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.