Recent Posts
-
Wednesday
-
In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
-
Sunday
-
Saturday — Election Day Australia
-
Vote for freedom…
-
Friday
-
Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
-
Thursday
-
Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
-
Wednesday
-
Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
-
Tuesday
-
Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
-
Monday: Election Day Canada
-
When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
-
Saturday
-
UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
-
Friday
-
The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one
-
Thursday
-
Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.
-
Wednesday
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Easter Sunday
-
Saturday
-
Good Friday
-
In crash-test dummy land, we solve teenage girl climate anxiety with $500b in fantasy weather experiments…
-
Thursday
-
Nothing says “Safe and Effective” like destroying all the data from Australia’s giant abandoned vaccine study
-
Wednesday
-
Who owns the oceans? The UN wants to tax ships to reduce carbon emissions — a $40b windfall for unaccountable global bureaucrats
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
Saturday
-
Conservatives promise to axe the car tax that would have added $10k to petrol and diesel cars
-
Friday
-
The monster Green Tariffs we put on ourselves are worse than a foreign trade war
-
Thursday
-
Trump goes gangbusters on coal power and coal mining to supply AI energy demand
-
Wednesday
-
Instead of $8b in rebates, Labor could have built gas and coal plants and actually made cheap electricity
-
Tuesday
-
Labor wants the working class to help rich people buy batteries
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
We couldn’t kill the worlds corals if we wanted to: They already suffered for two thousand years and recovered
-
Saturday
|
Spot the vested interest
The biggest competitor for hydro in Australia is cheap old coal power. Surprise me, Snowy Hydro jumped into the national energy debate a few days ago on behalf of taxpayers themselves.
With Turnbull offering five-billion-dollar gravy to build an unnecessary hydro storage battery, it is no surprise to hear Snowy Hydro pretending that Australia needs more intermittent unreliables. The more solar and wind rock the system, the more Big-Hydro is needed to stabilize the boat. The big question is why hardly any journalists or politicians seem able to spot the obvious vested interest:
Ben Packham, The Australian:
The government-owned company building Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project has added fuel to the energy wars by declaring wind and solar are clearly cheaper options than coal.
And if you owned Hydro stocks, you’d say that too. Coal is every generators enemy for a reason. It’s cheaper than they are.
See the tiny numbers above the columns in this graph? Those are actual settlement prices — tiny wholesale bargain sales of coal fired electrons at 1c per kilowatt hour.
Source: AER report on the closure of Hazelwood
Hydro can only fantasize about supplying electricity that cheaply. In the same AER report the Murray Hydro settlement prices were $44 – $122 per MW/h.
At least a few people in politics can spot the obvious:
The Coalition’s pro-coal faction questioned the claim, saying Snowy 2.0’s business model depended on the shift away from coal-fired power.
Why are the only sensible people called the “pro-coal” faction as if they are organized by the industry? They are the anti-stupid-waste faction. Their comment was spot on. Without renewables, there’s no reason for Snowy 2.0.
No one mention the cheapest source of electricity by far — old coal stations at $30/MWh
Snowy Hydro said its modelling showed the cost of wind power was $70-$80/MWh, and the cost of solar power was $77-$99/MWh, including price premiums for energy storage. It said new power from new high-efficiency low-emissions coal generators cost $78-$120/MWh.
See the word “new”? What goes unsaid is the price of old coal. The government owned company lies by omission.
Who does Snowy Hydro serve — not the taxpayers who own it.
“Regardless of views on climate policy or the future energy mix, what’s clear is the cost of building wind and solar — even with a price premium added for ‘firming’ capacity — is cheaper than new coal generation,” the company said in a document outlining the economic case for Snowy 2.0.
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
…
8.4 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
New essential poll today shows 35% of respondents support cutting spending on the ABC.
The ABC once had a hallowed status, but those days are over. One in three Australians are not enthused with non-stop naked Green-Labor advertising combined with derision and scorn for the deplorable half of the population.
We pay 14 cents a day for the ABC and it’s not worth it.
 … ABC ratings plummet 13% in the last year
Showing that this survey is not an abberation, the whole nation is voting with the remote control:
Last week ABC News attracted about 660,000 viewers in the mainland capital cities. This compares with about 760,000 viewers a year ago.
That’s a trend line headed for zero by 2025.
Most Australians don’t watch the prime time 7pm news service they are forced to pay for. Apparently the ABC is a subsidy package for poor inner city elites who can afford to live in Darlinghurst but not to pay for their own news service.
The ABC rescue plan is a workshop on telling stories
The ABC solution yesterday is to get better at “storytelling”. It does not include employing a second conservative or libertarian commentator (one, Amanda Vanstone, a soft-left Turnbull supporter, is enough). It does not include making the ABC “the place to be” for national debate of key issues. Nor does it include representing the other half of the population.
“We want to improve our storytelling for 7pm news,” the strategy document says. “To do so, we’ll begin writing workshops for TV news. These will be aimed at reporters at all levels to help reinforce how TV news storytelling is different and to remind reporters what producers are looking for.”
In a flash of insight, they also realized that a news service might need to tell “stories with impact”. Perhaps in future they might mention Rotherham*, instead of running 30 days strait about Rolf Harris? ABC News hammers the few pet topics of inner city ABC editors to the point that David and I sometimes have to pause the playback to check the date. Is there any other news service in the world where viewers wonder if they have accidentally played yesterdays news again? Lately, I swear I saw this exact same piece on sheep and for two weeks.
In long gone decades the 7:30 Report used to be “must see” viewing for anyone interested in politics in Australia. Now, whatever. At least they could bring back Chris Uhlman. Better yet. Give us back our 14c. That’s $200 a year for any family of four. How many Australians would buy that subscription?
And of course, the real cost of the ABC each year is measured in billions. For starters, there’s the damage done by government funded druid schemes to slow storms in 2100 that the ABC never asked one hard question about.
*Rotherham, UK: most Australians have no idea. Thanks to 18C you are not free to say much below, except “God Help Us”.
9.2 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
 Panels are going in everywhere in Perth. In Western Australia the uptake of solar panels has rocketed as electricity prices leaped — there’s a slow motion solar train-wreck underway. Solar PV panels are now on more than one in four houses and growing at a phenomenal rate.
