The ruling socialists are hell-bent to ruin the country with the climate racket.
1. **Climate Policy Mismanagement:** Chris Bowen’s climate policy decisions have been criticized for not meeting the expectations of the public and the scientific community. The policies have been seen as slow, ineffective, and not ambitious enough to meet Australia’s climate goals.
2. **Energy Crisis Mismanagement:** Bowen has been accused of failing to effectively manage the energy crisis in Australia. His policies and strategies have been criticized for not providing adequate solutions to the rising energy costs and power outages experienced by many Australians.
3. **Nuclear Energy Misinformation:** Bowen has been criticized for spreading misinformation about nuclear energy, claiming it is slow to build and not a viable option for Australia’s energy needs. This has been seen as a failure to consider all possible solutions to Australia’s energy challenges.
4. **Fuel Efficiency Standards Delay:** Despite promising to deliver fuel efficiency standards, Australia continues to lag behind because of Bowen’s failure to act promptly. This has resulted in Australia being left behind in the global light vehicle market, which already has widespread fuel efficiency standards.
5. **Renewable Energy Mismanagement:** Bowen’s policies on renewable energy have been criticized for not being ambitious enough. There have been concerns that Australia is not taking full advantage of its potential in renewable energy, which could lead to missed opportunities for economic growth and environmental sustainability.
6. **Gas Strategy Flaws:** Bowen’s new gas strategy has been criticized for its flaws, particularly in its foreign policy implications. This has led to concerns about the long-term sustainability and security of Australia’s energy supply.
7. **Rising Greenhouse Gas Emissions:** Under Bowen’s watch, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in the past year. This has been seen as a failure to effectively implement policies to reduce emissions and meet Australia’s climate targets.
8. **Nuclear Energy Misconceptions:** Bowen has been criticized for his misconceptions about nuclear energy, including claims that it is slow to build and not a viable option for Australia. This has been seen as a failure to consider all possible solutions to Australia’s energy challenges.
9. **Public Relations Missteps:** Bowen has been criticized for his public relations strategies, which have been seen as out of touch with the needs and concerns of the public. This has led to a lack of public trust and support for his policies.
10. **Lack of Long-Term Planning:** Bowen has been criticized for his lack of long-term planning, particularly in the areas of energy and climate policy. This has led to concerns about the sustainability and resilience of Australia’s energy and climate policies in the face of future challenges.
Previous blog entries:
Palace chook hits the town
Federal government’s silence and inaction on flood crisis
Alan Jones The Daily Telegraph March 25, 2021
The media pictures and headlines all this week have been about floods. Large tracts of Queensland and NSW have been smashed and Victoria and Tasmania may soon get their turn. It is hard to get your head around the figures. Tens of thousands of people evacuated. Red Oak, near Port Macquarie, copping over 900 millimetres of rain since last Thursday night, 35 inches on the old scale. Water pouring out of the Warragamba Dam at the rate of 500 gigalitres a day, equal to the volume of Sydney Harbour.
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People have lost their homes, their cars, their stock, their very livelihood, everything but the clothes on their back.
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The National Parliament, purporting to represent Australians, has barely volunteered a syllable about any of this.
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Three issues merit urgent attention – Warragamba Dam, appropriate relief and harvesting water.
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It is easy to argue that the management of Warragamba Dam impacted on the tragedy and the loss that has overtaken many in the Hawkesbury/Nepean Valley west of Sydney.
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Yes, the Dam overflowed and water equal to the volume of Sydney Harbour spilt from it every day.
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However, the Hawkesbury River had already reached one metre below major flood level before Warragamba started overflowing on Sunday.
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There needs to be an analysis of the protocols in relation to the dam.
Simply, Warragamba Dam is a storage dam, not a flood mitigation dam.
It cannot be both.
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If you want to control a flood, you would have to keep the dam significantly empty; if you want to supply a city with water, you’d have to keep the dam as full as you can.
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Nonetheless, these floods have, as did the bushfires, imposed untold and easily forgotten tragedy.
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It must be a source of shame that people are still suffering from the consequences of last year’s bushfires. And so it is now with the floods, in wide areas across Queensland and NSW.
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Not one word has been uttered about appropriate relief, other than to say, if you’re in one of the 34 declared natural disaster zones in NSW alone, you will qualify for a payment of $1000 per eligible adult and $400 per eligible child.
Someone is kidding.
