The Australian has a piece that ought to be another ominous portent for Britain’s Labour Government while it sacrifices the population’s well-being on the altar of Net Zero, presided over by its arch-priest of energy policy, Ed Miliband:
Employers supplying food to major supermarkets and thousands of cafes, restaurants and pubs have launched a revolt against Anthony Albanese’s energy policies, urging Labour to dump its 82% renewables target and focus on ramping up more gas and coal production to bring electricity prices down in the short term.
The Independent Food Distributors Australia – whose members use large chillers and freezers to store and supply food for 60,000 retailers – has broken with other peak industry bodies and is calling on the Albanese Government to recalibrate its climate change agenda, with business owners reporting energy price increases of more than 50% since Labour gained power.
Business owners in the sector have told the Australian they want the Government to drop its “ideological” approach to energy and instead support upgrades of existing coal-fired power stations while bringing on new gas peaking plants.
Like Britain, the same story is being peddled in Australia that renewables are the magic solution to cheap energy. In Australia the cost of energy is steadily rising too. The story sounds all too familiar to anyone in Britain where the cost of food has become crippling and only set to get higher:
IFDA chief executive Richard Forbes said there was a “national energy emergency”, arguing the Government’s policies were driving up the price of food for consumers. “Based on the impact of the level of increase in energy pricing for food businesses, and the downstream impact for consumers… there should be a very serious look at the approach towards Net Zero at present because of the damage that is being done,” Mr Forbes said.
“It’s very clear… that the damage is affecting the viability of businesses and is affecting the ability of consumers to purchase the food that they would like.
“I don’t think it ever hurts to have a recalibration when people are hurting.”
Mr Forbes said the “clear message” from IFDA’s 200 members, which employ 8,500 people, was that coal-fired power generation was being phased out too quickly and the renewables target of 82% by 2030 was problematic.
Under Labour’s plan, 90% of coal-fired power stations will be retired within the next decade and there will be no coal generation by 2038.
“As far as I am concerned, the Government’s energy policy has and continues to increase the price of food,” Mr Forbes said.
“Food businesses are sick and tired of hearing the Government saying they are doing something about the cost of living, when their costs, particularly energy costs, are soaring.”
Australia’s Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, isn’t having any of that. Of course it was all the previous Liberal Government’s fault:
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
“Extending them further would be a recipe for disaster,” the spokesman said. “After a decade of neglect under the Liberals, energy prices for small businesses are too high and exposed to international shocks.
The Godden Food Group, which distributes food, has seen its latest energy contract soar to 238% more [i.e., more than trebling] in New South Wales and 90% higher in Queensland:
Mr Godden said he would have to pass on about half of the increased costs for food storage which would lead to higher prices at the supermarkets.
“The Government can make a smoke screen out of it all they like, about supermarkets gouging,” Mr Godden said.
“The reality is, they don’t want to talk about the cost of energy and how it’s affecting that supply chain.”
Mr Godden said the Government was “chasing this renewables policy as a political agenda”. He went further than the industry body in calling on the Prime Minister to join Donald Trump in leaving the Paris agreement.
He said it was a “disgrace” that Mr Albanese, Mr Bowen and Jim Chalmers would not admit the Government had failed to deliver on its pre-election commitment to lower electricity prices by $275 on 2022 levels by this year.
“Answer the question,” Mr Godden said. “I think they’re treating the Australian people like idiots, like fools.”
Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?
Brisbane-based Moco Food Services Chief Executive Mike Peberdy said to the Australian in a killer line:
“I think we’re pursuing some ideological sort of outcomes, rather than a focus on actually delivering… cheap energy,” he said.
“There needs to be a focus on shoring up our short-term power requirements using coal and gas in order to reduce the cost to consumers and business.
“We used to be a low-cost power country, and now we’re high. It seems like a crazy destruction of wealth across the Australian population.”
The interesting question is going to be how many of these ideology-based Net Zero administrations will still be in power in five years? Given that the Telegraph today has a piece about Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises, it rather looks at the moment as if Labour might already be heading for the same oblivion as the Tories. Appropriately enough, the Telegraph has a piece by Brian Monteith declaring that Miliband poses a grave threat to every family in Britain:
Unfortunately for British industries enduring the world’s highest energy costs, Miliband is allowing no concessions to his tablets of stone that say we must be willing for all our carbon energy-based industries to either abandon Britain for foreign shores or stay and face being priced out of business altogether.
The greater tragedy is that for all the higher energy costs we face – at home and at work – the fact is that Miliband’s supercharged rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change.
If man’s carbon emissions cause the earth to warm and the seas to rise, then Miliband’s policies do not alter that equation. All that is happening is our industrial production (and the jobs and investment) are being exported to China, India and other countries where energy is allowed to be much cheaper and is usually dirtier.
In its place, Miliband is helping to import hardship and poverty that adds to the problems created by Reeves.
The Australian’s piece is worth reading in full as is the Telegraph’s about the threat posed by Ed Miliband.
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Morons rule ! Unfortunately
“Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?”
They are fools – at least anyone who voted Labour in Australia on the basis of “cheap green energy” is a fool, and anyone in the UK who voted for any major party other than Reform expecting to have cheaper energy.
I’m sorely tempted to use Hitler as an exponent of a politically sound strategy here¹. :->
It’s of no use to call people who have been fooled fools. That’s just going alienate them and make them dig in their heels wrt insisting that they certainly weren’t fooled. The trick is to un-fool them gently, preferably without them noticing what’s going on, to make them change their minds.
