|
|
Scott Morrison in Parliament. Photo, ABC: Nick Haggarty
The Coalition can now form a majority government with no need to do deals with a GetUp candidate. They may win 78 seats. While this is being hailed as a “great” win it’s nothing like Tony Abbott’s 90 seat landslide in 2013. Of the last three elections, the most skeptical PM won hugely, and the biggest believer, Turnbull, almost lost. Morrison-in-the middle, couldn’t fight hard on climate change because his party supports major and expensive action, but at least he didn’t burn off the base like Turnbull did. Luckily for him, the Labor Party had wild ambition and was doomed by overconfidence. (Thank the ABC).
Every time Labor and GetUp reminded Australia that Morrison brought a lump of coal to Parliament, they were helping Morrison.
This was a “climate change” election and Australians voted No
Even ABC commentators admit the central role of climate change and are baffled. (If only they had shown some, any, interest in the opinions of 50% of Australia?). Watch the struggle:
Election 2019: What happened to the climate change vote we heard about?
Matt MacDonald, ABC
It was supposed to be the […]
Gotta love a long unbroken proxy.
Scientists looked at 44 pines sites across the Scottish Highlands and used their tree rings to create a continuous temperature series for the last 810 years. Showing admirable restraint, they did not paste on adjusted thermometer records to create a hockey stick effect. Instead we can see that Scottish summers were just as warm in the 1300s, the 1280s and around 1500 as well.
The rate of warming is not unprecedented. The temperature is not unusual. But thermometers don’t tell the same story as the tree rings in the last 50 years. They both can’t be right. Either the tree rings are always unreliable thermometers or the thermometers are placed near ice cream trucks and adjusted up-the-kazoo?
Thanks to CO2Science:
Rydval et al. extended “the previously published Scottish dendroclimatic record (Hughes et al., 1984) by nearly 500 years,” in order to create an 810-year-long proxy over the period AD 1200-2010. The reconstruction was derived from a network of 44 Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) sites across the Scottish Highlands from both living and subfossil samples that correlated well with summer (July-August) temperatures.
In placing the most recent warming of the instrumental […]
While everyone saw the flying baby Trump balloon, did your local Fake News Media show you footage of the “We Love Trump” rally?
The ABC includes three videos of the anti-Trump events, but only a couple of still shots of the pro-Trump counter protestors which were described as a “small group”.
The ABC description on July 14th
Huge police numbers were on hand to manage the crowds in London, with only small flare-ups occurring when the demonstrators clashed with pro-Trump counter-protesters outside a pub on Whitehall. Wearing Make America Great Again hats, the small group chanted “USA” and also voiced their support for English far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
There’s no mention that the original Welcome Trump rally was banned from gathering at the US embassy and marching on Whitehall even though the large anti-Trump rally was permitted.
But our ABC did feature an interview with a guy wearing a MAGA hat that was there because he “happened across the March”. Obviously the ABC needs more money so it can train staff to use Youtube and teach the Arts grads how to interview leaders of protests instead of anonymous random uninvolved bystanders.
Tommy Robinson seems also to […]
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an […]
Australia is so irrelevant. India is cancelling fifty times as many nuclear power plants as Australians ever dreamed of building.
Let’s build another million wind farms.
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
Energy Post – thanks to GWPF.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are […]
The gold-plated stars of our national grid are the old coal plants we’ve built and paid off.
A US report (thanks Lance) shows how fantastically cheap and bountiful old coal and nuclear plants are. The LCOE or the Levelized Cost of Electricity includes the costs of the concrete, turbines, car parks and coal, plus the maintenance and salaries. It reveals that thirty year old, and even fifty year old coal plants, are the gift from past generations — enormous infrastructure, built and paid for, and ready to churn out bargain electrons. Or in crazy-land, ready to be blown up.
Look how long it takes to pay off the capital cost of building them (the red sector in the graph), and look how wonderfully cheap that electricity is from a 30 year old plant. Watch the pea. All those “investigative news stories” that compare the cost of building new coal to the cost of solar or wind are hiding the most brilliant and essential assets on our grid. Reopen Hazelwood now. (!)
Both sides of politics are choosing to destroy the family jewels in the hope of controlling global weather.
….
From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the […]
From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
…
In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
They just need batteries with three months supply. It will be fine once Germany turns the state of Thuringia into a redox unit.
Read about it: Dark Days […]
We can’t blame Goldman Sachs. It’s just good business.
Goldman Sachs pours money into lefty causes and politicians of both stripes. The gifts to left-wing flagships like climate change and same-sex marriage buy protection from the anti-bank Occupy crowd. And climate propaganda is doubly useful — Goldman Sachs can invest and profit from government largess. And these are very big biccies – -in 2009 Goldman Sachs announced it would spend $150 billion on green energy by 2020.
The message to non-left causes is that if you want to get multimillion dollar philanthropic funds, mobilize people and march in the street. When Goldman is afraid of what you might do against their bonuses or profits they might get interested in your cause too.
