It’s worth studying the electricity crisis in Venezuela, which depends almost entirely on renewable power. When the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine, and drought restricts hydro electricity, renewable energy fails. Venezuela is powered by hydro. Right now there is a drought. 

Venezuela has the world’s greatest oil reserves, but minority socialist President Nicolas Maduro does not want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity. His government’s environmental policies are crippling local industry.

President Maduro has announced new energy-saving measures, “to counteract the effects of El Niño as environmental conditions worsen.”  Electricity is rationed with daily four-hour suspensions of power - blackouts. The working week has been cut to four days, an effective wage cut.

Women have been urged not to use hairdryers. The government has distributed energy saving light bulbs throughout the country. Think about the wild promises from Bill Shorten in the last week or two. Ask how we would cope with not only higher-priced electricity, but energy shortages, blackouts, factory closures, and jobs leaving Australia as international companies move production overseas, chasing cheaper power.

"We must make an active effort. I call on all the patriotic forces of the country, sensible men and women, heads of households and young people to adopt this plan with discipline, consciousness and collaboration ahead of nature's extreme conditions, a radical conduct based on love, solidarity and disciplined consciousness.” That’s a quote from socialist Maduro, but close your eyes and imagine socialist Prime Minister Shorten preaching this tripe to Australians in the next year or two! 

Here’s the real hypocrisy of the Venezuelan situation. “Additionally, the head of state reiterated that institutions from the public and private sectors must generate their own electricity for nine hours daily as part of this new energy saving plan.”

Like Tasmania, using polluting diesel generators?

Industries including state operated aluminium and steel plants, "should provide a special self-generation schedule and guarantee a 20 per cent reduction in their electricity consumption,” Maduro decreed. So industry can use fossil fuel, but not the national grid?

Venezuela has huge coal reserves, and gold in the south. The revolutionary Chavez mantra says that coal should be left in the ground. Its extraction would damage the environment. Gold could be a badly needed new export to supplement oil, but it is likely to stay in the ground, too.

To explain what this environmental zeal is really all about, Venezuela has renamed the Environment Minister the “Minister of Eco-Socialism”. If Bill has to govern in coalition with The Greens, don’t laugh … this could be us.

The new Eco-Socialism minister is biologist Guillermo Barreto.

He gives us an insight into the government’s vision for its environment policy: “… the only way of sustaining socialism is by converting the environment into one of its focal points.” 

So is Bill Shorten’s environmental talk a sham? Is he really talking about “sustaining socialism”?