Down Under, Mindless Fantasies of Net-Zero

We have a government scheme in Australia which I’ve mentioned before. Its objective is to ensure the lights don’t go out during the chimeric transition to a bountiful job-rich renewable-energy future. It’s called the capacity mechanism. I suspect most western jurisdictions have one, in one form or another. In Australia it came under the purview of the Energy Security Board. Alas, the ESB is effectively no more; it’s been absorbed by the ever-expanding renewal-energy hegemony (akin to The Blob); namely, in this instance, by the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Market Operator. We got a million of 'em.

The ESB made the mistake of proposing the use of gas and coal to “firm” the supply of electricity during the transitional period and was duly given a damn good thrashing for its trouble. So now the plan, so far as I can work out, is to firm unreliable renewables with unreliable renewables, plus a few batteries thrown into the mix. Don’t dare say it won’t work. They visualize therefore they actualize.

The transition itself, which I’ll come to, via a different government scheme, this time mysteriously called the safeguard mechanism, is still no more than a gleam in the eyes of renewable-energy aficionados. To illustrate: the latest official figures, for the year 2020-21, show that coal, oil, and gas accounted for 92 percent of Australia’s energy consumption. Energy badged as "renewables" accounted for only 8 percent; and of that wind and solar was only 45 percent, or 3.6 percent of the overall total. That’s where we’re at after three decades and more of huffing and puffing and spending billions of dollars on subsidies and tax breaks. And yet, mindless fantasies of net-zero persist unabated among the zealots who populate governments and the plethora of assorted climate-change bodies.

Walter Mitty, stand aside.

Surely the world is doing better than Australia in saving the planet? I consulted the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, to find that 92.6 percent of energy consumption came from coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and hydro in North America in 2021, and 93.3 percent in the world as a whole. Of the rest, including biomass and ethanol, wind, and sun form only a fraction. Consolingly, Australia is not letting the side down.

But we must do better, so says Chris Bowen, "climate change" minister in the federal government. Bowen is on the job, single-mindedly; or, more aptly, simple-mindedly. Hence the so-called safeguard mechanism; named, I can only assume, to keep the planet safe from the one percent of world emissions being spewed out recklessly by Australian industry.

To give effect to the mechanism, legislation is afoot to make the 215 largest emitters of CO2 reduce their emissions by 4.9 percent per year from July this year until (end) 2030. Why 4.9 percent? Well, compounded, it comes to 43 percent after seven and a half years, in line with the government's goal of reducing emissions overall by 43 percent. Is that scientific enough for ya? Those who better this hurdle will be allowed to sell carbon credits to their recalcitrant fellows, who will also be allowed to buy carbon credits (domestic and some selected foreign credits) on the open market to assuage their polluting excesses.

The Greens (Party) don’t like the scheme. Giving miners the option of paying to pollute doesn’t row their boat. But, transactional to their bootheels, they’ve offered their votes in the Senate—required if the legislation is to pass—with the proviso that all new coal and gas projects are prohibited by law. I am not sure why they’re bothering to seek de jure prohibition when, de facto, the job is pretty well done. A combination of state government bans, onerous federal and state environmental hurdles, green and indigenous lawfare are already preventing any new projects from going ahead. It can only get worse as Australia’s judiciary inevitably becomes still Woker. Capital will flee.

Take a recent court case in which Australia’s largest gas producer, Santos, lost its ability to restart drilling at a multi-billion-dollar gas project off the Tiwi Islands, 265 kilometres northwest of Darwin. Santos thought it had jumped every environmental hurdle, consulted every indigenous group with a legitimate interest. It missed someone. Tiwi Islander Dennis Tipakalippa launched legal action, claiming successfully that he was not consulted over the company's plans and should have been. Apparently, his rights had been trampled on.

Rights to the sea country [in question] were based upon longstanding spiritual connections as well as traditional hunting and gathering activities in which they and their ancestors have engaged.

Spiritual connections you see. And how could Mr Tipakalippa afford to take legal action to protect his spiritual connections? Look no further than the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO); a bunch of lawyers on a well-financed mission to stymie fossil-fuel developments. If you look hard enough, and the green-left are indefatigable in their oversight, there is not one patch of Australian land for which an indigenous person can’t be found to have a spiritual connection. It’s game over, short of a sufficiently faltering grid bringing about a return to sanity. Cling on to that last best chance.

Clingers of the world, unite!

Back to the safeguard mechanism. It covers only 28 percent of Australia’s emissions. It will have a marginal effect, if any measurable effect at all. It will impose further costs and regulatory burdens on many of the businesses and industries which underpin Australia’s prosperity, and thereby lessen their international competitiveness. As to that, the government has engaged in silly speculative talk about placing tariffs on imported products which compete with products hit by the safeguard mechanism, which have not been similarly hobbled in their home country. The mind boggles as complication is heaped on complication is heaped on cluelessness. And all for very little to nought.

Be done with it. Close Australia down. Save the world. Shucks, forgot. China emits more greenhouse gases in 16 days than Australia does in a year. Never mind. As the late and great Leonard Cohen might have put it on behalf of alarmists: First we take Sydney, then we take Shanghai.

Animal, Vegetable, or Whatever

With the Climate Cult demanding we stop eating grazing animals, transitioning ourselves to fake meat (and bugs) instead of real beef, in the name of preventing the climate from getting a degree or three warmer, causing us all to die in a few years, let’s discuss tradeoffs between digesting animal protein and vegetable matter.

Those who have spent much time around horses and cows know that they almost never stop eating if grass is within reach. A horse walking across a meadow will reach out to bite off a mouthful of grass if the rider allows it. Cows will grab mouthfuls of grass and go lie down in the shade under a tree to chew their cud, moving it from one stomach to another for hours.  Until they get up and wander off to fill their bellies again with more grass.

