What About Our Parents?

It’s been a sensitive week.

For starters, this week’s Moowsletter was supposed to be about the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ underlying housing affordability. Fortunately or unfortunately, a colleague suggested I rewrite it because he felt it might create some unnecessary headaches. I thought he was being a bit precious at first but eventually my precious side agreed with his and I promised to rewrite it in a few weeks.

Then another sensitive subject surfaced almost as quickly to take its place – Climate Change and the Hazelwood Power Station.

Now, before I go any further, I want to be very clear this post is not about Climate Change. For mine, the Climate Change debate is now more divisive than religion and politics, which is a shame, because I love nature and everything that comes with it. Even if it’s just a lazy walk around the bay each day.

Instead, this post is about something more important, our parents.

This week the Hazelwood Power Station closed down the last of its generators because its French owners, Engie, deemed it to too expensive to ‘rehabilitate’. The cost would have been circa $750m. Chicken feed.

By every measure, Hazelwood is our dirtiest coal fired power station in Australia. In operation, it produced 15% of Victoria’s greenhouse emissions and 3% of the nations. It also generated 25% of Victoria’s power supply and accounted for 5% of the nations.

And while Engie refused to foot the cost and clean up its act, both the Victorian and Federal Governments just stood aside and let it happen. You couldn’t bust a grape with the fight they put up.

The Hypocrisy
One side of the Climate Change debate will argue that we need to be progressive and cut back on brown coal consumption to meet our emission targets. Yet at the same time, the Federal government is more than happy to export coal to India, China and Japan because they need the revenue.

Right now, Japan is building another 45 coal fired power stations, and guess who’s supplying their coal?

But it gets better. Japan are able to buy our natural gas cheaper than what you and I can buy it through our homes and businesses.

Water Supply
In 2007, Professor Tim Flannery, predicted the eastern states water supply would become catastrophic and the likes of Warragamba dam would never fill again. Thankfully, his science based predictions proved to be wrong.

But everyone makes mistakes, God knows I’ve made plenty myself, so I’m happy to cut Professor Flannery some slack.

The damage was caused in our response to the predictions. Desalination plants were built as a consequence and now the likes of Kurnell cost us $500,000 per day to maintain them, even though they’ve been effectively mothballed. That’s approximately $190,000,000 pa going up in smoke. Think of what could be done to our health system with that amount of money each year. Plenty!

Our Parents
Australia is facing a major energy crisis, by both price and volume.

On the demand side, a growing population fueled by record immigration rates is putting unpresented pressure on our existing energy supplies, and it’s unsustainable.

While on the supply side, the likes of Hazelwood are being ignored and renewable energy sources just aren’t cutting it. Sth Australia is one example.

Cost pressures won’t just come from energy suppliers but also businesses who will invariably pass on those energy costs to us, or worse, go out of business or relocate offshore. Mark my word, the knock-on effects will be significant if we don’t begin addressing this looming energy crisis.

I love innovation and there’s no denying we need to explore other means of energy, but we need to find a better way of transitioning from the old to the new because the cost of living is beginning to bite very hard.

Everyone talks about the future and what it means for our children. But what about the present and what it means for our parents. I see this almost every week. Ninety two percent of retirees live on less than $35k pa (couples) and now most of them are too scared to turn on an air conditioner or a heater.

Surely we can do better than that.

Have a great weekend!

Adam

Back paddock – In the years 2011 – 2013, China used more cement than the US used for the entire 20th Century. Source: Washington Post; Bill Gate’s GatesBlog