Again, we have the potential to be a low-cost producer of renewable energy, exporting most of it to the world and earning a good living from it. Finighan says countries with the most abundant and thus cheapest renewable energy available for export are those whose solar and wind resources are more intense, less seasonal and that have abundant land relative to the size of their population and economy.

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Those few countries include us. Garnaut says we’re the country with by far the largest capacity to export to the densely populated, highly developed countries of the northern hemisphere. Finighan finds we can produce “essentially limitless low-cost green electricity”.

The required solar and wind farms would occupy about 0.6 per cent of our land mass. Include the space between the wind turbines and that rises to a shocking 1.1 per cent.

To put this in the sign language of economists, on a diagram plotting what would happen to our cost of supply as (world) demand increased, the curve would start very low and stay relatively flat.

But, Finighan points out, there’s one big difference between the old trade in dirty energy and the new trade in clean energy. Whereas fossil fuels are cheap to transport, shipping clean energy is prohibitively expensive.

Remember that a key strategy in the global move to net-zero is to produce electricity only from renewable sources, then use it to replace as many uses of fossil fuels as possible, including gas in households and industry, and petrol in cars.

You can’t export electricity, but transforming it into hydrogen or ammonia requires huge amounts of electricity, thus involving much loss of energy and increased cost. So it’s cheaper to use locally made electricity to produce energy-intensive products such as iron, aluminium, urea and so forth locally, before exporting them.

That is, the world trade in clean energy will mainly involve that energy being embedded in “green” products. This means, for the first time ever, making certain classes of manufacturing part of our comparative advantage.

Finighan finds that, by ignoring the role trade will play in the process of decarbonisation, and thus the need for countries with limited capacity to produce their own renewables to import them in embedded form, earlier studies, including those by the International Energy Agency, have underestimated how much more electricity production the world will need.

In examining the likely energy needs of the five large economies – four in Asia and one in Europe – he projects large shortfalls in their local supply of electricity. By mid-century, Japan, South Korea and Germany will have shortfalls of between 37 and 66 per cent. Because of their later targets for reaching net-zero, China’s greatest shortfall won’t occur until 2060, and India’s until 2070.

These calculations take full account of the role of nuclear energy. It’s one of the most expensive means of generating clean energy. Unlike renewable technology, it’s become much more costly over time, not only in the rich economies but also in those such as India.

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Nuclear will play a minor role even in countries where heavy government subsidies render it competitive, such as China. Even if China triples its recent rate of building nuclear, it may contribute only 7 per cent of electricity supply by 2060.

In those shortfalls, of course, lies a massive potential market for Australia’s exports of green manufactures. So, to mix metaphors, the dream of us becoming a superpower turns out to have legs. All the Labor government and the Coalition opposition have to do now is extract the digit.