Creating Bushfire Hazards

A recent report from friends who suffered terrible losses of buildings, fences, pasture and cattle in the Coonabarabran fire commenced with the ominous and oft-repeated message: “a raging fire came out of the National Park straight for us”.

There is only one way to limit fire damage – reduce the fuel available.

Fuel load can be reduced in three ways – by grazing animals, by planned small “cool” fires, or by mechanical reduction with slashers, mulchers or dozers.

Australia’s grassland landscape was created and managed by generations of Aborigines who were masters at using man’s most useful tool – fire. Every explorer from Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) onwards noted the smoke in the sky and the burnt trees whenever they landed. This burning created the open grassland landscapes that dominated pre-European Australia. Aborigines lit fires continually, mainly to keep their fires sticks alight. Their small patchwork fires caused no permanent damage to the environment and fortuitously created and maintained the healthy grasslands and open forests on which many animals and Aborigines depended.

There have been two major changes to the tree/grass balance since European settlement. In the fertile well-watered coastal strip, large areas of thick scrub and open forest were logged and cleared for timber, farms, towns, roads, schools and the domesticated grasses of suburban lawns. Most of those trees have been displaced by those people who now, in ignorance, are also destroying the grasslands and remaining open forests by locking up land and preventing any form of regrowth control. Having destroyed much of the coastal forests and scrubs, they are now destroying the open forests and grasslands.

Misguided tree lovers and green politicians have locked the gates on ever-increasing areas of land for trees, parks, heritage, wilderness, habitat, weekend retreats, carbon sequestration etc. Never before on this ancient continent has anyone tried to ban land use or limit bushfires on certain land. The short-sighted policy of surrounding their massive land-banks with fences, locked gates, fire bans and exclusion of livestock has created a new alien environment in Australia. They have created tinder boxes where the growth of woody weeds and the accumulation of dead vegetation in eucalypt re-growth create the perfect environment for fierce fires.

Once ignited by lightning, carelessness, or arson, the inevitable fire-storms incinerate the park trees and wildlife, and then invade the unfortunate neighbouring properties. Many of today’s locked-up areas were created to sequester carbon to fulfil Kyoto obligations. Who pays the carbon tax on the carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by wild fires? The green bureaucracies and politicians are clearly mis-managing their huge land-bank. Aborigines and graziers did a far better job. There should be a moratorium on locking up any more land and a return to sustainable management for existing land holdings.

More, as well as:

• Time to Build Better Infrastructure
• Magic-gas Discovery
• Extreme Weather is Nothing New
• The Blind Worship of Windmills
• The Last Word

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/destructive-green-policies.pdf [PDF, 65 KB]

Keywords: Bushfires, grasslands, parks, floods, infrastructure, carbon dioxide magic, extreme weather, windmill monuments, James Lovelock, CSIROh!, Monckton, politicians on drugs.

The Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that so many green policies that appear to have useful environmental goals fail to analyse properly the long-term unforeseen consequences.

Quote:
Green politicians need to learn Newton’s Law of Government Regulations: – “Whenever government legislates to force an economic outcome, the long term effect will be equal and opposite to that intended.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of green politics, where laws designed to help the environment are harming the environment. To publicise this stupidity, the Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The winner of the Inaugural Gorbel Prize is the UK government whose green policies aim to make it uneconomic to burn coal. So the tax-payer funded Green Investment Bank has loaned £100 million to help convert the huge Drax coal-burning power station in Yorkshire to burning “sustainable biomass”. This is part of a huge finance package of one billion pounds to get the biomass green tick, earn renewable energy subsidies, and avoid the need to buy carbon credits.

Where do they plan to get the “sustainable biomass”? Each year 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips will be imported from North American forests to replace 4.5 Mt of coal.

The land required to produce wood at this rate is immense – about three million acres of forest per year.

Also, wood is less dense than coal with less energy per tonne and a greater volume per tonne. Thus a greater tonnage and a far greater volume of wood have to be handled to get the same energy. This huge volume of wood has to be harvested, hauled, chipped, dried, trucked, shipped and stored using more carbon fuels – all to produce more expensive electricity.

There is one real benefit from the scheme. When the whole process is considered, using wood will put more carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere than using coal. This will make the forests grow faster.

The same goofy green policies that have pushed Drax into burning forests also apply in Australia. Maybe wood chips from our carbon credit forests will soon fuel Yallourn or Hazelwood power stations?

