Calls to expand fossil fuel production ignore Australia’s real energy vulnerabilities, while electrification and renewables offer a clearer path to lower costs and greater security.

The leader of the National Party might have recently conceded that he has a secret love of Teslas and wouldn’t mind owning one of Elon Musk’s electric cars, but that doesn’t mean for a minute that he’s made the link between electrified transport and energy sovereignty.

“If we’re going to have a wake-up call we should just get back to drill baby drill,” Matt Canavan told Sky News last month, in an interview about the regional fallout from the US and Israel invasion of Iran.

“The world is run by fossil fuels,” Canavan said. “We need strategic oil and gas production so that we can keep our country moving whatever happens overseas.”

Apart from being a remarkably frank distillation of the Queensland senator’s world view, Canavan’s Trumpistic rantings on energy have little basis in reality – not Australia’s reality, anyway.

Happily, a major new report published this week sets out why this view is wrong-headed – as well as what the federal government needs to do, or continue doing, to unshackle Australia from the grips of the endless global fossil crisis cycle.

The  Climate Council report, published on Thursday ahead of the May federal budget, urges the Albanese government to keep incentivising the uptake of electric vehicles and home solar and batteries, and shifting the grid to a majority mix of wind, solar and battery storage, while also calling for new measures to step up the pace of the economy-wide decarbonisation journey that is already well underway.

Importantly, the report also sets out why the policy slogans being trotted out by opposition Coalition members and the fossil fuel lobby will not solve the problems Australia faces, on repeat, every time global energy supplies are disrupted. And why now, more than ever, the true solution is there for the taking.

For instance, on the matter of oil, the report notes that Australia does have a large resource of what is known as oil shale, which “often causes misconceptions” about its........

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