The Queensland Quixote

In far north Queensland, in the ancient forests of the Atherton Tablelands, Steven Nowakowski has spent three decades fighting to protect the natural world. A wilderness photographer and lifelong environmentalist, he once stood as a Greens candidate. Now he finds himself in open conflict with those who claim to be saving the planet.Steven and I met in 2024, while filming The Real Cost of Net Zero.Steven’s epiphany came through a camera lens. He began documenting the destruction wrought by industrial wind farms — roads carved through forests, ridgelines stripped bare, habitats fragmented in the name of climate salvation.“The end game here is to achieve Net Zero,” he says. “But pushing roads and clearing forests to build wind turbines is an oxymoron. The first thing we should be doing is keeping trees in the ground.”One project, the Chalumbin Wind Farm, would have cleared more than 500 hectares of forest next to a Wet Tropics World Heritage area. Steven helped rally the local community to stand against it.“I was shattered when the government wanted to come in and put these big windmills in,” said traditional owner Tom Gertz. “They didn’t consult with the traditional people. Everybody’s got to understand, you never gonna come in here and desecrate my country.”Against the odds, the campaign succeeded. The federal government rejected Chalumbin, deeming the environmental risks too great. The battle was over but the war had only just begun.Steven has turned his skills as a cartographer toward mapping the scale of what’s coming. Just in Queensland, 3,127 turbines are in the planning pipeline but as Steven says that number grows by the week. Thousands more turbines will march through New South Wales, Victoria, to Port Lincoln in South Australia and across the Bass Strait to Tasmania as the east coast grid is transformed, along with the landscape.And that’s only the generation side of the ledger. All of this scattered supply — wind and solar farms spread across the continent — must be stitched together with new transmission.“We’ve identified around 10,000 kilometres of transmission that needs to be built by 2050,” says Australian Energy Market Operator CEO Daniel Westerman. “About half of that in the next decade.”Think about that. Every fourteen hours, another turbine. Every day, 22,000 new solar panels. This is what it takes to meet the government’s 2030 renewable energy target.“The Australian public have got no idea,” says Steven. “I gotta laugh. They’ve got no idea what’s in store.”They will. These turbines won’t be tucked away in deserts or outback plains. They’ll march across the Great Dividing Range, loom over farmland, cut into native forests, and tower above once-pristine ridgelines.Changing the landscape forever, from sea to shining sea.This is what Net Zero looks like when the rubber hits the road and the bulldozers hit the bush.You can see (and buy) Steven’s beautiful wilderness pictures here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.powerlines.au