Australia may be the worlds largest exporter of coal, sending out 388 million tons in 2015, but China’s production of coal the same year was 3,747 million tons — nearly ten times as much, and nearly half of global coal production. But the Chinese coal boom is turning. David Archibald describes the geopolitical ramifications. For me, the next question is what stops China doing nukes? — Jo
PS: There is a rumor that Australia has only 4-5 days of fuel stocks today, and is especially low on aviation fuel. Anyone with info, please comment or email joanne AT this site.
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Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination
Guest post By David Archibald
One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power
There is no doubt that China wants to subjugate Asia, echoing Japan’s role during World War II. For those who think China’s economy might overtake the United States economy, and thus make China a more formidable adversary, this article aims to provide detail on China’s main constraint in that ambition: that its domestic coal production is near its peak and will then go into long-term decline.
Even if China can keep its energy supply constant with an accelerated expansion of its nuclear power sector, the cost of producing coal from deeper mines will mean that the costs of industrial production will rise due to higher feedstock costs. One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power. German solar panel-producers are hobbled by that country’s energiewende, which, translated from the German, means the miracle required to replace coal and nuclear power with sunbeams and breezes and still have a functioning economy.
Figure 1: The United States and China: Primary Energy Consumption by fuel in 2016.
To put China’s situation in perspective, Figure 1 shows the contributions to total energy supply in China and the United States in 2016 expressed in millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (data from the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy). [Editor’s note: One tonne, or metric ton, is equal to about 1.102 U.S. tons.] Coal absolutely dominates China’s energy supply. This would be good for China if its coal were going to last a long time. But China is depleting is coal endowment rapidly.
Figure 2: World Coal Production, 1830-2014.
One of the reasons why the U.K. dominated the Industrial Revolution is because it was the major coal-producer on the planet at the time. China now dominates world coal production with half the total.
…
Figure 3: UK Coal and Oil Production, 1853-2016.
What goes up in fossil fuel production must eventually come down. A classic case of that is the U.K., which provides two fossil fuel production peaks. That country’s coal production peaked in 1913 and, over the subsequent century, fell to a little over one hundredth of the peak production rate.
Figure 4: China’s domestic coal supply, 1950-2100.
Figure 4 is taken from a review written by five Chinese academics of physical supply and energy return on investment of fossil fuels in China. The solid blue area is their best estimate of China’s future coal production, with the peak year just two years away in 2020. Then, after 2030, production is expected to fall about half as fast as it rose from 2000 to 2012.
The implications of this are profound. According to the theory of resource extraction, the coal that is easiest to mine is mined first, and then, after half of the total resource is mined and consumed, operating costs per tonne start rising as supply falls. The era of the cheap energy that fueled China’s economic expansion in the 21st century is almost over. Note the little spike in production on the graph in 1960, which was due to the Great Leap Forward.
Figure 4: China’s domestic coal supply, 1950-2100.
China is now the largest oil-importer at eight million barrels per day. Up to one million barrels per day of this has been going into building the country’s strategic petroleum reserve. China wants to avoid some of Japan’s mistakes in World War II, and thus its strategic petroleum reserve is thought to be close to one billion barrels. This includes a cargo of crude sold from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve at Bryan Mound that was unloaded at the port of Qingdao in China. Selling down one’s strategic reserves ahead of an event that will call upon strategic reserves is unwise. China’s domestic oil production peaked in 2015 at four million barrels per day and is now in long-term decline, falling at about 250,000 barrels per day per annum. The forecast has oil consumption flat in line with an economy that is growing at Japanese-type rates. Any increase in demand will increase China’s import dependency, though it does have a coal-to-liquids industry that could produce up to a million barrels per day.
China’s coal production increased at 8.3% per annum from 2000 to 2012, with economic growth at about the same rate over that period. The production peak is expected to be in 2020, with a moderate initial rate of decline that accelerates to 60 million tonnes per annum from 2028. For electric power production, part of that decline will be made good by China’s nuclear power plant build. As the cost of coal rises in China, the economics of nuclear power will improve. But if China wants to have any economic growth from here, it will have to either start importing a lot of coal or accelerate its nuclear plant build.
Either way, the salad days of China’s economic growth are over. In fact, the Chinese will have to paddle harder, year after year, to stop economic contraction.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.
Originally published at American Thinker: What is holding back China’s plans for world domination. Reproduced with permission.
China should not be underestimated. They can field an army that will simply overrun any other army on earth. They lack the means of delivering that army to any useful invasion site at this time but I would not want to fight China on Chinese soil. I’m not sure that our superior military strength could stop that kind of attack where the soldier you kill is simply replaced by another, then another… …and yet another. Nuclear war looks like the only option if faced with that army. I hope I’m wrong in that analysis.
China is building nuclear attack submarines — unfortunately if I’m right, with the help of stolen classified U.S. technology. A submarine is a formidable weapon that is very hard for surface vessels to detect, much less to defend against. A missile launching submarine is even more dangerous, being able to strike thousand or 10s of thousands of miles from the launch site.
So I think China is still to be reckoned with on into the future. Let’s be grateful that they have the energy problem and also for the problem presented by their overpopulation with, and it’s true, as gruesome as it is, parents abort females and keep males. The long term effect of this can’t be good for them. If hey become desperate and have the bomb, what might happen?
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Japan was thought to be going to overtake the world economy in the 1990s. Then it collapsed into a two decade stagnation from which it is yet to recover. Their problem was the same problem China will have and has: heavy handed top down power and control over the economy with the government picking winners and losers. This process consumes wealth that usually ends only when all the available wealth is consumed. Then the collapse comes followed by irrational acts of violence that makes things still worse.
Unfortunately, this process is often deadly for more than the nation who attempts to use it. A lot of damage can happen on their way out. Especially if the leaders have an expectation of taking the wealth of other nations by declaring war on them. This never works out as planned. Even if it succeeds, the stolen wealth will only be consumed in an attempt to steal even more wealth.
See the history of the rise and fall of civilizations for instructive detail.
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While fine long term planners of world domination; it is the China controlling concept of Marxist commune that defeats them! Other versions of the same; are labor unions and the Bankster unfettered skimming of fiat currency! All inhibit development of personal integrity and ‘earned pride’ in well developed skills. Chinese workers\producers can fabricate iron product as good as any, yet they produce only cast mud (junk)!
Well regulated capitalism, without investment banksters, can produce structure such that the only party more important than ‘purchaser of product’ is the individual ‘producer of product’, using capital resources! Almost every corporation that produces product that needs no paid advertising follow this structure!
All the best!-will-
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‘Well regulated capitalism….’
Think back to all the world economic downturns over the past century, they appear to start in New York.
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I quite agree! OTHO there has been no US ‘regulation’ of capitalism since the establishment of national political parties, (limit two), favorable to Wall street banksters via skimming of fiat currency! Resulting in the finest government money can buy!!
Political party support need be ‘forced’ by populous\voters to most ‘local’. No need even for ‘State’ ripoff. Term limits (one term) would be created automagicaly. What sane folk would even consider re-election. Even the most daring test pilot would choose a less dangerous political office, next time!
Effective governmental regulation could be established via 95% of paid advertising revenue for promotion of political candidate; down to 3% for a bake sale all going to reducing national debt. No tax at all on unpaid word of mouth opinion! (free speach)…Consider a producer of product that you regularly buy as spontaneous good value! Please name one that treats employees poorly?
All the best!-will-
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“Well-regulated” does not mean the same thing as the heavy handed Governmental top down command and control that is called “regulation” today.
It is by means of the corruption of language and the acceptance of the corruption by people without question that allows tyrants to gain and exercise power over others. Otherwise they would quickly be identified as con men or thugs needing to be segregated or eliminated by any means necessary.
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El Gordo…
Socialist engineering by the Clinton administration …not Capitalism…was at the core of the sub-prime loan crisis that’s still largely unresolved.
