EV ownership in Australia is only 1 car in 4,000 of all our cars on the road. Yet already they are causing streets to go black, and possibly blowing transformers which need replacing “more often”:
It’s a crisis that has been concealed from the vast majority of the population … The danger really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars. When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.
Australians only own 5,000 EV’s at present. Imagine the fun when 500,000 new EV’s hit the streets in 2030, and again in 2031, 2032,….
He talks about intermittent power causing “choppy” electron flows which make transformers hotter:
To my horror I discovered that cities like Melbourne and Sydney are in danger of either experiencing explosions or even a complete collapse of the system.
Gottliebsen went on to find a solution (apart from the obvious one of “not rushing into EVs”). He found something called the Faraday Grid, developed in Australia, but ignored, so now based in Scotland and used by London and Tokyo.
But give me one reason not to just use cheap clean brown coal for the next 300 years, leave the grid as is, and use all the spare money for medical research and holidays in the Bahamas.
David Attenborough thinks fossil fuels cause scores of walruses to careen off cliffs. The ABC is crying as it advertises the latest Netflix tear-jerker and WWF fundraiser.
In behind-the-scenes footage posted to YouTube by Netflix, producer and director Sophie Lanfear explained the events with tears in her eyes.
“It’s the sad reality of climate change,” she said.
“They’d be on the ice if they could be, but there’s no option but to come to land.
Actually though, it’s the sad reality of predatory polar bears
…
Canadian zoologist Dr Susan Crockford is all over it calling it Walrus Tragedy Porn. Apparently, the Attenborough footage is from 19 October 2017 in Ryrkaypiy, Siberia which was overrun with polar bears that terrorised the walruses. Five thousand walruses were herded to a cliff. Hundreds were driven over the edge to their deaths, and afterwards the polar bears feasted off McWalrus on the rocks.
Apparently, it’s happened before and has nothing to do with sea ice:
“We have records of walrus haulouts that are nearly a century old, including some from this part of the Arctic. The idea that walruses are being driven on shore by sea-ice decline is entirely incorrect. They have always done so. In fact there are reports of walruses falling over cliffs from long before the age of global warming too. Sir David’s story about climate change appears to be just that – a fable.”
Buying a Tesla probably won’t save a single walrus.
The ABC doesn’t mention this, nor find an zoologist expert to interview. They don’t even google it. Instead, they give us the-world-according-to-WWF:
“They are meant to live on the ice. Now they have lost this ice platform essential for their everyday life in the Chukchi sea.
“Many scientists blame this on global warming.
Then for the 4,400th time, ABC breaks their own rule about only interviewing real experts:
“I am not a climate specialist, but the fact is, over the last 34 years the ice has just disappeared before my very eyes and the animals, their natural habitat has changed, that fact is undeniable.”
Of course, if they’d interviewed an actual expert, or even a blogger, they’d know that ice comes and goes, and so apparently, do marauding mean poley bears.
Should we save more polar bears? Let’s ask a walrus…
We can see how much research and planning goes into Labor Party policy.
“How long does it take to charge it up?” Jackie O asked the alternative prime minister in an interview on the Kyle and Jackie O radio show this morning.
“Oh, it can take, umm … it depends on what your original charge is, but it can take, err, 8 to 10 minutes depend on your charge, it can take longer … ” Mr Shorten replied unconvincingly.
“Is that all?” Jackie O pressed.
“Well it depends how flat your battery is,” Mr Shorten said.
Seeing the tragedy unfolding, assistants leapt to Shorten’s defense to say that there is a theoretical planned, possible battery charger that can charge in 10 minutes. But read Shorten’s words again — he is strictly all waffly present tense, and the only qualifier is “how flat the battery is”. This is not a man thinking of kW or amps. Jackie O presses him to expand, but he can’t.
In the world there is one show-pony super fast charger of 350kW — but there are no cars that can use that speed. Most home chargers are 3 kW and up to 7kW. It’s all very well for some EV fans to rave about how far new batteries go, but those new big batteries need two whole days even at 7kW to get fully charged. (see that Vector report)
PLUS we’re going to need a whole new grid
There’s the problem that each fast charger is like adding 20 extra houses. The Vector, New Zealand Report 2018 claimed that new big batteries are like adding “three new houses to the grid” (if they are charging at 7kW). If consumers want to fast charge at 50kW it is like adding “20 homes”. (Though at the moment the cost of a 50kW charger is NZ $50,000 which would rather limit the rush to buy them.)
