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.
Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
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.
He obviously hasn’t noticed that an astonishing 70% of the top ten “corporates” are state owned entities. Yet he wants everything government owned.
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?
“… so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop,…”
Sorry, but I don’t want solar panels on my house.
Let me count the whys.
But never mind.
I have to watch the grass grow, or have a beer, or both.
211
Logic would demand that if placing solar panels on everyone’s rooftops were to be an effective means to battle the so called global warming problem then governments all over the world would have made it mandatory given they claim global warming scare is the greatest threat to mankind. Of course the scare is pure BS and it just demonstrates yet again some governments like ours are just hypocrites if not far worse.
151
Make them mandatory? Our government virtually did.
We don’t have solar panels because I didn’t expect a rort so crooked to last this long. So we are paying for other people’s’ solar panels
170
You’re right Ted. I have solar panels and am aware and somewhat embarrassed that the taxpayer (I was one too) subsidised the installation of my grid connect solar; and that subscribers who do not have grid connect pay that part of the cost of the network, that I am not using when I draw from my own panels. Even though the cost of maintaining that network remains the same irrespective of whether I have grid connect solar or not. It simply demonstrates just how ignorant politicians are of the technicalities of the issues on which they make decisions.
130
Just had 5kw of panels installed this morning. Took about an hour. It was already producing 3kw at 9:30 am. I tried to avoid doing this, but I’m not in the least bit embarrassed. Thing is, I’m responsible for ensuring payments of $108 per DAY for my wife’s residential care. Our contribution is based on what is sitting in our various bank accounts, of which I am the QCAT appointed administrator. So I may as well pull something out for what is currently “responsible investment” under state administrator rules. It looks like being a long time before the green loonies in the federal government wise up to the folly of what they are doing, so I might as well cut my electric bill. This will be at the expense of others.
120
With you Martin, not the slightest bit embarrassed about taking back a small bit of MY money from the government! They only waste it, so I figure they might as well waste MY taxes on ME.
Soon, I will be going off grid, but I may just leave the solar inverter on the grid to sell all my useless solar power to Origin. That way I can arrange for Origin to pay for my BP gas/diesel bill.
10
Delusion is the holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder.
Lukacs conclusion is to take on corporate power – as in fight it. But why would we do that? After all, we are corporate power. We own the corporates. We are paid by the corporates. We get dividends from the corporates. We control the corporates far more effectively than we would ever, could ever, control the totalitarian Marxists.
Don’t believe me? Ask Pol Pot. Ask Chairman Mao. Ask Stalin or Hitler or Mugabe or Maduro, or Castro.
The corporates are us.
Rejoice in it and pass the Champers.
240
Martin Lukacs obviously did not have a classical education:
But the definitive definition, has to go to:
Those who do not understand nonsense are doomed to constantly spout it.
The definition of the term, “Neoliberalism”, depends on how old your favourite dictionary happens to be. It is one of those words that “shape-shifts” its definition depending upon the user and the recipient. That is why it is so much loved by Journalists who have nothing much to say, but want to sound important in not saying it.
230
You noticed!
He’s trashed the 97% consensus, pushed it under a bus, trampled it flat with that article. And Big Oil in conspiracy with Climate Sceptics, too. It’s all individual effort now. It has always been that way on the sceptical side but it’s now officially so on the Green/Warmist side. Sound the trumpets.
Jo says she’s surprised at the Grauniad publishing that; she isn’t alone. Maybe the editors at the Grauniad were looking somewhere else …
40
I am more inclined to feel that the socialist side is winning the long war. Which is kind of odd, because the things I read tend to suggest that both sides – or, perhaps, all sides – seem to be feeling (or pretending to feel) nearly-defeated. Perhaps in a democracy that is not a bad thing!
Nevertheless, all those billions chucked away on dumb global warming amelioration projects…
191
Mark,
Correction – “trillions”.
110
Mark, yes. I too am wary of the notion of “closing stages” in this war. Effort is required now more than ever. With the closing of Hazelwood the war is now in earnest, and the warmists won that battle in a big way, by corrupting democracy.
At least there is no longer anywhere to hide in this war. The consequences of actions are now out there to see.
80
That is classic battle fatigue. Ask any Vietnam veteran.
