Bob Brown’s Foundation protests at the Robbins Island Wind Farm
By Jo Nova
Every day the Greens sound more like Skeptics
Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.
Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.
Four years ago he surprised a few people when he spoke out against the idea of putting the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere on remote Robbins Island off NorthWest Tasmania because it would spoil the view and kill birds — something climate skeptics have been saying for years and about nearly every industrial wind park.
Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a 200% Renewable Energy Target to soak up carbon penance money out of the mainland. Of course, wind power is still essential (how could he say anything else?) but some of these wind farms — a small number — will do more damage to the environment than they will prevent. The wind farm developers are “not doing it in the service of the planet” you know.
This all very well, but ten years too late. When skeptics were predicting exactly this outcome — that Green policies would wreck the environment, where were the Greens? They weren’t saying “let’s listen to the climate deniers” — or climate deniers are people too you know. All their talk of building communities was the Gucci fashion show of hipster vegans who would just as soon demonize half the population as have a coffee with them.
Who needs maths?
As usual, the Greens biggest failure — and they condemn birds and whales with it every day — is that they can not do maths. They want to micromanage a bit of a wind farm here and a bit there — without doing the sums. To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day. Where will they go? Where exactly will those gigawatts fit among the gum trees, and the ten thousand kilometers of high voltage lines too? That’s eighty million kilometers of transmission lines around the globe. How many trees, bats, birds and koala’s will they kill?
Bob Brown protests at the Adani coal mine at Parliament House. By Andrew Meares, Flickr
That Robbins Island mega windfarm — by the way — now has approval, but it has to turn off five months of the year, so it doesn’t hurt too many orange-bellied parrots.
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Wind Farm “Free for All” must stop, says Bob Brown
Matthew Denholm, The Australian
Veteran conservationist Bob Brown has turned on sections of the wind industry, accusing some developers of “profiteering” from climate change and not caring about the planet, while warning the wind rush risks accelerating extinctions.
He was concerned the Tasmanian government’s pursuit of a 200 per cent renewable energy target – to allow surplus power to be exported to the mainland – was driven by “profiteering” under the guise of climate action.
The Bob Brown Foundation continues to fight the 100-turbine wind farm proposed for Robbins Island by ACEN Australia.
“The real driving reason for that (200 per cent renewables target) is profiteering by people like ACEN, moving into a lucrative new market which is being forced by the exigencies of climate change,” Dr Brown said.
Bob Brown is also opposed to the windfarm being built to the west of Cairns in the Daintree National Park, a project he calls “appalling”. In that he is correct.
Here’s the wisdom of The Bob Brown Foundation
From the press release — the Greens have a vision that we can save the world just by turning off a few appliances at home:
“This is part of humanity’s deliberated destruction of the natural world which sustains all life,” Bob Brown said today.
“Instead of turning off wasted electricity, we will wreck another surviving stronghold of natural wildlife diversity in Australia. It is now up to the Albanese government and national environment minister Tanya Plibersek to protect the cornucopia of nature which Robbins Island holds. They should at least back the Tasmanian EPA position.”
So we keep the 1.5C global safety limit under control just with a few more windfarms and turning off the standby light on the stereo?
Isn’t Brown just being the classic ‘NIMBY’? The despoiled views he speaks of wouldn’t include his own by any chance?
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Of course they would …. but beggars can’t be choosers.
In the fight against environment and energy-grid destroying solar and wind power, you have to take any allies you can get. Especially when the apostates are former greens who are widely respected by the other side.
A ‘climate denier’ can shout about the evils of Net Zero until their voice gives out, and it won’t make one bit of difference to the people on the other side who need convincing. But when former team green darlings like Brown or Steven Koonin, or people with qualifications that still mean something among establishment lackeys (like John Clauser’s Nobel Prize) switch sides, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You let bygones be bygones and welcome them to team reality, because their opinions actually mean something to people on the other side who are open to debate.
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I agree to a certain extent Steve, but to a large extent the lies, deceit and censorship of the other side have done so much damage to our civilisation that what they have done is unforgivable.
Also, the usual practice of the other side in dealing with those who have lost faith is to cancel them, unperson them, or worse. Those who remain on the other side won’t care that one of them has become (slightly) rational. Most of them are so indoctrinated that they utterly lack critical thinking skills and any possible belief that they might be wrong. They really do believe science is decided by “consensus” as the Left constantly repeats.
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Ask Judith Curry how’s she’s going after doubting the climate alarmism she was once part of. Sometimes those who defect are treated worse than the realists.
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One problem with accepting the u-turn of those that once opposed you is that they could turn again and become the enemy again.