Australians buy around 1 million new cars a year, so that would be 500,000 new EV’s each year by 2030 according to the Labor Party plan. If I read it correctly, according to the Vector NZ report that would be like adding another ten million homes to the Australian grid each year in terms of network capacity — and we only have 10 million homes in the country. Could it really be that nuts?
The world would probably cool if he took, say, 1,000 years.
Wiebe Wakker drove his retrofitted station wagon nicknamed “The Blue Bandit” across 33 countries in what he said was the world’s longest-ever journey by electric car.
The trip from the Netherlands to Australia took just over three years and was funded by public donations from around the world, including electricity to charge the Bandit, food and a place to sleep.
Proving EV holidays are viable if you can create a global fan-base by riding on a multinational industrial scare campaign, and have 36 spare months to do what fossil fuels can achieve in 20 hours.
Given it takes 12 hours to recharge the car from a domestic power point and three hours from a commercial point, he’s learned to live in the moment. The journey appeared to go really pear-shaped in Surabaya, Indonesia when floodwaters deluged his battery pack, rendering it completely unable to hold a charge.
However, the indefatigable Mr Wakker simply set up a GoFundMe page to raise the cash to have a technical specialist ***fly in and fix it…
When Coober Pedy was his next goal 260km away, he waited 12 hours for a tailwind and then trundled along at a power-saving 60km/h, with giant road-trains thundering by at irregular intervals. Despite the conservative approach he still fell 15kms short of the mining town and had to be towed the rest of the way…
Next time someone tells you how extreme the climate is today remind them that five million people died in a drought in 1896 in India. That was the same year a brutally hot summer in Australia caused 400 deaths and people fled the inland heat on emergency trains. Somewhere between 1 and 5 million people died a few years later in the next drought — the same time as Australia’s “Federation drought”.
Spot the effect of CO2 in 150 years of rainfall of India:
Average rainfall anomalies in India from 1850 – 2016 from IMD (black) and GISS (red). | Click to read the official caption.
Famine deaths have largely been eliminated in India, mostly thanks to better transport and organisation, higher yields (thanks to fertilizer and CO2) and irrigation. Droughts still happen but in a population that has grown from 250 million in 1880 to a billion in 2000 the extraordinary thing is that more people starved of famine when the population was only a quarter of the size and CO2 levels were “perfecto”.
Weakened people died of cholera and malaria, and bubonic plague too. Death rates to these diseases often doubled or tripled.
Famine, India, 1896.
Thanks to fossil fuels and atmospheric CO2 countless lives have been saved.
Despite the obstacles, the free market just saved South Australian’s $110 million dollars
The Aurora plant was to be a bigger copy of Crescent Dunes, Solar Thermal Plant, California.
The Aurora Solar Thermal plant was going to be the biggest one in the world, but they couldn’t find enough private investors so it’s just been scrapped. That is despite the SA government being willing to give $110 million dollars, and the state being one of the sunniest, richest places in the world and with people already paying obscenely high prices for electricity. If Big-Solar could make it anywhere, surely there is no easier place on Planet Earth than in coal-less South Australia where competition from cheap reliable power has been completely extinguished?
A $650 million solar thermal power plant planned for Port Augusta will not go ahead after the company behind it failed to secure commercial finance for the project.
Despite all those fixed, unfair advantages, the market didn’t want to pay up for a 150MW bird frying power plant that would cost $650 million and probably only produce 30MW effectively. (The company’s prototype was Crescent Dunes which had a capacity factor of only 16%). Possibly investors also weren’t enthused about the dismal operation record of that smaller sister plant in California which was beset with maintenance issues and failed for one third of the time in its first two years. That 110MW plant cost $1.3b in 2015 and produced electricity at $178/MWh, nearly 6 times as pricey as the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant managed in its last month of operation.
It was such a bad deal the government did everything it could to help:
Mr van Holst Pellekaan said the Government had done “everything it possibly can to support this project”, including extending deadlines, agreeing to changes to the project to add photovoltaic solar panels and introducing SolarReserve to potential financiers.
He said the interconnector project, due to be completed by 2022, prioritised another state’s “dirty coal power over South Australian renewable power”.
“That was a bad decision and the people that are going to pay the price are the Port Augusta community, but also South Australian power consumers,” he said.