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People will rightly ask what happened to the rest of the money raised for bushfire relief? It is a good question.
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The Red Cross collected $241 million and handed out $218 million.
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They are good people but we were told that the rest of the money was being kept for a crisis that might later occur or for ongoing recovery projects to the end of this year and beyond.
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Same goes for other outlets.
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The Salvos collected $49.41 million; they handed out $37.59m.
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St Vincent de Paul collected almost $25.6 million; they handed out $21.5m.
The public raised $500 million.
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Where is it?
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The Federal Government tipped in over $2 billion. People did not see it.
Now, in the aftermath of these floods, there are Lake Conjolas everywhere. Lake Conjola is a little town on the south coast of NSW, population 437, 169km from Sydney.
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They lost 89 homes in the bushfires and then were hit with torrential rain and flooding.
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In 2018, bushfires destroyed 69 homes at Tathra, another tiny seaside town with a population of fewer than 2000, 450km from Sydney.
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The rebuilding program for both, to put it generously, is a non-event.
Are the people of south-east Queensland, northern NSW, Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Windsor to be forgotten also? If not, what is the mechanism for assisting them?
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I have long argued the urgent need for a National Disaster Fund where money is appropriated from every Budget into such a fund.
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The money is invested, as happens with our Future Fund.
It could be managed by a couple of ex-Prime Ministers.
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I hear you say they don’t have a good track record at managing money.
But I would trust Paul Keating, John Howard, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to get the job done.
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People could make urgent application to such a fund for appropriate relief.
Their application could be validated by the local Mayor, the local bank manager or a JP.
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As a corollary to that, should insurance against natural disasters be universal?
Can Government provide some actuarial figures on likely cost?
Why shouldn’t natural disasters, from an insurance point of view, be treated the same as health care?
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If the premiums are beyond the capacity of some people to afford, that is when a public system can step in.
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The alternatives are appalling. On the one hand, abandon people in their time of need; and on the other hand, cart around hats to raise money in a variety of “funds” when we don’t know where the money goes or to whom.
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The third issue, of course, is what borders on a national scandal – the harvesting of water.
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We need dams the size of Warragamba in every State across Australia, and several of them.
In 2002, a group of us stumped up money to research a clear path for harvesting and using water.
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A massive amount of work and money went into it.
Two volumes of expert advice were provided to Government. They found their way into the dust bin. Here we are, 19 years on.
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How many hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into futile drought and flood relief, which does nothing for the day when drought and flood return.
It is a dishonest argument to say the nation is short of water. We are using, at most, six per cent of our available water.
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Lake Argyle in Western Australia releases 50 tonnes of water a second.
Only 10 per cent of it is used in the Ord irrigation system. 45 tonnes per second is pushed into the Timor Sea, four billion litres a day. Yet the catchment area of the Fitzroy River is 50 times greater than the Ord. Queensland’s north east has four times the water of the Murray Darling Basin, but 70,000 gigalitres flow into the sea.
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You have to wonder whether we have left our brains behind.
A gigalitre is a thousand Olympic sized swimming pools.
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Further west, the Gulf of Carpentaria has 130,000 available gigalitres.
But we are told we can’t use the Ord River surplus; we can’t use the north east Queensland water; we can’t build dams; and when it rains, we can’t harvest the water.
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But we can build a 3200km pipeline to carry gas from Papua New Guinea to Brisbane. We can build a fairly useless railway line from Darwin to Alice Springs.
And money today is cheaper than it has ever been.
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It was Jack Beale, a Minister in the NSW Government in the 1940s, who said: “A Nation cannot afford to let resources remain idle, even if it has to build pyramids.”
Isn’t it valid to demand Wake Up Australia?
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Terry McCrann The Australian March 12, 2021
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When I wrote last week about our utterly unworkable — if entirely woke — future, I most certainly did not anticipate we would in the coming week rush to get there some four years earlier. That is the simple bottom line of Energy Australia’s decision to close one of Australia’s biggest and most reliable power stations, Yallourn, in 2028 instead of the previously planned 2032. In a few words, goodbye Yallourn, hello brownouts and blackouts, at least for Victoria and South Australia. It’s certainly posing the question for NSW and Queensland, and, in a dry year, Tasmania as well.
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Ah, Tasmania, we on the mainland tend to forget about the Apple Isle — but not our Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, I might add, who wants to flood Devonport, Launceston and even Burnie with “northern foreigners”.
