Solar power fails every day from sunset to sunrise as well as during rain, hail, snow or dust storms. No matter how much land we smother in subsidised solar panels, they will still fail.
Wind power fails often and unpredictably, sometimes for days, especially in quiet cold winter weather. It also shuts down during cyclones, heavy winds or icy conditions. No matter how many hills we uglify with their subsidised roads, transmission lines and bird-slicers, they will still fail.
No one notices when green energy fails (as it often does) because coal, gas and hydro keep our lights and heaters on, trains running, petrol pumping, batteries charging and dairies, abattoirs and hospitals operating. (more…)
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (Christopher Lord Monckton) has agreed to come on a lecture tour in Australia in late January 2010. Professor Ian Plimer will accompany Christopher Monckton on a whirlwind tour of the mainland capital cities starting in Sydney on January 25th and finishing in Perth on February 9th. Unfortunately we cannot fit in Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Lady Juliet Monckton will come as well, in part to monitor Lord Monckton’s health.
Prof. Plimer says the following of Lord Monckton: “although I modestly state that I am a good performer, he is superb and I have seen him fielding a very hostile BBC and other networks. He has the ability to change thinking…”.
Given the now generally-acknowledged lack of understanding among the Australian general public of the underlying reasons for a “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” and the likely effects thereof, it is critical that the public gets a chance to hear a globally-recognised presenter to explain the rational understanding of the whole issue. Lord Monckton is the ideal person to carry out this task and to also put it to the mass media.
There are still details to be finalised for the tour, but basically the program for Lord Monckton’s public lectures is:
The response to this tour has been amazing which underlines the timeliness of it. We would stress that it would be good to get as many “agnostics” and “true believers” along to Monckton’s lectures. So if you have any such friends, please persuade them to come along.
Seeing we had not enough time to have tickets printed and sold, admission to each event will be by a donation of $20 at the door ($10 in Perth).
As you can understand, the cost of this exercise will be very substantial and if you have not as yet made a donation and wish to do so, your donations should be directed to:
Westpac Bank – Lord Monckton Tour account
Bank BSB: 035612
Account: 253068
Thank you in advance for your support of this nationally important project.
Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
Noosaville Qld. 4566 (currently in Melbourne)
0418 521 304 case.smit@gmail.com
John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ
Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567 (currently in Sydney)
0417 269 216 johnsmeed@adna.com.au
DATE: Wednesday, 3rd February 2010
VENUE: National Press Club of Australia,
16 National Circuit, Barton ACT
TIME: 3.00pm – 5.00pm
Afternoon tea & light refreshments will be available
COST: $20 per head
What follows is an expanded version of a complaint sent to the ACCC. (The ACCC complaint form limits the amount of text than can be entered.)
I wish to complain about the Australian Government “Climate Change” advertisement currently showing on Australian TV (August, 2008). The text of the advertisement is as follows: (more…)
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.
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.
Once upon a time Australia was attractive to processing, refining and manufacturing industries using our abundant mineral and food resources, our reliable low-cost coal-fired electricity and a workforce trained in technical skills.
No longer.
Australia used to have 11 oil refineries, spread around the country. There are just 4 left, all over fifty years old, and all in danger of closing down. Green barriers to oil exploration have forced most of them to rely on costly imported crude oil.
We buy our jet fuel from North Asia and have just 19 days supply of aviation fuel in the country. Australia’s diesel supplies sometimes fall to just 13 days of consumption.
Now, for the first time in at least 60 years Australia no longer produces motor vehicles.
China and India have about 430 coal power plants under construction but Australia has not built a single coal-fired power station for seven years – some politicians even rejoice when they manage to close and demolish one.
Brisbane’s new trains are being made in India, Victa mowers are made in China and most coastal shipping died decades ago. Steel works and refineries producing aluminium, copper and zinc are under stress. All these industries are being pushed overseas by costly unreliable electricity and other government barriers and burdens.
Red-green policies being pushed by all major parties are making Australia more dependent on bolted-down industries such as mining and farming that can’t be sent overseas because their basic resources are here. And green opposition to nuclear power increases Aussie reliance on coal.
A century ago Australians relied on wool, wheat, gold, silver, copper, lead-zinc, butter, beef and timber – all products of bolted-down industries.
Red-green policies are pushing us back to those days. Politicians need to remember Newton’s Law of Bureaucracy – whenever the government tries to use the force of law to achieve economic goals the long term results will be equal and opposite to those intended.
So in the long run, red-green energy and environmental policies will make us more dependent on the bolted-down industries they now attack – mining, farming, forestry and fishing.
If you would like to comment on this article, or see other comments go to:
Cosmic Cycles, not Carbon Dioxide, Control Climate
This cartoon may be used freely providing the author, Steve Hunter, and the source is acknowledged: www.carbon-sense.com
Those who think the political war on carbon will lower Earth’s temperature or keep climate stable need to study climate history.
Temperatures on Earth dance to a cyclic rhythm every hour, every day, every month, every season, every year, and to every beat of the sun-spot and glacial cycles.
