Crescent Dunes, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | Wikimedia Author, Amble.
A company called SolarReserve is planning to build the new Aurora 150MW solar thermal plant at Port Augusta, which is apparently a copy of their Crescent Dunes plant in the US. But that project has been offline for most of the time since last October. The whole SA government is meant to be running 24/7 off “solar power”, which allegedly only has about 8 hours of energy stored up (as heat in the molten salt block). So an 8 month break will be a bit of problem for the SA government (except of course, we all know that the real baseload backup here at 4 or 5am everyday, and most of the day in winter, is ultimately the very fossilized gas and coal.) Since the project only began working in Sept 2015 it managed to operate for all of one year and one month before it went offline for 8 months due to a leak. The SA State Energy Minister is not concerned saying it was a construction issue and SolarReserve “have learnt from that”.
The 150MW myth: most of the time it will be less, a lot less
Here’s an ominous number: Crescent Dunes has worked at an average capacity factor of only 16%. That would mean an average generation of just 24MW of power from the 150MW plant. Theoretically, they are aiming for a capacity factor of 51.9%. (Yes, according to Wikipedia, it is not 51.8%, or 52%, but 51.9%. Very specific spin then?) — Thanks to Graeme No 3 and AndrewWA in comments for their help. And from TonyfromOz who says: “Everything about this SouthAus plant is the hyped to the max best case scenario that NO plant on Planet Earth has achieved yet…”
Should they close their Solar-Parliament each winter?
The South Australian government might want to switch their summer holidays to winter, because Crescent Dunes production in summer was three times as high as their best winter month. (30GWh in Sept 2016 compared to 9GWh in February 2016). SA may well be better off if Parliament has to shut down for winter, but how do you run hospitals and schools on one-third of the power?
Not low-cost:
State Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis is not a man you want negotiating your deals:
“This deal is an incredible outcome for South Australians. It locks in low-cost power for our schools, hospitals and trams while also boosting supply to the broader market in order to reduce power bills for households and businesses.”
This genius deal is so good, Premier Jay Weatherill is going to waste $2.6 million to sell it to South Australians.
Premier Jay Weatherill has defended allocating $2.6 million to an advertising budget to spruik the plan.
He argued the advertising was necessary to “ensure” investors understood that SA has “a secure energy future” and to protect the state’s reputation against people “seeking to essentially characterise South Australia as having an insecure and unstable energy system”.
Given the likely capacity factor, and the governments use, how many megawatts exactly will be left to spare?
Jay Weatherill has promised a $50 cut to the average household power bill when a $650 million solar thermal power plant is running, even as experts warn that the technology is in its infancy and largely untested anywhere.
The South Australian Premier yesterday visited the proposed site of the world’s largest solar thermal project, 30km north of Port Augusta, hailing the new 150-megawatt plant as a “game-changer … (that) signals the death knell for coal-fired power stations in this nation”.
Coal is dead sayth Mr Weatherill
Being anti-coal is a religious badge of honor. Here’s a line history will not be kind to:
Mr Weatherill said no form of coal-fired electricity generation, which includes new high-efficiency, low-emission options, were considered during the tender process.
“There’s going to be no more coal-fired generation,” he said. “Coal is dead”
The solar thermal plant, to be built by US company SolarReserve in the state’s mid-north, was “by far the lowest-cost option of the shortlisted bids”, he said.
“The government will pay no more than $78MWh for our power. By way of comparison, you can’t build a coal-fired power station for less than $100MWh,” Mr Weatherill said, hailing the technology as “the future for the world”.
Weatherill knows coal is more expensive even though he didn’t consider it. All the other world leaders building 1600 coal plants in 62 countries must be kicking themselves.
As for $100MWh coal power — Weatherill could have paid $30m to keep the 520MW coal plant going.
Possibly people can come watch birds fry in the sky:
Birds combust in mid-air at Ivanpah, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | (Click to watch the video – how much fun can you have?).
h/t David Maddison for the youtube link.
Not the largest solar thermal project
Being the biggest in a new immature and rarely used field is not that exciting, but Aurora is not the biggest bar perhaps in a minor technical sense. Everything about this is hyped — spot the weasel words “of its kind”:
It’s possibly the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world, some as high as 4km and we didn’t even know these existed til recently. Despite that overwhelming ignorance, we’re 97.00% certain that all the warming in Antarctica is due to your car and airconditioner. Robin McKie, The Guardian writer, talks about the recent discovery of so many volcanoes under the ice. Not surprisingly, we have no data on how active these volcanoes are. However because we *know* climate change is definitely wrecking Antarctica, it follows that your car, air conditioner and pet dog could melt more ice, take the pressure off the tectonic plate and set one off. Then things will really get out of hand.
Anyhow, it’s just a coincidence that all the warming in Antarctica is where the volcanoes are.
Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.
The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.
Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa’s volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.
These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 metres. All are covered in ice, which sometimes lies in layers that are more than 4km thick in the region. These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system, which stretches 3,500km from Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.
UPDATE: More details are coming in: The SA govt is effectively covering all its own electricity use with this one plant, which is about 5% of the whole state’s demand. The plant will have 8 hours of battery storage (theoretically). The word I hear is that this is not an outright purchase of $650m, but an offtake agreement for around 70-78/MWh — which means the government will buy nearly all the production available (125Mw of 150MW) each year, but won’t own the plant. [Text edited and substantial additions below.]
Not long back, Port Augusta had a thirty-one year old coal plant generating 520MW. The Premier could have spent $30 million to keep it going through this anti-coal political era. Instead he blew it up and is spending millions to buy electricity at twice the price, under contract for 20 years. The $650 million Aurora Solar Plant will produce 150MW of solar power (on a good day). Per megawatt, this solar power is twice the price of coal fired power. (The old Hazelwood coal plant supplied electricity at around $30MWh.) Per degree Celsius, it will buy global coolness by some number starting with three decimal places of zero.
Solar power is supposed to be competitive with coal, but no private company seems to keen to do this. In this case, the company is getting a signed up buyer for around 80% of its product, and for 20 years. Of the 150MW of sacred solar electrons, 125MW will go to the government itself and just 25MW will be left over for non-government customers. If South Australians wanted to vote for cheaper electricity, this is another 5% that out-of-reach.
