The day the fightback against anti-renewables propaganda kicked off

Values to values: On the same day that Big Renewables took out full page advertisements in major metropolitan and nation newspapers around Australia, launching its fightback against fossil fuel and nuclear disinformation, the industry also received a big wake-up call from one of the nation’s most newsworthy clean energy leaders. The Fifth Estate was there!

Mark down 16 July 2024 as the day the Clean Energy Council (representing the big end of town) for the renewable energy industry in Australia found its mojo and flexed its public relations muscles.

As has become abundantly clear in recent weeks and months, there’s an orchestrated disinformation campaign, or, to use a more traditional term, a propaganda war being waged against the renewables led energy transition.

Tuesday brought an orchestrated fightback, anchored by one of the CEC’s the Australian Clean Energy Summit, or ACES 2024 for short, and driven by the chief executive Kane Thornton’s opening address for the two day industry get together.

Easing into his core theme with a rallying call to industry, highlighting its achievements, but warning of its vulnerabilities, Thornton set a more urgent tone when he voiced his “gravest concern”:

I fear that our nation’s ability to deliver generational reform and change is fragile.

Bad faith actors are using a weakened media, praying on communities increasingly anxious about the uncertainty and tensions in the world around us to tear things down.

Vested interests are stepping up to tell their story and peppering it with mistruths and outright disinformation.

They are undermining the very things that would build our nation’s future and resilience in an unstable world, to further their own short term political agenda.

The battering ram of bad faith actors today is nuclear power.

From that point on it was guaranteed to be an interesting day, the members and event supporters of which include many of the biggest solar, wind and energy industry companies operating in Australia.

What became clear as the day progressed, however, was that Thornton’s speech was part of a broader PR strategy, the organisation’s move to the front foot, a PR development that many will applaud.

This included an opinion article in The Australian, a very timely front page news article in the same newspaper, and multi-newspaper advertising campaign – which would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The irony of The Australian being involved won’t be lost on anyone who follow media attacks on renewables, the clean energy transition and net zero, because it and the Murdoch media in general are usually implicated in the anti-renewables and anti-climate action camp.

The full page ads, published in newspapers including Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph (another Murdoch publication) and The Australian Financial Review, were aimed squarely at Australian energy consumers, both home and enterprise. The banner heading was: You’re welcome.

It went on to say: “40 per cent of all of your electricity is from renewables, with more on the way each day. And finished with the line: Renewables work for Australia.”

All good, and about time, I hear you say. The anti-renewables brigade has been getting away with untruthful free kicks for far too long, and the pro-nuclear lobby, Thornton’s battering ram of bad faith actors, has dialled up the disinformation heat even further.

Which made the after lunch session on the first day of ACES 2024 even more interesting.

It provided the platform for the CEC members – let’s call them “Big Renewables” – to receive a boost t from one of Australia’s more high profile clean energy champions, a political figure who is now morphing into an institutional one.

Retiring Liberal politician Matt Kean, incoming chair of the Climate Change Authority (CCA), a somewhat gleeful recent appointment by the Albanese Labor government.

The CCA’s role includes advising the Australian government on its net zero targets under the United Nations Paris Agreement, with our national commitment to achieve 100 per cent net zero by 2050 and 43 per cent by 2030, with a 2035 target expected by early next year (although there is speculation this could be delayed until after the next federal election, which is due to be held by May 2025, given the fractious politics now playing out).

As luck would have it, Kean’s move to the CCA hasn’t taken effect yet, officially beginning on 5 August, and he’s still an elected politician for a further three weeks, the NSW state member for the Liberal-held electorate of Hornsby, in Sydney’s north. So, he made clear that he was speaking at ACES 2024 as “a backbencher and as a former minister”.

Kean set about excoriating the renewables industry for “a silence that is deafening” in regards to the propaganda attacks it was facing, warning that vested interests were “hard at work undermining this transition”

I’m sure you’ve all heard the propaganda. More coal. No renewables. When the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine. What about the whales?

On and on their slogans go. Being driven further into Facebook pages and politically motivated rallies up and down the coast and across the state.

Bit by bit eroding confidence in the concept of cheap, clean energy.

Their claims are fact free and easy to combat…and it should be a task that this industry relishes.

But the silence has been deafening. The future of the planet is on the line, but so is the fate of the very businesses in which you invest and you work.

I figure that anyone from Big Renewables in the auditorium and hearing Kean would have been glad they’d spent up on the new advertising campaign that very morning and would be digging into their deep pockets to do more.

At least, that’s what I hope. Because right now, the renewables led energy transition needs defending, its enemies are gaining traction, Matt Kean is spot on, and the CEC’s new campaign is hopefully just the first taste of more to come from the renewables industry.

All of which should make things very interesting when the shadow minister for climate change and energy Ted O’Brien arrives for the second day of the conference.