The unfree market can’t save us from stupid big government
That interconnector is a $1.5 billion project that will allow South Australia’s erratic electricity to help destroy baseload power in New South Wales just like it did in Victoria. Electricity prices are predicted to fall, but SA already has one interconnector to Victoria and prices have only gone up everywhere within 1,000km of that.
It takes big national planning to make big problems. Indeed, without the Heywood interconnector SA couldn’t have managed a state-wide blackout in 2016.
In the real economy, $1,500 million dollars buys a lot of electricity, or 6 gas fired plants, or most of one large advanced coal plant that could produce 2000MW of cheap electricity for 50 years (or indefinitely, as long we keep the maintenance going).
Kids are running the country.
h/t to Steve Hyland, Bill in Oz, Original Steve. Plus thanks to Graeme No 3 and AndrewWA in past comments for their help. And from TonyfromOz who says: “Everything about this SouthAus plant is the hyped to the max best case scenario that NO plant on Planet Earth has achieved yet…”
The message that CO2 causes fires, floods, storms, reef damage and refugees is wearing off
What a problem for the vested interests — it’s their main propaganda message.
It’s witchcraft:
When the witchdoctors ran out of long term trends and supporting evidence they started blaming every storm on CO2. It was a sign of desperation. In more respectable days they would say these were “weather” not climate trends. Storms, floods, droughts and fires are caused by many variables, none of which the climate modelers can predict even ten days in advance. Furthermore, huge 1 in 100 year events need a thousand years of data (at least) before we could pretend to have even a hint of statistical significance that they are not just natural events which have always happened and always will.
About 10% more Australians have woken up
New polling shows that about 1 in ten Australians that used to find this witchcraft convincing are smelling a rat and don’t believe it anymore. Back in 2015 when IPSOS asked the exact same climate change question 62% of Australians thought that climate change was already causing more droughts. Now after a vast drought, it’s only 52%. In 2015, 61% of Australians thought CO2 made bushfires worse, now it’s only 48%. Then, 57% thought climate change impacted on sea level rise, now it’s only 44%. Where 62% thought climate change made storms worse, now it’s only 48%. These are big changes in just 4 years.
It was a loaded question anyway:
In how many years, if at all, do you think climate change will cause the following?
In 2019, most Australians don’t think climate change is already causing more extreme fires, storms, floods, reef damage, sea level rise, extinction or more heat deaths. On pretty much every factor below, except droughts, less than half of respondents believe climate change is already causing it.
So Australians are increasingly over it, weary of ridiculous claims
Question: In how many years, if at all, do you think climate change will cause the following in Australia?
Belief is a fragile thing
Remember, every night on the ABC and every day in the SMH and The Age Australians are told that floods, fires, fish, crocodiles and everything else can be attributed to climate change. Imagine if they heard an alternate view — how fast would the faith crash? These numbers would plummet.
Belief in 2015:
Notice that IPSOS published more information back then. Now they don’t say how many people think it “won’t cause” or “don’t know”. Hiding something? IPSOS are supposed to be impartial, instead it looks like they will sell their reputation to the highest bidder.
Can people from other countries compile a short list with links of your worst floods, fires, droughts, storms and heatwaves? That’s a resource every nation or region needs. I want to set up a reference list.
Well that is a first! Lights in a city in #Venezuela are going crazy on and of and on repeat again. #SinLuz#SinAgua. Some people in Venezuela have now gone 210 hours without lights or either running water. pic.twitter.com/CETnHlNYAT
New York Times journalist Nicholas Casey was in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in March when the country was hit by a six-day blackout… “By the fourth day of the power outage, that was when you started to hear shots getting fired in the street,” Casey says. “People were beginning to loot, and the store owners were coming out to defend their stores.”
The U.N. estimates that it’s upwards of 3 million people who have left. Now remember, this is a country of 30 million people. So we’re talking about 10 percent of the population that has gone.
A few weeks with intermittent power and the country is becoming uninhabitable.
When a government tries to print its way out of trouble by giving away “free” money it seems cheap but costs the whole economy:
Rich one year, down with polio the next. Nature comes back fast:
…this crisis that’s getting worse and worse, because of lack of medicine mainly, people are coming into these countries with diseases that should be controlled in Venezuela — diseases like diphtheria, malaria, tuberculosis have made a huge comeback in Venezuela.