To put this in perspective $650 million dollars is around $400 per man, woman and child in SA, over the next ten or twenty years, to appease the climate Gods. The exact cost is hard to calculate at this stage. But the government of SA will be the one sole major customer, effectively paying off the solar farm, but won’t own it in the end.
The original Northern Coal Power station employed 250 people. The new solar one will give 700 people a pointless but paid position for three years, after which, only 50 people will have a job at the solar plant, and countless others will be out of work as more businesses close down in South Australia due to the price of electricity.
Praise flows in:
The Australian Services Union hailed Mr Weatherill as “the unequivocal international leader for clean energy generation”.
Independent SA senator Nick Xenophon and Pt. Augusta Mayor Sam Johnson said the deal will be “transformational”.
It will be “transformational” like a dose of Dengue Fever.
Will South Australia ever recover?
The project is underpinned with a $110m concessional equity loan that Senator Xenophon negotiated earlier this year as part of the talks over the federal government’s company tax cuts legislation.
Time for WA to secede and cut the financial lifeline that makes these kinds of decisions possible.
Put it in your diary, Malcolm Turnbull gets something right:
The announcement comes after Malcolm Turnbull told the South Australian Liberal Party annual meeting on Saturday that the state’s strong focus on renewable energy was equal parts “ideology and idiocy”.
The Prime Minister said Mr Weatherill’s energy policies were an “experiment’ that should have been conducted in private, not inflicted on an entire state”.
TonyfromOz in Comments: This is not nor has it ever been baseload power
Nick Xenophon said this: (my bolding here)
“This will make a difference in the South Australia energy market. It will secure the grid and mean more baseload power than intermittent power,” he said.
The Base Load for South Australia is at around 4AM every morning, every morning, and averages around 1100MW. The total amount of power that will be generated and delivered by this Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant at 4AM on ANY morning, even at the height of Summer will be …..
ZERO MEGAWATTS
There is not one plant of 150MW Nameplate on Planet Earth which has EVER generated 24 hour power, and this plant will not be the first to do it. If you want some facts on CSP, you only need to see how poorly it works in Spain, and I have some information on just that at the link below. This is just another joke from a Government that has no idea at all.
South Australia won’t need too much cable,
With less power, very dear and unstable,
And must learn to cast lots,
For the few megawatts,
Of crumbs from the Great Leader’s table.
— Ruairi
EDITED: The original headline was: SA Premier hailed “leader”: spends 20 times more to make one third of the electricity with solar — based on a comparison of spending $30m to keep Northern Coal running, or $650m to build a solar plant. With an offtake agreement, the unknown extra cost is spread over 20 years, and must end up being more than $650m in total. The SA government is buying most of the product; the Aurora project investors will expect some profits, plus there will be interest payments on the loans — all of which needs to be covered. Last year the SA government was asking for a tender for 480GW of electricity per year for government sites (but it’s not clear if this was the total demand). Hypothetically, if it was, the bill for getting that at a cost that was $40MWhr higher is about $20m extra dollars per year (please check my maths). Partly this is also funded by a federal govt concessional equity loan ($110m), not just funded straight up by SA taxpayers.
OK, a wind farm isn’t making sausages, but it’s also not a farm.
Nothing about this makes sense, unless you follow-the-money.
John Constable and Matt Ridley outline the absolute rort that Scottish wind generators are screwing out of British electricity customers. Scotland already has 750 industrial wind plants (the scammers) in their best moments making a total of 5,700 MW which is more than the peak demand of the whole Scottish grid. This is, at times, not just more than Scotland can use, but even more than it can safely absorb, so UK slaves were forced to spend £1.8 billion on giant interconnectors partly to send the excess down to England and whatnot, otherwise the profits of the unprofitable might suffer, and the weather might not be as nice in 2100 (or not).
If that’s not bad enough, these protected industrial plants sometimes produce a product when nobody wants it, and they still get paid. When it would be unsafe to dump it on the market. The geniuses who set this up promised the wind-generators that they would still be paid. And not only are they paid, but as Ridley and Constable document, before 2011 they were paid on average, four times what they would have lost, and one farm, 20 times as much. After that was exposed, the payments were trimmed to merely being 50-100% more than the loss. Nice work if you can get it, and even better if you can’t.
No free market here
In a free market, buyers connect with sellers. In a socialist-planet-saving-scam the buyers go to jail if they don’t pay for a product they didn’t use and don’t want, and the sellers connect with politicians who only represent 10% of the buyers. The people deciding whether to build or approve or invest in building most unneeded, unwanted, bird killing windmills are not the ones who pay for the product. Every new windmill is an automatic feeder off British forced consumers. So it’s in the Scottish governments interests to milk this situation for all it’s worth and approve every tower. What will stop them turning the whole of Scotland into a giant welfare windmill? Maybe only a hard Brexit with Scotland left behind.
Bear in mind some poor Scots have to put up with these towers, and they’re protesting, but drowned out by the river of gravy pumped from the south.
The layers of stupid don’t end there. Some corporates may be scamming both sides of the border. There are companies wanting to build even more towers in Scotland, but on the south side of the equation, they may be the same ones being paid high rates to rush in and fill in the missing supply at the last minute when the Scottish wind turbines are told to switch off. There is a unseen price for the volatility of wind power.
The Scottish wind-power racket
By John Constable and Matt Ridley
Imagine a sausage factory – the luckiest, most profitable sausage factory in the world. Its machines crank out their sausages, and lorries carry them to supermarkets. So far, so normal.
But this particular factory makes as many sausages as the management and staff choose. If they feel like taking the day off, the lorries and shelves stay empty. If they want to go a bit wild, they sometimes make so many sausages that there aren’t enough lorries to take them away. Or they carry on cranking out sausages even if the shelves are already full.
And here’s the really amazing thing: even when the lorries can’t cope or there is no demand for sausages, the factory gets paid. Indeed, they get paid more for not sending the sausages to the shops than for sending them. This is such great business that the factory is actually building an extension, so it can threaten to make even more unwanted sausages.
Does all that sound completely mad? Of course it does. But it’s what happens in the British electricity industry – where the blackmailing, money-printing sausage factory is a wind farm in Scotland.
