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Only five years ago Australia had a mere 20,000 solar systems installed on homes across the country. Now thanks to a Gonzo-Big-Daddy-Government we have over one million solar systems, almost all of them producing electricity that could have been made for something like a fifth of the price with coal.
The Clean Energy Regulator spins it as though wasting money on inefficient equipment in the hope of reducing world temperatures is a good thing for Australia.
“…the Clean Energy Regulator, which estimates that those solar energy systems provide power for around 2.5 million Australians. With a population of around 23 million, that means over ten percent of the country benefits from solar power.”
So 10% of Australians benefit from solar, and 90% pay for it?
“The regulator also says the installations have saved Australians about half a billion dollars on electricity bills!”
The regulator doesn’t say how much Australians had to pay to “save” a half a billion dollars.
In Dec 2011 The Productivity Commission estimated $777m in one year alone:
At the prevailing REC prices, this effectively provided an up-front capital subsidy of $777 million to solar PV systems in 2010.
[…]
The irony: the answer to “clean” energy might not be the glossamer sun or the lilting breeze, but an infectious germ.
[Science Daily] …a team from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a method to make bacteria produce diesel on demand. While the technology still faces many significant commercialisation challenges, the diesel, produced by special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel…
They’re not there yet, yields are … tragic.
[BBC] Professor Love said it would take about 100 litres of bacteria to produce a single teaspoon of the fuel.
“Our challenge is to increase the yield before we can go into any form of industrial production,” he said.
But speaking as someone who did microbiology, sooner or later, the bug solution is coming. I presume everyone knows the old exponential growth story where one bacteria weighing 10-12 of a gram, doubles every 20 minutes, and if Earth were a cheesecake, 2 days later you’ve converted it into E.Coli (and 4000 times over)? (There’s more on this theme here).
There is power in them efficient little biology machines. Our chemical factories are mere shadows of the curmudgeonly ‘Coli. Though in the […]
What were they thinking?
Tony Abbott has a plan to try to convince China and the US to sign up for the “global climate change deal.” As if the world’s number one and two economies, with a population of 1.6 billion combined, will be waiting for instructions. And as if the global climate needed “a deal”. Hey but we do have 22 million people. squeak. squeak.
To make matters worse, Greg Hunt — the opposition spokesman for the environment — said a Coalition Government might not wipe out the emissions reductions target but… wait, they might lift the target instead. Thus taking something useless, expensive and ineffective against a problem-that-doesn’t-exist and making it moreso.
It’s a mistake every which way. The Liberal Party could play them at their own green game and beat them, just by applying common sense. Instead its appeasing the politically correct namecallers (who wouldn’t vote for them anyway), and the price they pay is to look weak, irrational and lacking in conviction.
A true environmentalist would stop wasting money on schemes that don’t help the environment. (Why spend a cent cooling Australia by no degrees? There goes the carbon tax…)
If the Liberal Party were […]
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6.6 out of 10 based on 30 ratings
What the government giveth, the government can take away. So it came to pass that the glory of green investments fell over its peak and started to slide — a slide we hope will continue forthwith with speed until such day that Renewables Actually Work.
Weakest quarter for clean energy investment since 2009 [Bloomberg] 15 April 2013
Investment worldwide in the first quarter of 2013 was $40.6bn, down 22% on a year earlier, due to a downturn in large wind and solar project financings London and New York, 15 April 2013 – Global investment in clean energy in the first three months of 2013 was lower than in any quarter for the past four years, according to the latest figures from research company Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
2013 Q1 is not marked here (except with a dodgy red star thingy). It s somewhere around 22% below Q1 2012. 🙂 [Graph: Bloomberg]
Remember in the land of warmer-investments, this is just a global pause. It’s the fourth highest first-quarter investment. Ever. (!)
The US leads the way. Europe is following. Australia is too irrelevant to mention.
“Among the key details of the first quarter 2013 data were a 54% year-on-year fall […]
The EU is a basket-case, teetering, so when the European Parliament had the chance to “fix” the carbon market yesterday, they surprised everyone and chose not to. Being unfixed, it’s free to collapse, which it did and by 40%.
The Economist headline today is “Carbon Trading Below Junk Status”.
The EU carbon market once was around €22/tCO2 (that was 2008). Australia turned up five years late to the party, and is still trying to trade at similar rates.
Today Point Carbon is listing the carbon price as “€2.80“. Obviously, subject to change, and possibly trending-to-zero.
