Solutioneering means jumping to a politically motivated solution to a very ‘urgent’ problem without considering alternative solutions, if indeed there is a problem at all, and without any cost/benefit analysis.

The real goal is to implement the solution and if anyone objects, marginalise the critics and double down on the urgency and the benefits.

Spell out the plan in grand terms, underestimate the cost, and overestimate the benefits. Think Snowy 2.0!

It is a crisis, it will cost more later! As a last resort, say it is not an expense, it is an investment in the future!

Don’t consult the people who will be most impacted, engage ‘stakeholders’ including predatory lobbies, empire-building bureaucrats, and regulators.

Solutioneers thrive on crises, ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste!’ and if there is no crisis, just make it up! Did someone mention climate change, a bad kind of influenza, racism, online threats to children?

On the eve of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, the infant academic industry of social welfare studies turned up a number of ‘crises’ including teenage pregnancy. This prompted a wave of sex education, personal development, and social adjustment programs in schools.

These started in senior high school and we had a session with the slightly embarrassed head teacher and the science master in Year 12. That was during the early days. Since then, these lessons have been starting in younger and younger grades.

Thomas Sowell regarded sex education as a progressive ploy to dismantle traditional values. It was sold as a solution to teenage pregnancy and venereal disease even though in the 1960s, when it started, both had been going down for years.

‘In reality, the long downward trend in both not only ended, but rose dramatically, after new attitudes toward sex were promoted in the schools under the guise of educating students.’

Over the decades, sex education started earlier and has reached pre-school where it is now part of the radical movement to promote wokeness of all kinds, including toxic masculinity, climate alarmism, and gender fluidity. All this before children can read.

The quest to achieve Net Zero is the ultimate example of solutioneering, unparalleled in the scope of ambition and the calamitous consequences.

Trillions of dollars spent around the world on wind and solar infrastructure have delivered more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts! That looks like a bad idea, but the climate and energy industrial complex is apparently too big to fail.

The root of the problem is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that the Australian investigators, Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang, documented over a decade ago.

The recognition of wind droughts by the appropriate authorities would have been one of the greatest practical discoveries of the 20th Century, averting the waste of trillions of dollars, but the work of the Australian wind watchers is not even acknowledged in their own country.

It as simple as ABC. That is not an acronym, just three things that everyone needs to know about wind and solar power.

A: The grid has to receive a continuous input to match demand, minute by minute.

B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken at night when there is little or no wind.

C: Storage at the scale required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable with current technology.

The first two points are obvious and so is the third, after calculating the amount of power required to get through a windless night without conventional power in the system. The Prime Minister and Chris Bowen routinely refer to water storage, as though storing energy is a no-brainer but they should have consulted a farmer or an agricultural scientist.

The amount of man-made water storage is an invisible fraction of one per cent of the water stored naturally in the soil, not to mention permanent waterways and lakes.

Imagine plants growing without natural storage, they would need continuous rain or heavy mist to survive, otherwise a few minutes of sunshine would kill them. That would be the fate of an RE-dependent grid on a windless night.

The Net Zero program is staggering, and it is on the brink of collapse but many more rural communities in Australia will be divided and ruined before the curtain comes down on the tragic drama.

Roger James, an English GP and local councillor, coined the term solutioneering in the 1950s as he observed the socialist Labour government building the new Jerusalem in the green and pleasant land.

Rafe Champion is a retired dairy farmer with an Agricultural Science degree