Clinton mandated and strongly enforced the granting by banks of NINJA loans that were the basis of the inevitably worthless securities that were sold worldwide.
Clinton then with his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that was meant to prevent the emergence of mega-banks.
No sooner had that been done than Rubin left government to join the biggest of the megabanks at a massive salary and he and fellow mega-bankers designed securities around the dodgy mortgages.
So it was a corruption of Capitalism by uber-rich Socialists and the infiltration of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac by such people [some of whom ended up in the Obama administration] that precipitated the GFC.
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I note Maurice Strong was very supportive of the Chinese State and pretty much instigated the IPCC.
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Beijing has cornered the renewable market, coincidence? I think not.
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China also owns much of the Australian NEM..generation..retail…distribution …transmission…and is buying up more by the day.
Google ….’AGL parent organisation’ and you get this…
AGL Energy Ltd is an Australian listed public company involved in both the generation and retailing of electricity and gas for residential and commercial use. Wikipedia
Stock price: AGL (ASX) $24.32 +0.04 (+0.16%)
5 Jan., 4:10 pm AEDT – Disclaimer
Headquarters: Sydney
CEO: Andy Vesey
Subsidiaries: ActewAGL, Active Stream Pty Ltd, MORE
Parent organizations: State Grid Corporation of China, SP Group, SGSP (Australia) Assets Pty Ltd
State Grid Corporation is Chinese government-owned and SGSP is also a Chinese government-owned company…SP Group is Singapore-government-owned.
Energy Australia is owned by a Hong Kong company and Origin is mostly foreign-owned .
Much of Australia’s electricity distribution is owned or part owned by the Chinese Communist government and it’s the largest shareholder[ 46.5%] in SA’s Electranet.
Australia’s largest wind farm and others as well are owned by Chinese companies and AGL has sold its northern Australian gas assets to China, which also owns major gas pipelines.
The AEMO boss …a foreign national…is conducting a huge experiment at Turnbull’s behest with Australia’s future…herding us all towards spending tens of thousands of dollars making our homes into power plants for AEMO and AGL et al to round up into a collective [a virtual power plant] to be ‘orchestrated’ and managed by them….to see if a modern industrialized economy can survive without synchronous energy…or whether it will collapse into third world poverty powered by windmills.
Meanwhile her husband is employed in Northern China by the Chinese government in an advisory capacity on the Chinese grid.
Our electricity system is becoming increasingly vulnerable…especially as rooftop PV increases… to being hacked.
What could go wrong for US?
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Maurice Stromg received asylum in Communist China when Canadian authorities were chasing him for infringement of Environmental Protection laws following him attempting to illegally siphon water from an aquifer below farmland he acquired in Canada. His cousin was the girlfriend of China’s Chairman Mao. His objective using the IPCC was Communist China style controlled and managed capitalism to replace the free market capitalism the world has benefited from over the past couple of hundred years.
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Maurice Strong lived put his final years in China. I wonder who got his billions earned while setting up the climate scam?
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“The consummate sleazebag, thief and all-round corruptocrat who launched and shaped the UN effort to rid the world of CO2 has died, appropriately enough as his heirs gather in Paris to rob the world blind. Good riddance”.
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/12/discovering-maurice-strong/
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‘They can field an army that will simply overrun any other army on earth.’
Those days are over, they have been downsizing for more than a decade. Smart weapons and more robotics are the future, no value in having a battalion of your best crack troops wiped out by a well placed nuke.
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Hot off the press from Beijing’s propaganda wing.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201801/05/WS5a4ea568a31008cf16da5260.html
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Much of China’s advanced military and other technology has been stolen from the USA, much of it by “students” allowed to work on classified projects during the Obama and previous traitorous regimes.
It has also been stolen from Australia and many other places as well.
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Beijing plays hard ball.
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I agree. Physical science and technology (measurement) cannot be long remain hidden via fake political classification. The discovery must become free! Only all-knowing GOD limits discovery for good reason. Fox, Raccoons and Meerkats shall remain -more self-aware than Humans can possibly become. 🙂
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Roy, if everything i have read about Scalar technology is correct, nukes are already impotent old tech. Nuke subs could be disabled and nuke warheads dudded remotely.
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What is your could be? Just what makes you think anything you have read of your so called Scalar technology can possibly be correct? Have you any reproducible measurement whatsoever?
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Will:
It’s “the Return of the Pseudo Scientists” .
Read Aaall ABout IT wondrous miracles, free energy and hugely powerful weapons, No Bull, it’s all TRUE …
etc, etc, etc.
Reputed to be able to do anything.
Shhhhh … don’t tell anyone about this:
Top Secret Links Page.
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I prefer Vector Technology. Then you know exactly where it’s pointing.
Scalar stuff only has Magnitude and is therefore, without Direction, vastly more dangerous to its user than it is to other folk.
🙂
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MAYBE! OTOH A 100g apple stuck to high tree-branch overhead is dangerous if (vector) support is eliminated; as (vector) weight is initiated, and vector mv (momentum) quickly increases. While 100g higher altitude airmass having only scalar pressure exhibits no danger! 🙂
01
… probably because it’s breathable. Airmass will have oxygen in it.
🙂
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With the apple, you know the vector when the support is removed and if you’re too slow to get out of its way, too bad. Besides, if starting point is high enough the apple goes splat and disintegrates. 🙂
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Steve,
While I don’t have any evidence pointing to that’s being impossible, I’ll still doubt it until I see it in someone’s hands. Big promises for the future don’t always become reality. And frankly, I’m thinking our military planners are very worried about the possibility of sophisticated attack submarines patrolling the international watters that China wants to forbid us to sail in.
China already threatens us with air power. I’ve not looked into the actual threat that represents but I’m confident that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can defend itself from air attack. But the submarine remains a real threat as far as I can see. And they appear willing to build them in overwhelming numbers. How many they will actually build remains to be seen. But that threat bothers me a lot.
00
Due to China’s selective breeding of males as a result of a manipulated one child policy, (must have had an astounding number of abortions), China will have 80 million spare men so will have unlimited ground troops available. They could ship these soldiers to Australia unarmed as I doubt that the Australian armed forces have 80 million bullets.
Historically, any country that has had exceeded if makes has been destabilised, China is unlikely to become an exception to this and so China will almost certainly seek to forment a war somewhere.
00
‘China will almost certainly seek to forment a war somewhere.’
Not true, fake news, only the European types have a history of fermenting world wars.
Beijing is a benevolent dictatorship and Xi is on record as saying that war is a waste of resources.
30
I’m inclined to agree with you, el gordo.
00
Let’s hit them now, before they do!
But wait, should we hit the Russians or the Chinese first?
Or maybe we should start with North Korea and Iran?
I am confused…
01
The “balance” between the US and China is asymmetric.
A submarine is detectable at the moment it launches one of its missiles. The Reagan Starwars initiative was designed to a) knock out those missiles during the period they track outside of the earths atmosphere; and b) pinpoint the geographical location of the submarine at the time of launch. I have no idea if that initiative is still ongoing.
The population asymmetry is the real kicker. China can breed, and train, soldiers faster than any other nation in the world, a) because they start from a much higher base, and b) because they have a highly diversified gene pool to draw upon. The “two child” program was intended to produce a predominance of males from that gene pool. The biggest problems facing China, in breeding a fighting army, are those of language, and highly diverse social structures.
120
Have you considered that modern ocean submerged launch platform can be well away from any detectable surface launch location? The semi-orbital carrier re-establishes dynamic surface GPS, and Star tracker ephemeris, prior to proper release of each ballistic warhead. Please stop insulting Momma, child! 🙂
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I will bow down to your superior, and undoubtedly more current, knowledge in these matters. I have thankfully been well away from the technological details of the game, for some time.
But I am a curious being. In what way have I been “insulting Momma”, Bro?
