The Right’s Wrong-Headed Retreat to Energy Nostalgia

The Nationals’ decision to abandon net zero by 2050 reveals more than a policy shift — it exposes a deep confusion on the Right between nostalgia and realism. Australia’s energy future will be decided not by ideology, but by physics and economics.

Preface – After the Nationals’ Break with Net Zero by 2050

The National Party’s decision this week to abandon support for Australia’s net-zero-by-2050 target and instead peg progress to the OECD average has reignited a debate that never truly ended. Party leader David Littleproud described the move as a shift to “a better, cheaper, fairer way” to cut emissions – a plan that, he said, recognises “Australia’s unique circumstances” while still committing to reduce emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2035. The Nationals insist they are “not walking away from reducing emissions” or “denying the science of climate change,” but rather rejecting what they frame as unrealistic or unaffordable targets set to “foreign timelines.”

Yet behind the slogans lies the same unresolved question that has haunted Australian energy policy for two decades: what, exactly, is the country trying to build? The Nationals’ shift is not a plan but a posture — an attempt to trade direction for affordability by adopting a benchmark that sounds pragmatic but means little in engineering terms. Labor still treats speed as moral currency; the opposition now treats caution as wisdom. Both confuse posture for policy.

I do not dismiss the concerns that have led the Nationals to their position. Regional communities carry more of the physical burden of the transition – hosting wind farms, transmission lines, and solar arrays while power flows to cities – yet often cannot afford the tools urban households use to manage energy costs: installing rooftop solar and batteries. Their anxiety about cost and fairness is real. Nor should Labor’s own hubris be ignored: its moral certainty about the pace and inevitability of the transition has often sounded like indifference to those left carrying its costs.

At the same time, there is a broader irony the Nationals have rightly sensed: Australia exports coal and energy-intensive jobs, only to import manufactured goods with a cleaner conscience. It is reasonable to ask why those industries could not operate here, using the abundant energy we already produce. Nonetheless, the Nationals’ chosen remedy is unlikely to deliver either cheaper power or network stability. The physical system that keeps the nation’s lights on does not respond to ideology. It responds to engineering, sequencing, and price signals.

This essay argues that Australia’s task is neither to go slow on net zero nor to pursue it in blind haste, but to rebuild a coherent, realistic path between them – one grounded in physics, fairness, and long-term competence, paced reasonably and anchored in reliability.

The Illusion of Speed

Australia’s energy transition sits in a paradox of its own making: too invested in renewables to retreat, too brittle to accelerate. The grid now dazzles at noon and falters at dusk – a machine caught between centuries.

Both major parties confuse symbols for systems. Labor equates haste with virtue; the Nationals confuse nostalgia with prudence. Each promises certainty, and each deepens fragility. The issue is no longer whether to decarbonise, but how – and at what pace – without breaking the machinery that underpins modern life.

The illusion of speed once served a purpose: it signalled intent and attracted capital. But the atmosphere is indifferent to virtue, and markets are merciless toward imbalance. The next phase requires replacing moral momentum with engineering realism – a net-zero path calibrated to global context, domestic capacity, and social consent.

The Net-Zero Mirage

The 2050 target was meant to unify; instead it tranquilised. It created a countdown clock where a construction plan was needed.

The deeper flaw is provincial morality – the belief that Australia’s sacrifice carries planetary weight or virtue. National emissions are roughly one per cent of the global total. If the United States, China, and India do not decarbonise, domestic effort makes no atmospheric difference. It will not save the Great Barrier Reef. Nor will it protect against the next drought, flood or bushfire. Yet politics treats unilateral virtue as global leadership.

A realistic strategy would calibrate effort to international progress and technological maturity. Calibration does not mean waiting; it means sequencing reforms so that investment strengthens competitiveness rather than self-harm. Australia should advance in parallel with credible global action, not ahead of it for applause. But nor should it lag.

Otherwise, the country pays twice: once through higher energy costs, and again through lost competitiveness in a world still burning coal.

Why Act at All?

If unilateral virtue is futile, why pursue deep decarbonisation? The answer is pragmatic self-interest, not planetary showmanship.

• Energy security: A high-renewables grid insulates Australia from imported-fuel shocks and volatile gas-export prices.
• Price: when, decades from now, the restructured grid has been paid for, renewables will be cheaper.
• Industrial renewal: Cheap daytime solar and abundant minerals can anchor new value chains – green metals, hydrogen, ammonia – turning natural endowment into export leverage.
• Trade access: Carbon-border adjustments are coming; markets will price carbon whether Canberra likes it or not. We need to be prepared.
• Technology positioning: Global learning curves reward early movers; local deployment today lowers future cost.

Decarbonisation, done rationally, is not charity but industrial policy – a hedge against dependence and irrelevance in a decarbonising world.

