On March 18, 2024, Dick Smith argued that there is a necessary role for nuclear in Australia’s energy mix (for which he has been a longstanding champion).

Media reports suggest the ABC has made a humiliating back down in apologising to Dick Smith for its original March 22 report titled, Dick Smith says no country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables. Is that correct?

In reality, the ABC’s apology is narrowly focused on one issue: its misreporting that Mr Smith was hostile to renewables.

The Editor’s note on the fact check reads:

Editor’s note (March 26, 2024): The first version of this article was based on the inference that in Mr Smith’s interview with 2GB he was only referring to electricity grids. After publication Mr Smith clarified that he was referring to the full energy mix. This article has been updated to reflect that, and to add information on other off-grid energy sources of four countries whose grids are 100 per cent renewable. It has also added a statement from the CSIRO responding to Mr Smith’s assertions regarding that organisation. The article also previously incorrectly stated that Mr Smith had rejected renewable-led electricity generation; this has been amended. The ABC apologises to Mr Smith for the error.

More humiliating than the ABC apology is the expanded ‘fact check’ it updated and republished.

This expansion shows the ABC still refuses to properly acknowledge that no country runs entirely on renewable energy. Even the weird examples used by the ABC demonstrate that Mr Smith was entirely correct.

The sorry episode shows ‘fact checking’ ABC-style has an interesting relationship with ‘facts’ and opinion… This does not augur well for the announced cessation of ABC cooperation with the RMIT and the return of ‘fact checking’ to an in-house operation.

It is interesting that the ABC did not check with Mr Smith before unleashing its fact check.

Looking deeper, there are citations within the fact check which could do with little fact checking of its own…

Mark Diesendorf, an expert on sustainable energy and energy policy from the University of New South Wales, said it was possible to run a country’s electricity grid on renewable energy.

‘Several countries (and Tasmania) already run their electricity systems on 100 per cent renewables,’ he said in an email, noting that such places relied heavily on hydro power.

In response, there are few – if any – options for additional hydro power on mainland Australia. Even Tasmania cannot supply itself with hydro power when the dams run low.

Turning to wind and solar-generated power alone, Andrew Blakers, a professor of engineering at the Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster solutions, told Fact Check: ‘Several detailed studies show that [getting to] 100 per cent renewables [on the electricity grid] based mostly on solar and wind is quite straightforward, provided that enough transmission and storage is built.’

However, the amounts and costs of storage required would be astronomical, and of short economic life before needing replacement.

The land and sea area devoted to solar and wind installations, storage, and grid stabilisation equipment (and associated transmission lines) would be ruinous both to the environment and the nation’s budget.

The claim is akin to saying that since Americans managed to put 12 men on the Moon between 1969-72, it would be ‘quite straightforward’ for every Australian to have a holiday on the Moon, providing enough spacecraft were built. True? Yes… But it is also idiotic.

As for the countries putting renewable power to the test, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in the US, and director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, pointed Fact Check to a detailed list of countries at or near the 100 per cent renewable energy mark.

‘There are four countries running on 100 per cent wind-water-solar (WWS) alone for their grid electricity,’ he said in an email, noting that a further three countries relied on WWS for 99.78 per cent to 99.99 per cent of their electricity generation, while 45 countries were above 50 per cent.

The four named countries are Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, and Paraguay.

According to World Bank estimates via Our World in Data, real GDP per capita at purchasing power parity in Albania in 2021 was US$14,159 and life expectancy at birth, was 76.5 years; in Bhutan, US$10,908 and 71.8 years; in Nepal, US$3,832 and 68.4 years; and in Paraguay, US$13,688 and 70.3 years. For Australia, the numbers are US$49,774 and 84.5 years.

Any curious fact checker might wonder why these four odd examples of 100 per cent WWS belong to such poor nations… Does this 100 per cent WWS energy grid keep these countries poor – perhaps because of intermittency problems? Degrowth theory must carry considerable sway in the ABC if it thinks these four countries offer Australia something to emulate.

When it came to regions with a comparable or greater population size to that of Australia, Professor Jacobson pointed to the US state of California, which has a population of around 39 million.

As of Tuesday this week, he said, the state, which is aiming for 100 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2045, had ‘been running on more than 100 per cent WWS for 10 out of the last 11 days for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day’.

