Energy

Energy abundance, the price of ethnonationalism, and the dystopian myID

How not to do energy policy; the problems with acknowledgements to country; your ID or your facial data; the costs of land use zoning; and the war in Ukraine may not last much longer.

Justin Pyvis

02 Dec 2024 — 9 min read

Photo by Kendall Carter / Unsplash

Somehow we're now into December, which means Parliament is done for the year, the Reserve Bank of Australia board meets next week after mulling Wednesday's national accounts data and then goes on holiday until February, the chaos agent known as Donald Trump doesn't assume power until 20 January, and the whole of Australia collectively eases into what's known as silly season.

I'm going to continue publishing throughout December and January, albeit scaled back a bit. I'm not sure what that will mean exactly, but probably something like a couple of posts a week instead of the usual three. I've got plenty I want to write about, but what's most important is that you've got the time to read it!

Anyway, on to today's post.

The wrong road to energy abundance

Britain has stagnated because it can't build. Specifically, successive governments have erected barriers to housing, infrastructure and energy that make it "really, really expensive" to build. For example, in a recent Financial Times interview with Soumaya Keynes, Sam Bowman laid out the nation's energy issues:

"Industrial energy has grown in price by 150 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms since the early 2000s. The reason is, number one, we moved off coal and gas for good reasons. We should decarbonise. It's very important that we do that. Number two, we moved on to very expensive forms of clean energy: wind and solar. And number three, we have not made it affordable to build what could be a much less expensive form of clean energy, which is nuclear. So those three factors combined have led to final user costs, retail costs that have risen and risen and risen."

If that sounds familiar, it should as it's what Australia has done too. Large, energy-intensive companies have coped with endless subsidies – exactly what Australia is doing – but it has hollowed out the country:

"I think that the problem relates to entry — smaller companies that cannot get any subsidy or any kind of support, not being able to enter the market. I think the energy costs probably do hold back lots of services-based sectors. We think of services as being, you know, just somebody in a room with a laptop. But I mean, data centres count as services. There are lots and lots of things around biotech that are not necessarily kind of energy-intensive. They're not heavy industry, but they use a lot of energy. Energy costs are a large component of their costs."

I recently read a quote from Energy Minister Chris Bowen that really rubbed me the wrong way, where he claimed Australia's renewable transition was "as much about creating jobs in the regions as it is about taking climate action or securing Australia's place in an uncertain world".

A million times no; that's precisely the wrong approach. Energy policy shouldn't be a make-work scheme, it should be about energy. If you're worried about jobs, there are other avenues you can take to address that concern – although given that unemployment in Australia has been at or below 4% for nearly three consecutive years, it's not clear why "creating jobs" should be his concern at all.

If you're a politician and you want some high-value-added economic diversity away from mining, housing, and finance, then your first goal should be to reform the energy sector. The jobs will then take care of themselves; in fact, the fewer jobs we have in the energy sector, the better, because it will mean energy has truly become affordable and people are able to be more productive working elsewhere.

For Australia, legalising nuclear won't be sufficient to address the issues we're going to encounter as the renewables share of the grid increases; the UK has nuclear power! But as with housing and infrastructure, its burdensome rules make nuclear prohibitively expensive to build. Here's Bowman again:

"Kepco is the Korean nuclear authority, and they build [nuclear plants] in Korea at about a sixth of the price that we build for. And they're building in the Czech Republic at about half the price that we're building for. And I would like to be able to just say: if it's safe, here's your approval. And most of the small modular reactor companies are really trying to do that. That is what, that is why they're building and the way that they're building. There's not a particular efficiency to building small. There's a regulatory efficiency to getting approval once. And I would like to be able to give that approval to larger reactors, too."

If Australia eventually legalises nuclear power, getting the right regulatory regime in place will be the true challenge.

Acknowledgement of country

I guess I'm not the only person who thinks these obligatory announcements at the beginning of just about any gathering have gotten out of hand. In a provocative essay, economics blogger Noah Smith questioned why any group of people should have claims to land, regardless of whether they got it through conquest or because they were the first to set eyes upon it:

"Humanity didn't always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say 'This land is mine.' But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?
...
[But] why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it's called an 'ethnostate'. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism."