40
Preface: “Please stop insulting Momma, child! :-)”
Rereke Whakaaro January 6, 2018 4:34 pm
Not specific to you RW, a generalized admonishment against ‘hubris’ and resulting ‘nemesis’! 🙂 Religions promote all knowing ‘God the father’ sometimes ‘the son’ and\or ‘the spook’ but deliberately ignore eternal Momma! Christ became ‘man’ for the understanding, no matter how much you learn, you ain’t gonna keep up with Momma
All the best!-will-
01
Israel has developed an exoatmospheric interceptor, the Arrow 3.
https://youtu.be/g3W0-h-0G2g
https://youtu.be/GYSNWQVKxRg
20
Jo, Senator elect Jim Molan made a comment on Australia’s fuel security (or lack thereof) yesterday. It was based on a paper written by John Blackburn a few years ago. It is in two parts:
https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=86e8dfbc-1467-47fe-ad1e-bc635407ecf8&subId=301736
http://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=677ff8dd-ce35-40ee-9af8-bfec1e43d125&subId=301736
Nothing new in this paper. About 20 years ago, I wrote a short paper on a similar topic, the supply of aviation fuel in Australia, and concluded that, with closure of Australian refineries that were occurring then, and the specific quality of Australian crude oil (heavier distillates than crude oil from the Middle East), Australia was already completely dependent on oil imports for Aviation fuel.
The point Jim Molan was making was that the Federal Government has no mandated “strategic reserve” for fuel stocks for military use in the event of Australia being isolated. That problem is not just about storage, but also about where the fuel storage is located, and the distribution systems needed to get it to where the military would need it. The distribution system has changed considerably, as more northern centres have been connected to natural gas and switched from diesel generators to natural gas. Gas pipelines have replaced fuel storage, with a consequent reduction in road transport capacity for fuel as well.
A similar problem appears to be happening in the US north east, where power generation has switched to natural gas, and companies have run down their coal storage backup. In that case, in winter, they compete with domestic users for the limited gas supplies, and are surprised to find that snow prevents resupply of coal, when they run out. Storage and distribution need to be considered together. The question is always about the “worst case” that commercial companies should plan to, and if that is insufficient, who pays them to change either the storage capacity or the means of distribution.
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“Worst case” tends to be one of those corporate behaviors that needs a bit of regulation.
We try to define circumstances where the corporation should value security over profit,
and try to gain compliance through mandates, threats, or incentives.
An “astute” company in today’s environment is running “Just In Time”, and market disruptions
(which we have minimized) are accepted costs which can be laid off on consumers, customers, and governance.
There are still jurisdictions where a year’s coal is stored on site — as coal is our easiest,least volatile,
and cheapest to store fuel these coals plants are counted on to make up shortfalls.
The margins in the US get tighter every storm; in the UK, and apparantly, Australia margins are a thing of he past.
At least the company (usually) measures the risks and can respond to incentives. Putting industry into the hands of
the politically active where neither profit nor security are considered is……but you all know this.
We have all knows it culturally since we were preached to about seven fat years followed by seven lean years….
yet another reason to debase & destroy our share culture before embarking on the environmental windmill tilt.
00
Thanks for the nice energy assessment of China. Certainly an important topic that needs to be addressed by the US and its allies. Just as China’s fossil fuels start to decline, those in the US will be growing (assuming the Democrat/leftists in the US not get back in control).
80
With the info in the above posted article, one could argue there maybe competition between India and China for resource opportunities such as the Adani coal project in the state of Queensland.
20
I do not beleive some of the statistics. Firstly, there are different grades of coal. China is importing mainly coking from Australia. China has limited supplies of thid coal and wishes to use the high quality Australian coal while it can at reasonable price. China has 100s years supply of steaming black coal and lignites much in the north west which has not been exploited. Secondly, Chinas nuclear capacity is under reported by about half. Further the planned nuclear power stations will make it the largest nuclear country in the world. China has huge hydro capabilities in Tibet.
20
US fossil reserves are not growing. We are bending the cost curve for each new unit of energy acquired downward; reducing the rate of increase of acquisition cost for most, and, where the burden was almost entirely regulatory, actually reducing the unit cost a bit.
00
Australia has lots of coal (unless we export it all trying to sustain our unsustainable policies) but is short of oil. Maybe we should look at coal to liquids. And some rational thinking about nuclear if that is possible.
180
That would be a good plan but I doubt that Australia has the political leadership capable of it.
220
? about 250,000 barrels per day per annum
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Given the timeframe of this post, out to 2100, other regions and countries become important. The nations of South America, Africa, and India are growing, and improving (I think).
India 1.7 B (2065 ?)
https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/2050/
China 1.35 B (2030)
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/
Note the bulge for China at ages 55 to 70.
There is a phrase: Demographics is Destiny.
And another: They call Economics the Dismal Science.
Perhaps the last is because its practitioners are so often wrong.
31
Economics is called the Dismal Science as one of the first practitioners was Malthus (of the Malthusian Doctrine). Then later when folks realized that many economic outcomes and “problems” for people were more generally unsolvable.
A key one of these is the implications of “Marginal Propensity To Invest”. It basically says poor people eat all their seed corn and only rich folks can afford to do investment; so for any economy to grow, you need someone as the Fat Wallet to do the investing and not bother with feeding all the poor people everything they want. Yeah, that’s dismal…
Oh, and it doesn’t matter if the Fat Wallet is John D. Rockefeller or Stalin, someone has to tell a lot of someone else’s that they don’t eat tonight as The Boss want’s to build a new rail road…
On the post topic:
China has a very active modular nuke power plant program. They will, when needed, just start building a lot of nuke plants.
Per Starwars:
We (the USA) have a very good and very active sub-hunter program along with various devices that can shoot down missiles. The US Navy has just started field testing for Rail Guns and Laser defense weapons. That’s in addition to our regular fuel driven anti-missile systems. We can build all we need as we need them… Then there is that minor issue of just under 7000 nuclear weapons we can deliver on target anywhere we want any time we want… We can totally swamp any anti-missile system out there on “the other side” right now and for years to come. That is in addition to our stealth craft that take out anti-whatzit sites on the other side at the start of any war…
On the ground in Asia? Yeah, that’s a problem. It would require asymmetrical warfare that would likely mean nukes or a heck of a lot of machine driven firepower. Then again, we get “kill ratios” of 10:1 up to 100:1 at present, so “doable” even without nukes. (Once air dominance is achieved, a Specter type Gunship – whatever the current model is called – can chew up whatever is on the ground in the way of massed army, and you can’t hide a million-man army in the bushes…)
While I would not want to have such a war, I’m not losing sleep over it either.
Now given another decade or two of technical advances by China, it might be a different matter.
120
‘Then there is that minor issue of just under 7000 nuclear weapons we can deliver on target anywhere we want any time we want…’
Yeah it seems Donald has been boasting, the man is a bombastic individual with an empty head.
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Elgordo you say that as if it’s a bad thing , Trump is proof that the limp wristed Poncy presidents of past had no idea of how to deal with the likes of Kim Jong yuk.
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In his recent meeting with Xi he said the carrot and stick approach is the best way forward and Xi replied that its on your head, make sure its not a preemptive strike.
Since then China has been setting up huge refugee camps on their border with North Korea, its the precautionary principle.
10
No refugee anything; only armed forces to keep Nork invaders out of china!
00
Dizzy Dean (1934): “It’s not bragging if you can do it. Me and Paul’ll win 45 games this year.”
Dizzy won 30 and Paul 19.
Your bias is showing. Important. Take Donald seriously, but not literally. He is playing the MSM like a fine violin.
211
Donald is an intellectual featherweight.
When he became President (which he never expected to win) all he had to say was CO2 doesn’t cause global warming and everything else would have slotted into place.
06
If he was “an intellectual lightweight” he may have publicly said that about CO2 – which would have been a major strategic blunder for no long term gain. But he is not, so he didn’t. Instead they are methodically demolishing the CAGW apparatus, which takes a great deal of finesse given how entrenched it became in the US government under the real intellectual lightweight, Obama.
