The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration – a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”.
It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.
About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale – more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.
We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity?
Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.
Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields.
Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity.
This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.
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The New Cold War
The Great Barrier Reef
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Keywords: Golden Fleece Award, carbon capture and sequestration, London, Los Angeles and Asian smogs, dust, save the Great Barrier
Reef, book-burning academics, climatism waning.
A virulent virus is being spread at international climate conferences.
Called the GW Virus (short for Manmade Global Warming Virus), the symptoms are a psychotic fear of the word “carbon”, a compulsion to blame man’s industry for every bad weather event, an urge to weave a warm bias into every weather report and forecast, and a morbid fascination with windmills.
The GW virus was first identified in the British Parliament in 1988 and spread quickly to the vulnerable BBC. It is an airborne virus and was soon spread by junketing politicians to NASA and the UN, thence to an Earth Conference in Rio in 1992, and then to Kyoto in 1997. The infection peaked in Copenhagen in 2009, when thousands of politicians, academics, officials and reporters became feverish.
Because of its isolation, Australia had not developed immunity to this virus, and it quickly took root in the ABC, thoroughly infected many politicians especially the governing ALP/Greens coalition, and then spread via government grant meetings to the CSIRO and every University in the land.
In Australia, incurable cases are sent to an isolation ward called the Climate Commission, headed by chronic MGW sufferer, Tim Flannery. Like vultures perched on a dead tree, these dedicated doomsters see droughts and heat waves in every weather event, even when large areas of the country are suffering floods and unseasonal cold.
The only protection against the GW virus is immunisation with a shot of climate history vaccine. This helps “at risk” alarmists to accept that there is nothing new about fires, floods, droughts, cyclones, heat waves, snow storms or variations in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
To curb the further spread of this virulent and destructive virus, infected sufferers must be banned from climate conferences and all infected politicians must be quarantined in their offices.
Prominent climate alarmist James Hansen claims that the wisps of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere could melt all the ice caps, cause the ocean to boil and that would be the end for all of us.
Listen to the him trying to scare us witless:
Are we and the fishes and the corals in danger of being cooked?
The diagram below shows that the Pacific Ocean surface temperature is not rising – in fact it looks to be slowly turning into a cooling phase. The seasonal variations caused by the sun are obvious, but there is no correlation between this horizontal trend of temperature and the rising trend of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.
Professor Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies, the University of Western Australia, recently presented a paper in Poznan, Poland, in which he described the sun as the major control of climate, but not through greenhouse gases.
Abstract. The threat of dangerous climate change from anthropogenic global warming has decreased. Global temperature rose from 1975 to 1998, but since then has levelled off. Sea level is now rising at about 1.5mm per year based on tide gauges, and satellite data suggests it may even be falling. Coral islands once allegedly threatened by drowning have actually increased in area. Ice caps cannot possibly slide into the sea (the alarmist model) because they occupy kilometres-deep basins extending below sea level. Deep ice cores show a succession of annual layers of snow accumulation back to 760,000 years and in all that time never melted, despite times when the temperature was higher than it is today. Sea ice shows no change in 30 years in the Arctic. Emphasis on the greenhouse effect stresses radiation and usually leads to neglect of important factors like convection. Water is the main greenhouse gas. The CO2 in the ocean and the atmosphere are in equilibrium: if we could remove CO2 from the atmosphere the ocean would give out more to restore the balance. Increasing CO2 might make the ocean less alkaline but never acid. The sun is now seen as the major control of climate, but not through greenhouse gases. There is a very good correlation of sunspots and climate. Solar cycles provide a basis for prediction. Solar Cycle 24 has started and we can expect serious cooling. Many think that political decisions about climate are based on scientific predictions but what politicians get are projections based on computer models. The UN’s main adviser, the IPCC, uses adjusted data for the input, their models and codes remain secret, and they do not accept responsibility for their projections.
The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian federal government and the opposition to abolish all renewable energy targets, certificates and subsidies.
The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that it was time for those who worship wind turbines to pay their full cost, and not force electricity consumers and tax payers to pay for a costly, unreliable and obsolete method of generating electricity.
“Wind power has been around since Don Quixote and it belongs in an industrial museum not in a modern economy.
“For too much of the time, the wind just sucks subsidies when it should be turning turbines.
