy Authority' was established at the end of 2024 to “…promote a Net Zero economic transformation for Australia through facilitating investment, supporting workers, fostering inclusive engagement, and ensuring coherent and effective policies to empower communities, regions, and industries”: by, “Building community engagement and coordinating Net Zero related policies and programs”.

The lunatics in government and the bureaucracy seem to be doubling down on Net Zero rather than saying “Bye-bye” to it.

The ratbag ‘Workplace Gender Equality Agency’ intends to increase “women’s workforce participation across male-dominated industries” to “support the transition to Net Zero”!

While the rest of the world looks like turning away from Net Zero, encouraged by the US, Australia gets madder and madder.

The Australian private sector is gradually waking up, but the Albanese budget contains a further $3.4 million for the Australian Public Service Commission to keep the madness going.

Indyvidual,

I knew you wouldn't be able to resist, and I'm glad you couldn't, too, because your last reply leads me to believe that you're more sincere than what I had originally thought.

Solar panels are indeed recyclable, and so are many parts of wind turbines. It’s not hypothetical - recycling programs already exist in Europe, the US, and here. The technology and infrastructure still need to scale, but saying they’ll “be pollution forever” is just not accurate. It’s also worth remembering that coal ash, tailings dams, and slag heaps aren’t exactly disappearing either - and they certainly don’t get recycled into useful materials.

And your claim that “all metal can be recycled” ignores reality. Just because something can be recycled doesn’t mean it is. Huge amounts of scrap metal from fossil infrastructure is either left to rust, dumped, or takes decades to process. Again, no system is perfectly clean - but renewables have a much smaller ongoing impact and a clearer path to improvement.

As for land use - solar can coexist with farming (i.e. agrivoltaics), and wind turbines take up far less ground space than they appear to from a distance. Meanwhile, coal mines level entire landscapes and leave scars that last generations.

You say you're all for better energy - but you reject solutions not because they don't work, but because they’re not perfect yet. That’s sounds more like paralysis than pragmatism.

The irony is, if the alternative energy movement had the kind of broad support you’re suggesting it lacks, recycling infrastructure, efficiency gains, and R&D would accelerate dramatically. So maybe the real problem isn’t the people building wind turbines - maybe it’s the ones trying to stop them.

"NET ZERO is a long term goal, and adding gas to the system in the short term is not relevant to the final outcome. "

If you have a long term goal of giving up the fags, you don't start buying two packs a day when you used to buy one. Adding more of that icky fossil fuel gas to the system is moving away from the claimed long-term goal, not moving toward it.

Long term goal is pollie-speak for saying we'll tell you what you want to hear, but leave it up to others to explain in 20 year's time why its impossible.

They know we can't get there and that even trying is putting too much pressure on the economy and the poor's capacity to pay and that's why they're backtracking. But it'll take the next generation of leaders to tell the slow the truth.