Having coffee on Friday and heard from one of the chaps who still watches the ABC that it was spruiking information that Uruguay (about 3.4 million people) now runs on close to 100 percent (?98%) renewable electricity. I said that this could not be true but, of course, wasn’t envisaging renewables in the form of hydro, thermal, and biomass. Together these that make up over 50 percent of electricity generation in Uruguay. Wind accounts for most of the rest, with a bit of solar in the mix. Apparently, the wind is fairly good in Uruguay which has a small land mass with a South Atlantic coastline.

The ABC spends a lot of time and resources finding and cherry-picking  “facts” which suit its agenda. That is who they are in the staff collective. Only defunding and wholesale redundancies will solve the problem. There is Buckley’s chance of that. So I either ignore its presence or reflexively doubt any news or information finding its way to me which has come from the ABC. However, on this occasion, my sceptical response was based on hard reality, albeit on a false assumption that by renewables was meant mainly wind, sun, and batteries.

That hard reality is that you cannot run a power system on wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. It simply can’t be done. It is completely infeasible. No need to overthink it. Dark clouds, dusk, night and dawn interrupt sunshine. The wind does not always blow. Wind droughts happen. And batteries can store much too little power for the buck.

Unfortunately, Chris Bowen was probably watching the ABC and came away with even more obsessively misplaced confidence that what Uruguay can do, Australia can do too. Never before have we had governments on a mission to make Australia’s uncompetitive. Sure governments in the past have erred and Labor governments have always been fond of inventing new unaffordable welfare programs and of over regulating, particularly in the labour market. But nothing like this. Destroying cheap reliable energy on which business depends and, worse, replacing it with energy systems which are intrinsically expensive and unreliable and which, to boot, effectively prevent cheap and reliable energy systems from ever being rebuilt. That scale of deliberate national self-harm is unique in the annals of time.

Major political parties on both sides of the aisle across all levels of government are suffering from the mass delusion that they can and must play a part in altering the climate. It brings the apocryphal tale of King Canute’s demonstration of his limitations into sharp focus. And to twist the metaphor, is it too late to turn the tide?

Even if Dutton were to win, the Libs are too weak and comprised to ditch the climate-change madness. Plus the Senate will stymie any material pullback. And then there is the ABC and the rest of the legacy media railing against sane policies. Per-capita income and the AUD are falling as we speak. Is prosperity slipping away? No worries cobber, she’ll be right. This is Australia. “Something will turn up.” Won’t it?