“The 20% renewable energy target is unachievable without perpetual government mandates and subsidies and should be abolished.”
Combined climate and econometric computer models produce any desired result.
Ronald Bailey | August 2, 2013
… “In an incisive new study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Robert Pindyck rips the social cost of carbon estimates derived from integrated assessment computer models to pieces. In his National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?,” Pindyck concludes that the models all “have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis: certain inputs such as the discount rate are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the social cost of carbon estimates that models produce.” Pindyck adds that the “models’ descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc, with no theoretical or empirical foundation; and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the social cost of carbon, the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome.”…
By Kimball Rasmussen | President and CEO, Deseret Power | November 2010
With Acknowledgement to: John Droz at the Alliance for Wise Energy: http://www.wiseenergy.org/
“Wind energy has a highly intermittent output that significantly mismatches demand and delivers energy largely when it is less needed. Wind cannot satisfy the demand requirements of a utility unless it is backed up with fossil fuel plants and/or energy storage projects. This results in duplication of resources and additional costs, with little, if any, carbon mitigation. Further, the steep increases and declines in power delivery of wind put the reliability of the grid in question. The tactic of switching off excess wind supply only diminishes the already weak pattern of intermittency and adds to the per kWh cost of wind. Typically, wind resources are located far away from where the power is needed and require significant additional costs of building new transmission. Intermittency, duplication and grid operations all significantly increase the already high cost of wind energy.
“Wind becomes even more questionable when proven solutions like natural gas can deliver even greater reductions in emissions at half the cost.
“While solar power is much more grid friendly than wind, it is generally the most expensive form of renewable energy. Solar energy quasi-matches system peak load periods, but the peak solar output significantly misses actual electric system load peaks. In addition, solar facilities still produce only about 18 to 25 percent of the time. Without electricity storage, solar energy will not be able to do more than serve as a supplement to other forms of energy. It is not currently a full-scale alternative to baseload energy.
“A Renewable Portfolio Standard, or mandate of 20 percent, can result in a utility-scale duplication of net investment in generating plant of 100 percent or more. The mandate can also cause the wide variation of rate impacts, depending on availability of renewable energy projects and other utility specific parameters.”
Killing Australia’s carbon tax is a good idea but it should happen immediately, not later.
But replacing it with an ETS is a very bad idea and should never happen.
The carbon tax is a known amount, simple in principle, needs no bankers or brokers, and all receipts end up in Australian hands. And it is easy to abolish at any time.
The ETS is a variable and unpredictable carbon tax. It creates business uncertainty, is complex in operation, encourages brokers, lawyers and speculators and it will drain our money to middlemen and into the European carbon credit casino. And it will create a growing army of vested interests who will forever oppose its abolition.
Neither the fixed tax nor the vacillating tax will have any beneficial effect on climate.
The carbon tax should be axed, but replaced with … NOTHING.
More, as well as:
The Heavy Cost of Climatism
Who’s Afraid of a Bit of Warmth?
Warmists should Go the Whole Hog
“Taxing Air” by Bob Carter, John Spooner and friends
We are told, incessantly, that carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming – it is not.
The primary source of surface heat is radiant energy from the sun. Minor heat comes from geothermal energy from volcanoes and hot rocks. Trivial quantities of local heat are brought to Earth’s surface by humans using stoves, cars, boilers, engines and factories powered by mined fuels such as coal, oil, gas and uranium. Even using “green” energy such as ethanol, wind or wood has a tiny temperature effect by transferring solar energy from farms and forests, to be released eventually as waste heat in cities.
Solar energy is more concentrated in equatorial areas and is moved pole-wards by the circulation of air (99.9% nitrogen, oxygen and argon), and by water and water vapour via evaporation, condensation and ocean currents. These processes are all driven by conduction, convection, latent heat and Earth’s rotation, not carbon dioxide. They are the major forces creating weather. Variations in solar cycles and cloud cover control longer term climate change.
Carbon dioxide plays almost no part in any of these dominant weather processes. Moreover, it does not burn, nor is it radioactive – it cannot produce heat.
More, as well as:
Spinning Carbon Scare Stories out of Nature’s Tornados
Keywords: Global warming, carbon dioxide, solar cycles, tornados, green energy in Europe, solar subsidies, renewable energy targets, blackouts, energy policy crisis, Green poison.
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