Energy transition powered by wishful thinking
Changing an energy system is challenging. Governments have to ensure a reliable supply of electricity all day, every day. Ideally, in an orderly transition there would be like for like capacity replacement. The Albanese government has failed to balance the objectives of affordability and reliability as it embarked on its decarbonisation strategy. It legislated a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 that needs renewable energy to reach the 82 per cent target.
The government’s focus has centred on meeting these targets regardless of costs to households, the economy and our national interest. Legitimate concerns are described as the actions of “bad-faith actors” using “mistruths and outright misinformation”. Such comments may find favour in a speech to a sympathetic audience but do nothing to advance an important debate about our country’s future.
Any serious analysis of the energy transition should be grounded in fact, not wishful thinking. Let the facts speak for themselves.
Anticipating the loss of 90 per cent of our coal-fired generation in the next decade and with looming gas shortages, we need to ensure reliable baseload power into the future. The evidence shows the unreliability of intermittent, weather-dependent renewables. In July, the penetration of renewables in the grid fell to a low 10.2 per cent. It would be folly to believe you could rely on a predominantly renewables grid to power the economy.
Neither can there be any certainty about power prices with weather-dependent renewables. Across the past few months increased demand for heating has driven huge price volatility. Together with the lack of wind generation and a small number of unplanned forced outages, spot prices spiked to record levels.
On July 29 all the national electricity market regions registered simultaneous spot prices hikes at 18:00. The figures, expressed in megawatt hours, ranged from $3500 in Tasmania to $4092 in South Australia. The next evening at that time, prices rose between $15,600 in Tasmania and $17,377 in Victoria. At 20:15 the SA price reached $17,499.94 a megawatt hour. SA, with the highest penetration of renewables, took the prize for the highest prices.
So much for Energy Minister Chris Bowen trumpeting that wholesale power prices were falling. In the June quarter wholesale prices averaged $133 a megawatt hour, 23 per cent higher than the corresponding quarter last year. Far from receiving a cut of $275, prices have risen by 22 per cent, up to $1000, and will continue on this upward trajectory. Our power prices are among the world’s highest.
Energy poverty will continue growing as the costs of 10,000km of new transmission are still to be passed on in our power bills.
Last year, with falling investment in renewables, calls for greater government support grew louder. Bowen came to the rescue with yet another subsidy. His capacity investment scheme is based on taxpayers underwriting a vast expansion of 32 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Future risk will be transferred from investors in renewables to the taxpayer in secret contracts for difference. If revenues fall below the floor, taxpayers will fund the difference. Gas critical for firming and the viability of manufacturing was excluded from the scheme. We’re still in the dark about the total system costs of the transition, with estimates ranging from hundreds of billions into the trillions.
What are the aggregate costs from the public purse? Labor’s promise of transparency and accountability is undermined by non-disclosure and secrecy. Hopefully the Senate can pursue the public’s right to know.
There’s little progress to date in meeting the 2030 emissions and renewables targets. In Labor’s first year emissions grew by four million tonnes, a 0.8 per cent increase to June last year. Emissions across last year fell by a mere 0.5 per cent, registering a 29 per cent reduction below the 2005 base level. The Climate Change Authority’s 2023 report said the government “was not yet on track to meet its 2030 targets” and its policy agenda had “not yet translated into the emissions reductions we need”. Any claim the government is on track to reach a 42 per cent reduction, just falling short of target, is not based on fact, just wishful thinking.
Renewables have reached the halfway point at 40 per cent, with six years left to meet the target. The minister previously advised the 82 per cent target required installing 40 7MW wind turbines every month and 22,000 solar panels every day to 2030 as well as the transmission links. That won’t happen. Opposition in the regions is growing, even in Labor’s heartland seats, while social licence declines. Every transmission project is well over time, storage capacity is inadequate, Snowy 2.0 is delayed for years and battery storage limited to two to four hours.
