Recent Posts
-
What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
-
Wednesday
-
Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Winter Solstice
-
Saturday
-
We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
-
Friday
-
Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
-
Thursday
-
Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
-
Wednesday
-
The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
-
Saturday
-
New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
-
Friday
-
Thursday
-
Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
-
Wednesday
-
Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
-
Saturday
-
China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
-
Friday
-
The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
-
Thursday
-
To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
-
Wednesday
-
On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
Saturday
-
Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
-
Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
-
Friday
-
Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
-
Thursday
-
Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
-
Wednesday
-
The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
|
Normally a governing party, especially with a margin of “one”, would consult with its own members before it consulted with the opposition. Turnbull’s gambit appeared to depend on sneaking the plan past the conservatives and libertarian skeptics.
Turnbull in bid to quash NEG rebellion
Simon Benson, Joe Kelly, The Australian
It emerged last night that Labor had been given a copy of the NEG legislation, another move that has angered Coalition MPs who are yet to see it. A Liberal rebel told The Australian it was “disgusting” that Labor had the legislation but they were being asked to sign off on it sight unseen.
To forestall a revolt, Turnbull is said to be giving ground on all kinds of things, like ways to stop the big retailers gaming the market, but not “Paris”?
However, senior ministers have told The Australian this would not be enough to prevent Coalition MPs crossing the floor if the 26 per cent Paris emissions reduction target was not dumped or “decoupled” from the NEG.
The move to cauterise the growing threat of internal revolt came as the Prime Minister’s most senior conservative minister, Peter Dutton, suggested there […]
The advantage of communist autocrats is that they can create government havoc so much more efficiently.
The Chinese solar boom was so big it became the world’s largest solar market. It was so big it pushed up global “clean energy” investment to a record high. China became the veritable show pony of the solar spruikers: “leading the world in clean energy investment”. Mashable tells us it was so big “the solar boom could be seen from space“.
But the star advertisement for renewable glory was all based on subsidies:
The Chinese solar boom was “pretty significant”
A couple of months ago the Chinese government admitted they were cutting the subsidies to make electricity cheaper again for consumers. That hit the stock market. Now projects are being cancelled and orders are drying up for the hapless manufacturers.
The free market might be telling us something China’s solar industry is at a crossroads
“Without subsidies there’s no return on investment for over a decade, so investors and property owners aren’t interested in distributed solar. With subsidies it only takes seven years to recoup the investment,” he adds.
China’s solar manufacturers are unhappy with recent government policy changes […]
The climate circus is back in Australia
Election 2019 is coming and Turnbull just lit a fire under the conservative base. The Deplorables are angry. Phones are running hot today. The DefCons awaken. In the last election defiant non-left voters were the “most influential group” — the swingers who ultimately decide the winner. This was the same group the journalists completely missed, like Brexit and Trump voters.
The Australian government, despite the polls showing Australians don’t want to pay more for renewables, has agreed to try to legislate a 26% reduction in emissions, setting a target in stone that almost no other country has done. (Have any?) Most countries have committed to nothing, or rather, they’ve committed to building nearly 300 coal plants. They’re planning 400 more.
A 26% mandatory target means so much more than just higher electricity bills, we’ll have to carve up our cattle and sheep, transport, waste and the rest of the economy too. What are they thinking?
We could lead the world in agriculture or medicine but we picked hara kiri?
We are the largest coal exporter in the world and it’s our largest export earner, we have a lower population density, bigger distances, higher […]
…
8.5 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
Why Australia must exit the Paris Climate Agreement, The IPA report.
IPA estimates Paris Agreement to stop storms and hold back the tide may cost $8500 per Australian family
What a deal. You could have free electricity for the next four years or an imperceptible difference in the air outside the nursing home for your children’s 94th birthday.
The Americans went for the money. So did nearly everyone else.
Damian Wild at the IPA calculates that the Paris Agreement will cost patsy Australians $52 billion dollars in the next 12 years.
Paris deal spells ‘irreparable damage’: IPA report
Rachel Baxendale, The Australian
A study by the Institute of Public Affairs, “Why Australia must exit the Paris Climate Agreement”, estimates our Paris target of reducing emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 will impose a $52 billion economic cost between now and 2030, equating to $8566 a family.
