“Renewables are a virus:” Where have you gone, David Littleproud?

Five years ago, the then federal agriculture minister David Littleproud joined his then boss, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, on a tour of the drought-affected regions of New South Wales and his home state of Queensland.

“Farmers are always at the cutting edge of science and technology, and they’ve been adapting since we first tilled the soil here,” the Nationals MP told The Guardian in the June 2018 interview.

“I believe the climate is changing. Whether it is manmade or not, I don’t really care. The reality is we are seeing disruption, particularly with renewables, and we are going to see cleaner air. I try not to live in cities, you do feel the effects … so it’s a good thing that renewables are coming on.

“In fact, in my own electorate [of Maranoa in south-west Queensland] I’ve got all of the above. I’m about to have one of the largest solar farms in the southern hemisphere, one of the biggest wind farms in the southern hemisphere. I’ve got geothermal and I’ve got four coal-fired power stations. Two of those are super critical.

“The disruption that’s happening with the technology, moving towards renewable energy, particularly in storage for base load, is exciting. I think it is a good thing.”

But if a week is a long time in politics, five years is an eternity. And the Littleproud who in 2018 called for people to “listen to the scientific evidence” and to base policy “on science not emotion” is long gone.

In August 2023, the now leader of the National Party and deputy leader of the federal opposition finds himself in Melbourne telling a rally of farmers angry about transmission lines that the Labor government is running a “reckless race” to renewables.

“This is a virus,” he said, according to a Nine Newspapers report. “It’s epicentre is Victoria, but it’s spreading up the east coast.

“We don’t need to rush this. We can plan properly and look at the emerging technology,” Littleproud told the rally.

The “emerging” technology that Littleproud is now pushing, along with his current boss Peter Dutton, is nuclear – or, more specifically, Small Modular Reactors or SMRs.

Just this week Dutton made the magical claim on Sky News that SMR technology is being used in 32 countries around the world, and can be simply plugged into existing grid infrastructure to replace coal-fired power stations.

This is patently untrue. SMRs are not currently operating at a grid or commercial scale anywhere in the world, and where the technology is being developed the first prototypes are targeting 2030 operation. The technology has not been tested anywhere at scale and remains prohibitively expensive.

As the Littleproud of 2018 might have said, the reality is that telling farmers who need straight answers about their place in the energy transition that nuclear will come to the rescue is about as big a fib as saying we are in no rush to replace fossil fuels.

According to the “scientific evidence,” presented in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world is still falling drastically short of the sort of action needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

The IPCC Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report warned that if annual CO2 emissions between 2020-2030 – this decade – stay the same as in 2019, the world will exhaust most of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C by 2030. Forget 2050.

“IPCC scientists don’t mince words on the biggest threat to humanity: continuing to burn fossil fuels,” said Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, in March.

“Without a radical shift away from fossil fuels over the next few years, the world is certain to blow past the 1.5°C goal.”