It took 12 “researchers” to discover that the best way you, personally, can change the future global climate is to avoid having kids. If you do have kids, you can make up a bit, apparently, by all going vegetarian. If that’s too hard, consider swapping your dog for a hamster. But if you have to have kids, dogs, and eat meat, at the very least, assuage your green guilt for living in the easiest, most bountiful time and place on Earth, by feeding your dog some sweet potatoes occasionally instead of Chum.
Got that? How many tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds did it take to discover this while not ever once google searching for “reasons climate models are wrong/skillless/barking fairy failures?
Marvel at the Washington Times sentence construction — this study comes with cows?
The study comes with livestock, notably cows, already targeted by the environmental movement for their prodigious methane production, prompting calls for people to reduce their beef consumption in order to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
This news is popular with all vegetarian, childless, dogless, lizard owners:
His study, which found that dogs and cats have a significant impact on carbon emissions as a result of their meat-based diets, met with howls from pet owners and a lukewarm reception even from some environmentalists who also happen to love dogs.
So did the study calculate how many degrees forgoing all dogs in the US would cool the planet by? It doesn’t seem to say…
In his paper published last week, UCLA professor Gregory S. Okin found that meat-eating dogs and cats create the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on the energy consumption required to produce their food, or the same impact as driving 13.6 million cars.
There is great care to package this message as the height of reasonableness, as if the people suggesting the climate changing effects of dogs were all amicable flexibility and sense. Readers can find an option that suits their level of penance: everything from not having kids at all down to occasional sweet potato snacks for your 250 pound mastiff. (Remember its not the outcome that matters when it comes to the planet, it’s the intent…)
“I like dogs and cats, and I’m definitely not recommending that people get rid of their pets or put them on a vegetarian diet, which would be unhealthy,” Mr. Okin said in a statement. “But I do think we should consider all the impacts that pets have so we can have an honest conversation about them. Pets have many benefits but also a huge environmental impact.”
What they are really afraid of, is that the Chinese will get as many pets-per-capita as the US:
“Americans are the largest pet owners in the world, but the tradition of pet ownership in the U.S. has considerable costs,” Mr. Okin said in his Aug. 2 paper, published in PLOS One. “As pet ownership increases in some developing countries, especially China, and trends continue in pet food toward higher content and quality of meat, globally, pet ownership will compound the environmental impacts of human dietary choices.”
It’s only the Earth at stake, so don’t put yourself out too much:
What’s the answer? Mr. Okin suggested making the transition from dogs and cats to smaller animals including hamsters, reptiles and birds, or herbivores such as horses.
For a moment I had an image of him studying dogs that are bigger than horses.
Lastly, listen to the committed environmentalist — so committed to saving the Earth that he runs a digital media company called One Green Planet. Not committed enough to give up his dog:
Matt Howell, the CEO of Tomago Aluminium Smelter, told a few home truths on ABC radio Monday.
To paraphrase in my own words:
1. Aluminium Smelters gobble electrons for breakfast. His smelter uses 10% of the entire electricity supply of the most populous state in Australia (NSW).
2. If power goes out without warning for more than three hours, the smelter pot lines freeze, permanently. The company goes to the wall.
3. The largest battery in the world would keep their smelter going for all of 8 minutes. There is a good reason there are no solar or wind powered aluminium smelters anywhere in the world.
4. The government can ‘t let the market solve anything whilst it is simultaneously destroying the free market by propping up the market failures at the same time.
5. Electricity pricing has suddenly got very ugly. Their electricity bill may now be subject to price spikes where it could cost them $4 million just to keep one pot line running during that spike. It is as if suddenly gas stations only sold $400 per Litre petrol. (Which would be $1800/per gallon). What he doesn’t say, but which logically follows from that, is that heavy industry in most of Australia can no longer get reliable electricity at an affordable price, even with forward contracts. Cry, scream, run with your factory.
6. In Australia, if we achieve “zero coal” we will also achieve “zero heavy manufacturing”.
7. If we want heavy industry, we need a HELE Coal plant. There are hundreds being built around the world, and we are selling our coal to them. How crazy are we?
Howell makes some great points. It’s good to see an ABC presenter willing to let the evil capitalists speak. Well done Matt Wordsworth. I found something worth listening to on the ABC this year.
SA tries to fix a Big-Government mess with a Bigger Government:
Man-made regulations created the grid-crisis in South Australia, so the Weatherill government has decided to take what didn’t work and “do more”.
Australian rulers subsidized unstable energy, and lo, created an unstable system. The SA state govt thinks it can solve it by running an opposing scheme simultaneously. The Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme meets the Energy Security Target (EST). Don’t laugh. The Electricity Price Target (EPT) is probably next. This is magic wish-fairy governance where the guy in charge doesn’t take the effort to understand the cause of a problem and unwind it, he just waves a wand and issues a decree. Perhaps Weathrill thinks the hamstrung-market can squeeze some stable electrons out the ether, but cheap stability only came from coal in SA. His kind of stability-on-command comes out of wallets instead.
The fairy plan looks so bad even the wonder-hero, Elon Musk, is getting nervous that electricity bills will stay painfully high (making his battery power solution not look so attractive to the rest of the world). SA is going to be held up as the global text book example of how not to run a state. It’s the impossible bind for Tesla — the only politicians crazy enough to buy their biggest battery are too crazy to run an efficient, productive polity:
Battery giant Tesla has joined power generators, retailers, major energy users and experts in voicing concerns about a central component of the South Australian Government’s $550 million energy plan.
The SA scheme operates in a similar way to the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET). But instead of incentivising new renewable projects, it would require retailers to source 36 per cent of the state’s electricity needs from gas generators and other synchronous power sources.
Join the dots: There are no other serious synchronous sources in SA outside coal, nukes or gas. Coal and Nukes are forbidden on religious grounds, but gas prices are at record highs. So the SA govt chooses gas, gas and more gas, plus some diesel in the interim.
Everyone –Elon Musk, industry, the AEMO, even, fergoodnesssake the owners of the gas power plants themselves, can all see what’s coming — pocket-busting power bills.
Fellow power retailer Alinta said while it supported the Government’s pursuit, it was not convinced and thought it “would lead to inefficient pricing outcomes [at least in the short term], sub-optimal dispatch outcomes, increased uncertainty and deter new investment in generation in the South Australian market”.
Energy Users Association of Australia (EUAA) chief executive Andrew Richards echoed those concerns by writing “we believe it will add significant cost to the annual electricity bills of South Australian energy users without necessarily altering the nature or structure of the local market to provide greater system security”.
The EST is a second-degree fixit to solve a side effect of the first-degree fixit. The solution is to stop trying to change the global weather with our electricity grid. Until the RET is axed, and every other clean-green-scheme — every fixit will need another fixit, and so on forever.
SA to emulate Soviet Union
As it is, the SA solution is to get the government not just to pick the winners, but to own them. (Let’s face it, private industry won’t be building two “spare” gas generators to sit around, and do nothing most of the time, just wait there, burning capital, to rescue the state at peak moments. Governments are the only organizations that are inefficient and stupid enough to do this.) The state is becoming a money-hole, where capital goes to die. Only West Australian GST dollars plug the drain.
They will operate on diesel fuel over the next two summers before being relocated to a new site to become a power plant and be switched to gas, the Government said.
The Government has bought nine new General Electric aero-derivative turbines through US company APR Energy.
In his $550 million energy plan announced in March, Premier Jay Weatherill had proposed the installation of temporary generators before a new Government-owned generator could be built.
Together, the turbines will be capable of quickly producing up to 276 MW of energy, more than the 250 MW originally outlined in the government’s plan. The state-owned generators will be tested monthly and only used when required to prevent an electricity supply shortfall.
Those blackouts, which occur when the total demand for electricity exceeds supply, occurred three times last summer.
The power plant will have a lifespan of 25 years.
The Australian helpfully pointed out that other states use GE turbines like this to cope with summer demand — namely Indonesia, Algeria, Greece and Egypt. Add SA to that list of economic powerhouses.
Fast-starting turbines running on diesel will temporarily back up South Australia’s intermittent power supply for the next two summers..
The GE TM2500 turbines, a derivative of the jet engines used by Boeing and Airbus, will be purchased from APR Energy.
Mobile plants have been used to provide peak summer demand in Indonesia, Algeria, Egypt and Greece. They will initially be installed at two sites — the Adelaide Desalination Plant at Lonsdale in Adelaide’s south and the Holden factory at Elizabeth to the north.
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the generators “are the type of generators every modern city in the world is putting in”.
“Every modern city” in this case means Lombok, M’Fila, Rhodes, Camama and Cazenga. Yeah.
South Australia, leading the world in solar-rubbish-power
Things are getting pretty desperate. The new plan is to put the solar panels right over the landfill (sorting out the end-of-life arrangements right there with pre-disposed panels?)
“The solar farm is designed to integrate with the landfill gas renewable energy facility situated at the Uleybury Landfill and supplement its output, therefore combining base-load and solar PV technologies that will produce renewable energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Mr Faulkner said.
“The collective electricity generated from both energy sources will be over 11,000MW hours per annum, which is enough to power more than 1800 homes.
So 1,800 homes will get stable rubbish-power, and the other 727,000 homes, not so much.
My sympathies to all the South Australians who didn’t vote for this.
The Bureau have a budget of a million dollars a day, but seemingly can’t afford an extra memory stick to save historic scientific data.
In the mid 1990s thermometers changed right across Australia — new electronic sensors were installed nearly everywhere. Known as automatic weather sensors (AWS) these are quite different to the old “liquid in glass” type. The electronic ones can pick up very short bursts of heat — so they can measure extremes of temperatures that the old mercury or liquid thermometers would not pick up, unless the spike of heat lasted for a few minutes. It is difficult (impossible) to believe that across the whole temperature range that these two different instruments would always behave in the exact same way. There could easily be an artificial warming trend generated by this change (see the step change in the graphs). The only way to compare the old and new types of thermometer is to run side by side comparisons in the field and at many sites. Which is exactly what the bureau were doing, but the data has never been put in an archive, or has been destroyed. It’s not easily available (or possibly “at all”). We have this in writing after an FOI application by Dr Bill Johnston (see below).
These measurements from past years can never be re-recorded. A four-terabyte external hard drive costs a couple of hundred dollars and would probably store a whole years worth of text files. For just 0.02% of their budget they could buy one every day. Why, why, why wouldn’t a scientist who cared about the climate want to save this information?
The two different thermometers sit side-by-side in a Stevenson Screen, this example is at Wagga Wagga airport, NSW. Photo: Bill Johnston.
Dr Bill Johnston put in an FOI request for side-by-side data from both kinds of thermometer. He asked for six months of data from Sydney and Canberra Airports and was told it would cost him $460. That’s quite a barrier, and that was only to access the Sydney records. Look at what happened to the Canberra ones — the data was gone. No one could analyze it, no matter how much they were willing to pay.
The BOM stated that “in accordance with records management practices”, the field books for early 2013 at Canberra Airport were “disposed of” twelve months after the observations were taken. By mid 2014 the situation was even worse (if that were possible). The more recent Canberra Airport records didn’t even have field books to be destroyed. There were no records to be disposed of.
For what it’s worth, the $460 data fee was helpfully reduced to $230 after a lengthy appeal. The four page assessment cost the taxpayer more than the $230 charge, but it did successfully stop taxpayers from analyzing the data. Was that the point? The Bureau has a budget of $365 million a year – how much does it cost to store a text file?
Johnston declined to buy the Sydney data (it was confounded by multiple site changes, and he’s not paid to do this work).
He commented this week on the scant evidence that was available and the potential for a undocumented warming effect:
Comparisons between screens were done at one site using PRT (Platinum Resistance Thermometer) only and reported as a “preliminary report”, which is available; but after Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) became primary instruments, as I’ve reported before, the Bureau had an internal policy that parallel liquid-in-glass thermometer data were not databased. Furthermore, they had another policy that paper-data was destroyed after 2-years. So there is nothing that easy available….
The only way to compare AWS and Liquid in Glass, is to hunt for sites where there is overlap between two stations; where the AWS is given a new number. This is possible BUT the problem is that the change-over is invariably confounded with either a site move or the change to a small screen.