20
Big Green leads straight back to Big Oil/Gas. Big Green is corporate, a corporate business+religion with posh appeal, pushed relentlessly by corporate media and giving endless scope to corporate fiddling. It’s an even better score for corporates than tap water in plastic bottles with blue labels, since it often requires no production of anything. You don’t even have to turn on a tap to make money from a “carbon market”. And being a millennial religion, Big Green cares little for actual conservation, since no waste or sacrifice is too great when you are placating an angry godhead who punishes with hurricanes.
In Australia’s case Big Green means serious exposure to oil shocks, and in South Australia’s case it means much worse than exposure. It is the Greens, sensing that gas infrastructure will take too long in SA, who are lobbying hard for quick-fix diesel, of all things. No matter how great the supply thanks to fracking, tar sands etc, continued low price point relies on too many variables. Of course, supply failure and rationing are not out of the question, we just don’t like to think about all that. The politics of Africa, the Middle East, the Stans, Russia, all the world’s sea lanes and pipelines…that’s what we buy into when we reject the coal and uranium lying in our backyard.
The 70s have faded from memory and we’re ready to do it all again. Couldn’t we just break out some old ABBA LPs?
251
Beautiful to watch. The ideological green blob has nowhere to turn. Solar and wind are abject failures and the only solutions offered are to be found in a myriad of fossil fuel suppliers. The emporer’s nakedness is becoming an embarrassment. I am deriving an unending sense of glee watching a socialist administered problem surrounded by a growing plethora of capitalist solutions. Choose the one most suited to supporting the ideology (in this case: diesel generation) knowing that it’s an expensive, unsustainable option that buys time to formulate an escape plan with a healthy retirement plan intact.
171
mosomoso:
If there is trouble in the Straits of Hormuz we won’t be using diesel in about 2 weeks. Our blasted government is so keen on the Paris Accord because “it is an international treaty” but have completely ignored “an international treaty” that calls for minimal stocks to cover disruption.
161
Yes, Australia has virtually no strategic reserves of transport fuels.
And in any war the militant unions like the CFMEU would sabotage supplies just like they did in WW2.
100
While we might laugh our selves sick (then weep) at Weatherill’s adolescent infatuation with Musk and his belief in Musik Man’s hyper-expensive dinky-toy “solution”, there is little we outsiders can do about it. However…
The use of imported oil as a mainstream electricity supply (ie use to the point of general dependence or just the risk of such) for a vast region of Australia is a genuine threat to national security and is grounds for immediate dismissal of South Australia’s government. Libertarians/state rightists may hesitate and I appreciate their reasons. But I say do it. Dismiss the SA government if it acts on the Greens’ advice and commits this act of waste, betrayal and vandalism which exposes all of us.
90
According to the chart at the link below a 400kW diesel generator consumes 107 litres per hr at full load.
Scaling this up to 200 MW which is the capacity SA will employ equals 53,500 litres per hour or 1.284 million litres per day.
Now, in Australia a standard tanker truck carries 40,000 litres or a B double 57,000 litres with a road train more but these can only go on limited roads.
The generators will require a continous supply convoy of 32 standard tanker trucks per day, 24/7.
https://www.ablesales.com.au/blog/diesel-generator-fuel-consumption-chart-in-litres.html
80
According to these US figures diesel cost 45 times more than coal per unit of energy.
The insanity of burning diesel instead of coal is beyond belief.
http://www.science-ebooks.com/ematrix7/cost_ratio_diesal_to_coal.htm
30
Reminds me of the time when the Port Stanvac oil refinery south of Adelaide provided fuel oil that was transported by an armada of Alan Scott trucks to the Torrens Island power station north of Adelaide. Now of course the diesel will need to be imported – so about a 30,000 tonne product ship per month.
But a 400 kW diesel generator won’t keep many lights on?
10
I refuse to be a part of any collective that would collect me.
150
It’s a shame that everyone is his own self appointed expert viewing the world through their favorite screwed up glasses that distort reality in the direction they want it to go. My first reaction after reading this was to want to throw the whole climate change debate, not under some bus but under a speeding freight train somewhere while it’s doing about 80 MPH. So how about the BNSF*** line in southern New Mexico where it’s miles to the nearest road and trains go all out for speed with no curves of significance for miles and miles and then more miles? By the time a mile long train of heavy container cars has ground up all the arguments there won’t be a recognizable word left. And no one will ever know where we did it.
