William F. Buckley, who served as editor of the conservative magazine National Review for 35 years, was once asked how he selected the topics for his prolific writing. He answered that it was amazingly easy. Each week, he became intensely irritated at least three times. The topics simply fell into his lap.

I find humour to be a useful trigger for selecting topics but not humour in the normal sense of the word. I’m talking about my exasperated responses to completely hare-brained proposals, along the line of ‘you’ve got to be kidding’.

Build a 4,000-kilometre cable between the Northern Territory and Singapore to deliver solar-generated electricity. Now that’s a complete joke. Produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030.  That’s worth a real belly laugh. Construct massive wind farms offshore, including using floating platforms in deep water. That’s a complete crackup.

But here’s the depressing thing. Many journalists working in mainstream media simply regurgitate the self-serving and misleading press releases of sponsors and fail to report the impossibility of what is being proposed. No cynicism, no curiosity, no further research.

Take Mike Cannon-Brookes’s totally absurd idea of constructing a massive solar farm outside Katherine in the Northern Territory to sell electricity to Singaporeans. No consideration for the problems of getting workers and material to this remote site or for the fact that there are no existing transmission lines to move the electrons. Sure, there’s a lot of cheap land and plenty of sunshine outside the wet season. But so what?

But according to the blurb, ‘SunCable’s Australia-Asia PowerLink is a renewable generation and transmission project that aims to build a brighter, more sustainable future for Australian people and businesses. Australia’s abundant renewable resources will be harnessed to support decarbonisation of the Northern Territory and the Asia-Pacific region. They will power new green industries and cities, drive new economies and support communities across the footprint of the project.’

How good is that? Throw in world peace and it’s amazing we are not all clamouring to get a piece of the action. Who could query the outcome of a ‘brighter, more sustainable future’, built one Chinese-made solar panel at a time?

Of course, the whole idea is ridiculous. Even Twiggy Forrest, who is always attracted to a worthy but impossible project, decided to bow out as an investor. Just think about the undersea cables and the massive cliffs beyond the continental shelf that would need to be managed. And there’s the little issue – massive actually – of the voltage loss associated with moving electrons over large distances.

There’s also the ‘minor’ technical issue that Singapore is actually an hour and half behind the Northern Territory time-wise. So, the sun has set over Katherine just when the Singaporeans would be getting home and ramping up their use of electricity – the 5-to-8 p.m. surge.

Where are the sensible people in the room when these major impediments are being discussed? But fear not, Mike C-B, also known as ‘Double Bay Jesus’, has reluctantly acknowledged some of these minor technical impediments to his planet-saving project and has pivoted to constructing a solar powered data centre outside Katherine.

Because that’s going to work. All those highly skilled workers will be flocking to that location. Gosh, the back of Burke looks quite inviting compared to the proposed SunCable site. Bear in mind, here, that SunCable will be seeking government funding to achieve the vision.

Of course, if Mike C-B wants to waste his own money, that is entirely his own business. It’s a bit like his recent purchase of a private jet. Admittedly, this sits uneasily with the image he has tried to create for himself – saving the planet and all that. He also doesn’t have any qualms about charging Atlassian, the public company listed on the Nasdaq, which he co-founded, for his use of the private jet.

But when it comes to the best belly laughs, Twiggy really is top of the pops. He is a past master at going all-in with the latest climate-related fad, throwing time and dollars (as well as dollops of government funding) at different projects. For a while there, the pet project was green hydrogen which he declared was a ‘miracle molecule’ that could replace fossil fuels.

Of course, hydrogen as a source of energy has long been talked about. When George W. Bush was president of the United States, billions of dollars of taxpayer funds were devoted to its promotion, although not the green variety. By this stage, we were all supposed to be driving around in hydrogen-cell-fuelled cars. Alas, it was not to be.

Using renewable energy as the only source of electricity, Twiggy’s plan was to use electrolysis to create green hydrogen from water. He invested in a large warehouse in Queensland and the state government did ‘the right thing’ by constructing a water pipeline – cost estimated at $1 billion, pumping done by diesel generators – and extending transmission lines to the plant.

There were three principal problems from the get-go. The electricity was not available; the hydrogen was too expensive as an alternative source of energy; and there were no customers. Add in the absence of the bespoke infrastructure needed and the impossibility of shipping the hydrogen to customers overseas, at least an affordable price, and the whole dream screamed WHITE ELEPHANT from the start.

Let’s face it, you did not need to be a scientist, an engineer or an economist, to realise that green hydrogen was never going to work. But this didn’t stop governments wasting billions of dollars trying to support the industry and multiple journalists singing its praises as the way of the future. Don’t forget Labor’s SA pin-up boy, Peter Malinauskas, is on the hook for several hundred million dollars for its failed green hydrogen strategy.

Offshore wind is another source of amusement for keyboard warriors such as me. That’s right, let’s take massive turbines over 200 metres in height. Let’s anchor them to the seabed with tonnes of concrete and connect them to the electricity grid onshore.  If the water is too deep, let’s try floating turbines  – that should work. Salt water, tides and storms have always been a friendly companion of engineering works – not.

Even Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s deluded Climate Change and Energy Minister, had to call off the most recent auction for offshore wind projects because there were no bidders at the (exorbitant) price the government was prepared to pay to get the projects off the ground (geddit?). The insane UK government, whose commitment to action on CLIMATE CHANGE is cult-like, is finding that the cost of subsidising offshore wind is rapidly rising.

There is no shortage of topics on which to write because technically and economically impossible projects are regularly floated, even if they never reach the final operational stage. The tragedy is that if there were more inquiring minds, many of these fanciful proposals would never get out of the starting blocks, certainly not without the lure of government funding. But as they say, there is a sucker born every day and sadly many ministers making the decisions fit into that category.