For some reason no one can explain, the catchments for the Burnett and Mary rivers are included in the Great Barrier Reef protection legislation. These rivers don’t even flow into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, they empty to the south of it, and get swept away by the giant East Australian Current which heads south away from the reef.
The amount of water moving there is so vast that the entire annual flow of the Burnett and Mary Rivers passes in just two minutes.
Any runoff the rivers add to that flow will have to do a full lap of the Pacific Ocean to Peru and back before they get to the Great Barrier Reef.
We’re being so precious about the reef, but there are also eddy currents and gyres in the area that stir up the ocean floor and add a rich nutrient mix to the water. One near Frazer Island is so rich it causes phytoplankton blooms all by itself. Farms also use pesticides, and bad land management could add sediment to water — but as Peter Ridd says “where is the data”?
So despite farms adding an insignificant amount of nutrients to a current flowing away from the reef, farmers spread over 53,000 square kilometers of land must comply with rules about runoff, watering, and fertilizer. And they and their advisors all need to keep records of their compliance.
On this close up map below the distance from Bundaberg to Lady Elliot Island (the nearest reef) is 77 kilometers.
The Burnett and Mary Rivers flow into an area south of the Great Barrier Reef.
Let’s check that science — Queensland readers — we need your help.
Peter Ridd has looked closely into this (see his video below from last year.) The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) is starting up a campaign to get the Queensland Productivity Commission to run an independent inquiry into the scientific assumptions behind environmental laws. The initial case study would be the Great Barrier Reef Protection Measure in the catchment of the Burnett-Mary rivers because it is a star example of pointless Big Government legislation.
To get started we need 3000 signatures on the QLD Parliamentary Petition before it closes on June 12th. Only people living in Queensland can sign it. But if you know someone who lives there please send them an email.
Professor Peter Ridd is organizing this as Chairman of the Board at the AEF. I am also a Director of the AEF.
We’re facing the sixth mass extinction but carbon accounting games are a performance art and almost no one cares that the largest emitter on Earth has gaping holes in their numbers.
One reader in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out that The Onion saw this coming years ago:
The Paris Agreement allows everyone to set their own targets, and to define their own terms (and retrospectively as well). So China decided it would count “carbon intensity”, rather than carbon output. But it didn’t define carbon intensity. Normally it means the amount of CO2 emitted per unit GDP — which would work well for China with its rapidly growing economy. But something else is going on.
In the last five years China had promised to cut emissions by 18%, but all the official statistics suggested it was only getting 12% of the way there. Then a miracle happened and suddenly China leapt to a 17.7% reduction, just in the nick of time.
The Ecoworriers team at Carbon Brief are probably the only ones who do care and they drilled through all the detail. But being as generous as they can, even they can’t explain where 380 megatons went.
To put that in perspective, Australia’s entire annual emissions was 459 megatons. It’s like someone just said Oopsie to 80% of our national emissions.
So the rules are loose, and China is taking advantage of every loophole. The CCP knows that the UN isn’t going to turn up with guns to say “pay up”. But there is a price. The whole renewables project that China profits from looks just that much more dodgy, and so does the CCP. Who can trust anything they say?
Unlike the West’s green radicals, China isn’t willing to sacrifice its economy to meet its climate pledges. But Beijing isn’t above cooking its carbon books to gull Western activists into thinking it is.
At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal.
Old-style accounting implies China’s emission grew by a huge 1,430 megatonnes in the last five years. But the new carbon-intensity figures imply only 690 megatons of CO₂ growth, creating a 730 megatonnes from CO₂ gap.
A major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years.
Here’s one slight of hand — only coal burnt in pursuit of energy counts. Not coal converted to plastics, asphalt, rubber, chemicals or fertilizer.
A footnote in China’s latest statistical communique offers a brief description of carbon intensity as relating to the CO2 emissions from “energy activities and industrial production”.
This indicates that the carbon-intensity calculation now includes industrial process emissions and excludes non-energy uses of fossil fuels, shown by the “new scope” in the figure above.
Remember China’s huge coal-to-liquids program that I wrote about two months ago? Every year nearly 400 million tons of coal are converted to fertilizer, chemicals, plastics, jet fuel and diesel.
