The Australian electricity market has become a stinking swamp covered with a tangled net of treaties, laws, rules, obligations, prohibitions, targets, taxes and subsidies. The swamp conceals the rubble of demolished coal generators; another plant destined for destruction (Liddell) is gradually sinking into the green ooze.

The swamp is slowly claiming paddocks of subsidised solar panels that, at best, only work for six hours per sunny day. The scene is uglified by spec-built regiments of ailing wind turbines that are often idle, but sometimes whirling madly. To distract the gullible media from this mess, big diesel generators charge a gigantic battery which pumps water uphill and then lets it run down again. A garbage dump of dead lithium batteries fills a nearby gully and the swamp is fenced by locked green gates.

The stagnant water is stirred on sunny days by luxury launches carrying academics-with-models, green media evangelists, climate alarmists, emissions inspectors and power regulators. Speculative sharks constantly patrol the swamp snapping up every smelly subsidy morsel scattered by politicians in posh yachts fishing for votes.

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by Viv Forbes

Carbon dioxide must be an almighty gas – it gets blamed for almost every human disaster.

Now we have the alarmist Climate Council blaming bushfires on carbon dioxide and global warming. Focussing on the wrong problem is doing more harm than good. It is disappointing to see respected firefighters like Greg Mullins now blaming “climate change” for more and worse bushfires, and now even promoting the misguided Climate Council.

We have heat waves, dry spells and bushfires in Australia every year – bushfires were burning all up the coast when Captain Cook sailed by in 1770. But today we know what causes dangerous fires. It needs deliberate political mismanagement to create disastrous wild-fires which destroy everything – houses, sheds, fences, wildlife and mature trees.

A good wet season can result in nature building up a dangerously large fuel load. In the past this was usually removed safely by many small fires lit by lightning strikes, aboriginals, graziers or foresters. Today massive fuels loads are too often allowed to accumulate for more than one season in forests, reserves, parks and around suburbs. Then one match or spark on a windy day can produce massive fires.

Image acknowledgement: www.pixabay.com

Today’s stupid green policies that discourage and prohibit burning-off, encourage the accumulation of bushfire fuel and exclude grazing animals from large areas of parks and reserves are making uncontrollable wildfires more common. (more…)

Two messages for Canberra:

Firstly, Australia does not have a problem with too much carbon dioxide going to the sky – we have a problem storing enough of the water coming from the sky.

Secondly, Australia does not have a shortage of wind and solar “farms” – we have a shortage of water, stock feed and low-cost electricity on real farms.

Politicians fritter our money on dubious “research”, climate propaganda, foreign adventures and handouts for trendy, vote-seeking green causes. But they have not built a serious water supply dam since the 1980’s, and the last big coal-fired power station was opened 11 years ago. For a country with a growing population, abundant supplies of coal and uranium, and a history of severe droughts, these are serious omissions.

The Snowy Mountain Scheme (opened nearly 50 years ago) was a visionary project that produced large volumes of low-cost water for irrigation plus reliable hydro-power for industry.

The new Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a fraud – it will produce no extra water and will be a net consumer of power. Its sole purpose is to try to plug the holes and fluctuations in electricity supply caused by a bi-partisan love affair with expensive green energy toys producing unreliable, intermittent electricity.

Cease this baseless war on carbon fuels. Carbon dioxide does not drive global warming – it is driven out of sea water by ocean warming.

Australia should cancel Snowy 2.0, withdraw from all Paris and Kyoto Climate Treaty obligations, dump the NEG “plans”, remove all green energy subsidies and start building some real power stations and real water supply dams and pipelines.

No matter what the weather does, we will need more cheap, reliable water and electricity.

[Compiled by Mike Williamson from Australian Government Statistics.]

More:

How to Drought Proof a Dry Continent:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/build-more-dams.pdf

Reliable Infrastructure before Green Grandstanding:
https://carbon-sense.com/2018/08/20/reliable-infrastructure-before-green-grandstanding/

The Idiocy of the Turnbull Energy Policy:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2018/08/18/turnbulls-new-approach-to-electricity-smoke-and-mirrors/

Time to Drain the Energy Swamp:
https://carbon-sense.com/2018/08/01/drain-the-swamp/

The Real Snowy Mountain Scheme:
https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/our-energy/hydro/the-scheme/

A Nosedive in dry Australia’s dam water capacity per head of population:
http://theconversation.com/dam-hard-water-storage-is-a-historic-headache-for-australia-33397

The Labor/Green coalition in Australia has declared war on coal, oil and gas and industries that use them. So why is Big Mining not fighting back?

BHP Billiton is a big producer of coal, oil, gas, iron ore, copper, nickel and uranium. Rio Tinto is a big producer of uranium, coal, iron ore, copper and aluminium. Glencore is a big producer of coal, copper, zinc and nickel. And Shell is big in oil, gas and bitumen, manufactures biofuels, and generates peak power with natural gas.