Paris Agreement To Cost Australia $52 Billion
“The immutable law of energy policy is this: lower emissions mean higher prices.”
“Each family in Australia will be at least $8,566 worse off under the Paris Climate Agreement, on average. This is at […]
…
7.8 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Hear Ye!
To all the world’s recalcitrant, absent, and neglectful parents, paediatricians have arrived to tell you to give your kids a drink during a heatwave, pack food to last through droughts, and that you really need global unaccountable committees to look after your kids. Presumably their junkets meetings will be paid for by you.
Kids are “underprioritized”? (So what do they think 2 billion parents are doing?) Children are highly vulnerable to health risks of a changing climate
“…researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center set out some specific challenges associated with the impacts of climate change on the world’s 2.3 billion children and suggest ways to address their under-prioritized needs.“
Researchers discovered children have “anatomic, cognitive, immunologic, and psychologic differences” which put them at more risk than adults. OK. They’ve noticed kids are small and inexperienced. Ambitiously, they apply this to 2.3 billion children, pretty much all of them here on Earth. That’s your kids, mine, “under prioritized”. Hmm.
The finding that children are vulnerable will shock all the parents who assumed their kids would survive the next flood, malaria, and dengue outbreak without any help. What will […]
Last year AGL made $539 million net profit. This year, $1,600 million. What’s not to like about closing Hazelwood?
…
Profit statements confirm what we’ve said — closing cheap coal boosts profits for generators. No wonder AGL won’t sell Liddell for a hundred million dollars. It also shows us that the big “bubble” in electricity prices is from the doubling of wholesale electricity costs. These corporates are reaping it in far above costs. The way to cut wholesale prices is to get rid of the RET, and fix our old coal.
[ABC] Its underlying profit, which excludes one-off items and changes in value in investments and hedging positions, rose 28 per cent to $1.02 billion, at the upper end of the company’s guidance.
Even Andy Vesey admits the coal closures helped AGL:
“This increase in prices in the broader electricity market has mostly been a result of the abrupt closure of non-AGL power stations such as Hazelwood in 2017 and Northern in 2016 and higher input costs from coal and gas,” AGL chief executive Andy Vesey said.
But watch the pea. Who is trying to blame high profits on higher input costs?
Then he tosses […]
Just in case you missed it. In the last 24 hours Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Youtube banned Infowars. Suddenly, overnight all five major “platforms” noticed hate-speech they need to censor from the group which was influential in helping Donald Trump get elected. Mid-terms are coming. Coincidence?
This is a free speech line in the sand:
You don’t have to like or agree with Infowars — if they can be banned, anyone could be next:
[Breitbart] The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has urged citizens to defend free speech in the West after big tech firms allegedly coordinated to remove right wing voices, including InfoWars and Tommy Robinson, from social media.
On Monday, Apple, Facebook, Pinterest, Spotify, and Google-owned YouTube permanently removed content from InfoWars and its owner Alex Jones, saying he and the website violated their policies against hate speech and harassment.
Proponents of the ban say Mr Jones is a conspiracy theorist who deserves to be silenced, while critics have claimed the purge is an attempt to interfere in the U.S. midterm elections and described it as a form of “political censorship”.
The monopolistic giants say they are just “enforcing the rules” but so far they’re […]
End the taboo: The obvious solution to our expensive unreliable electricity is to fix old coal plants
The proposed NEG (National Energy Guarantee) will cut a pathetic sliver off our obscene bills. Malcolm Turnbull thinks Australians will be grateful for $100 off. We pay $3,700 a year for an average 4 bed house (and it’s heated with gas)? Are they kidding?
No one is even discussing the most obvious, cheap way to cut our electricity bills. Fix the old coal plants. As Ian Waters, engineer, says “Enlightened, motivated people can do it!” Just getting Liddell back up to full power would deliver another 800MW of cheap, despatchable, and reliable power. Wouldn’t that be “handy”?
All the talk of new coal ignores the cheapest source of electricity around the nation. Our star infrastructure, gift of the older generation to the younger, are our old coal power stations, paid off over decades and still powering the nation.
Ian Waters, describes below how the NEG serves the big retailers not the consumers, and it’s in their interest to run old coal plants into the dust. (Our electricity market is so screwed thanks to the […]
All around the world the climate druids are at work.
