While careers and statues have died at the merest hint of not refuting slavery hard enough, the UK Labour Party will make sure slave-made-solar panels will still be imported to the UK, and the people exploiting the slaves will still be paid.
We have to ask, O’ Great Moral Guardians, was it because there aren’t enough solar panels that are not slave-made, and if we stop supporting the slavers, the only panels left will cost a fortune? Is the big fear that it will blow the climate budget, or make green electricity even more absurdly expensive?
Or are we saying that the lives of slaves in 2025 are not as important as cooling the world by 0.0001 degrees 100 years from now?
Peers had sought to stop taxpayers’ cash from being used to buy products from a company where there was ‘credible evidence’ of modern slavery in its supply chain.
But the Government will whip its MPs to vote against the Lords amendment to the Great British Energy Bill in the Commons today, meaning solar panels made with forced labour could end up on the roofs of hundreds of schools and NHS sites.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband admitted last week that some solar panels bought for a £180 million project for schools and hospitals will come from China. The country is responsible for 80 per cent of the global supply of solar panels, and the Xinjiang region produces up to 40 per cent of polysilicon – a key component.
Coming soon, far-right extremists will demand that solar panels should be slave-free, and made with renewable energy, instead of burning more coal in China.
Ladies and Gentlemen, whenever you need to cut down the smug and sanctimonious, ask: What, exactly, have you done to stop the slavers profiting from climate change?
Globalists hate workers at home and abroad. Make them suffer.
New “emission” rules for cars started in January, but EV sales are falling and manufacturers are starting to panic
If the Labor government said it was going to make us pay a $10,000 fee on a fossil fuel car so it could give $10,000 to our rich neighbor to buy an EV, there would be mayhem and outrage in the streets. So instead they’ve come up with* a tricky scheme to force car manufacturers to do something like that, and they hope the complexity will fool the people. The new car tax and forced subsidy payments are called the “New Vehicle Efficiency Standard” (NVES) which makes it sound nicer and less Soviet, but really, the scheme is pure politburo management.
The Soviets were infamous for making 800 million pairs of shoes of the wrong sort . Somehow the Russian people had to stand for hours in queues to get one pair that they wanted, and so it is that Commissar Albanese has decreed the kinds of cars Australians will want, whether they like it or not. Like the Russians, we too will pay extra, or wait for years to get what we want.
As of January 1 2025, the government now is forcing manufacturers to sell “a balanced fleet” that meets the average emissions target the government set. In effect, they have turned the manufacturers into tax managers. The government tells Australians “you can buy whatever car you want” — but since the car companies can’t sell whatever car they want, it means customers have to change what they want. This is not a free market.
Obviously, companies selling too many “bad” high emission cars are going to have raise prices on those cars to slow down the sales, and they’ll have to drop the prices of the unpopular low emissions cars to boost them. Perhaps they’ll have to give them away to meet the targets? It might be cheaper than paying the fines.
In the end, it means only the rich will be able to afford the fossil fuel cars that most people want. The poor will have to settle for a subsidized EV, or they will have to pay more for the car they want, and subsidize the rich man buying the EV as a second car.
The car manufacturers face big fines if they can’t sell enough EV’s
The targets are delusional magic wand edicts — thou shalt reduce carbon emissions of new cars by 60% in five years! And the fines are savage. The new rule has only been in place for 3 months and already manufacturers can see, at this rate, they may end up paying $2.7 billion in fines. Insufferable:
In a new front in the growing industry push for Anthony Albanese to revamp his climate and energy policy, Mitsubishi Motors Australia chief executive Shaun Westcott said the government needed to rethink the aggressiveness of its targets aimed at lowering the carbon footprint of new cars by 60 per cent by 2030.
The sector is anticipating the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, which came into effect in January, would lead to car suppliers paying $2.7bn in fines by the end of the decade for missing carbon-emission requirements.
EV sales fell from 9.6% of the market a year ago, down to 5.9% last month:
After a very slow start to EV sales in January 2025, the Australian EV market has shown another month of stagnant sales, with electric vehicles making up just 5.9 per cent of the country’s total new car market, which was also subdued.
