Let's Get Frack To Work

No less an authority than the CSIRO has given fracking the green light. We’re going to need it if we want to bounce back from this COVID-19 lockdown. By Nick Cater.

The are many reasons to believe that fracking is safe — not the least of which is that Michael Moore says it isn’t.

The US documentary-maker and socialist provocateur is implacably opposed to hydraulic fracturing, even though it has done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US than any number of Tesla cars.

Fortunately, there are better reasons to lift the hydraulic fracturing bans than our instinctive distrust of Moore. Last week, the CSIRO gave fracking a clean bill of health with the release of a ­comprehensive study of its impact in Queensland’s Surat Basin.

It found that hydraulic fracturing had minimal to no impacts on air quality. The only air pollutant it raised was soil dust.It also had no detectable ­impact on nearby groundwater bores, adjacent soils or water samples from a local creek.

Any trace of fracturing chemicals was gone within 40 days, ­leading the CSIRO to conclude that water-treatment methods were effective.

Now the myths about fracking have been busted by the most trusted scientific body in the land, the only things that stand between Australian consumers and abundant gas are green tape and official timidity.

Moore remains a naughty boy, despite the joy he has brought into the lives of messiah-starved conservatives with his error-strewn documentary, Planet of the Humans. The movie’s exposure of the renewable energy sector has dismayed many members of the intelligentsia who thought he was on their side.

“I am used to ceaseless harassment and attack from the fossil fuel industry,” climate activist Bill McKibben said. “It does hurt more to be attacked by others who think of themselves as environmentalists.”

People who batted not an eyelid at Moore’s reference to cattle trucks and death camps when ­attacking Donald Trump appear surprised that Moore has been loose with the truth in his attack on the renewables industry.

One can only surmise that they slept through his other movies. Moore’s contribution to the ­documentary genre is akin to the arrival of computer-generated images. Just as CGI liberated movie directors from the laws of physics, the use of de-contextualised quotes and questionable statistics has released documentary-makers from the truth.

Moore’s exposure of some of the inflated claims about renewable technology is useful, if only to bring a burst of humour into our isolated lives. But the illumination Moore brings to the debate comes not from any great factual revelations but the reaction he received when he poked the bear.

The accusation that Moore is a “denialist” was never going to stick. Moore is a Bernie Sanders socialist and as green as they come. Last week he went so far as to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic was nature’s revenge. He hates humans and wishes them off the planet.

The odium he has incurred demonstrates that the climate wars were only tangentially about climate. It is a war about energy funded by vested interests with deep pockets.

Renewable energy attracts big money, not just from governments but from large corporations that see profit in a vital economic sector in transition and want a slice of it.

Large energy corporations are doing more than hedging their bets when they invest in wind and solar farms. They are actively distorting markets in their favour by willing the closure of ageing coal plants that will constrain supply and increase prices.

Some of their sharper practices have been blunted by regulation and veiled threats. The truth remains, however, that an erratic market with supply constraints and wild fluctuations in price ­offers more opportunity to grab quick profits than steady, even flow. The dispute between Moore and McKibben is bogged in a sterile argument about who is most tainted. Moore accuses McKibben of being a patsy for big renewables. McKibben counters that Moore must be an unwitting agent of ­fossil fuel merchants.

The mores of contemporary debate demand that one attacks the man but not the ball.The COVID-19 pandemic — and the global recession that will likely ensue — may be the circuit breaker to end this stalemate and the false morality that imbues it with passion.

In the politics that flow from double-digit unemployment and falling wages, there will be less tolerance for posturing about climate change and greater focus on the cost of mitigation and its effect on jobs. Fantastical arguments about the creation of green jobs will ­become less relevant where jobs of any colour are scarce.

Expectations of a growth in local manufacturing will be harder to realise without cheap and reliable energy. It is hard to see how manufacturing jobs will return ­unless we fix the things that drove them offshore in the first place.

Cheap energy won’t come from picking winners, a trap into which many on both left and right have fallen. It will come from competition between energy sources, which Australia has in abundance.While some might be reluctant to acknowledge it, the palette of resources from which we can draw now includes wind and solar, since Australia has invested more than twice as much per capita in renewables than any other country.

The investment has been costly, with much of it underwritten by subsidies. But renewables are an integrated part of the mix and contributed 17 per cent of the energy consumed last year.

Much as it will disappoint some, felling windmills with the zeal that the Taliban applied to the Buddhas of Bamyan will not be particularly helpful. Partnering the windmills with cheap, quick-start gas will give us the best return from the sunk investment costs to which the taxpayer has contributed.

The experience of living through a pandemic, rising global tension and a likely world recession will not end the most fractious debate of the century.

But it may just be enough to knock some sense into daft heads and incline them to make a more productive contribution than gluing themselves to the tarmac.