Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

With California electricity prices continuing to rise and energy demands set to skyrocket in the coming years, it's time for the state to rethink its outdated views on nuclear power.

It has been 50 years since California passed a moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants due to concerns about waste disposal. Since then, however, climate change has worsened and power prices have risen sharply as California has expanded use of renewable energy while cutting back on fossil and nuclear power.

This month, we met in Napa with state legislators, policymakers, agencies, energy companies and labor unions to discuss a hard truth: The 1976 ban on building new nuclear power alternatives no longer makes sense.

California prides itself on being a clean energy leader. Yet the average household pays around 32 cents per kilowatt-hour - nearly double the national average. Solar, touted as perhaps the cheapest energy source, produces about a third of California's electricity. But what really matters is the cost of the state's entire system: the extra transmission lines through fire-prone terrain, the immense overbuild of renewable production to compensate for its intermittent output, the batteries that cover hours but not weeks, and the gas plants needed for evenings and heat waves.

Those extra costs show up on monthly bills.

According to California's grid operator, the state will need $30 billion to $50 billion in new transmission infrastructure by 2040, paid mostly by households and businesses. Some of that investment is necessary for wildfire hardening and grid modernization. But a significant portion is driven by the need to connect remote solar and wind projects and to transmit power when production surges in one region and drops in another.

The last nuclear plant built in California, Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo County, was scheduled to close in 2025. Then grid operators warned of possible blackouts and the state reversed course, extending operations through 2030. That reprieve bought time (a decision to extend for another 20 years is pending), but revealed something unsettling: California had nearly lost its most reliable clean power source, with no replacement ready.

Diablo Canyon generates 9% of the state's electricity and 17% of its clean energy. Keeping it running for another four years is a necessary stopgap, but it's not a strategy.

Energy grids that rely on sunshine and wind must build substantially more capacity to cover drops in output. They also require additional spending on batteries and backup plants, like natural gas, to provide electricity when it is needed most. Studies have shown that as renewables scale beyond roughly 30% of generation, these system costs accelerate significantly.

Firm power, such as nuclear, reduces the need for backup and transmission. A 2021 MIT study found that achieving a low-carbon grid with nuclear power included in the mix was 62% less expensive than one relying solely on renewables and storage. The International Energy Agency has reached similar conclusions, stating that the clean energy transition will be far more expensive and take much longer without including nuclear energy in the mix.

Grids with a large share of nuclear power also outperform on decarbonization. California's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of power are roughly 10 times higher than those of France, Sweden and the Canadian province of Ontario - all of which have largely decarbonized their grids by incorporating nuclear and hydropower.

Paradoxically, California remains home to world-leading nuclear innovation. Advanced nuclear startups, national nuclear labs and world-class nuclear engineering programs are all based here. Yet while California tech giants have signed agreements to purchase more than 10 gigawatts of new nuclear power, none of it will be built here.

Concerns about safety and waste deserve serious attention. But unlike older facilities, modern reactors use passive safety systems that greatly reduce risks. It's also worth noting that while America's aging nuclear plants continue to provide one-fifth of the country's electricity needs, they have never caused a single fatality.

Nuclear fuel disposal and recycling technology have advanced since 1976. There has also never been, it should be noted, a fatal accident in the global history of civilian spent fuel management. And while countries like Finland are set to store waste in underground repositories, others like France and Russia consider that waste a precious asset to recycle and reuse as fuel, a strategy the United States is now considering.

California's ban on new nuclear plants may have made sense in its time. But today's challenges are of a different order. Rising electricity costs are hurting California families and businesses, driving many of them away. In Napa, we told state leaders something simple: Energy policy is not about nostalgia. It is about whether the entire system can deliver affordable, clean and reliable power at scale and on demand.

In many ways, California remains the place where the world's future is built. But when it comes to energy, it's still stuck in the past.

It's time to embrace the future once again - and lift the outdated ban.

Published in the Spectator Australia Flat White

Australia has reached an emperor-has-no-clothes moment in energy. The cracks are visible. But the course doesn’t change. Not because the evidence is unclear. But because ideology has become a blindfold.

For many years, Australia has told itself a reassuring story about energy. Coal would go down. Renewables would go up. Emissions would fall. Costs would fall. Reliability would be maintained. It was a nice story. But energy systems don’t run on stories. They run on physics. Engineering. Materials. Land. Weather. And time.

