This week Paul Murray is back onto one of his favourite topics… why anyone trying to make green and renewable energy is wrong headed and wasting YOUR money. In his latest editorial (Bowen’s plans are a complete waste of energy) Murray goes into great detail about all the reasons that pursuing green hydrogen is a waste of your money. While the details here are typically meaningless (there’s talk of a prominent funding body and scientist backing away from one of many Green Hydrogen projects), it allows Murray to return to one of his favourite refrains – we are sleepwalking into an energy supply crisis because of the current government’s insistence on moving to renewable and non carbon sources of energy production.
The err in Murray’s argument is that he never diligently responds to his own question. Why are governments around the world so reluctant to continue using fossil fuels as a source of energy? The answer is, of course, the clear and irrefutable evidence of climate change – and the scientific consensus that states quite unequivocally that the use of fossil fuels is fueling the increasing temperatures.
Interestingly Murray refused to acknowledge that the US has just seen the most severe week of hurricane activity in recorded history. This included the development of Hurricane Milton, which developed from a tropical low to a Stage 5 Hurricane (the worst) in under 12 hours – an unprecedented event. This incredible weather did not really feature anywhere in the West this weekend, and I can’t help but think that if Paul Murray was concerned about the health and wealth of West Australians, he might have actually discussed the issue of the increasing severity of weather – something which is universally attributed to the rise in ocean temperatures.
As this graphic shows, the more costly Hurricanes we’ve seen so far have impacts that run into the hundreds of Billions of dollars. And the longer we keep buring fossil fuels for energy, the worse they are getting. That, I think, is the news that Paul Murray and the West are leaving unreported. That’s why even governments are trying to get away from fossil fuels. Because the profit of oil and gas today, leaves a huge public debt to pay in the future. (and the trauma, and the loss of life, and the destruction of entire ecosystems… but you know… it costs money too).
So I do understand that Green Hydrogen may not be the panacea that solves all our energy problems in one go, but boy if its considered feasible then it’s definitely worth investing in. And yes we should be having a debate, and scrutinising the best way to de-carbonise our energy supply. But the first thing that needs to be said about that is that WE CAN’T KEEP BURNING OIL AND GAS… so what else can we do before the world goes to hell.