‘We live in an age where we see evidence of cultural decline, the erosion of values, the decline of civility, the denial of truth and the elevation of unreason. Many people are asking, “Where is our culture heading?” This website is devoted to exploring the major cultural, social and political issues of the day. It offers reflection and commentary drawing upon the wealth of wisdom found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It offers reflective and incisive commentary on a wide range of issues, helping to sort through the maze of competing opinions, worldviews, ideologies and value systems. It will discuss critically and soberly where our culture is heading. Happy reading!’
For adults interested in finding out more about the history of Western Civilisation and how a Biblical Worldview has impacted and continues to shape our world including Australia and the region.
This is your chance to ask questions and engage with the ideas that have shaped human history.
UPDATE from Jo: I don’t know Muehlenberg’s work, but other Classic Nights have discussed Homer, Beowulf, The fall of Rome, Gold as a Currency, The Battle of Beersheeba, Reaching the iGeneration, and other topics like that including Medieval times and Feudal systems. It was suggested to me that Libertarian types might want to come to this one, so I’m posting the info. I’ll be there. There is usually plenty of social time and discussion afterwards.
Poor Nick Kilvert at the ABC again, finds climate yeti’s everywhere — that imaginary creature, the converted skeptic. This is an important missing link in the fictional narrative — obviously if The Evidence Is Over-bloody-Whelming, there will be a stream of people gradually awakening. Alas, Kilvert doesn’t realize the traffic isall theotherway, an exodus, and there is no single outspoken skeptic that has convincingly switched the other way. The best he can do is drag out the self-declared convert Richard Muller who got away with his skeptic facade for while, until awkward quotes surfaced from during his skeptic days where he declared that fossil fuels were the “greatest pollutant of human history”. He was outed five years ago, but alas, Kilvert apparently still hasn’t got an internet connection and didn’t think to look. If only Kilvert could have emailed me?
To which I might say “Once were journalists: Why don’t these writers do any research any more?”
This is as good as it gets. Muller is the “star” convert. He and his whole team were doubting skeptics:
In 2010, Professor Muller from Berkeley University was funded to carry out a comprehensive study by a group of individuals who doubted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data. They believed that urban heat islands, data-selection bias, and inaccurate climate models were being glossed over by scientists. Professor Muller and his team — all of whom doubted climate change was happening or that carbon dioxide was its cause — were shocked to find a correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and warming.
Richard Muller, 2003. “… carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”
Richard Muller, 2008: “There is a consensus that global warming is real. …it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Given what Prof Muller said in 2003 and 2008 you’d think he might have heard before that rising temperatures correlate with rising CO2? Even skeptics know that. But then he’s only a professor.
There must be a converted skeptic somewhere…
The second supposed convert is a man called Dr Anthony Purcell. Purcell explains post hoc that he had some “doubts” about high sensitivity (sounds like a scientist to me) but was converted, “shaken” when he read that Prof Frank Fenner, the famous virologist, predicted humans would be extinct, perhaps within 100 years. Well that does it then, eh? Strange that he did his PhD on sea level change in 1997, but remained a silent skeptic til he read the OpEd in The Australian 13 years later.
Purcell claims sediments from 55 million years ago during the PETM “demonstrated first-hand that Professor Fenner’s prediction had a historic precedent.” Yet even a stupid beginner skeptic in their 7th post was able to surmise that resolution in 50 million year old mud might not be too decisive and google search to find papers like Sluijs 2007. (Which suggested the CO2 rose 3,000 years after the warming.) Purcell couldn’t find definitive cause and effect evidence from 1998, but only in data from 50 million BC.
To authenticate the pain of conversion we get sob stories. Purcell calls his father a “deeply entrenched climate denialist” and says his acceptance of the man-made catastrophe has “severely eroded” his personal relationships. No kidding. Maybe he could try not calling people names?
Digging deep, the third convert is Prof-Catastrophe-Karoly himself. Allegedly, 31 years ago, he had an open mind for long enough to write an abstract for a conference that favored natural causes, but changed his mind by the time he presented it. That’s it.
Since then, he has converted himself into someone who believes in “consensuses”, despite the radiosondes, the ocean buoys, the satellites and the ice cores and the entire philosophy of science.
He might be a convert, but if he was a scientist, he converted to something else.
Very few skeptics have cracked,
Even though some colleagues were sacked,
By consensus conformists,
From the legions of warmists,
All funded and government backed.
–Ruairi
REFERENCE
Sluijs 2007, Environmental precursors to rapid light carbon injection at the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary, Nature 450, 1218-1221 (20 December 2007) doi:10.1038/nature06400 [Abstract]
Since eating raw fruit and vege is associated with lower mortality, efforts to stop people dying of climate change in 2100 may be killing people today:
Australians are cutting back on basic things like fresh fruit and vegies in order to keep the lights on with the National Debt Helpline taking 14,000 calls in September — a record for the month, and up 14 per cent on the same time last year.
Dying stranded coal plant increases in value by 73,000% in 2 years:
In November 2015, the NSW Government offloaded Vales Point Power Station — an old, polluting coal-fired plant on the shores of Lake Macquarie — for $1 million.
Last week,… Sunset Power quietly released its latest financial reports — revaluing the Vales Point Power Plant at a cool $730 million.
Over the past year, Vale Points’ owners gained $380 million from electricity sales from the power station, compared to $270 million for energy generated during its last full year of state ownership.
The first gas is due from the Northern Gas Pipeline next year.