The latest data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) (released on Wednesday) and the Electric Vehicle Council (EVC – released on Tuesday) shows that a total of 5,684 full battery electric vehicles were sold in Australia in February, compared to 10,111 in the same month last year, when Tesla dominated and accounted for 5,665 units.
A total of 96,710 new vehicles were sold in Australia during the month, itself a fall of nearly 10 per cent from the same month a year ago.
Faced with these numbers Shaun Westcott said: “There is nothing we can do to force them to buy those vehicles.”
With typical gaslighting style, the “government spokeswoman said the NVES was providing Australians with “choices”.” While they take away the one choice Australians really want which is cheap large fossil fuel comfortable cars.
On the lowest population density country on Earth, with extreme heat, and no transmission lines in most of the country, let alone chargers, this is a dumb place to demand EV’s.
When Australians figure out this communist witchcraft, they are going to be livid.
____________
*Australian Labor didn’t come up with the idea, they stole it from the Democrats in the US who set up this up long ago.
Dr My Le Trinh lost her mother, and escaped Pol Pot in a fishing boat as a child and came to Australia looking for the freedom. But after prescribing safe, cheap ivermectin as a GP and hurting no one, she was suddenly suspended indefinitely. It’s been three years with no end. No complaints had been made against her in 27 years of being a GP, then two appeared in one day. ( One by Dr Gunja’s intern and one by “John Smith“). The punishment is not just undeserved, but abjectly surreal.
This is not just about one woman and her career, it’s about every one of us, and our right to choose the doctor we want to help us.
It looks, smells, and quacks like they are making an example of her in order to frighten thousands of other doctors into obedience and silence. The last thing the Big-Pharma-Bureaucrat Blob want is for doctors to be able to say what they really think, or even ask good questions in public. Few other professionals could magnetize the public as fast as outspoken doctors could.
If they have the evidence to justify her suspension they wouldn’t need to hide this tribunal behind closed doors.
Please sign the petitionso that Dr My Le Trinh’s NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT). Follow her at her X account or facebook. She says: “I’ll be on 2SM Monday morning at 9:30 AM with @chrissmithonair to encourage Sydneysiders to attend my hearing.“
Dr My Le Trinh writes:
I am facing tribunal proceedings initiated by the HCCC for prescribing ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic. No patients were harmed, and no complaints were made. The case was entirely manufactured by the HCCC to punish me for my medical decisions. The HCCC is prosecuting me for not following a guideline that is not legally binding, setting a dangerous precedent for all doctors in Australia.
NCAT must explain why they want this hearing behind closed doors.
The public deserves to see the truth—SHARE THIS POST!
People died who could have been saved if they had not been denied cheap effective treatments.
BTW — Where is DEI when you need it? Hyperspace. It was never about diversity, or asylum seekers, or compassion, it was just another tool to fight a culture war while pretending not to.
Dr William Bay suggests speaking up!
TAKE ACTION – DEMAND NCAT LIVESTREAM THIS HEARING!
Turns out, one of the world’s largest airports apparently didn’t have reliable back up generators. This may be just sheer incompetence but some insiders are saying it’s specifically because it went Net Zero compliant in 2012 and switched diesel generators for biomass ones.
Apparently some terrorism investigators are looking closely at the cause of the fire, but the crazy thing is, that Heathrow was completely reliant on one substation nearby which went up in a fireball yesterday, and never had even the slightest hope of keeping the airport running. The blackout left something like 290,000 people stranded, with 1,3oo flights canceled or rearranged. A bit like a war broke out or a volcano exploded, except they didn’t.
One industry source has claimed that Net Zero is to blame because Heathrow is moving from diesel back-up generators to biomass.
Reform MP Richard Tice said: ‘It appears that Heathrow had changed its backup systems in order to be, wait for it…Net Zero compliant’.
‘They had got rid of their diesel generators and had moved towards a biomass generator that was designed not to completely replace the grid but work alongside it. Their net zero compliant backup system has completely failed in its core function at the first time of asking’.
