The Golden Age of Bullshit: Why Australia will stay addicted to coal and gas

If you think buying an EV is going to help reduce Australia’s so-called carbon footprint, this is the reality check we all need. Here’s why Australia and the world wants you to focus on electric vehicles and not coal…

Download the PODCAST for this report

---

Breaking the epistemology of reality is not how serious problems typically get solved.

Here in Australia, you might put solar panels on your roof and buy a Tesla in the hope of trying to reduce your so-called ‘carbon footprint’. Problem is it's not going to make any difference doing this…

Why? Because here in Australia, we are the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, to the tune of 87.6 million metric tonnes. Australia’s LNG exports are trailed by Qatar and the United States, and it’s daylight to every other competitor. We really are very good at exporting methane.

Those 87.6 million tonnes of natural gas turns into roughly 240 million tonnes of CO2 when it gets burned overseas and that's roughly 50 per cent of Australia's total domestic greenhouse emissions; an additional 50 per cent - literally a fire sale.

We send this stuff overseas to be burned in exchange for cash and it is quite the big earner:

Australian government there, summiting the peak Himalaya of Horseshit simultaneously. Not even Elon Musk could be that delusional.

But we're not going to stop exporting the gas, are we? Not really. We can't afford to. But Woodside, the publicly listed humongous player in gas, is also a pack of underhanded arseholes (personal opinion) and a big political donor that is currently using legislation designed to protect the victims of domestic violence to gag protesters.

Because what's the point of being wealthy, powerful and having ministers on speed-dial if you can't also comport yourself like a card carrying bastard. Woodside's disgraceful descent-gagging conduct is an awe-inspiring abuse of legal process and a full frontal assault on the freedom of speech by weapons-grade corporate douchebags, in my opinion.

The first rule of Woodside's conduct is, of course, don't talk about Woodside's conduct.

The questionably Honourable Chris Bowen, minister for climate change and energy, and the equally questionable honourable Catherine King, minister for infrastructure and transport, recently issued an interesting joint statement:

Unfortunately, this is becoming an increasingly popular form of media release from the bullshit factory we know as Canberra. They went on to say:

Gold medal in the 100 meters bullshit steeple chase right there, because transport is not the same thing as cars, you obfuscating ministerial misleader.

Transport also includes domestic planes, trains, shipping. Nor is road transport just cars. Light vehicles make up only about half of total transport emissions.

This grandiose sounding National EV Strategy is the same thing as doing approximately nothing.

Now it's time to talk about the elephant in the room, which would be coal. In addition to our gold medal winning export performance on gas, Australia is also the world's largest exporter of coal - by a healthy margin, too.

We are responsible for a massive 35 per cent of global coal exports. This earns us a whopping $83 billion dollars which, as a nation, we simply cannot function without. Next is Indonesia, incidentally, about 20 per cent of the world's total coal exports there, and then that fine upstanding global citizen, Russia on 18 per cent.

Nobody else is even close to the podium on coal exports. Our exports of coal dwarf what we burn locally.

This graph is from Geoscience Australia with domestic consumption in orange, and our exports in blue:

It really is time to cut the bullshit on this. We cannot live in a world without coal or, at least, you wouldn't want to - and neither would I. Even if we can replace all of the thermal coal used for electricity generation with solar, wind, hydro and geothermal, or the so-called “renewables”, there is no viable alternative to metallurgical coal.

And trust me on this, you do not want to go back to the Bronze Age. It got that name for a reason. More on this later.

This is a graph (also from Geoscience Australia) showing how much coal Australia currently exports for use in both generating electricity and literally building the world around us. Notice how the more we sell (and thereby the more humanity consumes) the more valuable it becomes and the more our economy benefits from it.

Anybody who says humanity doesn’t need coal anymore does not understand what our world without steel looks like. Essentially, we go back to the Dark Ages. You do not want a world without steel.

What do you think we build our cities out of? Metallurgical coal is used to make steel and in the graph above it’s in blue, while thermal coal is in green.

What do you notice about the trend in this graph? Correct: massive increase in coal exports by Australia over the past 30 years.

