“Who benefits [from renewables]?” thundered United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet. “The globalists benefit! You don’t benefit. The Chinese Communist Party benefits!

“The average politician in that building there, the average politician is a career politician … if I didn’t know any better, I would swear that people in that place are selling us out to the CCP.”

Babet was cheered when he dived deeper into the swamp, raising a popular theory that Klaus Schwab, the German economist and founder of the World Economic Forum, wanted populations around the world to eat insects.

“Where do you think [renewables] are gonna go? Prime agricultural land! I guess Klaus Schwab was right when he said you’re gonna eat the bugs. You’re gonna eat bugs, you’re gonna earn nothing, and you’re going to be happy.

“They do a very good job in that place of seeing that come to pass,” he said, waving to Parliament House behind him. “That’s what they’re doing right now.”

Claims about the expense and environmental cost of renewables cause endless frustration to the engineers and scientists as there is overwhelming evidence that their costs are rapidly falling just as that of nuclear continues to rise.

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As far back as 2020, the International Energy Agency declared renewables to be the cheapest form of electricity generation in history. The most recent CSIRO report into Australian energy costs estimated that even if so-called small modular nuclear reactors popular in the Coalition existed, they would provide the most expensive form of energy.

But it was not just creatures of the fringe that appeared.

Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, currently the opposition veterans affairs spokesman, was not only a speaker at the rally but a champion of it.

As far back as August last year at the local Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – an import from US Republican politics – Joyce spoke about the need for concerned citizens to travel to Canberra and “make a racket on the front lawn” opposing renewables.

Since then, he has attended rallies in opposition to the Port Stephens offshore wind area.

“A politician that has the wrong conviction is very, very dangerous,” he said at CPAC. “A politician that has no conviction is very, very useless.”

At the rally he described renewable energy developments as an intergenerational “swindle” to the benefit of overseas manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels. He argued that the cradle-to-grave environmental costs of manufacturing renewable energy infrastructure outweighed their benefits.

“You won’t be able to borrow money [against your land], you’ll destroy the countryside,” he said of wind turbines. “They’re rusty, they catch on fire. They are filth! They are filth!”

As the rally continued, Joyce’s colleagues Matt Canavan, David Gillespie, Keith Pitt and Ross Cadell mounted arguments against renewables alongside a bevy of Queensland Liberal National MPs and those from One Nation and United Australia Party.

None of this was particularly surprising, though the appearance of Nationals leader David Littleproud, who was not listed as a speaker, did surprise some.

Like Joyce and the other Nationals, Littleproud did not indulge in fringe conspiracy theories, but he did mount a case against the further deployment of large-scale renewables, which is crucial to the government’s effort to increase renewables’ share of energy provision in Australia to 82 per cent, in order to meet Australia’s emission reduction obligations under the Paris Agreement.

Littleproud said regional Australia had reached a saturation point of large-scale renewables and that there was now a case to be made to constrain future renewables to rooftops in capital cities where there was a concentration of demand and population, rather than “tearing up prime agricultural land, tearing up native vegetation, not destroying the very thing they are there to protect.

“This is pure insanity. We need the common sense that you have brought here today to be heard inside that building in there,” he said.

Littleproud’s rhetoric at the rally suggested a hardening against climate action inside the Nationals party room.

One senior Liberal moderate observed days after the rally that there had always been opposition to climate action in both parties of the Coalition, but in recent years there had been unified support among the Coalition’s leadership for a 2050 net zero target in keeping with the Paris Accord.

Fracturing that, he said, would not only have negative consequences for Australia’s international standing, but for Liberals seeking to contest seats lost to teal independents at the last election or defend those that might be targeted at the next.

Another Liberal MP said he believed that in forcing Littleproud out his colleagues were deliberately undermining his leadership.

Littleproud declined to comment.

Observers outside politics see the growing movement against renewables as an effort to stoke the climate wars.

‘I’m not against renewables, I’m against putting wind turbines in a pristine environment’

George Trinkler, a protester from Port Stephens

“It doesn’t surprise me,” says Professor Mark Howden, director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University. “It’s like the last struggles of a drowning man.”

