Australia
The Conversation is a Leftist Loony Lovies internet Journal that according to the Conversation itself supposedly gives the reader ‘Academic rigour, journalistic flair’. Whatever that means, it does give the reader a one sided Leftist Loony view. The following article is about the latest out of Victoria and the draconian lockdown due to more China virus cases. If this state had been run by any party other than China loving Labor the words would be burning on the page. Andrews and his cronies had no problem with thirty thousand BLM protestors recently on the streets in Melbourne but it is the average Victorian now that will pay for it. Oh, well what else would one expect from a Leftist Loony Lovie paper?
‘The Victorian government will lock down all metropolitan Melbourne for six weeks from Wednesday night, as a new wave of the coronavirus takes hold in the city.
The lockdown will also cover the Mitchell Shire, north of Melbourne, which includes the towns of Broadford, Seymour, Kilmore, Tallarook, Pyalong and Wallan.
Under the restrictions, people will only be able to leave their home to shop for essential goods and services, for care and compassionate reasons, exercise, and for work and study if it cannot be conducted from home.
The dramatic action comes as the Victoria-NSW border closes on Tuesday night, amid some chaos in Albury-Wodonga, and follows the lockdown of suburbs in 12 Melbourne postcode areas, and the “lock in” of 3,000 residents in nine community housing towers.’ https://theconversation.com/six-week-lockdown-for-melbourne-as-record-191-new-cases-in-latest-tally-142171?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20July%208%202020%20-%201671716113&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20July%208%202020%20-%201671716113+CID_b108dd8327223bcbb91ba6119d525788&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Six-week%20lockdown%20for%20Melbourne%20as%20record%20191%20new%20cases%20in%20latest%20tally
Australia’s Sky News’ Outsiders television programme is on Sunday mornings while we are in the Lord’s House so we video it to watch later in the day or the next. One of those Outsiders have interviewed is Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger wrote an article that appeared in Forbes but was quickly deleted as the PC culture is quick to act on information they want to keep from you. It is easy to see ‘The debate on climate is conducted in a climate of fear coming from the bullying guardians of orthodoxy.’ https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2020/07/01/this-just-out/
However, here is that article in full.
‘On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
- Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
- The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
- Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
- Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
- The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
- The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
- Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
- Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
- We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
- Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
- Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
- Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
- Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
- The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
- The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
- 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
- We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
- Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
- Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
- “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
- Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
- The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.’ https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare
There is that slippery slope which the West is rushing down to its own demise. For instance, making so-called same-sex marriage legal was not the beginning down the slide but it certainly gave a BIG push! Therefore, ‘Let me totally clear at the outset. One of the purposes of this article is to say, “I told you so!” Or, more precisely, many of us have been predicting this moment for years. As reported in the New York Times, “A Massachusetts City Decides to Recognize Polyamorous Relationships.
The city of Somerville has broadened the definition of domestic partnership to include relationships between three or more adults, expanding access to health care. Is anyone really surprised?
After all, if the winning mantras of the same-sex “marriage” movement have been “Love is love” and “Love wins” and “I have the right to marry the one I love,” why limit that number to two? Isn’t that discriminating against love? Isn’t that simply carrying over the outdated, outmoded, limiting ways of the past?
To this day, in all my dialogue and debate with LGBTQ activists and their allies, I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation of why marriage should be limited to two people if any two people can marry. Why limit the union to two people? Based on what? All the solid arguments for limiting marriage to two people are, ultimately, arguments for marriage being the union of a male and a female. All other arguments fall short. Very short. (For a glaring illustration, see here.)
When it comes to polyamory, which can include virtually any combination or number of men and women, on what basis should the government not recognize such relationships? Is not love still love? Does not love still win? And is not love the only thing that matters? So the argument goes.
As I asked in 2015, “If Love Is Love, Why Not Three Men ‘Marrying’?” Why not?
Today, we’re talking about just one city in Massachusetts extending health benefits to polyamorous families. But one city is all that is needed to begin a trend. That’s also why this is national news, even in the midst of an unrelenting, tumultuous news cycle.
