The War on Fossil Fuels Has Failed: Now We’re Fighting a Desperate Battle for Reliable Energy, By Paul Walker
This blog essay outlines Judith Sloan's powerful argument in The Australian and defending its hard-headed realism against the ideological fantasies driving Western energy policy.
Judith Sloan, one of Australia's most clear-eyed economists, cuts through the green rhetoric with a blunt observation: For nearly two decades, Australia (and much of the West) has waged an aggressive war on fossil fuels — through subsidies, regulations, planning hurdles, carbon schemes, and political hostility. The assumption was simple and seductive: renewables (wind, solar, batteries) would not merely supplement but replace coal, gas, and oil, delivering cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy while hitting net-zero targets.
That assumption has collapsed. Renewables have not displaced fossil fuels in any meaningful scale. Instead, they have added to the energy mix, driving up system costs, destabilising the grid, and leaving nations more vulnerable to supply shocks. The "war" is ending not in green victory, but in a raw battle for energy security — where blackouts loom, industrial competitiveness erodes, and households face punishing bills. The so-called experts, Sloan argues, simply refused to accept that intermittent renewables could never fully substitute for dispatchable, high-density fossil fuels.
Key Elements of Sloan's Argument
Sloan highlights several interlocking failures:
Policy Hostility to Fossil Fuels: Successive governments — Labor most aggressively, but Coalition governments complicit — erected barriers to new coal, gas, and liquid fuel developments. Exploration approvals dragged, projects faced endless legal challenges from activists, and domestic supply was sacrificed on the altar of export revenues and virtue-signalling. Australia, a resource-rich nation, now risks shortages of its own energy.
The False Promise of "Cheapest" Renewables: The mantra that renewables are the lowest-cost form of new generation ignores the hidden system costs: backup gas or coal plants kept spinning for when the wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine; massive grid upgrades and transmission lines; battery storage that remains uneconomic at scale; and curtailment (wasted renewable output). Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) models that cherry-pick renewables while ignoring integration costs have misled policymakers for years.
Real-World Outcomes: Rising electricity prices despite subsidies. Grid instability and increasing blackout risks. Manufacturing and mining — Australia's economic backbone — threatened by unreliable power. Meanwhile, global demand for fossil fuels remains robust, especially in Asia, exposing the folly of unilateral Western de-carbonisation while China and India build coal plants at pace.
Energy Security Wake-Up Call: Sloan points to vulnerabilities in liquid fuel stockpiles (critically low, far below international standards) and the risks of "just-in-time" supply chains. Geopolitical shocks — Middle East tensions, trade disruptions — turn energy policy missteps into immediate economic pain. The transition isn't delivering an "economic prize"; it requires compulsion and massive ongoing subsidies, proving the opposite.
Her conclusion is pragmatic: Australia must urgently remove impediments to increasing domestic fossil fuel availability, boost strategic stockpiles, and abandon the fantasy that renewables alone can power a modern industrial economy. The battle for energy is here — and ideology is losing.
Defending Sloan: Realism Over Utopianism
Sloan's argument is not climate denialism. It is a defence of engineering and economic reality against performative environmentalism. Here's why it holds up, tying into the broader civilizational risks we've explored at the blog — from epistemic crisis and institutional overreach to the West's self-inflicted vulnerabilities.
1.Physics and Intermittency Don't Care About Targets. Wind and solar are dilute, weather-dependent sources. They require overbuilding, vast land use, and firming capacity (usually gas) to achieve reliability. Germany's Energiewende and California's repeated grid warnings offer cautionary tales: high renewable penetration correlates with higher costs and lower reliability. Australia's own NEM (National Electricity Market) data shows coal and gas still carrying the baseload while renewables add volatility. The experts' models assumed perfect storage and transmission that don't exist at affordable scale.
2.Economic Self-Harm. Energy is the master resource. Cheap, reliable power underpins everything — manufacturing, mining, agriculture, hospitals, data centers. Punishing fossil fuels while subsidising intermittents transfers wealth from productive sectors to rent-seekers (renewable developers, consultants, activists). Households and small businesses bear the cost through higher bills. Industry flees to jurisdictions with sensible policy. Sloan is right: this isn't a transition to abundance; it's managed decline dressed as progress.
3.Global Context Exposes the Hypocrisy. While the West wages war on its own fossil infrastructure, developing nations prioritise affordable energy for poverty reduction and growth. China dominates solar panel production (often coal-powered) and continues expanding coal capacity. Global emissions keep rising. Unilateral net-zero targets achieve little environmentally while eroding Western competitiveness — exactly the civilisational risk of virtue-signalling over pragmatism.
4.Energy Security Is National Security. Low fuel stockpiles, dependence on imported refined products, and a fragile grid make societies vulnerable to shocks. Sloan's call to ease barriers on domestic production and build reserves is basic prudence. The COVID mandates and border debates showed how quickly supply chains and public trust fracture under stress. Energy policy that ignores this invites blackouts, inflation, and strategic weakness.
Critics will cry "climate emergency" and demand faster transition. But Sloan's piece exposes the sleight-of-hand: if renewables were truly cheaper and better, no war on fossils or massive subsidies would be needed. The compulsion reveals the weakness of the case.
Tying It to the West's Wider Crises
This energy folly fits our ongoing thread perfectly. Like the epistemic crisis where inconvenient data on COVID policies or migration was suppressed, energy debate suffers from narrative enforcement over evidence. Like the bread-and-circuses distraction, elites push symbolic green targets while ordinary people face higher costs and reliability risks. Like selective justice or digital ID overreach, it centralises power and erodes freedom — this time through energy rationing by price or availability.
The West doesn't need to abandon emissions reductions entirely. It needs honest engineering: all-of-the-above policy that includes nuclear (where feasible), gas as transition fuel, continued coal where economic, and realistic renewables with proper costing. Australia's resource wealth gives it an advantage — squandering it on ideological purity is unforgivable.
Judith Sloan is right. The war on fossil fuels is winding down in exhaustion and failure. What remains is a battle for affordable, reliable energy — the foundation of modern civilisation. Policymakers who ignore this reality aren't saving the planet; they're risking living standards, industrial base, and social stability.
Time to end the war on reality itself. Prioritise energy abundance. Ditch the slogans. Abandon zero net. Secure the energy basics first.
