Net-zero groupthink

When industry acts as the government's cheer squad we're really in trouble

Australian business leaders have finally found the courage to call out Chris Bowen's nonsense and tell the Prime Minister to reach for plan B, in the faint hope that he has one.

Few of them are yet to put it so bluntly, choosing words like “challenging” to describe Labor’s 2030 emission reduction targets and the chances of meeting them as “doubtful”.

Yet the realisation has dawned that the dream of powering Australia with intermittent energy alone is unachievable, and the claim that energy will get cheaper under the government's plan is wishful thinking.

"As much as everyone would like to believe that renewables will be cheaper, what we're seeing right now is that energy costs are rising, and it's putting a great challenge on business," the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's David Alexander said last week.

Few people outside the renewable energy sector believe that replacing coal's baseload capacity with variable wind and solar is economically viable or technically feasible.

Even if we could afford the massively overbuilt, land-gobbling infrastructure, the ultimate deal-breaker is that it wouldn't work, not by 2030, 2050 or any date Anthony Albanese cares to pull out of the hat. That's why running the system on variable renewable energy alone is not something any other country has set out to achieve.

Yet business organisations went along with a plan that punishes many of the businesses they represent. They have watched billions of dollars of capital