“Basically their net zero-compliant back-up system had completely failed in its core function at the first time of asking. It beggars belief.”
Speaking to The Telegraph, Mr Tice said: “Why is Heathrow being so silent about this? Are they embarrassed because they have something to hide?
They were proud of their effort to change the global weather by (0.0 degrees)
According to the DailyMail the North Hyde substation fire involved a very old transformer catching alight and “involved 25000 litres of cooling oil igniting”. Apparently it burnt the generator at North Hyde and also the backup. Previously it had been running at 106% of capacity, suggesting they were pushing old equipment past its maintenance schedule.
Wait, what? This failure was “expected”?
It’s hard to believe but in their defense the Heathrow management effectively said they weren’t even trying to back up the whole airport, just some runway lights. Nothing to see here… it is just critical national infrastructure that could fail at any moment or be taken out in a blink at times of warfare:
[The Telegraph] — … Heathrow said in a statement the airport’s back-up energy systems worked ‘as expected’ when the substation fire started.
It said: ‘We have multiple sources of energy into Heathrow.
‘But when a source is interrupted, we have back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place, and they all operated as expected. ‘Our back-up systems are safety systems which allow us to land aircraft and evacuate passengers safely, but they are not designed to allow us to run a full operation.
“Diesel kicks in within seconds, keeping runways lit and skies safe. Biomass dawdles — hours to reach full power, better for steady warmth than sudden blackouts. … Net Zero’s noble pursuit has left Heathrow vulnerable, a global hub undone not by storms or foes, but by the folly of prizing untested green tech over proven resilience.”
No matter how we look at this, in every direction, we see incompetence.
A jury in North Dakota has ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 milllion USD to a Texas pipeline company called Energy Transfer. Greenpeace will appeal, but the suit named both Greenpeace USA and also the international arm, and the damages are so large, if they survive the appeal they would bankrupt the US branch entirely and prevent Greenpeace operating in the USA.
The payment is to compensate for damages and losses from protests in 2015 and 2016 that damaged and delayed the North Dakota Access Pipeline. The protests were so large and so out of control, the clean up bill cost North Dakota $38 million dollars.
Perhaps most importantly, this case may inspire other corporations to fight back. Kelcy Warren, the magnate who owns Energy Transfer, said in 2017 “Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,”. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.” (– Wall Street Journal)
The 1,172 mile long pipeline did eventually start operation in 2017. It shifts about 5% of the daily oil production of the United States. Presumably every month it was delayed would have cost US customers money, time or a better choice, and there’s no compensation for them. Taxpayers also likely funded some of the Greenpeace budget through USAID and the Tides Foundation. It’s easy to imagine how a million dollars here or there could whip up angry protests that cause hundreds of millions in losses…
Sadly it’s now nine years after the protests, justice still isn’t done yet, and the only guaranteed winners are the lawyers. But the message to Greenpeace and all the activist groups is they no longer have a sacred social license to damage, trespass and interfere with law abiding operations. They can and will be sued, and that should take the wind out their egotistical sails around the world.
We’re living though the great realignment of politics. The New York Times points out that among the environmentalists and celebrities who flocked to the site for the protest, were Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard. Who would have had any clue in 2016, that today they’d be the current Secretary for Health and Human Services and the Director of National Intelligence, and for a Republican President?
A North Dakota jury has ruled that Greenpeace must pay $660 million in damages to pipeline major Energy Transfer after the group was found guilty of defamation, conspiracy, and physical damage to the Dakota Access pipeline.
Greenpeace called the case an attack on free speech, but the company replied that “violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.” (Are you listening Tesla-haters?)
The environmental group had said the lawsuit, over its role in a protest movement, could mean an end to its operations in the United States. — New York Times
Greenpeace’s defense was that they didn’t organize much of the action:
The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics.