And then I woke up. Nuts! 🙁 But don’t I wish!
So how does this end? I can see it heading toward more and more confrontation until violence takes a toll on one or both sides and the usual result of that is escalation to more violence. Recent deterioration on the political front is very instructive. And our past union organizing is history we should all read and understand because it all exposes the nature of the human beast when we cannot talk to each other, cannot compromise under any circumstances and can’t even understand how human society operates. It’s worse when someone is altering the facts to suit their preferred version of the “facts”.
Human nature leads downhill without some restraint and willingness to talk to each other by everyone. And it’s even worse when we’re dishonest with each other.
It’s become some game out of The Twilight Zone or an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.
100
*** Burlington Norther Santa Fe, which also now includes the old Southern Pacific and Western Pacific railroads. There’s only one other railroad west of the Mississippi that I can think of and that’s the Union Pacific.
40
You left out the phrase “main line” or major lines.
There are many short line RR in the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_carrier_freight_railroads_in_the_United_States
Above source says 700.
40
Good point. But I’m a high iron (mainline, long haul) kind of guy when it comes to railroads. Well, not entirely but yes, I always think of the long haul lines that move so much of our goods from one place to another and do it even now when trucks do so much more of it than in the past.
The smaller ones are hard put sometimes to stay profitable. And much of your list is lines with a niche market.
There are also numerous strictly tourists attraction railroads that were once part of a major rail carrier. For instance, the Durango and Silverton and the Cumbres and Toltec were where The Rio Grande Western got started, hauling silver ore from the mines in Silverton over narrow gauge (36 inches between rails vs. standard guage of 68.5 inches) lines to Antonito Colorado and then north to Denver. Both offer a spectacular ride.
By the way, what’s left of the standard gauge Denver & Rio Grande is now part of the Union Pacific and everything else is either defunct or part of BNSF.
When the airplane took over long distance travel from the railroads a lot was forced to change. And now even short haul air service can get you from A to B. And Amtrak is financially stressed all the time so there’s always a fight in congress over whether to kill it or keep subsidizing it.
I doubt that Jerry Brown’s pipe dream high speed rail line will ever come true so rail passenger service may come to an end in the USA.
50
Roy
Standard gauge was 4’8 1/2″ or 56 1/2 inches as I recall from school
20
Ian,
You caught me. And I knew that too but wanted to convert it to inches so I hit 5 instead of 4, being clumsy for no good reason, and off the rails I went.
And speaking of school, as I recall back somewhere I was taught to work the result backward to the starting point to check whether I’d calculated correctly. If I’d done that the flaw would have been obvious because then I would have been forced to look at the resulting 5 feet.
4 feet 8 1/2 inches it is.
This pdf file is pretty thorough, going into the history leading up to 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. It started out being anything but standardized.
10
And by the way, California already has a goal established to have solar panels on every rooftop within the not too distant future. I’ve forgotten the date because I intend to resist until they plow me under. They may eventually pass some law allowing the state to do it but I still control access to the property and they will never get the necessary permission to avoid being trespassers when they come to put the damned things up.
I’ll risk jail or fines before I’ll allow it against my will. You can count on it. There is a point where you fight and control of my property is that point.
110
‘I still control access to the property and they will never get the necessary permission to avoid being trespassers ….’
Yeah but they have their ways of getting around that small problem, for the sake of the common good.
The other day the solar people rang (not a day goes by when they don’t) and a cheerful young man said I know where you live. That’s nice, I said, and I know where you live and you can tell your Beijing masters that I don’t want their panels on my roof.
I havn’t had a phone call since.
110
Gordo,
It’s a great tragedy that you and I are considering going out fighting rather than submitting to something we know is inadequate.
What have we unleashed on ourselves?
70
More than inadequate, its a sub prime disaster waiting for a trigger.
70
If you don’t know where we live, we’re in the phone book.
20
And on the county tax assessor’s books too. So there’s nowhere to hide. Property ownership is a very public record.
I wonder just how ruthless they’ll be willing to get to make it happen though.
10
When it comes to fighting climate change as an individual it seems that I’m not doing a bad job. I can’t remember where I saw it now but some alarmist had put up a list of things that individuals could do to mitigate climate change and, what do you know, cynical skeptic Stonyground ticks nearly all the boxes. Vegetarian – check; cyclist – check; keep chickens – check; small well insulated house – checkish, the windows need replacing. Etc.
