The Rainforest Reserves community group has achieved something that the Dept of Environment, Energy and Perfect-Weather has not been able to do.
Not only has Minister Chris Bowen not managed to create a map to show off his achievements, but nor has any other government agency. Even with a billion dollar budget, the CSIRO has not made a map so user friendly, helpful and informative, nor has the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the Dept of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), or the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC). Neither was the map done by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and the Climate Change Authority (CCA). It can’t be an accident… but it does look like The Blob doesn’t want to make it easy for Australians to know how vast these projects are.
ARENA got $7 billion to throw at renewable projects over 16 years. They and others, spent 3 million dollars mapping Australia to help renewables investors, but didn’t think to do a map to help Australian taxpayers? (The mapping project closed in 2021, and has now been sort of packed away.)
Usually when Ministers build industries they like to cut ribbons, wear hard-hats and brag to locals about how many jobs they are creating. Instead, it’s almost like the government doesn’t want Australians to know about all the Clean Green transformation.
Perhaps because it looks like this?
Clarke Creek Wind Turbines. Queensland. — Photo Steve Nowakowski
Australians wouldn’t be able to see this at all, if it wasn’t for Steve Nowakowski. Where was the ABC photography team? (Off having coffee in Ultimo and just being another billion dollar agency serving itself?)
From the press release: The Truth Map totals include:
31,000 wind turbine towers — six times the current national number to be replaced every 15-20 years, operating 30% – 40% of the time.
28,000 km of high-voltage transmission lines — longer than [half] a lap around the equator*.
7,800 km of undersea cabling — cutting through fragile marine habitats.
44,000 km of new haulage roads — longer than Australia’s coastline.
350–550 million solar grid panels covering 443,755 hectares — an area larger than metropolitan Sydney to be replaced every 25 years, operating 18% – 25% of the time.
$1.38 trillion in total costs — overwhelmingly subsidised by taxpayers.
Caught short, Chris “Blackout” Bowen is dishing up the insults for The Australianand Rainforest Reserves.
A normal person might think the Minister for Better Weather would be delighted that volunteers have worked so hard to highlight his work and the glorious transition. Instead he made a social media post with petty insults, saying they vastly overestimated the footprint area, and were just anti-renewable, pro-nuclear activists, and the real area was only 12% as large.
Later it turned out the 12% figure came from a NSW state report and didn’t apply to the whole country. The Australian asked him to clarify, and he sent back a page of points that didn’t answer the question. The Australian prodded again, and this time the Minister’s team said the maps were inaccurate because 5 wind and 1 solar project are not proceeding. Which means, they used the recent renewables “drop outs” to attack the volunteers who had achieved more than 10 government agencies had done.
Meanwhile Rainforest Reserves said they’ve added in some new projects since it was released a few days ago, and the footprint is growing. Bowen’s team said it was “replete with errors” but didn’t explain any. (If only the Minister had an up-to-date map!).
Steve Nowakowski said that Rainforest Reserves keep the withdrawn projects on the database because they often restart in a new form later with a new investor.
Because this map was done by volunteers, there are some projects that are missing and some that have been shifted or canceled. Footprints are often moving, and investors are also running away as they see how angry the protesting farmers are, how expensive the electricity is to build things in Australia, and how delayed every transmission line is. Rainforest Reserves invites people to send in corrections and suggestions.
A few examples I took from the map: The view around Melbourne:
The area near Gladstone in Queensland:
And the giant near Kalbarri in WA. Investors in Denmark have recently abandoned the offshore wind project in this map. But the land based “hydrogen” plant north of the town is still going ahead. They plan to build 500 wind turbines and 10,000 hectares of solar panels, and the government just gave them $814 million dollars of our money to help the foreign investors make a profit.
It looks like consumers won’t save the Australian grid by spending thousands to buy the batteries the government can’t afford.
Unfortunately, the government has screwed it up again. They’re (we’re) subsiding solar panels and home batteries, and hoping customers will pay thousands to put a battery in their garage so that the grid managers can use it at dinner time to stop wild price spikes and blackouts.