These companies employ competent geologists, physicists and chemists who could tell them that CO2 is not a pollutant, that it is not the primary driver of climate and that climate has been changing since time began. They must know there is no scientific justification for the green war on hydro-carbon fuels – but none of these big miners speak out against this baseless war on their products. UC Browser for Windows Some even waste shareholder funds producing glossy brochures promoting the green agenda – the BHP Billiton document “Climate Change: Portfolio Analysis” reads like it was produced by the Greens.

Big Mining is not that dumb. Their climate “concern” is more motivated by self-interest – they see long-term profits flowing from the silly green agenda. They are also political cowards wanting be loved by guilt-stricken billionaires, business haters from Hollywood and the green mob controlling the ABC/BBC.

Wind and solar power are indeed “free”, but to extract electricity from them is not free – it needs turbines and solar panels, generators and transformers, transmission towers and power lines – all of which boosts demand for metals like steel, copper, zinc, nickel and rare earths.

Moreover, wind and solar are very diffuse power sources and need large areas of land together with webs of access roads and power lines in order to collect significant power. The heavy machinery needed for construction, maintenance and replacements in these green power networks provide ongoing demands for petroleum and mining products. Before one watt of green electricity is generated for consumers, green power has boosted demand for most products of Big Mining.

Permission to use the cartoon is granted providing the source www.carbon-sense.com is mentioned.
To download a tif file of the cartoon (1.6 MM) click:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/flogging-green-horse.tif

Green power also needs back-up power ready to swing into action immediately the wind drops (or blows a gale) or clouds, fog, snow, rain, dust or night-time obscure the sun. This is great news for reliable energy suppliers capable of rapid backup, which usually means gas. Happy New Year 2018 Quotes So Big Gas loves Big Green – it is secretly delighted by the war on coal and the force-feeding of Green energy, as this will cause a boom in gas demand. Lead, nickel, cadmium and lithium miners are also delighted with the soaring demand for energy-storing batteries.
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Water is essential for all life, and happily it is abundant on our blue watery planet.

However, salty oceans cover 70% of Earth’s surface and contain 97% of Earth’s water. Salt water is great for ocean dwellers but not directly useful for most life on land. Another 2% of Earth’s water is tied up in ice caps, glaciers and permanent snow, leaving just 1% as land-based fresh water.

To sustain life on land, we need to conserve and make good use of this rare and elusive resource.

Luckily, our sun is a powerful nuclear-powered desalinisation plant. Every day, solar energy evaporates huge quantities of fresh water from the oceans. After a stop-off in the atmosphere, most of this water vapour is soon returned to earth as dew, rain, hail and snow – this is the great water cycle. Unfortunately about 70% of this precipitation falls directly back into the oceans and some is captured in frozen wastelands.

Much of the water that falls on land is collected in gullies, creeks and rivers and driven relentlessly by gravity back to the sea by the shortest possible route. Allowing this loss to happen is poor water management. The oceans are not short of water.

Some animals and plants have evolved techniques to maximise conservation of precious fresh water.

Some Australian frogs, on finding their water holes evaporating, will inflate their stomachs with water then bury themselves in a moist mud-walled cocoon to wait for the drought to break. Water buffalo and wild pigs make mud wallows to retain water in their private mud-baths, camels carry their own water supply and beavers build lots of dams.

Some plants have also evolved water saving techniques – bottle trees and desert cacti are filled with water, thirsty humans can even get a drink from the roots and trunks of some eucalypts and many plants produce drought/fire resistant seeds.

Every such natural water conservation or drought-proofing behaviour brings benefits for all surrounding plants and animals.

People have long recognised the importance of conserving fresh water – early settlers built their homes near the best waterholes on the creek and every homestead and shed had its corrugated iron tanks. Graziers built dams and weirs to retain surface water for stock (and fence-crashing wildlife), used contour ripping and good pasture management to retain moisture in soils, and drilled bores to get underground water. And sensible rules have evolved to protect the water rights of down-stream residents.

In some snow-fed rivers like the Nile, floods are generally a reliable and predictable annual event. For millennia the Nile delivered water and silt fertiliser to the farmers on the flood plains in Lower Egypt. The massive High Aswan Dam may have done more harm than good – it certainly did great harm to the farmers and land down-stream by stealing the silt and the water that supported the productivity of farms that have fed millions since Roman times. The value of the electricity generated by the dam probably does not compensate for these losses.

But in Australia, rainfall is usually a boom and bust affair. Much fresh water is delivered to the land surface suddenly in cyclones, storms and rain depressions. But “The Wet” is always followed by “The Dry”, and droughts and floods are normal climatic events. People who fail to store some of the flood must put up with the drought.

Read more, as well as:

• Trickery and Puffery in Climate Spending Claims
• Professor Ian Plimer in Westminster

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/build-more-dams.pdf [PDF, 170 KB]

Tags: Water, dams, irrigation, desalinisation, Ian Plimer, Heaven and Hell, climate industry spending, slush funds.

Playing Snakes and Ladders with Australia’s Electricity Supply.
By Viv Forbes & Helpers

Every day some green energy promoter or a battery salesman tells us how green energy with battery backup will supply Australia’s future electricity needs.