The South West Grid is small, with around one million customers and a daily peak of around 2 – 3,000 MW. But the solar generation now totals as much as 1,000MW, and is growing at blistering 180MW a year. Already, there are times solar can be the largest “single” source on this grid, and the AEMO has no control over it, which is why emergency notices are being issued more and more. The AEMO suggests the answer is more batteries, but we are still subsiding the installation of these unnecessary panels making the problem worse, and electricity prices are forecast to rise another 7% this year. As readers TomOMason and TonyfromOz say, so much for cheap solar — watch out: “Batteries Not Included”. The hidden costs get you every time, and the cost of the impact on the rest of the grid is only becoming known as we do this live experiment.
Solar panels are becoming an emergency in WA, equivalent to a bushfire
The growth of panels is so disruptive the AEMO sometimes has to invoke the “hisk risk state” and force the baseload coal and gas generators off the grid for fear of an overload. This is supposed to be something triggered only in exceptional circumstances. The rapid change to the grid generation will create a regular state of emergency in WA in a few years unless something changes.
Daniel Mercer in The West Australian
Extraordinary powers designed for emergencies such major power plant failures or bushfires are being triggered to protect WA’s main grid from soaring output generated by rooftop solar panels.
In comments to a Parliamentary inquiry, the body that runs the south-west electricity system has warned the market can no longer cope with the solar power being pumped out during certain conditions.
Experts have warned a looming crunch may lead to increased risks of blackouts and higher power costs for consumers.
There is now almost 1000MW of solar powered generation across the south west interconnected system — the biggest single source on the grid — with about 200,000 installations on households.
Solar spells “disastrous” trends for conventional power stations
From a January news report: Solar may overwhelm the WA Grid
Daniel Mercer in The West Australian, Jan 8th, 2018
It is believed solar power could displace 100 per cent of traditional generation such as coal- and gas-fired plants for short intervals within as few as five years based on current trends.
While this would happen initially only during specific weather conditions, such as mild, sunny days when demand for electricity was low but production from solar panels was high, the trend could be disastrous for conventional power stations.
This is one of the hidden costs of solar power.
The uptake of solar panels here has accelerated due to painful electricity prices and an ongoing subsidy. Here in the sunny state they work well but not well enough to make them worth installing without the subsidy. If they aren’t economic in most of WA, they won’t be economic anywhere other than remote off-grid locations.
In the even smaller North-West grid of Western Australia, the powers-that-be have limited the uptake of solar subsidies in Broome to 10% of the towns power for fear of grid fluctuations. (Thanks to RickWill for reminding me).
The SWIS grid is not connected to the whole NEM in Australia. The market rules are different, so is the structure. It’s largely government controlled. Therefore I’m very interested in hearing from anyone with insight into our system. Please, if you can help, get in touch through comments below or email joanne at this site domain.
h/t to Vic, Pat
Other posts on Solar Power
9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
Last chance to book for the Friedman conference!
Science is nothing without free speech. Join the ATA and friends — people who fight for it. I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer next weekend on How to Destroy an Electricity Grid.
It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.
Bookings close today.
As Senator David Leyonhjelm penned in his most recent oped:
“[The Friedman Conference] is a true festival of dangerous ideas, where people can voice their vision of the future and not find themselves in hot water because someone is offended.
9.6 out of 10 based on 37 ratings
UPDATE Watch Peter Ridd on Sky News. I’ll be on the show myself next Sunday. – Jo
 Peter Ridd as a first year undergraduate science student at James Cook University back in 1978. This is so much bigger than just one man and one university. Academic staff everywhere will be watching, most to see if they can say what they really think, but others, conversely to see whether James Cook University can get away with this. Can they squelch opinions they don’t like this easily?
James Cook Uni needs to be punished, mocked and heads should roll. We didn’t ask for this test, but it’s here. JCU don’t deserve a single dollar of taxpayer funds while they maintain this ridiculous anti-intellectual and political pogrom.
Peter Ridd wants his job back and he’s willing to fight to get it. Let’s help him!
Peter Ridd’s new website. Donate at his GoFundMe page.
Summary of Allegations with brief explanation
First they tried to punish Peter Ridd for daring to question divine institutions and sacred peer review. These are the words JCU wanted banned:
“…we can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – a lot of this is stuff is coming out, the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more.”
Then it became an order for him not to discuss their campaign to silence him. Now this is about his right to free speech to discuss their effort to stop free speech. JCU objects to him raising funds to defend himself — Did he breach a confidentiality agreement that James Cook Uni had no right to ask for? Does he have a conflict of interest by accepting money from the IPA given to help him defend himself?
This is a pure free speech battle — uni’s can accuse, but victims can’t defend
This taints all research James Cook University puts out. We know all reports will be pre-filtered or self censored.
It’s nothing but a legal hammer to stop the uni being exposed for behaving like a parasitic political tool. JCU accepts funds as a scientific institution but if it sacks people for saying the wrong thing, it proves it is really producing political documents disguised as unbiased research. Obviously no JCU researchers are free to “discover” anything that threatens the grand gravy train or suggests taxpayers are not getting good value.
This taints all research the institution puts out. How do we know that any news they announce is the whole truth — we must assume every result is put through the political filter and inconvenient conclusions or implications are removed.
It’s become a parody — JCU are denying they curtail academic freedom while they shift to an Academic-DefCon1 level, and type in the launch codes to stop him not only speaking about scientific matters, but also legal and free speech matters. JCU are nice people but Ridd should be sacked for talking to his wife and using words like “amusement”. The mildest irony is illegal!
JCU say he was making things up when he claims they told him not to talk to his wife but it was “misconduct” to email her:
(d) [James Cook University] Claims that Ridd was wrong to state in the GoFundMe campaign that the university did not allow him to tell his wife about the original allegations. It is certainly true that after a couple of months the university finally relented and allowed Ridd to talk to his wife. Then shortly after, the university made two allegations of serious misconduct about emailing his wife information relating to the case.
Ridd is free to speak, as long as he says the right things. He is not free to trvialize, satirize or parody JCU:
(e) Accused Ridd that he “trivialised, satirised or parodied” the disciplinary process by sending a copy of a newspaper article about the case to an old friend with the subject line “for your amusement”. The university particularly objected to the use of the word “amusement”. Naughty word apparently, but the university thought-police got it totally wrong. Ridd sees nothing amusing about what is happening to him. The strain and pressure is constant and potentially crushing – he was being ironic.
JCU claims he intimidated them after they intimidated him: It is so unfair!