The thing is, if it really was a problem, individual action is actually the thing that would make the biggest difference. The clumsy, incompetent hand of the state has a long, well established track record of achieving the exact opposite of what it was intending to achieve.
142
The left wing solution to corporate greed is to incorporate the entire society.
Replace small corporations amenable to legal remedy with one big corporation having the power of the gun.
That has always worked well.
Replacement of the individual with the communal produced mass murder, thought-crimes, and pervasive poverty every single time. And these people *still* claim the moral high ground.
Their pathology is an existential threat to the rest of us.
171
Have you heard of the Third Way? Possibly not and I won’t bore you with the details, but I make the further point that Karl said nothing in his manifesto about deindustrialisation.
40
I don’t think he said anything about saving the planet by removing most of the human beings.
30
Karl wanted to seize the means of production, admittedly there was a lot of collateral damage along the way. I particularly loathe Mao for allowing 40 million of his own people to starve because he exported too much rice, pathetic.
30
Copying Joe!
20
Yeah, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a good look.
By comparison the dictatorship of the middle class is a lot more subtle and varies from culture to culture.
10
Karl knew what all Socialists know. Everyone hypothetically ‘owns’ everything. Private ownership is bad. Those not on the political inside will need to obey those who are.
That’s all.
10
Yet again Jo exposes the true nature of the collective mindset and its never pretty, there seems to be a certain lack of maturity where social interaction is needed to engage with other people in large organised numbers, those suited to a free society can reason that their actions directly effect the quality of their life in that society whereas those suited to a more authoritarian system won’t have the confidence in their own decision making abilities to feel secure in a society that offers individual liberties.
This is why if we look back on the behaviour of those that opposed CAGW sceptics virtually every time their argument was defeated by sound scientific reasoning they resorted to personal attacks on character, qualifications etc.. instead of offering a solution or accepting being wrong, and those not qualified to give professional opinion will eventually resort to a thinly veiled physical threat out of sheer frustration that some people are confident enough to stand alone where they need the safety of hive to make everyday decisions.
52
The Grauniad exists solely to peddle the Globocult doctrine and is digested mainly by armchair socialist latte swillers. It becomes daily more strident, vacuous and increasingly irrelevant, but it gives them a little thrill with each sip.
92
Britain to ban new FF’d cars by 2040.
According to a National Grid report, peak demand for electricity could add around 30 gigawatts to the current peak of 61GW – an increase of 50 per cent.
vs.
Mr Gove suggested on Wednesday morning that more wind farms may be needed to meet the Government’s ambition.
60
Joe V:
Mr. Gove should be booked in for a lobotomy — or has he already had one?
92
Are all FF’d cars now F’d, or is this so far into the long grass the World will have woken up by then?
60
My I wish them all the trouble they can get from doing this? If persuasion doesn’t work, use the force of law. Apparently Brexit didn’t wake up the British parliament.
Lets hope for a British Donald Trump. I suspect he would chain Mr. Gore to a crank and make him turn out a few gigawatt hours every day just to get his room and board. It might be the first useful thing Gore has ever done.
No such luck Roy… Wake up again. 🙁
40
Did you mean Mr Gove Roy? He is a small man so not up to high production! We went to a presentation by him on education; he spoke quite well to our small group but I have been sadly disappointed by him more recently. He should have been left in education; the fact that the lefty teaching ‘profession’ were up in arms at his reforms spoke volumes.
00
No, Gore. The Gore is gore—ing everyone with his persistency. But there are many others I could wish to give a good shove in the direction of waking up to the awful trouble they’re causing in the UK.
00
To advance the green climate creed,
Their doctrine is primed to mislead,
The easily beguiled,
To think Earth was defiled,
By mankind’s fossil fuel greed.
110
Quite right. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it became clear the extent of the environmental disasters that were the Warsaw Pact countries. In 1990 the NY Times magazine, after looking at the former DDR stated
Worst of all was the Aral, once the world’s fourth largest inland lake, but decimated by Soviet agriculture.
100
‘Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals’
–
Individualism is to Consensus, as 0.04% is to 97%
🙂
60
The reported absence of “feisty” commenters is interesting. Perhaps the Guardian has begun to employ Silicon Valley’s algorithms for censorship— see here and here (which includes a section on “climate change”). The “partners” in this depressing development include Wikipedia, the New York Times, the Economist and, yes, The Guardian.