And some of these accounting tricks make sense. The Tupperware containers for example, are legitimately holding their CO2 (for now). But even that trick doesn’t account for the missing CO2.
So China treats us like mugs and we cheer it on. Why?
Wetzel describes this as a ‘wind power puzzle’ and discusses several possible causes:
Several years with weak wind conditions,
More frequent curtailments of wind turbines due to grid bottlenecks,
The expansion of wind farms at weaker inland locations,
So-called shading or ‘wind theft’ effects between wind turbines.
Australia has already done the same experiment. No matter how much wind power we add to the grid we can’t seem to get the bare minimum to increase, (the dark green columns at the bottom).
We’ve 1,000 years of coal left underground, but we’re returning to burning trees again to scare off the Climate-Yeti.
Environmentalists are aghast, of course, even though this is exactly what they wanted — a lower carbon form of concrete, and an end to coal.
But the 100 year old coal kiln needs $100m worth of transformation to be able to burn wood and tyres properly. So this is an expensive shift, and it won’t be easy to undo, and now the Greens and ABC (but I repeat myself) are concerned…
One of the largest cement manufacturing sites in Australia has temporarily shut operations as it upgrades its coal-fired kiln to accept alternative fuel sources such as used tyres and “sustainable” wood waste.
Cement Australia’s Railton plant, in north-west Tasmania, will stop production for an estimated 45 days to allow for the $108 million works as the company moves to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
The whole point of the ABC story is to gnash teeth over where will the woodchips come from? The concrete company says it will only use’ certified sustainable’ wood which should make the EcoWorriers crack the champers. But the greener types can see the temptation will be there to increase the harvest of native forest, to generate more ‘sustainable’ offcuts.
The Concrete company didn’t want to explain where the wood is coming from, possibly because they didn’t want anyone to chain themselves to any trees.
“To this day, they’ve not told people exactly where that wood was coming from, but we’re pretty sure it’s going to be native forests and Tasmanian timbers,” he said.
“If they need a very large amount of wood, and they will, isn’t that going to then drive logging and potentially increase the rate of logging in order to be able to sustain the flow of wood that they require?”
The, ABC, notably, did not interview any foresters, probably because they might be afraid the foresters would say the native forests could use some thinning so they don’t vaporize in a pyroclastic koala-killing blaze with one bolt of lightening.
Instead we get the bread and circuses statistics:
By switching to alternative fuels, Cement Australia expects to reduce coal use by 111,000 tonnes a year, and reduce carbon dioxide by 105,000 tonnes over the same period.
But not the statistic that matters — How many degrees with that cool the world? The ABC have no idea.
The ferocious demand for gas power to feed US Datacenters has triggered a global shortage
Such is the cashed up desire for gas turbines in the US, that all around the world other people are struggling to get gas turbines. Manufacturers have ramped up production, but waiting times have blown out to more than five years. In sheer desperation, companies are converting jet engines into small gas turbines.
The demand for gas power in “US captive data centers” is so large it is bigger than the investment in gas power in any other country except for the investment in grid connected datacentres, also in the USA.
Anyone who thinks they can just add a gas turbine here and there to patch up a gap in their renewable transition could be in for a nasty surprise.
“It only takes 30 -45 days to convert a Boeing 737 Jet Engine….”
Turbine makers like Siemens, GE Vernova, and Mitsubishi are ramping up production, but expansion projects could take up to 5 years.
Yet all these plans take time to materialize, and industrial electricity consumers need it now, so they are converting jet engines to gas turbines. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the conversion of jet engine turbines to power generation turbines was a growing business enjoying a lot of investor interest. One such converting company, FTAI Aviation, had seen its shares gain 42% since it announced this new business, which takes just 30-45 days to convert a Boeing 737 jet engine into a power generation gas turbine.
However aircraft jet engines are much smaller than the full capacity of a proper gas power turbine. A 737 engine is only about 25MW, compared to a proper gas power plant which might be 400MW or 600MW. They are really just large emergency generators. Still if Australians get poor enough from the renewable transition and crazy tax laws, soon we’ll have plenty of spare jets to convert to tiny power stations, right? The riff raff won’t be flying…
If only Australia had fully functional old coal plants they could restart like France, Germany and the US did, we could have sold the cheap power to desperate data center operators instead of being a technology backwater. Instead we blow them up, and throw a party to celebrate.