120
‘…..a major strategic blunder for no long term gain.’
Trump quits the IPCC, then Pruitt pulls out a hatchet and the bedwetters leave in droves, its only tinkering.
As head of the so called ‘free world’ he should have started a debate on the benefits of global warming and the danger of imminent cooling, but he took the advice of his daughter and nothing has changed.
01
I disagree.
The debate has been ramped up due to those actions. But as a regular reader of this blog must know, what should be a rational debate about real scientific evidence is definitely not one. For that you need two HONEST sides and the CAGW side and its scientutes have no scruples or honesty. They don’t care about scientific evidence at all. That will be important later, but right now its like debating with trapped, stupid lizard.
It is all about power and money (and world government). So the withdrawal from the Paris deal was the most effective thing he could have done at the time because that gets right to those points. By just sticking to the ‘bad economic deal for Americans’ it made basic common sense to most people possible. If he had said (out loud) that the whole CO2 story was just a political tool and a scientific fraud, the CAGW gang would have been hysterically screaming ‘denier!’ and ‘anti-science!’ and ‘97%!’ and many others would have been swayed by that screaming too – which would have created another whole pointless distraction. It was already bad enough.
Lots of politicians know the CAGW story is BS – but they don’t say that… yet.
Worth noting that Trump’s ‘America First’ policy is, in itself, a good kick to the New World Order Gang and that’s who is ultimately pushing the CAGW Lie.
So, be patient. It is happening. Just like the whole ‘Russian meddling’ thing that has now turned around completely and put the real corrupt players in the spotlight. You may not be aware of what’s happening on that front because the MSM propaganda machine is desperately trying to ignore it… major events on the horizon!
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Donald has had a year to utter the words ‘carbon dioxide does not cause global warming’, in my book its a massive fail and there is nothing on the horizon.
After the Russian scandal do you think he’ll get a second term?
00
“After the Russian scandal do you think he’ll get a second term?”
el gordo, you are a little out of date on that “Russian scandal” thing. Not surprising as the MSM propaganda machine is still flogging it while burying the emerging real story… but they can’t keep hiding it for much longer. Here’s the best summary on what’s really going on, from a great independent investigator. You can easily follow the links in it to substantiate everything in it.
“This outline is the story of how the FBI Counterintelligence Division and DOJ National Security Division were weaponized. This outline is the full story of what House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is currently working to expose. This outline exposes the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. This outline is also the story of how one man’s action likely saved our constitutional republic.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/05/operation-condor-how-nsa-director-mike-rogers-saved-the-u-s-from-a-massive-constitutional-crisis/
On other tangents, did you know that there is now a new investigation into the Clinton Foundation?
Did you know about Trump’s Executive Order about clamping down on corruption? It is ‘huge’ buried news that has major implications. It is officially called “Executive Order Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption.”
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/12/26/2017-27925/blocking-the-property-of-persons-involved-in-serious-human-rights-abuse-or-corruption
Just googled to get you a link that would explain its implications and, surprise, surprise, Google has buried it too except for this link with a convenient Russia connection:
“On December 21, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that would strike fear in the hearts of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and every corrupt actor in their international cabal that coalesced behind closed doors in an effort to install Hillary Clinton as President in 2016. The EO follows news of an FEC complaint blasting the money laundering scheme devised as part of the covert arrangements Clinton, Obama, the Democratic Party, big media, and big tech used to undermine democracy in 2016.”
https://www.therussophile.org/trump-executive-order-could-mean-killarys-goose-is-cooked.html/
So, yes, I think he’s headed for a second term unless they Kennedy him.
20
You appear have selected as sources for your “information” a couple of very highly dubious websites known mainly for peddling made-up nonsense.
Trump and his team’s ties to Russia are now general knowledge. Laws were broken, some charges have been laid and guilty pleas have been entered.
If you were interested in learning the facts (as opposed to swallowing lies from kooky websites) you might to read something sensible on the issue, for example:
https://20committee.com/2017/10/31/the-trump-campaigns-spy-ties-to-moscow-have-been-exposed/
11
Nice try Craig.
10
Total bull sheit Craig.
But then you were never very discriminating when a glass of cool-aid appears in front of you.
10
I’m extremely grateful that the Donald is not an intellectual. “There are none so stupid as an intellectual.”
00
Every one of those US 7000 thermo-nuclear warheads and delivery has been vetted by every other nation with thermo-nuclear capability. P45 seems to be suggesting that others play nice also!
All the best!-will-
21
In line with E.M Smith’s post above @ #6.1
The Stone Age did not end because of a shotrtage of stones.
It ended because somebody, somewhere came up with a much better and far more malleable and useable product called” Bronze ”
Ditto for the “Bronze Age” when somebody came up with a much better product called “Iron”.
David is one hell of a lot smarter than this 79 year old retired grain farmer with his complete lack of any qualifications but I don’t subscribe at all to David’s premise on the reasons why the Chinese will want to subjugate South East Asia, implied by David as due to the lack of long term coal reserves to be exploited in the future by China and the seeking of new sources of essential resources .
If and when Fusion energy is finally harnessed and it will be for the prize for first there is truly immense, the use of coal for all purposes will drop to about a quarter of its current tonnage mined per year as its use as an energy source rapidly declines .
Coals main use then wlll be in metal refining and cement production which accounts for abut a quarter of the global use of coal today
The Chinese have just completed experimental test runs on a new Fusion reactor design which has far surpassed the previous experimental Fusion reactors across the world of fusion research in both temperatures and the longetivity of the fusion burn , believed to be about for 100 seconds.
Mongolia over the northern border of China has 162 billion tonnes of coal not very far north of China’s northern Outer Mongolian border .
A thousand kilometres north of there is the immense coal reserves of the Russia’s western Siberian Kutzenhov coal basins which could be tapped by China via a multi line heavy rail connection and by stragically based coal fired power generators and very long distance HVDC power transmission lines.
The Chinese are already in eastern Siberia in large numbers already.
One of my daughters in the mid 1990s and soon after the fall of communism in Russia in 1991 , decided to travel from Bejing to Helsinki by the Trans Siberian. Her and another girl from Adelaide did the six week journey alone as just two independent back packing Aussie girls. Most russians in those parts had never seen a European let alone a truly exotic couple of guenuine young Aussie women
So they were the focus of intense interest where ever they went in western Siberia.
The train from Beijing and then from Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia on through to the former closed military city of Chita on the Trans Siberian rail route was fully occupied by Chinese traders heading north to trade goods in Siberia for whatever, possibly illegal gold out of Siberia’s back blocks
As an example, America shifts 92% of its annual tonnage of over 1.1 billion tonnes of mined coal right across the whole of the USA from mines in Montana to the huge power generators in the East using railroads.
We had one of those damn two mile long, 5 engined coal trains running down the corroidor of a motel we stayed in in North Dakota at about every twenty minutes, all going one way on the 1500 mile trip of taking Montana coal to the coal fired generators in the east
The return of the empty train to the coal fields ran along another rail route with less favourable grades that the empty train could easily handle.
Certainly China will attempt to establish hegemony or a suzerainty over all 22 nations on its borders at least and down into any areas in its ocean littorals where there might be oil and gas basins to exploit .
Thats the nature of expanding empires and the ego of those who are trying to create those empires .
But they like every Empire builder that has gone before them will eventually come up against the Limits of Power, be those limits sheer distance and area, , geological as in Mountain ranges, the example of which when one looks at maps of most past Chinese empires, they have never managed to cross the Himalays to take the indians on or a a very strong military kick back backed by strong racial overtones of those who are supposedly being trampled on.
And often a total failure by those being brought under the yoke of the new local super power to bow down on bended knee in any meaningfull way and to be subjugated by another racial based nationalistic grouping intent on controlling everybody and everything.
And will also possibly, China will try to do the same over other central Asian and middle east nations which it abuts on its western borders if it can accomodate the inevitable nationalistic and tribal groupings that everywhere around the world generally will react strongly against another ethnic group trying to take control of your own national and racial group.
