Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 26 June 2015

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Economic hit man Ross Garnaut takes aim at SA

Professor Ross Garnaut, former mining tycoon turned climate change guru, this week continued his career-long crusade to destroy Australia’s industrial economy, by attempting to disrupt the growing impetus towards establishing a nuclear energy industry in uranium-rich South Australia.

Garnaut’s 23 June public lecture at the University of Adelaide, entitled “Australia: Energy Superpower of the Low-Carbon World”, was a transparent attempt to torpedo the SA government’s Royal Commission into the possibility of creating a nuclear industry to revive the state’s battered economy. For SA to succeed, it would require an assertion of sovereignty in the face of powerful vested interests; in today’s charged political climate, that could well spell the doom of the global financial and commodities cartels that are bleeding our nation dry—the very interests that Ross Garnaut has served as an “economic hit man” for forty years. Chief among his crimes was his early-1980s role, as then-PM Bob Hawke’s chief economic advisor, in designing and overseeing the disastrous free-market “reforms” by which a hijacked ALP surrendered Australia's financial sovereignty to the City of London and reduced our industrial economy to a raw materials quarry. More than 20 years later, he authored the 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review that, along with its 2010 sequel, is the basis of today’s counterproductive “renewables industry” and carbon trading.

According to Garnaut, a domestic nuclear power industry would be too expensive (ignoring why those countries that don’t have their own uranium would be buying ours). “Uranium has very low international transport costs, so prices in Australia are indistinguishable from those in importing countries.” So much is true; but then this: “Unlike uranium … if it is much cheaper to produce wind or solar power in Australia than in Germany, the full difference will be felt in lower prices to Australian users. …Under free trade, these economic imperatives would move Australia towards using at home those sources of energy with relatively high international transport costs … and exporting energy that has relatively low international transport costs…” (emphasis added). In other words, according to Garnaut’s logic, everyone will be producing their power with expensive “renewables”; ours will be marginally less expensive, but, of course, impossible to export, so we’ll sell our uranium instead and in the meantime rely upon “solar, wind, deep geothermal, wave and tidal” for our own requirements. With breathtaking hypocrisy, he decried “government subordination of public to private interests, as powerful players from the old economy seek to block the emergence of the new”—this from the man whose personal actions saw the common good of the nation prostituted to private interests in almost every conceivable way. In pre-lecture remarks to The Australian, he also had the temerity to complain that “unfortunately, in Australia recently, lots of these questions have been caught up in politics rather than the real science … and the economics”—when in fact the neo-liberal “economic imperatives” of “free trade” that he preaches are based entirely upon political ideology.

However, let us take him at his word: here, then, are the real science and economics of “renewable energy”.

First, the science: no wind- or solar-powered generator of any sort is capable of producing energy at sufficient volume, density and continuous duration to produce and maintain another such wind/solar generator, and therefore neither is actually renewable. Nuclear reactors do produce the requisite energy to construct more nuclear reactors. Sufficient uranium exists that so-called ‘conventional’ (actually decades out-of-date) reactors could power the world for several thousand years, but there are also “breeder” reactors available that produce more nuclear fuel than they consume, especially via addition of thorium to the fuel cycle. It has been calculated that “all the world’s energy requirements for the remaining 5×10⁹ yr [i.e. five billion years] of existence of life on Earth could be provided by breeder reactors without the cost of electricity rising by as much as 1% due to fuel costs. This is consistent with the definition of a ‘renewable’ energy source in the sense in which that term is generally used.”

Secondly, the economics: solar panels and wind turbines are heavily subsidised—by consumers and taxpayers—and are absolutely not cost-competitive absent these subsidies. The intermittent nature of solar- and, particularly, wind-derived electricity mean that backup sources must always be available; the cost of running thermal power stations on standby or starting and stopping them on demand must also, therefore, be added in bright red ink to the (non-) renewables’ ledger. Most of the same materials—steel and concrete, for example—are used in the construction of both wind turbines and nuclear generators, and are therefore used exponentially more efficiently when used to construct nuclear generators, meaning that in real terms nuclear-generated electricity is thousands of times less expensive. Finally, Australia possesses nearly one-third of the world’s known uranium reserves and some of the largest known deposits of thorium. We also have all the iron and coal (for steel-making), lime (for cement), aluminium, nickel, copper, lead, and everything else we need to establish a nuclear industry, or any industry we like, and it is all free by the same standard as that by which wind and sunlight are free: you just have to build machines to make use of it.

All of this considered, especially Ross Garnaut’s curriculum vitae, Australia’s policymakers, academics and business leaders would do well to listen very carefully to everything he says—and then do exactly the opposite.

Click here for a free copy of the Vol 5 No 12 New Citizen paper headlined “Australia Must Enter the Nuclear Age!” to read about the benefits of nuclear power.

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