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Alan Kohler dreams of banning combustion engines in cars in Australia

You have to hand it to The Australian – they will publish both sides. Take this (please, take it): “Our energy policy still stuck in coal country”. This is Alan Kohler, bless him, who doesn’t get it and dreams of a nation of motor-heads “going electric”. But, wow, ouch, watch how he reasons it out… not with numbers and graphs (he’s the numbers man on the nightly finance report) but with pop psychology?

The idea of an Australian government banning petrol and diesel cars to promote public health seems especially remote right now: we can’t keep the lights on as it is, having closed a few fossil fuel power stations.

But you can bet that the Coalition government and its media supporters will argue that the electrification of transport makes it even more necessary for there to be more “baseload power” from coal-fired power stations — how could we possibly charge millions of cars, and run millions of airconditioners and fridges if we let Liddell close in 2022?

And you can fix that Mr Kohler, how?

Wait for it…

This is the underlying reality of Australia’s energy debate: a majority of the government does not actually believe the science of climate change. Not really.

Politicians are generally in it for the public good. If they all believed in global warming, there would be a bipartisan energy policy.

Fergoodnesssake, If politicians all believed in being skeptics there would be bipartisan energy policy too.

If half of Parliament are skeptical, it is exactly as it should be in a representative democracy. Fifty percent of Australians are skeptical, but too scared to say so on TV for fear the ABC will call them a denier.

If belief were baseload we could run our cars on polls instead of petrol.

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