China’s problem here again is its long demonstrated and well known xenophobic reaction from a thousand years back to any racial group that is not of the Chinese HAN peoples .
In Afghanistan and Pakistan where roads and ports under the Chinese Belt/ Road policy into central Asian and eastern Arabic nations plan are being built using Chinese long term loans .
These very long term loans which when the loan period is due to be paid back by one or two generations later, arouse immense resentment amongst those later generations ,
As has beeen seen in east Africa where the loans to build infrastructure , built by the Chinese labour force and its engineers which unlike the two dozen American Road engineers built a thousand kilometres of heavy highway. across Tanzania using Tanzanan labour and engineers they trained themselves , the Chinese built their projects without using much participation by the locals and which were built to Chinese standards that were not compatible with the British engineered East African infrastructure around it.
All of the actual building is done by Chinese labour and Chinese engineers.
The locals are only used as guards and poorly paid labourers as the Tanzanians of the early 1970s found out during the Chinese building of the TansZam railway and which one of my brothers watched happening during the four years he and his family spent in western Tanzania in the early 1970s.
And that denial, that attitude of we are the superior race here , that same historical Chinese racial xenophobia has created very long cultural memories from past Chinese invasions and Chinese supriority and Chinese attempts at national subversion and the attempts imposing a Chinese dominated hegomany amongst a vast number of peoples in the nations to the west of China’s borders
All of which work against China becoming another super power Empire such as the Brtish Empire which in 1920 covered some 24% of the Earth’s land surface and had about half the global population living in its Empire.
And then you have the history of the Chinese Emperors.
Go read the history of the Tang Dynasty, China’s Golden Age, and see the parallels between the actions of those Emperors and of the Chinese President Xi of today.
To my ming XI is building a very powerful entrenched and a hidden underground opposition to his rule as he contines to use his power to eliminate rivals including distorting the Chinese legal system to further his power by literally eliminating potential rivals.
. Corrupt they might have been, but if Xi tries to eliminate all of those corrupt army and bureacrats and Party officials who are completely corrupt and who he has to rely on for his power base and the implementation of nhis policies , it has been said that he would just about stand alone with no supporters left for him to govern with.
And the families of those many princelings, the revered Long March Surviver’s very corrupt children, who have seen their fathers and their close relations jailed and executed by Xi and their power base and activities disrupted or destroyed are still out there in growing numbers down through another generation or so and still climbing the power ladder, XI’s reign could be spectacular and possibly a lot shorter than many may think.
And if a major political disruption were once again to strike Chinese communism and Chinese power structures with choices to be made on whose side the power manipulators will side, then enlarging Chinas hegemony over surrounding nations will be low on the list compared to that of sheer survival for the political operators of the all controlling Chinese Communist party.
Yes there will many years of strife and power manoeuvring and blood and tears for a lot of peoplee andd nations out there on china’s borders but in the end that old, old Empire limiting factor will prevail.
its called the ” Limits of Power” for whatever reason those Limits might apply ato and on what and whom.
…
And then there is India, 1.3 billion people, a,population match that of China and a much younger population at tha and growing fast both in population. wealth and business and technological skills.
Plus being a messy and somewhat corrupt democracy where freedom still reigns and the rule of Law is till maintained in a corrupted but still meaningfully. way.
An economy of only one third of that of China’s GDP in size but accelerating just as China’s economy begins to see the capitalistic limits to economic growth and the consequent economic slow down with, for China , its still unknown social impacts and the social forces such an economic slow down might release ona one party state thart as ittle of the eeconmic and scial flexibility of a functioning democracy .
I must always try to remember that old dictum;
Predictions are difficult, partucularly about the future.
60
Not necessarily so. The Bronze Age ending was a massive economic crash which could (proof is difficult to find after all this time) have been caused by Cyprus running out of raw and refined copper. Sure, copper could have come from other places but not as plentifully and easily attainable as it had been on Cyprus. Even the Dead Sea area was mined for a while, but why that stopped is also not known.
The raw copper was refined in furnaces burning wood. The Cedars of Lebanon are no more. Most of the Middle East was denuded of forest by copper refining. From Turkey, through Greece, down through what is now Syria, Iraq, Palestine and across into Iran, all cut down and burnt.
Mixed up in all that at the end were powerful earthquakes. Turkey exists on its own tectonic plate, the Anatolian Plate which is being squeezed west by the scissor activity of the Eurasian and Arabian plates. Volcanic eruptions (Thera, for example, 1647BC) and major quakes would lay waste the unmortared stone cities which formed the Trade Route depots. Similarly with mud brick, an even more common building material. Embedded straw just would not have the strength to hold a wall together in a Richter 7 – 8 quake. (The desert Tells have many stories to tell).
Sufficient coincident disasters would stop trade even then, with perhaps not quite the same economic damage as they would now.
The iron age started probably because there was no easily accessible copper left. It is thought the Minoans could have been mining a lode of high purity copper in the Great Lakes of North America but that is not proven. That the lode in question was quite heavily mined though, is known.
00
Thanks sophocles;
Earthquakes, volcanism, the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation’s predating then Greek civilisation and it seems increasingly likely, laid the foundations on which the greek civilisation was built after Minoa’s destruction by volcanic explosive eruption.
Its achievements and its destruction, the cutting down of the Trees of Lebanon and Troy of the late Bronze Age I am aware of and have read on a long time ago.
But the mining out of the tin and copper respources for Bronze with the elemental mining technology they had available , I was not aware of although having read about the tin mining from that extraordinary region in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia where much of mankind’s development of technology and social organisation and the essential elements such as writing, all needed to make a permament and ultimately global civilisation were all developed in that small part of the world makes for some very interesting reading and pondering.
I for one and knowing that there is very little if any evidence to support me on this, believe that the Phoenecians from their original base in Tyre in what is now Lebanon and then later out of their major trading settlements in North Africa such Carthage , roamed over most of the world.
Far more so than is generally given credit for.
Way back before science also was so politically correct here in Australia , there were regular rumours and claims that an altar had been found , possibly Phoenician were the claims , back up in the hills behind Townsville.
Never proven of course as it might just have been a collection of rocks which Altars of the ancient sea peoples would have been constrructed from.
Unfortunately the men and women who were still well connected with the earliest explorers through family and association and with the by then few old men who had first penetrated itnto these districts are now also gone.
Those early settlers had an affininity with the land and i the secrets it held.
Today of course the new arrivals are from lands that have no connection at all with Australia’s early pioneers and explorers and settlers and so much of what those early settlers saw and experinced has been now lost as we are buried under an avalanche of citified claims that everything of any value can only be found in the big cities of today.
10
ROM and Sophocles – a reading list would be appreciated. Fascinating stuff.
00
The so called unsolvable problems arise from the fact that reality is what it is.
You cannot consume that which has not yet been produced.
If you have eaten all your seeds, you cannot plant them to produce more. Alternatively, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Simply wanting something or wishing for it doesn’t make it exist.
To make you want to have, you have to initiate and work the specific process to cause it to exist. That takes knowledge, skill, and sustained effort on the part of someone. Why not you?
Your life is yours by right but a living necessary to sustain it is not. You must work for it or depend upon the charity of others.
To take what you want or need from others or requiring others to take it for you denies the others the right to their lives.
If you don’t respect the rights of others, why do you expect your rights to be respected?
Water is wet, fire is hot, and rocks are hard. You can see this as being unfair and more convenient for you if they were not that way or use the rocks to make a fire place, build a fire, boil the water, and make some hot tea to drink.
These things and many other are simply the way things are. If you expect to stay alive and thrive in this universe, you must deal with them as they are. If you refuse to do so, you won’t stay alive for long.
They are dismal only if you expect to live based upon wishful thinking. Otherwise they are part of the unwritten instruction book on staying alive that each must learn from others or from direct personal experience.