[BusinessTimes] “Campaigners and traders warn the carbon price could now fall below 2 euros or even to near zero in the coming weeks, and government sales could fail if they don’t meet minimum price requirements, as banks that act as liquidity providers pull out.”
The EU carbon market is not dead yet, but this could be a game changer
[The Economist] The rejection [of the bill to rescue the carbon market] was a surprise. The parliament’s environment committee had looked at the plan in February and approved it by a surprisingly wide margin of 38 votes to 25.
April 18th, 2013 | Tags: Carbon Tax | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
It’s difficult to say anything for sure about Antarctica because the weather is so variable. Bumper snow one year, not so much the next. (Noise and uncertainty is large). But 800 years of ice cores spread across Antarctica shows the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) is more likely to have been increasing over the last century. (Which fits with what Zwally et al found in 2012 with ICESAT satellite data).
Note the correlation of the smoothed average of the SMB (orange line) with Total Solar Irradiance (green line).
Antarctic Ice has been increasing for the last half century, and over 800 years it correlates with solar radiation. TSI: Total Solar Irradiance (Click to enlarge) Fig. 5. (A) Mean normalised stacked SMB anomaly time series at the continental scale, calculated as described in the text (black line with positive and negative values filled in with red and blue contours, respectively) and the 40-yr central running average smoothing (orange line). The green line represents the normalised TSI anomalies, and the corresponding ±1 uncertainties are indicated by the green vertical bars.
H/t: HockeySchtick and Jaymez
A paper published today in The Cryosphere finds Antarctica has been gaining surface ice and snow accumulation […]
Stephan Lewandowsky’s work is a case study in government funded inanity. Some Australians are sure that burning coal will make storms stronger. Others are not convinced. In November 2012 Lewandowsky’s intellectual contribution to science in Australia was to call the unconvinced “stupid”. If that’s not inane enough, at the same time he claimed that he didn’t recieve funding from any organisation that would benefit from his article.
How many taxpayer dollars went towards funding that? No conflict of interest?
Are Australian Research Council funds used as a form of third party advertising for Labor Government policy?
Writing in “A storm of Stupidity, Sandy, Evidence and Climate Change” on The Conversation, his reasoning is like this: some scientists reckon that a very bad storm called “Sandy” has “links” to man-made emissions of a trace gas. Lewandowsky reasons that because those scientists are called “experts”, anyone who questions them should be called stupid. (He thinks this article and that tweet were overdue). Though, in a twist, apparently he doesn’t actually think the unconvinced are actually stupid, he thinks they are ethically “disembodied” people who “mislead”. (As an aside, notice how he approves of news articles that call them stupid even though […]
The Monster is in the house. I haven’t actually laid a finger on it, but I’ve been introduced.
It is currently being fed with special monster baby food — heavy windows, slow drivers, stuff like that — it is pacified with shiny plastic discs and drip-fed digits from far-distant lands.
At a hundred-billion-tera-flops a gargle-second, it’s learning fast. A lot seems to be going on.
In the meantime, sorry for the silence. I’ve been working as fast as I could on a tiny coaster-sized array of pixels with unfamiliar software, no mouse, and no ability to load up pictures to my usual storage site, or read my usual emails (except one at a time with 14 keystrokes of complexity and a 20 second wait for the next – I gave up). I dream of graphs I can’t make. I reboot the old machine, and sometimes feel normal for a half hour. Then it goes.
Space-time is being warped in my head. Things I used to do in five minutes take me all day.
Some futurists have waffled on prophesizing about the coming integration of hominid brains and silicon chips, blah-de-blah. I always thought they were bonkers. But I was wrong. […]
In astrological terms, Jupiter must be passing through my technology zone. Yesterday the web-host was down for 15 hours. Today, my computer collapsed randomly into the blue screen of death. It can be revived, sort of, but the five-year-old-overworked-disc only springs to life for short bursts in between intermittent freezes. It’s been kind, letting me back up. But it doesn’t last — we are now stuck in an infinite degrading loop where it crashes, logs off and restarts, thoroughly error checking the full disc, and an hour later I can do another two minutes work, before the Goto-loop-from-hell starts over. 😐
Sorry to all the people who emailed me today, Robert, Horst, Jennifer and Jim I was about to reply… Tony, Mods, I’m working from a lap top… my brain has shrunk from 2 x 30 inch, to 1 x 15. Please be patient. I don’t think I’ve lost emails, but I can’t see them right now.
Five years! The blog-war-horse is gone. 🙁
Donations gratefully received. A newer monster with more memory has been ordered…
Right now these self funding academic researcher-analyst-commentators could do with support. Those billion dollar government departments don’t seem be in a hurry to fund […]
Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning.
