Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's great to address the chamber on this very important bill. I'd like to address Senator Canavan's concerns about the environment as a result of these renewables because that is what really concerns me about the path that we are taking. If we continue down the path of constantly getting rid of our base-load energy in this country, like coal, and replacing it with wind, solar, lithium batteries and transmission lines, we are going to create an environmental catastrophe. I touched on this last night. It is well known that wind farms kill millions and millions of birds and bats. They kill apex birds. They kill lots and lots of bats. Many people probably don't know that bats, along with bees, are one of the major pollinators in our environment.

Then we've got the issue with batteries. Batteries come from rare earth minerals like lithium, for example. Lithium is a one per cent ore body. You have to mine a hundred tonnes of ore to get one tonne of metal. That involves an intensive electrolysis process that in itself requires lots and lots of energy. However, these rare-earths mines—it's just not that simple to go in and get the ore; you have to mine around and around and around. So, quite often you're going to have a stripping ratio of something like 10 to one, so you might have to move 1,000 tonnes of dirt just to end up with one tonne of metal. That metal, after it's been extracted through an extremely energy-intensive process, will then get shipped over to China, where it's put into a car battery, and that car battery is then shipped to the States, where it's put into a Tesla, and then the Tesla comes back to Australia, where basically you have to charge the battery by sticking it into the wall and using energy from coal.

We've also got solar panels. I just put an article up on my Facebook page this morning about the environmental catastrophe that is going on in California at the moment, and we'll have the same catastrophe here, whereby we'll have dangerous substances leaking from these solar panels once they are taken to the trash. This is concerning, because, as the head of the CSIRO said to me in estimates, it costs three times as much to recycle a lithium battery as it does to actually produce a battery. So, the big concern is, how are we going to afford—and what is the Labor Party going to do about this—recycling all these rare-earths batteries?

The other thing we need to touch on is the transmission lines. We are going to have to have hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines. The Labor Party have already earmarked a $20 billion Rewiring Australia Fund. But it's not 'rewiring'; it's additional transmission lines that are going to have to connect all these tiny solar panels and windfarms, because these solar panels and windfarms don't produce anywhere near the same amount of energy as a coal-fired power station does. Going back to the nineties, when 70 or 80 per cent of the east coast was powered by coal-fired power, there were only about 30 stations, and only a limited number of transmission lines were needed in order to get the power to the home.

However, what I really want to do today is address the issue from yesterday, when Senator Wong couldn't actually define what net zero is. I spoke to her about it this morning, and she said, 'Senator Rennick, why do you think so many scientists have all got it wrong?' Well, I don't actually follow scientists. I follow the mathematics behind the science and, in particular, the algorithms that underpin good science. Last night—and I'll do this again, because I can see Senator Chisholm sitting over there with a silly grin on his face—the first scientist I referred to—