While King Charles was busily afternoon tea-ing up fellow heavy-hitting climate proselytisers at Buckingham Palace last week prior to their departure to Egypt for this week’s Cop 27 annual revelation of continually unrealised forecasts of doom, another King was telling fellow Australians a very different story. At last week’s Sydney (heavily guarded against climate protesters) International Mining and Resources Conference, the Albanese Labor government’s Resources Minister Madeleine King, who is ‘committed to working with industry to ensure the benefits of Australia’s traditional energy resources are realised’, swept aside local and international demands to end investment in, and infrastructure for, fossil fuels in Australia. She talked up the need for Australia to continue to rely on coal and gas into the foreseeable future, with new developments helping to ‘ensure long-term energy security for Australian households and industry as well as our core trading partners’.

‘If the environmental and economic credentials of new coal and gas developments stack up and projects receive all the necessary approvals, the government will support such new developments.’ That is more than Australia’s banks, superannuation funds and leading financial and investment houses whose boards of directors are prepared to do, cowed as they are by climate activists, and fearful of political policy uncertainty, continually evidenced by divisions within the Labor party – and the growing political power of the Greens.

While King’s welcome recognition of the need for fossil fuels adds a touch of reality to the climate debate, her comments were all within the context of the government’s clearly unattainable and unbelievably costly newly legislated emissions limits. These guaranteed Environment Minister Chris Bowen a much warmer welcome at Cop 27 than Scott Morrison received in Glasgow at Cop 26. (Albanese was too busy to go this year despite Australia’s push to host a future Cop in 2026). But King made no attempt to resolve the self-evident conflict between these new emissions targets and her support for the continued use of fossil fuels.

If she really was fair dinkum rather than just playing good cop to Chris Bowen’s bad cop, and so enabling Labor to walk both sides of the climate street, she must by now have become a major target for the obsessive green Left – particularly within her own government. Unlike Bowen, whose message from the current energy crisis (created not only by Putin’s Ukraine adventure, but worsened by the mass premature shutting of fossil fuel capacity long before renewables were capable of replacing them) is that there must be a massively expensive greater rush into renewables, King, on the contrary, says: ‘The crisis underlined a simple fact – that Australia needs reliable supplies of despatachable power’ that rely on coal and gas which also play a role in key industries that lack viable alternatives. ‘As we decarbonise, we are still going to need gas and coal to firm renewable generation and keep manufacturing going’, with gas being ‘an ally of renewable energy’ by supporting the addition of more intermittent energy sources.

King also acknowledged that the current crisis also highlights the critical role Australian gas and coal play in meeting global energy demand and in providing our neighbours with a secure and dependable energy source. In addition, ‘Australian liquefied natural gas will have a key role in supporting the decarbonisation ambitions of our trading partners, particularly those in north Asia, several of whom have invested in our gas fields to help them navigate towards their established emissions targets’.

The Bowen approach is of a different order, involving transitioning our energy system from one powered by hydrocarbons to one powered by wind turbines, solar panels and batteries and other renewables. As the Menzies Research Centre’s Nick Cater wrote recently, to reach the government’s 2030 target of a 43 per cent reduction in carbon emissions compared to 2005 that was locked into legislation last month, would require ‘installing forty 7-megawatt wind turbines every month or more than one a day from now until 2030 and more than 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for the next eight years  – 2.4 for every man, woman and child’. So King’s emphasis on reliable fossil fuel energy in a non-disruptive transition to net zero and Bowen’s on targets without knowing how to get there – or the cost – will ensure that, despite Albanese’s promise, the climate wars (particularly within the Left) are by no means over.

King will have few friends in academe or among the Extinction Revolution activists; their concern is that even Bowen is not doing enough to save a planet that is ‘undeniably in crisis’. The UN warns that there is still ‘no credible pathway’ to limiting global warming to the required 1.5 degrees Celsius so that, ‘frighteningly, we risk tipping the climate into a dangerous regime bringing even worse consequences;. And the Economist magazine headline agrees: ‘Say goodbye 1.5C’.

But Australia is under heavy pressure from Asian neighbours, like Japan, who rely on Australia as a secure reliable source of fossil fuels. Minister King revealed that in recent talks with PM Albanese, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida underlined the importance of Australian coal and gas to Japanese energy security, a message reinforced by top business leaders who expressed fears that although Australian coal and gas will remain vital for Japan’s energy needs for decades, the lack of new investment in fossil fuels threatens energy security, Flying in the face of the diktat by climate disaster Jeremiah, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterras that it would be ‘delusional’ for countries to invest in more gas and oil exploration, King reaffirmed that the current energy crisis ‘highlights why we need to continue to explore and develop our energy resources’ and that not only is Australia a long-term, reliable energy supplier, but ‘I assure you the Australian government is committed to being a stable and secure destination for energy investment’. Is this the ALP’s road to Damascus?