The Nationals’ Nostalgia and Labor’s Provincial Morality

The Nationals’ new position masquerades as realism but risks becoming nostalgia. Pegging progress to the OECD average sounds pragmatic, yet it still avoids the harder engineering question: how to maintain reliability as coal exits. Their talk of “advanced coal” and “modern nuclear” offers the comfort of scale without the discipline of feasibility. Nuclear remains decades away; coal (and nuclear) cannot run profitably in a solar-saturated market.

Labor’s morality is the mirror image – a faith in inevitability. It imagines renewables will deliver cheap, clean power by volume alone, ignoring physical and social constraints.

Both parties avoid plain speech about physics and price. The Nationals deny that the grid has changed irreversibly; Labor denies that completing the change could cost dearly. Both falsely promise cheap energy.

One insists baseload will restore it; the other insists renewables will. Both are wrong. Baseload is uneconomic in a system where daytime prices collapse, and rooftop solar – though successful – benefits mainly homeowners. Renters and apartment dwellers cannot join the solar-battery class and instead carry a disproportionate share of network and transition costs for decades ahead.

Labor’s current battery-rebate program illustrates the distortion. It rewards households for storing their own excess solar, improving local absorptivity but not system dispatchability. Behind-the-meter batteries help individuals but do little for grid stability. The policy tilts benefits toward those already able to invest, widening inequity while barely touching the inertia problem.

The politics of “cheap energy” is therefore a shared deception: a bipartisan habit of promising lower bills while shifting costs to those least able to escape them.

What the Nationals Get Right – and Wrong

The Nationals are right to acknowledge that the pursuit of net zero has increased prices, and will continue to. Rebuilding a grid is costly. They are also right to note that without coordinated global action, Australia’s emissions cuts deliver little atmospheric benefit. Climate arithmetic does not reward virtue performed in isolation.

They are right, too, to question Labor’s haste. The physics of the grid cannot be hurried without consequence, and moral urgency has too often been mistaken for competent sequencing. They are also right to note that the costs of transition have fallen most heavily on those least able to bear them. Regional communities host much of the new infrastructure while receiving few of its rewards, and renters or low-income households shoulder a larger share of network costs without access to rooftop solar or batteries.

Yet the party’s remedies do not match its diagnoses. Pegging progress to the OECD average mistakes symbolism for strategy. Coal and nuclear nostalgia cannot rebuild system strength in a market already dominated by cheap midday solar. Replacing ageing coal with new baseload generation is neither economically nor operationally feasible. New coal plants would require heavy subsidies or higher power bills, and would become stranded assets if the rest of the world decarbonises faster. Nuclear is slow and capital-intensive to bring online, and Australia’s daily glut of solar would make full cost recovery difficult even if regulatory barriers were cleared.

The Nationals have identified real problems, but their solutions still look backward. Realism means confronting the grid we have, not wishing for the one we lost.

Electricity Prices and the Legacy of Mistrust

Every credible transition is expensive up front. Replacing a fossil-era grid means transitional duplication: maintaining one system while building another.

Whatever path Australia chooses – Labor’s sprint, the Nationals’ nostalgia, or continued drift – costs will rise. Coal and nuclear would demand vast subsidies; full-speed renewables require new transmission, storage, and market redesign. Even inaction is costly: outages, emergency interventions, and price spikes now add hidden billions. Instability itself has become a tax.

Public scepticism is earned. The gold-plating era of the early 2010s, when network businesses over-invested in poles and wires under incentive regulation, left households funding stranded assets. That fiasco polarised debate and eroded trust in every subsequent promise that “investment will lower bills.” Many now assume (perhaps correctly) any reform, regardless of ideology, will make power dearer.

Price increases are toxic yet unavoidable. Pretending otherwise ruins credibility. People can accept paying more if they understand why; they will not forgive being told they will not.

The Physics That Cannot Be Ignored

Energy transitions are physical sequences, not moral movements. Four pillars determine success: energy, capacity, inertia, and absorptivity – the ability to generate, deliver, stabilise, and absorb power.

• Energy = quantity. Solar and wind deliver it, but intermittently.
• Capacity = availability. Firm assets – hydro, gas, and long-duration storage – must replace coal’s 24/7 supply.
• Inertia = stability. As synchronous machines retire, the grid loses its mechanical buffer; synthetic inertia from advanced inverters must fill the gap.
• Absorptivity = flexibility. Storage and flexible industrial demand must soak up midday surpluses to prevent waste (improved absorptivity supports the delivery of 24/7 capacity).

Australia built the first pillar faster than the rest. It generates abundant renewable energy but lacks the capacity, inertia, and absorptivity to use it effectively. The next decade’s priority is to finish those remaining pillars: build capacity markets that reward reliability, deploy grid-forming inverters, and invest in storage and flexible industrial demand.

Storage economics remain difficult, but less unrealistic than nostalgia for cheap baseload. Snowy 2.0’s delays show what happens when storage arrives late, not that it should not arrive at all.

Gas will play an unavoidable bridging role – firming capacity through the 2030s until storage and flexible industrial demand mature. It must be treated as a stabiliser, not a permanent foundation. That view will displease purists, but physics is indifferent to ideology: until long-duration storage is proven, gas remains the least-capital-cost insurance against collapse. And voters will reward grid reliability over speedy but unreliable decarbonisation.