…plans to widen links between the east coast energy network and the Northern Territory’s gas fields, as well as new Queensland gas sources due to come online before the end of the year, may drive down gas prices due to increased supply. The Northern Territory government’s proposed gas pipeline has expanded its scope to supply gas to the eastern seaboard, via Queensland and South Australia.
Queensland gas company Senex Energy will this week bring 30 new coal seam gas wells online, with production to begin before the end of the year.
Apologies to foreign readers as we rake over the Stupidest Energy Policy on Earth. This really takes the cake.
Back in 2010 Rudd signed off on an extension of subsidies to renewables generators that would apply from 2020-2030, long after he would be gone. Effectively this decision will take up t0 $300 per Australian over that decade — in the order of $1000 per family — and gift to the renewables industry. Naturally, in the public arena, an issue this big was decided with major, some, no discussion at all.
The ABC investigated the intricacies of who knew what and when in the knifing of a first term PM, but billions of dollars — who knew?
Electricity customers face an extra burden of between $3.8 billion and $7.5bn in “windfall” subsidies for renewable power generators in the next decade because of the stroke of a pen in the last months of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership.
Against advice from consultants, energy companies and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Rudd government in 2010 extended the phasing out of the renewable subsidies for existing operators from 2020 to 2030.
The 10-year extension beyond the contracted 2020 phase-out under the Howard government is estimated to cost households and businesses up to an extra $7.5bn.
The subsidy scheme had been put in place by Howard, and back in 2003 the MRET (Mandatory Renewables Energy Target) was designed to end in 2020. Not only did the Australian public not get a chance to say much about extending this gift for another ten years, but neither apparently did Parliament. Indeed, perhaps not even the sitting ministers in the Government at the time:
Former Labor ministers cannot recall cabinet discussion or parliamentary debate over the extension of the subsidies for existing renewable generation to 2030, which was seen as a minor part of the massive changes to renewable energy policy.
There was a Senate Review, and apparently everyone thought it was a bad idea — the advisors, the big gas-giants, big industry, even the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Greenpeace. This gift was a windfall to businesses that were already running and which had made their investments based on the current plan and conditions:
“Facilities built between 1997 and 2007 should only be eligible for incentives due under the existing MRET,” the ACF said in a submission to the Climate Change Authority.
Rudd did it anyway — being greener than Greenpeace. What a hero, with other people’s money.
Now Turnbull is left with this ball-and-chain, the best way to undo some of the damage is to build a nuclear plant. Then again, we could just take that money from the ABC budget instead. (Which one would grow the economy more? Oh the dilemma!)
The AAA tested 30 cars under Australian real on-road conditions and found that like VW and so many others, the cars pass pollution tests in the lab, but fail in the real world:
— Sydney Morning Herald
The report by the Australian Automobile Association, members of which include the NRMA and RACV and RACQ, says real-world testing reveals some new cars are using up to 59 per cent more fuel than advertised. Almost six in 10 exceeded the regulated limit for one or more pollutant in cold-start tests.
The report found that, on average, real-world fuel consumption was 23 per cent higher than laboratory results, including one diesel vehicle that used 59 per cent more fuel than lab tests indicated.
One fully charged plug-in hybrid electric car consumed 166 per cent more fuel than official figures suggest – or 337 per cent more when tested from a low charge. It also emitted four times more carbon dioxide than advertised.
Of 12 diesel vehicles tested, 11 exceeded the laboratory limit for nitrogen oxides emissions….
Environmentalists accused the AAA of “seeking to delay the introduction of new standards” and urged the government to ignore the “misinformation”.
Shots from Geographe Bay, SW WA. I won’t be winning an award for these, but it was kinda cool.
…
They were having fun.
….
Showing off:
….
Judging by their very long flippers, dorsal fins, and the time of year, these were humpback whales which grow to 30 – 50 tonnes, and 15-18m long (medium sized for a whale). They are heading south for the summer to feed around Antarctica. They are apparently pretty friendly and curious, popping up to check out boats and allegedly even flirting, playing around and occasionally rescuing other species of whale and dolphin.
We were on the beach, the zoom was 64mm – 155mm (yes it did not look this close). Holiday house generously supplied. (You know who you are, thank you! :- ) ).
Turnbull threw away the Lib’s best election strategy in the last election and almost lost. He couldn’t run a carbon tax scare like Abbott had (or Trump did even moreso). Now he can’t run a cheap electricity campaign in a nation where wallets are bleeding from power bills. It would be a gift campaign to mock the idea that wind and solar make prices cheaper — that’s a bubble desperate to be popped. But Malcolm’s campaign (if he survives that long) is a Santa tricky plan to have it all — lower emissions, lower prices, and more stability. And if you’ll believe that…
He’s leaving his entire right flank open, unguarded.
A few dismal facts that won’t go away:
Malcolm’s NEG plan to reduce electricity prices aims pathetically low ($2 a week) and will fail anyway. The country already knows that.
The world still awaits the glorious discovery of a single nation powered by lots of wind and solar that has cheap electricity.
Australia’s 1.5% of global carbon emissions are irrelevant. Australia may be the only nation on Earth that is even trying to meet the Paris accord.
Today’s Sydney Morning Herald Readers Panel quiz asks if people believe the main promise behind the “Game Changer”:
Do you feel confident that the Prime Minister’s energy policy will cut electricity bills?”.
The responses: Yes: 9%
Don’t know: 16%
No: 75%
So people who believe in the magical power of windmills and solar panels don’t believe his plan will work. Those who understand reality also know his plan won’t work. That leaves Turnbull reaching the 20 people in between these two groups who all appear to be columnists in the media: Paul Kelly, Paul Maley, Dennis Shanahan. Not fooled, McCrann, Bolt, Blair, and most of Australia.
Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have made a deliberate decision to lose the next election and to lose it badly. The government woke up to the reality that a 43 per cent clean energy target would be all-but indistinguishable to Labor’s (insane) 50 per cent renewable energy target. But it then opted for something even more opaque. And, $2 a week off your power bill, in 10 years, maybe, doesn’t really seal the deal.
The Liberals instead backed Turnbull as he smashed their last hope with a plan that is boring, incomprehensible, backed by no credible modelling and – even on its own terms – will not cut power prices for a decade, and even then by just $2 a week on the average bill.
That plan will be even deader once Labor realises its best attack on this dud is simply to describe it as it actually is – just another plan to cut emissions – and then to argue it’s not as good as their own plan to do exactly the same. Already Labor is moving to this better attack.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology collects one-second records and can turn them into newspaper headlines. In contrast, the UK averages its readings over one minute, and the US over five. Obviously longer averaging could slow the latter down in the PR stakes (if that was their aim).
Hypothetically old glass thermometers just wouldn’t be as good at generating headlines. They take a lot longer to respond to bursts of hot air, sometimes missing short heatwaves completely (the kind that last less than a minute). It’s potentially quite an unfair race to run the two different thermometers in the same competition. It all depends on the handicap applied to the faster electronic ones.
In 2015 Bill Johnston warned that the introduction of electronic sensors in the late 1990s was artificially warming the records and asked the Bureau for data from the two different kinds of instruments side by side. The Bureau said they throw that data away (as you would). Lately, Jen Marohasy asked the Bureau for the manufacturing specifications and the Bureau said it’s all fine, the electronic thermometers were ‘purpose-designed’ to the Bureau’s specifications. We just don’t know what those specifications are exactly. No documentation. No data. (Send in your best guess.)
“All racing participants, as well as the general public, have every right to gain an understanding into the way in which their horse is handicapped. … In all instances, Handicappers must be able to provide logical and reasoned explanation for their decisions made. “
We can only hope our BoM should aim that high.
Don’t miss a great Spectator piece this week from Jennifer Marohasy on her quest to find out whether our BoM meets international standards, and whether our new thermometers are fit for purpose (and comparable to our old thermometers):
For about five weeks now the Bureau have been obfuscating on this point. There is ‘more than one way’ of achieving compliance with WMO guidelines they write in a ‘Fast Facts’ published online on September 11 – after I wrote a blog post detailing how their latest ‘internal review’ confirmed they were in contravention of international standards.
The Bureau has been insisting for some time that they don’t need to average because they have sensors with a long response time, which actually represent an average value, that is the same as the time constant for a mercury thermometer.
How this is achieved in practice was detailed for the first time in a letter from the new head of the Bureau Andrew Johnson, last Friday.
The letter explains that all the sensors the Bureau uses have been ‘purpose-designed’. I had been requesting manufacture’s specifications, but instead, I received this advice that it’s to Bureau specifications and, by inference, there is no documentation. To be clear, there are also no reports detailing the laboratory and field tests that explain how the custom-built devices have been designed to ‘closely mirrors’ the behaviour of mercury thermometers including the time constants – to quote from Dr Johnson’s letter of last Friday.
I am not blaming the sensors for being so responsive, just the Bureau for pretending one-second spot-readings from their purpose-designed sensor are comparable with instantaneous readings from mercury thermometers – while providing no proper documentation.
Did some politicans just wake up? The news today is that our Energy Minister may realize Australia is conducting a wild experiment with our electricity grid, and may have managed to convince other Australian federal politicians of the risk.
The Australian: Robert Gottleibsen (even Gottleibsen gets it).
When Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg walked into the Coalition party room with his energy policy earlier this week he faced a sea of hostile faces. But they left the room shocked. At last, the government politicians understood that Australia faces a long term blackout power crisis the like of which has never been seen in modern times.
It’s one thing to read commentaries warning of what is ahead but another to see a minister use confidential information from independent power authorities and regulators to show the desperate state of affairs that is looming for the nation. And then Frydenberg went to the ALP and showed them the same material.
Frydenberg was, if anything, even more alarming than me … [says Gottleibsen who wrote about how the “Energy crisis risk is criminal. March 2017″].
Between 2012 and 2017 Australia has built 1,850MW of weather-linked “intermittent capacity” and only 150 MW of “dispatchable capacity”.
At the same time “dispatchable capacity” has been reduced with the closure of coal and gas fired power plants and the failure to maintain existing coal fired plants.
According to the Australian Energy Market Operator back in 2012-13 we had 20 per cent “reserve capacity”— power generation capacity above maximum demand. Currently that’s down to 12 per cent and if the Liddell power station is shut there will be a big shortfall. We therefore face the clear certainty of frequent and long blackouts in all our cities if we do not invest in “dispatchable capacity”.
This graph shows what a fantasy-land most Australian state governments exist in — look at the targets set in Queensland and Victoria. Look at how far gone South Australia is:
State based penetration of solar and wind generation 2017
Gottleibsen doesn’t show this graph but here’s the SA Medium term outlook for the next two summers according to the AEMO:
Predicted outlook for demand and supply of electricity in South Australia from Nov 2017 – November 2019.
The red bars are the reserve shortfalls predicted to occur in summer next year and the year after. In itself, that doesn’t mean there will be blackouts but it means that SA is likely to be completely dependent on the interconnector to the coal plants in Victoria and the risk of blackouts is higher. SA is not self-sufficient.
