Mike's Minute: Week four of the war and what we've learnt

I think we have a couple of emerging themes as we come to the end of week four of Operation Epic Fury. 

If you follow Australia as closely as I do, you will, like me, have been filled with a sense of pride or surprise that we are out doing them in adultness. 

Yes, unions here and media have pedalled the usual BS on more money for every man and their dog, let's work from home, let's panic about days left of petrol etc. But believe me – in Australia it's been worse. 

They have lost their you-know-what. 

They are at each other. It's not helped by their state system and that tension between state and federal and the confusion over who is doing what, and when, and whether it's any good. 

Stations have run dry, not because they don’t have fuel, but because they don’t know how to drive a truck up the road. 

Rural has been going at city, punter has been going at petrol operator, the Coalition and One Nation have been going at Labour. It's been a free for all bitchathon, driven by an underlying panic. 

Another realisation – despite the fact a few hundred people have bought a BYD, it has become stunningly clear just how far off a renewable future we are. 

Buy all the EVs you want and cycle until you are blue in the face. The cold, hard truth is that solar and batteries do not, nor I suspect will they ever in our lifetime, run a country. 

Diesel runs a country. You put oil in tractors and trucks and in factories. We can be grateful our power is mostly renewable and that means we are better off than most of the world, including Australia. 

But the cold, hard truth is a small bit of water carrying only 20% of the overall supply can cripple a planet, or it will if this thing isn't over shortly. 

We have of course been here before. Oil has been an issue in the 70's and early 2000's. 

Did we change because of it? No. 

Did we say we should, or would? Probably. But we didn’t. 

And you know why? Because we can't. Until the combine harvester runs on wind and the plane takes off using batteries and every factory, farmer and person who produces anything we wear, or eat, or live with does it differently, oil is it. 

The whole renewables argument has been blown sky high. The world has never used, nor needed, more fossil fuels. 

Four weeks of a scrap in one country has laid theory vs reality bare. 

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