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The Expensive Folly Of ‘Renewable’ Energy

July 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Ray Evans & Tom Quirk have a comprehensive article on the folly and ruinous expense of so-called renewable energy in the current issue of Quadrant Magazine.

A few sample paragraphs:

The low-cost electricity we once enjoyed was obviously of great advantage to ordinary families, whose standard of living was thereby enhanced. But it was of greater importance to commercial and industrial consumers, who were able to offer goods and services at lower prices, and to employ more people. Cheap electricity is a major contributor to national prosperity and to economic diversity, and the increases in prices that have taken place, with more in the pipeline, will spread through the economy with continuing deleterious consequences. We will see the closure of industries which have relied on cheap electricity for their international competitiveness.

The mechanism through which electricity consumers pay greenmail to the owners of windmills and solar panels is the mandatory Renewable Energy Certificate, introduced by John Howard in his 2001 MRET legislation. As James Delingpole explained in the Australian on May 3, writing about the ghost town of Waterloo in South Australia (now depopulated by the impacts of the sub-audio frequency vibrations generated by the nearby wind farm), a 3-megawatt wind turbine, costing $6 million, will be lucky to generate electricity worth $150,000 in a year, but will receive $500,000 in RECs, paid for by the hapless electricity consumer.

The Commonwealth’s responsibility has been both direct—as in Howard’s MRET legislation of 2000 and Rudd’s legislation of 2010—and just as significantly indirect, as the continuing attack on coal, both under Howard12 and more recently under Rudd and Gillard, has made investment in new coal-fired power stations far too hazardous for private investors to contemplate. The MRET scheme, on its own, has led to so-called investments, mostly in South Australia but also in New South Wales, of at least $3 billion in wind farms. These wind farms are economically worthless13, in that their output is unpredictable and cannot be sold without government coercion. So the NEMMCO system operators who allocate output, on the basis of competitive bidding, to the generators for the next day, have to arrange for at least 90 per cent back-up for whatever wind-farm output is proposed by the owners. Because of the MRET legislation this output gazumps all other generators, as the coal and gas-fired generators have to purchase the RECs required by the Act.

Solar panels are much worse than wind-farms. They are at least four to five times as costly as coal-fired power. They only operate when the sun shines. They are a mechanism for transferring large sums of money from poor families to rich families, who not only receive hugely inflated sums for electricity they feed into the grid, but who advertise their green piety with large solar installations on their roofs. These solar installations are rarely seen on modest homes; they are the green equivalent of the Mercedes in the driveway.

Now the Gillard government’s tax on energy production has come into effect, the impact of this madness will be multiplied. Every aspect of the Australian economy will be less competitive; primary industry, manufacturing, retailing and service industries.

This graphic from Andrew Bolt’s blog shows a doubling in the wholesale price of electricity in the two days since the carbon tax began:

Carbon Tax – Change in Wholesale Electricity Price

Does anyone really think a couple of hundred dollars in bribes is going to compensate for this? If you wanted to undermine an entire economy, you could hardly come up with a better plan.

This is economic terrorism, and Labor and the Greens are the suicide bombers.

So Scary It’s Profitable

June 27, 2011 / / 1 Comment

A couple of excerpts from Matt Ridley, writing in The Australian:

No matter how many scares are proved wrong, the next set of dispatches of doom are treated with the same reverential respect.

Remember what the media said about the Y2K computer bug? “This is not a prediction, it is a certainty: there will be serious disruption in the world’s financial services industry . . . It’s going to be ugly” (The Sunday Times); “10 per cent of the nation’s top executives are stockpiling canned goods, buying generators and even purchasing handguns” (New York Times); “Army Fears Civil Chaos From Millennium Bug: Armed Forces Gearing Up To Deal With Civil Chaos” (Canada’s Globe and Mail). In the event nothing happened, but the media were soon saying the same thing about the next scare.

There’s a broad constituency for pessimism. No pressure group ever got donations by telling its donors calamity was unlikely; no reporter ever got his editor’s attention by saying that a scare was overblown; and no politician ever got on television by downplaying doom. …

Governments all round the world are interfering with markets to try to bring about this environmental revolution. One of the policies they have adopted has taken 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop and turned it into biofuel to power motor vehicles. This has driven up food prices, increased malnutrition and encouraged the destruction of rain forest, while enriching farmers.

Yet, given that the planting and harvesting of biofuels use about as much oil as the fuels they displace, it has had precisely zero effect on carbon emissions. Nonetheless, it is considered a green, progressive policy.