President Maduro forced visiting Cuban doctors to use access to medicine as a way to gain votes for Maduro right before an election
They would start by going house to house to people. … The way that it was being described to me was that essentially you would start by handing people medications that they needed, especially seeing if they had chronic illnesses that they really needed medication for on a regular basis. And then after you start to get their trust, you would start to bring up Maduro. You’d start to bring up politics. You’d ask them, “Are you registered to vote?” And then actually start to make a much harder pitch, like “You need to vote for Maduro. This is where this medicine is coming from,” and ultimately at the end of this there would be a threat, which is that “If you don’t vote for Maduro, there is a possibility that you will lose your medication.
Oxygen tanks and medicines were being withheld from opposition supporters.
The curse of galloping inflation,
Can destroy and bring down a nation,
Best to trade in coins minted,
And dump the notes printed,
To buy food in a dire situation.
Last year investment in unreliable and asynchronous generators doubled in Australia thanks to government decree. For some reason, adding another few gigawatts of iffy capricious infrastructure to a 50GW finely-tuned-system appears to put the whole national grid in a near constant state of emergency. The AEMO (our market operator) had to intervene in the South Australian market eight times in 2016/17, but last year they had to do it 101 times.
This warning comes from the Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC) which makes the rules for the national grid. Why are they baring the dirty renewables laundry? Because the answer to the crisis is always bigger government and this is a reason to call for it.
Australia’s electricity grid is relying on emergency safety nets to keep the lights on, …
The deterioration of the strength of the electricity network — most pronounced in South Australia — is also spreading to southwest NSW, northwest Victoria and north Queensland, adding to wholesale costs incurred by users.
SA’s electricity system is increasingly operating under the direct intervention of the grid operator, with last-ditch interventions reserved for emergencies becoming a default way of managing the network,…
“Systems with lots of non-synchronous generation like wind and solar are weaker and harder to control — raising the risk of cascading blackouts. Unprecedented in their breadth and scope, these trends put extraordinary pressure on the security and reliability of our power grid.” Investment in large-scale renewable energy doubled in 2018 to $20 billion, with one in five Australians now owning rooftop solar and electricity generated by clean energy accounting for 21 per cent of the overall power mix, Clean Energy Council data will show today.
That trend is also pressuring wholesale market prices, with the cost of keeping the system stable soaring to $270 million as of September 2018, while the cost of maintaining frequency control surged nearly tenfold to $220m in 2018 from $25m in 2012.
Australia’s power grid is only coping with the rapid influx of intermittent wind and solar power with the help of costly daily intervention by the energy market operator to keep the lights on, an assessment of the electricity system has found, ramping up pressure for a long-term federal framework that integrates climate and energy policy.
AMEC could have pointed out the costs of trying to turn our national grid into a weather-changing-machine. Instead they are changing the rules and adding synchronous condensers, giant spinning discs to create some artificial stability.
“After AEMO declared a problem in South Australia that state’s network provider organized to install synchronous condensers which are due to be commissioned in 2020,” Mrs Pearson said. When that happens the need for very frequent directions to maintain system strength in South Australia will hopefully come to an end. It is a timing and technology issue. First AEMO declares a shortfall, then networks decide the best local solutions for them and start putting them in place.” — AMEC press release
Just let the free market back and renewables wouldn’t be a problem…
Despite all the spin, the non-stop propaganda, a dreadful drought and the two “record” hot years, most Australians still don’t agree with the IPCC. This is exactly the same as it was in 2015 when the CSIRO last did a serious climate poll.
So we sit, a nation of majority skeptics, with no major party to vote for and hardly any TV media, academics or politicians making the case that the IPCC might be wrong and the Paris agreement might be a waste of time. No one is allowed to discuss it and national leaders stay cowed in silence for fear of being called petty names.
There is little to crystallize or focus this sentiment that doubts the experts, yet it exists, even in surveys designed by a team who appear to be doing their best to find and amplify the “believer” vote.
The IPSOS survey suffers from the the usual flaws: loaded questions, ambiguous terms and one sided analysis. Respondents are asked magical pie questions about solving problems as if they only need to wave a fairy wand and it shall be solved. They’re not asked how many dollars they personally want to spend solving it. It’s as if life is not about the costs and benefits or trade-offs. It’s as deep as saying if you could save the world for free, would you?
54% of Australian don’t believe man-made climate change is the dominant driver. | Ipsos, 2019.
What really matters is what would you give up in order to change this?