Dean Spaccavento is the co-founder and CEO of Reposit Power –– which sells a controller that connects batteries to solar panels. He says almost no homeowners are signing up for the Virtual Power Plans (VPP) where they share their battery to help balance the grid. People don’t trust the agencies, and even if they did, most of the batteries on the market couldn’t be used in a VPP anyway. They’re not fit for purpose. The government, he said, assumed you could just plug in a battery, but it isn’t like that. “The government’s definition of what qualifies as “VPP ready” is meaningless.” he says, so all the manufacturers can say their battery is “VPP ready” when they’re not.
“No more than 4% or 5% of those batteries will ever participate in a VPP [virtual power plant] based upon data we’ve seen,” he says in the latest episode of Renew Economy’s weekly SwitchedOn Australia podcast.
“That’s just a wasted opportunity. Probably 1.2 maybe 1.3 gigawatt hours of home batteries [have been] installed in the last three months, and 4% — 40 or 50 megawatt hours of that — will actually contribute to the transition of our grid from a coal-fired, gas-fired one to one based upon solar and battery.”
Firstly, he explains, people just don’t trust the VPP idea (Virtual Power Plant).
The first hurdle, he says, is trust.
“People don’t like the VPP thing because they say, I bought this battery. This is my battery, and I don’t want to share it with somebody who’s going to make a bunch of money out of it.”
Maybe if electricity retailers and the government hadn’t told everyone lies about how renewable-energy would be cheap, and how we were saving the world, customers might believe the agencies gave a toss about the people they are supposed to serve?
Even Boris Johnson can see the inevitable grinding collapse of Net Zero is imminent. If he thought it was the way of the future, and was just delayed, he wouldn’t be saying this. But with the writing so obviously on the wall, he’s getting in ahead with the mea culpa — astutely ducking some future barbs and arrows and looking slightly like a leader of relevance still, but only because he’s ahead of the Labour Party. (And the Australian Liberals).
Years ago I said the day is coming when everyone will say “I was always a skeptic”. We’re on the way.
h/t Andrew Montford who says “We can’t afford politicians who ‘get carried away’.”
Boris Johnson has admitted he went “far too fast” on net zero when he was prime minister, in his most outspoken comments against the policy he championed.
Mr Johnson said he got “carried away” by the idea that renewable energy sources could replace fossil fuels and, as a result, electricity is “too expensive for ordinary people”.
Mr Johnson told Lord Elliott: “I think net zero, we went far too fast. And I’ve got to be honest about that, I got carried away by the idea that sustainable and renewable forms of energy could fill the gap.
So he’s known since 2022, but said nothing until now:
“When the price went up and the Ukraine thing happened, it was obvious that that wouldn’t work. And I think we did allow some more hydrocarbons but I think what you’ve got to do now is just say, you’ve got to see. You’ve got to be like St Augustine. You’ve got to say, ‘we will be chaste, but not yet’.”
The wild prices of fossil fuels showed Boris that during a crisis everyone needed coal, oil and gas. It was the grand test. If windmills and solar panels were even slightly useful, everyone would have rushed to order them in 2022 instead of paying nosebleed prices for fossil fuels. Worse, it showed that countries that already had wind and solar had no protection against the price rises, because they needed gas, oil and coal too.
Boris’s comments come five months after former British PM Tony Blair dropped a bombshell saying“many leaders know the current approach is unworkable but are terrified of voicing that view for fear of being labeled a climate denier. “
Thus Boris agrees with Blair (belatedly). Yet he still can’t help putting in a plea not to junk it completely:
Mr Johnson said: “Blair was completely right. It’s too expensive for ordinary people. It’s too fast. But I think we should be careful about junking net zero altogether, because I think a lot of people out there do worry about the environment and don’t want to feel their government is just completely abandoning the [agenda].
Boris can probably sense that if he left it any longer it will be too late for a mea culpa. The rush is on, now that Kemi Badenoch has promised to axe the Climate Change Act, the conservative parties in the UK are both competing to get rid of Net Zero. The cat is out of the bag and it’s having kittens.
So what do we make of his avid fanatical support for Net Zero in late 2022?
According to Boris, the price rise in gas and coal during the Ukraine War was the moment he knew Net Zero “wouldn’t work”. However, the price of gas and coal was high all through 2022 and hit wild historic peaks by August. Yet here is Boris later that same year in November raving about how wind and solar were remarkably cheap and we needed to “double down” on unreliable renewables to win the war?