What Australia effectively did was set a target, an endpoint, before designing the system to reach it. We chose a destination – ‘100 per cent renewables’ – and assumed the system would adapt. That transmission would appear. Storage would scale. Communities would consent. Costs would fall. And reliability would take care of itself.

Over time, the gap between narrative and reality got bigger. To the point that Australians now face some of the highest electricity prices in the OECD, despite living in one of the most energy-rich countries in the world. The Australian Energy Market Operator has to intervene more frequently than ever because weather-dependent generation creates volatility in the grid that must be actively managed. Coal plants scheduled to close are being kept online because we haven’t solved what replaces them at scale. And the same politicians who promised that electricity would be cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable now rarely say all three together. That silence tells you something.

My Own Reckoning

I was a strong advocate of renewable energy. Then I started seeing things that didn’t add up. I woke up to the cost of everything required to make intermittent power usable: transmission lines, grid stabilisation, and storage. Then, the scale of what we needed to build. Not just wind and solar. But batteries, interconnectors, peaking plants and duplicate capacity. Then the footprint. Thousands of square kilometres of land. Cutting through pristine landscapes.

I realised that no matter how much we built, we needed to build more. Weather dependency means the system can never be complete. I saw projects announced with excitement, then quietly abandoned. Transmission lagged generation. Communities pushed back because of land use, cost, and fairness. Curtailment became routine.

And here’s the paradox. Australia is installing renewables faster per capita than almost any country on Earth. Yet bills are rising, reliability is falling, and we need more coal and gas than the plan promised.

I began to notice a gap. Between what was being said publicly and what engineers, grid operators, insurers and investors were saying privately. That was my own emperor-has-no-clothes moment.

So, I did what any serious person should do. Due diligence. I tested the system. I went around the world attending international energy conferences, technical briefings, and policy forums. Met with regulators, industry, and utilities across Europe, North America and the Middle East. And everywhere, the same thing came up. Firm power. The engineers understood it. The grid operators planned around it. The insurers priced risk through it. The investors demanded it. But the political conversation back home avoided it.

The Real Constraints

Australia’s problem isn’t renewables. It’s treating ‘100 per cent renewables’ as a system endpoint, rather than a component. This approach presents four structural constraints.

First, the true system cost. Renewables are often described as cheap based on one narrow metric: the Levelised Cost of Energy. It measures the cost of producing electricity at the generator. But it excludes the costs that make intermittent power usable – transmission, grid stabilisation, storage, gas plants kept online as insurance, curtailment payments when power arrives at the wrong time. When you include them, renewables stop being cheap. They become capital-intensive and subsidy-dependent. AEMO estimates the full system cost of the transition to be between $300 to $500 billion by 2050.

Second, social licence and land. To meet our targets, we need tens of gigawatts of additional wind, solar and batteries, and around 10,000 kilometres of new transmission lines. That footprint lands on real communities. And they’re pushing back. In parts of Northern Queensland, some of the oldest and most ecologically valuable rainforests on Earth are being cleared to make way for renewable energy projects and transmission corridors. If decarbonisation requires us to sacrifice our ecosystems, we’re not solving an environmental problem. We’re relocating it.

Third, intermittency and curtailment. On mild spring days in South Australia, solar generation can exceed total demand around midday. The excess must be curtailed, exported, or stored. But transmission capacity is limited. Storage remains expensive and limited in duration. Curtailment becomes routine. The more weather-dependent generation you add, the more often supply and demand misalign. Curtailment does not disappear as systems mature. It intensifies.

Fourth, abundance versus adequacy. A single data centre can consume as much power as a city of 50,000 people. AI, advanced manufacturing, mining, desalination – all require continuous, firm, predictable power at scale. That is where ‘100 per cent renewables’ stops being ambitious and starts becoming a constraint.

What the World Shows Us

I now live in France, and I experience every day what a firm, low-carbon system looks like. It’s boring. Predictable. Reliable. Clean. France generates around 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear. The result is low prices and low emissions. Stable supply. Electricity prices are roughly half those of Germany.