Grazing animals eat so much grass because vegetable matter has very little protein. Protein is what makes mammal muscle. It’s why Genghis Khan hunted and herded ruminants along his travels, and why his men defeated the local vegetarians wherever they went; they never lacked for milk or meat – animal protein – that made them stronger and gave them more endurance than those lacking in animal protein. In pre-mechanical combat, individual strength was all.

Does he look like a vegan to you?

It surprises, in the 21st Century, particularly among the Greens demanding solar power, that so many remain unaware that ruminants are solar energy storage systems. Solar power causes plant matter to grow; as plants grow, they turn that solar energy into matter. Grazers eat that solar energy converted to and stored as plant matter, processing it into muscle they then store and use to move around to live, work for us, make more ruminants, and to fertilize the ground wherever they go, nurturing more grass which, powered by sunlight, grows tall, storing more solar energy for another ruminant to store and make use of.

Humans consume this stored solar energy when eating beef, venison, rabbit, etc., allowing us to move, think, live, create. Animal manure and composted animal carcasses provide fertile soil to begin the cycle again as the sun enables new vegetable matter to grow and store yet more solar energy. In essence, animals we raise for food are organic solar batteries storing energy from the sun that we eventually use to grow, to live our lives, invent, explore, create, and procreate.

Grazing animals have digestion systems evolved and specialized to digest plant matter and turn it into useful protein. Humans, as omnivores, have different digestive systems, systems less-specialized for digesting plants. We process plant matter less efficiently than do ruminants simply because we also digest and process animal protein. The more specialized a digestive system, the more efficiently the plant matter consumed as food – stored solar energy – is turned into useful muscle, bone, skin, organs, etc. The less specialized, the less efficient.

Eating vegetable matter has certain physiological consequences. Again, if you’ve been around horses or cows, or read all the “bad” things about bovine burps and farts, you know that processing vegetable matter produces methane. If, for health reasons, you have altered your diet to consume more vegetables and fruits, you understand these consequences. If you’ve spent much indoor-time with vegetarians or their more aromatic cousins, vegans, none of this is news. We are not evolved to consume only plants.

Hilarious, right?

Scientists are working on altering feed to cause cows to create less methane, which is a good thing. But that’s a long process just beginning, and runs counter to the globalists demanding we eat fake, plant-based meat, or no meat at all to stop cows from destroying our world. But is our switching to vegetable matter really changing anything for the better?

Americans consume about 70 percent of their approximately 2,500 calories per day from plant matter, and 30 percent from animal matter. If we transitioned from 70 percent to 100 percent plant matter, an increase of 43 percent, it is logical to assume our methane output also would increase by 43 percent. Moving to a plant-based/fake meat diet would increase the human-expelled methane output of the United States from 332,000,000, to over 480,000,000 liters per day.

Removing the beef industry in America also would mean putting over a million Americans out of jobs and altering our health in unknown ways of unknown magnitude as we all stop digesting the food our digestive systems have evolved to digest, switching to digestive requirements for which we have not evolved.

Mr. Olympia he ain't.

Activities involving strength and endurance – from sports to military service to jogging or walking to stay fit – would decrease, further reducing the health of Americans, as well as our entertainment opportunities and ability to defend ourselves or our allies. To say nothing of the impact on industries as diverse as shoes, coats, and car seats, industries consuming leather and producing leather goods.

Does the road to reducing methane really run through rejection of animal protein?

Germany Comes to Grips with Reality

Germany has long been a bugbear of ours at The Pipeline, because it has spent more than a decade pursuing the most utopian approach to the environment in the developed world. Dubbed die Energiewende (meaning "the energy transition/turning point"), this series of policies and regulations has been ordered toward getting that nation of 83 million people off of all traditional energy sources (oil, natural gas, even nuclear), and completely replacing them with so-called "renewables," and in a much shorter time span than any other similarly disposed country.

That being the case, you will imagine our surprise at seeing reports of the surprisingly hard line that Germany's ruling coalition government — which includes that nation's Green Party — has begun taking against environmentalist protestors. The center of this crackdown has been the tiny, uninhabited hamlet of Lützerath in western Germany, whose handful of structures had been scheduled to be demolished as a nearby coal mine expanded into the area. Unfortunately for all involved, before this plan could be executed Lützerath became a cause célèbre for environmental activists from Deutschland and beyond. A few thousand of them (though the exact numbers are disputed) occupied the area, refusing to leave for well over a year. According to a particularly melodramatic report in the New York Times,

The activists... prepared themselves to defend the half dozen houses and farmyards with their bodies. They barricaded themselves in a complex of barns and other structures. They erected and occupied tall watchtowers. They carved out a tunnel network. They nested in the branches of 100-year-old trees.

As you can imagine, the increasing media attention eventually attracted everyone's favorite environmentalist publicity hound:

(Thunberg was eventually arrested, though the arrest appears to have been staged for propaganda purposes.)

Eventually the authorities had enough and decided to move in. Here is more from the NY Times:

The fight for Lützerath was long, but the end, when it finally came, was quick. In a matter of days this past week, more than 1,000 police officers cleared out the hundreds of climate activists who had sworn to protect the small village, once home to 90 people but no church, which was scheduled to be razed as part of a sprawling open-pit coal mine in western Germany.... For years, environmental activists had hoped to forestall the fate of Lützerath — possibly the last of hundreds of villages in Germany to fall to open-pit mining since World War II. For a while, it seemed that the activists would succeed.