30
The other big game is steel, the largest commodity after food. At wholesale $1.5Trillion a year. Turned into steel products from cars to buildings, $15Trillion per year. The whole modern world is dependent on steel, although the average city dweller does not see it. Concrete is $400bn a year, but would fall down without steel reinforcing.
China produces half the world’s steel. This was seen even by Mao Tse Tung as the only way to get into the 20th century, as Russia did. We nearly closed our last integrated mill. It is now owned by billionare Mr Gupta who just bought his own coal mine.
There is a big problem with Chinese coal. The coal from China and from Australia’s major competitor Indonesia is not good enough for steel. Too many impurities.
Steel needs coke, the dry carbon produced from coal. It was coke carbon which saved the forests of Europe. Australia has very high quality coking coal and the Chinese are buying it now to make better steel. Remember Pig Iron Bob, PM Robert Menzies, pilloried for supplying raw steel to Japan before the war?
So Australia is very attractive to China for a lot of reasons and there is mass migration of Chinese citizens, as if no one had noticed. Is there a small store, milk bar, newsagent around Australia not yet run by Chinese nationals? Not in Melbourne.
All this is not necessarily bad. Chinese people own much of Asia as they work hard, blend in and are massive contributors. In Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia they are greatly resented. My understanding is that Thailand has always had laws prohibiting Chinese from owning more than 49% of anything much. The vietnam war was the ruling Chinese minority against the rest of Vietnam. The irony is that Vietnam and China have always been enemies. When the US left, they went back to war against each other.
As said, the domination of one hard working, clever group is not necessarily a bad thing but it causes resentment. There are other obvious example, but not ones backed by 1.3Billion others.
However steel requires masses of coal to power the huge integrated mills and Bessemer furnaces or electricity for the mini mills which are electric arc furnaces which produce 75% of the steel in the US. As well, all smelting of metals, oxides to metal require pure carbon to remove the O2. This simple chemistry is unknown to Green leader Richard Di Natalie who said Whyalla could keep making steel as long as they did not use coal.
So the CO2 output of China from steel (power and coke), concrete, power generation is massive. Much more than just electricity generation alone. As if it matters. CO2 levels are set by ocean surface temperature. The rest is make believe.
Meanwhile in Australia, our governemnts are shutting down all forms of manufacturing, making electricity unusable, unaffordable and furiously selling our thermal coal, coking coal, iron ore overseas while having beach holidays on the profits of selling what cost us nothing. All this without a care in the world, especially in Canberra where our politicians go on about saving the world and focusing on importing incompatible people, g*y marriage and their salaries and superannuation.
Can we please have our real Prime Minister back? Someone who was recognized as a visionary world leader. Someone who spoke plainly and actually ran a concrete company. As he said, Climate change is crap, socialism masquerading as environmentalism. You can see why the UN/EU had to get rid of Tony Abbott and put their man in place.
260
I generally agree with everything in your comment. Just one minor point:
While steel IS the cheapest and most used method of reinforcing concrete, one can use a new kind of rebar made from basalt:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/12/21/unlimiting-resources-basalt-for-a-high-tech-stone-age/
it has the added advantage that it doesn’t rust away so your concrete structure lasts longer especially in wet or salty location.
And yes, it takes a LOT of energy to make melted basalt too …
80
We do have a bit of basalt:
Columbia River Basalt
20
Wrought iron, maliable Fe56 if properly fabricated and coated with Coal Tar epoxy may become the proper rebar. What say you? 🙂
00
Why not platinum rods?
00
The only reason to embed platinum rods in concrete is to prevent the theft of platinum rods? 🙂
20
Item — AAP via The Weekend Australian is at it again: ‘Blast furnace’ heat warning for Victoria, Melbourne faces “killer’ heat event with forecast temperature of 41C.
The hottest Melbourne January day was in Jan 13, 1939 at 45.6C.
Whatever the maximum temperature turns out to be it’s the hysterical tone of the forecast that is intended to stick in people’s minds, in order to keep reinforcing ‘the narrative’.
200
I vividly remember Jan13, 1939. The Vics were burning coal as though it was going out of fashion that day.
40
It remains to be seen if the predictions are going to be realized. I remember a few 44C days in recent years as part of long periods. This one is a neat fit between a warm morning and a howling cold Southerly in the late afternoon.
So for a few hours Melbourne might, just might experience what other places experience for weeks at a time.
What sort of house cannot stay cool for a few hours, if you shut the windows and doors?
The weather in Melbourne is such a flighty thing, you have to wonder if this is going to be real. I remember cancelling a bike ride because the BOM reported rain at 90%. Not a drop fell on Melbourne.
Anyway, the Mornington races have been cancelled. It’s really a wonder people are not in shelters awaiting the Blitz.
Consider that this all fizzles, as is possible. The cost of this sensationalization of the weather is enormous. As was reported yesterday, big business may have to shut? What, on Saturday?
It is now standard practice. news.com.au abuses Donald Trump. We are presented with the opinions of teenagers as world news. It is now a combination of Ripley’s Beleive it or Not and the old Truth newspaper. Alien babies and the like. Our weather has gone the same way.
As for dealing with the questions raised by a Nuclear North Korea and a rampant Chinese economy, we are presented with a parliament which is utterly blind to world events. Victoria and South Australia are locking up gas, while demanding power stations which run on gas. Everyone is locking up coal. Fracking is banned. Immigration is not to be questioned, even though it appears completely out of control.
Issues like Chinese economic dominance are simply not to be raised. To talk about the facts is racist. To ask for reliable and adequate and cheap electricity from our own coal is not being a good world citizen.
We need a new group of politicians, not these losers. Especially in Victoria where currently no one is in charge of anything, the top three people being on ‘well deserved’ vacations. No one really knows who is in charge. The new political classes, no care and no responsibility.
200
32C here in Hobart, Tasmania at 14.58 hours and with a strong breeze does not feel at all uncomfortable. And a nice change from a week of low twenties or below twenty.
During January 2013 I was in Adelaide and then driving in other parts of South Australia when the daytime temperature was 40C plus every day for a week, not unusual for summer despite what the BoM/MSM scare mongers promote.
41
Heat wave: ‘Don’t go outside’
Early Morning Weather
3:07PM
Conditions are quickly becoming unbearable as the east coast’s ‘killer’ heat wave bites. The cool change will be just as dramatic.
The Weekend Australian online latest news.
20
Weather for Saturday 6 January
City observations
Sydney
Now
27.8°
NE 44km/h
Max 30°
Sunny.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Sydney.
Melbourne
Now
40.6°
N 17km/h
Max 42°
Very hot. Late cool change.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Melbourne.
Brisbane
Now
29.5°
ESE 11km/h
Max 31°
Partly cloudy.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Brisbane.
Perth
Now
24.4°
SSE 17km/h
Max 29°
Sunny.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Perth.
Adelaide
Now
33.4°
SSW 17km/h
Max 41°
Very hot and sunny.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Adelaide.
Hobart
Now
33.2°
WNW 33km/h
Max 34°
Hot. Late shower.
0.2mm rain since 9am in Hobart.
Canberra
Now
35.8°
W 30km/h
Max 37°
Sunny.
0.0mm rain since 9am in Canberra.
Darwin
Now
29.9°
N 20km/h
Max 31°
Rain. Storm likely.
00
I see. That’s the ‘Killer heatwave blasting Australia’ (DM) is it?! Colour me cynical.
10
I suppose if the temp could be 39.7 in Hobart on the 9th of January 130 years ago, or 40.6 in Jan 1959, or 41.8 in Jan 2013, it could well reach 32 today or 42 some time this month. In fact, it would make perfect sense.
The alarmist and now alarmed climatariat is coming on pretty desperate with the predictions. It’s just the actual event that bores them. They seem to have worked out that the slave media will never ask for a retraction of a Warmageddon or Biblical Flood story. The prediction, accompanied by red and purple maps, has become the event and the actual event itself is a pale, uninteresting reflection of the prediction.