A battery stores energy. Energy can be stored using lead-acid, nickel/cadmium, lithium, molten salt, pumped hydro, hydrogen, flywheels, compressed air or some other smart gizmo. But NOT ONE battery produces new energy – they simply store and discharge energy produced by other means.OnePlus 5 specs They all deliver less energy than they consume. Moreover, to manufacture, charge, use and dispose of batteries consumes energy and resources.

The idea of producing reliable grid power from intermittent green energy backed up by batteries looks possible in green doodle-diagrams, but would be absurdly inefficient and expensive.

Solar works a Six hour day

Consider a solar panel which is rated to collect say 100 units of energy per day at full capacity, in full mid-day sunlight, with a clean panel, properly aligned to face the sun.

No solar energy arrives overnight and only minimal amounts arrive during the three hours after dawn or before dusk. That means that significant solar energy can only be collected for about 6 hours per day, providing it is not cloudy, raining or snowing. No amount of research or regulation will change this – the solar energy union only works a six-hour day and takes quite a few sickies. So instead of feeding 100 units of energy per day into the grid, at best, the panel supplies just 25 units.

Can the addition of batteries give us 24/7 power from solar?

To deliver 100 units of energy in 24 hours will require an extra 75 units of energy to be collected, stored and delivered by the batteries every sunny day. This will require another three solar units devoted solely to re-charging batteries in just 6 sunny hours.

Cloudy/wet days are what really expose the problems of solar plus batteries. (This is why isolated green power systems must have a diesel generator in the shed.)

To insure against, say, 7 days of cloudy weather would require a solar/battery system capable of collecting and storing 700 units of energy while still delivering 100 units to consumers every day. However if several consecutive weeks of sunny weather then occur, this bloated system is capable of delivering 7 times more power than needed, causing power prices to plunge, driving reliable generators out of business and wasting the life of solar panels producing unwanted electricity. 192.168.l.254

Solar energy obviously does best in sunny equatorial deserts, but that is not where most people live. And the huge Desertec Solar Power Dream for the northern Sahara has failed.

The report card on wind energy is different, but equally depressing.

When Australia had reliable, predictable coal-gas-hydro power in every state, the need for heavy interstate transmission was minimal. But green power will require robust and costly interstate transmission facilities to send large amounts of power at short notice from sunny coal-rich Queensland to cloudy Victoria, windless South Australia or droughted Tasmania.

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/battery-baloney2.pdf [PDF, 157 KB]

Opinion piece by Prof. David Bellamy
28 June 08
Cows and Sheep May Safely Graze?

As a youngster in a post war London I was brought up on lamb and anchor butter from New Zealand.

My first dabble into TV commercials was with WOOLMARK NZ, in what became a successful attempt to slow down the ingress of synthetic fibre into the carpet market. I still meet sheep farmers around the world who greet me their thanks and a pint of beer.

I still delight in your butter and lamb which I can buy in my local supermarket, the latter at half the price of the local product sold in our village butchers shop.

What a strange world we live in now bombarded with the rhetoric of food miles let alone tourist miles.
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OCEAN ACIDIFICATION IS A MYTH
Cliff Ollier
Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia

Email: cliff.ollier@uwa.edu.au

INTRODUCTION

Climate alarmists believe the world is warming, and that this is caused exclusively by man-made carbon dioxide. ‘Global Warming” is now stretched to Climate Change”, but it must be stressed that carbon dioxide can only produce warming: the deceptive change of name does not change the alleged process.

To demonise carbon dioxide further it is supposed to cause ‘acidification’ of the oceans. They claim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide causes the ocean to become more ‘acid’, which dissolves carbonate. This despite the fact that the oceans are alkaline, and have never been acid throughout their existence on Earth. We are implored to reduce the production of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to ‘protect’ the ocean. In this article I show that such claims are baseless, and indeed that carbon dioxide is beneficial to the ocean.

By Viv Forbes

Solar energy is very dilute, so solar collectors usually cover huge areas of flat arable land, stealing farmland, starving wild herbs and grasses of sunlight and creating “Solar Deserts”.

A Solar Desert expanding at Gannawarra in Victoria, Australia. Picture Credit ARENA

Wind turbines steal energy from winds which often bring moisture from the ocean. These walls of turbines then create rain shadows, producing more rain near the turbines and more droughts down-wind. Turbines work best along ridge lines where eagles also seek thermals, so birds and bats get chopped up by these whirling scythes. They also annoy neighbours with noise and increase bushfire risk. (more…)

By Rocky Wood

We all know the maxim that common sense just isn’t that common. Nothing proves this more than the current debate about Climate Change. ‘Global Warming’ has become the propaganda term of choice for those who make a living from scare tactics about the climate. Yet, brave souls in the scientific and political community are offering alternate views, views that receive scant regard in the mainstream media.

In a series of columns for carbon-sense.com we will investigate just how much, or little, common sense is being applied in the worldwide debate. We will expose the facts Al Gore and his cohorts don’t want the average citizen to know; and we will challenge the orthodox view that has enveloped the mass media and politicians of all stripes. More importantly, we will investigate the motivations of many of those who are on the climate change bandwagon – from simple economic avarice right through to an intent to alter the entire economic and political order.
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