That report's lyrical tone, which makes it sound like they're describing the Fall of Berlin, is ridiculous, although typical of the Times' overwrought, dishonest ideological bent. But the above also serves to downplay the clashes between activists and the police, which became intense at times, judging by footage on the ground:

(The headline above reads: "Attack on the police. The so-called 'friendly' protest in Lützerath.")

These are shocking images, especially since just a short time ago the combatants in this conflict were natural allies. For years now the German government has been working on behalf of these activists to create artificial energy scarcity, with the expectation that wind and solar would step in and fill the void. That had the unintended (though foreseeable) consequence of increasing the country's addiction to Russian natural gas. When the war in Ukraine (and the still-unexplained sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines) forced them to go another direction, they had no choice but to lean on domestically produced (and carbon intensive) coal. Even the Green Party can see that they can't afford to give that up now.

Which is to say, they've been forced to accept the fact that they've painted themselves into a corner and now they're stuck. Perhaps this will teach them a lesson about the dangers of utopian thinking. But chances are, once the war ends and energy markets stabilize a bit they'll get right back to driving the country into the ground. And, as history shows, utopian thinking is what Germans do best, and most dangerously.

Crazy Energy Ideas? Oz Is the Place

By way of prelude to an even crazier scheme, there’s a crazy scheme inland from Port Hedland in the north of Western Australia. It’s called the Asian Renewable Energy Hub. Leave reality behind. Imagine wind turbines and solar panels covering 6,500 square kms. A desalination plant to produce vast quantities of pure water. Industrial scale electrolysers, supplemented with plants to turn hydrogen into ammonia for safer shipping. And, voila! Magically, affordable green power delivered to foreign shores. And pigs might fly.

The project has metamorphosed since its beginning. It’s got bigger and quite different. It started as 5 gigawatt (GW) project designed to deliver wind and solar power by undersea cable to Indonesia. Now it’s a 26 GW project designed to produce ammonia from green hydrogen for export. It’s gone from the untenable to the unbelievable, you might say. Can’t wait for the next iteration. There will be one. Probably insolvency. Because dreaming things up doesn’t make them so.

Wherever you look now in Western countries there are mind-blowing projects on drawing boards. Utopian plans to green the world, to become world leaders, to save the planet; all creating jobs galore. Governments have their messy fingers in them all, with taxpayer money in their saddlebags to reward corporate high-flyers and billionaires whose delusions of green grandeur would in past times have had them institutionalised. These days they don’t stand out. All of the great and good have been captured by the climate cult. Apropos the Cheshire Cat’s observation, “we’re all mad here.”

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”

I’d like to feel I’m exaggerating for effect. Sadly, I don’t think so. Which brings me to a second scheme; the even crazier one, to which I referred above. This one is called the Australia-Asia Power Link project from the onomatopoeically-named Sun Cable Company. This indeed is an awe-inspiring visionary scheme, far more ethereal than anything before it; in fact, beyond anything yet dreamt up in the whole wide world. Truly, we Australians are now leading the way down the rabbit hole to our own Wonderland. Hold onto your hats.

What we have here is a project to supply solar-powered electricity to Singapore; apparently, 15 percent of Singapore’s needs 24x7 and, presumably, at a competitive price. I assure you I am not about to make anything up. Have a look at the company’s site, if, understandably, you don’t believe me.

The project, on paper, is situated deep in the Outback in the Northern Territory, about 200 kms north of Tennant Creek (pop. ≈3000) and 800 kms south of Darwin. Envisaged, surely only possible in fevered minds, is the biggest solar array in the world covering 12,000 hectares, generating 3.2 GW of electricity. The biggest battery in the world by far (in Darwin) storing between 36 and 42 GWh of power. The longest continuous submarine cable in the world by far, measuring 4,200 kms which, in turn, joins the 800 km cable between the project site and Darwin. It’s described as a A$30+ billion project. A joke. Multiply that by 10, I’d say, and still run out of money with no completion in sight. Imagine you’re in an Australian pub explaining it. “Pull the other one, mate.” It simply wouldn’t pass the pub test.

Take the battery. The biggest one I could find in the world was the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California; claiming to store 1.6 GWh. The Sun Cable battery is about 25 times the size. And it needs to be. Sunshine in Tennant Creek averages about 11 hours a day. That’s a lot. New York averages less than 7 hours. Still, 11 hours leaves 13 hours to fill. Do the sums. Power required 3.2 GW for 13 hours equals 42 GWh. Phew! Just made it. Mind you, the minimum monthly daily sunshine in Tennant Creek is less than 10 hours. Oops! Need a bigger battery.

Take the cable. According to the European Subsea Cables Association:

The NorNed cable between Norway and the Netherlands [at 580km] is the longest submarine power cable in the world… with a capacity of 700MW. However, the very latest cable technology has the potential capability of reaching up to 1,500km.

So they say. What do they know? They ain’t seen nothing yet. Sun Cable is going to build a cable carrying 3.2 GW across the bottom of 4,200 km of deep sea; and they’ve worked out how to lay it and repair it too. Yep!

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Unsurprisingly, Sun Cable was placed in voluntary administration on January 11. The CEO and founder is still pleading its case. The Northern Territory government remains jejunely optimistic. And the Commonwealth government in the guise of Chris Bowen, federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, remains upbeat; seeming to think it’s just a matter of “corporate restructuring.” Really? Dumb thy name is climate-change government ministers.

Reportedly, the principal backers, mining billionaire Andrew (Twiggy) Forest of Fortescue Metals and tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes of software company Atlassian, fell out; having different views on funding, among other things. Funding, an issue? I wonder why. Surely investment banks would be lining up to pour billions into this moolah-sucking chimera.