There’s a lot at stake in this energy transition, so it’s necessary to see through the spin. According to reputable experts, the 2030 targets won’t be met. Despite this, the government is considering raising the 2035 emissions target to between 65 per cent and 75 per cent.
If we’re to avoid the pathway to economic calamity it’s surely time for a plan B informed by independent energy experts. The country needs an orderly energy transition plan that’s grounded in reality, not wishful thinking.
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Yet More Calls To Make Climate Skepticism Illegal
Given how rigid the official orthodoxy is when it comes to the public health ‘crises’, the ‘climate emergency’ and the supposed moral defects of Western civilization, it’s no surprise that the slur words of choice today are “anti-vaxxer”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “far right” and, not least, “climate denier”
The “climate denier” epithet is used to shut down rational debate on the climate with specious claims about “settled science”.
As the physicist Steve Koonin says:
“I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion [on climate change] equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.”
The scurrilous epithet resurfaced last week in an article in the Guardian entitled – cue shock, horror – “Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of U.S. Congress.”
How much longer will this heresy be tolerated?
In an interview on GB News with Andrew Doyle, British environmentalist Jim Dale demanded the criminalisation of climate denialism. He said that “climate deniers” are “dangerous” for society and their scepticism about Net Zero “pollutes the discourse”.
Mr. Dale demurred in spelling out just exactly what sanctions should be applied to “illegal” opinions about ‘climate change’, stating that it would be up to politicians like Sir Keir Starmer.
That interview took place three months ago, and Starmer is now Prime Minister. Having moved from his previous role as the Director of Public Prosecutions to Parliament and then to the highest political office in the U.K., his response to last week’s riots has been to push for quick and harsh sentences, threatening freedom of speech.
Sky News reported on Thursday that a woman was arrested over a social media post on the Southport stabbing attack that killed three little girls and injured several others. Evidently, her media post was considered “dangerous” as she publicly shared a mistaken description of the perpetrator of the Southport killings.
The question of her intentions did not seem to be an issue in that arrest, although she still hasn’t been charged.
The U.S. Supreme Court holds that the legal threshold from protected to unprotected speech is crossed when the words in question are “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and they’re “likely to incite or produce such action”.
Both those tests have to be met for the words to lose their protected status under the First Amendment, something known as the Brandenburg test.
In the U.K., the land of the Magna Carta, recent court cases suggest that no such test is necessary for criminal conviction for “stirring up violence” online or indeed even for believing in “forms of toxic ideology which has [sic] the potential to threaten public safety and security”.
The blurring of the line between “criminal thought” and criminal conduct is a sad reflection of jurisprudence in the U.K.
One day before the arrest of the woman who posted inaccurate information about the Southport killer, the Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, warned:
“We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests…
You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false.”
UK Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told a reporter in response to a question about Elon Musk supposedly “whipping up hatred” on X:
“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.”
The purpose of blaming the riots on social media, of course, is that it deflects from the real issue: a great many Britons disapprove of the government’s complicity in the scale of the mass immigration of the past two decades.
That ‘thoughtcrime’ has fueled the riots in the country is reflected in the deluge of mainstream media headlines singing from the same hymn sheet:
Reuters: “Misinformation fuels riots”
BBC News: “Social media misinformation ‘fanned riot flames’ in North East”
CNBC: “Online disinformation sparked a wave of far-right violence”
Sky News: “Southport attack misinformation fuels far-right discourse on social media”
CNN: “U.K. riots show how social media can fuel real-life harm. It’s only getting worse”
Time: “Misinformation Stoked Anti-Migrant Riots”
In an Orwellian world where the carrying of machetes on the streets of British cities may more easily escape prosecution than the “far right thuggery” of “keyboard warriors”, Mr. Dale’s wish to criminalise “misinformation” about ‘climate change’ may come true.
Dis- or misinformation is whatever the state says it is. The moral crusade is the war over disinformation with little discussion of underlying policy issues. Policy choices supportive of a ‘Net Zero’ ‘fossil fuel’-free electric grid by 2030 are non-partisan “givens” – with little debate in or out of parliament – as the Covid lockdowns were when they were imposed.