Calibrating Targets and Building Stability

The rational course is calibration, not abandonment or acceleration.

• Keep 2050 as a compass bearing, not a countdown clock. It signals direction without trapping policy in false urgency or encouraging complacency. Openly acknowledge that achievement is contingent on both the Australian context and the actions of the rest of the world.
• Calibrate to international activity. Advance at the pace of genuine global movement; when major emitters act, match their stride. Until then, move steadily, avoiding self-inflicted shocks.
• Prioritise reliability. No plant should close until equivalent firm capacity is proven. A blackout is not merely an engineering failure – it is a political one that can destroy consent for decades.
• Invest in absorptivity and inertia. Redirect funding from new generation toward the plumbing of the grid – storage, transmission, flexible industrial demand, and system strength. The invisible infrastructure of reliability matters more than the visible monuments of capacity.
• Accept transitional cost with honesty. Electricity will remain expensive while duplication persists and is amortised into base costs. The price of rebuilding stability is preferable to the cost of perpetual crisis.

Denmark’s distributed flexibility and South Korea’s industrial coordination show that realism need not mean resignation: both nations balance renewables growth with disciplined sequencing.

While pegging progress to the OECD average sounds pragmatic, it mistakes arithmetic for design. The OECD is a political club, not an energy system. Its members share institutions, not infrastructure. France runs on nuclear baseload; Norway on hydro; the United States on gas and shale; Germany still burns coal while importing power from its neighbours. Averaging such diversity produces an illusion of balance without operational meaning. For Australia – an isolated grid with vast solar potential, scarce hydro, an ageing coal fleet and no nuclear base – the OECD average offers no guidance on sequencing or stability. Calibration must therefore rest on capability and context: the pace of technology, the maturity of firming capacity, and the absorptivity of the grid. International alignment is a diplomatic posture; system design is an engineering discipline. With the OECD average, the Nationals have embraced calibration theatre, not genuine calibration.

The Cost of Drift

If deliberate transition is costly, drift is ruinous. Policy oscillation deters investment and forces operators into permanent emergency. Unplanned coal exits trigger last-minute subsidies; delayed transmission creates regional price spikes. Each cycle of hesitation adds cost.

Without bipartisan clarity, every project carries sovereign risk – what one government funds, the next may cancel. Financing costs rise, households pay, and trust erodes. The longer the drift, the larger the bill – measured in dollars, reliability, and patience.

Political Realism and Institutional Durability

Calling for bipartisanship can sound naïve in a system addicted to tribal conflict. But engineering does not pause for ideology. If formal consensus proves impossible, durability can still be built through institutional insulation: independent market operators, statutory reliability standards, transparent cost accounting, and technology-neutral tenders.

Politics may never agree on language, but institutions can agree on metrics. A market that rewards reliability and penalises volatility can survive changing governments.

Energy policy lives in two domains at once: physics and persuasion. The grid obeys the first; governments survive by mastering the second. The art is to align them long enough for infrastructure to be built.

Truth and Complexity

But institutions alone will not secure public consent; language matters too.

Public trust rests on candour. Australians can tolerate hardship for a purpose; they will not tolerate deceit wrapped in optimism.

Every government since 2007 has promised cheap energy. Each has been wrong – not because technology failed, but because honesty did. Rebuilding the grid costs money. During overlap, expense is not failure; it is the price of continuity.

Yet discourse still demands binaries: coal vs solar, jobs vs climate, cheap vs clean. Simplification wins elections and loses systems. Real leadership means teaching complexity – explaining absorptivity, inertia, and capacity as calmly as earlier generations explained taxation or defence.

If energy politics remains allergic to complexity, the transition will stall for want of understanding.

Conclusion – Endurance Over Speed

The future belongs to those who build patiently and precisely, without losing direction. A stable grid in 2040 matters more than a rhetorical victory in 2030 or 2035. The transition demands perseverance, not posturing. Australia does not need a go-slow plan that locks it into a carbonised future, nor an expensive nuclear detour. It needs a plan grounded in physics and courage – one that moves steadily forward without losing power or purpose.

Abandoning net zero would isolate Australia; pursuing it blindly could impoverish it. The responsible course is steady alignment with global progress, obedience to physics, and honesty with the public.

That means accepting cost without panic, risk without denial, and delay without despair. The transition is not a sprint; it is a reconstruction – the rebuilding of the machine that keeps the country alive.

Australia’s energy transition remains a paradox of its own making: too invested in renewables to retreat, too brittle to accelerate. Trapped between pride and inertia, the country risks mistaking sunk costs for strategy. The grid remembers everything: every closure made too soon, every subsidy promised too late, every silence that hid a cost. The next phase of policy must be deliberate and disciplined, moving at a pace that achieves an enduring, reliable, and ultimately cheaper end-state.

Because the goal is not to win the race to net zero. It is to arrive there with the lights still on.