To sum up. A pie-in-the-sky-project has bit the dust. Don’t think for a moment that anything will be learnt. Not in this generation. I saw some press speculation that Twiggy might buy it out and convert it to making (hypothetical) green hydrogen, of which he is especially fond. Maybe. That’s pie-in-the-sky too but at least it avoids the need to smash world records on laying submarine cable and installing humongous batteries. Methinks, in desperation, where and when will this madness ever end?

'Conservation' Programs No Substitute for More Energy  

It astonishes me that the basics of human nature and the law of supply and demand seem to have escaped the ken of the West’s big thinkers—the politicians, think tanks, private do-good operators and media, but every now and then someone has to point these things out to them. 

 When it comes to energy conservation—the hat trick the left pulls to avoid facing the inability of renewable sources of energy to meet demonstrated and projected needs—every new brainstorm gets glowing endorsements in the press. When the stated objectives fail we rarely hear much of them. (It’s of a piece with the media magnifying the damage to the environment while ignoring for the most part the chopping of wild birds by windmills and the frying of them by solar fields, or the human and environmental tolls of lithium mining. ) 

Sudden death in the skies, to save the planet.

I remember in 2006 arguing that a government plan to have utility companies retrofit for free homes in order to make them more energy efficient would not result in substantial reductions in electric demand or free up energy for other users. The point to me seemed obvious. When the cost of home heating is high, people would be more conscious of turning off lights and appliances when not in use. But if—as this plan provided in effect—homeowners would not after retrofitting pay more for increased energy use, they might prefer a cozier, warmer house or a brighter one or even add on a lovely heated porch.

Such views were of course cast aside by the big thinkers and here and abroad, and governments got involved in subsidizing retrofitting for conservation. President Obama launched home energy retrofit programs (the Home Energy score pilot program in 2010) to assess homes and offer cost-effective recommendations and low-cost loans up to $25,000 would be made available for “energy-saving improvements.” 

In 2016 the domestic home energy conservation program became even more ambitious when the administration announced a Clean Energy Savings for All Americans program. The largest part of the program was the installation of solar and wind “to create a more inclusive workforce,” the latter, of course, padding the treasuries of non-government organizations, ostensibly to take people off the streets to train and employ them to install insulation, new windows, doors and solar equipment in existing homes (a project which to my mind seriously underestimates the skills in such construction work and overestimates the interest in such arduous work by the unemployed). 

How this has fared I am unaware, but a similar program in Great Britain seems to have validated my earlier concerns about the efficacy of such projects. The far-left newspaper, The Guardian recently described a University of Cambridge report on the long-term effect of attic and wall insulation, and the report was what I had anticipated years ago. After retrofitting, there is a “rebound effect” which cancels out reductions in gas use. Put simply, with the cost of gas heating of their homes down, homeowners turned up the heat, opened windows to air out stuffy rooms and even built on extensions to their homes. 

Look out below!

Once again, it’s the law of supply and demand which makes hash of so many bright ideas. Twenty-one years ago John LaPlante, predicted this. “Government-mandated conservation efforts never work to alleviate shortages. In fact, they do the opposite." With increased energy efficiency we are likely to consume more energy—and the result is either no net savings or even a loss of available energy. In the process, government-enforced measures like automobile fuel efficiency standards “impose unnecessary costs on people—even deadly costs” because smaller cars are less safe cars. 

It may be unpleasant for the renewable energy crowd to concede this, but the reality is that “conservation doesn’t reduce overall energy consumption.” Increased energy efficiency may provide lower costs, making product prices more competitive and affordable for more people when driven by market forces, but government policy makers must face the fact that, as the Cambridge study found, government programs are not a means of reducing energy consumption. You really have to increase energy production.

Who's Afraid of a Gigaton?

The Global Carbon Project, a cohort of self-anointed “experts” intent on proving that the Klimate Kult fiction through which they generate their funding is real, tracks carbon output across nations and creates a carbon “budget” of what they feel is allowable for humanity. When tracked against economic output, the report, "CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade,” is fascinating. It proves that what our elites are doing is exactly the opposite of what they’d be doing if they believed the green agenda were needed, let alone critical. How dare they?

Using gigatons of CO2, by nation, the GCP provides a metric of this “pollution” by country with the obvious intent of shaming the miscreants other than not-Green China and not-Green India into reducing their output of the CO2 that is a fundamental requirement for life on earth. Red China is allowed by those preening themselves over greenhouse gasses (GHG) to skip the entire Paris “agreement” and just not worry about CO2 output. The same CO2 measurements are the primary focus of the Green Inquisition to bash the U.S.A. for ours. Let’s look at the numbers:

Not-green China, a command economy under communist rule, the economic model preferred by our elites and to which our ruling class has been shipping all our jobs and prosperity for decades, generated in 2021, per this report, 11.5 gigatons of CO2, while creating an economic output of $17,734,000,000,000, or emitting 1.3 pounds of CO2 per dollar of economic output. America, a (semi-)free market, capitalist economy under ostensibly democratic governance, generated in 2021, 5.0 GTon of CO2, while creating an economic output of $22,196,000,000,000, emitting 0.45 pounds of CO2 per dollar of economic output.

In other words, America generates 288 percent of the economic output of China while emitting 43 percent of China’s CO2. Six times the economic output per Gton of CO2. If the political establishment pushing green actually were pushing green and de-carbonization, they’d recognize that a higher standard of living at a lower CO2 cost (i.e. a more efficient and productive use of energy) is being attained under our political-economic model than under that of Red China.

 

If our self-proclaimed “green” elites actually believed in “Climate Change” and were concerned about CO2 emissions, not only would we not be offshoring our manufacturing and prosperity and future, our elites would be making the pitch to all the world to move their manufacturing to America, and to move the entire planet to a capitalist free-market economy as this model provably provides more economic output per GTon of CO2 than any other, higher living standards than any other model in human history, and reduces carbonization along the way.