The daily solar cycle causes continual changes in temperature for every spot on Earth. It produces the frosts at dawn, the mid-day heat and the cooling at sunset. It is regulated by rotation of the Earth.
Superimposed on the daily solar cycle is the monthly lunar cycle, driven by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. These two cycles interact to produce variations in atmospheric pressure and tides, and currents in the oceans and the atmosphere. These are the daily weather makers. (more…)
The Australian Minister for Promoting Useless Energy thinks that hydrogen fuel, carbon capture and storage, soil carbon and biofuels are priorities for energy policy and greenhouse gas reduction.
If that’s the best our leaders can come up with, Australia should have voted Green last election to speed the inevitable recession and blackouts that will eventually kill this tsunami of energy nonsense.
“Hydrogen” does not supply net energy – burning it can return some of the energy used to produce it from hydrocarbons or electrolysis of water. It is an expensive explosive gas that makes less sense than Snowy 2 – more energy in than out!
Moreover, we have no infrastructure that can safely store, distribute or use hydrogen in our transport fleet, energy network or smelters. Governments should not force energy consumers or tax payers to promote Canberra’s thought bubbles – let the “green hydrogen” entrepreneurs risk their own or shareholders’ money.
“Carbon capture and storage” is another dumb idea. To capture CO2 emissions from coal, gas or biomass power stations consumes a lot of energy to separate, store, pipe and pump it underground (hoping it will stay there). It would be far better leave non-polluting CO2 in the lower atmosphere and surround every power station with crops and forests hungry for the CO2 plant food so essential to their growth.
Trying to extract CO2 from the atmosphere is even dumber because the mighty oceans will quickly release CO2 from their huge stores to restore equilibrium between atmosphere and oceans. Even if it could be done, it is a bad idea – why steal plant food from grass, crops and forests?
“Soil carbon” is green-speak for what every sensible pastoralist tries to do – increase the humus and biological activity in soil. The quickest way to do this is via keyline/contour ripping to retain water in the soil (as shown in Australia by P A Yeoman), and by managed periodic heavy impact of grazing animals to promote pasture growth (as shown in Africa by Alan Savory). But it is total nonsense to turn “carbon farming” into a costly rural rort run by a bureaucracy of soil samplers and modellers who think it will cool the climate.
“Biofuels” are another way to waste energy, food crops and trees to do jobs better done by coal, gas and oil – a crime against humanity and the environment.
If our Minister for Promoting Useless Energy is determined to sequester and store carbon, there is only one sensible way – restore the forestry industry. Harvest mature forest trees for poles, posts, sleepers, paper, cardboard or dance floors. Then replant with new trees. Young trees grow rapidly and extract much CO2. But old trees reach a stage of carbon equilibrium when the CO2 they extract in summer is equal to what they lose as leaves, branches and trunks fall to frosts, droughts, bushfires and termites.
P A Yeomans, 1965: “Water for Every Farm”, K G Murray Publishing.
“The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all of the carbon dioxide within a metre of the ground in about five minutes.” Freeman Dyson – a prominent scientist specialising in physics, mathematics and astronomy.
Viv Forbes is a geologist, financial analyst, weather watcher and pastoralist with long experience at maintaining the health of pastures and soils. He and his wife have used a Yeoman ripper for about 30 years and have studied and practiced Savory animal management techniques for a similar time. He is Executive Director of the Saltbush Club.
I note that your review has been commissioned to “examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy, and recommend medium to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity”.
As written, this is a straightforward if challenging task. Unwritten, however, is that the term “climate change” today carries connotations of human causation, thanks mainly to lobby group pressure and media propaganda. This transforms a straightforward task into one of immense complexity, because of the existence of both many unresolved, controversial scientific issues and the fierce environmental politics that becomes involved. (more…)
While Australia is increasing expenditure of consumer and taxpayer money to the renewables industry, governments around the world have decided that “enough is enough”.
Other countries are realising that renewable energy is a massive waste of tax payer funds and has zero or negligible effect on CO2 emissions. They are thus cutting or eliminating subsidies to the grossly inefficient green power generators.
Here are a few examples of the ways in which Australian state and federal Governments subsidise or give unfair advantage to renewables:
Bans on nuclear power
Renewable Energy Targets
Renewable Energy Certificates
Feed in Tariffs
Direct government subsidies for renewable energy
Tax and other incentives
Cost of the electricity grid enhancements that are needed to accommodate the disruptive, erratic renewable energy generators is shared by everyone instead of being attributed to the renewable energy generators.
Super Profits Tax on coal mining.
Threats to shut down or in other ways disadvantage coal fired power plants without fair compensation for the investors.
Green Hydrogen is the latest “energy” fad from the global warming warriors. It is mainly hot air.
Hydrogen will NEVER be a source of energy. Unlike coal, oil or natural gas, hydrogen rarely occurs naturally – it must be manufactured, and that process consumes far more energy than the hydrogen “fuel” can recover. And the heat content of natural gas is over three times that of hydrogen.
“Hydro-gen” means “born of water”, but the first commercial fuel containing hydrogen was born of coal. Maybe it should be called “Carbo-gen”? (more…)
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