Unsurprisingly, the Government doesn’t like to draw attention to the fact that since the 2022 election:
It has approved four new coal projects.
It has approved the drilling of 116 new coal seam gas wells.
It has sat in court with coal companies and defended its right not to consider the climate impact of opening new fossil fuel projects.
The Government has passed legislation at the request of gas companies specifically designed to expedite their expansion. This is not hyperbole. The transcripts and documents are there in black and white.
The Government has stacked the agencies legislated to oversee and shape Australia’s climate policies — including the Net Zero Authority and the National Reconstruction Fund — with industry interests and surrounded them with a fortress-like bureaucracy, impervious to public scrutiny. It has left a former gas executive in charge of the Climate Change Authority.
The Prime Minister and various ministers have flown to India, Japan, Korea, and (just this month) Vietnam to lock in customers for our gas and coal. The media releases never mention that either. Australia is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters, and the Government is subsidising, legislating, and using the full weight of our foreign policy to ensure we stay that way. Because Governments are very effective at making very big things happen very quickly when they want to.
The Australian Government has lobbied UNESCO to stop the Great Barrier Reef from being listed as “in danger”. This is as it is in the grip of another mass coral bleaching event.
The Australian Government has refused to end native forest logging. Despite the carbon it would store and the very real risk of extinction to the koala and the swift parrot. It has left the protection of our collapsing ecosystems to the market. It has put far more energy into talking about being ‘nature positive’ than doing anything about it.
The federal Labor government alone still gives over $9 billion in subsidies to fossil fuels. It has committed $1.5 billion to a gas export hub in the Northern Territory. One single gas export hub is getting half of what Australia has committed to global climate finance over five years.
Pedal-electric Hopper may be the German "car" you didn't know you wanted.
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The rider's pedaling power is augmented by a 250-watt rear hub motor, taking the Hopper up to a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph). The motor is powered by a removable 30-Ah/48V/1,440-Wh lithium-iron-phosphate battery, which is claimed to be good for a range of approximately 65 km (40 miles) per charge. An optional rooftop solar panel should help boost that figure.
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In order to minimise maintenance and mechanical complexity, the Hopper utilises an electronic pedal-by-wire system instead of a traditional chain-drive drivetrain.
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Such systems work by having the rider spin up a generator as they pedal. Doing so converts their mechanical energy into electrical energy, which is fed into the motor. That motor converts the electrical energy back into mechanical energy, which is used to turn the wheel.
On Tuesday this week, the Australian Financial Review went large with the story headlined, “How a big new solar farm became a stranded asset”. That evening, energy analyst Tim Buckley debunked the story on social media. This was not a stranded asset at all, Buckley pointed out. “Zero stranding … [financially] a brilliant success”.
What is not over, and the point of this republication, is the ‘culture war’ between new and old energy which is played out daily in the press and is frankly misleading for most Australians, and for many politicians whose votes they crave. People tend to believe what they see in the media.
For that reason, there is a generation of older Australians who read and watch the fossil media who are outraged about the demise of coal – this newfangled “not base-load power” solar boondoggle. “When the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine” blah blah. They are simply, relentlessly, misled by the financial press which is pro-fossil fuels. There is money in it for them.
This is also why you will see Tim Buckley, principal of Clean Energy Finance, and the leading coal and RE analyst in the country published in this journal from time to time, but so rarely ever in the AFR or The Australian. They won’t run him; he doesn’t suit the fossil agenda.
Hahaha, amazeballs. Never again shall i gently mock #physicists for their #SphericalCows analogy propensity. They ain't got nuffin' on these idiot #economists 🙄 🤦♀️
Possibly the part of the essay where i laughed loudest, was this;
Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization.
>Like most of the world’s 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday’s more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world’s water systems—affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation—it’s getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired—risking flooding downstream.
>But at one major dam in Northern California, operators have been demonstrating how to not just weather these erratic and intense storms, but capitalize on them. Management crews at New Bullards Bar, built in 1970, entered last winter armed with new forecasting tools that gave unprecedented insight into the size and strength of the coming storms—allowing them to strategize how to handle the rain.
>First, they let the rains refill their reservoir, a typical move after a long drought. Then, as more storms formed at sea, they made the tough choice to release some of this precious hoard through their hydropower turbines, confident that more rain was coming. “I felt a little nervous at first,” says John James, director of resource planning at Yuba Water Agency in Northern California. Fresh showers soon validated the move. New Bullards Bar ended winter with plumped water supplies, a 150 percent boost in power generation, and a clean safety record. The strategy offers a glimpse of how better forecasting can allow hydropower to adapt to the climate change.
>Modeling studies have long suggested that better weather forecasts would be invaluable for dam managers. Now this is being confirmed in real life. New Bullards Bar is one of a half-dozen pilot sites teaming up with the US Army Corps of Engineers to test how cutting-edge forecasting can be used to optimize operations in the real world. Early tests of the methods, called forecast-informed reservoir operations, have given operators the confidence to hold 5-20 percent reserve margins beyond their reservoirs’ typical capacity, says Cary Talbot, who heads the initiative for the Army Corps.