How to do this is not to sign-on to a global minimum tax, but to allow all countries to compete for industry – and jobs and living standards – using tax and market policies anathema to our rulers but liberty-generating for the global middle classes the WEF/Davos crowd is trying to annihilate, while reducing CO2 impact for all.

No one wants to decrease their living standards. This is why immigrants are flocking to America rather than to China or Mexico. If the world wants to decrease GHG and “Global Warming,” and to not reduce living standards, we need to move industry to the country and economic system with the highest GDP per ton of CO2: the United States, and to return to a free-market economy so derided by globalist elites.

The upsides of moving industry back to, or to, America are two. If, against all current and historical data, the earth is being heated by human-emitted GHG, we can reduce the CO2 output while simultaneously increasing global economic production - and so global standards of living. If, as the data actually show, the earth is entering a cooling period, then we will have the necessary industry here to at least keep us warm.

Plus, the working class grows wealthier, which history shows leads to a higher level of concern about the environment.

The point here isn’t that CO2 is increasing or decreasing, that the planet is warming, cooling or in stasis. The point is that the elites, the same ones telling us we must reduce our energy usage to pre-industrial levels, are acting against – not just ignoring, but acting against – what they insist be done. Which means they don't believe it, either.

What they insist on is contributing to the increase of GHG and, per their models, to the global warming about which they only pretend to care as a control device over our liberty and prosperity, the destruction of which is their actual goal.

We aren’t talking about private jets or big houses or multiple houses or extravagances those of us working and providing them their wealth cannot afford due to the policies of these same rulers. We’re talking about the facts on the ground: moving industry to a command economy increases rather than decreases GHG emission per economic unit of measure. Reducing GHG while keeping or increasing global living standards means moving jobs and industry back to a free-market economy and away from command economies.

More than any other report, this GCP report ought to convince everyone paying attention that the U.N. is not kidding in its statement of their goal for the entire climate change hoax. As noted by Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change in Brussels, in 2015, the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

“Changing the economic model” that has done more than any other in history to reduce poverty and improve global standards of living and, not coincidentally, to reduce greenhouse gasses better than any other, is the goal of our elites.

Their goal with “Climate Change” has nothing to do with saving the planet. Adding this report to the actions of our greenies proves that they are intent on adding to the global carbon output and increasing climate change while reducing our prosperity; as noted here early and often, to destroy the global Middle Classes.

These are the facts as presented by the GCP, an instrument of the Klimate Kult seemingly oblivious as to what its data show.

This has nothing to do with climate. It never has. It never will.

Panglossian Pipedreams of a 'Green' Superpower

As a callow 22-year-old recent (ten pound Pom) immigrant to Australia, I travelled to sub-tropical Townsville where I got a job with the Queensland Main Roads Department. I was dispatched to an encampment outside the small town of Cardwell, one hundred miles further north; where, nearby, a long new stretch of the Pacific Highway was being laid alongside the existing crumbling road. The new road, as the old, had just one lane either way. I asked the foreman why the opportunity was not taken to build a road with four lanes. His answer has stuck with me. You don’t understand, he said. And added, words to the effect, Australia is a big country with few people. We build what we can afford.

If ever that grounded view had legs within the Australian government, "climate-change" hysteria has driven it out. On the drawing board are 13,200 kilometres of new transmission lines to carry renewable energy from a vast panoply of yet-to-be-built wind and solar farms. Lots of steel, aluminium and concrete in them wires and pylons (about 40,000 of them) and many skilled hands needed to erect them and many landowners’ palms to grease. Infeasible? Yes, though it is the least of it. A projected 28,000 kms of new transmission lines will be required, apparently, if Australia is to fulfill its destiny of becoming a (green) “hydrogen super power.”

You couldn’t make it up. For those filled with zealotry to reset energy generation, one pipedream is built on another. They “have both feet firmly planted in mid-air,” to employ Francis Schaeffer’s description of moral relativists among churchmen. And, to boot, their Panglossian ambitions are unbridled: eliminate all coal, oil, and gas. Cull cows and sheep, or else make their belches methane-free. Transform industrial processes to eliminate their "greenhouse gas" emissions. Convert ships to run on hydrogen. Insulate the stock of all houses and commercial buildings. Ration power, precisely when it’s too hot or cold for human comfort. The list goes on, including the vainglorious ambition of running all cars, trucks, and buses on batteries or green hydrogen.

Visions of the Annointed.

The Electric Vehicle Council is a national body representing the electrical vehicle (EV) industry in Australia. In mid-October 2022, it reported that EVs now account for 3.39 percent of new vehicle sales; up from a little over 2 percent the year before. Apparently, the Australian Capital Territory, the seat of government and home to only 1.7 percent of the national population but many federal public servants, leads the nation with 9.5 percent of new car sales. Where white-collar, richer-than-average people live, there you’ll find virtue-signalling EVs trundling around well-to-do suburbs. This comment made me happy:

It’s great to see so much momentum behind EV sales in Australia, but to put our 3.4 percent in context – Germany sits at 26 percent, the U.K. at 19 percent, and California at 13 percent. The global average is 8.6 percent so Australia has a long, long way to come.

When lemmings are heading for the edge of a cliff being a straggler ain’t so bad. Moreover, to the chagrin of the Electric Vehicle Council new vehicle sales present an over-rosy picture of stark reality. Only 0.12 percent of light vehicles on Australian roads are EVs. And, bet your life, that percentage would be much lower, if it were based on miles travelled.