This new IPSOS climate change poll of 1000 people was conducted in December and finally published, coincidentally, on Sunday before the Labor Party launched its climate policy. IPSOS are telling Australians on the verge of an election that this is some kind of new record momentum. Matt Wade, at The Sydney Morning Herald repeats the IPSOS press release, “this was a record share of Australians that say humans cause climate change”. It’s the usual half-truth — the whole truth is that the CSIRO did multiple surveys involving 17,000 people from 2010 – 2014 and nothing has changed. Isn’t that the kind of research that both IPSOS and investigative reporters might want to mention?
Here are the CSIRO results from 2015. Spot the difference?
The gap between what the experts say and the public believes exists all around the world. In the US the AAAS found that while 87% of experts say climate change mostly “man-made” only 50% of Americans thought the experts were right. (And that was before Trump arrived — it’d be bound to be less now.)
Only 86% of Australians “believe” man-kind has any effect at all
To get a high number IPSOS and the parrot-media bundle together all the people who believe man-made climate change has any possible effect at all. They report that “86% of Australians believe humans contribute to climate change in some way”. That’s a category that would include most die-hard skeptics (like me) — so it’s about as meaningless a statement as anyone can make. The only thing it tells us is that the IPSOS investigators badly want to spin this.
If one third of Australians think the situation is part man – part nature, that’s a lot of people who already think the news is hyped and who won’t want to spend a lot of money.
Where do Australians rank climate change — last
When voters can rank climate change it’s the last thing they care about. Year after year, “the environment” is dead last on pretty much every survey, everywhere.
How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy.
What’s the biggest issue at the moment: Cost of Living.
Labor’s electric car plan means higher emissions, more pollution, more coal use, and threatens the grid but it’s great for socialists.
Fantasy-land: Labor wants half of all new cars sales to be EV’s by 2030. That’s a radical change in a big country that loves its cars and drives great distances. Last year only 0.2% of new car purchases were EV’s. Our grid is already struggling, and extra charging cars would push it over the edge and may add something like $20b a year in extra network and generation costs.
This makes no sense on so many levels: in Australia EV’s are 80% fossil fuel powered and over their lifetime they cause more pollution than internal combustion engines.
Electric Vehicles produce more carbon emissions if the grid that charges them is powered by fossil fuels.
The results reveal that the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of a battery electric vehicle production range from 92.4 to 94.3 GJ and 15.0 to 15.2 t CO2eq, which are about 50% higher than those of an internal combustion engine vehicle, 63.5 GJ and 10.0 t CO2eq. This substantial change can be mainly attributed to the production of traction batteries, the essential components for battery electric vehicles. (Qiao, 2017)
“… an electric car recharged by a coal-fired plant produces as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered car that gets 29 miles per gallon (12.3 km/L).” (Sivak, 2017)
In a coal fired country, EV’s achieve nothing for carbon emissions, but over their lifecycle, they’re worse for human toxicity, freshwater eco-toxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and mineral resource depletion. (Hawkins, 2012).
EV’s are so useless for the environment you might wonder why Labor and the Greens love them. Take your pick:
Labor Green policitians are honest but stupid.
Labor Green politicans don’t care less about the environment but want a great socialist car.
With our coal fired grid and long distances the only place on Earth less suited to EV’s is Antarctica, where it is too cold for the batteries to work and where people die when they run out of “fuel”. Although at least Antarcticans won’t have to worry about extreme heat setting their batteries on fire.
Unless our grid power goes nuclear the electricity draining into these cars is 60% coal fired, 20% natural gas and diesel powered and 20% “renewable”. The coal percentage would presumably be even higher if they get charged at night, like most electric vehicles surely are. (Figures from Dept of Environment and Energy)
99.8% of Australians don’t want an EV
This is a wild transformation. Currently 499 Australians out of 500 choose anything but an EV:
Behyad Jafari, chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Council which worked with Labor on the plan, said EV sales in Australia totalled 2216 last year, or about one in 500 cars sold. — Peter Hannam, SMH
Electric vehicles in particular are another new “appliance” which is set to place new demands on Australia’s power system. This review has found that each electric vehicle could impose additional network and generation costs from $7500 up to $10,000 per vehicle over the 5 years from 2015 to 2020 in the absence of appropriate pricing signals and efficient charging decisions.
Who pays for the extra generation capacity? Under current market arrangements all consumers would have to pay this extra cost regardless of whether they owned an electric car. Using the AMEX figures, if half our 20 million cars were electric that would add another $20 billion dollars a year to network and generation costs (and that was in 2013 prices).