Such green stupidity will take us back to the BC era (before coal) when forests and hillsides were stripped bare of trees to fuel stoves, heaters, boilers, charcoal makers and smelters.

We would all be better off if Drax burned coal, produced cheap electricity, saved those forests and, to satisfy green dogma, planted a token forest of new trees.

For those who find the above unbelievable, here is one reference:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/biggest-english-polluter-spends-1-billion-to-burn-wood-energy.html

Another:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290444/Madness-How-pay-billions-electricity-bills-Britains-biggest-power-station-switch-coal-wood-chips–wont-help-planet-jot.html

And here is a detailed report on combustion products from carbon fuels:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/coal-combustion.pdf

Nominations are invited for future recipients of the Gorbel Prize.

Meanwhile, Al Gore gets $100 million from Big Oil. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/010313-639260-gore-helps-oil-financed-anti-semitic-platform.htm

More:

• It’s Official – Carbon dioxide is non-Toxic
• Hobbling the Competition
• “Blue Skies are Falling” – a new climate soap opera
• Greedy Gas Giants Gazump Gullible Greens
• Climate Policies create Costly Electricity
• It’s Summer, Stupid, and it’s Usually Hot
• Count your Blessings – a Fairy Story
• The Last Word
• Lord Christopher Monckton is returning to Australia and New Zealand

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gorbel-prize.pdf [PDF, 147KB]

Keywords: Gorbel Prize, Drax burning wood for electricity, costs of green energy, announcing climate disasters, gas giants gazump greens, electricity costs, heat wave alarms, energy blessings, Christopher Monckton.

Australian Senate passes Carbon Tax Bill – Nov 8 2011.
– a date that will be remembered as Carbon Fools Day.

Just a year ago, Australia joined the ranks of Carbon Fools by passing the Carbon Tax Bill (actually 18 separate bills called the “Clean Energy Bills”.) Now the same fools who introduced it are among the front rank of volunteers for carbon suicide by trumpeting their intention to sign Kyoto 2.

Barack Obama and Julia Gillard are founding members of the Carbon Fools Club, and have learned tricks from one another on how to betray the electorate without getting punished.

Before the election Gillard said “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”. Her Treasurer confirmed the promise. After the election, she changed her mind and introduced it. Now she is proceeding to bribe enough of the electorate into acceptance of the betrayal.
(more…)

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.

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.

The Australian government claims that next month’s tax on carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for today’s soaring costs of living.

This tax, however, is just their latest assault in the decades-long war on carbon that is already inflating the cost of everything.

For at least a decade, power companies have been obliged to source 10-15% of their power at inflated prices from costly and unreliable sources like wind and solar. And for every wind or solar plant built, a duplicate backup gas facility is needed, increasing the demand and price for backup gas, hitting other gas consumers. Moreover, the threat of more carbon taxes has deterred the construction of efficient new coal-burning power plants. Rising electricity costs feed into the cost of everything from public transport to building materials.

The climatists are also responsible for numerous policies pushing up the price of food. These include the ethanol/biofuel madness, the restrictions on the fishing industry, the Kyoto scrub clearing bans, the spread of carbon-credit forests over farming and grazing land, the never ending war on irrigators, and the virtual ban on building new water-supply dams.

Then we have all the hidden costs of the climate industry. Thousands of our smartest graduates are lured into well-paid dead-end desk jobs in the overheads industry devoted to climate red tape, while real entrepreneurs are unable to find workers to develop our continent of under-utilised resources. There is an overpaid bureaucracy devoted to climate “research”, alternate energy, international junkets, Kyoto give-aways, and administration, auditing, enforcement, accounting, law and propaganda for their empire of climate taxes and subsidies.

Finally we have income tax implications from all the money being flung around to bribe people to accept their carbon tax? Every Australian will get these bills somewhere, sometime. And who pays for the hundreds of millions poured down subsidy rat-holes like carbon capture, solar panels, pink bats and the IPCC?

Australia’s crippling carbon tax is but the latest symptom of the costly Climate Madness infecting the well-fed elite of the western world.

When the consumers of Australia realise the extent to which they have been conned and needlessly pauperised, the electoral retribution will be swift.