(f) At the initial, and very frightening, serious misconduct interview in August 2017 when Ridd was handed by the Dean and HR representative the first set of allegations, and where there was a clear and imminent threat of dismissal, Ridd made it clear that he was going to fight the allegations all the way. Ridd said the words, “You should look at me as a poisonous fruit” and “[the University] could eat me…but it will hurt; I will make sure it hurts”. The university claims that this “language used is threatening, insubordinate, disrespectful”. In context, Ridd had just been told he was going into a procedure where the university is the judge, jury and probable executioner. He was simply being defiant against the odds.
Of professors, there are only a few,
Who dare challenge or doubt peer-review,
Of all topics climatic,
Which is so problematic,
For alarmists who think it taboo.
–Ruairi
To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly. In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.
New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February. The core issue continues to be Peter’s right to keep talking – including so that he can defend himself.
In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter’s employment agreement. The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him. Peter disputes this.
Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice – to defend himself! All of the documentation is now being made public – all of this information, and more can be found at Peter’s new website.
The Institute of Public Affairs published Climate Change, The Facts 2017, and continues to support Peter’s right to speak the truth. For media and comment contact Evan Mulholland on 0405 140 780, or at [email protected].
Buy the book if you haven’t already: this is another way of showing your support.
Just yesterday (Friday 18 May), Peter lodged papers in the Australian Federal Court. He is going to fight for his job back!
If you care about the truth, science and academic freedom, please donate to help bring this important case to court.
It doesn’t matter how little or how much you donate. Just make sure you are a part of this important effort by donating to Peter’s GoFundMe campaign.
There is more information at my blog, and a chart showing how much some reef researchers have fudged the figures.
Marohasy has a lot more about Ridd’s scientific importance, read it all.
See also WattsUp. “Climate skeptic professor Peter Ridd fired for his views by James Cook University @jcu”
“Let’s make them miserable using every legal method available. – Anthony Watts”
Suspending him from duty last month, JCU deputy vice-chancellor Tricia Brand said Professor Ridd had engaged in serious misconduct, including denigrating the university and its employees.
Terminating his employment, Vice-Chancellor Sandra Harding said he had “engaged in a pattern of conduct that misrepresents the nature and conduct of the disciplinary process through publications online and in the media”.
“You have repeatedly and knowingly breached your obligations to maintain the confidentiality of disciplinary processes,” Professor Harding wrote in a letter to Professor Ridd. “You have repeatedly and wilfully denigrated the university and your colleagues, and in doing so damaged the reputation of the university.”
Ridd is fighting back:
Professor Ridd responded by lodging new legal documents with the Federal Court. He said he would fight the sacking alongside 25 charges behind JCU’s “final censure” of him last year.
After already raising $100,000 from international donors in one day, Professor Ridd has turned again to the public for support.
“JCU appears to be willing to spend their near unlimited legal resources fighting me,” he said.
Professor Ridd claims he had been censured because he had “questioned the reliability of science coming from some of our most prestigious organisations who are claiming that the GBR is badly damaged”.
“All I am saying is we need to check this ‘science’,” he said.
Handy contacts:
Share your thoughts. Speak now while we still can:
The group-thinking warmists who preach,
A consensus, will censure free speech,
And those who might dare,
Have their science laid bare,
They would gladly dismiss and impeach.
–Ruairi
Last chance to book for the Friedman conference!
Science is nothing without free speech. Join the ATA and friends — people who fight for it. I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer next weekend on How to Destroy an Electricity Grid. It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. Bookings close tomorrow.
h/t Jennifer, Steve H, Pat, Another Ian, Albert Parker, William Happer, David B.
9.8 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
Australia must surely be The Global Patsy
Is any country acting so decisively against its own interests?
Last chance to book for the Friedman conference!
I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer next weekend. It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. Bookings close this Sunday.
We, the Global Crash Test Dummies of Renewable Energy, have the fourth largest known reserves of coal in the world. We have so much coal we can keep digging it up at the current rate for the next 294 years (assuming we don’t discover more, which we will)1. If we didn’t export three quarters of our coal, but used it all ourselves, it could power Australia for the next 1,000 years. (But we’d miss the money– better to sell the stuff before nukes make it worthless).
We have so much more coal than we need, most years we are the world’s largest exporter of coal.[2] Indeed, Australia contributes fully one third of the entire global coal export trade. (Three other countries, China, India and the US — dig up more than we do, but they use it themselves.)
Coal also makes up 3% of our entire GDP, employs near 50,000 people, is one of our top two exports, and brought in $54 billion dollars last year.[3]
If any nation was going to ask hard questions about the need to abandon coal it should be us. Instead, our leaders (bar Abbott) trip over themselves in the rush to sell out the national interests. All for the glorious pursuit of symbolic achievements in planetary air conditioning.
Our industrial competitors beam with joy as they pat us on the back, praise our greenness, and burn our coal.
Coal is not dying in the rest of the world either
The US and Russia have about 400 years of coal left at current production but China only 70. Countries with lower reserves are Indonesia (59 years) and the UK (17 theoretical years) which is as good as “run out”. The world as an average has 150 years left. All of this is just a best estimate based on assumptions that no one will discover more coal, and nor will they use more (or less) than they do currently. But you get the idea.
These are the countries with the most coal
These are the countries digging it up
These are the countries burning it up
These are the countries exporting it
 … No end to coal:
We will never run out of coal because sooner or later we will go nuclear, and sometime people will figure out fusion. No one will bother digging out the last coal. It will truly be a stranded asset then. We should use our coal now, while it’s still worth something.
REFERENCES
[1^]BP Energy Statistics 2017
[Backed up here: BP Statistical review 2017. h/t Anna]
[2^] EIA – Australian coal production
[3^] Austrade
9.7 out of 10 based on 64 ratings
Go Coal. Wood-fired electricity produces *more* CO2 for the next hundred years…
h/t NoTricksZone
Any day now the giant tree-eating-machine called Drax will be shifting back to coal as Greens and politicians realize they’ve made a planet killing mistake. Lordy! At the moment, Drax is supposed to be saving the world and making electricity for the UK by burning trees cut down and shipped from the US.
This temple to carbon neutrality happens to be the largest plant in the UK . It generates about 7% of all the megawatts used there. But a new study by Sterman et al, suggests the Drax plan is backfiring badly.