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As I’ve been writing for about 15 or 20 years now, “when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, the power don’t flow”; let me now add: “and when the rain don’t fall, the hydro don’t spin”.
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Now, I’ve used the word “reliable” in the old-fashioned meaning of the word; that you can rely on it to do what power stations are supposed to do but these days is considered at least quaint if not positively gauche — you know, generate electricity.
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Let me hasten to say I cannot in the least fault the logic and indeed the imperative of the EA decision. Indeed, if it was me, I’d probably be closing Yallourn in 2023 — to make it a grand two-fer with Liddell in NSW.
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If it’s such a “great future” why not get there soonest?
In closing Yallourn — and, more pointedly, ceasing to spend the $300m-plus a year, or well over $1bn over those extra four years, to keep it “reliable” — EA is only doing what the “woke elites” and more potently the policy framework is instructing it to do. I even admire the honesty, so to speak, in its statement.
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It’s closing Yallourn, which can generate 1500MW of electricity, pretty much 24/7 year-in and year-out — programmed time-outs and the odd mishap aside, not only when the wind ain’t blowing and the sun ain’t shining, even when it ain’t raining and even when it is — and replacing it with … the world’s biggest battery: all of 350MW of storage. Wouldn’t you like that in your smartphone! That was it; that’s what we’ll get to keep the lights on.
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All those quaintly named “turbines” that pollute the landscape and slaughter birds will give you the rest.
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Hmm? 1500MW hour-in, hour-out, 24/7 365 days a year, versus a 350MW battery that’s gone flat in four hours and looking for a real power source to recharge from?
The EA statement made an interesting contrast to what AGL came out with, back in 2017, when it announced the closure of Liddell.
AGL felt the obligation to at least pretend it could replace the power that Liddell had generated every year for 50 years.
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And I quote from the AGL statement: “a mix of high-efficiency gas peakers, renewables, battery storage and demand response”.
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Let me translate:
“Demand response” — you turn on that light switch, you get no light.
“Battery storage” — when the battery goes flat, you turn on that light switch, you get no light.
The only credible part of generation to replace 2000MW when Liddell closed was a 500MW gas plant. The “major” generation replacement was a joke — so-called 1600MW of renewables — which from day to day can be exactly zero at the whim of the wind and clouds.
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In contrast, EA didn’t even bother with the pseudo-nonsense. We are turning off 24/7 1500MW and we are — very partially — replacing it with a big battery. When it goes flat, you better hope that the wind is blowing. Straight, simple, honest.
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As I detailed last week, the central problem with wind (and solar) — problem? Like rendering them utterly and irredeemably useless, whether you’ve got 100 “turbines” or 10,000 or even 100,000 — is that they simply do not work.
On paper, Britain has wind-generating “capacity” to supply all its power at periods of off-peak national demand — some 26,000MW — and indeed, even close to two-thirds of the 40,000MW or so demanded at peak.
It of course never gets close — the most wind generates is around 13,000MW. But as I detailed, for two whole days the previous week wind was generating just 500MW to 800MW.
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There is no way even 100 of EA’s big batteries could make up the difference for two days.
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The lights in Britain would literally have gone off but for burning a lot of gas and two Yallourns of the phony renewable woodchips and nuclear and power cords into Europe and firing up an old coal-fired power station bigger than Yallourn.
That’s the central problem of an all-renewable future. You better have expensive alternatives on standby or prepare to turn the lights off.
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The problem identified by EA, forcing it to close Yallourn, is the more insidious corrosion of when the wind does blow.
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All that literally free — zero marginal cost — power comes flooding into the grid, temporarily forcing prices down, and driving out coal-fired power.
That would be fine, we would be into a Dark Green free lunch future, if it could be sustained. It can’t.
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You cannot build enough batteries. Do we really want to have a whole shadow power generation industry which gets turned on when and only when the wind ain’t blowing?
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It would be insane. But it’s even more insane to keep lurching into the future identified by EA — closing all the coal-fired power stations, with our ability to keep the lights on left blowing in the wind.
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The very minimum that must be required of anyone wanting to feed wind or solar power into the grid is that they guarantee a minimum level of despatchable power 24/7 365 days a year.
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Then you get closer to the true cost of “free” wind and solar.
1/ Victoria’s Yallourn coal-fired power station will shut down four years earlier than expected in 2028. Picture: Jason Edwards