Speech at the Centre for Independent Studies Consilium, Gold Coast

The beautiful site on which we gather today has been the home of the Kombumerri people for millennia, and I recognise that connection to land and their elders. 

Well, thanks for the invitation to be at Consilium today. It’s my second appearance here, although it has been a few years.

There are plenty of positions put by the CIS and its staff that I disagree with. But in my view that made it more important that I accept your invitation today rather than less.

There is no more important public conversation in my view than that around climate change, the path to net zero and Australia's role in global decarbonisation, and I was happy to accept the invitation to engage in that conversation with you today.

Enough with the niceties, I am going to get to straight to the point.

I have two fundamental arguments that I am going to put to you in the time that I have available today. 

Firstly, that conservatives and liberals should care deeply about climate change, support the drive towards to net zero and dismiss the conspiracy theories of climate denial.

Today, I will make the conservative case for climate action. 

And secondly, in the unfortunate event that I don't convince you on my first argument, I have a back up argument!

That is, even if you don't support action on climate change, the Government's move towards renewable energy, backed by storage and gas peaking is the economically rational, pragmatic and sensible approach.

And attacks on renewable energy are driven more by ideology and, frankly prejudicial views, rather than solid evidence.

Let me deal first with the argument that conservatives should support policies which reduce emissions to tackle climate change.

Now, at the outset of course I should stipulate that I don't regard myself as a conservative.

While I'm not a conservative, I have taken in the key conservative tracts and I think I do understand conservatism. 

I do respect it as a world view and can appreciate the consistency of a truly conservative world view.

I don't respect populism and nativism which I fear underpin right wing politics these days more than traditional conservative values do.

There is nothing inevitable about conservatives opposing climate action. I argue the contrary. 

I know this centre finds its inspiration and guiding philosophy in that of Hayek.  Again, I don't pretend to regard myself as a Hayekian, but I've read many of his works and I understand the logic of his philosophy.

There is a cartoonish view that Hayek was strictly laissez faire or a neo-con.  This is of course a gross over-simplification.  No doubt he was a champion of individual liberty and skeptical of central planning.  But he understood market failures and externalities and he recognised the necessity of carefully calibrated government interventions to deal with them. 

I have followed the debate, for example, about whether Hayek would have supported a carbon tax. Scholars and Hayekians differ on the issue - some think he would have and others doubt it.

I don't feel qualified to posit a view.  But the fact that this is even a debate underlines for me that it is no simple question as to what a conservative should think about climate change policy. 

So, firstly why should conservatives care about climate change?

Because it's real. It's happening, and its consequences are serious.

A true conservative believes in a careful evidence-based approach and prioritizing a careful fact-based approach to policy making over ideological zealotry.

Well, the evidence is in. The scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by human conduct is as certain as the science that tobacco causes cancer.

99% of peer-reviewed scientific literature found that climate change was human-induced. 

A true conservative would not and will not ignore the close to unanimous views of the world's scientists.

Hayek would not have ignored the scientific consensus or the careful evidence laid out in IPCC report after IPCC report.

Hayek, Friedman and Oakeshott all would have rejected the conspiratorial undertones of the climate denying nether regions of the internet and would have taken the carefully built scientific consensus seriously. 

And, the give away is in the name. 

A conservative sees benefit in what is, and resists unnecessary change. 

The changes wrought by climate change should be resisted by conservatives.

What could be more important to a conserve than the planet we inhabit and the fragile ecosystem which supports human life?

Some of the great names of conservatism are acknowledged as climate leaders of their time. None more so than Margaret Thatcher. 

Thatcher, was of course a scientist.

She understood what is at stake. When we think of Thatcher's legacy, it is probably not an explosion in the membership of UK Friends of the Earth.

But that's what happened when in 1988 she told the Guildhall: 

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels), concentrated in such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."

I wouldn’t have been a Thatcher voter – far from it - but I do think she was right on climate change. 

A conservative conserves. And there is nothing more important than conserving our environmental balance. 

And so, should a conservative who accepts the science of climate change accept net zero by 2050?

Well yes because one flows from the other. 

Net zero emissions is not an amorphous concept dreamed up by politicians.

It is the bare minimum action to avoid the impacts of the world warming by more than 2 degrees as found by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

Which is the most rigorous, comprehensive international assessment of climate science. 

With each report involving hundreds of expert authors.

Incorporating the latest data and modelling available. 

So, again a calm, sober and considered review of the facts and evidence leads one to the conclusion that net zero by 2050 is the bare minimum of climate action required and the ultimate policy objective.

This brings me to the second part of my argument today. 

Obviously one of the key elements of achieving emissions reduction and net zero is electrifying our homes and industry, and steadily making sure that the electricity used is generated by renewables.

You may decide, despite the scientific evidence, that climate change isn’t worth acting on. But acting on climate change doesn’t have to be a reason to reject modernising Australia’s grid with the lowest cost form of energy – renewables.

Some people, I'm sure some people in this room, refer to renewable energy as intermittent energy.