RepuTex Energy is the firm used by Australia’s Labor government for modelling its 'Powering Australia’ plan. One projection, now quietly dropped, was that household electricity bills would fall by $275 by 2025. Not quite. They have since risen sharply and Australia’s Treasury department forecasts them rising still further, by over $1000 by June 2024. Hopeless at predicting electricity bills. Trust them on predicting the usage of EVs?

Follow RepuTex’s and Labor’s yellow brick road. They say that the number of light EVs on the road will grow from next to nothing now to 3.8 million by 2030. There will be 1800 new public fast-charging stations, and 100,000 businesses and 3.8 million households (a third or so of all households) will have charging capacity.

Official figures show that 18.6 million light vehicles were registered in January 2021. At current growth rates, approximately 3 million more will be registered in 2030. Assuming about 800,000 to 900,000 million light vehicles are scrapped each year, EVs would have to average 37 percent of all new vehicle sales over the whole period from now until 2030 to reach the projected 3.8 million. It’s sheer unadulterated bunkum.

Each of these 3.8 million owners will not only have wanted to buy a new EV, and have had the wherewithal, but will also have to have managed to employ an electrician to upgrade their electrics (and, as applicable, the electrics of their whole apartment building) and install a charging point. Which electrician will also need to have checked how many such charging points the local substation can handle. Then there’s that pressing need to string out fast-charging stations right across the country. And, apropos of the wisdom of that Queensland foreman of whom I spoke, Australia has a large landmass and a dispersed population.

There’s also the revenue dilemma. Each litre of petrol or diesel sold is taxed at 46 cents. Over the next three years this will bring in about $15 billion dollars per year. EVs do more than make this disappear they negatively impact revenue. There is no 5 percent tariff on EV’s, as there is generally on cars, and they can be provided to employees free of fringe-benefits tax which is payable for conventional cars. What to do?

One thing for sure, a Labor government won’t give up revenue. So many things to spend money on. I suspect a road-user charge will be introduced to replace fuel excise but, at the same time, petroleum-fuelled cars will be penalised with emission taxes. The Greens (party) want it and Labor needs the Greens to pass legislation in the Senate. Where and when will it all end? Not in the realisation of pipedreams. Think, instead, of an ocean of tears that not even the wizards of Oz can make disappear.

The 'Energy Transition' Will Be Delayed a Bit

Perhaps the most scandalous aspect of environmental ideology is that its religious fervor for the Malthusian apocalypse requires its high priests to ignore data and science. The actual monitoring data for core environmental problems such as air and water quality, deforestation, and other genuine problems show that most environmental problems are improving all around the world, most conspicuously in prosperous nations that have market economies, embrace technological innovation, and protect property rights and the rule of law.

Presenting these data, from credible sources as various as Human Progress, Our World in Data, or Environmental Progress, or figures such as Bjorn Lomborg or Matt Ridley (to name just two), sends environmentalists into a rage of denunciation. For environmentalists, good news is bad news, akin to depriving a fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preacher of original sin.

This is true even of the grand-daddy of all environmental scares: "climate change." The latest official “consensus” scientific estimates of climate change have been backing away from the most dire climate disaster predictions of a decade ago, though the media never notice, and the relentless climate campaign won’t admit it.

Malthus: Doomed, I tell you, doomed.

It is not just more congenial, but essential, that environmentalism suppresses all data that does not support the urgency of their latest disaster scenarios. The most scandalous example came this week with news that BP (formerly British Petroleum) is weighing whether to discontinue its annual “Statistical Review of World Energy.” This fabulously useful report, which BP has published for 71 years, provides detailed trend data for every country in the world in downloadable spreadsheets, enabling analysts to conduct independent analysis easily, often noting findings that BP omits to highlight in its own write-up. Surprise: BP’s data turns out to be uncongenial to the renewable energy cheerleaders. Therein lies a tale.

Why would BP think of abandoning this well-regarded report, which can’t be a huge expense or labor for a multinational of its size and expertise? The Reuters report that broke this story hints at the problem:

The report has been seen by some BP executives as detrimental to the company's new direction, sources told Reuters... "Put simply, it (Statistical Review) is bad PR," one company source said. The company has in recent years also cut its ties with several oil and gas associations and has sought to raise its profile as a clean energy provider.

Why would a detailed, data-rich report on actual energy trends be “bad PR” for a major oil company? Back in 2000, BP formally rebranded its company initials to stand for “Beyond Petroleum,” accompanied with a $200 million ad campaign conceived by Ogilvy and Mather, featuring splashy public pledges to "go green" to fight climate change. In the immediate term this meant becoming predominantly a natural gas company and phasing out of oil exploration and production along with new investments in wind and solar power.

BP quietly abandoned the “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 made a mockery of its virtue-signaling pretensions. It also quietly sold off its money-losing wind and solar power divisions, and suddenly returned to expanding oil and gas production.

But BP lately has returned to the fold of climate hysterics, and is once again pledging to become carbon-neutral by 2050 if not sooner, and a full partner in the “energy transition” that is the fever dream of the climate campaign. And that’s where the Statistical Review of World Energy becomes an inconvenience and PR problem: BP’s data show that the “energy transition” isn’t happening. While we are inundated with headlines and advocacy group celebrations of the rapid growth of “renewable energy,” the data show that hydrocarbon energy—especially coal—has been increasing more than renewable energy for the last decade.

Meanwhile, a mountain of energy lies right beneath your feet.

In 2021, BP’s figures show global coal use grew by 6.3 percent, while oil consumption increased 6.1 percent, and global greenhouse gas emissions rose 5.9 percent. Coal accounted for 51 percent of total new electricity generation around the world, and coal even grew in the U.S., after falling (irony alert!) during the Trump administration.

