Obviously renewable energy is the key to fighting climate change while maintaining our quality of life. There are however other benefits of renewable energy.
I am a member of the Air Quality Community Consultation Committee for the M8. The M8 (previously known as the New M5) is a road that was built in Sydney as part of the WestConnex project. This is quite an eye opener. Before construction started, monitoring took place for about a year in various locations in the general vicinity of the M8, especially the locations of the proposed smoke stacks. It turns out that the national air quality standard was not achieved even then for particulates in the air. While this is not very surprising for locations on busy roads, the standard also wasn't achieved in some locations that weren't very close to busy roads.
I am very hopeful that as electric and hydrogen cars take over, air quality will dramatically improve, even if there are more cars on the road.
Fossil fuel fired power stations also produce air pollution. This will cease to be a problem when renewable energy takes over.
Australia imports most of its oil. Oil prices can be quite volatile due to manipulations by OPEC and because a lot of it comes from the Persian Gulf which is politically unstable. When electric cars take over, this will no longer be a problem.
Oil is directly and indirectly linked to various wars. For example:
We can expect that once oil will no longer be an expensive commodity, there will be less wars fought over it, if any. And even if there are still wars over oil, if Australia is not importing oil, Australia also doesn't have to get involved in those wars.