As for warning about this for years, polyamory was mentioned frequently in my book A Queer Thing Happened to America, published in 2011, but with research for the book dating back to 2005.
In fact, in the book I drew attention to a polyamory seminar hosted by the Metropolitan Community Churches – obviously, pro-LGBT churches – back in 2005: “Yes, ‘polyamory’ – in other words, having multiple sexual partners (loving, of course!) – was also a topic of discussion at the MCC conference, and church members were encouraged to come out of the closets with their ongoing, multiple sexual relationships.”
Again, this was at a church conference in 2005. And even then, this trend had been building for years. We told you so!
In the book I also quoted polyamorous advocates who marched prominently in gay pride parades, stating, “We’re 30 years behind the gay activist movement.” They probably underestimated the timeline. (On a different but related front, I could point to articles like, “Here Come the Polygamists,” dating back to 2012.)
In my 2015 book, Outlasting the Gay Revolution, I wrote, “Perhaps we should change the wedding vows to sound more like this (with the man speaking here): ‘I take you as my wife, but probably not for life. I take you as my own, but not just you alone. I pledge myself to you, and perhaps to others too. I take you as my bride, although your name is Clyde.’
“Is this really so farfetched? If you can have a bride and a broom, if ‘husbands’ can be women and ‘wives’ can be men, if you can be married and dating and swinging and swapping, if you live together before marriage and end the marriage whenever it suits you best, then what does ‘marriage’ mean?”
Back in 2015, Stephen Colbert mocked the idea of a slippery moral slope when it came to redefining marriage. The reality of the matter, as he likely knew, was that the mocking predictions he made had already come to pass. I illustrated all that in this video. You can mock, but you can’t deny reality. (Take a minute to watch. You’ll be shocked.)
In saying all this, I am not saying that gay couples do not love each other or that gay couples will inevitably become polyamorous throuples and beyond. I’m simply stating the obvious: if two men or two women can “marry,” then there is nothing sacrosanct about the number two. Any potential number will do, as long as the relationships are based on “love.”
Already in March, 2016, Oliver Bateman wrote on Mic.com, “When it comes to marriage, three is still a crowd. But that might be changing sooner than we think. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, a small-yet-growing percentage of Americans report that they find the concept of plural marriage ‘morally acceptable,’ while polyamorous relationships are increasingly receiving mainstream media coverage. A 2014 Newsweek article even estimates that there are more than 500,000 openly polyamorous families living in the United States today.”
Did I say we told you so? Need I say more?’ https://mychristiandaily.com/in-massachusetts-here-comes-polyamorhttps://mychristiandaily.com/in-massachusetts-here-comes-polyamory-just-as-we-predicted/y-just-as-we-predicted/
‘A man at the Sydney Black Lives Matter rally on Saturday 6th June held up an All Lives Matter sign. He was heckled and grabbed by the Black Lives matter supporters before being dragged away by NSW Police, probably for his own safety.’ https://www.theunshackled.net/rundown/all-lives-matter-the-new-its-okay-to-be-white/?mc_cid=ab614073d1&mc_eid=6e30632a8a
The mob knows best whose lives matter! Other freedoms we have come to enjoy will be gone soon if politicians don’t wake up!
The politicians in Australia in particular and the West in general have gone crazy in seeking to save the Earth! While they throw tax dollars at wind and solar energy prices continue to rise. These people are modern day crooks and should be made to answer for their actions. For example, ‘To call Australia’s energy debacle a ‘crisis’ is mastery in understatement: its obsession with wind and solar means its economy now operates around the vagaries of mother nature. The availability of sunshine and suitably beneficial breezes dictates when and where electricity gets delivered to power consumers.
The cause of Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is so simple and obvious it can be laid out in a handful of pictures.
Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid so far this month.
Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity of 7,728MW.
Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more that occur over the space of a couple of hours are routine, as are rapid surges of equal magnitude, which make the grid manager’s life a living hell, and provide the perfect set up for power market price gouging by the owners of conventional generators, who cash in on the chaos.