Show me the error bars
Once upon a time a scientist talked about thirty year trends and anachronistic things like “confidence intervals”. Now, thanks to the discovery of Unscience, any noisy, random short data is fair game to be declared undeniable climate change. Periods of flooding also qualify, as do periods of nice weather, though strangely no one mentions those. Where are the headlines? If climate change caused drought on the East Coast of Australia, it’s also causing average rain and good crops in Western Australia.
In terms of scientific data analysis we don’t get that many droughts or six-day-August-heatwaves to analyze. They’re complex phenomena caused by multiple factors and we only have short records. This makes them ideal to be oversold to hapless folk as a “sign” of climate change.
When we have data, we find global droughts haven’t changed much in the last 60 years. When we can scratch together longer proxies, we find that 1000 year rainfall studies show droughts and floods used to be longer and worse. In Europe and the US megadroughts happened in the last 2,000 years. The droughts of 1315, or 1540, etc, […]
…
8.5 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
Crash Test Dummy Update: Data analysis thanks to Tom Quirk
In the South Australian experiment total wind power capacity is now far above the average state demand most hours of the day. This effectively destroys any economic case for cheap baseload power (I hear that was the aim). This fleet of unreliable generators is being supported by forced subsidies through power bills from all around Australia. Sadly, despite this rain of money falling in SA, those funds end up with renewable investors, not South Australian consumers who pay some of the highest rates in the world.
These legislated subsidies have fed so much wind power that sometimes the state produces more power than it can use. That excess power will be exported, but may or may not be actually useful at whatever time it happens. Unless it happens at peak-time, it will be eating into the efficiency of baseload providers in other states. Like an infection, inefficiency and underutilization of infrastructure spreads…
This volatility appears to make freak wholesale price spikes more likely. Quirk calculates that one hot January day last year was so wildly expensive in South Australia it added $2/MWh to the entire years average wholesale cost. Can’t […]
Pull the other one.
No Bias — Audrey Zibelman,
Audrey Zibelman, the improbable green-lawyer manager of our National Energy Market claims her advice is not biased towards renewables. This is the same Zibelman who tells us that “resisting the energy transition is like trying to resist the internet.” As if governments had to legislate “An Internet Target” and mandate we do 16% of our shopping online. The same Zibelman believes “we’re the last generation on earth who can really do something about climate change.” She thinks she’s changing global weather with our power grid. By 2100 historians will have people rolling in the aisles with that one. What were they thinking?*
Her bias is so all encompassing she can’t imagine a world twenty years hence which still runs on coal and gas and views the temporary experiment with unreliables as a disastrous, predictable mistake, a historic dead-end. Renewables are the B-size-batteries, the hydrogen-filled-air-ships and the X-rays for shoe shops that didn’t take over the world. She assumes that the forced “transition” to renewables is inevitable, natural and necessary. What if it’s an artificial, uneconomic, unnecessary accident of profit hungry industry rent-seekers and fatuous virtue signaling fools?
Hands up who […]
Of all the homo subtypes only humans survived. We began to colonize the entire planet sometime between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Scientists Have a Bold New Hypothesis For Why We’re The Only Humans Left on Earth
Depending on who you ask, we’ve shared the Homo genus with six other species across the millennia. And those are just the ones we know about. One by one they’ve all vanished. Around 30,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthals disappeared…– Science Alert
Homo erectus spread from Spain to Indonesia, but stuck to forest and grassland. Neanderthals specialized in cold northern realms and survived hundreds of thousands of years of ghastly ice ages. They coped better than we do with cold but we are the ones still living in Siberia. Tell the world: we’re adaptable!
Maybe it’s time to stop trying to adapt the planet to us, and get back to adapting us to the planet instead?
Some of the ecological challenges faced by Pleistocene H. sapiens. a. The Thar Desert of northwest India at the site of Katoati. Credit: James Blinkhorn. b. The highlands of Lesotho at the site of Sehonghong. Credit: Brian A. Stewart. c. […]
Fujimori et al estimate that if we aim for the 2°C Paris commitment as many as 84 million more people will be going hungry by 2050. Their solution, naturally, is to still aim for futile, global weather management targets, but to add another layer of socialist complexity and welfare. It’s only money.
