This lobby barely blinks when Trump threatens genocide, but is in meltdown when Bowen talks wind and solar

A funny thing happened on the way to the global energy markets last month. Even as Donald Trump made threats of war crimes and genocide, and the wiping out of a whole civilisation, and caused oil and gas prices to surge across the globe, the far right lobby and the outrage industry in Australia barely blinked.

Instead, it became obsessed with something and someone entirely different – Chris Bowen, Australia’s federal minister for climate and energy.

Bowen has been a key target of the far right and the enablers of the fossil fuel lobby in Australia since he took the job in 2022, and he was central to setting Australia’s ambitious renewable energy target of 82 per cent by 2030, and ramping up of its climate goals.

For that, he has been awarded the alliterative moniker “blackout Bowen” – even though his critics would struggle to nominate a single outage that he could possibly be associated with.

Australia’s grid, despite the repeated failures of its ageing coal-fired generators, has become more, rather than less, reliable even as – or because – it becomes more renewable.

Bowen’s latest perceived crime is to suggest that more wind and solar, and more EVs, might be a sensible course of action given the costs of fossil fuels, their tenuous supply lines and, of course, their damage to the climate and human health.

“The one form of energy which Vladimir Putin or a Middle Eastern crisis cannot interrupt is the flow of sun and the flow of wind – that cannot be interrupted,” Bowen said soon after the outbreak of the war and as the implications on the supply of fossil fuels became clear.

He reprised the theme a few days later. 

“Australia is rich in sun and wind,” Bowen said at the opening of the Powering Our Suburbs forum in Sydney. 

“Renewable energy is the cheapest form of new generation in this country. The sun does not send a bill. Geopolitics can’t stop the sun shining in Australia. No war can stop the flow of wind to our country. It makes sense to use what we have in abundance.” 

Cue a collective melt-down in the Murdoch media – the ring-leader of the attacks on Bowen and his support of renewables, for EVs, and even for driving one – and an assault on his reputation through articles, opinion pieces, cartoons, and most loudly and absurdly on Sky After Dark.

There might be method to their madness. The attacks on Bowen are increasing now – in number and intensity – because the fossil fuel industry and its political chorus sense an opportunity to exploit the consumer angst over soaring diesel and petrol prices.

The Far Right appears convinced that if it can achieve regime change in the federal climate and energy department, then the government would lose its most forceful voice in advocating for the science, and respecting the economics and engineering, and the expertise of the CSIRO, the market operator and other key institutions.

And by “far right” we mean pretty much anyone not in or to the left of our centrist Labor federal government. Old fashioned conservatives and small-l liberals have all but disappeared from the political screen.

The conservative political discourse has moved so far to the right that even former policy chiefs at the climate-denying Institute of Public Affairs and their fellow travellers are now regarded as “moderates.”

And I’d challenge anyone to distinguish the key climate and energy policy differences between Liberals, the Nationals, and One Nation. They all agree that Australia should drop its net zero target for 2050, make vague references to nuclear, and want to keep burning coal.

To reach that conclusion requires you to do the opposite of Bowen and ignore the science, the economics and the engineering, and the expertise of the CSIRO, the market operator and other key institutions. On those key points, the three right wing parties essentially share the same platform.

The attacks on Bowen took a new turn late last week when Seven’s Liam Bartlett created a spectacle at a media conference in Sydney, hungry for a set of “grabs” for his latest assault on green energy and EVs.

Bartlett seemed convinced that renewables were the cause of the global fuel crisis, and invited Bowen to resign and rethink his climate policies. Bowen did not accept the invitation.

Bartlett – who was global head of TV, creative visual at Shell International in London from 2013-2015 – is no fan of the green energy transition. A few years ago he reported on the disgraceful environmental practices at a nickel mine in Indonesia, arguing that it meant that EVs were dirty and polluting as a result.

Industry experts said there are two problems with that conclusion. The first is that most EV batteries now are LFP batteries, and contain no nickel.

The second is that where EV batteries do use nickel – such as in NMC batteries – they require a significantly higher grade of nickel than that produced at that Indonesia mine. But the steel industry uses it a lot, but has not attracted the opprobrium of Bartlett and his fellow travellers.

Social media clips promoting his latest report for Seven’s Spotlight (to be broadcast this weekend) suggest a focus on cobalt mines in Africa.

Bowen is not expecting a fair hearing. Asked at a later press conference what he thought of the program, Bowen replied:

“Clearly, Spotlight‘s doing a story on renewable energy. I don’t expect it to be fair and balanced. I think that was shown by his (Bartlett’s) questions and his comments on Wednesday,” Bowen said.

“He’s entitled to do that. Another part of the democracy is I can choose which media I interact with. I don’t choose to interact with Spotlight. I’ll always interact with serious shows and serious journalists. Spotlight is not one of them.”

Just to be clear, cobalt is not used in LFP batteries for EVs, but it is in NMC batteries. And it has been used for decades and in large quantities for laptops, mobile phones, jet turbines, drills, plastics and ceramics and, yes, magnets for wind turbines and other electrical equipment.

There seems little doubt that the conditions in some of those mines appear to be a disgrace. That’s an opportunity for Australia, because it has nickel and cobalt resources in bulk, and already supplies nickel to the likes of Tesla.

Many EV makers, such as Polestar, now provide blockchain technology to trace how cobalt was transported from mines to the finished car, and it also traces other minerals such as nickel and lithium – so called “at risk” minerals because of the potential for human rights violations and environmental damage.

Such a shame then, that the fossil fuel industry does not follow suit. Fossil fuel producers, and their supporters, demand a free pass on carbon emissions and other harmful particulates, and argue that climate science is either hoax or an obsession of the world’s “elites.”

According to Clare Walter, the annual health cost of diesel combustion alone in Australia is $6.2 billion. The coal industry gets a free pass on its climate impacts and air pollution. Business groups say climate-driven natural disasters will cost Australia $73 billion a year by 2060.

In the meantime, super profits are falling in. According to Transport & Environment, ff current conditions are maintained until the end of 2026, refiners and distributors will pocket excess profits of €32 billion, with a further  €54 billion flowing to crude oil producers and oil-producing nations.

The Australia Institute also estimates that the total super profits for the Australian LNG industry alone since the Ukraine invasion triggered a similar surge in prices in 2022 at more than $112 billion. And that does not include what has and will happen in 2026.

Clearly, then, the fossil fuel industry has a lot to lose from an accelerated green energy transition and a lot to gain from the current crisis. The rest of the world has a lot more to lose if the energy transition is stopped or slowed. But you probably wont hear many Murdoch or Seven journalists making a scene or sounding indignant about that.

And here is just one final thought. As energy analyst and climate commentator Ketan Joshi noted in a LinkedIn post, if the world had gotten on with the job of the green energy transition at the pace it had agreed at Paris, rather than slowed by the fossil fuel lobby, the situation might look quite different now.

“If the world had followed ambitious climate scenarios, global oil demand would be at least 20 per cent lower than it is today – about the same volume of oil that flows through the Strait of Hormuz,” Joshi says.

Fortunately, we still have a few corporates with genuine ambition, like Fortescue, that could make a difference and shine the path to a cleaner future with their goal of eliminating gas and diesel from their giant operations within a few years.

And we still have some ministers – state and federal – who care enough to try and help us get there. Their policies are not always perfect, sometimes far from it, but it’s no time to show them the door for the sake of a Big Oil earnings bonanza.

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