Set out below are a few examples of daily output figures showing some of those staggering collapses, and lengthy periods when the combined output of every wind turbine connected to the Eastern Grid struggled to top 400 MW (5.1% of total capacity). Occasions like:
11 June when output collapsed to a trifling 86 MW (1.1% of total notional capacity);
17 June when total output fell to 134 MW (1.7% of total notional capacity);
26 June when, after a 1,200 MW slide, output was between 300-400 MW (3.8% to 5.1% of total notional capacity); and
27 June when output dropped over 900 MW to bottom out at 96 MW (1.2% of total notional capacity) .
So, what does all that daily power delivery chaos mean for Australian business?
We’ll cross to the team at JoNova for an insight into the prospects for enterprise in a country where power rationing is dressed up as solid economic policy. [Note to Ed: did you mean to refer to the old Soviet Union here?]
Desperate signs: Australian companies will be paid to use less electricity
JoNova Blog
JoNova
11 June 2020
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will shrink, so the price of those products will rise. It’s not possible that this change would increase the Australian GDP.
It’s all being rushed in to start in October 2021*, presumably because no one has the confidence that the Australian Grid will survive the next two summers without either price bonfires or a major blackout.
Electricity users will get paid to cut energy use under historic new market reform
By Stephen Long, ABC
Electricity consumers will be paid for reducing their power demands under a radical change to the market that will be introduced next year.
The historic rule change announced today will allow what’s known as “wholesale demand response” — where the wholesale market can pay users for cutting electricity consumption, rather than paying electricity generators to increase supply, when the system is under strain.
Big conglomerate generators and retailers don’t want this change, because it’s partly aimed at them. They like the price spikes and this threatens their profits:
The shift, which will begin in October 2021, has been adopted by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) despite opposition from big energy generators and retailers, who were using the COVID-19 crisis to pressure for delaying the rule changes.
Instead of making the market fairer and more transparent by removing all renewable subsidies, and asking renewable generators to pay fair prices for transmission costs, stability costs and back up of their unreliable product, this is a desperate workaround that leaves former agreements in place but adds a new layer of complexity to try to get rid of the spikes so the generators can’t game the system.
This is a change to enable the forced transition to renewables.
Head of energy policy at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre Craig Memery said it was “a critical reform that will bring much-needed benefits to consumers, and a key part of a secure, zero-carbon energy system”.
The propaganda makes out this is a win for all:
[AMEC] argues it will reduce electricity prices for consumers and improve reliability on the network, by allowing demand response to compete with “peaking” electricity generators that typically receive very high prices for supplying additional electricity during times of heavy demand.
“The benefits of wholesale demand response will flow through to all households and businesses through lower electricity bills and improved network reliability.
Obviously, the ABC repeats the propaganda and doesn’t ask any hard questions about how Australian citizens get richer by doing less.
Nobody mention the real costs:
Instead of “earning money” consumers will pay via their shareholding and superannuation losses, and via the increased prices of products. Some consumers will gain jobs, but more will lose their jobs as the net efficiency of a Greener economy means companies produce less, move overseas, generate less profit and thus employ fewer Australians. Less profitable companies will also pay less tax. Meaning that individual taxpayers will have to make up for lost tax income or the government will have to offer less services.
And so yet again, the cost of a green economy is buried so deep not even a PhD can unravel “who pays”.
They call it a win for environmental groups, which tells us it’s there to prop up the renewables industry, but of course, the only parts of the “environment” that will benefit from this are the unintended parts. Wind Turbines are the new top predator in the ecosystem. So lizards living under wind farms will be happy because predatory birds will be killed off.
Complexity breeds corruption:
Somehow we have to estimate what customers would have used to pay them for what they didn’t. This is a market of nullities again.
Under the change, large electricity users (such as big farms, factories and commercial enterprises) will be able to bid reductions in demand into the wholesale market and get paid for taking their demand out of the system.
Over time, demand response is expected to be extended to households and smaller businesses who sign up with companies that “sell” power reductions from thousands of customers into the market at times when wholesale prices are high.
Obviously all complexity comes at a price and provides more loopholes for dishonest players to profit just as China and others did when naive Western governments started paying companies to “save carbon” based on guesstimates of infrastructure changes they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Hands up who thinks companies will adjust their useage to game the system and imply they are taking out more demand than they actually did?