¹ Because of his conviction that a political movement which meant to have any success cannot afford elitism but must have mass appeal, that is, must manage to appeal to masses of factory workers politically associated with SPD and KPD.
I’m not advocating calling them fools in so many words as a political strategy. Just pointing out the current reality. Maybe you should go into politics (not a sarky comment – the world needs logical people in politics).
I absolutely suck at handling people.
[Not proud of it because I tend to get bitten by this, but that’s how it happens to be.]
Perhaps a shadowy Peter Mandelson figure lurking in the background?
I don’t like being “handled” and prefer straightforward honesty, but I guess I am weird. In my experience, it’s actually not that hard to tell when someone is being honest rather than rude, but maybe that’s just me.
” Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises”
Not sure the SNP want to Drill Baby Drill. Rab.C.Nesbitt would do a better job than those boys.
“rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change”…..Why is there something wrong with it!
Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs at venues throughout the newest and oldest continents. The largest continent of all just wants the cheapest possible energy to lift the other half of the continent out of poverty. Even despots know which side their bread is buttered on.
The second largest continent hangs in the balance. Luxury beliefs have a lot to answer for. If Governor Grewsom of California and the Dame from New York with the Hispanic name get their wicked way, it’ll be all beliefs for them and all no luxuries for you.
Grewsom and Dame best packed off to join chums Justin and Lucinda on a pristine Arctic island powered solely by breezes and sunbeams. What a foursome that would be. Good luck avoiding your turn on the emptying the privvy rota on cold and still, dark winter middays lasting for 4 months at a time. Have fun when Red Ed drops by for supper bearing frozen bacon butties. Bad luck, the microwave back-up battery ran out of charge months ago.
The most impoverished continent of all aspires to the energy riches whose largesse the oldest continent has taken for granted for over a century. Strictly fobidden on orders of the frosty foursome. Same goes for the proles back home. Our beliefs matter more than your energy prices.
A big unanswered question remains, who are the con-artist ventriloquists pulling these energy dummies’ strings? Along with the other big question of why did anybody ever fall for climate claptrap in the first place?
Answers on postcard please, sent back in plain English to the Club of Rome and the Jason Committee. Usual explicit two words should suffice.
The planet is perfectly capable of saving itself.
Latest from Whitney Webb….They’re rebranding the whole plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm7Ug42xhp8
These people won’t be around for much longer. Resistance to their evil is growing exponentially in two ways: understanding of the real nature of their agenda and the false science used to justify it and also people fighting back because it is becoming a matter of survival. Stuffed shirt bureaucrats will fade to nothing in the face of such undestanding and resistance. If you remember film of Ceausescu after he was deposed or any potentate once they are forced out. It is as if all power has gone from their demeanour they look like frightened husks. As Sun Tzu said. sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
It’s good to know that – 141 years after the invention of the steam turbine and after about century of all high-power applications on this planet being driven by steam turbines – ‘experts’ have finally discovered that they don’t really work. Or was this supposed to be a statement about some unreliable process for generating coal artificially? Maybe try mining instead. That works.
This guy is essentially spouting perfectly random nonsense by sticking words together whose meaning he obviously doesn’t understand. There is no such thing as a coal generator (unless they’re really trying to generate coal). Coal is burnt to heat water to turn it into steam which then drives steam turbines which are connected to alternators to generate electricity. Obviously, it doesn’t really matter how exactly the water is turned into steam, be it by burning coal, oil, gas or wood or some by nuclear reaction. Once the water has been turned into steam, the remaining process is principally identical.
The problem here is that crooked politicians get away with this kind of stuff, exactly as during COVID. They don’t even have to make sense when making up stuff. Mere flim-flam with technically sounding words and some mentioning of ‘experts’ is enough. Or so they believe.
Presumably these tame ‘experts’ did not say that Bowen’s government policy of sidelining the coal plants had reduced their operating hours and so the funding available to spend on their maintenance.
Trying to make sense of this gibberish is a mistake. That’s exactly what these ‘experts’ speculate on. They throw a few cheap words which mean nothing into the arena to distract from the issue at hand and other people then try come up with explanations what could have been meant by this instead of simply rejecting this out of hand and demanding that politicians actually talk sense instead of ominously waving their hands and whispering darkly about very important issues which aren’t ever actually named themselves.
It’s a safe bet that the sole reason this sentence contains an unreliable is to assert by implication that actually unreliable sources of energy, like wind, are really reliable, while actually reliable sources of energy, like coal, are really unreliable because people have been calling renewable unreliables already and hence, this must be politically defused by hijacking the catchy term and attaching it to the exact opposite of what it can sensibly apply to.
That’s same pattern also evident in cheap green energy: So-called green energy is anything but cheap, not the least because the state is willing to guarantee seriously inflated prices for it, and hence, whenever green energy is mentioned, cheap must somehow be attached to it to make people hope that the route through this valley of tears will eventually end if they put up with ever rising prices because of green energy for just a little longer. Just another two curves to flatten the week and then, it’ll all be over for good! Again and again and again and again.
Yes they gaslight us that the extremely efficient supermarkets are price gouging when its the cost of energy that is driving up prices, in production, transport and storage. They tells us they are addressing cost of living pressures by throwing our tax dollars around like confetti.
Why would britain have any concerns about what happens in australia with net zero when Rome is burning, right here at home?