50
Santayana.
Here we go again.
How many times does humanity need to endure this form of insanity, R J Rummel professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii estimates during the 20th century “… the total number of people killed by governments at 212,000,000, of which communist regimes murdered about 148,000,000 …” (Wiki).
50
The Santayana history quote is amazing and like all great science, self evident in hindsight.
So I read some of his other quotes. The one which entertains is
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
40
“I ask you what have multinationals done for us?”
Cheaper food.
“Right. Well apart from cheaper food, what have multinationals done for us?”
Transport and transportation links like ports, airports, roads. Cheaper cars, trains, plane flights. Easier accesses to imports and better markets for exports.
“Yea, yea, yea, but apart from cheaper food, cheaper flights, roads, cars, shipping, what have multinationals REALLY done to us?”
Funded medical research and helped the less abled.
“Yea, look you don’t get it, DO YOU!
THEY — they right, are making MASSIVE profits from the masses ain’t they? They are stealing the workers’ slice of the profits ain’t they? They’re polluting the world with all that carbon dioxins! BUT, but the important bit, T-H-E-Y are undermining your ordinary workers with all this talk of nero-libertism ain’t they. They’re oppressing …”
Hold on just a minute. Who is ‘they’ and why would ‘they’ undermining the workers when the workers help to keep the market system running?
By the way, what exactly is your job?
"POWER TO THE PEOPLE!"I think you mean SHEEPLE!
80
It is odd that people who rail against multinational companies are all for multinational governments, like the EU or Stalinist Russia.
80
Is this rant really about the industrial pollutant Carbon Dioxide? The greatest moral challenge of a generation?
There was a time when the environmental movement was about clean water, sewage, hygeine and the dangers of cadmium, mercury, lead, phosphorous, poisons released into the environment, radioactive waste, excessive use of fertilizer and chemicals generally and preserving nature reserves.
Now it is about Carbon Dioxide and only about Carbon Dioxide. To that end we are filling our environment with all the things the previous generation fought against, heavy metals in particular, leaving a mess for another generation to clean up when the windmills stop working, as they will and the solar panels need replacing and disposal, as they will.
So the fault in all this is in companies, even state run companies, not with the activists and their great irrational fight against CO2. Carbon. Pollution. Emissions. Global Warming. The two most basic molecules in chemistry are H2O and CO2 and one is evil? We, the trees, all life is made from CO2 and H2O but CO2 is evil?
If increased CO2 is causing the air to warm rapidly, why isn’t the temperature going up? The only missing part of this emotional story missing is any logic. Science is not a Marxist concept, controlled by consensus and politics and edict. It is also not a religion. Man made Global Warming is closer to scientology than science.
I do forget. The ‘pause’ does not exist. That’s only the temperature. Publish all the peer reviewed papers you like, it has not changed for twenty years.
70
TdeF mentions that this is all really about CO2., well, hasn’t it always been.
Let me show you what the cost is like when CO2 is (pretty dramatically) reduced.
In NSW currently, they have two units at power plants down, most probably for maintenance, just two units mind you, but big ones, one at Bayswater and one at Eraring.
Also, in Victoria, two of the big Units are also down as well, and in Queensland, four of their Units in the State are also down as well.
So, that’s 8 Units down, out of a total of 48 Units in total.
All up, there’s around 3600MW removed from the grid.
I understand it may be hard to believe, but those 8 Units down means 110,000 Tonnes less CO2 being emitted … EACH DAY.
So then, what does that mean. It means that now, just to keep the power actually supplied, those Natural Gas fired plants have to operate for longer periods, and more of them need to be brought on line.
That is mostly felt when we reach those two peak periods during a normal Winter’s day, around 8AM, and then again, the larger Peak at 6PM, when Australia is consuming between 24,000MW (AM) and up to 28,000MW at 6PM.
So then, the cost?
Go to this link, and when it opens up, it is at the Default, NSW.
Note the price spike at the morning peak, and also at last night’s peak as well, and you can see how much that cost is by just hovering your mouse over the top of that darker spike, the cost.
At the top, you’ll see the tabs for each State, and do the exercise for each State.
Note the spikes and the cost at those same times, for each State.