For those who have not gone-over-the-falls and chained their reputation to a big-Green-rock, there is time to backtrack. This is a good moment to start mentioning that “things have changed.” It’s five years too late, but that’s better than being ten-years-too-late, and it still has a tiny bit of kudos for being ahead of stampede that is coming.
The term du jour is “new evidence”. It’s the ticket back to reality, even though strong evidence has been there for a decade, and the lack of warming is just one more clue that the models are wrong.
As far as I can tell, Geoffrey Lean is one of the commentators who’s been very much on the side of the global warming drive, but not a zealot. He allowed the odd caveat, he spoke of skeptics, but not of deniers. When the ClimateGate II emails were released, mostly he wrote about how they didn’t matter, were misrepresented, and the science was settled. Even then, there was a small caveat that “disturbing questions” remain, […]
Rupert Wyndham is an eloquent treasure. For those who have not already seen this (and I’ve received many emails about it) — Enjoy! — His turn of phrase is something to behold: the damning indictments carefully understated, yet laid bare. That the Royal Society President has been reduced to ad hominem attacks “… demonstrates more clearly than anything else the loss of dignity it has endured and depths of corruption to which it has been reduced under your stewardship and those of your two predecessors. “
— Jo
The Royal Society in better days: Boyle, Newton, Franklin, Jenner, Babbage, Wallace, Lister, Rutherford, Hodgkin, Shackleton. (From The stamp collection).
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31 March 2013
Sir Paul Nurse, President, The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
Dear Sir Paul Nurse,
Your reply to Lord Lawson dated 8 March has come to hand. It goes without saying that I make no claim to be responding on his behalf; he is more than capable of doing that for himself. Your letter, however, is such a singular juxtaposition of barely suppressed personal antipathy (malice even), blatant mendacity and […]
Tim Flannery
No wonder Flannery and co. are playing double or nothing. While headlines have shouted for years that vested interests of the fossil fuel players dominate this debate, few journalists point out that the renewables industry, carbon trading markets, and the climate-scary-science-campaign have an all-or-nothing interest in propagating alarm.
As I keep saying, those in private business who provide real goods to real voluntary customers will suffer from a carbon tax, but they still have a market. For them it’s a “dent” in profits. We’ll still be buying coal, oil and gas for decades to come. In contrast, those who make a living from government funds could lose everything in an instant. Their wealth and status depends on a forced payment and a decision from one Minister. It is far more ephemeral and subject to whim. The state-dependents are far more desperate. The stakes are higher.
Gillard calls the “climate commission” an independent body, which is only true in the same sense that any parasite can be described as “independent” of the host while being completely dependent on it.
This shows just how independent and apolitical the Climate Commission reality is:
The Australian “Abbott says Tim […]
Real markets have real customers, who notice when things don’t add up. Fake markets are an invitation to criminals.
The state forced payments from citizens for the wrong reasons, to solve a non-problem with the wrong method.
In this case, state organized crime meets independent organized crime.
Mafia probe nets $1.7bn in clean energy assets
Italian police have seized assets worth 1.3 billion euros ($1.7 billion) from a Sicilian renewable energy developer in the biggest ever seizure of mafia-linked assets.
The assets, including 43 wind and solar energy companies, 98 properties and 66 bank accounts, belonged to Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old businessman dubbed the “Lord of the Wind” for his prominent role in the business.
“This is a sector in which money can easily be laundered,” Arturo de Felice, head of Italy’s anti-mafia agency, told local media.
“Operating in a grey area helped him build up his business over the years.”
The anti-mafia agency in a statement said it was the biggest seizure of mafia-linked assets.
This was not a free market, but a free-for-all.
Italy’s renewable energy sector has been heavily infiltrated by the mafia because of once-generous state subsidies and lax controls, as well as the availability of […]
The classic hot spot prediction (A) compared to 28 million weatherballoons (B). Click to enlarge. You won’t see this in the new report.
It was a major PR failure in 2007. The IPCC won’t make the same mistake again. They’ve dumped the hot-spot graphs.
In AR4 they put in two graphs that show how badly their models really do. In the next report they plan to bury the spectacular missing-hot-spot images through “graph-trickery” and selective blindness. Each round of IPCC reports takes the spin-factor up another notch. It’s carefully crafted.