Thus it is no surprise that the Counter Disinformation Unit which targeted dissent during Covid has been rebooted by the Starmer government as the National Security Online Information Team to monitor social media in the wake of the riots.
Will the reborn secretive Covid-era spy agency start ‘flagging’ social media posts that question Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State at the oxymoronically named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero?
Never mind that a ‘fossil fuel’-free electricity grid in Britain by 2030 – the interim goal enroute to a fully Net Zero Britain by 2050 – “is as likely as the second coming of Christ”, as David Starkey said in a recent interview.
Removal of climate contrarian posts on social media is bad enough on its own, but will it eventually become a prosecutable offense in the UK to point out the tension between ‘Net Zero’ and energy security, or to assert that ‘Net Zero’ policy targets constitute an onslaught on people’s standards of living and a denial of reality?
Will some future Britain sport an unelected offshoot of the judiciary, paid to hunt down, prosecute and jail those who dare to dispute the climate scam?
https://principia-scientific.com/yet-more-calls-to-make-climate-skepticism-illegal/
*******************************************Australia: Activists ‘stand in way of Indigenous economic empowerment’, says Roy Ah-See
Green activists are abusing land rights acts at the cost of economic empowerment and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is failing to listen to the Aboriginal authority on the lands of a vetoed $1bn gold mine, one of the most respected leaders of the Wiradjuri nation warns.
Despite her own department originally approving the project and the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council challenging the grounds of her decision, Ms Plibersek has said she declared an Indigenous protection order over a Regis Resources goldmining project near Blayney because of its importance to the Wiradjuri people of central NSW.
Ms Plibersek was holding firm on Monday as she came under attack from both the Business Council of Australia and the Coalition for her decision. BCA chief executive Bran Black warned of an investment drain and opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price called the veto a “serious threat to economic development for Indigenous Australians”.
Last Friday, Ms Plibersek said: “Because I accept that the headwaters of the Belubula River are of particular significance to the Wiradjuri/Wiradyuri people in accordance with their tradition, I have decided to protect them.”
Roy Ah-See – one of the most senior Wiradjuri leaders on the national stage and the former chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council – said the Labor frontbencher was wrong to prefer the views of opponents over the written advice of the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council.
Mr Ah-See said he was not speaking on behalf of the group, but wanted to speak up for the recognised cultural authority of the local land council.
“If it’s got the support of the local Aboriginal land council that should be enough for the minister to listen to the recognised Aboriginal party,” he said.
“If you don’t have that structure, you have chaos … We can have anyone ringing up saying they’re Wiradjuri and it doesn’t feel right to me. That’s why the land council is so important because in order to become a member there are certain requirements and restrictions. They are the statutory authority.”
Mr Ah-See said environmentalists believed Aboriginal lands should be locked up.
But economic empowerment for Aboriginal people in Blayney should come first, he added.
“The green attitude is that all our land should be locked up for environmental national parks and that wasn’t the intent of the NSW land rights legislation,“ the Wiradjuri leader said.
“The environmental view is that Aboriginal people should be environmentalists, that’s not true. That shoe doesn’t fit. We are balanced. It is about economic empowerment for us.
“We want to create economic opportunities for the future generations and we are not going to do that by locking up our land and using them as environmental corridors or offsets for other developers. That’s crazy.”
The BCA predicted an investment drain due to unwieldy planning and regulation in the wake of the Albanese government’s eleventh-hour decision to stop the $1bn goldmine.
Orange Land Council’s own heritage committee “truth tested” claims about the impact of the McPhillamys project, finding “they could not be substantiated”.
“The proposed development would not impact any known sites or artefacts of high significance,” the land council wrote to the NSW Independent Planning Commission last year.
Mr Black said that if projects were approved under federal and state law they shouldn’t then be put at risk by activist inspired lawfare. This followed an extraordinary statement to the Australian Stock Exchange by Regis Resources on Monday, criticising Ms Plibersek’s decision to declare an Indigenous protection order over the project, despite the minister having approved it under commonwealth environmental laws.
