Australia's climate wars strangled efforts to switch to renewable energy for years.
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Despite our nation being gifted with extremely abundant quantities of the stuff, scarcely anything got done.
Almost in the interest of creating a point of political difference, the Coalition - both in opposition and government - stubbornly stuck to its belief in coal.
The carbon tax, even the limp version eventually created, limped off into the abyss with barely a murmur.
Now the Liberals are putting their faith in nuclear, reckoning it's an easy fit for the existing transmission grid - just build them on the sites of the old coal-fired electricity plants.
Despite the obvious concerns - the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters are cases in point - Opposition Leader Peter Dutton reckons nuclear could be a panacea to climate change.
Even if it was as effective as he reckons, the accepted wisdom is it would take at least until the 2040s to get a facility built - perhaps a politically convenient time-frame, as it turns out.
Regardless, Australia is making significant headway on renewables.
From a 10 per cent slice a decade ago, wind and solar now account for around 40 per cent of power fed into the national grid.
That's really no surprise given our nation's world-first take-up of home-based solar.
But on top of that has been the commercial projects - paddocks turned over to an inland sea of solar panels.
Examples of that can be seen right across the Border region; swathes of the technology crop up, for one, on either side of the Hume Freeway heading north to Albury-Wodonga.
It's a significant investment because clearly, it pays - for investors and in trying to abate global warming.
But that doesn't mean it's an easy process.
A $636 million, 1039-hectare solar farm planned for Culcairn has been almost reluctantly embraced by that community.
People know the worth for generations to come, but there will always be the concern about the loss of valuable farming land.
These are the debates that no doubt will continue to arise as the renewable energy momentum continues to grow, but these are discussions we must continue to have.