The renewables fans must be hoping for a minor La Nina here over summer, so the temperatures are not so high and the air conditioners in Adelaide won’t be pumping, and so the hydro dams may fill.
RepuTex analyst Hugh Grossman says the NEG, in effect, will establish a de facto price on greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.
The government already has indicated that the electricity companies may be able to purchase international or domestic carbon credits to cover any overruns. This remains dangerous political territory for the federal government, which was forced to rule out unequivocally a carbon tax or market-based trading scheme when the review was first announced. A crucial decision will be how to manage the safeguards mechanism under which big emitter companies will be curtailed in growing their emissions.
This was the point that played a part in destroying two Prime Ministers here, and one opposition leader — Turnbull got tossed out in 2009 for Abbott over his support for the emissions trading scheme. Abbott pandered in too many respects to the carbonistas, but he always said emphatically “no” to international carbon credits. If we funnel money offshore for atmospheric nullities over China, we truly get nothing at all in return, and worse, we feed the crony crooks, the financial sharks, the deep UN state. Let’s have more of those!
No job gets created here, no soil gets improved, and no weather gets changed.
Part of this bomb was already in the works Australia already has an ETS – a carbon tax – which started on July 1, 2016. The “safeguard” mechanism isn’t doing a lot because it is set so low, but it is legislated, “ticking”, and can be turned on, ramped up, at any time.
The triple-cleverness of Abbott’s reverse-auction plan
Credit where it is due — the reverse auction idea that Lloyd writes about was an Abbott creation — and it succeeded in three ways.
Was a truly cheap effective and free market way to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a byproduct it improves Australian soils.
It calls the greenie’s bluff — achieving what they said they wanted, which they didn’t like at all: thus showing that they are renewables-industry lobbyists in disguise and don’t care less about the environment. How many greens/conservationists/climate activists spoke up to say they liked the Abbott plan?
Reverse Auctions work: they achieved a carbon price of around $12 a ton. It’s pointless, but much cheaper and more effective than any of the other “Carbon taxes”:
The Emissions Reduction Fund provides incentives for emissions reduction activities across the Australian economy. The government buys credits through a reverse auction system. The first four auctions have contracted 178 million tonnes of emissions reductions at an average price of $11.83 a tonne.
To date, the environmental lobby largely has failed to embrace the Emissions Reduction Fund scheme, preferring to concentrate on blocking fossil fuel development and lobbying in support of renewable energy.
The reason the enviromental lobby never liked Abbott’s plan is because it reduces CO2 emissions cheaply without intermittent renewables. It cuts support for wind and solar industries because they can’t compete in this auction — they are far too expensive at reducing CO2. Some estimates of the cost of abating carbon with wind were about $60 AUD per ton, and the cost of solar was $700 AUD per ton. (Marcantonini, 2013). The price of carbon reduction at South Australian windfarms was something like $1500 per ton. Perhaps wind and solar have improved a bit since then, but no one can pretend that they are cheaper than the solutions that win the reverse auction. Gillard’s carbon tax was $24/ton and rising, but because it was economy wide, it had all kinds of bad side effects. It was the price of emitting “carbon”, but because it applied to many industries which were already efficient, and couldn’t improve a lot, it took $15 billion from Australians and only abated 2.9 million tons of emissions. So Labor’s carbon price ended up being $5310 per ton.
The plan was an Abbott-the-skeptic compromise: greener than the greens but at the same time, used an actual free market solution, and had some useful outcomes beyond the irrelevant reduction of CO2.
It was more environmentally friendly than all the Green and Labor proposals because it achieved what they said they wanted to achieve in a more cost effective manner. In theory we could improve the environment more with every dollar spent. The auction is largely a waste of money — because CO2 is beneficial, not pollution and doesn’t control the climate except in minor ways — but as Abbott saw, and Lloyd’s article focusses on, getting carbon into the soil is a Net Good Thing. So the byproduct of the auction claws back some of the money wasted. Australia needs more carbon in our soils.
REFERENCES
Marcantonini and Ellerman (2013) The cost of abating CO2 emissions by renewable energy incentives in Germany. MIT Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, CEEPR WP 2013-005
In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.
So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”
German flagship business daily “Handelsblatt” reported … how Germany’s wind energy market is now “threatening to implode” and as a result “thousands of jobs are at risk“. José Luis Blanco, CEO of German wind energy giant Nordex, blames the market chaos on “policymakers changing the rules“. Subsidies have been getting cut back substantially. The problem, Blanco says, is that worldwide green energy subsidies are being capped and wind parks as a result are no longer looking profitable to investors. The Handelsblatt writes that “things have never been this bad“.
Development of Germany’s 20-year guaranteed support rates for onshore wind power. Source: CLEW.
“It is easy for politicians to make promises to impatient voters and opposition parties. But it is hard to impose high costs on powerful, well-organized groups. No system for international governance can erase these basic political facts. Yet the Paris agreement has unwittingly fanned the flames by letting governments set such vague and unaccountable pledges.”“
Suddenly skeptics are powerful and well-organised groups? Somehow the authors, editors, and reviewers all missed that it costs trillions to change the energy system our civilizations were built on, and millions of voters don’t want to pay. The opposition to this is only organised in the sense that we still hold elections.
In 2015, The Guardian said Paris was where “decades of failure were reversed, and a historic agreement reached.”
Nature, Paris targets, all nations failing, graphic. 2017.
No major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges to control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. Wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality.
No kidding.
