Of the issues in the Queensland election campaign, proposals for new investment in electricity generation stand out among the sharpest division. Labor and the Greens want more renewables, while the Liberal National party and One Nation are pushing for a new coal-fired power station.

The disputes are not over the desirability of public ownership (both sides support it). Nor are they, in any serious sense, about electricity prices (no one can reduce them by much). They aren’t even about jobs, or rather, they are more about what kinds of jobs we want to create than about the number that will be created.

'Political watershed' as 19 countries pledge to phase out coal Read more

Paradoxically, the closest parallel to the current debate is not over energy or economics it all. Rather it is the bitter culture war over equal marriage. Faced with a trend which has swept almost the entire developed world and seems certain to prevail everywhere in time, the supporters of coal are seeking to delay the inevitable. As part of the global push to reduce CO2 emissions, investment in renewable solar and wind power has soared, while coal-fired power is disappearing from most countries in the developed world.

The choice between wind turbines and steam turbines might seem to be purely one of technology. But since environmentalists support renewable energy, the demands of the culture war require that conservatives must oppose it.

Before spelling this point out, it’s worth looking at the spurious rationales that have been put forward for putting public money into coal. Despite the rhetoric that surrounds it, the push for new coal-fired power isn’t about creating jobs. Taking account of both the construction and operation phase, the number of jobs associated with generating a given amount of renewable electricity is greater than the number required to generate coal-fired power. Solar PV alone employs over 10,000 people in Australia, more than the total in all forms of conventional generation.

The coal-fired power plant proposed for north Queensland is claimed to create “up to” 750 jobs during construction and maintain 150 full-time positions. By contrast, proposals for a shift to 50% renewables have been estimated to involve 6,400 full time jobs over the next decade.

Nor is there any reason to suppose that building a new coal-fired power plant would reduce electricity costs. Both economic analysis and the outcomes of competitive bidding processes show that new coal-fired power is more expensive than renewables, even without taking account of the cost of CO2 emissions.

These facts explain the startling decline of coal-fired power over the past decade. Hardly any new coal-fired plants have been commissioned in the developed world in recent years. Of the 120 coal-fired power plants proposed in Europe in 2007, none have been brought to the construction stage. There is only one plant being constructed in North America: a 17 MW plant built by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

There are a handful of exceptions to this trend of which the most notable is Japan where the response to the Fukushima disaster was to propose 45 new coal-fired plants. Economic and environmental reality is starting to bite, however, and it now appears unlikely that most of these proposals will come to fruition.

Coal still has some momentum in the developing world, where rapid electrification has created a demand for new generation capacity from all sources. Even here, however, demand for renewables is accelerating while hundreds of proposed coal-fired power stations have been scrapped.

Far from considering new coal-fired power stations, the real debate is about how fast existing ones will be closed. Attempts to form a government in Germany have foundered on disputes over how fast to wind down coal. More positively, at the UN climate conference in Bonn last week, 19 nations including the UK, New Zealand and Canada joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance and pledged to phase out coal-fired power altogether.

Jobs bonanza? The Adani project is more like a railway to nowhere | John Quiggin Read more

If the end of coal-fired power is inevitable, as this analysis suggests, why is the political right fighting so hard to prevent the closure of old power stations and even to build new ones? The answer, as with equal marriage, is that the culture war is not, ultimately, about outcomes. Rather it is about stoking outrage against those (gays, greenies and leftists in general) who can be blamed for the changes that conservative voters find distressing, most of which are due more to financialisation and globalisation than to cultural shifts.

Unfortunately, even if the fight against renewables is ultimately doomed to failure, the consequences of delay can be disastrous. If the policies being pushed by the LNP, nationally and in Queensland, are implemented, there is virtually no chance that we will meet our commitments under the Paris agreement. We can only hope that the rest of the world will be more sensible.