Another policy is to bribe rich landowners to festoon the most picturesque landscapes with concrete pads on which are placed gargantuan steel towers topped with wind turbines containing two-tonne magnets made of an alloy of neodymium, a rare earth metal mined in inner Mongolia by a process of boiling in acid that produces poisoned lakes filled with mildly radioactive and toxic tailings.

The cost of this policy is borne by ordinary electricity users and their would-be employers. So far, the wind industry’s contribution to cutting carbon emissions is precisely zero, because it provides less than 0.5 per cent of world energy use and even that has to be offset by keeping fossil fuel plants running for when the wind does not blow.

Oh, and wind turbines have killed so many white-tailed eagles in Norway, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania and golden eagles in California that local populations of the species are in increased danger of extinction. And this is a green, “clean”, progressive policy?

Writing in the American Thinker a year ago, Andrew Walden made similar points about the astonishing waste associated with government subsidies to wind farms – they are vastly expensive to build and maintain, they kill wildlife, they save no carbon emissions or fuel.

The same applies to large scale solar power installations.

But still Western governments are intent on spending our money on these utterly uneconomic, wasteful, and non-renewable ‘renewable’ energy plans.

We continue to face a major economic crisis, exacerbated by idiotic ‘stimulus’ spending which sucked up money from sectors which produce and employ.

At the same time, the Australian Federal government is determined to introduce a carbon tax which, even if the worst climate alarmist theories are true, will make no difference to the world’s climate.

What it will do as a certainty, is increase the cost of transport and energy, the cost of living for every person in Australia, and reduce our productivity and the competitiveness of the agricultural and mining exports on which our economy depends.

Somebody is making money out of these scares. But it isn’t me. Or any other ordinary Australian.

Andrew Turnbull on Climate Policy

June 6, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Lord Turnbull was Permanent Secretary of the UK Department for the Environment from 1994 to 1998, and Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service 2002-05.

He has written a twenty page briefing paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is called The Really Inconvenient Truth Or “It ain’t necessarily so.” You can download the report in PDF format here.

Lord Turnbull discusses the claims of the IPCC specifically from the point of view of providing a basis for government policy.

He notes that there is general agreement that the world has gotten warmer by about 0.8 degress Celsius over the last 150 years. There is general agreement that there is a ‘greenhouse effect’ and that CO2 contributes to it.

(Not every scientist agrees that this is so. Alan Siddons, for example, claims there is no evidence of any real world greenhouse effect at all, and that it is not even theoretically possible.)

But back to Turnbull. He goes on to point that the alarm over climate change is based on the untested and increasingly unlikely looking assumption that a harmless and possibly beneficial 1 degree increase in global temperature caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would be amplified to between 3 and 6 degrees by various other ‘positive feedbacks,’ mainly a dramatically increased greenhouse effect caused by higher levels of water vapour.

Now in his own words:

The Really Inconvenient Truth is that the propositions of the IPCC do not bear the weight of certainty with which they are expressed. However, the purpose of the paper is not to argue that there is another truth which should become the new consensus, but to point out the doubts that exist about the IPCC viewpoint and serious flaws in its procedures. It is also to question why the UK Government has placed such heavy bets on one particular source of advice.

Even if the IPCC scenarios were correct, the impacts are frequently selective and exaggerated. The economic policy choices being made will not minimize the cost of mitigation. The paper concludes with a call for more humility from scientists, more rational reflection from politicians, and more challenge from our parliamentarians.

There it is: The economic policy choices being made will not minimize the cost of mitigation.

Climate change is inevitable, and difficult to predict.

Responsible government would act so as to minimise the negative effects of climate change.

But the Gillard Labor government is acting in exactly the opposite way. Its policies are designed to slow development and economic growth.

A ‘carbon tax’ is meant to hurt. It is meant to force us (the poorer of us, anyway) to reduce the amount we travel, to reduce our levels of consumption.

This means less tax income for government, less expenditure on infrastructure, less money for companies to put into research and development.

In other words, current policy directions will not enhance, but rather severely reduce our ability to mitigate the effects of future climate change whether warmer or, more likely and more damagingly, colder.

Blanchett to Australia – ‘Listen Up, Peasants’

May 29, 2011 / / 2 Comments

The Australian Greens have accused polluters of an “ugly attack” on Hollywood star Cate Blanchett, who has come out in a new television advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax.