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he’s not an ally, he’s doing this because somehow it affects him personally and when that goes away so does his critique and he will be back to moralising about how good he is and you just need to sacrifice
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Bob Brown was one of the Greenies who started off the whole sad ‘Environmental’ Catastrophe and now he is finally seeing what a mess he has unleashed and is desperately searching around for people to blame for the environmental disaster, other than himself.
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It started off with saving old – grow forests, saving Pedder – the Gordon and Franklin and so on. When climate change came along they had something the nascent political wing could get its teeth into. There you have it ; green socialist(communist) subversion as the result. I think that part of it was too much for Bob Brown.
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Same thing that turned Patrick Moore away from Greenpeace. Suddenly the organisation he founded opposing permanent wars and forest destruction became a bunch of political neo/ marxists.
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I guess reality eventually hits home. A pity it takes so long.
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Firstly, Brown just doesn’t one of these environment-destroying monstrosities built near his idyllic slice of Van Dieman’s Land. “Not In My Back Yard” syndrome.
Secondly, the subsidy harvesters are only acting in their own rational self-interest. It is Australian Governments, starting with the pretend conservative Liberal Party, Howard’s regime in particular, that introduced laws enabling their activities. Had a free market been allowed to operate, wind and solar simply would not exist, not even in places where you think it might possibly work like King and Flinders islands in Bass Strait in the Roaring 40’s.
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And curiously the “defence” of the developers claims that the wind is unobstructed on Robbins Island, so why have King & Flinders islands been listed as successes?
And the output of these ‘generators’ has to be diverted (from Tasmania which doesn’t need it) to Victoria (which doesn’t need it) via an undersea cable built at the expense of taxpayers.
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Bob is wrong. It is not ‘some’ developers, it is all of them that are profiteering.
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And the politicians are profiteering on the gullibility of the public.
Most of he MSM are going along for the ride as well. Good news doesn’t sell but “boiling oceans” and “the world’s on fire” does!
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The Australian article also points out that Robbins Island is the only location that has disease-free Tasmanian Devils, and the wind farm company plans to build a bridge to the island from the mainland. While it is possible that some Devils could cross to the island on the mudflats at low tide, it is very much preferable that Robbins Island remains as a refuge for both migrating birds, the rare parrots and the disease-free Devils.
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Where is the outrage for this assault on the fauna?
It just shows you that the care the “green” Left pretend to have for the environment is a complete sham. But we already knew that.
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Whenever engineered out comes are attempted through manipulating markets, the law of unintended consequences (plural) comes in to play.
And it’s all so futile. It won’t make any difference, even if it was necessary.
But it’s all so feudal.
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The irony of Nut Zero, is that the budgets that government have allocated to Nut Zero, cannot now achieve their aim, because the costs of Nut Zero are making the projects too expensive to be achieved with the budgets allocated. The same problem is also hitting the Bird Mincer business … the costs of running the bird mincers, keeps going up the more they keep adding to the cost of energy, and they too are becoming uneconomic.
It’s like the proverbial early government plan for powered flight … weighed down by red tape.
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If you keep on pumping money in at one end of a system, said system will not keep operating at current levels, but will adapt to absorb that money. It’s how economics work.
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He should protest by living in a cave on Robbins Island . The irony is that he would have to sup with the devils (will need a long spoon).
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The Bob Brown idiot has less credibility than silly Greta and should know better, but alas he makes no sense as usual. And ditto his clueless Greens party and of course the Bowen and Albo donkeys etc.
We should demand they stop all TOXIC, UNRELIABLE W & S because it will just WASTE TRILLIONS of $ for a guaranteed ZERO RETURN and WRECK our environment, plus kill animals and birds at sea and on the land.
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The article started off well by using the term “industrial wind park”, but then lapsed into “wind farm”for the remainder. We never call Liddell Power Station a coal farm, so why persist with term wind farm. I know I’m being pedantic, but language is important. It always the first thing the lefties/progressives/ green blob change.
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Prof. William Happer prefers the term “wind plantation” as they are reminiscent of slave plantations in the sense that these modern day plantations are also making slaves of us.
I call them “wind and solar subsidy farms”.
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It’s not a farm, a park, or a plantation.
It’s vastly expensive concrete and steel industrial power generation installation of intermittent, toxic, & environmentally destructive Chinese contraptions.
A widely dispersed vastly inefficient ugly network of unreliable and feeble electricity generators
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It’s a slur on industry … which derives from the same root as “industrious” … to call people who sit in expensive clubs parasiting their money from those who are industrious. I prefer something like “wind business park” … or just “bird mincers”.
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Bob, good news. I have found this stuff you can simply suck out of the earth and leave the forests and wildlife untouched. And all it does is produce some co2, a perfectly natural gas.