That cost is normally just an instantaneous spike and then it settles back down, and they usually happen on the odd day here and there when extra power is required. Only now, they are happening virtually every day, and for longer times.
That cost spike is the Wholesale cost of electricity, and during those spikes, that cost is now almost the same cost as power sells for at Retail.
Previously, spikes were occasional. Now they are all across the graph in all States.
Victoria once had Hazelwood to take up the slack in three States, and sometimes into Southern NSW. Now, without Hazelwood, Victoria is stressed, as are South Australia, and Tasmania.
Now, NSW has to supply into Victoria, and because of that Qld now has to supply in Northern NSW.
Hence those spikes now cover every State.
And you know what.
No matter if wind power is good, bad, or indifferent, it makes no difference, as those coal fired Units supply what they always have been. It’s just that now, Natural gas fired plants have to take up the extra slack, and that gas is costly, hence the spikes. Also, less wind, more gas, higher spikes.
Reduce CO2 emissions and you can now actually SEE the cost.
And this is just from scheduled maintenance.
It seems highly unlikely that ANY coal fired power plants will be closing down any time soon.
Also note the cost when power is cheapest, and that’s at around 4AM, when all that is supplying is (basically all of it) coal fired power.
Those graphs make a total lie out of coal fired power being expensive.
Tony.
60
Demented. That’s the only word I have…..
30
The school holidays have just started in the UK.
40
“At the very moment when [Global Warming] demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way.
Are you a global parasite, contributing nothing, living off welfare and destroying the planet too?
You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.”
~ ~ ~
All covered in this one link that is overloaded with metaphors, analogies and doomsday global warming slogans and propaganda:
Going down with the sheep: New Zealand rabbits hop aboard some woolly friends to flee floods
“Sixty-four-year-old Ferg Horne said he had been farming since he left school at age 15 and had never seen anything quite like it.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/26/going-sheep-new-zealand-rabbits-hop-aboard-woolly-friends-flee/
40
Is there nothing in enzed that won’t ride a sheep?
10
I’m not sure that ‘marxist’ is a meaningful description for the climate cultists; Marxism was based on hope of an inevitable future utopia for everyone even though it empirically and probably inevitably has resulted in murderous dystopias for everyone but the elite.
However Climatism doesn’t even offer that, but threatens a horrible dystopia if everyone doesn’t comply and a horrible dystopia (ruled by the technocratic elite) if everyone does.
40
The pseudo Marxists have no connection to Karl, beyond the Arcadian dream.
Picture a world without wars and a very large middle class being supplied by neoliberal juggernauts. The leading architect is China, the human face of capitalism.
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Remember also that when Karl was writing, consumerism did not exist. Everyone was equally poor. No health services, no police services, no single mother’s supporting pension, no holidays, no school for most, child labour, no rights for anyone. Even in the UK, only rich people voted, not ordinary people, women or tenants. Universal suffrage did not exist, except in the US. Most importantly no one had anything. A doily or a doll or a toy was precious. Plastics, zippers, rayon, nothing. Communism was a proposed solution for abject poverty in the factories of the industrial revolution for people thrown off the farms by mechanisation.
After WW2, America’s 25% unemployment vanished. Australia’s 40% unemployment. Most of Europe was a basket case of unemployment, poverty.
So now we our cars and televisions and iPhones and holidays and near guaranteed employment and universal suffrage and electricity and women’s right and what do people want? To go back. Madness.
Marx would have thrown his manifesto out the window if he had seen the Western world.
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Not in his wildest dreams could he have imagined our world today and there is no way of knowing what it would be like if he didn’t write his manifesto.
Looking ahead to 2050, how do you see Australia?
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The element of Marxism which gives relevant definition in the context we are operating in is the policy of abolishing private management of industry, which, incidentally, includes housing. That is the primary purpose of the AGM scam, and it makes no consideration of the consequences. Destroy capitalism, no matter what the cost!
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‘Destroy capitalism, no matter what the cost!’
In their minds its a noble cause which overwhelms all other considerations.
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collective political madness…COMMENTS ARE HILARIOUS:
27 Jul: UK Daily Mail: Tim Sculthorpe: A charging point every 20 miles – but only on the main roads: How the plan to BAN sales of all new petrol and diesel cars in 2040 will actually work
Charging points will be installed at motorway service stations and many current petrol stations, under the plans.