Ontario faced exactly what Australia faces now. How to phase out coal while keeping the lights on. In 2003, coal provided about 25 per cent of Ontario’s generation. By 2014, coal was phased out entirely by pairing renewables with nuclear and hydro. Emissions fell. Reliability held. Today, nuclear provides about 60 per cent of Ontario’s electricity. Ontario didn’t have to de-industrialise.

Meanwhile, California and Germany set aggressive renewable targets and banned nuclear. Both are struggling. California experienced rolling blackouts in 2020. Germany shut its nuclear plants in the middle of an energy crisis. Since then, emissions reductions stalled. Electricity prices are among the highest in Europe. And despite one of the world’s largest renewable build-outs, Germany remains dependent on electricity imports from France – a system anchored in nuclear power.

Physics doesn’t negotiate.

Why We Can’t Change Course

Australia is one of only two OECD countries with a legislative ban on nuclear power. We are the world’s third-largest uranium exporter. We mine it. We sell it. Other countries use our uranium to generate clean, reliable power. We do not.

Everyone can see the problem. But no one wants to be the first to say it out loud. It’s electoral suicide. Renewables have become a progressive identity. Nuclear has been coded as conservative. Crossing that line means betraying your base. Once you create a subsidy-dependent industry, it lobbies hard to protect itself. Environmental groups defined themselves by opposing nuclear for decades. They can’t reverse without losing credibility. And in most newsrooms, questioning renewables equals climate denial.

The result? A system locked in place. Not by physics. By politics.

The Way Forward

I didn’t change my values. I changed my conclusions when the system stopped behaving as promised. I support renewables. But I’m no longer a supporter of renewables-only. The evidence is clear. Systems combining renewables with firm power outperform those that do not.

Australia has every advantage. Engineering expertise. Stable institutions. Wealth. Space. What we lack is the intellectual honesty to admit the emperor has no clothes. We need to accept that a diverse system is better – one that includes renewables, gas, hydro, geothermal, batteries, and nuclear. We need to lift the prohibition. We need to commission a serious analysis. And we need to keep all options open.

The emperor’s clothes are gone. What matters now is whether we choose competence. Or continue pretending not to notice.

Published in the Australian Financial Review

When I first read Why Nations Fail, Australia certainly didn’t come to mind.

Yet as our energy debate drifts further from engineering and economic fact, the book has taken on uncomfortable relevance. If authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson ever released an updated edition, Australia would almost certainly be paired with Germany: two wealthy nations risking their future not through corruption or scarcity, but through institutional overconfidence and narratives that no longer match how energy systems actually work.

The authors describe a pattern they call the “vicious circle”: leaders become so invested in a narrative that they defend it long after evidence has turned against them.

Germany’s Energiewende is a textbook example – a prosperous nation clinging to a renewables-only vision even as prices rose, dependence on Russian gas deepened, and energy-intensive industries suffered.

Australia now shows similar traits: ignoring rising bills, growing curtailment and slowing investment because acknowledging them would require challenging a political identity rather than adjusting a policy.

The book contrasts these failures with societies that “break the mould” when circumstances demand it. France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and the Netherlands have all revised their energy strategies by reinforcing nuclear, securing gas, and strengthening firming capacity.

Australia and Germany, by contrast, resemble cases where institutions become psychologically captive to their own storyline. The danger is not sudden collapse but steady erosion of competitiveness as nations choose narrative comfort over practical competence.

Governments rarely fail because information is unavailable; they fail because it’s inconvenient.

Australia’s insistence that an advanced industrial economy can be powered primarily by intermittent renewables within a decade has shifted from policy position to political identity. Evidence is treated as threat rather than guidance.

The pattern mirrors the years before the 2008 global financial crisis, when economists and regulators warned that the US mortgage market was structurally unsound, yet leaders insisted everything was fine.

The US Federal Reserve’s own historical account shows how explicit and ignored those warnings were. The result was a crisis as much psychological as financial – a system built on narratives too comforting to abandon.

Domestically, Australia’s 2011 Brisbane floods followed the same script. Hydrologists had raised concerns about dam management and floodplain development, but acting was politically inconvenient. Once disaster hit, investigations found that institutional blindness amplified the damage.

Today, warning signs flash across Australia’s energy system. Electricity prices have risen more than 30 per cent year-on-year once temporary rebates are removed, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Investment in large-scale renewables has collapsed: the Clean Energy Council reports that only 1.1 gigawatts reached final investment decision in 2024, far short of the roughly 6 gigawatts required annually to meet the government’s 2030 target.