Yes, but if CO2 is a pollutant, then everyone still breathing is a polluter, right?

A tax on CO2 will have a serious effect on the ability of average householders to pay for fuel, electricity and ordinary household items. The whole point of a CO2 tax is to make it impossible for ordinary people to go on using the resources they use now. In other words, the point is to make people poorer.

But Cate’s response to these concerns is not just ‘Let them eat cake,’ but ‘No problem, let a few starve or freeze. Can someone bring me my second cappuchino. And where is the limo to take me to my private jet?’

And for heaven’s sake, why can’t the people who want a tax talk clearly about what it is they want?

They don’t want a ‘carbon tax.’ They want a tax on human production of CO2. Calling CO2 ‘carbon pollution’ makes as much sense as calling water ‘oxygen pollution.’

When Cate Blanchett lives in a two bedroom cottage like I do, uses only rain water like I do, car pools like I do, uses less than 6000 kWh of electricity per year as I do, then I will listen to what she has to say on the subject of reducing our resource usage.

Until then, she can keep her preaching to herself.

Axe the Tax

March 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The Prime Minister is scheduled to speak at Adelaide University tomorrow on ‘Governing for Reform: Values in Practice.’

Short talk, then.

Late notice, but a good opportunity. Copied from menzieshouse.com.au:

We have just received word that Julia Gillard will be speaking at Adelaide University tomorrow evening!

We are sorry for the late notice, but this is a great opportunity for us to send a clear message that Australians oppose this destructive and unnecessary tax, and some of our friends have quickly put together a rally to show her what Australians really think!  

Axe The Carbon Tax has arranged a last minute protest, and have asked us to pass on the following message: 

Julia Gillard will be speaking at Adelaide University tomorrow evening (7pm, Wednesday, 16 March 2011).
 
Sickeningly, she is addressing the Don Dunstan Foundation on the topic “Governing for Reform:  Values in Practice”. One wonders what values she was demonstrating when she broke her promise and announced a carbon tax!
 
RALLY AGAINST THE CARBON TAX
6.00 – 7.30pm
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Adelaide University, North Terrace (outside Bonython Hall)
 
Please note the following:
 
This is a peaceful and silent rally. There will be a large police and security presence, not to mention another, completely separate rally on the issue of same-sex marriage. Those attending the rally against the carbon tax are expected to refrain from argument with those attending the Gillard function, the other rally, passers-by, etc.
 
Rally attendees are to obey any and all instructions given by security or police.
 
Sensible carbon tax-related posters are welcome. However, we have been advised that any poster affixed to a stick or pole will be confiscated and could see us removed. Sticks, poles and the like are considered potential weapons. Do not bring them. 
 
Above all else, remember that our rally is intended to demonstrate to Julia Gillard, the media (who will likely be present) and anyone passing by, that we are grassroots members of the community, peacefully presenting a legitimate grievance by our silent presence.
 
I hope to see you tomorrow night at 6pm. Together, we can defeat the carbon tax.
 
Yours sincerely,
 
Damian Wyld
8363 5044
info@axethecarbontax.org

Obviously, most of you will not be able to attend this rally, as it is in the evening and at rather late notice, however, thought we should still pass the message on. Please contact rally organiser Damian if you have any further questions, or visit AxeTheCarbonTax.org.

We hope to see you, if not at this rally, then at the main Adelaide anti-carbon-tax rally on the 23rd.

Together, we WILL win this battle! While our opponents are flushed with millions of dollars in union funds, and Julia Gillard has already laid plans to use a staggering 30 million dollars in taxpayer funds to produce propaganda, we have truth and the Australian people on our side and WE SHALL PREVAIL!

Sideshow Bob

March 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Tim Wilson has a delightful piece at The Punch, cross-posted at the IPA, which explores a day in the life of Carbon Bob.

Bob’s a model citizen and busy man trying to save the world from the hundreds of big bad carbon polluters required by law to report their environmental vandalism to the government.

Tim’s article shows just how much of our ordinary daily life depends on the productivity of the ‘carbon polluters,’ how much of our economy would be undermined by a carbon tax, and the sheer hypocrisy of those who campaign for carbon reduction while swanning around the world in business class chewing nuts and drinking pinot noir.

Then What’s The Point?

March 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

As I noted a few days ago, the only way a carbon price can have any affect on CO2 output is by reducing the use of fossil fuels.