I’ll be speaking tomorrow at an event organized by Gerard Rennick’s team in WA. He will take part from Queensland by video link. It’s all things crazy about the energy crisis, and the pagan witchcraft masquerading as science, and finding a path out of the swamp.
The great thing about these events is meeting the people who come.
The worst global warming nightmares all came true 130,000 years ago, done by mother nature all by herself. Most of the time the media ignores all this inconvenient catastrophe that lasted an astonishing ten thousand years. New research suggests almost all the Ross Ice Shelf melted and large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared too, yet somehow Emperor penguins survived. So did the seals and the whales, and there was no tipping point that broke the planet. But the Hunter-gatherer beach clubs of 131,000 years ago were all washed away.
A new study looked at dust in Antarctic ice cores and noticed there was an ominous shift 120,000 years ago. In other periods the ice core had a layer of fine dust that seems to have traveled all the way from South American volcanoes. But when the Earth last warmed out of the depths of the ice age 130,000 years ago, a different type of coarse grainy dust appeared in the ice core they dug out. Normally big grains don’t travel far on the wind, so this implied that it was coming from a close volcanic source. And while there are plenty of volcanoes on Antarctica, they are normally buried under ice and their dust doesn’t spread. This meant the icesheets must have melted so far that the volcanoes were exposed.
The isotopic fingerprint of the fine dust matched dust from volcanoes in South America. But the large grained dust matched rocks in McMurdo Sound in the West Antarctic Rift area.
We already knew things must have been dramatic in Antarctica at the time because sea levels were so much higher. There are remnants of corals up to 9 meters higher near Kalbarri in Western Australia, a stable part of very old crustal plate.
The map dramatically changed:
The Eemian period was hotter than our current Holocene.
Lest we forget, every hottest ever record today is nothing compared what has already happened.
Seas are rising at 1 to 3mm a year. Yet humanity saw the seas rise by 125 meters (twice) — children used to play on the continental shelf until all their beaches disappeared, their homes washed away, and their favourite reefs were destroyed. Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.
Teach the children what real climate change is. The more they know about prehistoric times and geology, the less vulnerable they’ll be to the scaremongering.
But sometime, some day, the ice sheets will return. We do need to talk about that.
REFERENCE
Austin J. Carter et al, Diminished Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctic Ice Sheet during Last Interglacial warming, Nature Geoscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-026-01988-1
The EU Free Trade agreement would Weaponize the Paris Agreement
The Labor Party want to sign a deal with the EU which means that future Australian governments won’t be able to drop the Paris Agreement without being bludgeoned in trade by the EU. If we revise our Net Zero goals downwards or delay them the EU can cut access for our farmers to their markets. And the EU will be able to say they are not bullying us, or interfering with our sovereign rights, they are just enforcing a trade agreement we signed up for.
In the Labor Governments own words:
For the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia (and the EU) has made a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Effectively Australian farmers or exporters to the EU will be held hostage by the EU to make sure we meet our Paris targets, even if we vote against Net Zero commitments. The deal has meaningless words like “Australia maintains the right to regulate in pursuit of its own public policy objectives” but if we actually do that, there will be a price.
Once farmers have adapted to the new EU market, and supply lines are established to advertise, package, transport and distribute the goods, there will be real pain if those markets are abruptly cut off because Australia didn’t meet it’s absurd impossible Net Zero targets.
This suits the Labor Party, they can sell out the regions without worrying about a voter backlash from country folk who don’t vote Labor much anyway. The Labor inner-city voters will be happy because they can buy their French cheese and European electric cars slightly cheaper, along with their discounted Dutch ham. But the farmers and the Coalition will be caught in a no win situation where they will pay if they try to get rid of the Paris agreement.
This is a pincer move that’s intricate and clever in the same way Ebola is
And if this Trade Agreement goes through, the farmers won’t have much choice. They could choose not to sell to the EU to stop themselves from being held hostage. But the trade deal means new meat and dairy products from the EU will be arriving to take some of the Australian market away, so they will be, de facto, forced to find some new market.
