Harnessing sunlight for heating and other power purposes is not new. Solar collection devices were developed in the 17th century to protect plants brought from the tropics to northern countries, and both the first solar water heater and the first solar oven were developed the 18th century. Indeed, the solar power revolution has been on the verge of taking off for centuries.

In response to the Arab Oil Embargo, in part, the relatively new U.S. Department of Energy (along with other agencies) began a slew of programs to fund solar energy research, deployment and commercialization. Based strictly on performance, these programs have failed at the cost of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

More: http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st334.pdf [PDF, 1.7 MB]

Big Wind Energy Subsidies: A Hurricane of Carnage, Cronyism and Corruption

To date, under just one program, the US government has awarded US$16 billion to wind and solar energy companies. This crony capitalism is what keeps green energy afloat. The green jobs created have destroyed a bigger number of real jobs.

Read More: http://greencorruption.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/big-wind-energy-subsidies-hurricane-of.html

Energy Roulette Week
(The antithesis of Earth Hour)

A Reality Game for those Concerned about the Future for their Families

Acknowledgement: Josh at www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Media Statement by Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition.

Any quotes taken directly from this statement may be attributed to Mr Forbes.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on electricity consumers to boycott Earth Hour grandstanding by pampered people too silly to recognise the realities and benefits of reliable electricity.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, is supporting an alternative proposal that “Earth Hour” be replaced by “Energy Roulette Week”.

Quote:

The Earth Hour people turn off a few lights on a balmy night for a romantic hour in candle-light (incidentally generating twice as much CO2 as light bulbs for the same amount of light.) This is unrealistic green tokenism.
(more…)

By Don Aitkin

“I object to having to pay more for electricity that is produced inefficiently and erratically because some people are worried about the end of the world. In the 1980s, solar energy looked a possible way in the future of protecting our small and diminishing reserves of oil – because even then there were experts telling us that ‘Peak Oil’ had already arrived. It would never have occurred to me that we would be considering it as a source of baseline power. How would we store overnight the energy gained during the day? No one had the answer then, and no one has produced an efficient working model of the answer today. For isolated settlements and properties? Yes. For the grid? No.”

From: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14447

“Germany and the European Union have taken a pioneering role on climate protection, under the mistaken assumption that other countries would follow our example. That’s the wrong strategy. Making this kind of advanced effort weakens our bargaining position. Instead of building wind turbines, we should build higher dikes.”

– German government advisor Kai Konrad

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-kai-konrad-on-the-mistakes-of-european-climate-policy-a-870693.html

James Hansen, an outspoken world climate alarmist says: “Coal-fired power plants are factories of death”. The Australian Greens want a fast end to coal mining in Australia, and support a swift expansion of wind and solar power. As the Greens are part of the coalition which governs Australia, the electricity industry is now being coerced by carbon taxes and green subsidies and mandates to replace efficient and reliable coal-powered electricity with costly and unreliable wind and solar plants. All of this paranoia is driven by climatist claims that carbon dioxide causes environmental harm by triggering dangerous global warming. Let’s look at whether coal energy or green energy does more harm to the environment.

There is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide causes any measurable changes to climate. In fact, the evidence indicates that changes in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are a result, not a cause, of variations in global temperatures.

Moreover, burning coal in clean modern power stations has definite benefits for the biosphere – it puts food and drink for all life back into the atmosphere. The major coal combustion products are – nitrogen plant food from the air (69%), carbon dioxide plant food from the coal (21%) and water vapour, the liquid for life, from the coal (7%). The other 3% comprises mainly inert atmospheric gases from the air and an ash residue of trace minerals from the coal. The green bogey-man, carbon dioxide, is the gas of life and a free gift from coal combustion to the biosphere. More carbon dioxide has proven benefits in making plants grow faster in good weather and helping them survive better in droughts or frosts. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is insurance for the biosphere no matter what climate change is in store for us.

Green energy, however, can affect local climate and does cause environmental damage…

More, as well as:

• The UN, Agenda 21 and the erosion of land ownership rights
• Killing the Earth to Save it
• The Last Word

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wind-solar-coal.pdf [PDF, 221 KB]

Cartoon Credit: Steve Hunter http://www.stevehunterillustrations.com.au/political-cartoons/

Keywords: Coal, wind, solar, gas, gases of life, wind farms affect the climate, turbine fires, bird kills, UN, Agenda 21.

The human race advances by exploration, adventure, experiment and innovation – by looking forward. The Green Generation worships the past and would take us backwards.

Their promotion of “sustainable farming” yearns for a bucolic nirvana of self-sufficiency with no room for modern farming that has produced the food surpluses that sustain the cities. Their worship of the ‘precautionary principle” would have us cease innovating and experimenting “in case something goes wrong”. They scare our kids with never ending forecasts of doom. And they hobble our enterprising spirit with taxes and green tape. Their goal is to force the human race to retreat to the past, abandoning our mines, farms, forests and fishing grounds. This is a real model of doom for a large part of the human race.

The climate industry forges on with scant regard for science or logic. Water vapour in the atmosphere is by far the most effective “greenhouse gas”. Should we also have a tax on steam?

Finally, to the people who say “we have not noticed any effects from the carbon tax” – we say “They planned it that way”.

More:

• Sustainable Farming – the Impossible Dream
• Retreat to the Past
• Climatists not Fair Dinkum?
• Why have we not noticed effects of the carbon tax?
• How to Create an Intermittent and Costly Electricity Supply Industry

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/retreat-to-past.pdf [PDF, 184 KB]

Keywords: Sustainable farming.