Meanwhile, the Australian Energy Market Operator shows solar curtailment exceeds 20 per cent to 25 per cent in parts of NSW and Victoria – vast amounts of clean energy the system cannot absorb.

In any functioning system, this would trigger immediate correction. Instead, the government insists the transition is “on track”.

Understanding why requires examining three cognitive forces.

First is sunk-cost fallacy. After a decade promising that renewables alone would deliver cheap, abundant electricity, reversing course means admitting misjudgement. For a government that ties its identity to climate credentials, this is politically excruciating.

Second is groupthink. Australia’s energy debate is dominated by a tight ecosystem of advisers, NGOs, consultants and sympathetic experts sharing the same assumptions. This creates an echo chamber in which dissenting voices – even those grounded in engineering or economics – are dismissed as obstacles.

Third is moral licensing. Because the government views its intentions as virtuous, it feels psychologically insulated from policy failure. When motivations are framed as noble, outcomes become easier to excuse.

A decade ago, leaders might have claimed ignorance. Today, globalisation and real-time information remove that excuse. Around the world, advanced economies treat energy as strategic infrastructure – the foundation of economic competitiveness and national sovereignty. Crucially, they are adjusting course where reality demands it.

Germany is the most striking example. Once the global champion of renewables-first strategy, Germany now faces some of the highest electricity prices in the OECD and is being forced to strengthen gas and capacity mechanisms to stabilise the grid. Germany is the future Australia is walking toward – only Australia still has time to change direction.

Other countries have already shifted. France is investing €52 billion ($92 billion) to expand nuclear capacity and secure long-term competitiveness. South Korea reinstated nuclear expansion after its phase-out weakened energy security and threatened heavy industry. Japan is restarting reactors and locking in long-term LNG supply because its economy cannot function without firm power. The United Kingdom is investing in both large reactors and small modular reactors to ensure future baseload. The United States is approving record LNG export infrastructure to support allies and domestic industry, while revitalising nuclear through production tax credits.

The pattern is clear: nations that secure affordable, firm, reliable energy prosper; nations that treat energy as ideology decline.

Energy policy is destiny. It determines which nations manufacture, innovate and attract investment, and which lose industries, competitiveness and geopolitical autonomy. It shapes household living standards, regional cohesion, national budgets and strategic security.

Australia is not doomed to failure. But it is drifting – and the drift is psychological, not technological. A refusal to re-examine assumptions, even as evidence accumulates, is precisely the dynamic Why Nations Fail describes: institutions that stop learning.

The warnings are clear. The global lessons are visible. The data is unambiguous. The only question is whether Australia’s leaders can overcome the inertia and self-protective instincts that have undone other nations, and act before the correction becomes severe.

Published in The Interpreter

For all the grand declarations about a global energy transition, the real story has been written not in climate summits but in the quiet, deliberate choices made by the world’s major powers. As Adrian Monck, former managing director at the World Economic Forum, recently summarised: “Europe chose regulation; China chose manufacturing; the US chose extraction.”

The outcomes, unsurprisingly, are far from equal.

Europe spent two decades perfecting the rulebook, including emissions trading schemes, renewable quotas and green taxonomies. Brussels built the world’s most elaborate framework for climate governance. It became the moral centre of global decarbonisation. But in the process, it allowed its industrial base to wither. European solar manufacturing once held more than 40% of the global market. By 2023 that figure had collapsed to roughly 2% as production migrated to Asia, led by China.

For 20 years, the US has excelled in innovation, with solar, batteries, advanced reactors and the shale boom all tracing back to American labs. What it neglected was industrialisation. The US created the technologies of the transition while China built the factories.

But for all the rhetoric about “reshoring”, the US remains predominantly upstream. It mines lithium, refines some critical minerals and produces a portion of global polysilicon, but on a scale dwarfed by China, which controls roughly 93% of that capacity. The world’s richest nation is digging the inputs for factories it does not own.

While Western governments debated carbon prices and regulatory frameworks, Beijing built the entire industrial stack. It did not attempt to optimise one part of the supply chain; it built the whole chain. China subsidised upstream materials, poured capital into wafer and cell production, locked in refining capacity, scaled module assembly, and offered cheap electricity in key regions.

