VALUES TO VALUE: Somehow it feels like we all just woke up one day recently and found ourselves in the midst of a raging debate about whether Australia’s energy future should be led by renewables or nuclear power.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The nuclear power push is an increasingly well-funded, orchestrated, long-maturing campaign to influence public attitudes in Australia, and deliver a very specific political outcome.
An outcome that is good for legacy energy industries coal and gas, by prolonging their life, and could potentially propel a new civilian nuclear power industry in Australia in tandem with our planned AUKUS nuclear submarines.
But if those are the winners, the losers will be timely climate action and the clean energy transition. Because the large scale rollout of renewable solar and wind has to be slowed or stopped now, in the mid 2020s, to keep the door ajar for nuclear power by the 2040s.
The suddenness and urgency that we’re all feeling now, which can seem like it came out of nowhere, is because the next federal elections, due by May 2025, loom as a watershed for which future Australia chooses.
Don’t just take my word on how deliberate the nuclear push is.
I’m basing the above on what University of Queensland Adjunct Professor Stephen Wilson told the youth-focused 2024 “Generation Liberty IPA Academy” (see video, around 1.13.17), run earlier this year by leading conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).
Wilson, an energy economist and an intellectual leader of the nuclear push, and IPA Visiting Fellow, used a concept called the social maturity (or maturation) curve. Developed a decade or more ago by an Australian strategic advisory group called Futureye, it helps to analyse, diagnose and anticipate future progression of social issues.
He charted a progression that began in 2006, with a nuclear inquiry, and has been building ever since. On a continuum that moves through successive phases of observation, emergent, popularisation, challenge, governance and normative, Wilson puts today’s Australia in the popularisation stage in nuclear power and moving on to challenge.
Such social progression, however, isn’t inevitable. If that’s not the future that enough of us want to see, then the forces working to take Australians down the nuclear path, with most people blissfully unaware of the deliberate manipulation involved, need to be countered.
A key part of this is where we get our information from, and the quality of that information.
For my own part, I spend a lot of time, arguably too much, following and inserting myself into a relatively informed and sophisticated energy transition and climate debate, with mainly polite exchanges of information and perspectives, on LinkedIn.
Much of my news and current affairs comes from the ABC in its various manifestations across digital, radio and television, from progressive publications like The Guardian, and from more specialist sources like The Fifth Estate.
Sometimes work or perverse curiosity requires me to venture further afield, into the scary post-apocalyptic infotainment world of Sky News “after dark”, tabloid TV and newspapers, or even the parallel universe of The Australian and the toxicity of X (formerly Twitter).
It makes you think? How would you perceive the current state of the energy transition, the road to net zero and the climate crisis if most or all of your information came from these sources? Or even just from general legacy mass media or increasingly news-free social media?
For starters, you might think, through a current cost-of-living crisis lens, that the future of electricity was all about cost, both now and into the future.
You may well forget that the whole point of transition is to decarbonise energy, as quickly as possible, to avert catastrophic climate impacts. Like extreme heat waves, lethal bushfires and mega droughts, floods and storms.
You might overlook that big transitions mostly have big costs but are compelling anyway because the alternative scenarios are worse, much worse in the case of runaway global heating. Ultimately the “clean” part of the equation trumps the “cost” part, and cleaner faster at lowest-cost is the holy grail.
The current hot topic of sticking with a renewables-led energy future versus pivoting to a nuclear-enabled one, is largely being fought on cost comparisons, arguments and counter-arguments. But how can people know who and what to believe?
It’s easy enough to accuse one thing of being propaganda, and then laud another thing as being a sound statement of public policy. However, it’s a lot more difficult to provide the voting public with the tools and filters to always know which is which.
The multiplicity of language around information and communications doesn’t help us a great deal. What is misinformation? Or disinformation? Or gaslighting? Or spin? Or hype? Or greenwashing?
Where can acceptable lines be drawn? For example, between legitimate lobbying and campaigning, with claim and counterclaim, versus improper influence, deliberate manipulation or outright corruption?
Transparency is a key part of the solution, but the dark-arts masters of public policy manipulation know this, and have their strategies and methodologies to navigate around it.
You attack the institutions if their “truths” stand in your way. For the nuclear advocates, and coal and gas defenders, that’s the CSIRO, our premier science agency, and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
You reduce things to simplistic, but head-nodding “that’s right” kind of arguments. All these other countries have nuclear energy, so we should too! We shouldn’t be picking winners, and thus should have all the technology options on the table, so lift the ban on nuclear energy!
We saw this with the Voice Referendum last year. And we’re seeing it again this year, with an orchestrated information war against the clean energy transition that is becoming more visible by the day.
My view is that we need better “info-structure” for the energy transition as well as infrastructure. We need trusted sources, highly-accessible explainers, memes and narratives, just as we need solar panels, wind towers, big batteries and transmission lines.
There is a real battle for the hearts and minds of Australian voters/consumers going on, out in the community. The mainstream media still does some good journalism, in places, but it’s a pale shadow of its former self, and compromised in places. Social media is more a problem than a solution. The disciples of the disinformation game are real, well-resourced and very focused.
So that “info-structure” is what I’m working on, from here on out!
COMING UP IN THE FIFTH ESTATE: Don’t miss Murray Hogarth’s new series, The Nuclear Files, starting this week.