ABC tells 100% renewable Canberrans that electricity prices are rising $300 “because they are falling”

It’s hard to find a more daft example of Pravda-style Public Broadcasting

ABC journalist Markus Mannheim was given the task of making Canberrans feel good about having to pay nearly $300 more for their electricity this year. He also had to hide that the rise is all due to renewable energy. Canberra has now gone “100% Renewable” so there is no other energy to blame. Thus, he’s created an article which actually says that prices are falling which is why they are rising.

Like all good Pravda pieces, higher prices were “always expected” and the only graph he shows is not of Canberra and not about retail prices. Graphs are just eye candy anyhow.

The ABC journalists are apparently being trained to write in the genre of top level teenage girlie-gossip magazines. This is how a precocious, fifteen year old girl would explain electricity pricing to her 12-year-old Youtube fan-club:

Electricity prices are falling. So why are Canberrans’ household power bills about to rise?

EvoEnergy says its charges need to go up because electricity prices are going down.

If that sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone — the workings of Australia’s electricity markets […]

Canberra man uses subsidies, “invests” $20,000, still pays $700pa in electricity. Hopes to break even in 14 years.

A fairly crappy investment in every sense — even as a “subsidy farmer”:

…renewable energy proponents say individual consumers like Mr Pulford could play an increasingly important role as citizen investors.

“I say it is a little bit gold plated,” Mr Pulford says of his $20,000 investment.

‘The new system was installed last month and he is already generating enough power to run all his home energy needs, charge his son’s hybrid SUV and sell excess back to the grid. “It ranges between $2 to about $1.90 a day for energy and that can be with the clothes dryers and bar heaters on.”

Mr Pulford said he expects to pay off the investment within 14 years.

He’s excited that his electricity bill is only $700 a year, after laying out twenty grand. After 14 years his “investment” will start to pay off, assuming the batteries are still running, the solar panels are clean, and the inverter didn’t need replacing. Those battery warranties, at best, are ten years. He might get lucky. Without subsidies, his “pay-back time” would be something like 30% longer.

In the ACT, 250 homes with Reposit technology […]

Kill the Climate Deniers is back with a new club dance album

Remember the government funded play “Kill The Deniers”? They’re back!

This time they’ve got a talkie-dance video (is it funded by the ACT government again? I don’t know). They’re launching it today in Canberra (Weds 21st). See it below — at first glance I thought David Finnigan was up to his deep game — living satire — where he pretends to mock skeptics while he’s really satirizing the Global Worriers, post modern art, and pointless government funding. It could be, but this one looks more like a therapy session. Let’s work through the pain, and pretend the artistes paid for childish drama are the victims of meanie words…

But cynically, seriously, maybe climate skeptics were the only ones who paid any attention last time, and this is just a gambit for a link from Andrew Bolt?

Note the credits:

Words by Andrew Bolt, Joanne Nova, and Bishop Hill and all the commenters

The narrative is about someone with a bag on their head who gets uncovered, does a big stretch, dances around some cardboard heads, then she stops and they put the bag back on. Plotless. (You expected a plot, you philistine?)

Andrew Bolt is […]

Kill the Deniers — a government-funded fantasy play where “guns” solve climate issues

This is your brain on government funding (pace Mark Steyn). The government of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) gave $18k to a theatre group to put on a play called “Kill the Deniers”. Now, lucky us, we can read the e-book. Because the climate debate really needs more guns, hostages, brute force, and threats right?

Well, it does if you don’t have any evidence.

“Kill the Deniers” — All the wit and wisdom of government funded “arts”. Can’t persuade the voters? Shoot their representatives.

The Kill the Deniers e-book is coming:

…writer and theatre-maker whose work sits at the intersection of art and science, [David] Finnigan said Kill Climate Deniers grew out of discussions with Aspen Island Theatre Company’s Julian Hobba.

‘We got really interested in talking about the climate debate, and we were wondering why it was that in Australia the debate had stalled so badly; what is it about this country? And then we moved on to asking what would it take to shift the debate forward again – what would it actually take to generate real political change?’ said Finnigan.

Why did the debate stall? They could have done some research and […]

Kill the Climate Deniers — taxes fund new “living satire” where writer plays paranoid believer admiring terrorists

I’ve come back from a few days R&R at a marvellous farm, to hear that the ACT government is tossing $19,000 to an Aspen Island Theatre Company to do the “creative development” of a fun play called Kill The Deniers.

David Finnigan

Don Aitkin wonders if it is a comedy, so I went with an open mind to investigate. After reading his other works, I conclude the writer, David Finnigan, seems to be doing a brave new kind of living satire –– one where he lives the genre full time as he prepares, never breaking out of character in tweets, blogs, or plays. Sheer brilliance! He is self-satirizing the paranoid useful idiot who swallows improbable scientific visions about controlling the weather, and uses hyperbolic crass motherf…… language in a form of scientific self-mockery. Taking things to absurd extremes, he calls himself peaceful while he admires terrorists, invents conspiracy theories, and dreams of bloody revolution.

Truly, this could be a remarkable production that we will laugh at for years to come. In a stroke of innovation, the production is not the play that is in draft — instead it’s the media, the blogs, and his own parody responses. The […]

Canberra (the ACT) will cut emissions by 40% (!) by… 2020

File this one under: Experiments in Green Government. Watch this box.

There’s a spot in Australia called The Australian Capital Territory, where our National Capital, Canberra, sits and which has it’s own anachronistic government: a kind of glorified local council and junior “state” government at the same time*.

In 2008 they were lucky enough to elect a Labor minority government with a Green coalition. Now it seems they’re going to showcase the ACT in a grand symbolic experiment by enacting the strictest carbon reduction scheme in Australia.

ACT environment minister Simon Corbell tabled the new target in a Bill in the Legislative Assembly today. (Aug 26, 2010)

“Governments have a responsibility to act on this issue, and the ACT Labor Government is leading Australia on reducing our carbon footprint,” Mr Corbell said in a statement.

The ACT has also pledged to have its emissions peak by 2013, decline by 80 per cent by 2050, and for the ACT to be carbon neutral by 2060.

Forty percent cuts (from 1990 levels) in just ten years?

Samuel J at Catallaxy Files calculates that as the mother of all emissions cuts translating to a 62% per capita reduction in a decade.

5.5 out […]