JoNova Blog‘ https://stopthesethings.com/2020/06/28/new-soviet-era-australian-businesses-paid-to-shut-down-when-wind-solar-output-drops/comment-page-1/?unapproved=523206&moderation-hash=1cff75d5848536d197a320a4deb6e6d7#comment-523206
Genesis 8:22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
The world is going or has gone NUTS. Here in Australia the politicians are going stark raving mad over solar and wind power. Well, the truth is that solar only works when the sun shines and turbines only turn when the wind blows. One doesn’t have to be a scientist in any field to know that! However, when the public throws money into a public purse where elected officials have the seemingly freedom to spend it however they want then stupid things happen. Near where I live the supposedly conservative state government of New South Wales is throwing another ‘$31.6 million’ into a solar panel farm https://dugaldsaunders.com.au/renewable-energy-zone-sparking-investment-boom/#comment-115. Oh, and the same day I read this news concerning the solar farm I received a letter from the electricity company saying their rates were going up in July. Anyway, the article below outlines the result of a state that has gone crazy over renewable energy.
‘In South Australia – Australia’s wind and solar capital – the situation is out of control and has reached the point of high farce, with the grid manager begging for legislated powers to shut down domestic rooftop solar panels in the hope of preventing another total ‘system black’ taking South Australians back to the Dark Ages, once again.
AEMO report says solar surge leaves SA at risk of major blackouts
The Advertiser
Matt Smith
18 June 2020
SA’s leading uptake of rooftop solar systems leaves the state at risk of mass blackouts, a new report says, triggering a multimillion-dollar push for the power to cut them off as needed.
Household solar panel systems could be turned on and off under State Government instructions in a bid to avert statewide blackouts predicted as early as this spring, a new report shows.
The unprecedented move is being triggered by concerns from the national energy market operator that South Australia’s world-leading take-up of solar panels is making the grid unstable.
The concerns, raised in an Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) report obtained by The Advertiser, include that solar systems can stop working after voltage disturbances – or sudden losses of power – which was one of the triggers for the 2016 statewide blackout.
The findings will prompt a $10 million state government investment to fund measures that will allow it to switch household solar on and off to stabilise the grid.
The measure would shore up stability of the grid to help avoid mass blackouts but would also cut revenue earned by the household feeding electricity back into the grid.
The report says that solar panel systems can fail in response to sudden changes in the power grid’s operation.
The concerns are raised even further because AEMO predicts household solar panels in SA could provide 100 per cent of the state’s energy needs on certain days within a few years.
But it says there is “considerable evidence that many distributed PV inverters (solar panel systems) disconnect in response to voltage disturbances” – similar to challenges faced by wind turbines during the 2016 statewide blackout.
It has raised concerns within government that if SA was cut off from the national electricity grid and large numbers of solar panel systems failed, the state could be again plunged into a blackout.
The statewide grid relies on a mix of reliable energy sources, more volatile intermittent renewable energy including solar, and baseload gas.
New rules, which The Advertiser understands will be announced Friday, mean the market operator will have the ability to reduce solar panel outputs – stopping households pushing power back into the grid. New solar panel systems would also be able to be controlled by the market operator via smart meters.
“Analysis in this report demonstrates that a severe but credible fault (in the grid) near the Adelaide metropolitan area could cause disconnection of up to half the distributed PV (solar panels) in the South Australian region,” the report says. Government sources said the issue was incredibly serious, echoing the problems that led to the statewide blackout in 2016.
A loss of power from wind farms and tripping of the interconnector to Victoria combined to collapse the stability of SA’s network and deliver the statewide blackout, a 2017 AEMO report found. The government sources said commissioning of the report had probably saved a repeat of that incident.
There is already so much rooftop solar in South Australia that, at times AEMO struggles to securely manage the system. Figures from the Clean Energy Regulator show there are about 276,000 solar panel systems on SA homes – representing about 35 per cent of all dwellings in the state.
An estimated 11 per cent of small business and 24 per cent of large businesses have solar. Last year, there were times when 64 per cent of SA’s power use was from rooftop solar. The report said SA has already experienced dangerously low operational demand that is required to maintain a stable electricity grid.
