MEDICUS May 2022

Power shift In Windfall , author Ketan Joshi reflects on the suspicions around renewable energy with great humility and insight, writes Martin Tuner 44 M E D I C U S M AY 2 0 2 2 O N T H E S H E L F I happened to be in South Australia in 2016 at a highly unusual time, during a savage storm system off the coast that has had significant repercussions for the climate wars that have ravaged this country. I felt the full force of this incredible natural event. At one stage, I found myself involuntarily running from an open space as a storm front loomed, like an extra from some disaster movie. During the same period, in Port Adelaide, I witnessed a light pole fall in the powerful winds, a scene which was somehow captured on film, and then played endlessly on news bulletins. The night of the storm, the power suddenly went off in the entire area. We weren’t to know that it had basically gone out in the entire state. I was in a restaurant, where candles were lit and people ate their meals regardless. A young disabled boy came in being comforted by a woman. Clearly, his whole routine had been totally dislocated and he was in a distressed state. We went to bed still without power, which then returned after midnight. But we weren’t to know how this singular and frankly terrifying tempest would be interpreted, because it was subsequently weaponised as the reason renewable energy could not be relied upon. South Australia’s embrace of renewable energy was seen as not just a vulnerability, but an inherent danger to society as a whole, based on this weather event and the few hours in which it took for the grid to be fully restored. I mention this not to describe something I was doing on my holidays, though the wild weather certainly gave an edge to my participation in the Australian Masters Hockey Championship that year. It’s a neat juncture in what we know as the climate wars. The so-called carbon tax had been passed into legislation in 2012, which caused a massive disruption in Australian politics. It was subsequently repealed in 2014. The South Australian black-out came roughly halfway between these milestones and the present day. Analysis by the Grattan Institute shows that less than 50 articles a year had been written about blackouts before this event, while more than 700 were published in 2017. With an election just days away, it feels as though we are emerging into a different place in these climate wars, particularly with the rise of the so-called teal independents who are disrupting the narrative of conservative politics on climate. The scale of this disruption will become apparent after 21 May, but something in the atmospherics appears to have changed. The author Ketan Joshi in his book Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-fuel free future , places events in a slightly wider context, starting with his family’s migration from London to Sydney during a devastating bushfire season in January 1994. Of course, the bushfire season to which he referred significantly preceded that in which the current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was effectively caught out holidaying in Hawaii, as New South Wales, his home state, burned in devastating fashion. It might well have affected his overall standing irrevocably in this country, and could signal a longer holiday in terms of Mr Morrison’s incumbency. A hallmark of Joshi’s writing in Windfall is a quality that one doesn’t always see in works of this nature: humility. Having worked in the renewable energy field for many years, including data analysis and communications, you would expect him to bring his authority and expertise to this book in a way that tells Australians how they should feel about renewable energy and the climate wars. But at every turn, he reflects on the reasons for the kinds of suspicions that have arisen around renewables. For the most