Have we gone completely mad? We’re winding back the progress which has made this last century the most prosperous in the history of mankind. We live longer, grow taller, can be healed of more diseases, and have seen worldwide poverty drop to unprecedented levels. But we’ve convinced ourselves that our own progress is evil, is destroying our planet, and so we must ruin our own lives preemptively lest we… ruin our lives.

But Malcolm Turnbull must be doubly mad, given he’s thinking about introducing a form of the Carbon Tax which destroyed Gillard and saw the Greens vote go into decline.

Since re-election the Turnbull government has spruiked a new troika of energy priorities with a descending order of merit. “Energy security, energy affordability and the transition to a lower emissions future,” is how Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg expresses it.

Doing himself political harm, to do harm to our standard of living. Utterly insane.

Notice already the consequences of our actions with regard to energy generation in this nation. The well documented blackouts in South Australia were due to infrastructure damage during a storm, but the network had no spare capacity, no hope of remaining viable, once the inter-connector to Victoria was cut. In other words, our system is already vulnerable.

And an ongoing lack of investment into power infrastructure sees blackout happening more frequently, and combined with rising power prices some businesses are becoming unviable in this country.

Alcoa’s Portland smelter lost power for five and a half hours on Thursday morning after an interconnector from Victoria to South Australia failed. The company said on Friday it had taken one of two potlines out of action to reduce instability and ensure the safety of workers, and could not say when it will be fixed…

The future of the smelter, which employs more than 500 people directly, has been under a cloud for some time, with Premier Daniel Andrews confirming in February that Alcoa was in talks with the government about the pressures it was facing. In May, workers at the plant agreed to a one-year pay freeze to allow for conditions to stabilise.

When even the union can see the writing on the wall and agrees to a pay freeze, you know things are really bad.

But instead of seeing the consequences of our folly, the way we’ve driven up power prices with ‘renewable energy targets’ and subsidies for uncompetitive ‘renewables’ and learning from our mistakes, our ‘leaders’ are now doubling down on the folly.

We’ve seen the announcement that the Hazelwood coal fired power plant is now going to close. That was a decision made by the owners, not by the government directly, but government did a very good job of making coal power unprofitable with its increased royalty charge for the use of brown coal, with subsidies for competitors to coal, and with increasingly strident anti-coal rhetoric which would make any business think twice about having money invested in the industry.

This of course was the aim. State and Federal Governments, aided and abetted by a large portion of the media and an endless supply of talking heads, have waged war on ‘dirty’ power (if plant-food can really be considered dirty!) and congratulations, they’re winning. How the announced closure was met with cheering! The Greens are Australias most anti-progress party, and Greens MP Adam Bandt predictably called the Hazelwood closure a ‘win’. A win for ideology, yes. A win for ‘feel good’, perhaps, if you hold to the ‘right’ views on the evils of Co2. A win by any real-world measure? Definitely not.

Now the Hazelwood closure is not on its own a ‘disaster’, it’s not going to leave parts of the country permanently in the dark or anything as dramatic as some people have tried to make out… but it’s certain to increase electricity prices, and reduce the resilience of an already-stressed power grid. Our ability to cope with extreme weather events has just taken a nose-dive. Our ability to keep the lights on during storms (already marginal as seen recently in SA) is now even lower.

And Hazelwood isn’t the end of it, it’s just the beginning. Already there’s talk of ‘who’s next’.

EnergyAustralia has warned of a further round of electricity price rises if its Yallourn power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley – the country’s second-dirtiest power station after Hazelwood – were to close.

And the anti-progress cheerleaders are so quick to dismiss the hardship that these closures will cause.

“It’s bad news for consumers, with household budgets under pressure. But there’s some good news in this: it makes renewable investments more attractive – and we need more investment in renewable energy if we’re to cut national emissions to zero. And we need it fast.

Translation: “It’s bad for vulnerable people, but it makes us feel good, so really we should do more of it.”

And ‘more of it’ is exactly what we’re going to get, if Turnbull gets his way. He’s so quickly forgotten than it was a Carbon Tax that destroyed the credibility of the Labor Party and gave the Liberals power. And now he’s repeating the mistakes of his ‘opponents’ (are they really opposed on anything? The Libs and Labor seem like peas in a pod these days) and forcing unwanted, unnecessary, and useless ‘reforms’ on us.

During the Carbon Tax debacle I did a series called ’50 to 1′, all about the cost of a Carbon Tax vs the cost of adapting to Climate Change as and if it happened. For the purposes of this project I assumed the Climate Change lobby were right about absolutely everything. They were right about the impact of human Co2 emissions, they were right about their predictions of future warming, they were right about the costs that such warming would cause.

And y’know what I found? Adapting to climate change would cost one-fiftieth of trying to stop it. You can watch the core video from the series here:

So being skeptical about spending money ‘stopping’ Climate Change isn’t just for skeptics, it’s for anyone who can do maths. I haven’t used a single bit of ‘skeptics’ data in the above video, it’s all the Gospel According to Global Warming, as certified by the High Priests at the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In other words, all we’re going to get for the destruction of our economy, the destroying of jobs, the reduction in our standard of living, and if we take this ‘decarbonisation’ far enough, the shortening of our life-spans and return of 17th century living conditions, is a ‘feel good’.

More specifically, our politicians will get a ‘feel good’. The rest of us will have a ‘feel cold’, a ‘feel hungry’, a ‘feel hopeless’, and a ‘feel angry’. Because the politicians with their fat pay packets and generous perks aren’t going to feel the pain they’re causing. Their job is to feel good. It’s our job to feel the pain.

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