Countries in the European Union are struggling to increase energy efficiency and renewable power to the levels that they claimed they would. Japan promised cuts in emissions to match those of its peers, but meeting the goals will cost more than the country is willing to pay. Even without Trump’s attempts to roll back federal climate policy, the United States is shifting its economy to clean energy too slowly.
The Paris deal had voluntary agreements and no enforcement — I can’t think why this didn’t work:
The Paris agreement offered, in theory, to reboot climate diplomacy by giving countries the flexibility to set their own commitments. As of July 2017, 153 countries have ratified the agreement — 147 of which have submitted pledges to reduce emissions, also known as nationally determined contributions. The idea is that as each country implements its own pledge, others can learn what is feasible, and that collaborative global climate protection will emerge. That logic, however, threatens to unravel because national governments are making promises that they are unable to honour.
The only real power to enforce (thankfully) comes from dedicated namecalling. It works on susceptible individuals, but perhaps not so well on whole nations. If only the fear of being called a global pariah could be measured in kilowatt-hours?
… in 2015, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions in the United States to 26–28% below 2005 levels by the year 2025. Yet the country was probably only ever on track to cut its emissions by 15–19%.
The US promised big, but that’s an impressive “gap” on the graph (right) between hope and change.
Japan pledged to cut 26% (like the magic number of the Paris convention — “26”):
But … the Japanese government is unlikely to meet its aim to supply 20–22% of electricity from carbon-free nuclear power by 2030; our analysis suggests that 15% is more likely. Today, just 5 of the country’s 42 nuclear reactors are producing electricity.
Still infinitely more nuclear power than Australia.
European plans are “extremely ambitious” — did the authors say that before the agreement was made?
European plans to shrink energy use by 27–30% by the year 2030 compared with the business-as-usual scenario are extremely ambitious. Progress is dogged by the weak building regulations of member countries, poor enforcement of minimum standards and double counting of energy savings from overlapping policies.
Even when taxes are levied, emissions don’t change much — see Korea and Mexico:
Mexico and South Korea have introduced schemes that levy charges on those who use energy and emit carbon dioxide, and other policies aimed at increasing energy efficiency and the adoption of cleaner energy. But emissions are not changing much in either country, calling their pledges into question. If South Korea mothballs many of its nuclear power plants, as the current government has suggested, the gap will only grow.
The authors keep mentioning nukes.
There’s a clue here about complexity and transparency:
Most pledges are almost silent on the range of policies being used, making it difficult to discern which are actually effective. The EU, for example, submitted little information about the complex pledge-implementation process that is already under way. The gap between promise and action is especially large for the strategies that governments are using to boost energy efficiency, for which the real costs are often opaque.
David G. Victor, Keigo Akimoto, Yoichi Kaya, Mitsutsune Yamaguchi, Danny Cullenward & Cameron Hepburn (2017) Prove Paris was more than paper promises, Nature 548, 25–27()doi:10.1038/548025a
This is good news but Turnbull still wants to have the Paris cake and power the fridge with the crumbs
Faced with national bill shock, dismal Newspolls, and even leadership rumors, Turnbull is, at last, dropping the deadweight Finkel Clean Energy Target. The biggest poisoned-band-aid will not be plastered on, though mini bandaids will be.
Too much regulation is never enough and the energy market is still being micromanaged.
[ABCnews] A Clean Energy Target recommended by Australia’s chief scientist will not be adopted, with the Federal Government instead proposing a new plan to bring down electricity prices.
The details have not officially been released, but the ABC understands Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will argue his policy will lower electricity bills more than a Clean Energy Target (CET), while meeting Australia’s Paris climate change commitments.
Cabinet is also keen to adopt a generator reliability obligation, which requires three years’ notice of closing a power station, in order to prevent a repeat of the sudden closure of Hazelwood power station in Victoria in March.
The answer to pointless overdone, intrusive and clumsy regulation is apparently to do even more of it:
[The Australian] Energy retailers will be forced to buy a minimum amount of baseload power from coal, gas or hydro for every megawatt of renewable energy under a drastic intervention into the energy market by the Turnbull government to drive energy bills down by $115 a year.
We forced people to buy renewables, and now we force people to buy the antidote too.
The only subsidies we are ending are the ones that haven’t started yet:
Malcolm Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg will today announce a “national energy guarantee” as the centrepiece of an energy plan that will end new taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy from 2020 and impose a 0.2 per cent reliability regulation on retailers to inoculate the system from blackouts and give a lifeline to coal power.
The savings (if they happen) are small compared to the increases:
A senior government source confirmed that the policy signed off by cabinet last night and to be taken to the Coalition partyroom today, is estimated to cut retail energy bills of between $100 and $115 a year.
We are just aiming to wind back a tiny part of the pain.
[The Australian] …It is those untruths Abbott has called out.
And the response from his critics? Personal abuse, distortion… the Prime Minister snidely refers to “it being Mental Health Day”; a minister (Josh Frydenberg) who resorts to the self-demeaning criticism that, as prime minister, Abbott defended the renewable energy target and signed up to the Paris Agreement, both of which he now criticises.
Of course he did, because, despite his long-held view that this new paganism was “absolute crap”, a Turnbull-led majority of his cabinet, to their eternal discredit, had gone along with it and tied his hands. Being at last free to speak the truth, should he be mocked for doing so?
The fact is, as Terry McCrann said (The Daily Telegraph, October 12), Abbott’s speech was “a seminal event”.
