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When investors cry for certainty, what they really want is “no risks” and “your money”
The renewables industry only exists because of government largess. What the government giveth, so can it sucketh.
Now that the bountiful wheel of the Turnbull government is turning slightly toward other beneficiaries, the Australian renewables industry are holding crisis meetings. Feel the entitlement! Sophie Vorrath reports in RenewEconomy on the green industry disappointment with the NEG — (the theoretical new Australian plan for Weather-Management-with-Socialist-Electricity-Grids.)
The government is still picking winners, it’s just different winners:
NEG will block renewables, favour hydro and big retailers Oliver Yates, head of UPC Renewables:
Yates said that setting emissions compliance cost on a path to zero could “pull the carpet out” from under existing solar and wind energy investments and actually stop future investments. “This is very bad for our industry and very bad for the nation as a whole, as this orderly investment and orderly transition towards using new generation assets is required.”
And – “as a banker” – Yates also warned against the mentality that the NEG could be legislated now, and tweaked later, under a future Labor government, or a more enlightened […]
Obviously, if you are a thirsty solar panel, Australia is the place to be. We have ready-made irrigated high quality agricultural land set to be covered with an uneconomic and unreliable solar panels.
Only collective-coerced taxpayers are stupid enough to pay for this.
It’s so silly, groups of unconnected farmers of all different kinds are rallying together to oppose the flagrant waste.
Prime agricultural land loss or booming future energy? That’s the solar planning conundrum for Victoria
Residents near Shepparton are concerned that farmland the Victorian Government has invested in under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be lost to agriculture as the state undergoes a solar farm boom.
Four applications for solar farms in the Greater Shepparton region that could produce up to 243 megawatts of electricity have been proposed for Tatura, Tallygaroopna, Lemnos and Congupna, and have been ‘called in’ by the Victorian planning minister.
Critics say there has been no thought put to where the solar farms are being placed and how much prime agricultural land is being lost, and while there is suitable, more arid land available close by.
At least two of the solar farms have […]
A reminder of what most of our planet is made of.
Volcano, lava spreads across road, Hawaii, May 2018.
The lava has reached Leilani estates. Rock and ash are being thrown into the air. Evacuations are underway. There has been some warning. Small earthquakes have been occurring. Cracks appearing in roads.
See the drone footage of the eruption in Hawaii:
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RT news story on this:
9 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
CFACT has a report from a 40 year career meteorologist who alleges that skeptics are silenced through intimidation and threats at the National Weather Service (NWS). He also says data is “altered for political purposes” and that he was advised nearly forty years ago that he could find fame and fortune with CO2.
““When I was a graduate student I had a professor come up to me, and he said in the late 1970s ‘If you want to make a name in the field, want to be famous, CO₂ is the place to go.’ There is a lot of money to be made, authority and control over people’s lives at stake.””
A whole generation of meteorologists and climate scientists have been raised with these incentives, and a culture of fear:
Meteorologist allegedly assaulted by NWS Director Uccellini
Adam Howser, CFACT
“I was giving a talk to fellow NWS staff about the jet stream flow in the upper atmosphere [in 2014]. What it showed was large amplitude waves in both the northern and southern hemispheres. I explained that the only way the jet stream could get to be high amplitude is if the atmosphere was […]
Since 1984 humans have gushed forth 64% of our entire emissions from fossil fuels. (Fully 282,000 megatons of deplorable carbon “pollution”.)
During this time, satellite images show that 24% of our beaches shrank, while 28% grew. Thus we can say that thanks to the carbon apocalypse there are 3,660 sq kms more global beaches now than there were thirty years ago. Yes. It’s that bad.
The encroachment of beaches would mean there is less ocean for fishes. Thankfully sea levels have risen too, so it looks like it will all work out.
