In your Utopian example you forget one important issue.
You are still increasing your emissions.
And, the requirement to reduce emissions is inevitable.
I fully agree that we are very lucky to live in Australia. We are blessed with all sorts of natural resources, many of which we take advantage of. And we are also blessed with a small population.
I haven't heard of anyone, except for politicians and people like Gerry Harvey that want to sell you more stuff, say that they want a bigger population.
Yes, we need some population growth for the economy but how much is arguable.
So, for the forseeable future, we will be considered a high emission country per capita.
Back to our blessed resources.
We also have more than enough of these resources to enable us to become a very low emission country. Not overnight of course but no doubt over a timeframe of 20-30-40 years.
Many other countries don't have this luxury. Either their populations are too big of they don't have the resources we do. So, they have to buy these resources from elsewhere.
This gives us a natural advantage over all these countries. A big advantage.
So apart from being able to be a good global village member by reducing emissions, we are also able to get a head start on everyone else on the transition.
If it wasn't for the lack of political will over the last decade, our transition would have been much smoother and much simpler.
And, a whole lot cheaper.
Looking back at what's happened in the last decade, it is very easy to see what went wrong.
Various states went rogue.
SA in particular went a bit too early and were caught out.
Victoria called Engie's bluff on Hazelwood and lost.
Both states went against the feds on ideology. Who lost out ? The electorate.
But it's not just the states fault exclusively.
If we has established an east coast domestic gas reserve a decade ago, we wouldn't have had a shortage of gas on the east coast. Therefore, the price gouging that drove prices for the last five years wouldn't have existed.
People were calling for that domestic reserve a decade ago and they were ignored. They were also proved to be correct.
If we'd established a NEM or some other mechanism a decade ago, we still wouldn't be arguing over extending Liddell now. We would have an established plan to manage existing infrastructure and the transition progressively that would have been cheaper than what we have right now. It would have given business the confidence to invest and it wouldn't be a topic of conversation. There would be no power shortage emergencies or industrial demand response problems.
And yet the arguing still goes on even though moving to a low emission economy is inevitable.
So , let's not keep the blinkers on and pretend. We need to deal with what we have right now and benefit from the learnings of the last decade.
You know it makes sense.