New “fat” batteries on EV’s draw so much current we need a whole new grid:
New bigger batteries need two days to charge at 7kW which is like adding “three new houses to the grid” and that’s the good option. If consumers want to fast charge (who wouldn’t) the 50kW option is like adding “20 homes”. (Vector, New Zealand Report 2018)
Ten million cars fast-charging at the same time would be like adding 200 million homes to the grid. Psycho.
EV’s are perfect for socialists because no one wants them without subsidies
All around the world consumers need lavish subsidies and rewards to be coerced into buying EV’s. Governments have to offer subsidies in China, India, Japan, Denmark, Norway and practically every country on earth. In South Korea the subsidy is something like US$12,000. In Norway electric vehicles are exempt from purchase taxes (which are extremely high for other cars). They’re also exempt from the annual road tax, all public parking fees, and toll payments. How much icing does that cake need? A lot: Sales of EV’s collapsed from 2000 cars to just 32 cars in Hong Kong when subsidies were withdrawn.
Last year, Australia’s Electric Vehicle Council predicted more than three million electric vehicles could be on Australian roads within 12 years (that’s along way short of ten million). The council wants $7000 tax breaks for buyers of electric vehicles.
The Mitsubishi iMiev arrived in 2010, with a range of just 150km and a hefty price tag of $49,000. The Nissan Leaf was about three times as expensive as a comparable petrol-powered car. The Holden Volt cost $60,000. Only the super-rich could hope to afford the more glamorous Tesla Roadster at more than $200,000. — Sam Clench, News.com
Electric vehicles are the perfect car for socialist governments. It’s another industry destined to be totally dependent on Big Government. EV cars and their owners are born Big Gov lobbyists. They form part of a club to cheer on other big-gov dependents.
The ALP are simply copying the Greens fairytale plans and multiplying by half. But make no mistake, the Labor plans are obscenely ridiculous all on their own. The job of the Greens is to make extreme Labor policies look “moderate” in comparison with something twice as stupid.
In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived ninety thousand year stretches of abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years.
It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness.
Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky. This is a lot of fun to do with kids.
Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
Light your backyard with the landcruiser headlights! (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
It doesn’t matter how pointless your action is, the ABC will cover it as long as it gives free advertising to giant multinationals and fellow lobbyists for big government.
Six women take a swim, put it on the news. No hard questions asked.
When South Coast NSW photographer Tamara Dean asks you to be involved in her latest project, be prepared to make a bold environmental statement in your birthday suit.
“Biologists predict that if we continue carrying on the way we are, by the end of this century, 50 per cent of species living today will face extinction,” Ms Dean said.
Canberra environmentalist and economist Tory Bridges said she would do whatever it took to get people thinking about climate change.
That included swimming naked in the open ocean with 20 other women on a rainy weekend. But she was willing to suffer for the art, especially with the future of the environment at stake.
The photo shoot was part of Ms Dean’s ongoing project called Endangered.
She wanted the photo shared, so I’m happy to help. Be convinced all ye doubters.
Sydney-based photographer Tamara Dean was recently invited to Heron Island, near the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern Great Barrier Reef. During the trip, she learned about the effects of climate change from Professor Tim Flannery and world-leading coral experts, while experiencing ‘the beauty and fragility of the reef’.
The reference for the apocalyptic prediction about 50% of all species was from “leading biologists” who were speaking at a conference with Paul Ehrlich, sayth the Guardian. Don’t forget that one (count it) one single mammal has gone extinct anywhere in the world so far and it was a rat stranded on a 3m high sand dune far out to sea. It was surely destined to be wiped out by the next available storm. Just 3,000 species to go til we hit the halfway mark.
How about some taxpayers jumping in with only their wallets on? Do you reckon the ABC would cover their protest about being forced to spend a billion dollars paying for hate-male and naked political advertising?
The Greens policy blueprint suggests Australia would become a “renewable energy superpower”, with coal exports to be replaced by clean hydrogen, and the construction of a $6bn taxpayer-funded energy grid upgrade to develop new renewable energy zones.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Coming soon, the Greens will ban planes, holidays and jokes…
The Greens will propose 2030 as the cut-off point for thermal coal exports, and the shutdown date for Australia’s fleet of coal-fired power stations, in the party’s new climate and energy policy heading into the federal election.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
Current thermal coal exports bring in $25 billion dollars each year. That’s a lot of money and taxes taken out of our economy. Which hospitals will the Greens close? (Maybe all of them, especially at night time). We could just ban people from getting sick?
