The mass murdering barbarians of Daesh, who prefer to be called Islamic State, sent out a call this week for the assassination of Australia’s Islamic leaders.
The five Australians, including the Grand Mufti, were targeted because they are peace-loving. And they are prominent. They preach non-violent Islam. Daesh calls them “collaborators” with the “infidels”.
Daesh is losing. The group claimed responsibility for the car bomb that killed 51 innocent civilians in Baghdad on Thursday and the suicide bomb that killed at least 72 worshippers at a Sufi shrine in Pakistan on Friday, so they are not going quietly.
But they are being routed in Iraq and their Syrian strongholds are under siege. The so-called Islamic State eventually will be stateless. The capital of their so-called caliphate, the Syrian city of Raqqa, is already out of money and electricity is being rationed.
Sweating, fearful, with food in short supply and many of their leaders deserting, it’s easy to understand why the Daesh desperadoes would envy some air conditioned comfort.
How interesting that, of all the freedoms, benefits and comforts of the civilised world, the one that they should single out is air conditioning. Even as Daesh does its damnedest to ruin civilisation, it looks longingly on one of its everyday fruits, the humble aircon.
Airconditioning and refrigeration, technologies pioneered by an unsung Australian, are one of the most important and most overlooked inventions in human history, incidentally,
America’s National Academy of Engineers ranks it as the 10th greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, ahead of highways and the internet. Britain’s Royal Society says the fridge is the most significant invention in the history of food and drink, ahead of pasteurisation and the plough.
Even the height of the average human in modern societies owes a great deal to refrigeration. Refrigerated trucking and shipping revolutionised trade and, according to the US economist Robert Gordon, constitute one of the least appreciated yet most valuable additions to 20th century productivity.
None of which might have happened if not for James Harrison of Geelong. In 1854 he invented a commercial ice-making machine. He expanded it into a vapour compression refrigeration system, the basis for modern refrigeration.
“That’s right – an Aussie invented the fridge and it’s first real use was making beer,” remarked the US technology website Gizmodo. “You have to love this country.”
So it would give the barbarians of Daesh the greatest satisfaction if Australia were to become so degraded that it couldn’t maintain a stable power supply to keep its airconditioners running.
There is a blithe assumption that the recent blackouts and cutbacks in Australia’s electricity system are a passing blip. That the summer heatwave is gone and now the system will somehow correct itself.
Wrong. In the next few weeks 4 per cent of Australia’s power supply will vanish when Victoria’s big Hazelwood power station shuts down, clapped out after 50 years of turning coal into electricity. It’ll be the ninth coal-fired power station to close in the past five years. New solar and wind plants are being built, but they are intermittent, and that means they are unreliable.
“Taking out Hazelwood is taking out a big buffer,” says Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute policy research centre in Melbourne. And, as we’ve just witnessed, Australia’s power system lacks buffers. “Managing intermittency is an increasing problem.”
Not only has South Australia suffered three major power failures in the last half-year, NSW last week ordered industry to cut power usage so that households could turn on their airconditioners on a hot day. The chief executive of the Tomago aluminium smelter, Matt Howell, who was ordered to cut electricity usage but is entitled to no compensation, says that “it’s fair to say the way the energy system is working at the moment is dysfunctional.” He told the Financial Review that last Friday was “a genuine system security risk.”
The Turnbull government blames South Australia’s dependency on solar and wind for two of the three blackouts in that state. South Australia, with renewables making up 40 per cent of its power capacity, is vulnerable to the wind stopping and the sun setting.
But NSW depends on coal for nearly 90 per cent of its capacity, and it faced a critical shortage last week too. This is not a state-by-state problem. It’s a national problem.
“We need to be able to plan better, because nothing is getting built between now and next summer,” says Wood, whose independent expertise is respected by both the federal government and the opposition.
“This is a significant challenge. We have this system we’ve had for 100 years and we are trying to change it quite quickly. No one in the world has got this far – you can’t take a system created around coal and gas and suddenly make 40 per cent of it renewable energy” – as it is in South Australia – “with the same system and the same rules.”
But it must be OK, right? Because we hear the Turnbull government, day after day, week after week, slamming Labor for the blackouts, so the government must have a policy to fix the situation. Doesn’t it?
No, actually. Wood summarises: “We have this policy introduced by Tony Abbott to cut carbon emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030. The government told us how they weren’t going to meet it. They weren’t going to meet it by putting up electricity prices, and they weren’t going to do it by increasing the renewable energy target,” the target that requires electricity firms to install 33 gigawatt hours of solar or wind generating capacity by 2020.“So how are you going to do it?”
The answer, so far, is no answer – a grab-bag of speculations and possibilities. But no settled policy. Labor doesn’t have an answer, either. All we have is tremendous clamour of blame and counter-blame. We have a national energy crisis and neither the government nor the alternative government has a policy to solve it.
In an extraordinary moment of unity this week, the Business Council and the ACTU and 16 other groups including big investors and environmental groups came together to appeal to the political parties to stop arguing and to seek a shared solution. In a joint letter, they railed against “partisan antics”.
This coalition of groups from the real world complained that “the finger pointing will not solve our energy challenges. More than a decade of this has made most energy investments impossibly risky. This has pushed prices higher while hindering transformational change of our energy system.”
Did the political system respond to this plea? Of course not. It’s too much fun to keep up the partisan antics. Turnbull won’t stop because he’s winning. He blames Labor’s predilection for renewables – solar and wind – for the problems of SA while conveniently ignoring the larger systemic problems. Labor, he says, is “drunk on ideology.”
He’s winning according to the simple political rule that his former environment minister, now health minister, Greg Hunt, promulgated inside the government for this area of argument. If the debate is fought on environmental grounds, like climate change, then Labor wins. But if it’s fought on electricity prices and electricity reliability, the Coalition wins.
Why? Because the public broadly trusts Labor on the environment, and the Coalition on electricity. It’s as simple as that.
Among Labor’s signs of mounting panic this week, we saw the WA Labor Party dump its policy of a 50 per cent renewables energy target. WA Labor is most sensitive because it has the most immediate problem – an election next month. And we saw federal Labor, too, started to get nervous about its plan for a 50 per cent target. Though Labor had never said this was a firm commitment, it suddenly became a lot more tentative this week.
South Australian Labor says that the federal electricity operator is to blame, and that’s Turnbull’s fault. Bill Shorten says lots of things are to blame, but not Labor’s renewables target.
“There’s always a little bit of truth in both sides, and little bit of falsehood in both sides,” observes Wood. The Turnbull government says it’s the South Australian renewables energy target; South Australia’s Labor government says it’s the Australian Electricity Market Operator. “The answer is it’s both.”
The core of the problem is “the toxic political debate that all parties have been guilty of for a decade now”, says Wood. He’s absolutely right. The Turnbull government is waiting on a review by the Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, due by May. His recommendations will form the basis for a government response. With luck, the government might actually produce a policy by around mid-year. That will allow maybe six months, at most, to actually impose a solution. If the lights go out next summer, and the airconditioning ceases to run, the voters will rightly hold the political establishment to blame, and rightly so. Pauline Hanson will be the main political beneficiary of rising popular disgust with Labor and Liberal.
And while it will do nothing to help Daesh, they will no doubt take some small satisfaction if the country that pioneered airconditioning has become so politically dysfunctional that it can no longer keep it running.
Peter Hartcher – smh