Greenpeace played a leading role, mobilizing activists who trespassed on private property, vandalized equipment, and disrupted lawful commerce. These protests, portrayed as peaceful by the mainstream media, caused millions in damages and left the state to shoulder over $38 million in law enforcement costs. Property owners faced destruction and intimidation, and vital energy infrastructure was attacked – all under the banner of environmental justice and free speech.
We absolutely believe in our legal defense. We believe the law is fully on our side. We believe in what we did at Standing Rock, and that ultimately we will prevail against this meritless lawsuit.
Of the total damages of $USD666.9 million, the jury found Greenpeace USA must pay nearly $USD404 million, while Greenpeace Fund Incorporation and Greenpeace International would each pay roughly $USD131 million.
Taxpayers of the USA probably helped fund Greenpeace whether they wanted to or not. Only a few days ago it was reported that USAID gave about $25 million dollars to the Tides Center, which in turn funded radical organisations, including Greenpeace. h/t RickWill.
Who knows how much other money ultimately found its way from taxpayers through The Blob to Greenpeace. DOGE may well uncover more.
Time Magazine (does anyone still read it) posted the most incompetent coverage on the topic allegedly written by one Hallie Golden/AP. Or maybe an AI just phoned it in. In “What to Know About Greenpeace, After it was Found Liable for $650M” someone or something wrote three paragraphs saying the obvious and then three pages reproducing a Greenpeace brochure they got in 1995 or something. Their softball questions were so soft it was more like throwing teddy bears — “How was Greenpeace Founded”, and “Where did the name Greenpeace come from” as if the chumpy chumpy promo stories from 50 years ago have any meaning at all in this case. It was so bad I wondered if the domain name was hijacked.
— Political Blasphememes (@PBlasphememes) March 18, 2025
It’s possible some indoctrinated teens want to save the world from fascists — or maybe the Blob strikes back — I mean, we have to ask who benefits from the circus distraction of anti-Musk confected hate? Obviously the millionaires in Congress with their hand in the jar benefit from a decoy story. “Look, a squirrel”! Those with something to hide would like it if Musk can be bullied, coerced or harassed into leaving DOGE alone. There might be some very nervous people in the Halls of Power who are afraid he’ll get the code crackers into the FBI and find the Epstein files, or the grants they arranged for their girlfriend. There may even be foreign interests who don’t want their web of influence and schemes exposed.
Elon Musk speaking on Hannity, Fox News talks
“I always thought that democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy and caring and yet they are burning down cars, Firebombing dealerships. Firing bullets into dealerships. Smashing up the Teslas. Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything harmful. Only done productive things.
I think we just have a deranged — there is some kind of mental illness going on because this doesn’t make any sense. I think there are larger forces at work. Who is funding and who’s coordinating it — because this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Quite a few Australians may have missed this, especially if they watch the ABC.
There are so many ways it could have gone badly wrong yesterday:
Musk on how he built Space X — is disarmingly self deprecating:
Musk: In the beginning we didn’t actually know anything about rockets. The first three missions failed … and we almost ran out of money and just barely made it with the fourth launch. If it didn’t succeed we would’ve failed as a company. I was not a very good chief Engineer in the beginning but i did learn over time and i think we’ve gotten at this point to where it’s very reliable and we are going to be able to take astronauts to mars. We want to take anyone who wants to go to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
On all the things that could have gone wrong:
When i see the rocket i see a list of all the things that are wrong and all the ways it could go wrong and potentially fail. The dragon could fail separate from the rocket. There could be an engine failure on the spacecraft itself. When it’s coming back it’s coming in so fast it’s a blazing meteor and if anything happens to the heat shield, the whole craft is going to incinerate. It’s remarkable that humans can actually go all the way to orbit and come back from orbit given the immense amounts of energy that is required to get to orbit. And the amount of energy that must be dissipated on — upon return. It all has to work.
Even though he is a numbers nerd, Musk is a master statesman at persuading people to come with him. He wouldn’t be a supremely successful businessman if he wasn’t:
Musk — The cost of our debt has gotten so high that just the interest payments on the debt exceed the Entire military budget…
So the country is going bankrupt. If a country over-spends and doesn’t spend wisely — just like a person, a country will go bankrupt. The reason I’m here is because I’m very worried about America going bankrupt due to the corruption and waste. If we don’t do something the ship of America is going to sink. We are all on that ship.