Britain will “double down” on investments in renewable energy as a way of achieving energy independence while weakening Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed this week. But in a newspaper article sketching out a revised energy strategy, Johnson also called for additional fossil fuel exploration in the British isles, as well as further investments in nuclear power, leaving some commentators nonplussed.
Writing in the U.K.’s DailyTelegraph newspaper, Johnson noted that “Putin’s strength—his vast resource of hydrocarbons—is also his weakness. He has virtually nothing else.”
He went on: “If the world can end its dependence on Russian oil and gas, we can starve him of cash, destroy his strategy and cut him down to size.”
Johnson argued that renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, offered the best path to achieve this, saying his government would “double down on new wind power” and “do more to exploit the potential of solar power,” which is “remarkably cheap and effective.”
Was he lying then, or is he lying now?
In the end, Boris Johnson totally failed his country causing crippling economic losses that were completely avoidable.
PS: please, someone tell The Liberal Party in Australia they are the last ones on Earth who still “believe” in the climate voodoo.
It was always going to happen, as long as the Minister for Weather was determined to control Pacific Decadal Oscillations with windmills. Everyone would be happy-happy until the bill arrived.
In a survey of 500 Australian companies, the rapid rise of energy costs are now the single biggest concern. Any given business was three times as likely to worry about the price of energy rather than about Trump’s tariffs.
Yet in the election campaign, mere months ago, media coverage of US tariffs was wall-to-wall.
Likewise, the billion-dollar-ABC spends 100 times as long lecturing us on foreign wars as it does discussing the things Australians need, like lights, heat, air conditioning and jobs. The national conversation about electricity grids is nothing more than renewable advertising slogans and fairy wish spells. Everyone can subsidize everyone else to buy solar panels and batteries, and we’ll all have free electricity, yeah?
Businesses now rank the cost of energy as the chief concern for their future, rating it almost three times more worrying than US tariff and trade disruptions, according to new analysis.
Several corporate leaders, including those in the manufacturing sector, say the cost of energy is rising so fast that it’s now risking their competitiveness with importers…
BHP’s Mr Henry told a shareholder forum last month: “The reality is … Australia has electricity costs that are two to three times higher than countries that we are competing with and 50 to 100 per cent higher than the US.”
The chief executive of data centre owner NEXTDC, Craig Scroggie, said higher energy costs were crimping Australia’s competitiveness. “No one is happy with higher energy costs, especially when the government says they are going to be low.
We’re reached the point where we are thousands of miles away from most factories and smelters, but we still can’t make anything cheaper for ourselves than they can. Energy costs are rising so fast in Australia, it’s less expensive to dig up rocks, put them on ships and send them 6,000 kilometers to China, to smelt the steel with our own coal, and then ship the widgets right back to us. And if it’s made with slave labor and plenty of pollution, that’s OK.
Sir Kier Starmer was a star at the last COP meeting in Azerbaijan, but this year he doesn’t even want to go to the next COP meeting in Brazil. Apparently his aides “are worried about being criticized by the Reform UK party.” Only two years ago Starmer was criticizing Rishi Sunak for missing COP27, now he’s too scared to go himself lest he look crazy-green.
Everywhere countries are saying they care about climate change but are doing the opposite. The EU nations are fighting over their 2035 and 2040 emissions targets, Mexico is borrowing up to keep its oil company afloat, Canada scrapped their carbon tax, and is being “coy” about their 2030 target. Governor Gavin Newsom just boosted oil drilling in California “a year after he described the industry as the “polluted heart of this climate crisis.””
Now Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Tories in the UK, is promising to dump The Climate Change Act if she gets elected. Suddenly, the race is on to be skeptical. She’s in an existential fight for relevance against the storming Reform party which are polling as high as 29% now, compared to the Labour government on 21% and the Tories at just 16%. All those skeptical voters were there all along, enough to break the two party system in Britain.
The Climate Voodoo Doll is coming undone
Ponder how fast it all is. Only one year ago UK voters had a choice of Net Zero by 2050 from both sides of politics. Labour were offering to be recklessly green, and the Tories were aiming to be 95% as reckless, while calling themselves “pragmatic”.
