Riding Australia’s big dipper - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Geoffrey Blainey
THE GRAND SNOWY SCHEME, IN ITS HEYDAY, WAS A LIVING NATIONAL MONUMENT. But probably its economic importance was exaggerated. Far more important in giving Australia cheaper fuel and energy were the rising imports of cheap oil and scattered projects of the 1960s and 1970s that mostly arose far from Canberra and were sponsored by the private sector. Australia's power industry was transformed less by the Snowy scheme than by the discovery of oil and natural gas in the Moomba and Cooper basins in Central Australia, the massive discoveries in Bass Strait in the 1960s and in the north-west shelf from the 1970s, by the development of the huge coalfields in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, by the revitalising of the older coalfields of NSW and the continuing development of brown coal in eastern Victoria. While the Snowy scheme fired the public imagination, those other discoveries and projects fired the economy.
Another point can be made with confidence. Without the discovery of oil in Bass Strait, Australia in the 1970s would have been battered by the two oil crises and the worldwide explosion in petrol prices. As a result, the standard of living of the average Australian would probably have fallen. Today, Australia's reserves of oil are diminishing and expenditure on imported oil is rising. But, all in all, thanks to the strenuous revival of coalmining and the expansion of output of liquefied natural gas, Australia is still a net exporter of oil and natural gas on an impressive scale.
Black coal has become the number-one Australian export, a position unimaginable as late as 1975 when wool was still king. Indeed, if coal is subdivided into the coking and steaming coals, these separate products fill first and third places in the nation's list of exports, with crude oil coming fourth. Moreover, the great ports of the continent measured in tonnage are no longer Melbourne, Sydney and the old capital-city ports but the harbours, mostly new and tropical, that specialise in exporting coal and iron ore in huge bulk carriers. Of today's great coal ports, Newcastle remains prominent while the other three are on the central Queensland coast, serving a tropical coal region that mined virtually nothing in 1970 and today produces more coal than England.
While the energy industry in Australia since the end of the Second World War has been revolutionised, with profound effects on the economy and the standard of living, not everybody cheers. The opponents of new forms of energy have multiplied. Back in the age of steam, coal as the main fuel had few opponents. Admittedly, coal smoke polluted the sky and NSW coal was especially noted for its dense black smoke. But passengers with few exceptions still preferred a steamship to a sailing ship and a steam train to a horse-drawn coach. Naturally the miners of coal faced physical danger but that was discounted by all except the miners and their families.
When oil became the new king, it, too, created few enemies: at first, the smog created by the internal-combustion engine was not very visible. These two fossil fuels, coal and oil, were generally applauded because, on the whole, they saved so much hard, relentless human labour and sweat. One of the major changes in the past century is that the majority of the workforce no longer carries out, day by day, hard physical work. For this triumph the fossil fuels deserve high praise.
IN AUSTRALIA, THE FIRST MAJOR CAMPAIGN DIRECTED BY THE NEW GREENS against a form of domestic energy was not against fossil fuels but against hydroelectricity. That campaign initially concentrated on the banning of several new schemes that endangered places of rare natural beauty, Lake Pedder and the Franklin River in Tasmania. Nor was the second major campaign directed against the fossil fuels: it was against uranium.
Australia has huge reserves of high-grade uranium ores but produces no nuclear energy for its power grid. An influential section of public opinion opposes the mining of uranium; an even stronger section opposes the building of nuclear power stations. It is reasonable to suggest that if the home-grown supplies of energy had remained as deficient as they were in 1950 and if the hydro-electric, black and brown coal, oil and natural gas ventures of later decades had never emerged, then Australian governments would have been forced to sponsor major nuclear powerhouses.In the mid 1960s, South Australia, gravely deficient in oil and black coal, went close to designing and building its own nuclear power station on Torrens Island, near Adelaide. Another power station was proposed for Jervis Bay in NSW. The public opposition to uranium was not yet large-scale.
In the 1970s, left-wing hostility to uranium was mounting. In 1979, at the Australian Council of Trade Unions congress, Bob Hawke suffered a major blow after arguing that the three existing uranium mines in Australia should be allowed to continue. The trade union movement disagreed with him. By a clear majority it denounced uranium. After Hawke became prime minister he gained a limited victory. Two uranium mines were allowed to continue, but that was the limit. It is fair to suggest that the effective hostility to the mining and exporting of uranium was based on one clear fact: uranium was not seen as vital to national survival or economic development. It was much easier to oppose uranium when other sources of energy were being developed in abundance. On the other hand, if Australia in 1980 had produced no oil and natural gas and insufficient coal, uranium would have won far more friends than enemies. Sheer economics would have made national opposition to uranium a dubious luxury.
Fossil fuels initially were not a major target for critics. As the smog increased in Sydney and Melbourne in still weather, oil and coal were periodically denounced as a source of pollution and illnesses, but not yet of global warming.
The Whitlam government was the first to examine the question of global climate change, though from a direction that now seems surprising. The government was stirred by the fear expressed at the World Food Conference in November 1974 – and evidence supported that fear – that the world was cooling and that such a change, if true, might damage Australia's vital rural industries. As a result, the Australian Academy of Science was invited to report. Setting up a committee of eleven scientists, led by C.H.B. Priestley, it released its report On Climatic Change in March 1976. Scholarly and cautious, it treated global cooling as an unlikely possibility, saw the hazards for Australian farmers of relatively small shifts in climate, and was emphatic that climate in a typical century was more variable than people realised. The idea that the world by the late 1990s might become appreciably warmer was not then envisaged widely in either Australia or the northern hemisphere.
Now global warming rather than cooling is seen as the danger. And yet the Australian opposition to its country's widespread output of fossil fuels, the massive export of coal, and the might of the local metallurgical industries remains relatively muted. The reason is pretty obvious. Australia is one of the great miners in the world. Such industries are vital to our standard of living. But the whole question of Australia's role in minerals requires more than that partly-true economic explanation.
There exists a long-term palliative for global warming – massive diversion of resource to the production of nuclear energy. If there was such a diversion, Australia could be a gainer, because it holds the world's largest reserves of high-grade uranium. But to most conservationists, global warming – while currently in the spotlight – is actually viewed as a lesser peril than an increased global emphasis on nuclear power. In their eyes, global warming is serious but not so serious as to merit a solution that might aggravate an even graver problem – a drastic increase in nuclear energy. The dilemma of fossil fuels is more complicated than is suggested by public debate within Australia.
Australia has come full circle in the past hundred years. At the start of the century it was self-sufficient in sources of energy to an astonishing degree. By 1950, the era of plenty had ended. The age of oil was here, but Australia produced no oil. Black coal was still vital but Australia, through poor industrial relations, failed to make the best use of it. By 1975, however, the nation was returning to self-sufficiency. Oil and natural gas had been found in large quantities; hydro-electric schemes had multiplied; brown coal was exploited massively and the mining of black coal was revitalised; and huge ships could carry coal cheaply from Australian ports on the Pacific coast to the booming markets in East Asia. By the year 2000, additional projects including the natural gas of the north-west shelf in Western Australia had confirmed Australia's role as, overall, a massive exporter of energy.
The history of energy in this land has been marked by astonishing swings from abundance to scarcity, and from scarcity to abundance. It would be rash to think that another such swing is unlikely in the next fifty years. ♦