The resources sector has warned of a dangerous precedent set by Ms Plibersek’s intervention last week to accept a section 10 application under the 1984 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Heritage Protection Act to protect the land on which a tailings dam for the mine had already been approved by the NSW and federal government.
“I constantly hear from CEOs that Australia is missing out on major investments because our planning and regulation systems are difficult to navigate, duplicative and cumbersome,” Mr Black said.
Sky News host Chris Kenny says resource projects being blocked because of “Indigenous heritage claims” has the mining industry “worried” about the sovereign risk of trying to invest in Australia.
“We need an approval system which balances economic, environmental and social benefits of projects and provides transparent decisions.
“If projects are supported by communities and meet all the approval requirements, they should not be put at risk by activist actions or lawfare.”
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No, Evie Magazine, Climate Change is Not Causing Anxiety
Evie Magazine, a conservative-leaning women’s publication, recently posted an article titled “Climate Change Anxiety Is A Cause For The Decline In The Birth Rate,” in which the author claims that human-caused global warming is leading to climate anxiety which misdirects its wrath at larger families. This is mostly false. Climate change is not producing anxiety so much as false and misleading alarmist media coverage is, but it is true that blaming large families for bad weather is equally wrong.
The article begins with writer Carolyn Ferguson claiming that “last year was the hottest year on record for the world,” and that the United States is somehow warming faster than the rest of the world, and that “many are feeling the effects of global warming this year.” This is false.
The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet. It should be obvious that every place on earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world. Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different timeframes, using different datasets and methods, whatever timeframe is most optimal to show the most warming. This makes these comparisons basically worthless.
The fact for the United States is that the record of high temperature anomalies, that is, extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high temperature events since the best records begin in 2005.
Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has actually declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.
Even looking at proxy data globally which give an idea of ancient temperatures do not indicate we are in a period that can be described as “the hottest on record.” Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1000 to 2500 years ago, respectively. Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
The majority of the abnormal warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but was simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September. A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe. This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.
This is not to say an average warming has not occurred over the past hundred-plus years, but it is not unprecedented nor is it alarming.
The Evie post proceeds to claim that aggression rises amid higher temperatures, writing “one of the most often overlooked corollaries is a rise in communal anger and aggression.”
The “heat makes people crazy” idea has been floated several times over the years, but even the article the Evie post links to admits that it’s likely heat is not the main factor in most of the studies that found aggression. The social sciences and psychology experiments are rifle with uncontrollable variables. Without attempting to conduct any studies, the plain fact that places like Florida and Mexico, the Bahamas, and other hot tropical locales are popular relaxation destinations seems to throw cold water on the hypothesis. Why would anyone go someplace that makes them angrier or more aggressive for vacation?
Discomfort can be aggravating, certainly, but it’s not just higher temperatures alone. Ferguson then gets to the claim that mental health professionals are “seeing more patients come in with symptoms of climate change anxiety, which is supposedly the root of many activists’ anger when it comes to large families.”
Climate Realism has written extensively about how misleading the climate anxiety diagnosis is, here, here, and here, for examples, often shifting the blame from the true culprits. Something like “climate anxiety” does exist – but it is a media-driven phenomenon because of the constant drumbeat of impending doom, not from actual lived experience of warming. Constant media coverage telling people that we are hurtling towards “global boiling,” that every weather extreme is because of you and your neighbor’s use of gasoline, including from typically conservative publications like Evie Magazine, is what is causing anxiety in people.
While Evie is right that climate activists should not turn their ire on big, traditional families, they are wrong that climate anxiety is a legitimate phenomenon.
As Ferguson correctly concludes in her piece, if someone decides not to have kids, “that’s their prerogative, but they should know this decision will likely have little impact on saving our planet.”
https://climaterealism.com/2024/08/no-evie-magazine-climate-change-is-not-causing-anxiety/
****************************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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