‘If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,’ wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It’s one of his ‘Proverbs of Hell’, and it seems apt, considering the belated getting of wisdom dawning on Australian businesses driven by Labor and the zeitgeist to persist in the folly of net-zero renewable schemes.

Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue, Australia’s loudest green hydrogen evangelist, laid off another 90 staff from its hydrogen division on Tuesday, 14 May. The company still insists green hydrogen is ‘the fuel of the future’; it’s just not the fuel of the present.

One assumes Fortescue reached this conclusion once Albanese’s subsidies were no longer enough to make wasting money profitable. Fortescue now says it will focus on developing technologies to deliver green molecules at scale, efficiently and cost-effectively, to produce the vast quantities of green hydrogen needed for green iron. In other words, current tech is inefficient, unscalable, and economically unviable.

Fortescue isn’t alone in shedding green illusions. After hosting 117 Australian companies at its annual investor conference this month, Macquarie Bank – long enriched by green subsidies – observed firms are now prioritising energy security over climate, noting ‘more signs of a pullback and slower transition’.

Whitehaven Coal chairman Mark Vaile put it plainly: ‘We sell most of our thermal product into North Asia, where nations are expanding ultra-supercritical coal-fired power stations and managing carbon very differently – and successfully – from Australia.’ The CEO of Japan’s largest oil refiner, Eneos, agrees: the ‘trend toward a carbon-neutral society is slowing’.

This awakening might as well be happening on Mars however for all the impact it’s having on the Albanese government.

Once upon a time, in the 1980s, Labor, under Hawke and Keating, embraced economic rationalism. No such green rationalism troubles the government of Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers, and their benighted Climate and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, who is itching to shut down ‘our ageing coal-fired power stations’ and replace them with renewables.

Undeterred by the fact that the government is falling short of existing targets  – 82 per cent renewables in the grid by 2030 and a 43 per cent emissions cut from 2005 levels – Bowen wants to go even harder.

Australia’s emissions have fallen 29 per cent since 2005, but after three years of Labor’s climate policies – and soaring electricity prices – the latest Safeguard Mechanism data shows just a 1.9 per cent annual drop from Australia’s largest polluters.

That figure underscores the Everest businesses face if they’re to cut emissions across all sectors just to hit the 2030 targets, let alone net zero by 2050.

Bowen claims the ‘silent majority’ backs his net-zero fantasy, yet he was the one who was silent during the election after the Prime Minister abandoned the Powering Australia modelling it took to the 2022 election that underpinned its joke promise to cut power bills by $275 a year by 2025, and by $378 from 2030.

The only energy policy Labor discussed during the campaign was Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien’s plan to build seven nuclear plants on coal sites – costed by Labor at a staggering $600 billion to hit net zero by 2050.

That’s a prize piece of scarenomics, yet Dutton and O’Brien failed to explain the reality: as countries like Finland and Korea have shown the cost would be far lower. The first plant might cost $14 billion, with each subsequent unit 10 to 25 per cent cheaper. The total? Closer to $80-to-90 billion.

In that sense, O’Brien’s nuclear policy was a rerun of John Hewson’s Fightback disaster, with the costing of nuclear plants the 21st-century version of Hewson fumbling the GST on a birthday cake. The result felt like 1993 – an election the Coalition had hubristically called unlosable – only worse. And for Albanese and his left faction, who’ve now decimated the ranks of both the Greens and Liberals, this is, as Keating said, the sweetest victory of all.

Yet the deeper flaw in O’Brien’s plan was accepting the net-zero-by-2050 target at all. Labor cleverly refused to cost its own plan, but according to the Net Zero Australia project – run by the universities of Melbourne, Princeton, and others – its renewables-backed scheme would cost $7-to-9 trillion by 2060 – an eye-watering $194-to-250 billion a year from 2025 to 2060. It is this that makes nuclear cheap by comparison.

This mad scheme involves tripling the National Electricity Market and carpeting 68 million hectares – about 9 per cent of the country – with 1.9 TW of solar, 132 GW of onshore wind, 42 GW of offshore wind, 10,000 km of transmission lines poorly stabilised by batteries and hydro, mandated electric vehicles and heat pumps, vast desalination to produce green hydrogen, and a network of pipelines to capture and transport CO2 to storage sites.

The whole scheme is bonkers. So why didn’t Dutton and O’Brien tell Labor they were dreaming? Because the Liberal left and its venal rent seekers want to hop on board the net-zero gravy train.

That’s also why a group no one’s heard of – Liberals Against Nuclear – has been running ads on Sky News since the election.

Yet nuclear is only indispensable if you’re chasing net-zero delusions – which, even then, are unachievable with current technology.

In the real world, a responsible government would face the strategic and fiscal threats bearing down on Australia and do the only sensible thing: go for growth.

Australia has over 450 major mining projects in the pipeline and loses $68 billion a year on the stalled or abandoned ones. Environmental approvals should take hours, not years – AI can make that possible. Let businesses deduct 100 per cent of capital investments, such as new plant and machinery, and they’ll invest. Real growth is the only way to end bracket creep and fund defence at 3 per cent of GDP – vital to deter threats from China and Russia.

A responsible government would legalise nuclear energy but be technology-neutral on power generation. It would remove itself from net zero or any commitment that did not have an economically feasible technological pathway.

Only one politician had the courage to put a tax cuts and growth agenda to Dutton – only for Dutton to nervously brush it into the too-hard basket.

Whether that politician sits on the backbench or serves in a shadow portfolio, he now has one mission: to ensure Australians understand that unless we abandon our net-zero follies and wise up to growth, we risk losing everything – our sovereignty, our prosperity, and our freedom.