See more:
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=d9f51dd317ac24a90c904906c&id=fe9a5fd1c6&e=8391ec2f7c

And more in this newsletter:

• Carbon Price Propaganda Taxes the Truth
• Sawmills to Save the Planet?
• Species Extinction is Nothing New
• Rallies to “Smash the Carbon Tax”
• It’s the Sun, Stupid
• More Green Jobs Created – in China
• Rio – 50,000 People Flock to another UN Flop
• Ian Plimer comes to Brisbane
• The Carbon Tax Explained
• Turn up the Heat on The Liberals too

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/war-on-carbon.pdf [PDF, 88KB]

Keywords: Australia, carbon tax, electricity, food, costs, propaganda, sawmills, species extinctions, solar cycles, protests, green jobs, Rio flop.

With the failure of “Global Warming” the climatists have concocted a new alarm – the soda water scare.

Their computer models are forecasting that the oceans, which weigh 300 times more than all the gases in the atmosphere, are being turned acidic by the 0.0012% (12 parts per million) of man-made additions to the carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere.

CO2 is a natural gas that dissolves in water. The amount absorbed depends upon how much CO2 there is in the air, and the temperature of the water. CO2 dissolves best in cold water and is expelled as the water warms. And far more would be absorbed if there was 100% CO2 in the atmosphere above.

When concentrated CO2 gas is bubbled under high pressure into ice cold water much CO2 dissolves, producing acidic soda water whose pH (acidity) could be as low as 4. This is 1,000 times more acidic than pure water whose pH is a neutral 7.

But oceans are much warmer than that and atmospheric CO2 is at much lower pressure. Therefore in the open ocean, pH seldom gets below 8, ten times more alkaline than pure water.

This weak soda water could only be described as “acidic” by someone pushing an alarmist agenda. There are no measurements that show that the pH of the ocean is changing more now than in the past – only models. In historical terms, atmospheric CO2 levels are now close to record lows. Corals and other ocean life have flourished in atmospheric levels of CO2 far higher than today’s.

We are told that the tiny bit of natural soda water in still-alkaline sea water will dissolve corals and shells, kill fish and create oceanic mayhem?

If soda water is so dangerous, then how come people consume it in copious amounts in beer, scotch and fizzy drinks?

Read on for more, including:

• The Impact of Carbon Dioxide on Climate Change and Earth’s Plant and Animal Kingdoms
• Saving the Planet?
• Lord Monckton on Agenda 21
• Germany faces some painful Truths on Green Energy
• The Wheels are coming off the Wind Energy Gravy Train
• Green Companies Crash and Teeter
• Rallies to “Smash the Carbon Tax”
• The Last Word: Three Inconvenient Facts

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/soda-water-scare.pdf [PDF, 303 KB]

CO2Australia boasts of planting three million carbon credit trees. This is “just the beginning” of a new bubble industry, the CO2.con.

This bubble is set to inflate rapidly. To offset just one day of Qantas operations, CO2 promoters must plant more than 200,000 trees in permanent forests covering 130 hectares. How much land is required to offset all Australian power stations, industry and transport?

Yes these trees will consume carbon dioxide. However CO2 levels today are well below what is ideal for plant growth. While they are growing strongly, these trees will suck the gas of life from the atmosphere, competing strongly with nearby crops and plant life for the traces of carbon dioxide remaining.

Then as the trees mature, growth stops. The aging forest just sits there, some trees growing, some dying and net carbon sequestration ceases. It becomes a sterile shrine to the green religion whose main impact on the biosphere is providing a haven for feral animals and noxious weeds.

Green spruikers claim that they only use land not suitable for anything else. Wrong! Every bit of Australia not covered by road, cities, parks or deserts can support crops, timber-getting or grazing animals. Carbon-credit forests gnaw away at this national land asset every year.

Moreover, CO2.con investors, like all speculators, want quick returns. Their quick return demands rapidly growing trees in arable country – deserts and salt pans are uneconomical. Thus the wheat/sheep belt is shrinking.

No one can demonstrate any climate or environmental benefit from the CO2.con.

Forcing consumers and taxpayers to fund this large scale permanent land sterilisation is clearly unsustainable. All Australians fund this destruction via increased prices for electricity, cement, steel, air tickets and rail fares, and reduced land for food production. The carbon tax will increase their burden.

Like all bubble industries, the CO2.con industry must end in tears, and the sooner it ends the better.

Read on for more, including:

1. Vested Interests in the Climate Debate
2. Solving Three Problems
3. The Rice Video: Carbon Dioxide in perspective
4. Flogging a Dead Horse
5. Two Green Prophets Recant

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/co2-dot-con.pdf [PDF, 171 KB]