This might be a message to people out there who are wealthy and have a lot of means or control companies. Just remember we are all in Ship America here. Your company is not going to exist if the Ship of America sinks.
Hallelujah — Kemi Badenoch has thrown Net Zero under a bus
Finally, 8 weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in, the UK conservative party says what skeptics and many conservatives have been saying for ten or twenty years. Perhaps they were jolted into action by the shocking polls that showed — from out of nowhere, the Reform Party was polling just as well, or even better than the 200 year old Conservative party.
Conservatives supporting global weather witchcraft and UN fantasies are facing an existential threat.
The GWPF is delighted, of course, having warned about the dire Net Zero outcomes for 15 years. And Kemi Badenoch blasts the old policies, calling them “fantasy politics” that cost the Earth, drive up the cost of electricity, while “not really” protecting the environment. She’s realized no one had a detailed plan, and if they did, sensationally, she says they wouldn’t talk about it because it would reveal “just how catastrophic the actual costs will be for families, for businesses, and for our economy.” In a blockbuster moment, she even admits the futility of it all saying that the UK has done more on carbon emissions that anyone in the developed world, but they were only responsible for 1% of the worlds emissions, and the world isn’t following them.
Her three big reasons are that the plans have no details, the targets are unrealistic, and they’re far too dependent on China for everything, which is 60% powered by coal. Finally, a Western Leader admitting that “leading the way” on climate change is pointless if no one else is following you.
This marks a major change in the Tory party plan — and even though the UK election is not for another four years, it will finally allow the conservatives to point out all the silly flaws in the government climate plan, instead of just promising to be a different shade of crazy themselves.
Net zero by 2050 “is fantasy politics. Built on nothing. Promising the earth. And costing it too.”
Today, I’m talking about one of the biggest ways we are destroying our children’s inheritance.
Let’s start by telling the truth on energy and net zero. Every single thing we do in our daily lives is dependent on cheap, abundant energy.
When energy became cheap and abundant, living standards began to rise, health and life expectancy grew. Cheap, abundant energy is the foundation of civilisation as we know it today. We mess with it at our peril. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for twenty years. And it’s now starting to cause real pain for everyday people and businesses. The cost of electricity – far too high – much higher than nearby and comparative countries with the real possibility of it going even higher with environmental levies.
It’s fantasy politics. Built on nothing. Promising the earth. And costing it too.
She lays out the pointless hypocrisy of it all — though doesn’t twist the knife — did Nick Clegg care at all about CO2?
I remember Nick Clegg dismissing the idea of building new nuclear because it would not come online until 2022. That decision has cost us billions.
Given that the conservatives legislated many of the suicidal Net Zero ideas themselves, there is a mountain they have to climb, to convince voters they really mean it:
…the political class has lost trust. The only way that we can regain it is to tell the unvarnished truth. Net zero by 2050 is impossible.
I don’t say that with pleasure. I want a better future and a better environment for our children. But we have to get real.
Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it cannot be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards or worse, by bankrupting us.
Let me give you three truths at the heart of net zero.
…Reform UK leader Mr Farage, whose party had already pledged to ditch the target, accused her of desperation. The Clacton MP said: “Kemi is fooling no one. Let’s not forget that she happily waved through Conservative government legislation on this, including enshrining net zero by 2050 into law. “If she truly believed this would bankrupt the country, why didn’t she voice her opposition sooner? This is a desperate policy from a leader and party floundering in the polls in an attempt to hitch themselves onto Reform’s momentum.
The Conservatives have a lot of work to do to earn trust after years of sabotaging their own country.
Isn’t it time we talk about The attempted Coup (and the media)?
…
In the two weeks since Elon Musk spoke to Joe Rogan for three hours, the media has ignored it, trivialized it, or reduced it to “Elon tries to explain his Nazi salute”. Here was the richest man in the world, best friends with the most powerful man on Earth and he’s talking without an autocue, walking through the underbelly of the US government and describing the “greatest scam in human history” and the media are discussing the weather.
