Picture a Teal, perpetual querulousness of mien sharpened by the chill of the morning, shuffling fluffy-slippered across the freezing travertine from her bathroom, where the hot water’s run out, to her designer kitchen where, for all the glittering imported gadgets, she has trouble striking a match, the packet being so damp, to light the primus stove retrieved from the shed to make a cup of coffee on. Or a climate scientist, lab coat drenched with sweat, fanning himself with The Guardian as he climbs onto his desk to bash the inactive Fujitsu vainly with his shoe in the hope of extracting a flow of cooling air.

You can picture it but it’ll never happen. The sun mightn’t shine and the wind mightn’t blow but the kind of zealots who, in their quest for Net Zero, will have reduced our power supply to an irregular flicker will be fine. Whatever shortages lesser mortals have to put up with, the people who run things in this country won’t be short of electricity and gas, you watch.

I used to think a few cold showers and the gas running out while the soufflé was in the oven would be enough to induce our Green-washed ruling class to take a more sceptical attitude to ‘renewable energy’. But not if the soufflé rises as it should and the hot water flows uninterruptedly.

This class imposes its pet projects and the rest of us pay for them through taxes, surcharges, or in the case of Net Zero, the inconvenience and privation to come. They may occasionally burble about ‘the welfare of all Australians’ but they don’t care about people on lower incomes, as they’ve shown by pursuing energy policies that have given us shamefully rising power prices many people scrimp to pay but the rich can easily afford and, if themselves ‘renewables’ investors, make fortunes out of.

You might have expected that the unions, representing so many workers on a fixed wage, would have opposed climate fanaticism and forced their Labor puppet government to protect reliable sources of energy. But no, as in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the union bosses and the people who run things are all pals together. The bosses have swallowed all the climate fiddle-faddle and are loftily uninterested in helping their members pay the soaring power costs.

The sensible thing to do, to ensure the growth and prosperity all governments claim to want, would be to abandon the obsession with ‘renewables’. It’s clear by now that the climate apocalypse so long predicted isn’t going to happen. But common sense will not prevail. There are too many vested interests in energy alarmism to allow the whole charade to be called off.

Faced then with the inevitable failure of wind and solar energy, which even if we could count on endless gales and sunny days and clothe the landscape with forests of skeletal windmills and drape every roof in photovoltaic panels would not generate enough power to make up for the fossil fuels we are banishing, how will the ruling classes cope? They have set themselves such absurd targets – Net Zero non-renewables by 2035 is one of the wilder flights of fancy – that it would be a most embarrassing climbdown to follow the European example and stay with dirty old coal to keep the country lit and heated.

No, they will cope by entrenching even deeper the differences between the haves and the have-nots. There won’t be enough power to keep everything going so they will make sure they get all they want, and whatever’s left can be shared among the rest of us. They will do this as they do everything else, through their superior wealth. They will create a category of ‘premium consumers’ – platinum users, gold users, some name like that, who by paying extra to the energy companies will be guaranteed a constant supply of power, especially at times of peak use.

This extra fee will be set high enough so that, when added to the already exaggerated costs of energy, it is beyond the resources of the average household. It is ordinary families who’ll have to put up with the shortage of power for every household task. See if you can find an ancient carpet sweeper at an op shop: the vacuum won’t work.

This power shortage will be presented as progress and wrapped in weaselly advertising. ‘Energy that’s tailored to your home needs’, the unctuous voice-over will intone through an image of swirling steam. ‘When you sign up with GoodGas you get just the amount of power you want, with no waste.’ Translated, this will mean you’re offered a ‘budget’ contract with the gas or electricity company stipulating supply at certain hours of the day or week. (The small print, naturally, will ‘regret that it may not be always possible to maintain supply at the contracted times’.) You’ll be ordered to switch everything off at peak times, as already foreshadowed by the European Union president, or have it switched off for you.

Then what? Having condemned us to shiver and starve, do Net Zero enthusiasts imagine that our ‘good example’ will touch the hearts of polluters like China and India, whose huge emissions make ours look like a puff of smoke from a Greenie’s spliff? That these industrial giants will convert their coal-powered economies to ‘renewables’ just in time to prevent the planet from becoming a molten ball or whatever the prediction is.

Are they dumb enough to believe that, or is the whole Net Zero crusade a fraud, just another weapon from the Marxist armoury in the never-ending strategy to weaken and ultimately destroy our civilisation? Either way, climate fanatics will soon have undermined the West from within, making us literally powerless.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in