When is carbon neutrality not neutral? When the carbon debt is not paid off in our lifetimes…
Burning forests instead of coal deposits raises CO2, and in so many ways:
- Wood is a less efficient fuel. Megawatt for megawatt, wood produces more CO2 than coal. In terms of efficiencies, the combustion efficiency of wood is 25% compared to coal at 35%.
- Processing losses to supply wood are around 27%, while losses to supply coal are 11%. (NEA 2011, IEA 2016, Roder 2015)
- This is the slow road to carbon neutrality. It takes 40 – 100 years to grow the trees.
- In a century, lots of things can go wrong. The natural forest may never grow back thanks to disease, development or fires. Cleared land may be converted to pasture. There are many ways to leave a permanent carbon debt.
- If the slow-growing hardwood forest is replaced with fast-growing pine, the site can only soak up 60% of the carbon “lost”. Oak-Hickory forest stores 211 tC/ha compared to 131 tC/ha for pine plantations. A managed plantation can’t store as much carbon as an unmanaged one. After 500 million years of evolution, nature has fine-tuned carbon extraction in ecosystems. In an unmanaged forest, biology fills every carbon-sucking niche and doesn’t leave gaps for heavy machinery.
- If power stations don’t use as much coal, the coal price may fall, and other people may use the same coal elsewhere anyway.
- The kicker: As long as biofuel use is expanding so are CO2 emissions. All biomass burning from an existing forest creates an immediate carbon debt. And if you are continually chopping down more forests, the carbon debts accrue…
The next pair of graphs shows that Shortleaf Lobilly (a pine) regrows quickly, while Oaks take 80 years to recoup the CO2 lost.
 Click to enlarge and read the caption. The real kicker
It’s all very well thinking about how long it takes one year’s wood-pellet electricity to become neutral, but power stations need more fuel every year and if we keep razing more land, the carbon debt keeps growing. In the two scenarios below the biomass industry keeps growing linearly every year. But in S8 people settle down on the whole biomass idea and stop razing extra forest in 2050. Even so, the total industry carbon debt keeps accruing for another 56 years until presumably the regrowth reaches a point where it is pulling in more carbon that the yearly raze produces. It takes 144 years after the industry stops expanding before the net carbon debt is back to zero.
What other industry today won’t produce a net benefit (its whole reason for being) for one and a half centuries?
 “Scenario 8 (S8), CO2 continues to rise for 56 years after bioenergy production growth stops and only falls below initial levels 144 years after growth stops” Click to enlarge and read the caption. If razing forests for electricity makes any sense at all (in the world of climate voodoo) it only begins to “help”, maybe, in 150 years or more. Would anyone let me buy carbon offset futures for 2168 and get a refund on the RET/carbon tax/electricity bills now? Who are we kidding?
If you believe that CO2 is a threat, then you’d have to also believe that biomass burning makes the next century even hotter than burning coal. Most greens will choose the biofuel. What’s more important – to be pro-climate or anti-coal? We all know the answer to that…
Even under a best case scenario burning wood is “not good” for the climate
The numbers are so clear here, every single pin needs to line up in the right way for forest to be useful as a fuel:
… using wood in electricity generation worsens climate change for decades or more even though many of our assumptions favor wood, including: wood displaces coal (the most carbon intensive fossil fuel); all harvested land is allowed to regrow as forest with no subsequent conversion to pasture, cropland, development or other uses; no subsequent harvest, fire or disease; no increase in coal demand resulting from lower prices induced by the decline in coal use for electric power; no increase in N2O from fertilization of managed plantations; and no increase in CO2 emissions or methanogenesis from disturbed land. Relaxing any of these assumptions worsens the climate impact of wood bioenergy.
It is quite difficult to imagine a way that burning forests for electricity could possibly make sense while the world has hundreds of years of coal underground and thousands of years of uranium and thorium. But if the aim is not to change the climate but to hurt independent companies that stand on their own two feet, then burning wood in power plants is just the thing.
The Australian Climate Sceptics gave the UK govt the Inaugural Gorebel Prize (for inconvenient outcomes) thanks to Drax
The winner of the Inaugural Gorbel Prize is the UK government whose green policies aim to make it uneconomic to burn coal. So the tax-payer funded Green Investment Bank has loaned £100 million to help convert the huge Drax coal-burning power station in Yorkshire to burning “sustainable biomass”. This is part of a huge finance package of one billion pounds to get the biomass green tick, earn renewable energy subsidies, and avoid the need to buy carbon credits.
Where do they plan to get the “sustainable biomass”? Each year 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips will be imported from North American forests to replace 4.5 Mt of coal.
How much land does it take to sustainably generate electricity?
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
Oops, forgot yesterday.
7.7 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
 That’s why the sport must take notice of a report published by Climate Coalition, …
The document names cricket as the sport that will be hardest hit by climate change in England, stating that “wetter winters and more intense summer downpours are disrupting the game at every level”.
God forbid. This is a death spiral:
.. Glamorgan Head of Operations, Dan Cherry, …warned that climate change could “fundamentally change the game”.
“The less cricket we play, the fewer people will watch it, the less they will come to the ground and pay to enter, the less chance there is for young people to be inspired,” said Cherry.
This change, it seems, has already begun.
Wait til you see the evidence:
In international cricket, 27 percent of England’s home one-day internationals since 2000 have been played with reduced overs because of rain delays. The rate of rain-affected matches has more than doubled since 2011, with five percent of matches abandoned completely.
By crikey. That is a six year weather trend. Statistical significance p < 1 ( ± 4 or 6! ).
Hmm. Strange clue here in the first paragraph of this story:
Cricket has always been a sport at the mercy of the weather. In the 1930s, county cricket clubs in England were headed for financial ruin after a succession of wet summers. Twenty years later, persistent rain saw desperate clubs experiment with blankets, rubber mats and suction pumps.
So wet summers happened before, CO2 didn’t do it, and cricket survived. Hmm?
We’re talking about a game that is played from 45 degrees South to 54 degree North limiting it to about 90% of the population on Earth. But hey, it’s not like people play cricket in hot countries like India or Jamaica…
Photo top: Autographed photograph of the English batsmen, Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, 1928. Hobbs and Sutcliffe were the opening batsmen for England in the cricket test match held in Brisbane in 1928. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
Claiming fans would not buy a ticket,
To support their own team at cricket,
Because rain on the day,
Could have postponed the play,
Is a climate-change real sticky wicket.