This study also produced a handy map of where the sandiest beaches are. Clearly Africa wins (unless you prefer rocks and cliffs).
h/t GWPF
Sandy beaches (yellow) versus Rocky beaches (black). Percentages indicate the proportion of sandy beaches. Source
Presumbly the paradox of how seas can rise unprecedentedly fast at the same time as beaches are growing will be explained through global currents shifting ominously due to rising CO2 levels. Either that, or the paradox and the study will vanish into a subterranean library — like the deeper Asthenosphere Archive, where they will be converted to magma.
Seriously, though, this study appears to be the first to […]
There are 741 million people in the EU. For years, their supranational government has been spending one fifth of their entire budget (!) on attempts to change the weather. Since that didn’t work, they are going to spend more. What was 20% is rising to 25%.
It says a lot about how irrelevant the EU is that they have nothing more important to do than wave sticks at future storms and promise to hold back the tide with low powered hairdryers.
No other big pressing issues?
..
The European Union’s executive is poised to propose spending 25 percent of funds available in next EU multiannual budget on activities related to climate protection, making sure new economic and political challenges don’t weaken the bloc’s resolve to fight pollution.
While Europe’s political priorities are changing, the EU wants to continue leading global efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for heating up the planet, and seeks to cut dependence on fossil fuels, shifting to cleaner renewable energy sources. The bloc aims to lower carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and to boost the share of renewables to at least 27 percent of energy […]
Climate Worriers have the most terrible luck. All the runes were lined up for Solar power — it is nearly free, pours from heaven, and millions of people seem to need energy “pretty often”. Plus universities and governments have gifted twenty years of free advertising about its Glorious Wonderfulness. Solar power is also used by the Celebrity Saints of Gaia thus filling fashionable, spiritual, and tribal needs. On a good day, it fills some megawatt needs too.
Despite all this, without forced payments from unwilling and unwitting non-users of solar power, investors are fleeing and the solar industry in Germany is collapsing. How can that be?!
Lawrence Solomon: Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels? Not a chance
Financial Post
After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without […]
New research looking at three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals showed the very unshocking result that people are happiest on sunny clear days around 25C. Facebook and Twitter comments on those days used more positive, fun terms. Days below 20, above 30, that were cloudy or had a humidity above 80% put people in a less happy mood. So did terrorist events, and the effects of weather were pretty comparable. Temperatures that are below freezing put a real dampener on expressions of positive sentiment. (The next ice age is going to be no fun.)
Peak positive occurs in the mid to high twenties and on days with zero mm of rain.
The effect of temperature and rain on Facebook and Twitter moods in the US.
Some people have a sunny disposition, others have cloudy faces and everyone over two knows what those expressions mean.
If our aim is to maximize human happiness and productivity, shouldn’t the UN Weather Control Committee (IPCC) be aiming to reduce freezing days and maximize the zone of 25C days on areas with the highest population density?
Judging by this awesome Hedonometer graph, during the hottest ever […]
Two researchers looked at the ten main countries in East Africa in the last fifty years and compared global temperatures to a database of wars, conflicts and refugees.
They found that regional drought and global temperatures didn’t cause wars or drive the total number of displaced people. The things that did were rapid population growth, poor economic times, and political instability.
“What our study suggests is the failure of political systems is the primary cause of conflict and displacement of large numbers of people.”
Thus, if you love peace, it’s better to defend free speech and the constitution than to use cloth shopping bags and change your light globes.
Climate change is not a key cause of conflict
The Conversation, Mark Maslin
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Probably the most surprising thing about this study is that sometimes academics test hypotheses and publish sensible conclusions.
In our recent paper, my student Erin Owain and I decided to test the climate-conflict hypothesis, using East Africa as our focus. The region is already very hot and very poor, making it especially vulnerable to climate change (in fact neighbouring Chad is by some measures the single most vulnerable country in the […]
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an […]
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A new paper finds that there is already enough genetic variety spread across the Great Barrier Reef to adapt to the imagined “unprecedented” warming coming in the next two centuries. We don’t need to rely on random mutations or consider fantasy solutions of man-made oceanic sunscreens, mass sunshades, or giant reef fans. Corals already have a major immigration program running pretty effectively to juggle 200 million years of genetic material and then spread the successes far and wide. Meddling humans can help things (maybe) by moving a few bits of coral around. That’s it. Cancel the scare please.
