"Wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency has forced rent seekers to engineer yet another fraud: hydrogen gas – which is to be purportedly produced using wind and solar’s occasional and chaotic output. Where wind and solar have never made any sense, the hydrogen proposition is completely bonkers.

Defying the laws of physics and thermodynamics – just for starters – the economics would make hydrogen gas produced using already heavily subsidised wind and solar the most expensive energy in human history.

And yet, the same class of dimwitted politicians are signing up in feverish earnest, as if they’re about to back a surefire Melbourne Cup winner."

Ian Plimer is an Australian geologist and Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.