So, we suspect that the introduction and reliance on AWS has led to artificially higher maxima (and thus record temperatures) than in the past, but we have no way of knowing for sure and how much.
How can the CSIRO hope to produce reliable climate modelling with any number of climate scientists when the BOM cannot produce reliable temperature data? Garbage in, garbage out.
This information and other oddities of Australian temperature records was discussed in my chapter “Mysterious Revisions to Australia’s Long Hot History” in the new book Climate Change: The Facts 2017. Co-authors include Clive James, Matt Ridley, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts. Pre-order your copy now, the first edition, released last week, has sold out.
REFERENCES
[1] Letter from Anthony Rea, Assistant Director Oberving System Strategy, Bureau of Meteorology, 23 December 2014. Reference: 30/5838.
In particular, the Minister [Josh Frydenberg] was told that while the Goulburn weather station accurately measured the local temperature as minus 10.4 at 6.30 am on Sunday 2 July, a smart card reader prevented this value from being recorded as the daily minimum on the Daily Weather Observations page.
Apparently, the smart cards don’t filter out the spurious hot readings — on the hot side, all noise is good? I want the BOM to confirm or correct this. Despite knowing of this extraordinary, uncertain, situation, the Minister still has “full confidence” in the Bureau of Meteorology. A month ago, the BOM said the temperature clipping was a deliberate “quality control measure”, but then changed that to “equipment failure”. This week, Bill Kininmonth pointed out that the same equipment worked in Antarctica (where it gets to minus 50C). And I can add that David Stockwell spotted the data sheet for an Automatic Weather Station thermometer installed at Nerriga. It claims that particular resistance thermometer has a range from -200 to +600 °C. (You might think they can handle minus ten?)
Jen Marohasy claims that the BOM have made a fuss about replacing the faulty equipment, but all they had to do was take off the smart cards and leave the equipment alone:
All-the-while, the Minister has known that the problem is limited to the smart card readers.
To be clear, the problem is not with the equipment; all that needs to be done is for the smart card readers to be removed. So, after the automatic weather stations measure the correct temperature, this temperature can be brought forward firstly into the Daily Weather Observation sheet and subsequently into the CDO dataset.
Graham Lloyd has picked this up and adds more in The Australian in “Temperatures Plunge after BOM orders fix”. Jen Marohasy saw a -10.6C temperature disappear from the Thredbo recording last month, but now, after the BOM’s rushed fix, Thredbo has already reached -10.6C this week in the official record. The Bureau’s CEO, Andrew Johnson said they had replaced equipment that was “not fit for purpose”. Which begs the question that if thermometers were not fit to record cold temperatures, what purpose were they fit for? Politically correct thermometers? Thermometers to justify Renewable Energy Subsidies and ARC Grants?
Want to avoid answering basic questions — call a review!
Graham Lloyd asked the BOM about the smart cards, but got no answer:
The BoM declined to comment ahead of the internal review.
“The findings of a review into this matter will be made available after completion,” a BoM representative said. “We do not intend to publish detail prior to that.
Since when did a review become a reason not to explain a supposedly scientific process? Either there are smart cards there, or not. There are limits set (or not). And there is hopefully a record of the real raw temperatures recorded somewhere…
A Minister more concerned about public confidence, rather than accurate data?
The Minister has things back to front:
Josh Frydenberg: “I’m treating this seriously and am determined to get to the bottom of what has happened. I look forward to receiving recommendations as to how we can ensure that the public’s confidence in climate data is maintained.”
We, the paying, voting, public are more concerned that the BOM is worthy of public confidence in the first place. The way to maintain the BOM reputation is to fix the institution, not bury the flaws and political biases. Time for a real independent audit now. What are they afraid of? _________________________________
POST NOTE: Want to be a citizen scientist?
To watch BOM data come in (before the smart cards edit it), go to the BOM home page, look for “City Observations” (mid right hand side) or click on the state maps listed below.
Click right through til you see half hourly data for each site. (So most days this is not exciting, but if your pipes freeze, you might get a thrill. 🙂 ) Don’t forget to capture the screen shots.
The National Center for Public Policy Research released a report that tells us Al Gore’s swimming pool uses the same electricity as six average US homes. In kilowatt hours, his house draws a total annual load equivalent to 21 homes — averages 19,241 kWh per month. He probably lives alone now that Tipper and the kids have moved out. This is after he paid $60,000 to add solar panels which provide about 5% of his domestic electricity (Why doesn’t he just go solar, that’d be only $720k, plus batteries).
He owns two other homes.
I would never use this as an ad hom argument to say that man-made global warming crisis is wildly exaggerated (there are plenty of other reasons to say that). Obviously poor Al needs to use more electricity than most people so he can swim in between flights, because he is constantly being attacked in articles like this one:
How Al Gore Fooled The World Into Paying For His Giant Carbon Footprint
Jeff Dunetz …The real reason Al Gore wants you to read his books and go see his movies and even see his lectures isn’t because he is trying to save the Earth from global warming and climate change, but because he’s invested in products that will be successful as long as people are convinced by the climate change scare tactics.
Today, Graham Lloyd, and Jennifer Marohasy turn up the heat even more on the Bureau of Meteorology’s strange practice of “editing” raw data. The Bureau says it works to the “highest possible standards”. Natch. So an independent audit would clear them, silence the critics, and restore their reputation. Strangely, instead they have been apparently avoiding an independent audit for six years now and counting….
It is the biggest public scandal for BoM since furious debate was sparked three years ago over its treatment of historic and contemporary temperature records to compile its new homogenised national temperature data series known as ACORN-SAT.
For an agency that screams from the rooftops every time the mercury nudges to the slightest record high, losing a half a degree Celsius here and there at the lower extremities is a pretty poor look.
In reply, once again, the BOM promises another do-it-yourself review. The Minister (Josh Frydenberg) has insisted on two external independent experts, but if the BOM gets to approve or appoint them, that box won’t be hard to tick (just ask the NZ NIWA team). Apparently the last public scandal in 2014, the Minister then (Greg Hunt) killed off a proper investigation of the BOM to supposedly “protect the reputation and integrity of the institution” which, of course, did exactly the opposite. Given the BOM’s “excellence”, the effect of another hand-picked one-day forum to study none of the key issues that skeptics raised, told everyone that Hunt didn’t think its integrity would survive a high school debate, let alone a forensic investigation.
As “blogger Jo Nova” is quoted as saying:
“We audit banks, companies, government departments, energy flows, and projects, but we don’t officially audit science.
“Whenever big money is involved we assume things need to be checked.
Automatic weather stations work in Antarctica, but not in Goulburn?
Bill Kininmonth — the guru himself, cannot figure out why the equipment would fail now:
William Kininmonth, a former head of BoM’s National Climate Centre, says he is puzzled that after decades of service the bureau now claims the automatic stations are not fit for purpose at some cold weather locations.
“My understanding is a lot of testing was done before the automatic weather stations were installed in all different sorts of conditions,” Kininmonth says. “Why this is happening now, unless they have changed their manufacturers who they get them from, I don’t know.
“I would have thought minus 10 would have been well within their scope. They take automatic weather stations down to Macquarie Island and Antarctica, I can’t understand this at all.
“It seems to me they have some sort of automatic collection system in the computer; once the data comes in, they check on it then. I don’t know why they would be doing that at that stage.”
Lloyd comments on the unofficial BOM team — the volunteers that won’t stop asking hard questions:
What cannot be controlled is a small army of largely amateur enthusiasts such as Pidgeon who pore over the millions of lines of BoM’s temperature data made public by the high-profile institution. Pidgeon, a freelance radio technician and citizen scientist, has found instances where thermometers accurate to a tenth of a degree were adjusted by as much as two degrees. Original cooling trends in temperature records were being revised to warming trends.
There are vast areas of the nation where identical temperature readings have been recorded over long periods and places where the daily minimum temperature has exceeded the maximum, changes that defy logic.
Records of extremely hot days before the turn of the century have been erased, in one celebrated case simply because a diligent worker had taken the observation on a Sunday, which was outside of usual practice.
[Anthony] Watts says a solution would be to calculate temperature trends from stations that have a long record, no moves, no equipment changes, no time-of-observation changes, and remain free of nearby infrastructure encroachment.
“Choosing only stations like this ensures that there is no need for adjustment of data, and that this data is representative of the true changes in the surface temperature over time,” he says.
“Until the existing data quality problem is fixed, which has created an artificial warming bias, it is nonsense for the mass media to promote the idea of any year being the ‘warmest year on record’ ”.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this article. Lloyd has done a great job. Credit to Jennifer Marohasy for this and for editing the magnificent new IPA book.
It’s a creative South Australian solution to an unstable, expensive grid: close large factories and have less blackouts. If they can close enough, it’s guaranteed to succeed:
The closure of Holden’s Elizabeth plant is expected to result in 13,000 job losses across the company and its supply chain.
Energy use in SA is set to fall from 3,116MW to 3,035MW in summer peaks. Even so, they’ll still need more temporary generators (time to cut more jobs?):
Nevertheless, AEMO is forecasting widespread shortfalls of reserve power over the next two summers, prompting the State Government to invest in temporary generators.
The ABC and other green-fans think this next point is a bonus:
“Minimum demand in South Australia is expected to be negative by 2027-28, as rooftop PV generation is expected to exceed customer demand in some hours,” the report stated.
They don’t realize that the lack of any demand during the middle of the day makes it very hard for any baseline power generator to invest in the South Australian market. That means SA is utterly dependent on either the interconnectors to ugly brown coal in Victoria or to government owned expensive temporary generation.
Mr Weatherill has used a meeting with GM officials in Detroit to implore the carmaker to give the state a $5 million “community fund” as an “act of goodwill”.
And this is how you make a poor state that needs GST subsidies from other states.
Jennifer Marohasy, Lance Pidgeon, at the Stevenson screen, Goulburn Airport.
Amazing, the power of the media. Suddenly, the Bureau of Meteorology needs to replace equipment and answer questions and set up an internal inquiry. But they’ve had weeks of warning. Lance Pidgeon and Jennifer Marohasy have been watching the automatic weather stations record very cold temperatures, and then astonished when those same readings either got entered into our national raw database as warmer, or simply disappeared. The BOM apparently has a filter set so that super cold temperatures need to be manually checked. Yet the filter is set so high, in Thredbo’s case, nearly five whole degrees warmer than temperatures already recorded.
Wow. Just wow. What does raw data mean anymore?
The lack of respect for real observations is profoundly unscientific. How much does the BOM even care about understanding our climate if they are so flagrantly uninterested in the data? As I have said, the Bureau of Meteorology behaves more like PR agency than an institute of science. Based on past practice their internal inquiry will find excuses, not answer the questions, and will not fix appalling methodology. The BOM needs a full external audit (what are they so afraid of?). The BOM admits temperature adjustments are secret and thus completely unscientific. If we had a team to audit the dataset, as we requested in 2011, or to replicate the data as I requested in Sept 2014, this erasure of cold temperatures would have been fixed by now. How much data has been lost forever?
The Bureau of Meteorology Budget was 365.3 million in 2015-16. The Australian climate is a national crisis, but the Bureau won’t publish it’s methods in full, aren’t doing basic quality control checks, and can’t employ even one person to answer questions about its secret methods?
… this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply equally to the high side records, who set them, how long has this being going on, and where are they published? Are the limits on the high temperatures set this close to previously recorded temperatures? How many times have raw records been automatically truncated?
Jennifer Marohasy points out that these stations are used to homogenize other stations which are supposed the best stations used in the ACORN dataset. So when the BOM protest that they are not manipulating the data, it’s obvious that they are.
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The Bureau of Meteorology has ordered a full review of temperature recording equipment and procedures after the peak weather agency was caught tampering with cold winter temperature logs in at least two locations.
Bush meteorologist Lance Pidgeon blew the whistle on the missing data after watching the minus 10.4C Goulburn recording from July 2 disappear from the bureau’s website. “The temperature dropped to minus 10.4, stayed there for some time and then it changed to minus 10 and then it disappeared,” Mr Pidgeon said.