Yep, Just as the medium became the message, the prediction is now the event.
31
TdeF,
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
John Setka is well and truly in charge in Vic and has been for 2 horrible years.
30
Are you suggesting Labor politicians are just handpuppets for the Unions? So what’s changed? You have to be a member of a Union to be a member of the Labor party.
As union membership declines to 12% in the general workforce though, the only ones left are the worst. The CFMEU, ETU, MUA. Gillard, Andrews are the worst examples of Unions running governments as proxies for their unelected, uneducated masters. The UFU control Andrews totally, as if that needed saying.
However Turnbull is no less a proxy of the EU/UN elites and bankers. You would think the Greens ran Labor or Liberal governments. As I said, the worst set of uncaring politicians in my memory.
In England, May is making a total mess of BREXIT, because she has no intention of it. We are left with only Trump in the US making sense and defying the swamp. We did have Abbott, but he was railroaded by the secret Black Hand, politicians with an agenda they did not want people to know.
At least Abbott had a good handle on International politics. He does have a Masters degree from Oxford in the subject, a degree in economics and a degree in law, but the Black Hand put the head of Goldmann Sachs in charge of the country. We are drowning in debt and the Chinese do not have to invade. Soon they will own the place.
110
Hottest I’ve experienced was 47.2° (117° F) in Tucson, Arizona.
Glad to have had that one event.
Rather not do it again.
40
John F. Hultquist January 6, 2018 at 10:01 am ·
Similar to my experience in central New Mexico. We had hundreds of thermometer; each with a different reading. We finally decided that ‘all’ local atmospheric water vapor was imported via many cases of adult beverage!
21
Throughout the Nullarbor summer, used to regularly work in small huts full of hot valve electronics where temps exceeded 55C. Was a lot younger then…
00
Economists say many things.
Most of them are wrong.
The CO2 horsesh*t has to stop.
100
Black Thursday February 6 1851 – 5 million Ha of Victoria burnt. Reports suggest temperatures may have gone beyond 50 deg C – many thermometers exploded. Some at BOM unofficially credit this as Melbourne’s hottest day, although it is before official records started. Only 12 dead (whites – who knows how many natives) and 1 million sheep.
91
The further you go back in time the more meaningless records become .
20
Quite so.
10
I recall Tim Blair (?) or someone getting in a lot of trouble with some law of OZ for saying “Quite so.”
20
“The further you go back in time the more meaningless records become.”
Depends on what specifically you are referring to.
In terms of weather records and statistics, I would argue that since The Global Warming Project got underway, the official records have become far more meaningless than the older ones.
I would also argue that the daily journal observations of early Arctic explorers are far more credible and meaningful than anything coming out of the current agenda-driven Arctic crusaders. Etc.
61
The energy (fuel) statistics are here. https://www.energy.gov.au/publications/australian-petroleum-statistics-2017
You’ll need Table 7. Automotive and diesel fuel reserves are 17 to 20 days and Australia has no strategic fuel reserves. We will be up the creek without a paddle if shipping is ever disrupted!! Australia stops in about two weeks without diesel for transport!
80
I understand that we signed an International treaty agreeing to maintain 60 days stocks. Seems our politicians believe that only International treaties that the Greens like need be carried out.
80
Graeme No.3, the reference you are looking for is Australia’s membership in the International Energy Agency (IEA), which happened in 1979. The IEA stipulates that a net oil importer, which Australia now is, must keep 90 days reserves. However, that number is based on net oil imports.
The first link I provided at comment #3 above has some very clear graphs that show that Australia’s dependence on imports has been growing over the last decade, and that dependence is forecast to increase as three out of seven refineries shut down. While our strategic reserve may have been OK when the net import delta was smaller a decade ago, the change in the net import balance has not been matched with a change in storage. Hence the comment on page 10 of that link that states our stockholdings only amount to about 23 days consumption.
Latest statistics I could find on Australia’s petroleum industry can be found here:
https://industry.gov.au/Office-of-the-Chief-Economist/Publications/Pages/Australian-petroleum-statistics.aspx
The table for aviation fuel is notably absent of any data.
30
We have plenty of oil under the southern end of the great barrier reef, just north of Gladstone.
We could harvest much of it from the mainland with modern horizontal drilling techniques. There is also a large volume of shale/sand oil there as well, that the Rundle project proved was economically viable.
I wonder when we will be forced to use this resource, & how long it would take to bring into production, with our refineries closed?
70
No way the green governments we have these days would allow direct or indirect drilling around the Barrier Reef .
We do have oil in the Cooper basin and Northern WA but no idea how much and we do have a few small refinerys ,why we ever stopped having a major refinery though is a shameful indictment on our recent crop of politicians.
30
Huge reserves of shale oil in New South Wales too, but most is now “protected” inside National Parks, Newnes near Lithgow for example where shale oil was extracted for decades in the early to mid 1900s.
30
This adds some urgency to coal alternatives. From a grid supply perspective nuclear is the only option. Clearly China has recognised this with their great push into nuclear power. The Chinese technology is now world leading and China is providing direct investment for nuclear power plants in other countries – UK being notable.
Unlike China, Australia has a few centuries worth of brown coal that is currently not economic to put on a ship. By the time it is getting scarce China should have nuclear power well sorted and Australia can import the electricity from China.
20
I watched a documentary on, as I recall the terminology, pebble bed reactors, uranium contained in what look like lawn bowling balls that can be handled until activated and after they are spent. An engineer bounced one for the interviewer and laughed at the shocked reaction.
20
5 Jan: Reuters: China aims to supersize coal sector through mergers
by Muyu Xu, Josephine Mason
China said on Friday it plans to create several “super-large” coal mining companies by the end of 2020 as the world’s biggest producer of the fuel ramps up years of efforts to streamline the fragmented sector and slash outdated capacity.
The country’s National Development & Reform Commission (NDRC) said in a statement that by the end of 2020, China plans to form a number of mega-miners, each with the capacity to produce 100 million tonnes per year of coal, which will compete on the global market and help to modernize the sector.
Last year, China had more than 4,000 coal mines with a total capacity of 3.41 billion tonnes a year, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said in November
Only six of China’s coal mining companies are currently capable of producing more than 100 million tonnes per year, according to the China National Coal Association. Those include top coal miner Shenhua Group, China Coal Energy Group and Datong Coal Mine Group [DTCOA.UL].
The NDRC’s plan follows the acquisition last year of state power company China Guodian Group Corp by Shenhua to create the world’s largest utility…
???It also comes as Beijing deepens its war on smog with a push to boost cleaner energy consumption and limit the use of coal, which is used to produce the majority of China’s electricity…
Under its five-year plan to 2020, China has pledged to eliminate around 800 million tonnes of outdated capacity and add around 500 million tonnes of advanced output. Coal output will be around ***3.9 billion tonnes a year by 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal/china-aims-to-supersize-coal-sector-through-mergers-idUSKBN1EU0Q8
10
5 Jan: Quartz: This could be the beginning of the end of China’s dominance in bitcoin mining
by Zheping Huang
Having shut down the exchanges where cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are traded, the Chinese government is now going after the facilities where such currencies are “mined.” To do so, it’s hitting such operations where it hurts: electricity supply.
Fresh reports have emerged about a crackdown—though not an outright ban—on bitcoin mining operations in China. Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Jan. 3) that the nation’s central bank has outlined plans to curb the power supply to some bitcoin miners, citing unnamed sources. Reuters noted that the bank intends to tell local governments to regulate miners’ power usage to “gradually reduce the scale of their production.” Chinese business magazine Caixin, meanwhile, reported that (paywall) authorities will no longer offer mining companies preferential benefits such as discounted electricity and tax deductions.
The crackdown could well put an end to China’s dominance in bitcoin mining.
The country accounts for more than two-thirds of the world’s processing power devoted to bitcoin mining…
Cheap electricity is a major advantage for bitcoin miners in China. Coal-abundant regions such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have in recent years taken to crypto mining as a niche approach to transforming their less-developed economies.