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Brown is against so-called “green” hydrogen as well (as are rational-thinking people) and has run afoul of Forrest and his plans.
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/bob-brown-changes-tune-on-twiggy-s-green-hydrogen-20211118-p59a6q
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11:19am Summer King Island 83% diesel. Maybe Bob is right and wind is rubbish as well as damaging to the environment?
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Bob Brown in concert with Bob Hawke denied a more sustainable future for Tasmania when they and the mad hatters from Sydney stopped the Franklin Dam. Hawke was chasing votes
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He would need to take his grievance to the UN. Australia has just signed on to their tripling of wind capacity.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-02/australia-commits-to-tripling-renewable-energy-capacity-decade/103181500
The only way this will happen is if Australia guarantees the finance and the income stream or it comes straight from general revenue. It would require payments above and beyond what the promoters could extract from consumers even with the existing RET. All mainland States are currently offloading grid wind and solar this Saturday morning. All mainland States currently have negative prices. There is no point in building more grid wind and solar because the supply system is already saturated. New capacity just leads to reduced capacity factor. That will be the case until there is substantially more storage.
TBM Florence has been making progress for the last week. They are still saying December 2028 finish but I doubt that all the issues have been resolved. I wonder how many new 2GW Chinese made power stations you could get for AUD12bn. And about 70% of the power that goes into pumped hydro comes back out. So it does not actually produce energy and it wastes about 30% on gong in and out. Then there is the billions in new power lines to connect this storage to generators and loads.
Australia electricity consumers are on the hook for really big bucks. All because the incompetent sods at the BoM produce silly computer games that they convince others are able to predict the weather.
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Arguably climate alarmists might be regarded as demoralised by the incessant propaganda tyey are subject to, hence the relevance of the following quote.
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Solar panels invade wildlife spaces,
Wind turbines kill birds in all places,
While the skeptics shout NO,
The Greens were gung-ho,
Now their folly blows back in their faces.
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Then, there’s this little gem:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-23/intervention-to-save-red-handfish-marine-heatwave/103261502
“HEATWAVES? Oceanic heatwaves
Read it and weep, but check your wallet, first.
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Way to late Bob Brown you DHead.The environmental impacts of YOUR ruinables future will be unprecedented,unlike the absurdity of climate alarmists claim about the weather.Sucked in climate alarmists striking school kids,this is what you wished for so enjoy your future environment covered from east to west, north to south in “wonderful” ruinables…bwahaha.
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Who’d a thunk it: Not everyone is pure of heart.
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Supplementary:
“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had”.
Michael Crichton.
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Michael Crichton RIP. Gone too soon.
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Probably back in the last Millennium, I joined the Greens, because I was in favour of wind … because I hadn’t seen any of the science. Apart from the blatant lies and corruption of the wind business, the thing that really got me, was the total gullibility and lack of knowledge of greens. For example, I did the maths and worked out roughly how many windmills would be needed to power Scotland (one of the windiest countries in Europe). And the answer was that almost every hill had to be covered with the monsters. I couldn’t see how that would be acceptable, especially when I learnt that birds were being killed (outright lie followed when I asked the main wind lobbyists about it).
Talking to greens, I couldn’t get them to take the problem seriously. I finally worked out the problem … whereas I had seen the enormous monsters (now much bigger), none of them had a clue what they were supporting. It turned out, they were thinking of things around 1m across hidden in the trees. I was talking about something 50m high, visible for tens of miles.
It was that total lack of any understanding of what they were supporting, that led me to take a determined effort to “find the science” … and which led me to become a sceptic, because there was no science backing the wind scam.
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“To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day.”
Let’s be clear, it doesn’t matter how many of these fantasy technologies you install, they CANNOT provide a baseline power capability. They are a complete waste of money and provide a guaranteed method of gutting the economy.
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The former not long ago CEO of the Snowy Mountains Hydro during an interview after he had resigned estimated that to reach Labor’s latest 82 per cent transition to so called renewable energy (wind and solar plus) would take more than 80 years to achieve and cost well above one trillion dollars conservative estimate.
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Started his “environmental” career opposing hydro, ending it opposing wind … his only real claim to fame was as a doctor in a London ER when Jimmy Hendrix was brought in and pronounced dead!
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As a young man I trained in Biology, and was swayed by environmentalism. I attended a few of their meetings, realised they were idiots, and went back to real science.
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Same story…
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Two words…NIMBY HYPOCRITE! Like all good socialists, the greens eventually run out of other peoples environments to save their own.
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There is an interesting precedent in Western Australia. A few years ago a green crusader came up with the idea of supplying the town of Denmark on the south coast of WA with wind power. He found the ideal site for the turbines, right on the bluff overlooking the local beach.
