Half a century ago, the eco-catastrophists in the Club of Rome conjured up apocalyptic nightmares about ‘the limits to growth’ – the world was going to reach ‘peak oil’, or ‘peak gas’, or run out of food, plunging the planet into mass starvation. As we know, none of these scarcity nightmares happened. Thanks to human ingenuity, we invented new ways of doing more with less, including feeding billions more people.

Ironically, what we have discovered in pursuit of the utopian fantasy of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is the limits to decarbonisation. Ruinously, at the cost of trillions of dollars and millions of jobs, Western governments are discovering that you can’t wish away the need for baseload power or pretend that wind turbines and solar panels can replace much maligned fossil fuels without driving up power prices.

It turns out that it’s not ‘peak oil’ that we have to worry about, but ‘peak renewables’. That’s the point when, at roughly 40 to 50 per cent of grid penetration, every extra megawatt of intermittent energy adds exponentially to power prices.

As you might have guessed, Australia has well and truly passed ‘peak renewables’, which might help explain why the cost of electricity has jumped 25 per cent in just the last 12 months. The diffuse, highly dispersed supply of harvestable wind and sunshine forces power providers to build three times as many generators and vastly more transmission lines to reach remote locations where piddling amounts of intermittent energy are generated. Then there’s the cost of stabilising their unpredictable surges, the exorbitantly expensive backup batteries that last minutes to hours, not weeks, and the environmental vandalism of paving farmland, seascapes and wilderness with toxic contraptions prone to explode into flames or break down in storms and have an insatiable requirement for replacement.

Ever since the Howard government, to its discredit, created the Renewable Energy Target, the myth of cheap renewables has been papered over by subsidies and soaring prices — but, like every other Ponzi scheme, it was never sustainable.

It is painfully obvious that Albanese’s promise of power prices falling by $275 per household per year by 2025, which he repeated at least a hundred times in his 2022 election campaign, has collided with the laws of physics and economics – subjects that Chris-information Bowen and Grim Jim Chalmers must have skipped at school.

The Prime Minister’s cheaper and cleaner energy revolution has produced higher electricity prices that are driving up the cost of living, driving small businesses broke, and pushing large manufacturers like nickel processors and aluminium smelters offshore.

Pathetically, the Prime Minister’s answer this week was three hours of free electricity. Albo’s midday happy hours will just make electricity more expensive during the evening rush hour, the six o’clock swill. As for emissions, they are flatlining; or being exported, mainly to China, which burns more coal – including ours – than the rest of the world combined.

The most shameless apologist for this bonfire of the vanities is former NSW energy minister and treasurer Matt Kean, who brazenly argued this week that the collapse of the viability of the Tomago aluminium smelter, and the probable export of its jobs and emissions to China, had nothing to do with his fatally flawed ‘Renewable Energy Zones’, which have produced energy that is neither reliable, renewable, affordable or even available, and instead reflects China’s superior efficiency. How absurd. What Kean calls ‘efficiency’ is based on cheap coal-fired power, state subsidies, and indifference to labour rights and belching emissions and particulate matter into the atmosphere.

Let’s be clear. Deindustrialisation is not decarbonisation; it’s a dangerous delusion. In driving energy-intensive industries offshore, Labor simultaneously harms Australian workers, weakens the economy, and increases global emissions. It’s triple-bottom-line vandalism – economic, social, and environmental.

The consequences are clear. Renewables are fuelling rising power prices, inflation, and unemployment, putting upward pressure on interest rates and increasing the threat of stagflation. The only thing falling is productivity.

Labor won the last two elections by fraudulently offering cheaper electricity than the Coalition while posing as the planetary saviour.

The Liberal path to re-election is obvious. It must reject the fantasy economics of the renewable energy transition and the cynical apologetics of those ‘Kean’ on exporting emissions to China.

A genuinely liberal policy would recognise that energy affordability, reliability and security are essential to national security and prosperity. Forcing up the cost of coal-fired power or forcing it out of the market without a cheap baseload replacement when competitors are using it to undercut us is unfair.

Some in the Liberal party remain besotted with the Paris Agreement. Senator Andrew Bragg, for example, says Australia can’t abandon the Paris Agreement without becoming a ‘pariah state’.

That’s absurd. Nobody is treating the United States, China, India or Russia as pariahs for refusing to commit to net zero by 2050.

And no country claiming to be committed to net zero by 2050 has any hope of reaching that target. All they’re doing is exporting emissions abroad and re-importing them embedded in goods.

In any event, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require net-zero emissions by 2050. It speaks only of achieving a balance between emissions and their removals in the second half of the 21st century. Net zero could be reached in 2099 and still meet the Paris Agreement.

Meanwhile, Tim Wilson argues that the Liberal party should ‘find a position (on net zero) that achieves net-zero price increases and net-zero outages – because that’s the pathway to get permission for emissions reduction’.

Put Bragg and Wilson together, and there is no problem keeping faith with an international commitment to net zero sometime before 2100, technology-permitting, so long as the Liberals make a cast-iron commitment to not export jobs and emissions and to cut the cost of electricity. How? Remove all renewable subsidies, and you cut not just the cost of coal-fired power but the incentive to install any more reckless renewables.

Those who, like Dave Sharma, claim that abandoning the net-zero by 2050 target will make it impossible to win back Teal seats need only look at Wilson. He unseated Teal Zoe Daniels by relentlessly reminding voters that thanks to Labor zealotry, local electricity prices and global emissions had skyrocketed.

It was Paul Keating who said, always back a horse called self-interest. The Liberals need to rediscover the power of the hip-pocket nerve – and hit it. Now that Trump is no longer a dirty word, but Albo’s bestie, they should make their mantra, Make Electricity Cheap Again.