–Ruairi
Hope to see you in Sydney the weekend after next!
I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer at the ATA Friedman18 conference. It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. Bookings close this Sunday.
9.8 out of 10 based on 47 ratings
From Jo: Bookings close this Sunday.
Hope to see you in Sydney the weekend after next!
I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer at the ATA Friedman18 conference.
It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner.
Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.
USNews, Alan Neuhauser
A Pew survey exposed a stark gap between younger and older Republican voters on global warming and energy policy.
Neuhauser doesn’t mention it but the implications are pretty dire — look how long it takes to recover from school:
Republican millennials – people roughly ages 22 to 37 – are far less likely than older generations to support the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuel sources. By one count, while three-quarters of Republican baby boomers and older generations supported more offshore oil and gas drilling, fewer than half of millennial Republicans felt the same way.
At least most Republicans grow up:
Among [young and old] Democrats, by contrast, there was only a small divide.
If half the population is shifting in the same direction as they age, this suggests… something… what could it be?
There can be a tendency for younger voters to become more conservative as they age. The divide on energy and climate is so broad, however, that experts expect it’s one that will not significantly narrow.
So young believers will not grow up to be old skeptics?
This must be why the numbers of believers in global warming has grown cumulatively since 1990 as young believers grew into old believers, and old believers died… except, that didn’t happen. Over the last quarter century, the only group that has grown in Gallup polls on climate issues are the skeptics.
 …. But let’s ask the experts:
“I’m not aware of any evidence that they’ll become more like the 65-plus types now and adopt their worldview,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
It’s research like that that gets you to Yale.
For a democrat journalist there is always hope:
But even with a president occupying the White House who has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax,” the findings may also be a sign of a shift to come within the party: Millennials are set to overtake baby boomers as the largest generation of Americans eligible to vote.
Good luck with that theory.
Here come the excuses. I mean reasons:
As with those other policy areas, the results in the Pew survey may reflect the different experiences and far greater access to information that younger voters have enjoyed, experts say.
Yup. Young people have more info because old people live in shoeboxes.
And when it comes to experiences — old people just built companies, raised kids, and paid off houses, but young people have built entire civilizations in MineCraft TM.
Hear them roar:
“I am a millennial – we grew up at a time when the air has been relatively clean and Earth Day existed and the general idea that the planet as a resource that should be preserved is not uncommon,” says Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. “Millennials also didn’t directly experience things like the fuel crisis in the 1970s, so there’s no hangover from there being fuel controls and other issues like there were for boomers and other folks.”
Old folk are obviously hungover because they’ve been through tough times. But since the real world is a fluffy buttercup, young naive people are so much better placed to understand it.
Note how the experiences of millenials that help them are the experiences they didn’t experience.
This process of growing up and getting wise is now a “fault line”:
The results are the latest to highlight fault lines within the Republican Party, which – even with control of the White House, both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures – has struggled to find common ground amid what can seem an ever more fractious caucus.
The fault line in the GOP is that the representatives keep lining up with the young and gullible instead of the old and wise.
The fault line in the Democrats is just between them and the real world.
Keep reading →
9.5 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
 The subsidy that flows whatever the weather | by Josh. How do you know when an industry is a loser? When even repowering old turbines, which were put in the best spots, is not worth the trouble unless they get a subsidy, I mean, even more subsidies.
Remember the days when subsidies were needed to get a project going?
Maintenance is not an option
Europe is full of old windfarms. The original subsidies have run out and there’s not much appetite for new ones. Without more free money from taxpayers the most economic option for older turbines is to run them into the ground and give up on them. Maintenance costs are the silent plague. But so too is red tape and legal approval. The age of the European turbines is reaching the point where half of the entire fleet is facing do or die decisions.
John Constable of the GWPF wonders if the wind industry in Europe may be on the point of collapse.
And Europe’s fleet is old:
By 2020, 41% of the currently installed capacity in Germany will be over 15 years old, 44% in Spain, and 57% in Denmark.
John Constable is responding to a renewables policy cheerleaders, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), who recently released the hopeful vested fantasy study: Repower to the People. But the days of ripe subsidies are over, so even the industry sympathizers have to admit that owners of old turbines face a set of no-fun decisions.
Sites with existing wind farms are often impossible to repower due to lack of availability of the site, legal consent, changes in subsidies, environmental protection, public acceptance, or insufficient wind conditions. (p. 1265)
And there’s not much empty space to allow for new and larger gaps between turbines and houses. Residents have wised up to the price of living to close to them:
…the state of Bavaria has even “introduced in 2014 a regulation that sets a new minimum distance of ten times the tip-height between a wind turbine and the closest residential areas” (L. Ziegler et al.). A modern machine can be upwards of 120 metres (nearly 400 feet) to tip, so this implies a separation of over three quarters of a mile, and would rule out many existing onshore wind farms in the UK, particularly in England, where at present there is no formally required separation distance.
Read it all at GWPF: Wind farm Lifetime extensions and repowering
Keep reading →
9.2 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
 Audrey Zibelman No wonder our national electricity grid is in deep. Audrey Zibelman is the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The former New York based woman is a lawyer with an MBA who thinks we can change the weather with our power supply. She was appointed in March 2017. Thank Malcolm Turnbull. Apparently in 2016 she was a favourite for the future Team Hillary in the US.
Audrey the activist
Just to make her motivation clear. Her words last year:
“I believe we’re the last generation on earth who can really do something about climate change.“
The manager of our electricity market thinks wind and solar are actually competitive:
And the good thing is that technology has evolved so that we don’t have to worry about sacrificing economics for good environmental policy.”
Notably, what she isn’t dreaming of is cheap electricity:
Her dream is of a grid dominated not by big power suppliers and their fossil-fuel generators, but rather a system of “distributed energy” that delivers better supply security by storing solar and wind power in batteries for later use. She wants a market that better rewards people with rooftop solar panels and other renewables; with incentives for more efficient power use in peak times; that harnesses idle energy, instead of building more large power stations for short periods of peak demand in hotter months.
You might think the Australian national grid should be providing electricity rather than being a tool to reward people for buying uneconomic equipment in the hope of stopping Antarctica from melting. Silly you.