The local community, recognised as the most green in WA, and therefore regarded as the most likely to want wind-generated electricity, rejected the proposal because they didn’t like the aesthetic impact on their favourite recreation spot. The project was abandoned.
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Former Greens Leader Bob Brown during his last address as leader to the National Press Club in Canberra also spoke about his “dreams” of a “world parliament” and no international borders.
At that time Labor MP Tanya Plibersek from the Labor left factions agreed with his objectives.
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By the way, what is the Minister for Environment, Tanya Plibersek, doing about the environmental vandalism taking place to clear land for wind and solar installations, transmission lines from every location to the main grid and a brand new main grid for the exclusive use of wind and solar supply?
According to submissions to the Senate and other sources the latest Small Modular Reactors could replace coal fired boiler technology on existing power station locations and with no new second grid needed.
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What I increasingly miss in reporting about windfarms and solar panels is a simple statement that these contraptions are a supposed ‘solution’ to a problem that doesn’t exist. There is no climate ‘crisis’. Yet the way we talk about windfarms, also here, has the undertone that they and their raison d’etre are a valid proposition.
Have we been gaslighted into tacit acceptance of the green delusion?
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That’s right at the heart of it Ed.
The constant drone of verbalism induces a hypnotic state of acceptance.
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So how many TRILLIONS $ will it cost us to replace reliable BASE-LOAD energy with the TOXIC, UNRELIABLE S & W disasters?
Here’s the latest data from the IPA a few weeks ago. Just think how we could recover from the loss of about 119 million hectares or about 15% of Australia’s land mass.
“Policymakers cannot escape the reality of the impact wind and solar energy generation will have on Australia’s landscape, particularly on our prime agricultural land, which will have to be sacrificed to satisfy net zero mandates,” said Dr Kevin You, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Today, the IPA released new research analysing the land use of forecast renewable energy production by 2050 as part of its regional tour throughout Victoria’s Mallee region and South Australia’s Riverland region, two regions under threat from new high voltage transmission lines.
The research finds that to generate the forecast energy demand by 2050 with a 50/50 mix of wind and solar, one third of Australia’s prime agricultural farmland will need to be covered in solar panels and wind turbines, specifically;
Using data supplied by Enerdata, the International Energy Agency, and the International Monetary Fund, the report forecasts that energy demand in Australia, and that of our trading partners, will grow by 4.25 per cent per annum to 2050.
Therefore, the amount of energy that is currently produced by coal, gas, and oil is estimated to increase to 15,459 terawatt hours by 2050.
To replace this with wind and solar generation will require between 57 million hectares and 181 million hectares of Australian land (depending on production mix), in addition to the land that is currently used to generate energy from wind and solar today.
“The federal government’s reckless ideological demand that Australia export ‘clean’ energy to our neighbours will obliterate regional communities, and the livelihood of farmers who feed and clothe Australia and the world,” said Dr You.
The land required for a 50/50 mix of wind and solar to replace energy generated by coal, gas, and oil to meet the forecast demand is estimated at 119 million hectares, equivalent to 15 per cent of Australia’s landmass and approximately one-third of all Australia’s agricultural land.
“As renewable energy generation will need to occur near existing population centres, it will be regional farming communities that will be sacrificed to meet the radical and niche demands of inner-city activists,” said Dr You.
Destroying Australia’s affordable and reliable baseload energy generation will not only see household energy bills continue to rapidly rise, but also undermine the nation’s energy security and our ability to produce the food and fibre we need to feed ourselves and our trading partners.
“As usual, it will not be wealthy, inner-city elites who will incur these burdens and costs mandated by the policy of net zero emissions by 2050. It will be working families and small businesses in the outer-suburbs and regions who pay the price,” said Dr You”.
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Renewables are designed to “cost”, “clutter ” and “collapse “.
Any engineer will tell us that they are primitive design and functional nightmares.
Sun Tsu designed this renewable scheme to smash the west.
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1982 – Green History Remembered:
Bob Brown was a leader in the campaign to stop the Gordon-below-Franklin dam and the first green politician elected to the Tasmanian parliament.
A clean green non-CO2 making hydroelectric dam that would have helped stop climate warming and save the world was stopped by mass protests by green activists.
What would the Great Greta Thunberbum think?
We are not amused. 😖
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No kidding Bob
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re: “Former Greens Leader Bob Brown says wind industry and renewables are profiteering off climate”
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Heh. What was the name of that movie Michael Moore was the executive producer of (and directed by Jeff Gibbs) about this subject? OH yeah – this one: “Planet of the Humans”
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Michael Moore presents a film by Jeff Gibbs, Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
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