So what does this tell you? There is no reduction in coal, no plan to “get out of coal”. Don't waste my time (or yours) on claims about getting out of coal. It's there in black and white, from an unimpeachable, impartial source.

Getting out of coal simply means we tank the entire Australian economy. Currently we are exporting about 375 million tonnes of coal annually. This is pretty hard to conceptualise, a bit like “20 billion stars in the sky”.

But if you stack it all up on a football field, it would stretch 50 kilometres into the air - that's halfway to space. Every year.

This is a drop in the ocean, of course…

I'll help you save thousands on any new vehicle here

Just fill in this form. No more car dealership rip-offs. Greater transparency. Less stress.

AUSTRALIA’S REAL CARBON FOOTPRINT

When you burn one metric tonne of bituminous coal, you emit about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 and if you happen to do that 375 million times by lighting a fire at the bottom of that football field, metaphorically and overseas with all of our exported coal, that would create roughly 900 million tonnes of CO2.

Another drop in the ocean…

So our total national greenhouse emissions - the domestic ones - are 464 million tonnes. But the CO2 from all the coal and gas that we export which is 900 million plus 240 million, respectively, totals 1.1 billion tonnes of CO2.

When you export as much coal and natural gas as us, double the nation’s onshore emissions, plus a bit, we're really exporting 1.1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year and just pretending that this is someone else's problem. This is national bipolarity disorder.

Net Zero is a fantasy.

Chris Brown and Catherine King, with their National EV Strategy, tell you they’re going to take three million tonnes out of the equation. With a straight face, mind you.

Our economy is powered by exporting greenhouse gas - that's how Australia works. If we turn that tap off, Australia is going to be an even more emphatically third-world antipodean backwater. Get used to it.

You'd need rather a lot of Teslas, Polestars, BYDs, Hyundai Ioniq 5s and Kia EV6s to ‘balance the books’ on that one. It’s as meaningless as connecting your EV up to a supercharger that is part of a bank of chargers that is powered by an enormous diesel generator out the back behind a bamboo screen from Bunnings.

Electric vehicles are not going to cut it. But the ministers and EV zealots in the public, vested interests and the captured motoring media all want you to think the mad rush to embrace EVs is some kind of wide-ranging greenhouse solution.

Plans, proposals or strategies like this, whatever you want to call them, are nothing - but they're worse than nothing when you think about it - because it's nothing dressed up as something.

Australia exports greenhouse so profitably because homo sapiens are addicted to energy. Energy is the best drug that we have ever taken as a species.

You can drive a huge EV with a battery that weighs as much as a small car and further delude yourself that this is what saving the planet actually looks like. You can also go to bed patting yourself on the back (or elsewhere) for making ‘real progress’, every night, when in fact you've done less than bugger all.

The scale of this problem is so big and it's so complex, and the implications are so huge for the future now, economically, that nobody on the front bench of any government will touch it. No one wants to look it in the mirror and nor do they want to put a dent in any relationship with their largest douchebag donors.

They - both governments and the likes of Whitehaven Coal and Woodside - don't want you thinking about this stuff. This is why they employ an army of people professionally trained to take nothing and dress it up as something; this is the main output of the bullshit factory (Parliament), in a sense, really. It’s our actual number one export; it's the only thing that we do better than coal and gas.

This is an extreme dichotomy and I would argue that making progress is the only viable solution, because I'm one of those people who enjoys both what hydrocarbons do for us and electric vehicles. The only difference is some of us aren't deluding ourselves over our fossil fuel addiction, and this is, of course, the real beauty of living now in the Golden Age of Bullshit: anything's possible.

Only STEM type people can solve this impossibly enormous problem facing humanity, but because this is Australia, where people who actually paid attention to science, technology, engineering and mathematics are such an endangered species, our votes essentially no longer count anymore.

Perhaps we can thank Electric “Elon Musk” Jesus for that too.

But I think we would have achieved this without him, because in the Golden Age of Bullshit, anything can be true, and that really is miraculous, at least it is to me.

Have your say