In 2022, renewables made up around 45 per cent of the state’s energy mix, while nuclear made up around 9 per cent.

Australians are used to electricity supply 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with 99.998 per cent reliability – outages in total of no more than 10 minutes a year. Electricity between 0.25 and 6 hours a day for 10 out of 11 days will not cut it.

In the ABC’s March 26 expansion (and, we assume it thinks, an improvement) of the original piece, now notes:

When looking at total energy supply, a measure which includes (only) off-grid generation and transport fuel, renewables in Albania contributed 33.7 per cent in 2021, with the rest contributed by fossil fuels, biofuels and waste, according to the International Energy Agency. Meanwhile, renewables contribute 37.5 per cent in Paraguay and 6.1 per cent in Nepal. For context, in Australia, renewables contributed 5.4 per cent in 2022.

Even relying on the one-sided opinions and weird examples, the only possible answer to its own query of whether any country can run entirely on renewables is a resounding ‘no’. Dick Smith was, and is, totally correct.

Instead of a plain statement of that incontrovertible fact, the ‘fact checkers’ and ABC News end with equivocation and an apology to Dick Smith – one that seems reluctant to admit error and instead waffles around the material point.

The ABC’s unacknowledged problem in trying to keep alive the fiction of a country running wholly on renewables, is that any country’s dependence on the use of fossil fuels (and resultant CO2 emissions) is vastly deeper than electricity generation and transport. Fossil fuels are essential for making the four essential building blocks of the modern world: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. (Ammonia is used to manufacture nitrogenous fertilisers, which are estimated to produce half the world’s food.)

Unfortunately for the ABC, dependency on fossil fuels to produce and use these four essentials is simply How the World Really Works, as evidenced in the work of the Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil.

There is no available means, proven to scale, of producing these materials without the use of fossil fuels on any foreseeable time horizon or at any competitive cost.

While Australian policies have already decimated our ability to produce these four building blocks onshore, Australia and the rest of the world continues to consume them in increasing quantities. Production is largely found in China and other growing emitters of CO2. This has been going on since Europe and America created policy designed to reverse their fossil fuel growth and export industrial capacity to countries with cheaper energy. So this issue is important for those who seek to control the global climate through what they believe to be the CO2 ‘control knob’. Its intractability is why 30 years of effort at energy transition and reducing CO2 emissions has totally failed.

Of course, green visionaries always have a futuristic, theoretical answer to such persistent practical challenges, and these days ‘green hydrogen’ is the magic phrase for an over-the-horizon, quantitatively implausible technology: ‘First destroy what we use now, and afterwards, new, affordable technology that we can’t prove to you today will smoothly emerge.’

The truth is, this fact check against Mr Smith and his claims amounted to shoddy work.

This is not ‘fact checking’ and the ABC should withdraw the whole thing.

And we should not forget that there is a broader concern when it comes to the nature of fact checking.

As sketched in the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023: Guidance Note, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will let social media companies know of any concern about information that it judges ‘false, misleading, or deceptive, and where the provision of that content on the service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm’ (where governments and academics are exempt). Climate denialism, nuclear advocacy, mRNA vaccine hesitancy, or criticism of Covid lockdown policies could easily draw ACMA’s ire.

Any ACMA concern might be self-initiated, or could be motivated by inquiry or instruction by the Communications Minister or other ministers – Chris Bowen, for example. ACMA would confidentially discuss with the social media companies what they are doing to suppress the targeted (non-government) ‘misinformation’ and whether the suppression is sufficient. Threats of huge fines in the Bill would assure compliance.

The media companies will likely continue to use ‘fact checkers’ to mediate their reply to ACMA and its minister and to shape the application of their internal censorship policies.

The government notes, ‘The ACMA may also request information from other persons on the same matters. These persons could include fact checkers or other third-party contractors to digital platform providers, to assist the ACMA monitor compliance with misinformation codes, misinformation standards and digital platform rules.’ (Guidance Note, p 13)

Amusingly, the policy worship of self-proclaimed fact checkers coincides with a recent academic review of the discipline internationally. The leading international journal of ‘misinformation studies’ published a survey of 150 of its practitioners but omitted to note one interesting finding buried in its own statistical appendix: ‘fact checkers’ swing hard left. Bjorn Lomborg charts the pattern.

Who could have guessed?

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