Demand is expected to reduce further by spring, prompting AEMO to stress there is “an urgent need” to establish ways to increase more reliable system loads while decreasing the use of solar.
The Advertiser‘ https://stopthesethings.com/2020/06/24/dark-ages-south-australias-solar-power-obsession-threatens-total-system-black/comment-page-1/?unapproved=522694&moderation-hash=0306050e1721dd6bedab34f0ed00c4bc#comment-522694
One doesn’t have to be a scientist of any kind to know the sun does not produce as much heat in the winter as the summer. Duh! All this solar and wind renewable talk is lies. For instance there is an ad for solar that tells the viewer that the solar panels will be paid for by the savings. Nah, for most average homes this is an out and out lie. Sadly, governments contribute to this lie sometimes by millions of taxpayer dollars https://www.theland.com.au/story/6781773/solar-farm-at-goulburn/?src=rss&utm_email=1ec342a17f.
‘When energy policy sounds like something from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass it’s because lunatics have overrun of the asylum.
Sure, those with skin in the game will say and do anything that needs to be said and done to profit from the most obscene subsidy rort in history. But, their licence to operate comes from the great unwashed proletariat, plenty of whom are convinced that we’re well on our way to an all wind and sun powered future. It is, of course, just another example of mass delusion and the madness of crowds.
As the adage goes, people go mad in herds and regain their senses, slowly, and one by one.
Films like Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans may herald just such a turning point, where logic and reason re-enter the fray to do battle with the unhinged emotions and irrational ideology of those who would readily drive us all back to the Dark Ages.
Norman Rogers delivers a neat little essay on the current state of energy insanity and how we landed where we are.
Green Electricity Delusions
American Thinker
Norman Rogers
22 May 2020
With global warming the alleged science is so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is different. It’s relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes of confusing data are needed.
Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies and fake accounting. (My book, Dumb Energy, goes into great analytical detail.)
Green electricity is ineffective for preventing climate change. The climate change alarmists James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger make the case forcefully in this video. Hansen is the most important and most famous scientist warning against climate change. His followers consider him to be the greatest authority on the dangers of climate change. He calls wind and solar energy a “grotesque idea” and a “fantasy.”
It’s true that we won’t run out of wind or sunshine. That doesn’t mean that wind and sunshine are effective tools for making electricity. They aren’t. The exhaustion of fossil fuels has been predicted many times. The current situation is that fossil fuels are in great over supply and the prices have crashed to low levels. Natural gas, currently the most economical fossil fuel for generating electricity, is painfully cheap and is being extensively exported from the United States to other countries.
Natural gas from wells, not served by pipelines to take it to market, is burned or flared to get rid of it. Only the more valuable oil is kept. Thanks to fracking, we have plenty of natural gas for the next 100-years.
Promoters of quack medicine sell various pills guaranteed to improve your memory or your sex life. Green energy is quackery too. It is promoted by green organizations like the Sierra Club. At one time the Sierra Club was a harmless club of backpackers and bird watchers. But it was taken over by ideologues driven by the delusion that modern society is a destructive fraud that must be rescued by the adoption of green principles. These armchair green commandos are math handicapped. They regularly propose policies that make no sense. The green commandos pontificate confidently without real understanding.
Coal is an excellent fuel for generating electricity. Unlike natural gas or oil, coal has limited uses other than generating electricity. The Sierra Club hates coal because it competes successfully against their beloved green wind and solar.
No lie is too outrageous as long as it is useful for discrediting coal. The Sierra Club uses trick photography to make it look like coal plants emit clouds of black smoke. The trick is to photograph clean white clouds of “steam” with the sun behind the plant. That makes the harmless white clouds look black. The exhaust products are composed of water vapor and carbon dioxide with very little pollution. As the exhaust mixes with the cool air, it condenses into a white cloud of clean water droplets commonly called steam.
In modern coal plants, almost all pollution is scrubbed away before the exhaust goes into the smokestack.