The BBC lays out how similar the two main Parties were in 2024 — Labour wanted to decarbonize the whole grid by 2030, while the Tories were aiming for “only” 95% of the grid to be low carbon by 2030. Labour hoped to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, but Richi Sunak pushed that back all the way to… 2035.
Tory leader says she would replace it with ‘cheap energy’ strategy, ending decades-long consensus on climate
Fiona Harvey and Helena Horton, The Guardian Thu 2 Oct 2025
Kemi Badenoch has vowed to repeal the Climate Change Act if the Conservatives win the next election, doing away with controls on greenhouse gas emissions and dismantling what has been the cornerstone of green and energy policy for successive governments.
The Conservative party leader was already committed to scrapping the UK’s net zero target but repeal of the Climate Change Act would go much further. It would remove the need to meet “carbon budgets” – ceilings, set for five-year periods, on the amount of greenhouse gas that can be emitted – and disband the Climate Change Committee, the watchdog that advises on how policies affect the UK’s carbon footprint….
Badenoch’s announcement, before the start of the Conservative party conference this weekend, brings the destruction of the three-decade long consensus on the climate among the UK’s major political parties, under which all have campaigned on strengthening climate action rather than weakening it.
Playing a game of “slightly less crazy” was a hopeless trap for the Conservatives. The people trying to be a small target are the weaklings of climate battles. They have nothing to campaign on. They can hardly point out all the flaws in climate policy when they want to make most of the same mistakes. Instead the crazy people look like they have conviction (at least), and the less crazy people just look weak. (I’m looking at you Sussan Ley).
When Prime Ministers are promising to control the weather with power stations, the only response is mockery and derision.
Badenoch says: “Climate change is real. But Labour’s laws tied us in red tape, loaded us with costs, and did nothing to cut global emissions. Previous Conservative governments tried to make Labour’s climate laws work – they don’t.
She says “climate change is real” so the crocodiles won’t eat her first, but it doesn’t work. Donald Trump didn’t pander or pussy-foot and look where it got him — elected twice (and probably three times)?
Once a leader breaks the sacred climate vow in any way, they are an Apostate — there’s no point being half-an-Apostate, because The Blob will throw just as many bricks. But there is something inspiring about a leader who takes the bullies on directly instead. Being fearless is inspiring.
Everything is a catastrophe
Former British PM Theresa May, speaking on behalf of The Blob, called Badenoch’s move a “catastrophic mistake”. It wasn’t that thousands would drown, instead a catastrophe was something that broke “the consensus”.
Responding to Ms Badenoch’s plans, the Tory peer said: “I am deeply disappointed by this retrograde step which upends 17 years of consensus between our main political parties and the scientific community.
As if there was something wonderful about both political parties and the scientific community all saying the same thing at the same time.
As Dave in the States says: “It’s catastrophe for grifters, and the subsidy and grant harvesters. “
And isn’t this just the perfect quote?:
“To row back now would be a catastrophic mistake for while that consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.”
The science is always the same, anything else is not permitted.
We’re watching the slow collapse of the Net Zero, Gender identity bubble
Australia’s largest military ally announced a major change in direction yesterday — shucking the Woke Hair Shirt and baubles of diversity:
Hegseth boasted of “remov[ing] the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department”.
He added: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions, no more debris.”
But most Australians won’t know that. The Australian ABC carefully buried this big shift inside a story on the US budget battle. The transformation of US military values was dismissed as just a “pep-talk” for generals. The ABC showed Trump making an inconsequential joke, and Hegseth discussing physical fitness and shaving. In other words, the ABC wants you to think this was a fitness campaign for a”dysfunctional” government which can’t even pay its generals today. How many Australians would join the dots that the country we depend on for protection just shot down twenty years of leftist fashion bubbles? Where were the interviews with the Australian Deputy Director of Navy Diversity & Inclusion (who knew we had one), Commander Prudence Hawkins-Griffiths? Last year, she was “doubling down” on diversity and inclusion. Where were the questions of whether our defense force is rethinking their Net Zero Strategy and Future Energy Strategy. As the Department of Defense said last year:
Climate change is a national security issue. It poses risks to Australia’s national interests and exacerbates geostrategic risks. The shift to net zero not only contributes to making Australians safer but also enhances Australia’s standing in the Indo-Pacific.