Well, let’s talk about intermittent energy. 

An energy source that is unreliable. 

That you can’t count on, night and day, to power your home. 

That is expensive for billpayers and taxpayers alike, and relies on constant government support to keep it going. 

Of course, I’m talking about coal.

Most of Australia's coal fired power stations are more than 40 years old.

Over the past 3 years, not a single week has passed without a coal-fired power station being out of service due to a breakdown across Australia.

All of our independent market bodies and regulators have told us, year on year, that coal power stations are becoming more unreliable and increasingly costly to operate.

All require high levels of maintenance and refurbishment to keep them running. 

And they are prone to unplanned outages, sometimes over prolonged periods. 

My body isn't getting more reliable as it gets older.  If yours is, I would appreciate you sharing your secrets with me before we leave. 

Coal fired power doesn't get more reliable as it gets older. 

This unpredictable intermittency of coal is a significant risk to electricity prices and reliability – and it’s Australian households and businesses who are left to pay.

Those who have an ideological opposition like to claim that there can be no power when the sun doesn’t shine. That hasn’t deterred the more than 4 million Australian households who’ve installed solar onto their roofs. 

Why? The thing is we know each day when the sun will set – it's predictable. Each day a thousand Australians are installing batteries at their homes and businesses because they want to store more of that affordable power.

Predictability in the energy grid is critical to reliability. And coal fired power is no longer predictable generation in Australia.  
The average level of coal capacity that was unavailable due to outages increased by 28% in the second quarter of this year, compared with the same period last year.

During the second quarter according to the Australian Energy Regulator, high price events were observed 66 times across six days, with coal outages playing a central role in every single one of these events. 

The now infamous catastrophic outage of Callide C a few years ago left about half-a-million Queenslanders without power. 
It put one unit out of service for 3 good years. 

It also saw the quarterly forward price jump by over $30 per megawatt hours. 

These examples represent a broader trend that will only worsen if governments continue to hope that unpredictably intermittent coal can keep the lights on.

The evidence could not be more clear.

Coal’s intermittence puts households at risk.

Over reliance on coal and "sweating the asset" of coal fired power is far more serious threat to reliability than renewables will ever be.

Now I am sure some people here might say: “well OK maybe Australia's coal fired power stations are unreliable, but we should just build some new ones".

Well, that argument fails the test of sensible economics as well as sensible climate policy.

We didn't appreciate the extent of coal’s impact on the environment in the 1980s  when we were building many of our current coal fired power stations. Nor did we have the low-cost technology to harness and store our abundant sun and wind.   But we do now. 

Coal was a cheap source of energy generation in the 1980s, whereas it isn't, anymore.

Australians, who have been doing it tough with power prices following many international pressures, deserve better than having to factor in unreliable coal-fired power outages causing surge pricing coupled with doubts they can turn the lights on.

That means increasing the uptake of renewable energy.

Our support for renewable energy isan acceptance of the economics, the science and the need to modernise our energy grid to keep our lights on and our economy growing.

Renewables are quicker to build. Lower emissions to run.  And cheaper to operate than coal or nuclear. 

GenCost is something that the CIS has expressed views on. 

The scepticism of the GenCost project is, with respect, ill-founded. 

GenCost is not a creation of the Labor Government. It was established by our immediate predecessors to help guide investment decisions.

The only significant change to the GenCost report under our Government was the result of independent decisions by AEMO and the CSIRO to include more additional analysis of nuclear costs that were prompted by stakeholder feedback – including from the CIS.

Yet the results are the same.

We know that Gencost has found consistently that renewables, including the cost of transmission and storage, are the cheapest form of new energy generation.

Now the CSIRO in these findings is entirely in keeping with other studies which make very similar findings.

Whether it’s the International Energy Agency, merchant bank Lazard, Baringa, a comprehensive study by Danish academics into the economics of Denmark’s energy needs, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies’ work, or extensive research published in the respected energy journal Joule.

The results are the same, and consistent with the work of Australia’s institutions.

And recent research by Griffith University’s Centre for Applied Energy Economics and Policy Research suggested the cost of generating electricity would be as much as 50% higher today if Australia had relied solely on coal and gas instead of pursuing renewables.

In no small part, the global shift to renewables is being driven by economics as well as climate policy.

Australia is no exception.

Last month we saw renewables overtake coal as the largest source of energy in our grid. 

Now this is a monthly figure, and of course figures do bounce around month to month, quarter to quarter.  One month does not a transition conclude. 

But the fact that we have now had a month where renewables have provided more of our electricity than any other source is a key turning point in our transition. 

As it happens, the same happened globally at the same time.

Renewables now supply more electricity globally than coal.

And clean energy investment at $2 trillion is double investment in fossil fuels.

Australia's policies are in keeping with international trends, because the rest of the world knows what we know: 

A transition to a cleaner, cheaper, more reliable grid is good for emissions, good for energy security and good economics. 

And that’s why it’s important this transition continues - 

As I’m sure it will. 

Thanks for having me here today.