If we feed corn to cars instead of people, and we limit land-use to carbon storage rather than food crops, how could the outcome be any other way? A million dead here, a million dead there, and pretty soon someone will be using their deaths to ask for for a grant, a tax, and a supranational committee.
For thirty years people have been saying we need to reduce our emissions as a precaution even though we can’t predict the climate. But when we can predict that people will starve, the principle seems to be do it anyway and “give them your money”. I can find zero mentions of the precautionary principle in their paper.
This paper is, yet again, another variation on a plea for more governance, more tax, more fiddling with global systems.
Inclusive climate change mitigation and food security policy under 1.5 °C climate goal Abstract […]
Strangely, despite NASA Giss “discovering” that the world has heated a lot since 1998, fires have declined.
Apparently increasing our CO2 emissions means less fires. Tell the world.
Figure 2. Wildfire occurrence (a) and corresponding area burnt (b) in the European Mediterranean region for the period 1980 – 2010. Source: San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. [37].
This new paper points out that the perception is that fires are worse than they have ever been, but that this is simply not true, not in the last thirty years, and not in the last few hundred either. It also documents how much money and effort we put into suppressing almost all fires and that this is in contrast to tens of thousands of years where humans used fire as a tool. Suppressing fires is getting increasingly expensive and sometimes costs lives as well.
Putting things in perspective. We spend a lot of money to avoid death and damage by fire, yet earthquakes kill 700 times as many people and floods kill 1,800 times as many people. There is something primal about fire that we feel driven to stop.
Table 1. Global comparison of human and economic losses derived from wildfire, earthquakes and flood […]
The Renewables Lobby subsidy and handouts are still growing. In 2018, Australia must get 16% of all our electricity from “renewables”, up from 14.2% last year.
That’s 28,000 Gigawatt hours of magical green electrons from generators that give us nice weather as opposed to generators that cause droughts, floods, cyclones and spread crocodiles, dengue fever, cause wars and change butterflies.
Welcome to modern Australia where our grid is designed by witchcraft, run by superstition, and panders to every whim of the Giant Renewables Industry Lobby.
The noose tightens in Australia.
Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Source: 2001-2030 Annual Targets and renewable power percentages, Clean Energy Regulator.
Prices are rising too: Could there be a connection here?
Even the ABC now says “Something has gone terribly wrong with our electricity prices”. Prices went off the ranch from 2007, rising much faster than the CPI. This is also the point Australia started ramping up the intermittent renewables. Before that the Snowy Hydro Scheme –the only reliable and cost effective form of renewable power — had been operating for decades. Correlation is […]
Cheap energy might save more lives than expensive “climate-changey” energy?
Researchers looked at 47 major cities in Spain, from 1980 to 2015 and checked 554,491 deaths. Even though temperatures have risen, less people are dying of heat in Spain. Apparently human ingenuity, energy and air conditioners were more than able to keep up with climate change. The population is older but less vulnerable to heat now than it was forty years ago.
Air conditioners rose from 5% of the population to 35% during the study period.
Oh the dilemma — to save lives, should we build more windmills to try to change the global climate or aim to get 100% of households access to an air conditioner?
Welcome to the dire threat of climate change:
The relative risk of death fell as temperatures rose (According to the model used). See the caption below.
From the Discussion in the paper:
The temporal evolution of heat-related mortality risks here found is, in general, consistent with those reported by previous studies in some other countries [12–15], which provide evidence for a decrease in vulnerability to climate warming despite the ageing of societies. For example, in Spain, the proportion of people […]
After 30 years with no debate and one predictable, repeated lecture the audience is switching off
Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters reports that one climate-worrier journalist revealed in a tweet that climate change kills the ratings. Another tweeter had prodded Liberal MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes to cover more on climate change. “Acting like there is nothing to be done is not excusable.”
In reply Chris Hayes lamented:
“almost without exception. every single time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.”
@chrislhayes 24 July 2018
Those crashing ratings would change overnight if news networks threw open the doors and pitted skeptics against believers in a real televised form of debate. The spectators would suddenly be able to pick sides — may the best person win. There would be genuine controversy. Sacred cows would be slaughtered, and for a while at least, climate change would rate well.
What stops the media doing this? Most editors are too scared of being called climate deniers if they dare allow the other side to speak. Look at the pushback when the BBC allowed Professor Bob Carter to do one interview:
The […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments