Two trendlines and the climate distraction converged
Just before Easter, the Page Research Centre put out a policy paper that ought to rivet Australians.
We have so casually sleepwalked (sprinted) blindfolded to the edge of cliff. Twenty years ago we were self-sufficient in liquid fuels, then we got distracted trying to change the rain and clouds in 2100 AD. Meanwhile in 2013, the area of South East Asia under the potential control of China was starting to grow rapidly. It is only now, after we have closed 6 of 8 refineries, banned oil exploration and shale use in some states in an Ode to Gaia, but we find that at a moment’s notice, China could potentially put three quarters of our liquid fuel supply under threat.
“In an Asian war scenario, 76% of our liquid fuel requirements would be in immediate jeopardy.”
The situation in 2013 regarding China’s ability to control supply lines:
China’s area of denial capacity 2013
But the world is a different place in 2026:
China’s area of denial capacity 2025
How rapidly we ran towards the pit, closing refineries, assuming it didn’t matter even after China had been dishonest about and leaked a bioweapon, revealing a hostile intent, or at best a callous indifference to our health and welfare.
Figure 10 – Australian domestic liquid fuel demand and supply
Remarkably, we don’t use much more petrol than we did 50 years ago. But staggeringly we use nearly five times as much diesel.
Figure 13 – Comparison of Australian Consumption of major petroleum products in 1975 and 2025 | Page Research Centre
We are a diesel nation that would grind to a halt in days if the ships stopped arriving.
The two authors of the Page Research Report, Gerard Holland and Jude Blik, lay bare the four options we have, three of which aren’t much use:
1. Diversify our sources — (Good for peace-time, but likely to fall in a whole once a war breaks out).
When war breaks out everything changes. Right now, 800 ships are stuck in the Persian Gulf which is about 10% of the official global cargo fleet, not delivering anything to anyone. When 20% of the world is short of oil, no one wants to give it up, so most countries are suddenly competing in the same diversity game.
A disruption anywhere in the global oil chain can change the direction of every ship that we don’t control, and we control none, not a single ship. The Australian merchant fleet is zero. With an acerbic wit, they ask the core question that both sides of government forgot to ask:
“Given the current reserve requirement is 30 days, do we intend to maintain sovereignty and economic function for longer than a month?”
ie. Would you like to still be a country in 30 days?
And as they point out, our fuel stocks are public information, and any malign actor could easily use this vulnerability to extort our submission. Indeed, we are encouraging them to do exactly that:
…an adversary can tailor a naval capability around cutting off our seaborne supplies, knowing that at some certain future point (determined by our reserves, which are publicly known) Australia would be economically crippled. This allows considerable leverage to intimidate us short of conflict breaking out, since their ability to impose catastrophic pain is so clear. This further encourages an opponent to develop such a capability, since the pay-off is clear. With only 30 days of reserves, and near-total dependence on imports, successfully sinking a single convoy would bring us to our knees. Honing the ability to do this has clear returns for an adversary.
2. Increasing our 30 day fuel reserves is a band-aid:
Australia’s pitiful reserves are embarrassing, but we must not be distracted thinking that making them 60 days or 90 days is “the answer”.
Increasing our reserves just makes the bridge-to-nowhere a bit longer if we have no destination — that is, no way to restore our ongoing supply. We are still in danger of falling off the cliff. No matter how long our reserves are, the question that matters is how we ensure our fuel supply in a crisis? Security only comes from self sufficiency.
3. Demand Reduction: “Pretend we don’t need oil”
Painless demand reduction is an illusion. There are no easy efficiency gains left. We use barely any more petrol now than we did in 1976 (See figure 13), even though the national car fleet has increased from 6 million to 20 million vehicles. As the Page Research team note, even during the pandemic lockdowns, with all the pain that brought, we only saw a 20% reduction in total fuel use.
Even if we all caught the bus to school, work, shopping and soccer, (if that were even possible) passenger vehicles only consume 30% of the total liquid fuel demand. And miners and farmers don’t take their 130 ton Haul Trucks, or Combine Harvesters on frivolous trips to the corner store that they can easily do on a bike.
4. Produce oil ourselves
If a real war breaks out, the only protection comes from domestic production. We can drill, baby drill for oil and shale, perhaps even approve some fields in less than seven years, but there’s no time to waste.
We can also store large reserves of crude oil like the US does in salt caverns. Crude oil needs refining, so we’d need to build-back a refinery or two, but it has a long expiry date. And then there’s the biggie — we can convert our coal into liquid fuel. Something that China is doing at the astonishing rate of 380 million tons a year.
Maybe, if we can tame the Maritime Workers Union, the island continent could even afford to own a merchant ship?
There is so much more to say…
Thanks to Aidan Morrison for pointing me at this report, and Vic in Perth.
Researchers followed 80% of the US population for two decades, and found that cold temperatures contributed to a whopping 800,000 deaths while hot temperatures were linked to only 2,000 (per year).*
They were looking at monthly temperature data in 819 locations across the US. Then they checked the cardiovascular death rates and found the burden of excess deaths is “quite substantial”.
During cold periods our blood vessels contract to reduce heat loss, which is why our skin looks slightly bluer or whiter in colder weather. But even a small reduction in volume makes our blood pressure rise. So it is not surprising that colder months are linked to significantly higher death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and coronary artery disease compared to milder periods. As the population ages and kidney disease and diabetes get worse, the deaths will increase.
Nearly every dollar we pour into preventing heat deaths will end up killing more people than it saves. It’s time Climate Ministry’s put more accurate costings on any policy aiming to reduce global temperature. We want numbers, and during cold months the people need cheap oil or gas to keep them warmer.
The relationship followed a lopsided u-shaped curve: both extreme heat and extreme cold raised the risk of death, but the effect was much stronger on the cold side. Researchers estimate that cold temperatures contributed to about 40,000 additional cardiovascular deaths each year during the study period (about 6.3% of all cardiovascular deaths), totaling around 800,000 deaths over two decades. In comparison, hot temperatures were linked to roughly 2,000 extra deaths annually (about 0.33% of all cardiovascular deaths), or about 40,000 over the same time frame.
Planning for Climate and Public Health Risks
The findings suggest that communities should pay closer attention to the dangers of cold weather when preparing for climate-related health risks.
“We tend to focus on heat-related impacts of climate change, but climate change also includes extreme cold. We need to not only have heat-related mitigation measures, but also cold-related mitigation measures,” he said.
UPDATE: The study measures outdoor temperatures and not indoor ones and doesn’t account for any extremes, but other studies on indoor temperatures show a strong lopsided mortality curve too, so in a sense the outdoor temperature average is a proxy for a cooler indoor temperature — especially in poorer households.
One major confounder in this research is that Vitamin D3 levels and exposure to beneficial infrared from the Sun are also limited in winter. In some ways monthly temperature is a proxy for sun exposure and Vitamin D3 levels. Hence some of the cold associated deaths could be easily prevented by increasing D3 levels, though a substitute for the infrared is not so easily found unless people spend more time outdoors at midday in winter.
REFERENCE
Pedro Rafael Vieira de Oliveira Salerno et al (2026) Cardiovascular disease mortality attributable to monthly non-optimal temperature in the United States: a county-level analysis. American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 2026; 101514 DOI: 10.1016/j.ajpc.2026.101514
*CORRECTIONS: The headline 40 to 1 ratio is actually 20:1. Corrected!. Apologies. Thanks to SH. And 2,000 deaths due to hot weather is per annum.
Engineers were warning the grid was close to crashing due to excess solar
The mass blackouts in Spain and Portugal wrecked havoc on April 28 last year. At the time everyone accountable was feigning confusion, blaming it on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which might have set up mysterious oscillations in the line. They were bandying around terms like “ ‘induced atmospheric vibration’ and talking about extreme temperatures (you know, like 23 degrees C). But all along, the head honchos at Red Electrica knew it was due to an excess of solar power and a lack of reliable generation, because the technical staff had told them what was coming:
The Senate committee investigating the blackout heard a second round of conversations this week between private electricity companies and Red Eléctrica, the system operator. Almost a year after the incident, and with no one yet taking responsibility, the latest recordings demonstrate that as early as January 2025, three months before the total blackout, the company chaired by Beatriz Corredor knew that the entire Spanish electricity system was at its limit. They also show that its technicians foresaw an imminent risk— “at some point , we’re going to crash,” they even predicted—and that they had identified the source of the voltage fluctuations: an excess of solar photovoltaic power and a lack of nuclear and gas generation. Once again, the recordings of the incident put the spotlight on the management of the company controlled by SEPI (the Spanish State Holding Company) and call into question the narrative of its leadership.
On January 31st, there was such a bad power surge that staff at the Asco nuclear power plant warned, “if the units trip, we’ll be left with zero power .” They went on to say that “Solar power isn’t like wind power, which has inertia. With solar, someone comes along and pushes a button, and if they don’t scale it up a bit, they’ll cause problems, and that’s what happens.”
Prophetically, on the morning of the blackout, staff knew exactly what they needed, telling the state’s operator’s control center: “We need more large-scale, thermal generation capacity, which is what regulates the situation.”
For a laugh, lets remember those glorious excuses:
The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.
REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
Not only did the Spanish staff lie to the voters, but most of the media in the West covered up their lies, didn’t ask hard questions, and let them get away with it.
The reports are coming out now, but no one who was accountable has been held to account. (Not yet). Will it ever happen?
Mysterious line oscillations,
And rare atmospheric vibrations,
Showing power failure signs,
In the high voltage lines,
Caused blackouts in the Iberian nations.
–Ruairi
UPDATE from commenter Paulie: The final 472 page report — “Don’t mention the Solar Excess”
For those who don’t have the time to read it all, it is a 472 page apology for not being able to identify a clear causal sequence leading up to the blackout. Lots of excuses, including insufficient instrumentation on their lower voltage transmission network, and operators not being able to provide documentation on the behaviour of specific generators.
Specifically, the report takes great pains not to identify the generators or specific equipment that were the source of the voltage instability that caused the blackout. But Figure 1-2 on page 10 shows that, on the day of the blackout, that voltage instability started at about 10:30am local time.
Figure 1-6 shows how voltage instability resulted in a rapid rise in grid voltage to well outside the normal operating band (max 420kV) within the final minute before the blackout. Again, while this figure identifies some critical events, the report fails to address why the grid operators were unable to deal with this rapid voltage increase.
The investigators were able to do one very useful thing: they built a model of the Spanish grid and were able to accurately replicate the behaviours seen on the day. But it takes them until page 311 to produce a result that clearly shows the source of the problems on their grid.
Figures 4-114 and 4-115 show the behaviour of grid voltage and frequency, had the grid had eight new synchronous condensers operating. The preceding text provides no technical information on the capacity of those syncons, but the results from their simulation are self-evident. They show that complete failure would not have occurred had the syncons been operational.
Had the Spanish grid maintained sufficient synchronous generation, from coal, nuclear, gas or hydro, the blackout would not have occurred.
So the authors of the report never say the obvious! The Spanish grid failed because it had too much inverter based energy, and not enough synchronous energy. When instability events happened, the lack of sufficient system strength and inertia caused the grid voltage to increase uncontrollably, tripping numerous automatic safety systems, that led to the blackout event.
But you won’t find any such straightforward explanation in the report’s Root Cause Tree 14 factors on pages 333/334.
The big losers in this war, apart from some former Iranian leaders, appear to be China, and NATO.
In the last two months China has lost easy cheap access to cheap oil from Venezuela and now Iran. China was getting around the sanctions and buying discounted Iranian oil through a shadow fleet of ships. It was acquiring as much as 80% of Iranian oil production. Now it has to pay market prices and fight for a limited supply.
Meanwhile the divide between the US and Europe is suddenly very obvious. NATO has been shown to be an empty shell.
Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, explains the big picture:
GB News: Basically, is this a victory for Donald Trump? Does Does this ceasefire represent a victory for his sort of strategic campaign?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, if it’s honored, it is because when all of the rhetoric and all of the politics vanish, and if they abide by the agreement and we stop and the straits stay open and … if we’re viligant — then it is.
He [Trump] comes back and he says when I came into office Iran had the ability to make 11 bombs apparently … we’ve realized they had missiles that would reach Europe. They had shut down, through the proxies, the Red Sea. They had caused October 7th — and they can’t do that anymore at least for the foreseeable future. If they think they’re going going to try, I or any future president can stop them at very minimal cost. This has cost about 50 to 60 billion dollars.
It’s about probably a quarter of what was stolen in California under the Newsom regime by welfare fraud. And we’ve lost tragically 13 soldiers. We lost the same amount in one day in Afghanistan getting out of Afghanistan. So if everybody just keeps calm and looks at the actual data, the cost, the benefit, uh, and who wins and loses, … I think in two months nobody’s going to be talking about this if it holds.
We’re in an information war. I recommend people watch this to understand just how deep and complete the wall of anti-Trump propaganda is.
From the Transcript: A brief history of the last 47 years of the Iranian war — “Death to America”
Victor Davis Hanson asks “what was the alternative?”
Because for 47 years [the Iranians] had bombed the American embassy in Beirut. There were operatives who bombed us in Tanzania and Kenya. They had kidnapped people and butchered them. They blew up 243 Marines. They probably killed anywhere from 700 to 1,500 American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending advisers and shape charges to the opposition.
They tried to kill Donald they had a plot to kill Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and they wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador right inside Washington DC. They were supplying the Houthis that were disrupting and causing a lot longer and more extensive damage in the Red Sea, the entry to the Suez Canal. They shut that down for 5 months. And then in addition, we would never have [had] October 7th. None of this would have happened had Iran not supplied Houthis, Hamas, and and Hezbollah.
So at some point somebody had to bell the cat and every single administration said they were going to do it. Ronald Reagan said he was going to do it. We had the tanker wars where they did shut down the Hormuz strait. We had then George HW Bush who said this was intolerable. He did nothing. Bill Clinton thought of doing something. He did nothing. George W. Bush — people advised him.
People say that Trump is guided by the Israelis. The Israelis told him in 2003 it was a mistake to go after Saddam and it would be a preferable target for Iran which was the nexus really of terror not Saddam. [The US] did nothing about Iran even when they supplied these charges. Then we had Barack Obama and his idea was to appease them and create an alternate nexus of power in Iran and then Damascus and then Beirut and the Gaza and then play that off against the Gulf states in Israel and he would adjudicate as if there was a moral equivalence between the two. That didn’t work.
And then we had Trump’s first term — he didn’t want to do this. He put maximum pressure. He sanctioned them. He declared that the Houthi is a terrorist organization. And then they were silent for a while. Soon as Joe Biden came back in, he lifted all the sanctions, all the punitive measures. They got a hundred billion dollars in oil revenue. The Houthis were right back at it.
And then he came in a second time, Trump, and he said he was going to … stop this. And I think you could make a plausible argument that they have suffered the greatest military loss in the history of the Middle East as far as the number of missiles, uh, launchers, uh, naval assets. They don’t have an air force. They have shoulder fired missiles now. They will be resupplied by Russia and China, but they still, even when they had air defenses, the Israelis, the United States took them out.
The end of the NATO era?
Later in the interview Victor Davis Hanson wonders “What’s the purpose of NATO after this latest war?” The US helped the UK and Europe in the Falklands, in Serbia, in Libia, Ukraine, but now weak countries speak against the US and pay the Danegeld to Iran to get their boats through. Iran had long wanted to set up a payment system (effectively extortion) for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, and only one country stood against that.
Finally, a year after the Democrats realized that climate change was a vote loser, the Australian Labor Party are taking their first baby steps to hide their climate zealotry.
Even they realize that bragging about renewable energy targets is like juggling sticks of dynamite when the nation is in danger of running out of diesel. Every time someone mentions the 82% target during an oil crisis, it just reminds us how the government have been barking up the wrong tree.
Make no mistake, they aren’t renouncing Climate Change, they’re just packing the idea away quietly and hoping no one notices. They are testing-the-waters. After the war, if it’s safe to bring aggressive Net Zero policies back, they can pretend it was just a typo. If it isn’t safe, which it probably won’t be, they will be hoping everyone just forgets.
Labor has dropped references to its 82 per cent renewables target in a preliminary draft of the national policy platform it will take to the next election due in 2028, but is vowing to use wind and solar power to bring down electricity prices and reindustrialise Australia while blaming coal for grid unreliability.
Labor sources are playing down the omission of its goal of 82 per cent by 2030 in the draft, declaring the party remained committed to the target and it was covered in a broader reference to “ambitious and achievable 2030 and 2035 targets”.
And we can see they are afraid of Andrew Hastie — they mocked his idea of reviving an Australian car industry, but lookie here — the government want us to become a leader making EVs?
An initial draft of Labor’s platform would tie a third-term Albanese government to “urgently” grow the manufacturing base by addressing high energy prices and “poor-quality trade agreements”, while backing Australia as a potential producer of electric cars.
Sure, let’s compete with China but with electricity at twice the price?
The Labor Government have been caught with their pants down in an energy war
They’ve spent years trying to stop the tides rising by a millimeter a year, when they should have been keeping our oil refineries running, exploring for gas and oil, and setting up coal to liquids plants for national security.
This is the feasibility study for the whole country that the government could have done…
Instead of doing reckless experiments with our national grid, we could have done a practice run and transitioned one small town to see if it worked. If renewables were going to be successful anywhere, it would be in a place like Coober Pedy. After all, these small desert communities have wide open spaces, lots of sun, and new renewables only have to compete with expensive diesel generators, not cheap coal.
Fans of renewables were partying last week because one small town had managed to run for “nearly five days” on renewables. Nearly five!?
You might think this was a new set up, but this is a system that was built in 2017. Basically, the people of Coober Pedy have been waiting for nine long years to get this lucky with the weather.
And the previous record they set with this equipment was in 2019!
In a LinkedIn update on Tuesday, EDL said its Coober Pedy Hybrid Renewable Power Station recently clocked 116 hours of continuous diesel-free operations. “That’s almost five straight days of energy for the iconic Australian mining town, all generated exclusively by wind, solar and battery power,” the post says.
The previous record for the longest continuous period operating on 100 per cent renewables was 97 hours in December 2019.
It’s been a long time between drinks, so to speak.
And the big question is “How much did that cost”?
This is a town in the South Australian desert with a population of about 1,600 people. They tried to build a big solar system in 2009 for $7 million but it didn’t get off the ground. Then in 2014 they tried again, but this ended up costing about $40 million in capital costs, and the total project ballooned out into $192 million dollar power purchase bonanza over the next twenty years.
It was so bad, The State opposition called for an inquiry, and an independent report estimated that if they had just got another quote, they could have saved $85m (off the $192m bill) over the course of the 20 years operation.
Or they could have given every man, woman and child $120,000 to buy their own generators…
And how much did it save over 20 years?
Wait til you hear:
A DSD spokesperson said the project was forecast to save the Government $5.4 million against diesel generation costs over a 20-year-period.
So the State Government spent about $100m in subsidies that it didn’t need to spend in order to save $5m in fuel costs spread over the next two decades. But the good news is: we know our national renewables grid isn’t worth doing. The bad news: we’ve already wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and we didn’t need to.
How long, exactly, would Australia last without diesel??
Google was going carbon free by 2030 right up until it needed reliable hard energy itself, then the Net Zero goals were dropped in a hole. Even though The Goolag has been censoring skeptics and lecturing the public for ten (or twenty) years about the dangers of fossil fuels, now that it wants more power, Google chooses “gas”. Never mind the families that can’t afford dinner …
Google didn’t just promise to use more renewables—it promised to run on carbon-free power every hour of every day. “Climate Change is an urgent threat to humanity,” said Google in 2020. But now Google wants to build a 933MW gas plant in Texas, and is exploring building another huge gas plant in Nebraska.
Google was a key part of the marketing and election campaign to crush fossil fuels and promote the renewables industry, and it’s not even pretending that solar and wind power are the answer any more.
Michael Thomas, the founder of Cleanview and author of the report [on Google’s new gas plant] said that this power plant would be one of the first direct investments in fossil fuel infrastructure that he’s seen with Google.
“Google has spent decades crafting an image as a clean energy leader,” said Thomas. “I’ve always considered them to be the most committed to their climate goals. But these projects suggest a major strategic pivot at the company could be under way.”
Google are still pushing for Net Zero (they say) but don’t ask them any hard questions:
Asked by Axios last week at an energy conference in Houston about how natural gas jives with the company’s clean energy goals and overall strategy, Google’s head of advanced energy, Michael Terrell, said: “We don’t have anything to say on that.”
In 2024, the company reported a 48% rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 2019, due to datacenter energy consumption.
What they called climate commitments are now referred to as “climate moonshots.”
Five weeks after it started, suddenly Australians are noticing the bonanza under our feet all along.
That most hated thing, the unthinkable brown coal, could save the day if we would only stop beating it down with blunt sticks and Voodoo dolls.
In 2016 Geoscience Australia estimated we have so much brown coal we could keep burning the deposits we already know about at the current rate for our whole lives, and our children’s lives, and their children’s lives too. We could keep going for 40 generations.
“Australia’s recoverable brown coal EDR did not change during 2016. The majority is located within the Latrobe Valley (Victoria). At 2016 production levels, Australia’s recoverable brown coal EDR is expected to last more than 1000 years.”
We burned it to make electricity all year in 2016 but the total amount was so insignificant no one counting national resources could even notice.
Look at the size of the Gippsland Basin deposit. It’s almost like God has a sense of humour putting all that in there so close to socialist HQ.
https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/coal
Brown coal is the cheapest fuel there is for reliable electricity, bar none, but even more importantly, it can be turned into liquid fuels, which Australia desperately needs for trucks, tractors, and mining gear. We need to be able to pour our energy into a tank at room temperature and pressure, and in five minutes flat.
It’s great to see National Party talking about the thousand-year supply, and also about a new method of turning coal to liquid fuel. Do the Liberals have enough gumption to even follow The Nats?
— By Abisha Sapkota and Nathan Schmidt, The Australian
However, 95 per cent of that energy was “locked up in coal and uranium”, Senator Canavan said. “Two things the Labor Party doesn’t like to use,” he said. “In the short term, we need to use the coal and gas we export to these countries in North Asia as a bargaining chip to get liquid fuels.”
In the medium term, the Nationals are urging for the adoption of “coal to liquids” technology, Senator Canavan said, that would turn coal into liquid fuel.
The Nationals also want to get rid of the SafeGuard mechanism (Hallelujah!)
Introduced in July 2023 and reformed in 2023, the [Safeguard] policy requires facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to keep net emissions below set limits. It’s a policy to assist Australia to reach net zero by 2050.
“Refineries are covered by the safeguard mechanism, which is designed to put refineries out of business,” [Matt Canavan] said. “OK, that’s what it’s there for, so get rid of that.”
There are two choices in coal liquefaction processes: Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch, both invented in Germany in the 1910s. In the Bergius process, hydrogen is forced into coal molecules at a temperature of 450˚C and a pressure of 170 kg/cm2 (165 atmospheres or 2,420 psi). The Fischer-Tropsch process burns coal in pure oxygen to produce a synthesis gas that is catalysed to long chain hydrocarbons in an oil bath. Bergius is the better process. In WW2, German synthetic fuel production was dominantly via the Bergius process…
For self-sufficiency in liquid fuels, we need 33 Bergius plants producing 30,000 barrels per day at a cost of $4.6 billion per plant for a total outlay of $152 billion. Somehow we have run up a national debt of $1 trillion in the last 25 years and have nothing to show for it. Building the coal liquefaction plants we need will be an enormous benefit by comparison. We can do it.
Bergius plants are the near-term solution. Longer term it will always be nuclear…
Finally, we see a few key topics hitting the media. Things that should have been discussed 10 years ago.
Brown coal could fill an awesome gap in our national energy profile. Imagine we could make all the diesel, jet fuel and petrol we needed yet we were not doing it because we were afraid of 0.0001% more beach-weather a century from now?
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