It does this by making the use of those fuels more expensive. This increases the cost of electricity, of water (especially if that water come from a desalination plant), of manufacturing and mining, production of agricultural goods, transport and travel. A carbon tax increases the cost of everything, because everything in our economy depends on fossil fuels.

When the cost of production goes up, the price of the items produced goes up. People buy less, production goes down.

This is what the Prime Minister said would happen:

“It has price impacts. It’s meant to, that’s the whole point,” Ms Gillard said. “If you put a price on something, then people will use less of it.”

But now Simon Crean says money taken from CO2 emitting companies (ie, any company that produces anything) will be fed back into the economy in the form of compensation to consumers:

“The cost to the families will be compensated,” Mr Crean told ABC radio this morning.

“We have made that clear. We will ensure that the compensation is totally adequate. We will return all of the monies raised to people through the tax mechanism.”

So there won’t be price impacts, so people won’t be using less of anything, so there will be no reduction in CO2 output.

So what is the point? What is the Gillard government trying to achieve?

Ms Gillard also warned that Australia would miss out on new green jobs and be left behind the rest of the world if it did not create a “low carbon economy”.

But a paper released a few days ago by Verso Research confirms what other studies have shown – that every ‘green’ job created costs four jobs somewhere else.

The Verso study finds that after the annual diversion of some 330 million British pounds from the rest of the U.K. economy, the result has been the destruction of 3.7 jobs for every “green” job created.

The study concludes that the “policy to promote renewable energy in the U.K. has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200 jobs in Scotland.” So British taxpayers, as is the case here in the U.S., are being forced to subsidize a net loss of jobs in a struggling economy.

This is the grand plan: a huge bureaucracy to manage a tax to reduce carbon output that won’t reduce carbon output, and a green job scheme that will cause higher unemployment.

Pricing Carbon

March 5, 2011 / / 1 Comment

I noted last August that people seemed to be confused about how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere. Some people thought that CO2 made up half of all the gasses in the atmosphere.

One of Jo Nova’s readers recently asked 100 people questions about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and came up with similar results.

The actual amount is about 380 parts per million. Or 0.038%. Or not quite four one hundredths of one percent.

Human contribution to this total is about 3%. No one knows for certain because there is no way of telling human produced CO2 from natural CO2.

In the past there have been much larger natural variations in CO2 levels without any human input.

For example, when many modern green plants developed in the Cretaceous period, CO2 was aprroximately three times its current level. Coral reefs evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels stayed above 1,000 parts per million for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 parts per million for several million years, compared with 380 ppm now. Any influence of human activity is minor compared with past natural changes.

But we know that human use of fossil fuels does contribute something to current CO2 levels. Calculations (necessarily very approximate) of the amount of CO2 produced by all human activity as a proportion of what we think we know at the moment of the normal natural carbon cycle, gives a figure of about 3%.

So the influence of human CO2 production on atmospheric gasses is about 0.038 x 3% = 0.00114%

Australia’s share of human produced CO2 is 1.5%.

So Australia’s share of the impact of human CO2 production on atmospheric gasses is 0.038 x 3% x 1.5% =  0.0000171%

The Greens/Gillard plan to tax CO2 is intended to increase prices and reduce production so that CO2 output is reduced by 5%.

So the anticipated change to atmospheric gas composition if this plan is successful is 0.038% x 3% x 1.5% x 5%, or 0.000000855%

Australia’s Carbon Tax will change atmospheric gas composition by less than one molecule in 100 million.

Even on the most exuberant alarmist guesses about the impact of CO2 on climate change, the impact of Australia’s Carbon Tax on climate change will be zero. Nothing.

Just to be clear, the only way a CO2 tax can reduce CO2 output is by making corporations and people change their behaviour. It does this by increasing the cost of energy so that energy usage is reduced.

Increasing the cost of energy means more expensive production and therefore reduced production. It means travel and transport are more expensive. This means everything from food to electricity to sleeping bags to tractors, will cost more.

The cost to selected major corporations is already estimated to be over $10 billion. These costs will be passed on to ordinary Australians in the form of price increases. When other companies and costs are factored in, it is likely that the total cost of the Carbon Tax will be well over $25 billion per year.

This is about $1,250 for every Australian. Or $5,000 for every household. To achieve nothing.

Again, $100 per week cost to the average household, to achieve nothing.

Human CO2 production is growing at approximately 3% per year. Australia’s CO2 output is 1.5% of the total. Even if Australia instantly stopped all CO2 output – that is, if we stopped producing anything, driving anywhere, turned off every appliance and all the lights and stopped breathing – the world would have caught up in just six months time.

