Australia’s energy policy had the country on a “pathway to poverty” and it was time for the WA mining industry to “raise your voice against the direction that we’re on”, journalist Chris Uhlmann told the WA Mining Club last month. 

Uhlman, part of a panel discussing a wide range of topics, is presenter of the Sky News documentary The Real Cost of Net Zero: The shocking truth of the renewable energy push. 

“One thing I would say to this room today is you have power,” Uhlmann told the club’s February lunch. 

“Here in Western Australia the mining industry is large. I would raise your voice against the direction that we’re on now in order to try and stop doing what the east coast is doing because we are on a pathway to poverty. 

“We are de-industrialising. Around the world, Germany, UK, California, South Australia everywhere where they have tried to force large scale wind and solar onto the grid the price of electricity has gone up, reliability of the grid has gone down. 

“Red lights are flashing everywhere but an environmental movement which is cashed up with money from wind and solar industry is driving the debate and it’s time that other people raised their voices. 

“Sure, we’ll use wind, we’ll use solar but in amounts that make sense and for the time being it makes sense for us to use the resources under our feet. 

“It is time for the chief executives of mining companies to stand up and be heard on this. The argument is being dominated by people who are pushing a particular line and the economics and the energy system realism is not there. 

“It needs people who know what they’re talking about to join the argument.” 

On nuclear energy he said: “If we continue on the path we are on, the only way that you’re going to get anywhere near Net Zero is … nuclear energy at some stage. 

“There is there’s a massive business opportunity for Australia. The rest of the world is doing it. China is going to build 150 nuclear reactors; the United States is building 198. 

“Microsoft has just reopened Three Mile Island so that it can supply energy for its data centres and data centres are going to chew up more energy than most cities in the world. 

“We can either be in it or we can be out of it. I think eventually we probably get there but not before we’ve made every dumb decision we possibly can along the way.” 

Uhlmann said Canberra, where he lived, was “now so disconnected from its sources of energy, its sources of food and its sources of wealth that it’s actually voting against them”. 

“In Western Australia you understand where those things come from, and it is incumbent upon people (to) go out and test the facts yourself,” he said. 

“You’re engineers, you are practitioners, you know the way that the world works, you need to speak up, you need to be raising your voices if you believe that we are on a path that is leading us essentially to poverty then people need to speak up now. 

“Too many people have been cowed into silence.  People want to shout you out of the debate.”