Oops? How do you mistake a 100% artificially forced transition with a natural one
Zilbelman talks about the energy transition as if it is some natural change thrust upon us, instead of an artificial bubble, like a giant marshmallow man, inflated entirely and pumped relentlessly by government dollars to keep it from collapse:
Resisting energy transition like trying to resist internet says Zibelman
“This is not a judgement about anything. It’s just the reality that the economics have changed, and technology has changed, and resisting this change is a little like trying to resist the internet. It’s just going to happen because of where technology is going.”
How many governments had to offer $5 billion in subsidies to convince people to try the internet? Zero.
Note from Jo:
Hope to see you in Sydney in two weeks!
I’ll be speaking at in Sydney with Ian Plimer in a few weeks at the ATA Friedman18 conference. That’s a rare event.
See an amazing line up of speakers on May 25-27 in Sydney, or come for the dinner or drinks sessions.
Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.
Zibelman hasn’t done any research. Everywhere government subsides are withdrawn, renewable investors flee the market at light speed. In Germany, after 20 years of subsidies, half to three quarters of the wind industry was forecast to disappear as the subsidies end and another 80,000 solar jobs are gone. It happened in Australia too where 97 percent of renewables investment suddenly dried up without subsidies.
At university, she spent no years studying physics, chemistry or engineering.
- Doctor of Law (JD) [Hamline University School of Law]
- Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) [Penn State University]
- MBA [University of Minnesota]
But she did marry an electrical engineer:
Her husband, Phil Harris, is the chief executive officer of Tres Amigas, a New Mexico-based company that is seeking to raise more than $1 billion to connect the nation’s electric grids and allow for greater growth of clean energy.
Which raised other questions in 2015. Journalists asked about potential conflicts of interest with her then role as head of the NY Public Service Commission. After that, she recused herself. h/t Beachside at Catallaxy.
June 16, 2015: ALBANY—As New York’s top energy regulator, Audrey Zibelman is in a position to influence a market worth billions of dollars and help set the policy that governs it. At the same time, Zibelman, who worked in the private sector before Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed her chairwoman of the state Public Service Commission in 2013, has unusually close ties to energy companies vying for work in New York.
She cofounded Viridity Energy which sold software to help people with batteries and panels minimize their electricity bills. How uneconomic are batteries? It would only take $60-90 billion to back up South Australia. Yes, 100% renewable is possible — though not at the same time as having an economy.
The issue is “not technology” says the non-technologist
Storage, price, efficiency, frequency stability? Wave a magic wand, other people who understand these things will definitely absolutely solve this and with other people’s money.
Zibelman also believes she is in the best place to solve them. “The issue is not so much the technology; technology is happening,” she said. “It’s the regulatory regimes and the market regimes that need to be adapted to the future power system.”
It’s all just a question of rules. If we change the system and don’t worry about how much it costs, anything can be solved. We just need to use the right language when we talk to baby electrons.
Zibelman was apparently on Hillary Clinton’s hot-list:
Australian Fin Review:
One of Hillary Clinton’s hot picks to lead the United States Department of Energy has been appointed as chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator, as part of the political and corporate exodus in the wake of Donald Trump’s upset election victory.
No surprise then, that she was so appealing to Turnbull who is on the same side of politics as Hillary.
For the record, AEMO is 60% owned by taxpayers
Just so we all know who is ultimately responsible for the AEMO:
AEMO is a public private partnership between government, which owns 60% and industry members (including generators, transmission companies, retail and distribution businesses, resource companies, and investment companies) who own 40%. AEMO operates on a cost recovery basis as a company limited by guarantee under the Corporations Act (2001). AEMO fully recovers its operating costs through fees paid by participants.
I was unable to find the salary package used to tempt her to move to Australia. From the 2017 AEMO Annual Report, total wages and salaries of their employees add up to $76m (unless I am reading page 56 incorrectly –can someone familiar with accounting check?)
9.4 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
More support for snowflakes.
Are you feeling stressed about imaginary man-made climate change that hasn’t even happened yet? Thanks to taxpayer funds, there is a virtual reality event that may help you (or not). The Bureau of Meteoranxiety is on in Melbourne this week. This experimental, untested technique doesn’t look like it gets to the nub of the problem.
If victims spent 45 minutes with a friendly skeptic instead, they could be cured for life. Where is the grant for that?
Image credit: Michael Tartaglia
Are you feeling stressed about the end of the world? If yes, you might want head to this Next Wave event. An immersive live art experience incorporating VR technology, Bureau of Meteoranxiety by Perth-based artists Alex Tate and Olivia Tartaglia will allow participants to work through their fears of climate change by exposing them to “experimental visual therapies and sensory remedies” and providing “new language and coping strategies to help stay above the metaphorical and literal flood line”.
Blindside: Bureau of Meteoranxiety.
Book your tickets for Melbourne (or pick an airline and fly somewhere else).
Hannah Francis of The Age tells us the treatments seem “counterintuitive”. Not half. You can listen to other naive victims and touch a 3D printed log:
Participants in the bureau’s “wellness trial” start by filling out a questionnaire to assess their level of “meteoranxiety”.
They then watch a video from Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term meteoranxiety as “the specific anxiety that people feel when their climate and the weather … becomes so abnormal as to give them a sense of foreboding that the future is going to be more difficult than the present; that the next storm is going to wipe them out”.
But the bureau’s proposed treatments may seem a little counterintuitive. There’s a guided meditation that starts off soothingly and escalates into an unusual weather event; an AI chatbot called Gail, who delivers online counselling; a shared online journal to help patients feel less alone with their meteoranxiety; and a three-minute virtual reality simulation of a rainforest which eventually leads the patient to touch a 3D-printed log, giving them a therapeutic dose of “nature”.
“There is a satirical element to the work,” says Tartaglia.
It’s good to know there is one. If anyone spots that lone satirical element, let us know.
Art as good as this couldn’t survive without forced payments coerced from taxpayers:
Amount unknown… (can anyone find that grant?)
Olivia Tartaglia recieved $14,953 from the WA Dept of Culture and the Arts.
To support the presentation of “Bureau of Meteoranxiety”, a multi-room pseudo-agency dealing with the pre-traumatic effects of climate change. The presentation will combine sculpture, performance, and digital and virtual reality technology. The presentation will be part of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.
Keep reading →
9.2 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
Early…
9 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
For the last year everyone has been calling Tasmania the “Battery of the Nation” — Turnbull, Hydro Tasmania, government departments, the ever hopeful green press. It’s an official plan. The bright idea is to add “Pumped Hydro Storage” to the large dams already on the island state, boosting the only reliable renewable type of energy. But right now, as far as mainland Australia goes, Tassie is a No-Volt Battery.