An Australian Carbon Tax will have no impact on climate whatever.

The only possible reality based argument for the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia is that of leadership. For this argument to hold water, you have to believe the following things:

  • The world is getting warmer at an alarming rate.
  • This warming is caused by human activity, specifically human production of CO2.
  • Reducing CO2 output to pre-industrial levels will stop the warming.
  • Less costly mitigation or preparation for climate changes will not work. The warming must be stopped.
  • Failure to act will be disastrous.
  • If Australia takes the first step, even if it substantially reduces our standard of living, other nations will follow.
  • When the whole world acts, the world will be saved.

If even one of those points is refuted, the whole argument fails.

Julia Gillard Makes No Sense

November 18, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Julia Gillard is not stupid.

But as Forrest Gump said, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’

And there could hardly be anything more stupid than putting a punitive tax on the resource – cheap carbon fuels – that has underpinned the fastest ever growth in development and standards of living around the world, including health and education, and without which there would be no modern industry, no fast, economical transport, no large scale agriculture providing cheap food, etc, etc.

There is simply no reason for such a tax. The world is not running out of oil or coal.

So this claim by Ms Gillard is nonsense:

‘The alternative is very stark, if we continue to do nothing we will pay a heavy cost – electricity prices will spiral up. Our power supplies will begin to run short.’

No, our power supplies are not going to run short and cause spiralling prices.

But putting unnecessary taxes on energy resources will push prices up, causing industry to move offshore, and impacting especially harshly on poorer families.

So why do it?

Because human activity is causing the world to warm catastrophically?

If that’s the real reason, Julia, just say so. If you can prove it, I’ll back you 100%

But before you impose even more taxes on Australian businesses and families, I suggest you do some reading:

How Not to Measure Changes in Temperature

Know What You’re Voting For

August 20, 2010 / / 1 Comment

A few people I have spoken to over the last couple of weeks, people who are otherwise intelligent as far as I can tell, have told me they intend to vote for the Greens in the Senate.

When asked why, they usually respond by saying they think the Greens will do a better job of protecting the environment.

So I ask if they can tell me about any specific Greens policies.

‘No. Well, they’re in favour of the environment.’

‘OK. How do their specific policies differ from those of the Labor or Liberal parties?’

No answer.

The Greens win votes by making sure people don’t know about their policies. There’s just a general fluffy, let’s be nice to green things and furry things feel about them.

But there is nothing green or pleasantly furry about the Greens.

Just consider two Greens policies, one which will impact on everyone, and one which will impact on a few in real need.

First, the Greens have made it clear that if Labor depends on them, even occasionally, to get legislation through the Senate, the price of their co-operation will be a carbon tax.

A Carbon tax will have no positive effect on the environment.

Human activity has had a miniscule impact on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere – from about 3 particles per 10,000 to about 4 particles per 10,000.  And that is assuming we are to blame for all of that small increase over the last 100 years. But we don’t know. It really is just an assumption. CO2 levels change all the time. They have been much higher in the past, and sometimes lower.

Higher is good. During the Carboniferous period, when most modern trees evolved, temperatures were about the same as they are now. CO2 levels were three times higher than now. At current levels, trees and other green things are Carbon deprived. For plants, surviving at current levels of CO2 is like our surviving on Oxygen depleted air. Less CO2 means less green, not more.

More CO2 means better crops, and more resilience in forests and wetlands.

So a carbon tax is bad for the environment. It is also bad for industry, because it is a tax on energy, which means it is a tax on transport, manufacture, travel, power generation, etc, etc, etc.

Everything will be more expensive, for no point whatever.

This is what voting for the Greens means.

A second Greens policy is the closure of the Lucas Heights reactor.

I have mentioned this to a few people, and the response is always something like: ‘Well that’s OK. Good. We don’t need any nuclear reactors in Australia anyway.’ 

Actually we do. They are a cheap, clean, sustainable form of energy production that will reduce our dependence on coal and imported fuels. But that is not the immediate point.

The Lucas Heights reactor produces the isotopes required for nuclear medicine. Radiotherapy. Diagnosing and treating cancer.

1.5 million doses of nuclear medicine (radiotherapy) are administered in Australia every year.

If the Greens have their way on this, cancer patients in Australia will die because a basic modern form of treatment will not be available to them.

Know what you are voting for.

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