Labor have thrown the regions under the bus in order to trap the Coalition into keeping the Paris Agreement, and the Paris Agreement is a ratchet that can only move in one direction. Commitments can only increase…
The good news is that the Coalition appear to be aware of this now and have vowed to oppose it:
The position means the government could have to rely on the Greens – which has opposed recent free-trade deals – to ratify the agreement that took nearly eight years to conclude.
The bad news is that only last week the Opposition was saying they won’t drop the Paris Agreement because it won’t change anything they do, and “it’s just a piece of paper”. That didn’t age well. Didn’t they see this coming?
The true danger of Paris framework is coming into focus
It is the legal bomb that can be weaponized through other domestic legislation. If Labor can do a deal with the Greens to sign this, Australia effectively becomes a quasi satellite state of the EU at least on climate and energy. And the new ludicrous targets that Labor snuck in last September become an excuse for the EU to punish any particular industry in Australia that exports to the EU. And we can be sure the EU will pick the most politically leveraged industry to target. It’s not like they will block the Great Fashion Houses of Warringah, because the Teal politicians will squeal for free.
This is the elegance of the trap: the voters least enthusiastic about Labor’s climate agenda become the collateral for enforcing it. If a future government tries to loosen the Paris ratchet, it is not the inner-city teal voter who gets threatened with lost market access; it is the farmer, processor and regional exporter.
The irony is, it was a lousy inept trade deal for farmers anyhow
The incompetence of this offering made it easier for the Opposition to turn it down.
Ted O’Brien, The Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, in The Australian:
For the first time, Australia faces legally binding climate commitments in an FTA, including enforceable obligations and the prospect of sanctions. Yet the Albanese government has said remarkably little about this. Instead, debate has centred on agriculture, where Australia was out-negotiated by Europe – securing access for just an extra 30,600 tonnes of beef while Canada won 50,000 tonnes, and forcing Australian cheese producers to compete against government-subsidised European imports at home.
Imagine if Albanese had managed to arrange an EU deal which seemed appealing?
His incompetence is the best thing he’s got going for him.
Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:
Mike Foley and Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
Investment in renewable projects collapsed by 50 per cent over the past year, wiping out $4 billion in spending on the rollout, compromising the Albanese government’s clean energy targets and spurring industry warnings that the delays could raise electricity bills.
It’s always a critical juncture for renewables isn’t it? It’s like that for things that serve no useful purpose and levitate on subsidies. Investors must bet on which way the political wind will blow, and last year, after the Trump win, renewable energy took a hit.
Financial commitments for new renewable generation projects fell to a 10-year low in 2025 of $4.4 billion, half the value of projects that reached financial close in 2024, according to the Clean Energy Council’s annual report, published on Tuesday.
Investors are fleeing because of all the usual reasons not to invest — there’s a glut of solar power at noon that curtails every kind of generator and makes prices so low they go negative. Manufacturing and transportation costs are lifting off. Added to that, all the new areas for wind and solar plants have no transmission lines built to them yet, and the farmers hate the proposed high voltage lines. Community resistance is organized and growing. Around the world skeptical governments are winning elections and the golden subsidy deals might vanish any day now.
Cue the next crazy plan where our Energy Minister thinks data centers will rescue his ludicrous target:
By Perry Williams and Elizabeth Pike, The Australian
Energy Minister Chris Bowen has bet that Australia’s booming data-centre industry can reverse the slower-than-expected rollout of wind farms amid fears a slump in financing projects will result in Labor failing to hit its 2030 renewables target.
Data centres could help wind farm projects get off the ground as part of a proposed edict for operators to underwrite new renewable power supply and pay their full share of new grid connectivity, so costs are not passed on to consumers or businesses.
As if AI data centres would want to jump through all those Australian hoops and regressive taxes to make it happen here, when they can set up in the US where electricity is half the price?
The kind of dumb datacenters that serve up Netflix need to be near their customers because the lag times matter, but AI datacenters don’t because no one cares if their answer comes 500 milliseconds later. Australia could have been a master hub of AI development for the world if we wanted to burn our coal, gas, or uranium, instead, we pray to the Eco-Lords to attract datacentres for gaming or watching reruns of the Hunger Games so they might install a few more industrial wind parks, kill off some excess koalas, and cool us by zero degrees by 2100.
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