The global bullies are trying to tar Abbott by reminding everyone of what he said as a PM and contrasting it with what he says now. But it’s unlikely to do much harm. Millions voted for him when he made a “blood oath” to remove the carbon tax. He didn’t win more over when he spoke with the wooden tones, constrained as PM. Indeed, the critics just give Abbott a chance to talk about why our national conversations are so constrained by the politically correct box…
To pursue the renewable grail,
With Australia’s great coal wealth for sale,
To be burned up abroad,
Is a policy flawed,
And reduce power prices, would fail.
–Ruairi
h/t David B, Scott of the Pacific, Pat.
PS: Headline edited. Was “Christmas already.” (or something like that). Now it’s “Santa’s arrived”.
One in six or, 15% of the Australian population, apparently has experienced “uncertainty” around food in the last 12 months. For some, that’s only one episode in a year but still, in a first world country which is a major food exporter, it’s not a sign of wealth and good times. If the survey is to be believed, fully 9% of Australians are experiencing a food shortage every month or even more often. Surprisingly, half of those experiencing food uncertainty have jobs — working serfs. Foodbank blames it on living costs — like rent and power bills.
A nation in decline: A ten percent increase in people seeking food relief across the nation
One thing is sure “bill shock” is hurting people, and it’s getting worse:
Foodbank provides food for over 652,000 people a month, however, the front-line charities report that demand for food relief has increased by 10% in the last year and they are forced to turn away 65,000 people every month due to lack of food.
How much does renewable energy contribute? Hard to say — all the factors are confounded and feedbacks flow like spaghetti. Adding unreliable energy adds hidden costs in managing wild swings in supply, and lack of spinning inertia. We have to have back up storage that we didn’t need before, so add batteries, battery subsidies, hydro storage, and also the inefficiencies for coal generators — which are cheapest and most efficient at constant supply. Then, add the cost of electricity into the cost of all products, so supermarket bills go up. The intermittent generators make us more dependent on gas, and that extra demand pushes up the price of gas too. Higher costs of living mean higher wage claims. Then the extra prices of everything (electricity, food, salaries) force companies out of business or offshore. Because it’s energy we are messing with, the flow-on implications touch everything.
The 10% increase in people seeking food relief applied across all Australian states. But South Australia started from a higher baseline. The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) data shows that the proportion of residential electricity and gas customers on hardship programs in South Australia is twice as high as other states.
But I spoke to a well connected, influential South Australian last week and he tells me people there love renewables — they think they are cheap. We need to tally up the hidden costs.
This graph shows the total electricity generation capacity in each state and it’s breakdown by generation type. Remember, those grey bars are the capacity of “wind power” but the generation from wind sources is only one third or thereabouts of the total “capacity”.
All the states below are connected to the one NEM electrical grid. SA has more renewables than the other states, but this is electricity-sans-borders to some extent. Pain and problems in one state can flow into the grid. Though according to foodbank, the number seeking help has also gone up by the same amount in WA which is not connected to the NEM. A messy problem. The only thing we know for sure is that when we had hardly any renewables, we had cheaper electricity.
Electricity by generation source, Australian states, AER, 2017. Graph. (I don’t think rooftop solar gets counted at all here). Solar probably means only large solar projects, which make almost nothing — See the dark blue bar in NSW.
For completeness: those unemployment statistics:
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The end of the mining boom in WA increased the unemployment rate and may also explain the increase in hardship cases and unpaid bills.
In South Australia the Advertiser picked up the issue. Read more from Eric Worrall at WattsUp and Scott of the Pacific.
MORE than 102,000 South Australians seek help from food charity Foodbank every month, as parents skip meals for days on end so children can eat and utility bills can be paid, astonishing figures show.
Foodbank SA chief executive Greg Pattinson said the high number of those needing assistance was staggering, but not surprising, because more and more SA families were being forced to make the heartbreaking decision to either “heat or eat”.
“We’ve heard it from so many people; the power bills come in and they have to decide: ‘Do we feed the kids today or do we not?’” he said.
As as aside — one Foodbank recipient, Steve in Melbourne, wondering why the media is talking about Trump instead of about hungry Australians:
I’ve worked voluntarily for the Uniting Church and The Salvos so I’ve got a lot of food parcels from them and obviously I want to put back in as well. There’s more on our news about Donald Trump and what he’s doing in America than there is about hungry people in Australia. How is that even in the hemisphere of right? That just doesn’t make sense.”
The media are part of the problem. The deplorables are the ones going hungry.
We had a few days away last week in Geographe Bay, SW WA thanks to the kindness of a supporter. Miles of quiet beaches for those who don’t like crowds. 🙂
Yet again, it’s another mindless apple-pie-survey produced to fog the debate
Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.
“Four in five (78%) said Yes: the Australian government should introduce a new Clean Energy Target to encourage the construction of new clean energy sources in Australia.” — The Australia Institute
If we ask people if they’d like free/cheap/clean stuff, they say “yes”. If we ask them how much they want to pay for renewables, 62% say “N.o.t.h.i.n.g”.Which is why the Australia Institute didn’t ask them.
They also didn’t ask whether voters would change their vote on this issue, because we already know, time after time, that voters rate climate change last on their list of priorities. You can bet the Australia Institute would have asked that question if they thought the public would give the right answer, instead they surely know that people vote for jobs, to lower the cost of living and to have a strong economy instead of shipping our manufacturing industry to China in a sacrificial quest to change the weather.