 Even Hydro Tasmania is calling itself the “Battery of the Nation” The dirty secret is just how fragile the link is. Not only did it break for six spectacular months in 2016 — leaving the “green” state flying in squads of diesels — but its now quietly out of action again and it’s projected to be out for two months all up. The 290 km undersea cable known as Basslink is the second longest of its type in the world. It broke on 24 March 2018. It is not expected back in action til May 31. It was an accident of routine maintenance at one end.
“The equipment was damaged by a third-party contractor during routine works. There is no damage to the cable itself.”
The hype:
It’s a glorious title, but the Battery of the Nation is apparently just an “initiative” to “investigate and develop a pathway”. So it’s a $2.5m thought bubble about a plan to make a path. This was announced in April last year by the PM and Tas State Premier.
It’s … a web page:
““Tasmania is uniquely placed to help lead Australia through its challenging transition towards cleaner sources of energy. Battery of the Nation offers a future that’s clean, reliable and affordable.”
– Steve Davy, Hydro Tasmania CEO”
Which is all true apparently, except it’s not so clean nor reliable and costs billions. But apart from that….
Back on March 1, 2018: the Australian Fin Review was lauding it: “Hydro Tasmania’s 5 GW ‘Battery of the Nation’ dwarfs Snowy 2.0“. Three weeks later the cable was inoperable again. Where are the headlines now?
The Tasmanian government-owned hydro electricity monopoly will unveil a report next month saying preliminary studies have identified 4000 megawatts to 5000 MW of potential pumped hydro storage sites across more than a dozen sites that can be delivered at a cost of $1 million to $1.5 million per MW.
And where is the report that was due in April? There’s no press release yet. I guess no one wants to mention the Battery of the Nation while it is effectively dead — including the lefty-lobbying-media. If a coal plant was out of action for two months, there would be a headline every week in the Fairfax press. The Australians for Big Government (ABC) mentioned the disconnect on March 28th, and played it down a few weeks later as the fault problem was extended — “it’s no threat to power security”. Of course, if the dams were empty, it would be.
The Tasmanian Labor opposition policy is now aiming for a 120% renewable target. If the cable breaks again, perhaps they can post those extra electrons in shoe boxes.
“We’ve seen what South Australia has done, Tasmania could have been been leading the charge here,” Ms White said.
If your aim is world leading electricity costs, the highest unemployment, and businesses abandoning the state while others revert to fifty year old diesel tech, SA is the place to beat!
What about a second interconnector?
A second interconnector across the Bass Strait would cost $1 billion dollars and is considered unlikely to ever go ahead. But the AEMO wants it now, and Infrastructure Australia is thinking about it with a $20m study.
Spent a billion, get 15% back, looks like an “affordable” big-gov solution:
“The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has handed down a report calling for a second Tasmania-Victoria interconnector from 2025 …
A second Bass Strait cable had the lowest “cost to benefit” ratio of the other options recommended in the report.
The AEMO found the cable’s overall net benefit over 20 years would be $143 million when combined with augmented interconnector capacity linking to New South Wales.”
Still cleaning up after the last debacle
In 2016, Hydro Tasmania had run their dams too low out of greed — collecting carbon credits by exporting renewable hydro power to Victoria –even as an El Nino was forecast which meant dry conditions were coming. Things reached high farce when Hydro Tas attempted the world first of generating electricity by the not-so-renewable option of cloud seeding. The icing on the Farce-Cake was that they tried this in the face of a major storm front that caused flooding rain.
Basslink and Hydro Tasmania are still fighting it out in court over who’s to blame for the last breakage.
h/ts Robert Rossicka, Yarpos, Ian 1946, Chad, Peter C, Pat, Rickwill, AndrewWA
9.8 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.
A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.
 Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.
Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as much. But most of their confusion, as usual, starts with their assumptions. Firstly, they assume that there is some connection between our global climate and plastic bags — as if people really believe that by using a cloth bag or buying organic tomatoes that they will cool the planet. If we surveyed the reasons people use cloth bags, its probably to reduce plastic in landfill and to stop dolphins getting strangled. Nobody thinks a cloth bag will slow storms and reduce droughts.
The researchers didn’t stand a chance: set up to fail with their choice of words. “Climate change” and “pollution” are muddy ambiguous terms that mean different things to different people. Language is the main investigative tool we have — but it’s been blunted to mush by spinmeisters. No great gems of truth will be found while mining rocks with ripe bananas.
What the study shows is that skeptics are more diligent and conscientious about reducing their own environmental footprint.
Are skeptics dumb robots or are believers social climbing patsies:
These results suggest that different groups may prefer different strategies for addressing climate change.
You don’t say.
Thus, belief in climate change does not appear to be a necessary or sufficient condition for pro-environmental behavior, indicating that changing skeptical Americans’ minds need not be a top priority for climate policymakers.
In your dreams believer-academics. The biggest message in this study was that skeptics don’t even want climate policymakers, full stop.
It’s as if skeptics are dumb robots behaving to “save the climate” by catching a train, without even believing the climate needs saving. Maybe the deplorables don’t believe in “climate change” but can’t afford the car? Seriously guys.
It would be just as fair to conclude that if what you want to get people on public transport, using cloth shopping bags and buying eco-friendly products, then convert the masses to skeptics.
If anything the study suggests that believers don’t care much about shopping bags and starving whales. Why do they profess belief? It might not be moral licensing, so much as moral vanity — where belonging to the right tribe is more important than “saving the planet”. But in a democracy, if you want voters to support parasitic gravy trains and inefficient subsidies, you still need to persuade the voters that these things are worth doing.
The alternative — the dishonest Turnbull approach is to hide the carbon trading schemes within meaningless names like “the Safeguard Mechanism” or the National Energy Guarantee. Works for a while, but the public is waking up. So far he has lost 14 seats at the last election and 30 newspolls since.
As for “pro-environmental behaviour” — Hall et al equate catching a bus with supporting a wind farm as if people have a pro-environment button that activates everything Hall and Lewis think of as being “pro-environment”. Instead people pick and choose each action separately.