The data for 2022 (BP’s report comes out every year in June) are likely to be even more dismal for the greens, as the disruption of the world’s energy supply has exposed the green energy fantasy. Coal use everywhere is soaring. Right now Germany has a higher electricity carbon footprint than coal-heavy Poland, which is wisely resisted the romantic nonsense of the greens. No wonder the climate campaigners would like to see this bad news suppressed.

The return to energy reality the Ukrainian War has prompted merely sped up the inevitable consequences of green energy diktats by a decade. Suppressing the data demonstrating this reality isn’t going to change that. If BP dumps their annual report to appease their in-house climate campaigners, hopefully a more clear-headed energy company such as Liberty Energy will want to take it over.

'Global Warming' Meets the Kobayashi Maru

Have you ever wondered how progressives were going to get the West to pay for climate reparations, estimated to cost between $1-1.8 trillion, yet limit economic activity enough to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C and do so with significantly fewer people? The populations of nearly all the present great military and economic powers will collapse in this century. One has to wonder who's going to be left to foot the bill.

For example, unless things radically change, Ukraine will halve from its 1990 level by 2100, annihilated not by Russia, but by legacy Soviet population control policies. Russia's population is also in free fall. It has already lost more than two million people since the fall of the USSR, even counting Crimea which it may not be able to keep. Even worse new census data shows that the only regions growing are ethnically non-Russian. "All predominantly ethnic Russian areas are declining." By 2100 China will have nearly half a billion people fewer than today. The One Child Policy is aging it fast. Japan's population, a World Economic Forum publication notes, is shrinking by a quarter million people each year. By the end of the century Europe will have diminished by 117 million.

By contrast, Africa’s population will soar from 1.34 billion to 4.28 billion, drawing nearly level with Asia in numbers by the dawn of the 22nd century. But though numerous authorities predict the Third World will be devastated by "climate change," a World Bank blog observes, "the climate crisis is a deeply unfair one: the poorest people in the world contribute the least to climate change."

Which way to the Camp of the Saints?

We return to the affordability of climate reparations. One might for a moment imagine a future world limping along where the only remaining licit sources of energy are the winds, the sun and the tides; where coal, petrochemicals, and nuclear power have been proscribed. But conceiving of how such an energy-handicapped world could pay compensation to teeming Africa from a dwindling workforce of aged climate criminals staggers the mind. By 2100 the median age in China will be 57 years of age, with half the Chinese older than that.

Can the aggrieved global South depend on that? People pose a dilemma. On the one hand they create wealth, so necessary for "redistributive justice." On the other hand they consume raw materials and threaten the planet. Do we celebrate the decrease of people in productive economies or fear it?

One answer, featured in the New York Times, posits that it's better to just bring down the curtain on the whole human story. "For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, has spent decades pushing one message: 'May we live long and die out'". There is no alternative because "wealthy countries with relatively smaller populations like the United States are generating most of the pollution that is driving global warming." To force them to generate the income to pay climate reparations is to risk still more warming. “The lack of freedom to not procreate,” Mr. Knight argues, has doomed the earth. “We’re not a good species,” by his reckoning.

A better solution, says Lord J. Adair Turner of the World Economic Forum, is automation. "In a world of rapidly expanding automation potential, demographic shrinkage is largely a boon, not a threat. Our expanding ability to automate human work across all sectors – agriculture, industry, and services – makes an ever-growing workforce increasingly irrelevant to improvements in human welfare." It will not matter if half the people in China are over 57 if all the work is done for them by advanced robots and artificial intelligence.

There is, Turner notes, one fly in the ointment. In a world where robots make everything, most Africans can't get jobs. "Automation makes it impossible to achieve full employment in countries still facing rapid population growth," because unskilled labor will become worthless. He points to India as an actual example. "Although annual GDP growth has averaged around 7% for the last five years, it has been powered by leading companies deploying state-of-the-art technology. The expansion has created almost no new jobs, and an increasing share of India's population is either unemployed or underemployed in the country’s huge low-productivity informal sector.... But we should at least recognize that this is where the real demographic threat lies. Automation has turned conventional economic wisdom on its head: there is greater prosperity in fewer numbers."

Africans, as ever, are stuck on the wrong side of the door. They are inconveniently numerous and pose a problem for the few. The obvious expedient is to tax the rich old Asians and Europeans of their automated wealth and give it to those populations who stubbornly cling to the quaint old custom of having children. Forestalling instability, though Lord Turner may be wary of saying so directly, may be the real underlying reason why Western governments are pushing so-called climate reparations. "For years, the United States and other wealthy nations have blocked calls for loss and damage funding, concerned that it would open them up to unlimited liability," until Washington realized that it could be cheaper to pay Third World populations "climate compensation" rather than face billions of people, recently and permanently unemployed by technology, angrily demanding a Universal Basic Income.

The World Economic Forum website helpfully informs us that the natives would be restless without it: "The alternative to not having UBI is worse – the rising likelihood of social unrest, conflict, unmanageable mass migration and the proliferation of extremist groups that capitalize and ferment on social disappointment. It is against this background that we seriously need to consider implementing a well-designed UBI, so shocks may hit, but they won’t destroy."

It's not climate reparations; it's a redundancy payment. And a bribe.

But if, as Lord Turner assures us, robots can provide for everything then the progressives can have their cake and eat it too: the empty West, a populous global south sustained by UBI, all powered by no more than the sun, wind and waves. But because AI and robots use power also, often much more than a 20 watt human brain, the Green dream is constrained by the law of physics prohibiting getting something for nothing. The sad reality is that "machine learning is on track to consume all the energy being supplied. Perhaps there is not enough free energy on the planet to automate the dreams of ideologues.

