Image by Manuel Angel Egea from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Welcome to Futility Island
Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and set God-like new emissions targets in to legislation. Ponder the scale of the national achievements of the last three years. All that money, all the wind factories, the solar panels, the batteries, the holes bored in the Snowy Mountains, and this is all we have to show for it?
This is the graph from the latest Quarterly figures shown on the DCCEEW website (with added notation from me):
Poignantly, Mr Bowen, the Minister for Weather Changing and Energy said — “We’re turning around a decade of denial and delay, by setting serious climate targets in law and delivering the policy certainty to industry to bring down emissions”. Indeed. (Do tell us when you start Chris?)
The bump last year was because the clouds didn’t rain on the Tassie Hydro Scheme as much as we needed. And the wind didn’t blow anywhere much in Australia in Quarter 2 last year. Who can forget the calm days of April-May-June last year when the wind turbines on the continent stood still? At one point, $20 billion dollars worth of wind power could only make as much power as two diesel generators.
For some reason none of our expert Climate Models saw any of that coming far enough in advance for us to plan ahead. So we just had to burn a bit more gas and coal. You’d think at this point, the failure of extra wind and solar would be so obvious, the Greens would be begging the Labor Party to build some nuclear plants. But they don’t care about CO2 either.
Beyond that, ponder that even despite weather anomalies, the Labor Government and all the extra “renewables” have not seemingly achieved much in the last three years (or not much in the way of emissions). With all the money spent, wasn’t the line supposed to dip below the trend, not plateau?
The thing is, more than a million people have immigrated to Australia since 2022, and they like emitting carbon dioxide too, and need houses and cars, but no one talks about that. Does the Labor Government care about our national emissions, or is it all just a performance art to justify trips to Davos and Brazil, and enrich their friends and donors?
Carbon emissions go up, hydro power down, data shows
By Greg Brown and Perry Williams, The Australian
Anthony Albanese’s 2030 target to reduce emissions is on life support after new data showed Australia’s carbon footprint rose slightly last year driven by a 2.2 per cent increase in the electricity sector.
Figures released by the Climate Change Department show carbon dioxide emissions rose by 0.05 per cent in 2024 to 446.4 million tonnes, equivalent to 27 per cent lower than in 2005.
Despite Labor going all in on renewables as part of its climate change agenda, emissions in the electricity sector increased in 2024 with coal and gas needing to step up due to a lack of water limiting hydro generation in Tasmania.
Australia has currently reduced its emissions by 27% in total since 2005 (mostly due to land use changes, not electricity, but that’s another story). Supposedly, if something supernatural happens, like aliens visit, or a meteor hits Sydney, we’re going to get to a 43% reduction by 2030.
Otherwise to have even the faintest ethereal chance we’d need to increase “renewable-unreliables” from the current 40% up to 82% and 2030 is only five years away? Everyone knows it’s impossible, and yet the crazy bus keeps going?
Even the believers like Bruce Mountain are saying he did not think there was a chance… yet Mr Bowen is still emphatic that “we’re on track”. (Like we live in a different decade of denial now?)
We’re so “on track”, that 75% of the projects the Minister is expecting are not taking off:
Only a quarter of the large-scale renewable energy generation required to hit Labor’s 2030 target in the first three months of 2025 progressed to a firm capital commitment, new data showed this week, sparking a warning that the pace of investment must quickly accelerate to hit the end of decade goal.
At this point in our breakneck transition, wind-factories and solar panels should be going in all over the country. But we just heard that the price of high voltage transmission towers was going to cost up to 55% more than expected, and the AEMO was throwing their previous plans to the wind. Now, we’re all supposed to subsidize each other to buy home batteries, EVs, and solar panels. What do we call that — a pyramid scheme?