Bitmain, a mining giant, has taken advantage of cheap coal-fired power in those two regions to build several of the world’s largest mining facilities. In Inner Mongolia’s Ordos city, local authorities offer the company a subsidized electricity rate of just 4 US cents per kilowatt hour. That’s 30% cheaper than what industrial firms in the area typically pay, and well below prices in the US and most European Union countries.
Miners get even cheaper rates by bargaining with hydropower stations—rather than local or national grids—in the mountainous Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. At one stage, Bitmain’s mining facility in Yunnan enjoyed a rate of less than 2 US cents per kWh, according to company executive Su Jiahai…
Bitcoin mining in China is “mainly an opportunistic way of making some money out of the failures and inefficiencies of the power system,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, a Beijing-based campaigner with Greenpeace. The massive hydropower networks in Sichuan and Yunnan were built to transfer electricity to the rest of the country, noted Myllyvirta, but state-run grid operators too often fail to prioritize renewable energy over coal. In 2016, Yunnan wasted a staggering 32 billion kWh (link in Chinese) of hydropower, about equal to the total electricity consumption of Denmark the same year…READ ALL
https://qz.com/1172632/chinas-dominance-in-bitcoin-mining-under-threat-as-regulators-hit-where-it-hurts-electricity/
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“Bitmain, which runs China’s two largest bitcoin-mining collectives, is setting up regional headquarters in Singapore and now has mining operations in the U.S. and Canada, Wu Jihan, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview. BTC.Top, the third-biggest mining pool, is opening a facility in Canada and ViaBTC, ranked No. 4, has operations in Iceland and America, their founders said.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-05/bitcoin-miners-migrate-china-canada-pboc-cracks-down-mining
I would very strongly recommend this site for up to date information on a variety of topics, including those deliberately not covered by the MSM propagandists. (unfortunately the quality of the comments has taken a major dive over the past few years.)
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Hmmm. It is too simplistic to consider China in isolation.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-03/new-pipeline-doubles-russian-crude-oil-supply-china
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‘But if China wants to have any economic growth from here, it will have to either start importing a lot of coal or accelerate its nuclear plant build.
‘Either way, the salad days of China’s economic growth are over. In fact, the Chinese will have to paddle harder, year after year, to stop economic contraction.’
Wrong on both counts, Beijing is putting big money into fusion and there is no sign of economic contraction. Have you heard of the Belt and Road?
Anyway we have a quarry, with the world’s finest black coal, and China is our biggest trading partner.
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‘ANU will work with the University of South China (USC) on fusion energy research, with the prospect of Australia providing China with its first plasma Stellarator device.
‘Energy pundits see nuclear fusion, which powers our sun and all stars in the Universe, as the Holy Grail – it has the potential to provide sustainable, zero-emission and relatively cheap power to grids.’
ANU
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I find this crystal ball gazing, a moderately interesting exercise in speculation, little different from idly wondering how a variance the actual weather will be at the end of the week from the projected weather, courtesy of the Met models at the beginning of the week. As I do not forget and I pay attention, >97% of the time there simply isn’t the remotest convergence between the two. In fact, it’s a farce, an expensive joke and an exercise in divergence beyond a day or so. And like most jokes, rarely are they memorable a week later.
Meanwhile, I am comforted by the following. Most here will recognise the author without the need for reference.
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This reminds me of a scene in Atlas Shrugged, where the railroad executive is questioning her friend the copper baron who destroyed his own company:
–They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won’t have to see it (the railroad) serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D’Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves.
Petr Beckmann warned of the Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. Now it appears Australians will have to feel it on their mandatory suffrage hides before reality sinks in.
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No matter how cheap the solar cells are, was Germany is discovering, even with cheap solar panels, they don’t produce electricity when the sun doesn’t shine.
Climate Crisis? Al Gore and Michael Mann Fail Science 101
In this post I will address Michael Mann’s assertion that record cold temperatures are the result of man-made CO2 as detailed in a recent Climate Reality Project article, mentioned by Al Gore in his “Tweet.” Before I go any further, without addressing any of his claims, the important take home is that even if Al Gore and Michael Mann are 100% correct in their analysis and conclusion, the solutions they offer will only make matters worse.
If CO2 causes more draught, biofuels like Ethanol are idiotic solutions as best.
If CO2 causes more rain, then solar is an idiotic solution at best.
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/climate-crisis-al-gore-and-michael-mann-fail-science-101/
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Don’t worry about coal supply in China.
Nearby Mongolia has hundreds of years of coal, its never been touched because it’s too far from ports, but China will use it when it needs to. Expect some political goings on with Mongolia over its coal perhaps, but there is zero chance this area will run out of coal in the next century.
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Thus the reason China supercharged it’s nuclear program(s) some years ago. The Chinese, unlike the West, can still do simple math. Given their current air quality levels, they’re trying to both improve new coal-fired plants while building new nuke plants. A key marker is if, or when, they start converting coal fired plants to nuke-fired plants by using in place generation equipment and simply remove the furnaces and coal delivery gear. That will mean they’ve won their gamble.
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Here is some interesting info on energy consumption;
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/07/13/analysis/these-missing-charts-may-change-way-you-think-about-fossil-fuel-addiction
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I would not be too fast in predicting peak- coal for China. Remember all of the peak oil prognosis for the US, going back to 1908? Not that their coal may well be depleting, but that gas or oil reserves may well explode. Ever heard of fracking?
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The Chinese population has either peaked already or soon will, they have enormous debts and in addition the Indian economy has reached the point in its development curve where it will accelerate, thus takng jobs from China. Add in to this that Chinese society will be under considerable internal pressure with 80 million excess men and China could see another long march or at the very least some Chinese or regional fireworks. Chinas ocean piracy I’d frrply unpopular. We could see the next major war in the region with many Asian countries becoming embroiled in that.
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US debt is out of control and with the recent tax cuts the whole thing is looking dodgy.
‘Intragovernmental holdings stood at $5.4 trillion, giving a combined total gross national debt of $19.8 trillion or about 106% of the previous 12 months of GDP; $6.2 trillion or approximately 45% of the debt held by the public was owned by foreign investors, the largest of which were Japan and China …’ wiki
Capitalism needs new markets to survive and flourish, US isolationism and Sino expansion are there for all to see.
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David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.
Yeah… I would attempt to mention that as little as possible if I was him.
Gripen is a lightweight fighter. F-35 isn’t.
Grippen may be the best lightweight fighter in the world (or not – a lot of nations when faced with the choice selected the Eurofighter instead) but it is still not in the same class as the F-35.
To word it another way, you can buy the best 1.8L small car in the world and at a very affordable price, but it is still not going to tow a boat trailer or comfortable seat a family of four.
The ‘troubled development’ argument is also flawed. Gripen took nearly 9 years from first flight to in service, or pretty much the same length of time as the F-35. Gripen also had the misfortune of crashing two test aircraft due to problems with the flight controls. Aircraft development takes time. Get over it.
Also Stealth.
So what we really have here in Archibald’s book is an argument that a new aircraft at the beginning of it’s life cycle should be replaced (because of a ‘troubled’ development) with a smaller less capable aircraft at the end of it’s life cycle (which, just casually, also had a ‘troubled’ development) and a brand new project be started from scratch based on the rejected Northrop F-23 design. Sure. Why don’t we just scrap the TSR-2 while we are at it as well.
Archibald’s discussion on coal and China may have some very valid points, but reminding the world of his aircraft books is not doing his credibility as an analysis any favours.
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The Sukhoi 35 may well be a better fighter jet than the F35, certainly the latest stealth Sukhoi 57 should best the F35.
It’s interesting to note that in two recent aerial war games between the US air force and the Indian air force, one held in India and the other in the USA, the Indians, flying Russian jets beat the US air force with a kill ratio of 9 to 1.
If Hillary had been elected we may save seen a live contest.
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[…] Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination […]
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