Tick the Stereotype – believers are young, white and naive
The old and wise don’t believe everything they read. Believers do:
Overall, participants who belonged to belief clusters that endorsed the existence of climate change and expressed concern were more likely to: be young; White/Caucasian; see climate change as anthropogenic; perceive climate change as harmful to humans around the world, soon; and be trusting of scientific and media communications about climate science.
The Skeptics got more skeptical
Interestingly, after repeated surveys, the worriers kept worrying at a constant level, but skeptics got more skeptical.
 …. Could it be that the act of repeatedly asking people about their skeptical views helped to solidify their opinion? The skeptical group is the only group that doesn’t get to discuss their opinion in politically correct society. Possibly the more they thought about it, the more sure they became.
Researchers are baffled:
Despite these findings about climate change beliefs, self reported behaviors, and policy support, we were unable to explain why the “Skeptical” low-believers were more likely to self report more pro-environmental behavior than high-believers. For instance, the “Skeptical” did not report greater identity fit with environmentalism, did not endorse greater beliefs in individual and political efficacy to reduce climate change, and were not associated with logical demographic factors (e.g., political ideology, income, education). One possibility is that our findings generalize only to Americans on MTurk who tend to lean to the political left. Although we cannot rule out this possibility until this study is replicated with other samples, the current sample contained enough conservatives to test for ideology effects; furthermore, other research has documented that conservatives on MTurk are dispositionally similar to conservatives in well-respected nationally representative samples (e.g., American National Election Study; Clifford, Jewell, & Waggoner, 2015). However, it is also possible that we did not measure partisanship or ideology with enough granularity to detect nuanced differences in climate change beliefs. Indeed, research published after we collected our data found that “Tea Party” Republicans have the most distinct environmental views (Hamilton & Saito, 2015), whereas conventional Democratic/ Republican divides (our measure of partisanship) do not sufficiently capture diverse environmental views in the U.S …
Perhaps our “Skeptical” participants had more libertarian leanings, leading them to report engaging in individual level behavior over endorsing federal government climate change policies. Or, the “Skeptical” might have been motivated to report behaving pro-environmentally for other reasons that they did not associate with climate change, such as reducing pollution or waste accumulation. Other possibilities for these results involve the “Highly Concerned”: Perhaps they engaged in moral licensing (Merritt, Effron, & Monin, 2010), whereby their concern about climate change psychologically liberated them from engaging in (and reporting) pro-environmental behavior. Or, perhaps the “Highly Concerned” felt that federal policies were the more effective means of addressing climate change (vs. individual pro-environmental behaviors).
Hall makes a careless but important error in the first line of the introduction:
Although 97 percent of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2013), not all Americans agree;
depending on the study, only 54–65% of Americans believe in climate change (Hornsey, Harris, Bain, & Fielding, 2016;
Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Hmielowski, 2012; Saad, 2017a).
There is a big difference between 97% of all scientists and 97% of a micro niche subset called “climate scientists”. Hall and Lewis don’t realize that there is no mismatch between scientists and the public — almost half of meteorologists (2013) (half of meteorologists in 2017) — fergoodnesssake — are skeptics, survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, and most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees.
Keep reading →
9.6 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
Tell me again how solar power is cheaper than fossil fuels
People in the UK have been misled into taking out loans to put solar panels on their roof — they were told the panels would “pay for themselves” but discovered they were losing money. The UK Ombudsman has received around 2,000 complaints.
Solar manufacturers paired up with banks to install and finance solar installations telling customers they’d make money, except many didn’t:
… a common method was to encourage households to buy the panels on credit from a partner lender. Households were often told that the subsidy income, combined with the savings from buying less electricity, would more than cover the loan repayments. In some cases this proved to be false.
Many of those to whom panels were allegedly mis-sold were either “retired or approaching retirement” and some were “left in financial difficulty”, the financial ombudsman said. One customer was left £1,000 a year worse off.
We can all say fair’s fair, do your homework before you buy. But under UK law, the partner-banks are responsible for the financial scam not the solar manufacturers (and not the customers). Presumably the banks were the ones selling solar panels as if they were a get rich quick scheme.
Our whole nation has been fooled by a solar scheme. Just call us patsies-downunder.
h/t GWPF
Keep reading →
9.5 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
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:
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 Coalition.
According to the Smart Energy Council, no one in Australia knows more about renewables finance than Oliver Yates. Boy is this industry in trouble.
“It is impossible to invest on the assumption of election results,” he said.
Dear Oliver, coal investors and everyone else, have been doing it for decades. It’s called “risk”.
“You cannot explain to your board, when you’re asking them to put money into a transaction, that the structural price of power could bounce around wildly, depending upon the outcomes of various state or federal election campaigns.”
The problem is not that governments and voters may change their minds, it’s that they should never have been messing with this market in the first place.
There is more than one path to “certainty”
Yates again:
“The only way that we can get certainty… is if the federal emissions level set within the NEG is around 50 per cent for the electricity sector.
No. No and double No. We get far more certainty with the free market where the price, demand and need for green electrons is zero, and the certain profits are nothin’. Since the effect of CO2 has been minimal for the last 500 million years, the price of CO2 will trend toward its true value. This is the kind of certainty that will last until the Sun goes supernova. We’ve got the next billion electoral cycles covered. How long will your bubble last?
Shovel it on with a spade:
“I can ensure you that no investor ever anticipated that the electricity sector would only reduce its emissions between 26-28 per cent by 2030.
Then, shovel it on with a Front End Loader:
“That outcome, that little level of emissions reduction will be a shock to the financial markets, and actually it’s a shock to many of us who are concerned, deeply, about climate change.
“Diddums”. Do your homework. The government’s role is not to save investors who make stupid decisions from being shocked that the government is only hoping to achieve what it said it would aim for. Investors who read skeptic sites know the right level of emissions reductions is zero. They know that CO2 doesn’t control the climate, and that renewables aren’t competitive. They knew grid prices would rocket, households would hurt and voters would run.
PS: If you are a sophisticated investor who does understand risk, and can see a great opportunity coming by helping to capitalize on snowflake investors who face some reality shocks, check out Cool Futures. Things are steaming ahead with an international team coming together. I’ll need to update the info I posted previously. David and I have an interest and are involved in this — see the Risk, Disclosure and Disclaimer on that post.
PPS: A rare event coming — I’ll be speaking at in Sydney with Ian Plimer in a few weeks at the Friedman18 conference. Join us! You can get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. See an amazing line up of speakers this year on May 25-27 in Sydney.
9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
…
9.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
|
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