Die-hard coal resistance and emotional hullabaloo is on full display this week, after the NEM report was released. Alan Finkel, our chief scientist, was lead hand for this report, subtitled a "Blueprint for the Future". Its title claim is "Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market. Much of the phatic noise is from the reactionary parts of the federal Coalitional government.

The report is not as interesting as so many pre-scripted reactions to it. The coal and self-promotion stalwart Senator Malcolm Robertson, was getting stuck into it early on ABC radio , even though admitting to not personally having read the report.

The report is free online for download and read. It is a political document about the power of regulation as much as about power of electricity. It recognizes the NEM as a complex system, that serves multiple goals, has multiple constraints, and is already undergoing modification in response to climate and technology change. In future the NEM requires ongoing planning processes, supervision and monitoring. The document is well organized and spells out recommendations to rationally manage the NEM into the future. The COAG Energy Council is named as a key body for future planning and management, and who gets to be on it, including state and federal government energy ministers, will obviously be very important. It is too important to be left to the vagaries of political wind-bags.

This NEM report doesn't set carbon emissions or clean energy energy targets, as these will no doubt change with the political wind-bags. The report emphasizes that we really ought to have goals and plans, and have processes and regulations for achieving them. This alone has proven enough to set off howls of political protest from the usual suspects of coal industry conservative capture. This should be really no surprise, otherwise no rational long term plans will be made, and the energy industries, and their dependents, including us, will be left sweating in the dark.

As this Sydney Morning Herald article about the eruptions in the LNP ranks indicates, Australia is never going to be able to have a significant clean energy target, nor a planned reduction in coal and gas emissions, as long as members of the climate change denial wing of the LNP have power to break any LNP prime minister. Only a wholesale identification and rejection of this faction of the LNP in every future Australian election, can bring about any stable rationality to Australia's dinosaur energy and climate policies.