Thanks to DOGE we now know that the US government spent $270 million on 6,200 journalists, which presumably buys a lot of “Nothing to see here”. Which is exactly why I feel an urge to pass this on.
What Musk describes is the ultimate pork barrelling
Instead of giving our tax dollars to buy votes in marginal seats, it looks like the Democrats were giving away the country, to buy voters to fill marginal states, so they could stay in power. By offering up free houses, free healthcare and free citizenship to non-citizens, as Musk describes it, the Democrats (really, the whole Blob) hoped to gain enough permanent Democrat voters so they could win, not just one election, but every election. And of course, the houses, healthcare and lifestyle they were giving away was largely that of the working class. The elites would live on in their private estates, fly on their private planes and visit their private hospitals.
“It is an attempt to destroy Democracy in America… to make it a permanent one party state” — Elon Musk
At one point, Rogan mentions a whistleblower who claimed her job was to turn illegal immigrants into social security or disability “clients”. This hits a nerve with Musk, who gets animated, saying that entitlements fraud is the main reason the Democrat propaganda machine was “so fired up to destroy me”. The way he describes it, the thing they hate the most is that he is turning off the magnet drawing illegal immigrants in and keeping them there:
Entitlements fraud for illegal aliens… like Social Security Disability Medicaid … is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here. Basically if you if you pay people at a standard of living that is above 90% of Earth then you have a very powerful incentive for 90% of Earth to come here and to stay here. But if you end the illegal alien fraud, then you that you turn off that magnet, and they leave, and they they stop coming, …and the ones that are here — many of them will simply leave and if if that happens, they [the Democrats] will lose… a massive number of democratic voters and if it didn’t happen they would turn those people into voters. — Elon Musk [Edited for readability from the transcript]
He explains that it’s not just theoretical, it’s already happening. In New York state illegal aliens can already vote in state and city elections* (pending a legal case) and something like 600,000 illegal aliens are registered to vote. Some of these are staying in expensive hotels which are being paid for by FEMA, a government agency.
Musk: They’re buying voters. it’s like a giant voter-fraud scam. A lot of people have trouble believing this, but it’s not just real, it’s an attempt to destroy democracy in America.
If you take the seven swing states, often the margin of victory there is maybe 20,000 votes. If you put 200,000 illegals in there, they have an 80% likelihood of voting Democrat. It’s only a matter of time before they become citizens, and then those swing states will cease to be swing states — we’ll become a permanent, deep blue socialist state.
Rogan: That was the game plan?
Musk: That’s still the game plan. They almost succeeded. If, if, the machine of the Kamala Puppet had won, it would have happened within four years. They would win the Presidency, the House, the Senate. They would create States out of Washington DC and Puerto Rico to achieve four extra Senators, and a majority big enough to pack the Supreme Court.
And then they would keep importing more illegals to cement that outcome. Basically, the same as already happened in California.
It would be the end: an obvious fork in the road. That’s why I went so hardcore for Trump. And that’s why the Democrat machine is so intent on destroying me. And they probably would institute some central bank digital currency and some social credit score system. And censorship, of course.
They’ve been doing this for years in California:
Musk: Yes. The Democrats were doing this under the guise that they’re the kind, compassionate, progressive people. But it’s just about hijacking power for money and control.
California is now a super-majority [60–19 in the 80-seat Assembly]. California last year made healthcare free for illegals. Obviously, that’s a gigantic magnet for more illegals. If you’re anywhere on earth and you need any operation at all, come to California and have it free.
The tax burden for healthcare for illegals was supposed to be $3 billion. They now estimate $9 billion. That number will scale to infinity.
We note the Blob didn’t offer free citizenship to just any foreigner — they didn’t seem to want gun-loving Australians or British asylum seekers who wrote offensive words on facebook. They weren’t even trying to get political prisoners out of North Korea. The foreigners the Democrats wanted were apparently the people desperate enough to walk through Mexico. What they were aiming at, presumably, were dependent people, who are more likely to vote to live in a big socialist state.