He relayed his concerns to scientist Jennifer Marohasy, who has queried the bureau’s treatment of historical temperature data. After questions were asked, the bureau restored the original recording of minus 10.4C to its website. A bureau spokeswoman said the low recording had been checked for “quality assurance” before being posted.
The bureau said limits were set on how low temperatures could go at some stations before a manual check was needed to confirm them. “The bureau’s quality control system, designed to filter out spurious low or high values was set at minus 10 minimum for Goulburn which is why the record automatically adjusted,” a bureau spokeswoman said.
A similar failure had deleted a reading of minus 10.4 at Thredbo Top on July 16 even though temperatures at that station had been recorded as low as minus 14.7 in the past. That temperature was still blank on the bureau’s website yesterday.
The bureau did not respond to questions about how widely the quality control system had been applied and at what upper temperature the cut-off had been set.
Dr Marohasy has evidence of the initial minus 10.4C recording at Thredbo before it was deleted for quality assurance.
“This either reflects an extraordinary incompetence, or a determination to prevent evidence of low temperatures,” Dr Marohasy said.
Would the BOM be doing anything if The Australian was not being so dedicated and critical?
Where is the ABC or Fairfax? Do they care about the climate?
That adjustment process, known as homogenisation, has got the bureau in trouble in the past. Again, the issue has been one of transparency. The bureau has made a series of changes to historical records across the country. It says it does so to adjust for the movement of a weather station site, changes to surrounding vegetation or results that look wrong when compared with nearby sites. Such homogenisation is not unique to Australia but the bureau sometimes fails to convince when asked to explain the specific local adjustments it has made, especially if these bolster a warming trend. The same goes for any practices that discount cold temperatures.
The official record must be accurate and trusted. Otherwise, claims of historic extremes — the hottest winter day! — only mislead and public policy gets corrupted. Even if the bureau does have all the answers, it needs to do a better job of taking the public — sceptics included — into its confidence.
Background Information:
Jennifer Marohasy has been laying out the evidence on her blog:
Australia is a wonderful living experiment for nations worldwide of how a people with more energy resources per capita than anywhere else in the world can sabotage a perfectly good electricity grid in the hope of appeasing the Weather Gods.
At the request of Senator Malcolm Roberts, Alan Moran slices up our “Chief Scientists” report (known as the Finkel Review) and gives us some home truths. Electricity costs have doubled in Australia, Finkel’s plan would take what isn’t working, and do more of it — in the process pretty much destroying one fifth of our manufacturing base, costing us thousands of jobs, and adding almost $588-$768 per household annually to energy bills. Let’s ask Australian voters if they want cheap coal power or if they’d rather spend $600 a year to make the weather unmeasureably nicer in 2100? Why don’t we have a plebescite on that?
In other basic truths Moran points out that while Finkel seems to think new coal fired plants are uneconomic, everyone else is building them around the world. Old plants don’t have to be blown up on their 50th Birthday either. They can be maintained instead, like lots of other perfectly good 50 year old industrial workhorses.
The big cost of Electrons-for-the-climate is not just the higher electricity bill consumers pay, but the awful effect that expensive electricity has on our manufacturing sector (leading to the double whammy where people have higher bills at home, and no job to pay them). Moran points out that higher costs eat directly into profit margins. A 2% rise in costs can wipe out 13% of the total profits. This is why businesses flee from high-cost countries.
How do we fix it? Let the free market solve it for us
Moran recommends we return to a free market in electricity, dump the Renewable Energy Target, abolish subsidies, stop the SRES scheme and state based plans giving money to roof top solar with preferential feed-in tariffs, and stop tossing taxpayer money to the Clean Energy Regulator and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. All new generators should pay the costs of the transmission lines required to connect them to the grid, and ensure they can operate “reliably”.
Cheap electricity: How Australia went from the top of the list to the bottom
In 1999 Australians had some of the cheapest electricity in the world:
….
By 2015 Australia has a lot more renewables, and a lot more expensive electricity.
..
Working out the lifetime cost of electricity is difficult. It is even more difficult to find a nation with lots of wind and solar power that also has cheap electricity.
Electricity prices skyrocket in Australia
Graph Electricity prices
Thsoe government subsidies $4.9 billion
Specifically $3.7billion from the Feds, $1.2b from states
…
Finkel Myth: The old Coal fired fleet has to close
Alan Moran replies:
“Some argue that many of these power stations are old, and the Finkel report contemplated a forced closure of power stations over 50 years old. The absurdity of such notions should be clear: US global military power is dependent on its 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers which were first launched in 1972, and many rail lines and ports are over 100 years old. Even most of Australia’s commercial hydro power stations are over 50 years old. In all cases, older established plant has been renewed and revitalised over the years. While totally new facilities can be lower cost, it is wasteful to scrap facilities which continue to be competitive.
Companies will leave if electricity costs add just 2% to their total costs
I thought the devastating effect of a small rise in costs was particularly well explained.
“It might be said that even if electricity comprises 20 per cent of costs, a price rise that brings as much as a 50 per cent increase in these costs might be affordable. After all this would be an arithmetic increase in overall costs of a mere 10 per cent.
Such logic however overlooks the drivers of industry location in a market economy. One sees global brands like Adidas and Puma relocating their manufacturing source in response to two or three percentage points of costs. The reason behind this is the amplification effect of costs on profits, the driver of firms’ decision making. Profits are the residual benefit to the owner and decision maker after all other costs are covered. If profit comprises 15 per cent of the overall cost, a 10 per cent increase in costs eliminates two thirds of the income of the owner.
This amplification is the key to the creation of efficient economies the world over. Firms strive for seemingly tiny cost savings because of the effect of these in the income of the firm’s owner and decision maker. Even a two per cent cost increase would, where profit is 15 per cent of total cost bring a 13.5 per cent reduction in profits. Such a loss of income to the owners would, where the loss was being experienced in only one location, cause a shift away from that location.
A key competitive strength of Australian industry has been the cheap energy endowment that its mining and energy utility businesses have successfully tapped. p35 – 36
Tony Thomas finds an academic (Matthew Liao) who suggests that given the climate change risk it might be more ethical to shrink our kids by 6 inches, or drug people with oxytoxin to make them more compliant. Jo Nova thinks it might be more ethical to fund skeptical scientists instead of unskeptical ones and figure out whether a man-made disaster is actually coming before we start shrinking kids.
