RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/paris-treaty-important/

While our leaders have been eager to impress the world with Australia’s resolve to hobble its economy before the altar of the climate gods, another international accord is observed only in the breach. That’s the one insisting we maintain 90-day fuel supplies.

It seems we are finally rid of Julie Bishop, who resigned in a huff as foreign minister because she wasn’t made prime minister. Apparently, among the slights of her rejection, what particularly rankled was her failure to get a single party-room vote from any of her fellow WA Liberals. Presumably they know her better than anyone, which no doubt explains a lot. For others, those who have not lashed themselves to the mast of the Liberals’ Hesperus, she also uttered this reminder of her lack of fitness for higher office: Australia must honour the Paris Agreement and reduce emissions by 26%. “When we sign a treaty,” , she said, “parties should be able to rely on us.”

Yes, we should honour the Paris agreement — but not the climate one. There is a far more important treaty, also signed in the City of Light, to which are signatory. This is the International Energy Agency agreement of 1974, born out of the OECD in response to the First Oil Shock. The idea was that all the signatories would keep 90 days of fuel supplies on hand and be prepared to share in the event of an emergency.

Australia signed on in 1979 but is not honouring our treaty obligations. We know that because the new Department of Energy, under its new Minister Angus Taylor, says so. From the website (emphasis added):

As an IEA [International Energy Agency] member and signatory to the IEP Treaty, Australia is required to hold oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of the previous year’s average daily net oil imports. The Department is working to implement Australia’s compliance plan to address the current shortfall in oil stockholdings. The Department’s priorities for the IEA include working with the IEA to progress Australia’s plan to return to IEP treaty compliance.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/09/white-elephants-painted-green/

By any reasonable standard of environmental accounting, Snowy 2.0 is even more foolish than the prime minister whose brainstorm it was. Not only will it do nothing to lower electricity prices, the likelihood is that it will boost the emissions it is intended to reduce.

Canberra breeds many white elephants, but now they are breeding a gigantic new breed of pachyderm in the Snowy Mountains – a green elephant. Grandly named “Snowy 2.0 Hydro-Electric”, it is just another big white elephant under a thick layer of obligatory green paint.

Snowy 2.0 plans a hugely expensive complex of dams, tunnels, pumps, pipes, generators, roads and powerlines. Water will be pumped up-hill using grid power in times of low demand, and then released when needed to recover some of that energy. To call it “hydro-electric” is a fraud: it will not store one extra litre of water and will be a net consumer of electric power. It is a giant electric storage battery to be recharged using grid power.

This is just the latest episode in an expensive and impossible green dream to run Australian cities and industries, plus a growing electric vehicle fleet, on intermittent wind and solar energy and without coal, gas, oil or nuclear fuels. Surely we can learn from the unfolding disaster of a similar German grand plan.

The first stage of Australia’s green dream was to demonise coal and nuclear power, set onerous green energy and CO2 emissions targets, subsidise and mandate the use of intermittent energy from wind and solar, and give electric cars financial and other privileges. All of this costs Australian electricity users and taxpayers at least five billion dollars per year. This destructive force-feeding of solar and wind power is well advanced.

Solar energy peaks around mid-day, falls to zero from dusk to dawn and is much reduced by clouds, dust and smoke. Over a year it may produce about 16% of name-plate capacity. Thus a solar-battery system would need installed solar capacity of six times the demand. These solar “farms” are very land-hungry per unit of usable energy, often sterilising large areas of agricultural land.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/26/how-the-war-on-climate-change-slams-the-worlds-poor/

When a “solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today.

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The scientists used eight global-agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050. These models suggest, on average, that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger. But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into risk of hunger. The areas expected to be most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Trying to help 24 million people by imperiling 78 million people’s lives is a very poor policy.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/08/paris-longer-relevant/
With The Lodge flushed there is a possibility of post-Turnbullian sanity, with the first priority being to re-evaluate Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. As a nation, we are pauperising ourselves in a cause demonstrably false and easily discerned as such.

National energy policy is failing to satisfy what has been described as the trilemma of objectives: meeting national commitments for emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement; providing affordable energy; and ensuring continuity of supply.

There is potential flexibility for adopting different technologies to provide affordability and continuity of supply, but governments are tightly constrained by the need for national emissions reduction.

Australia is further constrained by policy shackles of its own making. Legislation is in place that rules out the most obvious technology readily satisfying the policy trilemma: nuclear generation. The reluctance to consider nuclear is baffling considering that seventy percent of France’s electricity generation is from nuclear and the global nuclear increase from 2016 to 2017 was a not inconsequential 65 terawatt hours. That is, nuclear provided more than 10 percent of the global increase in electricity generation, the equivalent of 10 new Hazelwoods.

Not surprising, the government’s favoured option of renewable energy, in the forms of wind and solar, is saddled with the burden of intermittency; there is no generation when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. In addition, expansion of the renewable base requires considerable reallocation of public funds from other infrastructure and social needs (schools, hospitals, transport, etc.).

As each day passes it becomes clearer that the federal government is finding the competing objectives of the policy trilemma impossible to resolve. The costs of overcoming intermittency and the subsidies to promote wind and solar expansion are driving electricity prices for consumers through the proverbial roof. In addition, major industries that underpin our national prosperity are threatening to close or relocate overseas.

It is time to re-evaluate our national commitment to the Paris Agreement and its requirement for emissions reduction. As a nation, are we pauperising ourselves in a cause that is now demonstrably false?

The basis of the Paris Agreement is the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming. Computer models of the climate system, which few scientists understand, are invoked to project global temperature rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increases. The most recent assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that global temperature is projected to rise between 1.5oC and 4.5oC for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/one-word-paris/

If Scott Morrison PM can’t see how carbonphobia is hurting Australia and wrecking the party he now leads, further voter desertions and electoral carnage are guaranteed. Yes, he’s preferable to his predecessor, but that’s not saying much — especially if current energy policy isn’t repudiated.

Well Malcolm Turnbull is gone, the blow to that monumental ego perhaps somewhat mitigated by the martyr’s canonisation being bestowed beneath the bylines of left-wing pundits who would never vote for him in a month of Sundays. He once famously vowed he wouldn’t “lead a party that’s not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am”. By ‘effective’ he meant, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, whatever he wanted the word to mean. To Australians dreading their next power bills, the word translates as ‘cold homes and economy-destroying imposts’. It took a while but the party eventually and narrowly took him at his word and forced him to make good on that threat/promise. Full disclosure: I wanted Dutton to be the outcome of this process, for all the reasons outlined at Quadrant Online late last week. But it was not to be. So let me indulge in what is, admittedly, the lament of someone who has come reluctantly to accept that half a loaf is indeed better than none.

The myth now being sown and copiously fertilised by the effusions of Turnbull’s ABC and Fairfax admirers is that he was a colossus torn down by a party that never wanted him in their midst. The more ardent keyboard-ticklers seem almost to be suggesting that the Liberal Party, unworthy of such a leader, had failed him The irony, revealed most tellingly by Graeme Richardson, is that he had to direct his upward gaze via the party of Menzies because Labor wouldn’t have a bar of him. Labor has inflicted gross damage on Australia at various times, but such an appraisal indicates they are not entirely lacking in wits. As for the commentariat’s current line, that is hardly a surprise. It was their paeans that helped to persuade the Liberal party room in 2015 that this leather-jacketed wonder of a man was their natural-born leader. That and their campaign of endless abuse of Tony Abbott, of course.