See the draft of AR5: Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
It’s hot-spot hidey games and PR tricks
In the new extra-tricky AR5 version, the IPCC “quote the critics” and ignore them at the same time. That way they can say they include the McIntyre’s, McKitrick’s, Douglass’, and Christy’s: the words are on the page, but that doesn’t mean the information is used in the conclusions. The models have failed and they bury that undeniable result under the clutter. (You’ll need to read the fine print). There is no acknowledgement that this issue of the “hot spot” drives more amplification of predicted warming in their models than any […]
This is the Easter Spirit!
Gotta love it. h/t Eric W
9.3 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
The MoonLanding paper is finally here. Eight months after Lewandowsky was so sure he had a “peer reviewed” conclusion that he announced his results in The Guardian and The Telegraph , the paper has finally been published.
Lewandowsky et al claimed to show skeptics are nutters who believe any rabid conspiracy like the “moon-landing was faked”. Their novel method for discovering the views of skeptics involved surveying sites frequented by those who hate skeptics.
The survey questions included conspiracies likely to appeal to a small percentage of conservative or free market thinkers, and largely left out conspiracies that would appeal more to supporters of bigger government (like the idea that the rise of “climate denial” was a big-oil funded conspiracy). It studied big-government conspiracies and ignored big-corporate ones. There are gullible conspiracists who also believe in global warming, but there was no danger this survey would find them. The survey bias was so obvious, even alarmist commenters said they feared few “denialists” would take it. The results that were headlined in newspapers were based on a tiny sample of ten respondents to an anonymous online survey. Not surprisingly Lewandowsky’s university (UWA) received many complaints about ethics, methods, and the dismal […]
The Risk Monger (David Zaruk) was astonished to receive an advertisement from the Dutch government looking for 60 young PhD students to help with the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
They salary is “none”. But they are not just looking for any old student. You don’t need experience, but to qualify you need “an affinity with climate change”. I guess they are not looking for skeptical students who feel an affinity with logic, reason, and empirical evidence?
The reasons for asking the unpaid students is actually described as an “ambitious plan” to do a “thorough review” because there were “errors in the fourth assessment report…”. O.K.
The Risk Monger:
Maybe I am jumping to conclusions, but with all of the mess of the last IPCC Assessment Report (including a non-scientific WWF campaign document predicting the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers getting through the review process and becoming one of the IPCC’s main conclusions), shouldn’t they try to do a more rigorous review process this time around? Students, working for free, are not perhaps the ideal choice of reviewers needed to challenge the experts
What troubles the Risk-Monger more here is that many environmental activists are working on their […]
If the Greens cared about CO2 they’d be very interested in ways to reduce emissions. But their selective interest speaks volumes about their real priorities. Anton Lang shows how newer coal fired powers stations run hotter and at higher pressures, and use 15% less coal to produce the same amount of electricity. We could upgrade our power stations and cut a whopping 15% of their emissions — which is huge compared to the piddling small, often unmeasureable savings thanks to renewables. Even massive floods that stop industry don’t reduce our emissions as much as this would. Do the Greens hate the coal industry more than “carbon pollution”? — Jo
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Ultra Super Critical Coal Fired Power gives a 15% CO2 Emissions Reduction
Guest Post: Anton Lang (aka TonyfromOz)
It all comes down to steam.
Assume (for a moment) that we have to reduce the emissions of CO2 by something like 20% between now and 2020.
Previously I showed we could achieve a reduction of 13% in CO2 emissions from the electrical power generating sector just by converting from the current 70’s technology coal fired power to the newest technology USC (UltraSuperCritical) coal fired technology. That 13% I quoted […]
Dr Craig Emerson, Minister for Science, Weather, Inventions, Factories and Universities.
After the leadership farce last week and the resignations of the more-sensible Labor ministers, Gillard has reshuffled again and the DCC (Department of Climate Change) is disappearing into a “super ministry”. It is a sign of the times.
The P.M. has bundled the Department of Climate Change into a nightmare acronynm:
The Prime Minister used her sixth ministerial reshuffle to merge the Department of Climate Change with the Department of Industry, creating a new Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.
Is that DIICCSRTE?
Gillard has made Craig Emerson minister of nearly everything.
Gillard also appointed the former Woodside director, Gary Gray, to cabinet as mines and energy minister. The Climate Spectator is worried. Gray said something skeptical once in 1993: that the evidence linking human activity to climate change was ‘‘pop science”. Years later he apparently said he regretted the comments, but this was not enough to convince the religious that he has discovered the faith. He made the mistake of saying there needed to be “intellectual challenge and debate”. These plain and sane words marked him as a confirmed skeptic. Only […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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