Recent Posts
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Batteries failed on day One: A four day wind drought in South Australia wreaks havoc, high prices
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Friday
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The UN wants to be One World Government and it starts with a carbon tax on ships and planes
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Thursday
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What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
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Wednesday
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Wednesday
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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Saturday
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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Friday
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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Thursday
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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Wednesday
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Friday
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Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
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Thursday
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Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
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Wednesday
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Once upon a time governments bragged about how much they spent on “climate change”. Every Climate Quiz or tin-pot-program to insulate a chicken-run was wrapped under the Climate Action banner so that politicians could claim they were saving the world. Nowadays voters have voted for the guy who called it a hoax, and the funding’s gone underground because he was going to boast about how much climate funding he’d cut.
When I wrote Climate Money in 2009, a lot of the spending was already documented, under the Climate Change Science Program or by the GAO. How times have changed.
To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
Climate change is so important that no one even estimates what the government spends on it:
The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 […]
Turnbull announces beefing up the Snowy Mountains Hydro. Weatherill gets grumpy. Insults exchanged.
Things are so serious that suddenly the Feds are unveiling a new solution to fix the blackouts and “load shedding”. http://a.msn.com/01/en-au/BBybbQL?ocid=se
As Bob FJ writes: see Canberra Times and note the eye-contact avoidance etcetera twixt Weatherill and Frydenberg.
h/t To Bob FJ
9.3 out of 10 based on 49 ratings
South Australia (SA) is planning to build a new gas fossil fuel plant for $550 million because it has too much competitive and “cost efficient” free energy. There are fears this will not only push up electricity prices in the state but in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania too. (Bravo, SA). In order to build a new fossil fuel plant with Greens permission they spend $360m on the new gas plant, and then offered $150m more to appease the angry renewables spirits. It is said to be needed to encourage investment. Obviously no sane investor would spend money on renewables for purely economic reasons.
Meanwhile Elon Musk offered to fix the states problems in just 100 days or “it’s free” and with only $33million for a 100MWh battery farm. The offer has triggered a bun fight between Musk and local companies who say they can do even better.
But in the long run, SA wants to go “100% renewable”. Below Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk calculate that for SA to truly do that, it would need about 270GWh of batteries to cover the peak use. This would require 7.5 million tonnes of lead acid batteries and cost 60 – 90 billion […]
Don’t mention the climate — unskeptical conservatives give away some of their best weapons
The local Liberals (conservatives) got smashed on the weekend in the Western Australian election. Polls predicted it, but instead of a Trump-surprise, Colin Barnett’s team got a nasty shock instead — wiped out. There was no “hidden vote” waiting there because the local Liberals are just another brand of The Establishment. There is nothing politically brave about them.
In WA climate was a non-issue, yet pandering to the religion still cost conservatives. One of the main election messages was about the privatisation of “Western Power” (Electricity supplier). This strange spectacle unfolded where McGowan, the leader who’d suggested the ridiculous 50% renewables target was thumping Barnett’s campaign with messages of fear about rising electricity prices after the privatization. Barnett didn’t hit back — No one seemed to notice the incongruity of Mr Renewables accusing someone else of making electricity expensive.
There are many reasons the WA Libs crashed (read some here). But the “climate” policy hole gets forgotten. Colin Barnett was unarmed, unskeptically accepting the unaudited foreign committee reports. In 2014, when semi-skeptical-Abbott was PM, the premier of a state that lives off mining and energy wasn’t […]
Australia’s “leading climate scientists” can’t predict the climate but they are very good PR operatives. Here in Perth we’ve had a cool year — for the last twelve months it’s been nearly a whole degree cooler than the average for the last 20 years. But last weekend in Perth, news stories told us we’d had an “autumn stinker” and wait for it, we might get Perth’s second hottest first eight days of March. Call that a HFEDOM record and write in the Guinness Book of records. It’s a permutation “record” almost as important as the longest distance run by a man holding a table in his teeth. Except it’s not even a record, it’s a news story about a record that “might happen”, but didn’t.
Let’s name Neil Bennett (BOM) and Will Steffen (ANU) as the Propaganda-in-Chiefs dumping meaningless climate-trivia on the people in order to generate FEAR and screw more money from the public.
Straight from the New Climate PRAVDA Manual:
Invent contrived trivial permutations in order to use the word “record” Don’t bother waiting for real data, use forecasts If record includes the word “cool”, “cooler”, or “cold”, send to trash. When wrong, crickets.