There are already 11,500 charging points in Britain and £500 grants are available for people installing charging ports at home…
But motoring experts have warned that the National Grid will struggle with the switch over to electric.
The AA warned that the National Grid would be under pressure to ‘cope with a mass switch-on after the evening rush hour’.
A National Grid assessment reportedly found that peak demand for electricity could add around 30 gigawatts to the current peak of 61GW – an increase of 50 per cent
The extra electricity is believed to be the equivalent of almost 10 times the power output of the new Hinckley Point C nuclear power station…
Jack Cousens, AA spokesman: ‘There will also need to be a significant investment in order to install charging points across the country, especially fast-charge points so drivers can top up their vehicles within half an hour.’
The details of today’s plan also reveal councils could introduce local road charging to ease pollution on dozens of the most congested roads in Britain.
£255million for local authorities home to the 81 most polluting roads in Britain to come up with new plans to clean up their air
£1billion promoting Ultra Low Emission Vehicles (ULEVs) including £100million for the new charging infrastructure
£89million green bus fund for a combination of new low emission busses and retro fitting for older models. Another £27million in a clean bus technology fund
£1.2billion for a cycling and walking strategy to divert journeys out of vehicles altogether
£100million for improvements to the national road network
Immediate work on the first Clear Air Zones. Councils will have to produce strategies to cut Nitrous Dioxide and this could include road charging
More stringent testing of new vehicles including real driving emission tests
Councils are also advised to study immediate measures to smooth driving, including redesigned junctions and removal of speed bumps where possible
And the schemes, announced by Environment Secretary Michael Gove and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling today, pour cold water on the idea most people who were encouraged to buy polluting diesel cars will now get to use a scrappage scheme…
The overall air quality proposals include spending of £255million in addition to £2.7billion previously announced…
The ministers warned previous scrappage schemes had been poor value for taxpayers’ money and would have to be highly targeted at the worst off.
Any newly bought diesel cars could be subject to higher taxes to pay for the air quality plans…
Today’s plans were only unveiled because the Government was defeated in the High Court over breaches in air pollution limits set by the EU…
A judge ordered ministers to unveil the new air quality strategy to cut illegal levels of pollution from diesel vehicles by next Monday.
The Government also faces fines from the European Commission, which has sent Britain a final warning to comply with EU air pollution limits for NO2 or face a case at the European Court of Justice…
Earlier, Mr Gove told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the huge changes were essential.
He said: ‘We can’t carry on with diesel and petrol cars, not just because of the health problems that they cause, but also because the emissions that they cause would mean that we would accelerate climate change, do damage to our planet and to the next generation.’…
Told the Conservatives had a manifesto promise against more wind farms, Mr Gove said: ‘The Conservatives had a manifesto promise to ensure by 2050 there would be no diesel or petrol vehicles on our roads…
Any suggestion that drivers of diesels should be penalised will be greeted with anger from motoring organisations. They point out that the last Labour government had encouraged people to buy the vehicles.
It was thought that efficient diesel engines were the best way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It later emerged that the nitrogen dioxide they emit was harming air quality…
Town halls will be told to do all they can to avoid hitting diesel drivers, who bought the cars in good faith, with punitive measures…
But if these do not work, the Government will allow town halls to charge drivers of the dirtiest vehicles using the most polluted roads.
They could also restrict the times of day when they can use these roads – banning them during peak hours, for example.
Town halls will not be allowed to bring in city-wide restrictions. They will only be able to take action on the 81 most polluted roads in the country…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4732416/A-charging-point-20-miles-main-roads.html#ixzz4nyPgMSb8
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Thanks Pat,
But it’s all OK. UK needs 11,000 power points, but our Queensland only needs 18. More sunshine there.
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Oops,
The link got lost, after an emoji which seemed appropriate and also disappeared. So, the link:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-27/free-charging-stations-to-boost-queensland-electric-car-numbers/8748246
And the (also lost) salutation,
Cheers,
Dave B
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Prof Ridd touches on Pruitt’s red team/blue team plan:
AUDIO: 9mins26secs: 27 Jul: Alan Jones Show: Peter Ridd: Alan talks to the James Cook university professor of physics about the state of the Great Barrier Reef
http://www.2gb.com/podcast/peter-ridd/
read all:
26 Jul: GWPF: Science Magazine: Scott Pruitt May Invite Former Obama Official To Lead A Climate ‘Red Team’
by Hannah Northey
Steve Koonin, a physicist and director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, is being eyed to lead EPA’s “red team, blue team” review of climate science, said Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a Trump transition leader.