Closing our 23GW of coal fired electricity will be a glorious collectivist fashion statement. But China is currently building seven times the entire Australian coal fleet and plans another twelve “Australian coal fleets”. China already has nearly fifty times as much coal power as Australia has. And all that is “part of the Paris agreement”. Geddit? Of course you don’t. None of it makes sense to anyone who can add up numbers bigger than two.
The Coal Council of Australia branded the Greens platform as “economic vandalism” that would threaten up to 150,000 direct and indirect jobs, and hit the governments of NSW and Queensland with the loss of $2.5bn in annual royalties.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Shame about the 150,000 jobs lost. Still they can all move into tourism to cater for the people who are willing to sail 10,000 kilometers to an island filled with diesel generators and old rental cars.
Backpackers are bound to love the bicycle tours of solar farms and forests filled with windmills.
The party is proposing to phase out thermal coal exports by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020, a set of procedures that would require resources companies to secure permits at auction in order to export product.
The policy also advocates for vehicle emissions standards “that lead up to a complete ban on new internal combustion vehicles by 2030”, and a 17% tax on “luxury fossil fuel cars” to help cover the costs of scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles, “reducing the cost of electric vehicles by around 20%”.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
By 2030 with no coal or nukes running, the price of electricity will be $2 a KW/h (if it’s not $20) and EV’s will cost three times as much as petrol cars to drive and take 72 times as long to fill (assuming we still have electricity).
Does “internal combustion vehicle” mean more than just cars? I’m especially looking forward to battery powered combine harvesters and solar powered semi’s.
Just to make the impossible a little bit harder they won’t allow Kyoto credits:
The Greens have disavowed using Kyoto credits, which is an accounting system that allows countries to count credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris emissions reduction commitments for 2030.
All the other parties in Australia must be loving this announcement. What a gift.
Even for the Labor Party, the Greens are there to make their suicidal 45% reduction look less stupid.
The question is though, how could any party preference them anywhere except last?
Lance predicted this could take 3 – 6 months to restart (and scored 67 thumbs up)
This is a teachable moment. Smart people will pause and reflect upon what is happening, lest it happen elsewhere. This is not a game sane people want to play. Societies melt down in a matter of days to weeks without electric power, water, food, transportation, communication, etc.
We’ve yet to see how bad this is going to get. It will get a LOT worse before it gets better.
My guess is it will take 3 to 6 months to restart the grid in Venezuela, even if things go swimmingly. If a few substations and alternators are blown out, it could take 2 years. Longer if some turbines are damaged.
Today, Judge Vasta asked how it could be that James Cook University – a recipient of so many billions of dollars over the years – could leave no stone unturned in its disciplinary process against Peter Ridd, while doing absolutely nothing to address his complaints about the lack of quality assurance of its research.
Not once in court today, or yesterday, was there any defense by the James Cook University Team of “the science” that Peter Ridd has been so critical of. The university is simply arguing that he doesn’t have a right to speak-out.
Let’s remember how important “quality control” is to JCU: One researcher at JCU was found guilty of fabricating results by Upsalla University. Peter Ridd reported the same researcher has presented photos of 50 fish that contained manipulated, flipped duplicates. These are serious allegations in science. In response JCU took a whole year to even name the people on the investigation panel, let alone start investigating. As I said at the time:
The words, “wild”, “bizarre” and “extreme” come to mind:
“Chris Cocklin, dep Vice Chancellor of JCU, tried to suggest that Professor Ridd was not a “distinguished academic” at the university and therefore was not covered by the academic freedom clause.”
Peter Ridd says he felt he had no choice but to publish information on the GoFundMe page because he was being gagged, had lost all faith in the disciplinary process and needed to raise funds to mount a legal challenge.
He explains why quality assurance is so important:
by Charlie Peel. The Australian
“I [Peter Ridd] was disciplined for saying these institutions were untrustworthy and that was referring to quality assurance in science.”
He argued the studies affected “a lot of people” because it informed public policy on legislation to cut fertiliser use in Great Barrier Reef catchments, shut down dredging and mining operations and was affecting tourism because visitors thought the reef was dying.
“The science needs to be rigorous because it affects a lot of people,” he said.
I know commenters discussed this on the weekend, but lest anyone missed it. The man who wants 
Recent Comments