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Billions of dollars spent on wind, solar and batteries and Australian electricity emissions went up last year

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 […]

May 31st, 2025 | Tags: , | Category: Australia, CO2 emissions, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | | Comments (57)

Those Green Australians! Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990

Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.

The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?

As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like […]

January 13th, 2015 | Tags: , , | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Chemistry, CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions, Global Warming, Property Rights | Print This Post Print This Post | |