In June this year the UNEP report announced that Global Renewable Energy investment reached $257 Billion in 2011. It’s so large it rivals the $302 billion invested in fossil fuel power. But how much electricity do we get for all that money? When the details are pulled from the fog, a quarter of a trillion dollars appears to produce only about 3% of all our global electricity, and even less of our global energy. All that money, so few gigawatts.

Source: http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/renewable-energy-is-a-257-billion-dollar-industry-that-makes-only-3-of-our-electricity/

Cartoon Credit: Steve Hunter http://www.stevehunterillustrations.com.au/political-cartoons/

When I was a kid, Mum did the washing in a copper of boiling water over an open fire in the back yard. We collected the wood from the back paddock with a horse and dray. It was all very “green” (but we thought it was just hard yakka).

Greens want us to return to this primitive method for generating heat, and even electricity.

It is sensible for industrial plants such as sugar mills to burn readily available organic waste such as bagasse to generate power. But to deliberately build power stations to run on wood chips is a step back to the BC (before coal) era when forests were clear-felled to produce fuel and charcoal to feed boilers and furnaces.

Coal is an energy-dense fuel, and often has huge deposits in a concentrated area. Long-life power stations can be built close to the coal deposits, thus minimising transport costs and land disturbance.

Wood, however, has very low energy density and biomass energy is always spread over large areas of land. The fuel gathering operation must move every day, with enormous waste of transport energy and displacement of plants and animals.

Burning coal or burning biomass produces exactly the same harmless combustion gases, and a switch of fuels will have no measurable effect on climate.

Even more stupid than wood power are Green dreams to feed power stations with low grade fuels such as wheat stubble or fowl manure. The collection and transport costs for such inferior fuels will exceed the value of electricity produced. It also robs the bio-sphere of valuable mulch, fertiliser and humus.

Burning biomass to generate electricity is Green madness. Speculators should be free to fritter their own funds on such nonsense but public subsidies, carbon credits and market mandates should not be used to support them.

Here is a new slogan for true environmentalists: “Don’t Burn the Bio-sphere”.

Read how one foolish island nation plans to burn its food (coconuts) in diesel generators:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/09/of-coconuts-the-sun-and-small-isolated-islands/

More:

• Why Bury the Essentials of Life in Carbon Cemeteries?
• Abolish the Two Big Climate Taxes
• The Real Agenda: Agenda 21
• Nothing New about Extreme Weather
• Has the LNP forgotten the battlers?

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/burning-the-biosphere.pdf [PDF, 219 KB]

Keywords: Green Energy, biomass, wood power, biofuel, CCS (carbon capture & sequestration), climate taxes, electricity costs, carbon tax, renewable energy targets, Agenda 21, extreme weather.

We are winning the war about Man-made Global Warming.

But about half of the population still think that the carbon tax will do some good. Why? It is all about “cleaning up dirty coal energy”.

The seeds of public concern were sewn with Penny Wong’s Machiavellian linking of “carbon” and “pollution”. She was assisted by the gross stupidity of the coal industry leadership in promoting nonsense like carbon sequestration as a “clean coal” option. The public naturally assumed “if they need to spend billions to produce “clean coal”, obviously we are now using “dirty coal”. This generation of coal industry leaders is more culpable than the greens – they should have known better – they have betrayed their shareholders, their employees and the nation.

The whole “dirty coal” program was assisted by the continual portrayal by alarmist media and government propagandists of power station cooling towers belching “pollution”. As carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, this is clearly a lie. What is seen are clouds of water vapour with no more pollution potential than wispy white cumulus clouds or boiling dark nimbus thunderheads.

And of course coal is black, thus dirty and dangerous like “a black mark” which is a de-merit point, a “black act”, which is nasty behaviour, “black magic” which is evil sorcery and “the black death” which kills people. What a pity coal was not rare and pretty like that other form of carbon, diamond.

A local climax of this unrelenting black-guarding of coal was a letter published in the Queensland Times of Ipswich, a town founded on coal mining, describing carbon dioxide as “one of many lethal pollutants released by coal combustion”.

What are the facts on coal combustion?

Read on for more, including:

• Taxing Termites, Wetlands, Volcanoes & Sacred Cows?
• Four Steps to Cheaper Electricity
• Solar Energy Dims and Wind Power Runs out of Puff
• The Measure of our Stupidity
• The Last Word – the Consensus is Destroyed

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/is-coal-dirty.pdf [PDF, 512 KB]

Letter to the Editor

Add more carbon dioxide to green the planet

In western Canada, a ‘BC Greenhouse Growers Association’ spokesperson said on a radio program to the effect, “most greenhouses consume the available CO2 within the first 1/2 hour of the daytime growing cycle, and thereafter the grower must add CO2 within the greenhouse”.

Therefor assuming a 12 hour daylight growing period, they would add 23 times the ambient (380 parts per million) amount of CO2 to make the plants grow stronger to the desired size, strength and health etc. These CO2 enhanced plants also use less water to grow. If we wanted to green the planet, we should be adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, not less.

Roland Seguin
Langley, BC Canada

Keywords: coal, combustion, pollution, SOX, NOX, mercury, termites, wetlands, volcanoes, sacred cows, electricity costs, solar, wind, carbon trading, consensus, sustainability, censorship.