Only in the first half of 2025, China installed 256 gigawatts of new solar capacity, more than twice as much as the rest of the world combined. In batteries, China produces around 70% of the world’s lithium-ion cells.

This is not an advantage – it is architecture. China built the industrial spine of the energy transition, and the world will spend the coming decade negotiating its dependence on that spine.

This is why the West’s climate ambitions increasingly collide with its geopolitical anxieties. Europe can legislate its way to net zero, but it cannot meet those targets without Chinese hardware. America can subsidise clean technology at a historic scale, but its roll-out still depends on imported components from the very country it seeks to counterbalance. The transition is universal in rhetoric but profoundly concentrated in execution.

And several close allies, from resource-rich nations to advanced economies, have similarly locked themselves into roles that fall well short of their strategic potential.

Australia – a trusted democracy, a critical minerals powerhouse and a stable US ally holding almost one third of the world’s identified uranium resources – still plays an almost entirely upstream role, digging and shipping while banning nuclear power, enrichment and fuel fabrication at home. The result is an irony: Australia hosts a Pentagon-backed gallium refinery (part of the new US-Australia critical minerals agreements) but won’t build a reactor. Australia exports rare earths but makes no magnets. It helps the US reduce reliance on China while relying on Chinese-made technologies itself. These are political choices, not technical limits.

Luckily, some democracies have shown what a sovereign energy strategy looks like. France, led by the nuclear fleet of electric utility company Électricité de France (EDF), has already done what many countries are still only talking about. It generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, delivering some of the lowest-carbon and most affordable electricity in the OECD. The results speak for themselves: in 2024 France exported 103 TWh of electricity (a 48% increase) while Germany, having shut down its reactors, faced higher prices, higher emissions and growing dependence on imports.

EDF’s model is not speculative, theoretical or aspirational. It is operating at a national scale, every day, powering industry, stabilising grids, and delivering clean energy at a fraction of the carbon intensity of its neighbours.

At the same time, EDF must play a larger international role, because as China and Russia expand their nuclear exports, democracies need a credible alternative with proven gigawatt-scale experience. France is one of the few nations that has already done it at scale.

Meanwhile, China continues to demonstrate energy pragmatism: building solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and coal simultaneously to maximise reliability and industrial advantage. It is not ideological about energy; it is strategic. The question is whether democracies are willing to be strategic, too.

This should be a wake-up call for the democratic world. If China is already the workshop of the transition, and if Europe and the US remain focused on regulation and extraction, then allies such as Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea must expand the industrial footprint of the free world. Western economies do not need more suppliers of raw minerals; they need democracies capable of manufacturing, processing, building fuel cycles and deploying sovereign clean energy.

Until then, we must live with the uncomfortable truth that the energy transition already has a frontrunner, and it is not a democracy. China built the factories, the scale and the supply chains. Europe wrote the rules. America wrote the subsidies. Allies like Australia supplied the rocks. If democracies want to change that story, they have to build.

The energy transition is not yet won. But it will be won by those who build, not those who merely buy.

Published in the Australian Financial Review

For years, I was a passionate and vocal supporter of Australia’s net zero commitment. As the leader of an environmental organisation, I championed the target from boardrooms to parliament, persuading conservative and progressive politicians that it wasn’t just the right thing to do for the planet, it was also smart economics. Net zero seemed like a rallying point for innovation, national resilience and environmental stewardship.

But today I must say something I never imagined: net zero in Australia has gone badly off course. Not because the ambition was wrong, but because the road we chose to get there was built on fantasy, not facts.

What began as a science-based mission to decarbonise has been hijacked by rigid ideology, vested interests, and a startling disregard for basic principles of engineering, economics and even environmental protection.

For the past few years, Australia’s net zero agenda has been driven by a single idea: renewable energy, built fast, at any cost, is the only way to reach our climate goals. That message has been repeated in speeches, policies, investor briefings, and public campaigns. It sounds decisive. It feels bold. But it is dangerously incomplete.

Here’s the reality: Australia has spent over $29 billion of public and electricity-customer funding on large-scale renewable energy subsidies since 2014. We have rolled out close to 40 per cent renewables on our electricity grid. Yet power bills have risen by 23.6 per cent in the past year alone. In many states, families are now paying 20 to 30 per cent more per year for electricity than before the transition accelerated.

