Conservationist Steven Nowakowski has shared new aerial footage of the desolation being carried out by the Albanese government to make way for renewable projects in regional Queensland.
The Lotus Creek Wind Farm in the central Queensland renewable energy zone (REZ), located between Mackay and Rockhampton in the Great Dividing Range, where bulldozers are currently uprooting trees and flattening mountains, is just the “tip of the iceberg”.
Speaking to Sky News Australia, Nowakowski said the government’s pursuit of net zero emissions through relentless solar and wind projects was the “biggest policy failure in our lifetime”.
Mr Nowakowski provided aerial footage of the ongoing development.
“If the climate issue is such a big issue, you’d think the solution is by keeping trees in the ground, keeping wilderness intact, keeping biodiversity intact,” he told Sky News host Chris Kenny.
“But what we’re seeing is the exact opposite. We are blasting out mountains left, right and centre, right down in the Great Dividing Range of Queensland.
“What scares me and many others that know what’s going on is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. You know, where there’s another, well over 5,000 wind towers proposed.”
Mr Nowakowski said the footage showed mountains in the distance which were being “flattened right now, as we speak”.
The professional photographer said that what scares him most was that there was “no end point” as trying to “electrify everything is completely impossible”.
“We’re going to destroy the environment and destroy our economy, destroy manufacturing, and everything to try to achieve what the government is trying to achieve,” he said.
“I’ll go as far as to say, this is the biggest policy failure of our lifetime. Yeah, it’s actually terrible.”
A spokesperson for CS Energy, which acquired Lotus Creek Wind Farm in 2024, told SkyNews.com.au that “extensive work” had been undertaken at the site to “avoid and minimise” the clearing of land.
The spokesperson said the project had to abide by strict control measures to minimise the impacts on biodiversity, including setting aside an offset area of approximately 4,500 hectares – more than 10 times the project’s clearing footprint to be protected for conservation.
“Under the project’s environmental approval, no more than 399.1 hectares can be cleared within the approved development footprint,” the spokesperson said.
“To ensure that construction stays within the approved clearing footprint, the project is using controls such as on-site surveys, GPS tracking on machinery onsite, physical and GPS flagging of protected areas and satellite imagery.
“The project is being constructed on privately-owned cattle grazing land and has been designed to minimise the impact to local flora and fauna by avoiding areas of high conservation significance.”
Last October, Mr Nowakowski joined Sky News and described the destruction of the untouched bushland as “hypocrisy of the highest order”, arguing the same activists and politicians who once fought to protect these habitats were now endorsing projects which were tearing them apart.
“It’s these areas that are now being targeted by the wind industry in Queensland because this is where there’s a scarcity of wind along the coastal ranges,” he said.
“So, what we’re seeing is vast amounts right now being cleared for green energy. The hypocrisy is outstanding.”
Mr Nowakowski said the scale of the planned rollout was “beyond comprehension”.
“We’ve done some recent mapping and, in the pipeline, we’re going to need around 31,000 wind towers, close to 500,000 hectares of solar, well over 500 million solar panels,” he said.
According to the Truth Map, renewable projects would require 44,000 kilometres of new haulage roads – longer than Australia’s coastline – and tens of thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines, many cutting directly through national parks, farmland and coastal wilderness.