Click to enlarge, […]
8.3 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
The The Climate Institute is a private think tank set up in 2005. It got about $2m a year back in the heyday of climate panic. Today Planet Earth is still about to collapse, but it’s not important enough for the team to keep working without a salary. Amazing what someone, who really believes in what they do, can achieve with 1% of what they had.
No more propaganda surveys from them then:
Climate Institute announces closure, citing lack of funding to continue
After a decade of climate advocacy work, climate change research organisation the Climate Institute has announced it will be closing in late June.
The non-profit’s survival has until now been dependent on donations, and it has cited a lack of funding as the reason for its closure.
Best known for its Climate of the Nation reports, the organisation also helped, among other things, expand the renewable energy target in 2008.
The Climate Institute could be relied upon to pay for trite motherhood style surveys to score meaningless headlines about how 110% of Australian believe we have a climate.
My past posts:
Climate Institute Poll finds we are all […]
Love it! (Sing ’til you cry).
Welcome darkness my good friend
it’s good to meet you once again
Because the power grids are stressing,
that’s the reason for load shedding…
— Shrish Viyas Hargoon h/t Lance.
….
9.2 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
The whole NCSE march on April 22nd is devoted to a strawman:
The National Center for Science Education was one of the first organizations to endorse the march, and we are encouraging our members to take part. Why? Because we believe that the marches will be a powerful and positive reminder that there is something that virtually everyone agrees on: the value and importance of science.
There is no public debate saying science is not important. It simply does not exist. So why march? According to Ann Reid, biologist, science is important for farming, water quality, and beer-making. No kidding. Load up the strawmen.
Rage On: March for the trite!
“Science is for Everyone” (except scientists who disagree with government propaganda):
And that’s where the March for Science fits in. On April 22, 2017, people all over the world will be gathering together to celebrate science, and to declare that science belongs to everyone. NCSE will be there.
Obviously the real subtext are controversial topics (why else does anyone march?) Guess which branch of establishment science is the one hardest hit by the Trump presidency:
At the National Center for Science Education, we know […]
News is out that diesel cars which don’t comply with pollution standards will be banned from some roads in Germany on “high pollution” days. Depending on how often those bad news for diesel industry and owners. How useless is a car that you can’t drive when you need it? Stuttgart is being called the “Beijing” of Germany for air pollution. Residents are suing the Mayor for “bodily harm”. The same thing happened in Oslo — governments told people to buy diesel to reduce carbon pollution, but they are now banning diesel cars on some roads on some days too.
This may apply to as many as 90% of diesels on German roads. Sales of diesels fell by 10% last month. The pain level in this depends on how often those high-pollution days are. See the current Stuttgart air-quality monitoring — it’s OK today, but if I read this air pollution road map from 2008 correctly, it suggests some roads are over the safe limit 60, 80, even 180 days a year. In 2014 fine particulate matter exceeded safe limits on 64 days a year.
Corruption always has a price but in this case the owners of diesels are paying for […]
Looks like the halo is fading. Today-Tonight is a current affairs show in Australia. Today a few more Australians discovered that free energy is not just expensive but creates its own kind of pollution.
This hardly a surprise for anyone who can spell cost-benefit, but it’s healthy to see the prime-time media in Australia doing something other than singing the Clean-Green advertising jingle.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
8.8 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
Sorry I am a bit distracted with other things this week. Light postings.
8 out of 10 based on 30 ratings
Advertising your virtues sometimes conflicts with advertising your social status.
Paul Joseph Watson never minces his words. …
The surprising thing is that these guys get away with it. Not laughed out of town for their grandstanding piety at awards nights.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
9.2 out of 10 based on 96 ratings
Climate Change threatens to make bread less tasty
Over at The Conversation the panic is rising. Life is not going to be the same. Get ready for the bland future — if we stop all plant breeding tomorrow, and don’t change our fertilizers at all, it possible, by 2050, in dry years, wheat may have a 6% decrease in protein.
It’s that serious.
Everyone likes the high protein kind of wheat, and it’s worth more. Glenn Fitzgerald, at The Conversation argues that Australian wheat is going to be lower in protein, and downgraded, making us less competitive and our farmers poorer. (Cynics among us note that authors at The Conversation only seem to care about farmers when climate change might hurt them, not when climate-change-action actually sends them broke, makes them homeless or puts them in jail. Y’know — whatever.)