Meanwhile, emissions, the very metric this was all supposed to solve, have barely budged. Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions for 2024 sit at 446 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent – just 27 per cent below 2005 levels, almost unchanged from last year. That figure includes controversial land-use credits. In other words, after all the spending, all the land clearing, all the transmission lines and subsidies, we are flatlining.

If this were a business strategy, no board would approve it.

We urgently need to admit the obvious: building wind and solar farms as fast as possible, in isolation from grid needs, environmental protection and baseload power, is not a climate plan. It’s a construction campaign paid for by taxpayers, delivered by private companies, and justified by slogans rather than engineering.

The most alarming part is that this approach is not even helping the environment it claims to save.

Across northern Queensland and regional New South Wales, vast swathes of native forests, home to endangered species, Indigenous heritage, and biodiverse ecosystems, are being bulldozed for solar farms and transmission corridors.

In Queensland alone, around 25,000 hectares are estimated for clearing in the Northern REZ renewable energy projects currently under assessment, with an additional 13,332 hectares of remnant vegetation at risk statewide if all current proposals proceed. These ecosystems are meant to be protected under the EPBC Act, but in practice, environmental due diligence is being fast-tracked or abandoned in the name of “urgency”.

It pains me to say it, but in the rush for renewable build-out, environmentalism has been used as a shield to excuse environmental destruction.

Whole communities are being told to accept 85-metre pylons, roads carved through wildlife corridors, land sterilised for decades, and ocean zones filled with offshore turbines, all pushed through without proper consultation, social licence or full impact assessment.

What is the point of cutting emissions if we destroy nature to do it?

This is not what net zero was supposed to be. Net zero was supposed to unite all Australians behind a clean, affordable, reliable, and environmentally respectful future. Instead, it is now synonymous with higher bills, land conflicts, and worsening grid stability.

The biggest flaw? We still have no genuine plan for 24/7 baseload power.

Australia is phasing out coal, but what is replacing it? Intermittent renewables cannot run a modern economy alone. And so, gas is filling the gap. The Australian Energy Market Operator projects gas generation will need to increase by 14 per cent by 2030 to maintain grid reliability as coal retires. Gas peaked plants, gas capacity investments, gas purchase contracts – not temporary, but structural. That is not an energy transition; that is greenwashing fossil dependence.

At the same time, we continue to ban nuclear energy, the only zero-emissions technology capable of providing reliable baseload power at scale. Australia is the only G20 nation with a ban on nuclear energy.

Yet while we block nuclear, the rest of the world is shifting.

In June 2023, Sweden’s parliament changed its energy target from “100 per cent renewable electricity” to “100 per cent fossil-free electricity”, explicitly reintroducing nuclear as central to achieving industrial competitiveness and energy security. The UK is doubling down on nuclear with its £20 billion ($40.3 billion) Great British Nuclear program. The US passed the ADVANCE Act in July 2024 with overwhelming bipartisan support, accelerating advanced reactor development and unlocking over US$100 billion in private capital for next-generation nuclear projects.

Japan has restarted nuclear reactors. Canada is building modular reactors. Poland is transitioning directly from coal to nuclear. The Philippines, Ghana and Kenya are preparing nuclear programs as part of their decarbonisation strategy.

France, which already generates approximately 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, announced a program to build six new EPR2 reactors with an estimated investment of €52-67 billion ($92-$118 billion), affirming nuclear as essential to its climate and energy independence goals. South Korea reversed its nuclear phase-out policy in 2022, returning nuclear to the centre of its energy strategy.

These are not reckless nations. These are pragmatists who understand physics.

It’s time for Australia to do the same, to design a transition that is real.

That means putting people, nature, and national security back at the heart of climate policy. It means embracing every technology that works, instead of clinging to a single narrative. It means measuring success by outcomes: lower emissions, lower bills, stronger ecosystems; not by construction targets or political slogans. Above all, it means restoring integrity to a debate that has drifted dangerously far from evidence.

Net zero is still the right destination. But the road we’re on is broken.

Australia must learn from the global reset already underway. We need an all-technologies approach that prioritises performance over ideology. We need to stop confusing megawatts built with emissions reduced. And we need to stop sacrificing nature in the name of saving it.