In former times civilization saw humanity as the crowning glory of earth. Freeman Dyson once said, "the more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we are coming." Today it sees man as a problem. The leading intellectuals can hardly wait for man to give way to something else, for he is too creative; too inclined to disrupt. The only way to stop climate change is to dampen the source of change. The only fully predictable world is a quiet place where everything stays where it should is perfect in its own way. In other words, a dead one.

Albo’s Airy-Fairy Electricity Fables

Recall the original message? Green energy is more costly than conventional energy. But, they said, much less costly than the climate catastrophe awaiting if nothing were done. A problem arose. Surveys showed that while people naively went along with the prospect of using green energy, they were unwilling to pay for it. I know what to do, some bright spark probably exclaimed, deep in the bowels of Renewable Energy Inc, we’ll tell them it’s cheaper.

Thus, in a far-off land called Oz, opposition leader Anthony Albanese (Albo) promised voters, no fewer than ninety-seven times, that his green plan would reduce electricity prices for families by an annual $275 by the year 2025. And so it came to pass that Albo and his Labor Party mates were elected to power in May this year.

It’s hard to get a representative national reading on electricity bills, which vary markedly between states. However, a Sydney family (Ma, Pa and two kids) would pay something like $1,800 a year. During the time Albo was campaigning, bills were already rising, putting his fanciful promise in peril. Still, he was resolute; confident in the modelling behind his plan. After all, as he kept on saying, and keeps on saying, renewables are the cheapest form of energy. Ergo, as a matter of unassailable logic, more wind and solar equals cheaper power. And don’t believe your lying eyes, whatever your bills might say.

Albanese and Dishy Rishi yukking it up at the G20 in Bali.

It's not propaganda on Albo’s part. Might have started that way. Now he undoubtedly believes it. I suppose if you tell others a demonstrable lie enough times it becomes your truth. Haven’t tried it personally. Never been a politician or used-car salesman.

But the jig is up. Federal budgets in Australia are usually brought down in early May. The new Labor government couldn’t wait until next year, bringing down an interim October budget. That was probably a mistake. In the budget papers, Treasury projected that electricity prices would rise 20 percent over the balance of 2022-23 and another 30 percent in 2023-24. Yikes, that doesn’t sound like a reduction of $275.

Clever people in the media (the majority caught on eventually) realized that 20 and 30 percent compounded to 56 percent. At that rate an $1,800 bill rises by over $1000; instead of falls by $275. Not an easy discrepancy to explain away, even for practiced snake-oil salesmen. What to do? What would Biden do? Blame Trump and Putin of course. Albo and his mates didn’t disappoint. Years of mismanagement by the previous government is behind this they said, and also that slubberdegullion Putin. They didn’t actually say slubberdegullion; but they might well have, if they’d found the word as I did.

What would they do without Putin? These days, he’s behind the undoing of all the best-laid green schemes. Think aptly of Snowball, George Orwell’s porcine character. Orwell is perhaps too often brought into the frame. Yet his work is so unmissably prescient. The interchangeability of truth and lies in 1984 thrives in real life among those pimping climate-change catastrophe. And then there’s the fall guy Snowball playing Trotsky (yesteryear’s Putin) in Animal Farm, blamed for all ills.

Befitting a leftist government, the new Australian Labor government foresees budget deficits without end; with gross public debt exceeding $1 trillion by the end of June 2024 and progressively rising from there on. That might seem small compared with America’s $31 trillion debt, but you have to multiply it by 13 to get a per-capita comparison and, of course, the USD is the world’s reserve currency – quite an advantage when you owe money. It is glaringly discernible, not disputable; leftist governments incorrigibly spend money they don’t have to buy votes. Democracy would fall without right-of-centre governments periodically repairing the fiscal ship of state. In fact, that now seems to be their only function, having largely ceded away civil society to Marxist mobs.

Spendthrift governments often spend money outside of the budget to disguise their profligacy. In Australia’s budget, $20 billion (more than half the size of the projected deficit for 2022-23) is designated as low-cost finance, and therefore off-budget, to fund 13,200 kms of new transmission lines and pylons. Connecting far-flung wind and solar farms to grids is an expensive exercise. And, in this case, a forlorn one.

Everybody hates Vlad.

First, it can’t be done. There is nowhere near the skilled manpower to the job. To boot, objections are already being made by landowners to having large pylons and wires strewn across their land. Lawfare awaits. And then there’s the little matter of building the many and massive wind and solar farms from which the transmission lines sprout. It’s make-believe.

Second, whatever part is built is bound to be well behind schedule and way above cost. It’s a government project. Take the white elephant, Snowy 2.0-pumped hydro. When will it be built? They said by 2021. Assume 2028 at the earliest; that’s if it’s ever finished at all. And the cost? They said $2 billion. Assume something northwards of $10 billion or, more probably, $15 billion.

There is much else about “cheaper, cleaner energy” in the budget. For example, $157.9 million is provided for a “National Energy Transformation Partnership.” All hat and no cattle, sums it up.

…the Government will work together with state and territory governments on priority actions to support the transformation of Australia’s energy sector. Initial priorities include delivering Australia’s first fully integrated energy and emissions reduction agreement, introducing an emissions reduction objective into the National Energy Objectives, accelerating mechanisms for the uptake of flexible energy supply and progressing a co-designed First Nations Clean Energy Strategy with First Nations communities.

Blah-blah-blah. Lots of taxpayer loot to produce yet more grandiose bumf. Not one kilowatt of power. And, by the way, Australian Aboriginals never constituted Nations. Hundreds of stone-age, hunter-gatherer, thinly populated itinerant tribes were not remotely nations. Part of the lies that now inform Australia’s national life. Fitting in this era of climate hysteria and green-energy boondoggles.