So many other, better, surveys show the lie behind this one
So instead of useful information, we get headlines to pressure Turnbull into thinking that 78% of voters want him to introduce the Clean Energy Target that he is considering backing away from. Will he be fooled? My bet is that he will wipe the words “Clean Energy” out of the title to get his “backbenchers” off his back and to avoid igniting boiling fury among Coalition voters. But Turnbull will find another way to subsidize the Green Blob to keep them from calling him names. That’s how he works. He brought in an emissions trading scheme and carbon tax by stealth — calling it a “safeguard mechanism” buried in fine print. The “environment” is so toxic for voters who are not part of the eco-religious left. A supposedly centre-right leader has to hide the money and power behind innocuous language.
The problem for Turnbull is that Australians have been systematically misinformed about the costs of the forced renewables transition, so at any point, a ticking time bomb could go off when they find out how much intermittent, unreliable wind and solar panels cost.
We need a survey to ask Australians how many cents per kilowatt hour wind and solar are subsidized? What percentage could say 8 – 9c KWhr? How many would also know what the wholesale price of coal fired electricity is? (It’s 3 – 4c/KWhr). Those surveys would demonstrate how immature, underdone and pathetic our national debate has been on this topic. Those surveys, and the ignorance of the public on such basic questions, would also show the true value of the ABC.
From The Australia Institute:
Respondents were also asked what kind of generation should be supported by a new Clean Energy Target. Respondents could select all that applied.
81% said the CET should build renewables like wind and solar.
Only 27% selected gas fired power and only 16% selected coal fired power.
Respondents selected 1.33 on average.
Amongst voting groups, 79% of LNP voters selected renewables, more than double gas (37%) and triple coal (24%), while 68% of One Nation voters selected renewables, again much higher than gas (24%) and coal (23%).
“We are the people who will be swimming,” he said. “The question will be — will those people on the lifeboats bother to pull us in or push us away because we would be too problematic?”
Kiribati’s highest point is 13m above water, and is sinking at a rate of 1mm a year (see the updated graph below by Eyes On Browne). To rephrase Euan Mearns, at this rate, complete inundation of it will take 13,000 years.
The Titanic’s elevation (waterline to the deck) was 18m, so it was 50% higher, yet it sank in 2 hours 40 minutes. That’s one ninth of a day, or one 3,285th of a year. Conservatively, the comparative speed works out to be 42.7 million times faster. Allowing for the higher elevation (but discounting funnels and/or palms) that would be 59.1 million times faster.
For some reason the ABC was unable to do an internet search on the words “Kiribati, Tide Gauges, Sea Level”. With a billion dollars to spend, apparently they can only afford a one way internet cable. Just enough to upload news stories like this which are essentially a repeat of a press release, unchecked from President Tong:
Kiribati…is already suffering from the effects of climate change.
Rising sea levels are causing land to be engulfed by tidal waters, driving people away from their homes and leaving them displaced.
“What I have seen in my lifetime over the years has been villages, communities, who have had to leave … because it is no longer viable,” he said.
“The sea is there and there is nothing. Everything has been taken away so they have had to relocate.”
No matter how melodramatic the claim, there are no hard questions from journalist Sarah Hancock.
Good luck to Mr Tong. He is just playing the cards he is offered.
Pity the ABC though. I wouldn’t want to be them when Australians realize that they are paying for an internet rerouting service from socialist troughers, freeloading gravy hunters and pagan czars.
To serve the Australian taxpayer he quotes a Professor Vassallo, Chair of Sustainable Energy Development (USyd), and CSIRO Energy Director Dr Glenn Platt. Just in case they weren’t green and biased enough he also interviewed Professor Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. Finally he turns to Dr Mark Diesendorf, who is apparently just some guy at UNSW with a team of modelers. (Kilvert doesn’t give us his title, but a two second search suggests he works at the “Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets“. Perhaps it was an oversight, or maybe Kilvert was feeling guilty that every single person he quoted has a career in sustainable energy). Glenn Platt — by the way, is not just “Energy Director” but is described at The Conversation as leading the Energy Transformed Flagship research centre at CSIRO. So that’s four green academics, no one from the coal industry, no skeptics, no other engineers, and no one involved in managing a grid.
So here’s Dr Platt, struggling with the basics of electricity grids:
“The idea of there being an average or ‘base’ electricity load, doesn’t make sense. Let alone having this sort of big, slow-changing power station to meet that load,” says CSIRO Energy Director Dr Glenn Platt.
And here’s today’s energy production across the national grid, where everyone can see that the minimum demand was 18,000MW (just like it was last time TonyfromOz wrote about it here five years ago. That 18,000MW are all the fridges at Coles, the freezers at Woolies, the air conditioning units in every skyscraper or tall building with windows that don’t open. It’s hospitals, night shift workers, smelters, street lights, home heaters or air con, and water heaters.
Don’t believe your lying eyes.
Source: Aneroid (which gets the data from the AEMO)
Dr Platt is working hard to convince the public that demand is all over the place:
Throughout the day, electricity demand peaks in the morning as people get ready for work, and again in the evening.
But electricity use also changes across the year, maxing out on hot summer days when air-conditioners are at full blast, and bottoming out on mild spring nights.
No mention that the constant unremitting base load is 75% of the peak. Would it change things for the paying public if they knew that?
To craft a story that base load is “old” Prof Anthony Vassallo digs out some historic anedotes:
Coal-fired power stations can take days to fire up from cold to full capacity and when demand slumps during off-peak periods, shutting down isn’t an option.
So when these power plants were being built in Australia, a market solution was created, says Professor Anthony Vassallo, Chair of Sustainable Energy Development at the University of Sydney.