As for Australia’s export earnings, I say, forgive me, but I thought the CO2 elevation was a global thing — so unless we are competing with aliens and intergalactic wheat, color me unconcerned. All the wheat producers on Earth will be dealing with the same issue.
How to make a good thing sound bad
The bottom line in biology […]
Smile. One more noxious, power-grabbing bit of legislation: fixed.
Farmers and land-owners lost control of the puddles and ditches on their land under the guise of environmental protection.
Remarks by President Trump at Signing of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Executive Order
The EPA’s so-called “Waters of the United States” rule is one of the worst examples of federal regulation, and it has truly run amok, and is one of the rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land. It’s prohibiting them from being allowed to do what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s been a disaster.
The Clean Water Act says that the EPA can regulate “navigable waters” — meaning waters that truly affect interstate commerce. But a few years ago, the EPA decided that “navigable waters” can mean nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land, or anyplace else that they decide — right? It was a massive power grab. The EPA’s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter. […]
You might think we’d know whether a solar PV system produced energy before we installed 1,000 Megawatts of it. But it’s hard to even know after the fact. Dr John Constable points us at an interesting new paper that discusses the odd creature called EROEI. This stands for energy return on energy invested. If you get back less than “one”, it sucks.
That sounds like a fine idea except everyone seems to get different answers to the same question. Solar PV in Switzerland achieves either a tenfold return or it costs a fifth of your energy. Plan your national policy with a Ouija Board?
Constable comes to the conclusion that the whole calculation is so uncertain it’s useless. There are so many subjective estimates on the “energy invested side” that the answer is almost irrelevant. Constable points out that what we really need to know is how the whole system responds to the addition of a new generator –but the whole grid analysis is even harder than just the EROEI to calculate.
His conclusion, it that we really need something more like a neural net to calculate the costs. Luckily we have one — us — and the contractual free […]
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8.2 out of 10 based on 28 ratings
It would make any hunter gatherer proud.
[The Times] Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidizing power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found.
Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.
The UK tribes can thank chief Huhne (Energy and Climate secretary) for the 7.5 million tonnes of dead trees otherwise known as biomass — which mostly come all the way from the US and Canada.
Naturally, doing something this improbable takes a lot of money.
Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets.
Curiously, there are over 200 trillion cubic feet of dead trees stored under Lancashire. They may have been very very small trees, like algae sized, but nonetheless, 4,999 kilometers closer. Apparently when all the trees of […]
There are probably more solar panels in QLD than anywhere else in the world. Back in February last year, the boss of the Queensland state power company announced the awkward result that households with solar panels were using more electricity than those without. Apparently people without solar were turning off the air conditioner because electricity cost too much, but the solar users didn’t have to worry about the cost so much.
Queensland solar homes are using more grid electricity than non-solar, says Energex boss
Feb 2016: Solar-powered homes in south-east Queensland, which boasts the world’s highest concentration of rooftop panels, have begun consuming on average more electricity from the grid than those without solar, the network operator has found.
Terry Effeney, the chief executive of state-owned power distributor Energex, said the trend – which belied the “green agenda” presumed to drive those customers – was among the challenges facing a region that nevertheless stood the best chance globally of making solar the cornerstone of its electricity network.
From October 2014 in Queensland, the average grid electricity use of solar homes started to exceed the average use of people without solar power and stayed higher for the […]
Bob Inglis is a former Republican congressman who lost out to a Tea Partier (you’ll see why). He’s visiting Australia to talk us into doing climate manipulation. I can’t see his reasoning catching on:
Former Republican congressman Bob Inglis says he knows it sounds improbable to say the US president would impose a carbon price, but he thinks reality will force Mr Trump’s hand.
“Donald Trump said climate change is a Chinese hoax and conspiracy – but he couldn’t possibly believe that,” Mr Inglis told the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.
Obviously it’s impossible for Inglis to believe Inglis Could Be Wrong.
In the five stages of grief, he’s stuck at number one…
Watch the contortions to fit that worldview into a round hole:
He laments the tribalism of the debate, saying there’s such fear among conservatives about being seen as weak in the face of the environmental left they refuse to hear anything.
He frames the question to conservatives as not whether they believe in climate change, but if they think free enterprise can solve it.
“We’ve got to build the confidence of the right so that […]
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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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