“It makes sense because he has positioned himself as an honest broker,” Ebell said. “He doesn’t think that the consensus is what some of the alarmists claim it is, and there’s a lot that needs to be discussed.”
When reached by phone, Koonin declined to comment on whether he was in talks with the administration about the climate job. But he added, “I think it would be a good idea if that kind of exercise took place.”
EPA has also consulted with groups like the free-market Heartland Institute for input on which scientists to include in the effort, but the agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Koonin or its outreach.
Jim Lakely, the Heartland Institute’s spokesman, said in an email that the White House and EPA had reached out to help identify scientists for a “red team” and called the debate “long overdue.” …READ ALL
http://www.thegwpf.com/scott-pruitt-may-invite-former-obama-official-to-lead-a-climate-red-team/
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‘The idea of using red teams gained traction with Trump administration officials this year after former Obama administration official Steve Koonin suggested the arrangement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in April.’
WUWT
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lengthy, read all:
25 Jul: NewAmerican: William F. Jasper: Climate “Scientists” in Panic: Real Debate and Fact Checking Will Expose “Consensus” Fraud
Michael Mann, the Penn State activist-scientist notorious for the Hockey Stick fraud used in Al Gore’s flim-flam film An Inconvenient Truth, as well as in UN IPCC and U.S. government agency reports, has declared the Koonin proposal to be “un-American.” AGW militants Benjamin Santer, Naomi Oreskes, and Kerry Emanuel co-authored a Washington Post rant calling the idea “dangerous.” Others are insisting it would be redundant, wasteful, and a sellout to the fossil-fuel industry.
“They’re looking to use taxpayer funds to run a pro-fossil fuel industry disinformation campaign aimed at confusing the public and policymakers over what is potentially the greatest threat we face as a civilization,” Mann told the left-wing group ThinkProgress, a “project” of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress led by John Podesta. “It is frankly un-American,” Mann declared…
Un-American? Well, considering that the cost of the UN-brokered, Obama-approved, media-acclaimed Paris climate deal would come in at around $100 trillion over the course of this century, all for the astoundingly minuscule “accomplishment” of reducing global temperatures by 0.057 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s five-hundredths of a degree!), and considering that much of this will come from American taxpayer funds, perhaps it should be considered un-American not to challenge such outrageously profligate schemes. Especially since the alarmists, such as former UN climate chief Christina Figueres, a globalist-socialist, have boasted that their goal is nothing less than “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” And not only an economic transformation. There is an additional, more onerous price tag: subjection of all human activity to a global, all-wise bureaucracy that will direct all aspects of our lives in a “sustainable” manner, and protect us from our own carbon footprints…
According to Michael Mann, the back-and-forth process Dr. Koonin and others are calling for is already taken care of: It’s called “peer-review.”…
Santer, Oreskes, and Emanuel sounded a similar refrain in their Post op-ed, writing that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”…
The Santer-Oreskes-Emanuel trio claim that the Koonin proposal would inject ugly “tribalism” into the pure and pristine process of climate science. They argue…READ ALL
https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/26558-climate-scientists-in-panic-real-debate-and-fact-checking-will-expose-consensus-frau
25 Jul: Boston Globe: The perversity of the climate science kangaroo court
by JOHN P. HOLDREN
John P. Holdren is a professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard University and codirector of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He served as president Barack Obama’s chief science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy)
All of science works through the continuous application of the skeptical scrutiny of key findings by essentially everybody working in a given field. This happens in part through the peer-review process that findings must survive before being published in a scientific journal. It happens far more widely through the scrutiny of the wider community of experts in any given field once the findings have been published. That scrutiny is intense, not least because scientists make their reputations in substantial part by providing corrections and refinements to the published findings of others. This is the essence of the cumulative and self-correcting nature of the scientific enterprise as a whole…
Climate science has been repeatedly “red-teamed,” both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the world’s scientific community. The right wing’s “red team” efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited. Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.
Of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself, which works under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, can be regarded as a “red team-blue team” operation…READ ALL
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/07/24/the-perversity-red-teaming-climate-science/VkT05883ajZaTPMbrP3wpJ/amp.html
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