Residential rooftop solar energy is an uneconomic method for generating electricity but it sounds convincing to the naïve. Rooftop solar panels lack economy of scale. These small installations generate electricity for about three times more per kilowatt hour than the large-scale utility installations. The homeowner reduces his consumption of grid electricity, reducing his electric bill. Excess solar electricity is sold back to the utility, often at a price far higher than the cost of wholesale electricity.
The beauty of this scheme is that if the rules are sufficiently rigged in favor of the homeowner, it is possible for the homeowner to save money. No one could complain if the homeowner disconnected from the electric utility. But no one is disconnecting unless they live off grid. The utility is expected to maintain a power line to the home and maintain excess generating capacity to take over supplying electricity if it is cloudy or it is nighttime.
The true cost of maintaining this backup service, exclusive of any electricity sales, is around $100 per month, but utilities commonly charge only around $10 or $15 a month for a connection before the first kilowatt hour is sold. Every kilowatt hour of utility electricity displaced by solar costs the utility gross profit. If the utility is forced to buy the homeowner’s electricity at retail rates the utility may end up paying much more than the reasonable wholesale cost of the electricity.
In some places the homeowner is even allowed to bank excess solar electricity and draw it at a later time. The utility doesn’t have a bank where it can store electricity. In short, rooftop solar is a scheme of making everyone else subsidize the homeowner. The homeowner is under the delusion that he has discovered cheaper electricity. It is cheaper only because everyone else bears the cost.
The crippling weakness of wind or solar electricity is their intermittent and erratic nature. A fossil-fuel generating plant can be fired up as needed and throttled up and down as the consumption of electricity changes. Wind or solar generates electricity according to the vagaries of the weather. The grid operators, except in extreme circumstances, are required to accept all the green electricity presented. In order to do this, fossil-fuel plants have to seesaw their output to compensate for the erratic wind or solar.
Wind and solar plants can’t replace fossil-fuel plants for the simple reason that at times the wind and solar plants are not generating electricity. You must have enough fossil fuel along with hydro and nuclear to carry the full load. The consequence is that the system has to continue to maintain and pay for its traditional plants regardless of how much wind and solar is added to the grid. The only economic contribution of wind or solar is to reduce fuel consumption in the fossil-fuel plants during times when wind or solar electricity is being generated.
The proper cost comparison is to compare the cost of green electricity versus the marginal cost (fuel) of operating the fossil-fuel plants. Natural-gas plants have a fuel cost of about $15 per megawatt hour. Wind or solar with battery backup costs about $130 per megawatt hour.
For grid stability reasons new wind and solar plants are being equipped with battery storage, greatly increasing the cost. Without the battery backup wind or solar electricity costs around $75 per megawatt hour. To be clear, the electricity supplied by wind or solar at $75 to $130 per megawatt hour (not counting subsidies) could be generated in existing fossil fuel plants for $15 per megawatt hour.
Why the various states and the federal government continue to pursue, mandate, and subsidize green electricity is a mystery best explained by psychiatrists and students of propaganda.
American Thinker‘ https://stopthesethings.com/2020/06/25/welcome-to-crazytown-the-dangerous-delusion-that-wind-solar-can-power-us/comment-page-1/?unapproved=522554&moderation-hash=acb444c422411028d000b5a74c6d3ffd#comment-522554
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC or sometimes known as ‘aunty’) is one BIG Leftist Loony Lovie Marxist Australian Government sponsored waste of money.
Now, ‘Hundreds of jobs will be axed from the ABC as its executive team – clearly stricken with arithmophobia – struggles to balance its measly $1.1 billion budget. ABC Life has become the first causality. You might remember the lifestyle website cost taxpayers $3 million a year to run, and in return, produces articles about what might happen in a zombie apocalypse or how to cook tofu. The website will be rebranded ABC Local and those journalists will be redeployed to doing real journalism instead of the aforementioned strange lifestyle pieces. Still, ABC Life editor Bhakthi Puvanenthiran appears defiant in the face of imminent change. “We are losing up to half the ABC Life team as we rebrand as ABC Local,” she wrote today. “It’s devastating news and the details are unclear right now, but what I know for sure is I’m really proud of what we’ve built, telling diverse stories the ABC has never told before.” And despite the ABC putting out statements that the content would dramatically shift, she hopes to do the same sort of work with the new brand. “I hope we can keep doing that under a new banner but right now I am thinking of this incredible team of winners,” she said. While job losses in journalism are always sad and should never be celebrated the announcement by ABC Managing Editor David Anderson’s five-year plan is a step in the right direction. The national broadcaster only spends 20 per cent of its budget on news right now. That figure is disturbingly low when you consider what the core function of the ABC is supposed to be. Thankfully the reforms will put an end to ABC Comedy and redirect resources back to news gathering and breaking. Ironically, ABC Comedy, which has come under fire in the past for producing skits mocking religion, will be tasked with reporting on religious affairs and science. The changes have certainly ruffled the feathers of Ultimo’s elite – who have been told may have to vacate their prime real estate. Mr Anderson has promised to base 75 per cent of content creators outside of Sydney by 2025. The freed up space will then be leased to the private sector to return $40 million to the ABC’s poorly managed budget. In whole, the changes are a positive sign that Australia’s toxic culture of identity politics does not have to be supplemented by taxpayers. Instead many jobs will move to the regions and more people will be reporting stories of significance. Hopefully the culture continues to shift away from its churn-and-burn approach to digital journalism and returns to the days of boots-on-the-ground journalism in country towns. The ABC has morphed in recent years to become a Digital Monster. It now eclipses the largest news websites in the country. Granted the organisation breaks stories – many of national importance – but it also re-writes and publishes every good scoop journalists break from the private sector, drastically limiting the monetisation opportunities for that content. It is undoubtedly the best-resourced collective newsroom in the country and competes commercially against organisations for traffic and social media presence. One way it unfairly does this is by spending, millions of dollars boosting Facebook posts and paying Google to manipulate search algorithms to ensure its content stays at the top of searches. When the ABC was last questioned about this figure at Senate estimates it revealed the total cost each yeah of promoting its content online was $2 million. Roughly $1.4 million was handed over to Facebook while hundreds and thousands of dollars went to Google. It would seem that if the ABC wanted to save a few million dollars it could stop boosting its content and let its stories perform as they would naturally perform. In a coronavirus media environment marketing budgets are the first thing to go from a newsroom, but Aunty is not plagued by pesky limitations of COVID-induced funding cuts. Its budget remains untouched – impervious to advertising constraints which are being felt everywhere else in the industry. An industry which has been facing job cuts since this writer began his career. The ABC has never had to feel this burden on the same scale. Perhaps its current financial woes will serve as a lesson for the importance of learning to balance a budget.’ https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6166816175001?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Viewpoint%2024-06-2020&utm_content=Viewpoint%2024-06-2020+CID_2e8c29f4eb8761b5b42bc652f89411ff&utm_source=Daily%20newsletter&utm_term=ABC%20Life%20axed%20as%20Aunty%20announces%20major%20editorial%20reforms
‘A viral video of a Black Lives Matter protest is exposing the hypocrisy of a movement that claims to fight to protect black Americans.
According to BizPac Review, the video shows a black man confronting medical workers who gathered for a Black Lives Matter protest outside a hospital. Some online commenters identified the hospital as University Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, but LifeNews could not confirm the location.
In the short video, the man asks the medical workers, many in lab coats and scrubs, if “all black lives matter, or just some black lives.”
“All black lives matter,” the protesters respond.
Seconds later, though, when he asks them about abortion, the protesters remain silent and look confused.
“The black babies killed in the abortion clinics matter, right?” he asks.
When no one responds, the man adds, “Thought so.”
Later, he continues: “But the black babies killed in the abortion clinics don’t matter, do they medical people? Do their lives matter? Does the future of our black babies matter?”
A few protesters respond, but their words are indistinguishable.
“It’s okay if we kill them in the womb, right?” he ends. “If we don’t respect the lives of our unborn children enough to save them and fight for them, our lives mean nothing when we are born.”’ https://www.lifenews.com/2020/06/17/black-man-silences-blacklivesmatter-protesters-by-asking-do-aborted-black-babies-matter/