The Blob clothes itself in compassion and kindness when it talks about immigration, but there is nothing compassionate about selling out the blood, sweat and tears of your fellow citizens, putting their health, wealth and homes at risk, just so you can keep your own career and castle.
And if the Blob cared so much about Africa or Ecuador they could always try to help them in their own countries — keeping families and culture intact and all. But all the billions in USAID funding largely ended with barely any protests from the Third World and nothing to show for it? It’s almost like nearly all the foreign aid money was spent to serve The Blob and their friends, and not the poor. Where is that outrage? Who, exactly, were The Blob helping?
The big question of course, is if this was happening, what would stop it? All rich countries have political parties with an incentive to grow that half of the population that votes for Big Government. That party would be perpetually tempted to give away the wealth of the nation to foreign new simpatico voters. The only thing that would stop this is if the native population found out about the plan… and so we come back to the State of The Media.
With exquisite timing, another price rise in Australian electricity arrived just in time for the next election
As the Opposition point out the Labor government went to the last election telling us 97 times how they would make our electricity $275 cheaper, but with the latest rise, it’ll cost more like $1,300 more than it did before the Labor party were elected. Prices look set to rise about two or three times faster than inflation. But coming after big blockbuster rises two years in a row, even a 5 or 10% rise is nasty.
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER). Being part of The Blob, diplomatically and uselessly blame nearly every part of the system, as though this is just bad luck, even though they must know exactly which single dominant factor has changed in the last 30 years.
Average wholesale market spot prices increased across 2024, impacted by factors such as high demand, coal generator and network outages, and low solar and wind output that drove high price events across DMO regions. These high price events have also affected the price of wholesale electricity contracts for 2025–26.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen defended the government’s energy policy, insisting that the unreliability of coal was responsible for the rise.
“Not a day in the last two years have we had a coal-fired power station not break down somewhere in Australia,” he said. “Not talking about planned maintenance, I’m talking about unexpected breakdowns which then see energy prices spike. The government wants to replace that power with “more reliable, cleaner, cheaper renewable energy”, he said.
“What we have seen is substantial world movements in energy prices as a direct result of the long tail of Covid and supply-chain issues, but also of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the Prime Minister said on Thursday.
As for the failures of coal plants, it’s like being gas-lit. If electricity costs more when we have less coal, what happens when we have no coal?
No one is buying the pandemic-war-excuse anymore. The price of oil is the same as what it was before Covid and the Ukrainian war, so is the price of coal, and LNG. In any case, Australia is one the top three exporters of coal and gas in the world, and so if we’re short, it’s because we screwed up.
The real problem with the “old” coal plants is that we are running them full tilt, treating them like dirt and giving them away to corporations for $1 (Vale Liddell!) Many of the companies that own coal plants also own a suite of competing generators and happen to benefit when some coal breaks down because they earn more off the price spikes. In a fake free market, AGL paid $1 for Liddell, but wouldn’t sell it for $250 million a few years later because it was worth more dead than it was as a functioning plant.
The auction rules for the Australian electricity market means that the highest winning bid that was needed by the market operator is paid to every single player who successful bid (even though they may have offered a lower price). So removing a low bidder shifts the winning bid “up” a layer to the next highest bidder in the stack. Effectively, nearly every big player benefits when one low cost asset is disabled or removed.
The top accepted bid sets the price for all the players.
If we had of used rune stones and chicken entrails to design our national energy policy it wouldn’t be this embarrassing.
Will any journalist pin that Minister down with some basic questions? Does he realize coal plants can be maintained for 50 to 70 years? If we delay “Net Zero” targets by ten years, or even a hundred, would any Australian notice? How many degrees of cooling will we achieve and at what cost? What are the interest payments costing us on our global weather control… (Readers can suggest more questions below. What should an Energy Minister know?)
The leader of the opposition has called for the Energy Minister to be sacked. The mystery is why he was put there in the first place.
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