But infamously and so much more importantly, Goldman donates to both sides of politics and their people are appointed to key positions in the Treasury and corridors of power. When Goldman crashes, it gets bailed out — and that has happened four times in the last 20 years. The TARP bailout for Sachs was as much as $10 billion, so a mere $675k in speaking fees for Hillary-nearly-Pres might be viewed as a decent investment at the time […]
Oh the futility. Australia’s entire annual production of carbon from all that mining, construction, industry and everything is replicated in China every 18 days.
If we cut our emissions by an obscene, bleeding 25%, we will spend billions and yet China will undo all our hair-shirt “savings” in just 5 normal days. (And that’s at current rates, it gets worse by 2030).
Australia is a giant coal and iron quarry built at the far end of the Earth, with a tiny, but rapidly growing population spread across a vast land. Transport distances are eye-watering. We run 94% of everything off fossil fuels and there are no more easy cuts to be made. Gaia gave us more uranium than any other country but we are religiously opposed to nuclear power. (What would it take to change that — a bomb from China?). We’ve got more Sun, hot rocks and empty space than anywhere, so if solar, wind or geothermal were going to work on Planet Earth, it would be here. We are God’s Gift to the renewable industry — yet they all fail. (Today, Flannery’s Geothermal project crashed, last week Windorah’s solar farm shut, and last month, the whole state of […]
With an election likely for July 2nd, the hottest topic in Australian politics right now is how to vote. So put your best case forward here. Hammer this out. Will Turnbull promise anything to win back the Delcons — the angry conservatives? The time to ask is now, and if the Liberal base are not prepared to vote against him, they have nothing to negotiate.
“Better to have a real conservative opposition than a fake conservative government.”
The elephant in 2016 is the ferocious boiling anger among betrayed conservatives and small government libertarians, divided over whether they can bear to vote for Turnbull (a Liberal*) who has been called the best leader the Labor Party never had. Delcons was tossed at the so-called “Delusional” Conservatives. But they took up the badge. Defcons means the Defiant ones.
Right now, and since September, I’m a Delcon, like Tim Blair, Merv Bendle, and James Allan. Convince me otherwise. (We love you Miranda but you are wrong.)
“As long as Turnbull is in charge there will be no real alternative for conservative libertarians.”
The issue: Is it better to vote for the lesser of two evils and hope a Turnbull-led party can be reformed […]
This week the Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, called people who oppose green energy subsidies “liars”.
Mr. Schmidt said: “And the people who oppose it (climate change) are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
Meanwhile, Google uses mostly non-renewable fuel to power its operations, but has “pledged $1.5billion” to fund renewables. It has invested millions into solar panel plants that are “bird-fryers” — literally roasting birds in the sky. These investments mostly occur in states with renewable-mandates, would not survive without taxpayer funding, qualify for tax credits, and require infrastructure (like transmission lines) that electricity consumers or governments have to fund.
Wall St Journal
Google Kills Birds The mercenary motives behind Eric Schmidt’s appeal to green virtue.
“The real charlatans are businesses like Google that use climate change as a pretext for corporate welfare.”
… nearly all of Google’s solar and wind farms are located in states with renewable-energy mandates, which create opportunities for politically mediated profit-making. For instance, California requires that renewables make up a third of electricity by […]
Is this a 2013 Streisand-Effect finalist?
The UK has decided to build its first new nuclear power plant in 20 years. The UK Department of Energy & Climate Change posted this graphic below in a News Story probably to help justify why it really did make sense to go nuclear rather than renewable. The Renewable Energy Association called it “unhelpful”, and lo, it disappeared from gov.uk.
Credit goes to Emily Gosden’s Tweet, and Will Heaven‘s Blog. Hat tip to Colin.
(Click to enlarge to see the fine print)
The fine print (edited out in the small copy here) says that Hickley Point C “is estimated to be equal to around 7% of UK electricity consumption in 2025 and enough to power nearly 6 million homes.” About onshore wind, the fine print reads: “The footprint will depend on the location and turbine technology deployed. DECC estimates the footprint could be between 160,000 and 490,000 acres“. That’s quite some error margin.
How many National Parks does one nuclear plant save then?
It’s a good representation of just how much of the Earths surface we have to give up if we want to live off renewables at the moment. So who […]
Roger Pielke, Jr. has looked closely at Australia’s ETS targets and helpfully put some numbers into the hypotheticals.
With all their subsidies, goodwill and fervent wishes, solar, wind, and geothermal produce just 3% of our energy needs. Fossil fuels produce a whopper 94%. And “energy” on these grand continental scales is measured in quadrillion BTUs which is known as “one quad”. Australians use about 5 quads / year, and to make that we pump out about 400 Mt of carbon dioxide per year. (These kind of big-picture numbers are often hard to find, so I wanted to capture that to keep things in perspective.)
…
Population growth is a big factor in Australia 8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
History will record December 1, 2009 as the day of the first major political damage to the momentum of the Global Warming Scam.
For the first time anywhere in a major western democracy, a mainstream party is ready to face an election on “climate change” and face the bullies. The Australian Liberal Party have elected a new leader, held a secret ballot and voted 55 : 29 to defer the Emissions Trading Legislation.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments