Tesla Inc founder and chief executive Elon Musk’s agreement to build the world’s largest battery for South Australia is not just an extraordinary technological breakthrough that signs coal’s death warrant — it is potentially a game changer in the way politics works, reinserting the importance of basic reality into a debate which has been bereft of it for too long.
There has been a lot written on the idea that this is now a “post-truth” world.
Climate writer David Roberts brought it to my attention about 2010, when I was grappling with the idea that dinosaur politicians and rent-seeking corporates not only were not telling the truth about climate change and energy: they were actively dismissive and destructive of the very idea of truth.
While Australia got a taste for it under former prime minister Tony “don’t believe anything I haven’t written down” Abbott’s government, the idea sprang into the global mainstream last year with US President Donald Trump’s election campaign and the Brexit bus.
It seemed that truth no longer mattered. Facts were not just unimportant, but barriers to be smashed through with rhetoric.
Demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that a politician was lying no longer had any effect. Even when people agreed that he — usually — was lying, they still supported him, because he activated a frame or a value that drove their political decisionmaking.
At the same time, political scientist Brendan Nyhan conducted fascinating and depressing research on what he called the “backfire effect.”
Although this research is not conclusive, he showed that using facts to try to reverse strongly held political views — such as on climate change, vaccination and gun control — was worse than useless, generally ending up emphasizing existing views rather than altering them.
He also showed that these tribally-based political views trumped — and I use that word advisedly — our ability to do math. People can read graphs really well, except when they contradict political views.
Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they had just correctly read the same graph about soap.
What does this have to do with Musk’s great big battery?
Often politics deals in ephemeral ideas, subjective ideas, ideas about how well off people are, how confident people might be about the future, how safe people feel.
Decades of political focus on the dismal science of economics has enabled this. Politics can become a confidence game.
However, sometimes politics comes up hard against reality.
For months, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Australian Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg, various fossil fuel energy executives and media commentators such as Paul Kelly have been rabbiting on about the “energy trilemma.”
It is their contention that energy policy must deal with cost, reliability and emissions, and that it is impossible to achieve all three at the same time.
Conveniently, they choose to put emissions at the bottom of this list and bury it under a pile of coal, which they claim is cheap and reliable.
This is not true. Not even close to it. It does not stand up to basic scrutiny.
Renewable energy, which obviously wins on emissions, is beating coal on cost.
What is more, with an energy grid managed effectively by people who want renewables to succeed, it is no less reliable than fossil fuels.
Australian Conservatives Party leader Cory Bernardi’s installation of rooftop solar panels demonstrates that these people do not even believe their own rhetoric. They have just chosen to throw truth onto the fire of climate change for political reasons.
Interestingly, the great bulk of Australians already do not believe this story.
The Sydney-based Climate Institute think tank’s latest — and sadly final — Climate of the Nation report, featuring comprehensive polling data on a range of climate-related issues, showed once again that the vast majority of Australians want to see more renewable energy, do not believe that renewable energy is driving price rises — correctly identifying misregulation, privatization and other corporate price-gouging as more to blame — and do not think renewables need fossil fuels to back them up in the long term.
However, the politicians, business people and commentators continue to lie. It suits their agenda, and it clearly activates something in people’s minds — enough to make it worth their while. People know that they are wrong, but they sound like they might sort of be right.
Musk’s gambit closes this book. He has brought reality crashing in.
Within 100 days, there is to be a huge battery system making South Australia’s energy grid clean, affordable and reliable, and benefiting the eastern states along with it.
All the talk of building new coal-fired power stations, or a Snowy Hydro 2.0, no longer sounds vaguely “truthy.” It sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly. It sounds like old men yelling at clouds.
This will not suddenly bring back a cherished, and somewhat mythological, era of truth in politics, but it will have real, demonstrable effects.
It will help. We all owe deep gratitude to those who have made it happen.
Tim Hollo is the executive director of the Green Institute, an Australian non-profit organization that aims to support “green” politics through education, action, research and debate.
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