He says the uptake of renewables is growing so fast that the fossil fuel industry is being forced to lobby hard through its allies to defend it.

He does not believe the movement will be enough to arrest the deployment of renewables, but it could still have a significant impact.

“It can slow down the transition, and it can cause increased social disruption. We don’t want a slow transition. Under the IPCC’s projections to keep under 1.5 degrees [of warming] we have to peak emissions in 2025 and then decline, so we are not talking about years any more, we are talking about months.”

Speaking on Friday, Joyce denied he opposed efforts to reach net zero, stating that he supported nuclear power to that end. Rather, he was opposed to wasteful policies that hurt regional Australians. He noted that former Greens leader Bob Brown remains an opponent of some wind energy projects.

He asked, as he has in the past, that if wind turbines were so good, why weren’t they being proposed for the waters off Manly or Bondi.

This was a point made by people among the large contingents of protesters from Port Stephens and the Illawarra at the rally too.

Toni Taylor, who is 73 and lives in Thirroul in Wollongong “but not with an ocean view”, said she found Joyce and Pauline Hanson to be the most impressive of the speakers she heard on Tuesday. Once a supporter of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, she no longer trusts Labor.

George Trinkler, a recreational fisher from Port Stephens, protested alongside a group concerned about the impact of wind turbines on seabirds and the seafloor, as well as the exclusion zones that would surround turbines in any future offshore development.

He has been unimpressed by the government’s efforts to engage with communities, saying that Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen appeared rude and dismissive when speaking with locals who raised their concerns in a public meeting in Port Stephens last year.

“I’m not against renewables, I’m against putting wind turbines in a pristine environment,” he says.

“No one in Port Stephens supports this.”

Views on offshore wind are more contested in the industrial cities of Newcastle and Wollongong, where many see the benefit of future industries that could be built on local steel platforms and installed and maintained by local workers already facing the closure of coal mines and power plants.

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The Star of the South project proposed for Gippsland, which is Australia’s most advanced and for which development began under the Coalition, has attracted far less dissent.

Among the people and groups who support the proposed offshore wind area slated for the Illawarra is the majority of the local council, the mayor, the University of Wollongong, the local Chamber of Commerce, the South Coast Labour Council, BlueScope Steel, Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the local Labor representatives including the NSW Planning Minister and local MP Paul Scully, and federal MPs Stephen Jones and Alison Byrnes.

Two days before the rally against renewables in Canberra those three MPs attended a “family fun day” in Wollongong in support of proposed offshore wind. The tone of the event could not have been more different to the Canberra gathering – think bare feet and Birkenstocks compared with Blundstones and RMs.

The electrification champion and engineer Dr Saul Griffith, who has advised political figures from Matt Kean to Joe Biden, was cheerful in his advocacy of the economic benefits of renewable energy, while children slung free cups of shaved ice from a contraption he had crafted from an old bicycle. There was face painting.

The gathering was far smaller than the Canberra event but it was not the only one – other rallies sponsored by union and climate groups were held in Newcastle, Gladstone and Gippsland.

Gauging overall support for the two activist camps is so far difficult. Evidence is thin. According to a report by the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner published on February 2, 92 per cent of respondents to a survey were overwhelmingly disappointed by the extent to which project developers sought to engage with communities.

The group Farmers for Climate Action highlight their own survey showing 25.8 per cent of respondents from central Queensland, Hunter and Illawarra see renewable energy projects to be the biggest opportunity for their regions over the coming 20 years, followed by tourism at 23.7 per cent and healthcare employment at 15.4 per cent.

Either way it is clear that Labor is watching the movement against renewables with concern, and that Joyce and others are determined to press the case against them.

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“This is the start,” Joyce told the rally on Tuesday. “You are the army and this is the start. If you’re from the Illawarra I want you to go home and get more [support]. I want you to get fired up. I want you to talk to your local members and remind them that they might not have a job after the next election unless they change their mind.”

By this time Joyce was on a roll and he rattled off a list of seats stretching up and down the east coast.

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