Skeptics have been saying this for years — who needs a computer model to predict that the Barrier Reef will adapt? How bad could global warming be? The global oceans span a 32C range and corals prefer the hottest five degrees of that. Indeed, there is a five degree temperature range from one end of the Great Barrier Reef to the other, and corals are clearly, obviously pretty happy about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is warming at a mere tenth of a degree per decade. Then there is the well known phenomenon that corals spawn in vast clouds that are […]
What destroys a grid faster than than a socialist electricity system? A semi-socialist system that pretends to be a free market.
This hybrid monster combines the worst of both socialism and capitalism at the same time. Socialists get the power to destroy, then capitalists can use self serving interest to make it happen faster.
The socialist managers can pick loser options (wind and solar), rig the market, and also conveniently blame the market when things go wrong. In a pure socialist system, at least the public know who created the mess.
What socialism created — socialism can partly solve
In a free market Liddell’s cheap coal power would not be closing in 2022. Since we have no free market, and can’t suddenly create one, the only band-aid option is to buy the damn asset back:
Ron Boswell gets it:
If someone suggested that $3 billion in consumer-funded subsidies be paid to one energy source every year for the next 12 years, and if that one energy source was guaranteed significant market share for every one of those years, and if there were hundreds of millions of dollars available in grants and concessional loans to projects limited to that […]
Hands up who knew that Greenland has been pretty much the same temperature for the last hundred and forty years?
We know that there has been massive melting ice, shrinking ice sheets, a dark zone that is a huge problem, that the melting is accelerating, faster than at any time in the last 400 years. We all know “this is scary”, and due to climate change and could raise sea levels by 20 feet. And that’s just the news stories in the last two weeks.
At NoTricksZone, Kenneth Richards has found an up to date graph of Greenland temperatures buried in the supplement of a new paper by Mikkelsen et al., 2018:
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So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.
Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.
Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That […]
Australia is so irrelevant. India is cancelling fifty times as many nuclear power plants as Australians ever dreamed of building.
Let’s build another million wind farms.
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
Energy Post – thanks to GWPF.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are […]
Pursuit of an untruth ultimately creates a vacuum.
Prominent Lawyer in Fight for Gay Rights Dies After Setting Himself on Fire in Prospect Park
Jeffrey C. Mays, NY Times
Perhaps there was some other cause, or mental health issue and the man would have taken his life somehow, someway and left a different note. But if we take him at his word, this was a desperate end. He was chasing the impossible wisp — planetary climate control through CO2. Destined to fail, overwhelmed with the futility, he apparently saw his life as worth more dead than alive, perhaps as some inspirational saint.
Alas, true saints may sacrifice themselves for a greater cause, but they don’t issue press releases. They don’t pick the time and place.
There is a desperately hollow emptiness about trying to inspire people through suicide PR. It’s not like you want children to grow up to copy you. (The danger is — some might).
Mr. Buckel left a note in a shopping cart not far from his body and also emailed it to several news media outlets, including The New York Times.
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability […]
Martin Place, Central Sydney — the raging crowd gathers to chant for Approved, Groupthink “Science” TM
This was the second annual “March for Science“. Apparently, 4,999,900 people had better things to do.
March for politically correct science, 2018
This photo is patched together from the SBS news pan across the crowd in the centre of the largest city in Australia.
The turnout was so small, journalists didn’t even try to make up a number. They just said “demonstrators” plural, “rallied in eight cities across Australia”. So there were at least two people at each city. “Congrats”.
The Sydney rally even had Triple J celebrity, Adam Spencer. They presumably also had free advertising on the ABC beforehand. It didn’t help much.
Science without debate is just propaganda, it’s no wonder no one cares
Having taken all the public passion, controversy and competition out of science, the masters of Groupthink have destroyed it as a spectator sport. Who wants to watch a football game where the result is fixed and everyone knows it? Public interest in science was settled in 1990 — at zero.