I think most Australians are decidedly not racist, which is why The Voice failed. We are one country, with many diverse groups of people including those whose families have been here for tens of thousands of years, and those who have just arrived. Australians don't want the drama that is happening right now in New Zealand, where "Maori ethno-nationalism" has become akin to a religion:

"Some are obvious: the presence of Holy Scripture (The Treaty), literal prayers (waiata) now omnipresent across the public sector, actual religious ritualas (blessings, incl those required to progress investments), temples (marae), spiritualism and belief in the supernatural, etc.

Others are a bit more subtle but still clear: the existence of a quasi priestly caste (nobody other than the priests can interpret the scripture or speak on matters of "faith"); opposition to any blasphemy/offending of symbols/language etc; blood requirement to be considered a member (akin to Judaism); insistence on separate medical doctors, teachers, even judges; lack of demands for any territorial autonomy or separatism."

Jumping back to Smith, he argues that "land acknowledgements" like welcome and acknowledgement of country "are moral claims about rightful land ownership":

"But the moral principle to which they appeal is ethnonationalism — it's the idea that plots of land are the rightful property of ethnic groups.

There is an obvious moral appeal to these land acknowledgements. They are a way of decrying the brutal, cruel, violent history of conquest and colonisation. And they probably feel like a way of standing up for the weak, the marginalised, and the dispossessed."

However, take it to its logical ends – such as where a certain senator wants to take it – and you end up with "some very dark futures":

"Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.

And in practice, any attempt to create such a world would inevitably lead to violent resistance by the groups in danger of being 'decolonised'. The orderly world of nation-states would dissolve into a chaotic free-for-all of competing irredentist claims, backed by genocides and expulsions. Ten thousand October 7th-style attacks would be followed by ten thousand Gaza-style wars."

Rather than focusing on the past, Smith argues that the best way forward is for all citizens to "exist in harmony and cooperation rather than in conflict". I agree, and I think there are much better ways to honour Australia's indigenous people than causing everyone's eyes to glaze over with obligatory acknowledgements of country that are repeated so often that they lose any meaning they might have had.

Your ID or your facial data

Well, social media age limits will soon be in Australia (I believe implementation is scheduled for late 2025). I'm sure it's purely coincidence that a day after becoming law, I received this email from the federal government:

The legislation to do this was rushed into law earlier this year with only three weeks of consultation, which shouldn't be surprising; accountability, transparency and honest debate haven't really been a feature in Canberra for some time. "myID" is essentially an Australia Card, and will allow "accredited entities" to use it to verify users, in the process giving the government data on when and where people are using internet services.

But never fear! As the ABC recently highlighted, the last-minute addition of section 63DB to the bill means you don't have to use government ID on social media:

"While on the face of it, so to speak, blocking social media companies from insisting on ID might seem like a privacy win, some policy experts are worried it's leaping from one frying pan into yet another frying pan.

'Perhaps more likely, is a situation where platforms opt for privacy-invasive technologies … including the use of biometrics, as they have few other viable options', said Lizzie O'Shea, the Chair of Digital Rights Watch."

But it won't stop with social media; over time, myID will spread all over the Australian internet because businesses will have their lives made difficult if they don't comply. Such a plan is already in the works.

But even aside from the dystopian privacy issues, social media age limits will have the unintended consequence of killing off a key avenue for creative Australian youths like Leo Puglisi, who created the popular 6 News media channel on YouTube when he was 11. Or Ross McCallum, whose career in creating music lesson videos started when he was 15 and using social media.

When asked about a related issue – "how young LBGTQIA+ and marginalised people would deal with losing access to online safe spaces" – Albanese responded by saying he just wanted young Australians "having more conversations with each other".

Honestly, with a comment like that I don't think he even understands the medium he just banned for millions of Australia's youths.

Fun fact

Land use zoning is costly:

On a related note, a new paper from New Zealand found robust, "economically and statistically significant" evidence that a liberalisation of zoning rules led to more housing and lower rents in Auckland.

To fix housing, simply stop restricting supply while simultaneously subsidising demand.