Fossil fuel industry feeding us Crocodile tears
CRISPIN HULL COLUMN
It makes sense, in a way. Since the re-election of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the fossil fuel industry; its News Ltd backers; the National Party; and the right fringe of the Liberal Party (the fossil quartet) have become maniacally more active.
It makes sense, because, if a hitherto very profitable industry is facing extinction, it fights back as vigorously as it can.
The return last week of Opposition energy and emissions-reductions spokesperson Dan Tehan from his fact-avoiding mission to US shows this nonsense has gone too far. If continued it will threaten Australia’s economic future and undermine our national security – and that is aside from the climate argument.
Some of the incessant non-journalism, lies, and rubbish in the Murdoch press in the past few months would verge on the comical, if the issue were not so serious. Off-shore wind-farms kill whales; onshore windfarms kill endangered birds; discarded solar panels are clogging landfill; electric-vehicle batteries are exploding causing fires; electric vehicles are smashing up roads and paying no fuel tax; on and on it goes. There is no evidence that any of these are serious problems.
But any grab-bag argument against moving from fossil fuels to renewables will be used by the fossil quartet to keep the profits rolling whatever the long-term damage.
Since when did they ever care about whales, endangered bird species; poisonous plastics in landfill; or a rational tax policy?
The landfill argument is risible. The fossil quartet has been arguing that old solar panels present an environmental risk because they are clogging landfill. Well, yes, unrecycled material is a problem. But how about some facts and perspective?
Australia puts about 20 million tonnes of stuff into landfill each year, of which 50,000 tonnes or one-quarter of one percent is old solar panels. And it will fall as industry see a profit in recycling them.
Do we see a campaign from the fossil quartet to stop plastics, fossil engine parts, and all the other rubbish from the consumer society going into land fill? No.
Do we hear the fossil quartet standing up for koalas as their habit is shattered by the property-retail industries? No.
Instead, the quartet gives disproportionate air-time to any climate-change denying quack instead of dismissing or challenging them, as good journalists and politicians should.
The fossil quartet sheds crocodile tears for the environment while championing the very carbon outputs that most threaten it.
Ultimately, though, they can come up with any amount of misinformation, distraction, and lies in an attempt to dupe Australians away from the urgent task of transitioning away from a carbon-based economy, but the science does not change.
High on a mountain in Hawaii, the Mauna Loa Observatory (https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/ ) meticulously and incessantly has been recording the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
From 320 parts per million in 1969 it now approaches 440 parts per million. Fact (see graph).
It is causing the planet to heat. Fact. The EU’s Copernicus global temperature trend monitor (https://apps.climate.copernicus.eu/global-temperature-trend-monitor/) proves it (see graph). The climate has already changed.
The fossil industry is like the tobacco and asbestos “industries” – denying science and putting profit before people’s lives. At least tobacco and asbestos only killed a limited cohort of people. The fossil industries threaten the world.
But repeating the facts, science, and logic is not effective in the face of the fossil industry’s huge misinformation onslaught that plays upon people’s emotion and their desperate desire to believe in the illusion that there is nothing to worry about here.
One argument the fossil quartet puts in Australia is that Australia only accounts for a few percent of global carbon emissions so doing anything about it here will make no difference.
But every nation should contribute. That is how humankind removed man-made hydrofluorocarbons from the atmosphere and prevented the continued destruction of the ozone layer that protects life on the planet from dangerous levels of UV radiation. It was done with the Montreal Treaty.
That is what we have to do: acknowledge the existential threat and collectively act to meet it – not to go into denial or postpone action based on the nuclear delusion.
Tehan said on his return from his fact-avoiding mission that the US is going through a “nuclear renaissance”. If so, it is a renaissance without any paintings. Not one nuclear power station is under construction in the US.
More pertinently, there are no nuclear power stations under construction in any of the 35 nations in the Americas.
Tehan said: “"There is huge investment going into nuclear. There are huge developments that are taking place. And everyone that I spoke to is incredibly confident, given the use of AI, given the use of quantum, that they will continue to make rapid developments with nuclear technology."
This Trumpian use of meaningless superlatives – “huge”, “incredibly confident”, “rapid developments”, “everyone I spoke to” – is deliberately misleading.
The conclusion upon which they base their “facts” is that they want to continue burning fossil fuels for profit for as long as they can get away with it.
But continuing with fossil fuels flies in the face of economic and national-security consequences. Australia imports virtually all its fuel. If imports were blockaded, critical transport would start collapsing in less than a month, no matter how many submarines we have. Moreover, we are paying $35 billion a year for what we should aim to be an unnecessary import. And our coal exports will slowly become an endangered species.
Australia ranks 105th out of 145 nations on the Economic Complexity Index – a Third World ranking. Renewables give Australia a chance to lift our economic game for the benefit of all.
The Liberal Party has to grow up. It imagines it can dog-whistle is way into government beating a racist immigration drum and then repay its fossil-fuel and nuclear mates by subsidising their past-used-by-date technologies.
In fact, they are handing the show over to Labor and denying Australians an effective Opposition on all the other matters so crucial to our nation’s well-being.
As for News Ltd and its non-journalism and propaganda, it is fossilised beyond redemption.
But the science, economics, and national-security concerns will not go away and therefore arguing against transitioning to renewables verges on the treasonous.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 7 October 2025.
Crispin Hull is a distinguished journalist and former Editor of the Canberra Times. In semi-retirement, he and his wife live in Port Douglas, and he contributes his weekly column to Newsport pro bono.
The opinions and views in this column are those of the author and author only and do not reflect the Newsport editor or staff.
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