A Modern Mania By Viv Forbes

     Every society seems destined to suffer at least one episode of crowd madness. They range from the Dutch Tulip Mania in 1636, the British South Sea Bubble in 1720, hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic in 1923 and in Zimbabwe in 2008, bank failures, booms and depression, and evil eras of murderous madness like those of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Red Guards in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia. Today we have a modern madness, less dramatic but more insidious, which is affecting the affluent West. It is the phobia about hydro-carbon energy which is now being blamed for every natural disaster, and the parallel religious worship of everything “green”.

     “Green Energy” is a relic from a bygone era when most people lived or worked on farms and relied on animal power, windmills, sailing ships, solar energy and biomass. Subsidising, mandating and promoting its use in modern urbanised industrial society is a con-trick worthy of the shady salesmen of past manias. Weather-dependent “Green Energy” may suit remote or stand-alone applications, but is unreliable and destabilises electricity grids. It is destroying Australian industry and jobs and harming consumers, while disfiguring the landscape and having no measurable effect on global temperature. Manias always end badly. Suffering electricity consumers forced to endure the costs of its unreliability will eventually revolt and we will abandon this modern “Green Energy” mania.

     But as Churchill said: “How much greater the cost, for each day’s delay.”