If the ABC was serving Australians it might have asked questions about whether our soldiers can change the global climate without losing any military edge? Can we have our cake, eat it, and stop storms with the same cake? We need to know…
By investing in clean energy, investigating opportunities for adopting lower-carbon fuels and preparing for future energy needs, Defence will contribute to a cleaner, safer environment and more resilient Australia, without compromising military preparedness or operational requirements.
For a lesson in soft propaganda from the ABC watch from 16 minutes on ABC iView. Most of the agitprop is that which is left unsaid. Only those who already know the news, know what they’re missing, which is why the ABC gets away with it.
So the more we share, the harder it is for them.
For those who want to see more, at what was an extraordinarily rare roomful of senior military heads:
Donald Trump pays no lip service to the tender heart of the Eco-Blob bureaucrat. Old coal plants are going to be kept running. Plants that have stopped will be reopened and modernized. New coal plants will be built. It’s all there. Some plants will be converted so they can switch between different fuels seamlessly.
It’s almost like the US is in a race to claw back industry and manufacturing, and wants to be world leaders in a breakthrough new technology that burns energy for breakfast.
This is what a true leader does — they make the right choice while all the minions are aghast, then years later everyone copies them.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Monday it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants as President Donald Trump continues his efforts to reverse the years-long decline in the U.S. coal industry.
Actions by the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency follow executive orders Trump issued in April to revive coal, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been shrinking amid environmental regulations and competition from cheaper natural gas.
Under Trump’s orders, the Energy Department has required fossil-fueled power plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania to keep operating past their retirement dates to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars. The latest announcement would allow those efforts to expand as a precaution against possible electricity shortfalls.
Trump also has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands. A sweeping tax bill approved by Republicans and signed by Trump reduces royalty rates for coal mining from 12.5% to 7%,
Coal once provided more than half of U.S. electricity production, but its share dropped to about 15% in 2024, down from about 45% as recently as 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.
No one wants to lose the AI race, except maybe Australia
Imagine there was hot potential new technology, maybe as transformative as the printing press, and your nation said “No” because the PM wanted to earn Green Victory points at the U.N. assembly?
Australia could do this too and say hello to cheap electricity, jobs, smelters, patents and technological advances. Instead, the more renewables we add, the less industry we keep. Alcoa has just closed an alumina refinery in WA that has been open for 60 years. Alcoa is tactfully blaming several causes, but everyone knows that electricity prices are rising, and the country is in the grip of the meddling bureaucratic Blob.
Firstly, all that money we spent — it’s done nothing (shh!)
It turns out Australia’s economy has been decarbonising at the same rate for decades regardless of how many windmills and solar panels we install, or how many UN speeches we give. Carbon taxes can come and go, coal plants can close, and we can fill up the roof with pink batts. But in the end, the Australian economy, our GDP, is decarbonising at about 2% a year, and has been since 1992. All the frequent flyer carbon schemes, carbon certificates, waste management plans and electric cars amount to a cake decoration.
Roger Pielke Jnr, graphs 30 years of government failure.
For all of the sound and fury of Australian climate politics, which have claimed the careers of a few prime ministers, there is no evidence that Australia’s emissions reduction policies have done anything to meaningfully accelerate the rate of decarbonization over many decades.
We see how Labor, Liberal, makes no difference. The dinosaur era where we used mostly coal power had nearly the same reduction as the Rudd renewable era where we started out quest for “renewables”, and the “Decade of Denial” that followed that was as successful as anything the Labor Greens ever managed.
At it’s peak, our Australia emissions reduction per unit of GDP reached nearly 3%. But if we are to reach even the lower end of the new 2035 goals Pielke calculates we need to double the reduction to nearly 6%.
Not only are the implied rates of decarbonization far in excess of anything ever accomplished in Australia, they are also far in excess of any annual rate of decarbonization achieved by any country — ever.
We know they can’t do it, they know they can’t do it, and they know we know.
Pielke Jnr calculates we should be rushing to install 25 nuclear reactors, if we were serious.
And we are serious, of course, just not about carbon dioxide. We are serious about converting the free market to a socialist paradise.
When every business is dependent on the State, none of them will criticize the Party. Hallalujah.
When energy is unaffordable here, Australia will be the perfect quarry for China, and happy clapper for the UN. …Almost there!
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