“In the 70s, to stop them from having to turn off overnight, the regulators and the operators offered very, very-low-cost electricity for consumers to run their hot-water systems, which in turn sustained the ‘base load’ on the power station,” he says.
It’s true that people found ways to even out our electricity use by switching on hot water heaters at 11:32pm, but it’s also true that it was cheaper for everyone when they did.
Vassalo frames coal in the worst possible way:
But today, as more and more renewables such as wind are feeding the grid, coal-fired power stations are often forced to pay to keep their turbines running when demand drops.
What he doesn’t say is that coal fired stations are only forced to pay because taxpayers are forced to subsidize renewables. If there was no RET, rooftop or other subsidy, many renewables plants would never have been built. Who would put solar panels on if they had to pay $4,000 more?
Looks like the dinosaur industry supplies the dinosaur base load
Today’s production: 14,000 out of 18,000 MW was supplied by fossil fuels.
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The ABC is happy to make sure Australians know the limitations of coal in fine, if imaginary detail:
“Technology has moved on from base load, and now you want flexible power.
Spell it out for us, Prof Blakers, why do we “want” flexible power — is that so we can cope with the artificial “flexible” supply, forced onto the system by mini-Gods who think they can change the weather with solar panels and windmills?
…And that’s what demand management, batteries and pumped hydro is,” says Professor Andrew Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems.
So, by golly, why didn’t we use them before — maybe because they are inefficient, or inconvenient, or waste energy or cost more?
“If you have an increase in demand, a coal power station will take hours [to meet it], a gas turbine 20 to 30 minutes, batteries about a second, demand management about a second, and pumped hydro will take anywhere between 20 seconds and two minutes.”
It’s true coal can’t shift up quickly and gas can (and I hear, within a mere minute or two, not “20 – 30”). But gas also costs twice as much as coal (or even more). Does an academic care? Do taxpayers pay him to give them the whole truth or just the bit that suits him?
“Compete Nonsense” because thousands of computer simulations show that it’s theoretically possible
Theoretically, if you have unlimited funds, we could go “renewable”:
“All this talk about ‘you’ve got to have baseload power stations’ is complete nonsense,” says Dr Mark Diesendorf.
His team at the University of New South Wales ran “thousands of computer simulations” correlating hourly power-consumption data from the National Electricity Market (NEM) in 2010, with the potential power generation of renewables, based on recorded weather data for the same year.
He claims that a combination of existing technologies, including hydro and biofuelled gas turbines, were able to supply the simulated NEM even during “peak demand” — on winter evenings following overcast days.
Kilvert didn’t ask what it would cost. The academics just say “it won’t be cheap”.
Known as ‘stilling’, it has only been discovered in the last decade. And while it may sound deceptively calm, it could be a vital, missing piece of the climate change puzzle and a serious threat to our societies.
While 0.5 kilometre per hour might barely seem enough to ruffle any feathers, he warns that prolonged stilling will have serious impacts.
‘There are serious implications of wind changes in areas like agriculture and hydrology, basically because of the influence of wind on evaporation,’ said Dr Azorin-Molina. ‘A declining trend in wind speed can impact long-term power generation, and weaker winds can also mean less dispersion of pollutants in big cities, exacerbating air quality problems and therefore impacting human health.’
Here’s a rare concept in science these days: Dr Azorin-Molina isn’t sure if this is natural or man-made. No doubt, climate modelers will coming up with the answer they didn’t predict, post hoc, any day now…
In idyll speculation, researchers wondered if perhaps humans built too many obstacles (which seems hard to believe — for every skyscraper that blocks the flow we must have flattened a million trees to pave the way for easier breezing). But we have built 340,000 wind towers. Wickedly, commenter barrashee jokes that we could run nukes to power the turbines in reverse and restore the wind. 😉
Take it all with a bucket of salt– in 2011 National Geographic ran a headline The World is Getting Mysterious Winder.That same year at the meeting of the UK Parliamentary science committee they wrote a report “Warmer, Wetter, Windier, Will the UK’s Infrastructure Cope.“But despite “windier” being in the headline the sole reference to wind strength was to say that the models will get better at predicting it one day, and to note the alliterative possibility that there were unknown effects of Wetter, Warmer, Windier on the World Wide Web.
Maybe it’s clouds? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe no one has any idea:
We know that one of the best forecasts in Europe, that of the ECMWF, predicts winds close to the earth’s surface which are slightly different than those observed,’ said Dr Nuijens. ‘The question is, “What causes that?” One idea is that it is related to convective mixing coming from these cumulus clouds.’
I’d be amazed if global average wind speed was identical now to what it was in 1960.
What a fantastic line-up of speakers at the One Nation, Cost of Living Summit on Friday 13th October, 9.30-4pm.
Go see Malcolm Roberts, Mark Latham, Ross Cameron, Graham Young, Tim Andrews, Dr Alan Moran, Prof Tony Makin, and Dr Dan Mitchell (USA) and others speak on Friday at the Queensland Parliament House, LC (red chamber): Just $20.
Australians are facing severe cost-of-living pressures and decreasing living standards caused by Federal and State governments who no longer represent everyday Australians. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party are bringing together experts in tax, regulation, money, banking, housing, farming and energy who will highlight the key issues driving our high cost-of-living in Australia.
Our Cost-of-Living Summit will demonstrate how excessive government interventions have created a mess in the energy market resulting in our unaffordable power prices, and how we can remove these drivers of high costs to create a fairer and more affordable future. One Nation wants to set our nation free, harness human ingenuity and resourcefulness to create a better Australia for all Australians.
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