If the Academy of Science wanted to make science a million times more popular it would arrange […]
Just when you think headlines can’t be that stupid:
Baby fish may not find their way home as the level of CO2 in the ocean rises, study finds
— ABC Isabel Dayman
Baby fish may lose their ability to find their way home in the future due to rising CO2 levels in the ocean, a marine ecology expert has found.
What the study found was that fish larvae were not paying attention to the right noises.
The researchers put the larvae in a tank and bubbled CO2 through it constantly. They appear to forget that CO2 changes naturally every night on reefs all over the world. Fish are not just used to having a daily shift, they prefer it.
In shallow water, ocean acidification happens at 7pm daily, and after 400 million years, somehow, fish have adapted.
One previous study declared fish might become reckless in a high CO2 world, but later discovered that it was the laboratory setting that was the problem, not the CO2. When they added the daily pH swing back to their tanks, the fish behaved better and coped with the extra CO2. The real message is that laboratories […]
Former PM Tony Abbott and a team of conservative pollies suggested the government should forcibly acquire the old coal plant Liddell to keep it running and save our grid.
Our current PM called this idea “socialist”:
This drew immediate criticism from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who accused Mr Abbott of suggesting that the Coalition adopt socialists policies of nationalising the means of production.
Our energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, suddenly remembered how conservative governments support free markets:
The Energy Minister ….[said] there will be no subsidies for coal-fired power plants under a Turnbull government and [claims]that right-wing ideology has no place in the energy debate.
Who’re the socialists here?
Turnbull and Frydenberg are the same team who preside over a system which takes billions from some electricity generators to reward others and is intended to drive the former out of business. They bought the giant Snowy Hydro generator for $6b, and are planning to spend $4.5b to build a hydro storage “battery” that is only needed in order to stop their pick-the-winner favourite new generators from destroying the grid or the household budget, whichever comes first.
Apparently nationalizing a hydro generator is not “socialist” but nationalizing a […]
Just another hidden cost — intermittent generators are vandals on our baseload suppliers. Wind power needs gas, but gas doesn’t need the wind. When the two are paired together it makes the wind energy “reliable” but adds nearly $30/MWh to the cost of the energy from gas. Right now that cost will be added to the gas plant, but in a free market, it should be paid by the wind farm investors.
Stacy and Taylor compared the cost of running a Closed Cycle Gas plant (CC Gas) on its own or combined with a wind farm. The combination produces reliable electricity “on demand” and uses less gas to do it. The sole benefits to this odd industrial couple are a smaller gas bill and lower emissions of a fertilizing gas (CO2). All the capital and labor costs of running a gas plant are the same, but now it sits idle more often, pointlessly waiting like a spare wheel til the wind slows and gas power is needed again. About the only thing we can predict about the wind farm is that it can be relied on for almost nothing, so the gas plant must be almost as large whether or […]
You may have thought that solar panels were designed to collect sunlight and convert it to electricity. But obviously the real aim of solar industrial plants is to attract government handouts and convert them into yachts.
Solar farms receive more cash from green subsidies than selling the energy they produce “Total subsidy provided to solar electricity generators last year was about £1.2bn
Energy producers were encouraged to start solar farms with generous handouts funded by a ‘green levy’ on taxpayers’ bills.
But many of them now make the majority of their cash from the subsidy – instead of the electricity they produce.
This was part of the £5.6billion subsidy paid to green energy producers, which critics say inflates household energy bills.
Owl Hatch is the largest solar subsidy farm in the UK, harvesting £3.8million from captive UK taxpayers which allowed it to sell £2.5million of electricity. Supposedly, it can provide enough clean energy to power around 12,600 average UK homes. The 49.9MW Owls Hatch Solar Farm was constructed in just 12 weeks, showing just how fast subsidy sucking infrastructure can be created.
Owl’s Hatch Solar park collected 65% more money from subsidies than […]
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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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