The idea is that people would accept bizarre climate-saving imposts willingly if only we could give them the “love drug” oxytocin. He calls it “Pharmacologically induced altruism”. Oxytocin increases altruism and empathy, but I would guess that only altruistic or empathetic people would willingly take it “for the sake of the planet”. The rest of the population might be a little suspect that they might be more prone to being duped and conned while “under the influence”.
The initial paper Human Engineering and Climate Change, came out five years ago. But in academic circles, Liao wasn’t laughed out of town, and hasn’t apparently issued a more comprehensive update.
Tony Thomas spots a few ethical problems:
Liao insists his human engineering is all voluntary, but should be incentivised by tax breaks and health-cost discounts. What he failed to explain is how toddlers could volunteer to restrict their adult height to say, 5ft (152cm).
“We think we now have optimal height, and that we should not do anything to mess with our height, but the reality (can be) much more fluid,” he said, noting that everyone was much shorter in the 19thcentury with no harm done.
No harm done, apart from maybe a shorter life expectancy.
Ethically, some might wonder why Liao didn’t spend five minutes doing an internet search before publishing his work.
He said height is seen by many as a social advantage but that was not a reason to scratch the shortness-creating idea. As his paper says, bungee jumping, tattoos and running marathons are also minority tastes but legitimate activities.
Ever-hopeful, Liao believes that once a few people started shortening their children, others might be similarly inspired, especially if given tax breaks. He conceded that poorer people are already shorter on average, and should not be encouraged to further shrink their offspring.
Drugs to give up meat?
He told his audience that many people wanted to give up eating meat but enjoyed the taste too much. To assist, their immune systems could be primed to react to meat “and induce some sort of unpleasant experience, very mild. (Laughter). Even if the effect was not for a lifetime, the learning effect could persist a long time.”
A safe way to induce such intolerance could involve a “meat patch”, akin to a nicotine patch, that people could wear before going out to eat, he said.
Note the powerful fear of breaching political correctness:
He agreed that bio-engineering against obesity would be climate-effective, “but I focus on height because the issue of obesity is very politically sensitive, raising a lot of issues and, on top, some discriminatory aspects – talk about obesity, you know…a tricky situation.” So Liao put this planet-saving measure aside because of potential backlash from “obesity identity” activists. Anti-height measures, however, are politically safe because tall people are already advantaged.
It may offend obese people to suggest that we engineer skinnier kids to save the planet. But 99% of doctors suggest we are healthier if we avoid obesity, and few people voluntarily choose to be obese. So in Liao-ethics, rather than risk offending Social Justice Warriors, it is better to save the planet by risking children’s health in an unconsenting, permanent change that few doctors recommend and few people voluntarily seek.
Marvel that Matthew Liao is still in his job five years after he released this paper despite his apparent lack of rigor, research and … ethics. Is he government funded? Hard to say, there’s no mention of any funding on the paper, or for his role as Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics.
But his work is a great example of why we need to get academic research out of the hands of academics.
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
Is of much shorter people, a fan,
And through drugs has devised,
To make all kids pint-sized,
Which he thinks is an Earth saving plan.
Peter Ridd: Coral Reefs recover — “the scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way but they are quiet when it recovers.”
On symbionts — “There is a large variety of symbionts and some allow coral to grow faster but are more sensitive to bleaching.”
All the corals on the Great Barrier Reef live and grow much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter than it is on the reef and the corals just juggle these symbionts. 4:20
Corals have a little thermometer built in them, when you take a core of them from many years ago we know what the temperature of the water was back when Captain Cook sailed up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then. It was colder 100 years ago, but it has recovered from that. The temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average on a hundred year timescale.
Corals that bleach in one year will be less susceptible to bleaching in following years.
On the failure of modern science:
Peter Ridd:We can no longer rely on our science institutions. This is a very sad thing.
We are like a ship upon the ocean when our science fails and we need to do something about it. … This science is almost never checked.
Alan Jones:All these things [bleaching, crown of thorns] have been around for millennia, I love this line, as you write “long before scientists got hold of any scuba gear.”
Peter Ridd:These things only became a problem when scientists pop up on the scene.
Scientists are trying to close down, or affect adversely the sugar cane, the cattle, and the coal industry, and they are also telling the world the reef is dead which affects the tourist industry in Queensland.
Like a bushfire… It [bleaching] looks terrible when it happens but it grows back.
Feel the hate. Martin Lukacs in The Guardian blames “corporates” for everything. It’s all a big 40 year neoliberalist plot to trick you, make you feel guilty, and worst of all, to fool you into thinking you are an individual instead of, err… a group. What could be worse?
In the declining stage of the Climate Wars, the excuses are running amok. The Lukacs “analysis” tries to foment an us-n-them class warfare, but will offend quite a lot of believers by tossing their individual actions (their plastic bag penance) under a bus.
He is so busy looking at the world through marxist-colored-glasses he doesn’t seem to have noticed that many of the “big polluters” — the oil and gas giants — all lobby and profit from carbon action. Big Oil and Big Gas want carbon rules and carbon subsidies because it helps them compete with their real rival, Big Coal. Meanwhile Lukacs wants everything back under government ownership, but the worst real polluters on the planet are the wasteful communist regimes and socialist dictators, not the free West and the publicly listed corporations.
The saddest thing is that The Guardian editors thought this was worth publishing as is, and that the feisty, good Guardian commenters that used to turn up to mock this kind of vacuous philosophy are nowhere to be seen.
Lukacs argues that most individual green eco-actions are just pointless busywork to distract people from the real task, which is “taking on corporate power”:
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
We are all Thatcher’s children, he cries. Exploited, duped by the ” insidious anti-social toxin” called neoliberalism. Save the workers!
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”
Apparently you give power to the people by taking away their individual choices:
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Are you a global parasite, contributing nothing, living off welfare and destroying the planet too? If you feel guilty about that, blame the ideology that provides everything for you:
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.
And if the worst polluters are not China, or Exxon, but The Pacific Ocean, or the Siberian forests? Can they be Unionized?
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