Patrick Moore, co-founder of extremist group Greenpeace, put together this video about carbon dioxide and its role in the atmosphere.
Climate Change
ETS- fake market with fake words
Jo Nova explains that an ETS is a tax and there is no free market involved in CO2
The Emissions Trading Scheme monster idea is back – but the conversation is booby-trapped with fake words
It’s a tax that’s “not a tax” and a “free market” that isn’t free.
Joy. An emission trading scheme (ETS) is on the agenda again in Australia. Here’s why the first priority is to clean up a crooked conversation. If we can just talk straight, the stupid will sort itself out.
The national debate is a straight faced parody — it could be a script from “Yes Minister”, except no one would believe it. Bill Shorten argues that the Labor Party can control the world’s weather with something that exactly fits the definition of a tax, yet he calls it a “free market” because apparently he has no idea what a free market really is. (What union rep would?) It’s like our opposition leader is a wannabe entrepreneur building a Kmart that controls the clouds. Look out Batman, Billman is coming. When is a forced market a free market? When you want to be PM.
The vandals are at the gates of both English and economics, and we can’t even have a straight conversation. The Labor Party is in flat out denial of dictionary definitions — is that because they can’t read dictionaries, or because they don’t want an honest conversation? Let’s ask them. And the idea central to modern economics — free markets — when will the Labor Party learn what one is? It’s only a free market when I’m free to buy nothing.
A carbon market is a forced market. Who wants to buy a certificate for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions? Only 12% of the population will even spend $2 to offset their flight emissions. How many Australians would choose to spend $500? Why don’t we ask them?! Why — because Bill Shorten knows what the answer would be.
Then, on top of all that, is the hypocrisy — the Labor Party say an ETS is the most efficient way to reduce carbon, but they know it isn’t true, because they also insist we buy 50% of our electricity from renewables. Even with an ETS, no one would choose wind power or solar to reduce CO2. They are that stupid.
But a fake free market will help the Global Financial Houses. Buy a carbon credit and save a Banker!
When will Labor start to speak English?
Definition of “Tax”: noun
1.a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.2.a burdensome charge, obligation, duty, or demand.So let’s call it what it is, the ETS-tax. Confront the Labor Party with their inability to speak honest English. There is deception here, written into their language. As long as they won’t speak English, how can we even discuss their policy?
Can someone tell Labor what a “free market” is?
Real free markets are remarkable tools and very efficient, but we can never have a real free market on a ubiquitous molecule used in all life on Earth. It’s an impossibility.
The Labor Party is simply stealing a good brand name. This fake market in air certificates does not meet even the basic requirements of a true free market. It’s a market with no commodity, no demand, no supply, and no verifiability of goods delivered. You and I are not “free” to choose to buy nothing. Most of the players in this market are not free to play — who pays for yeast, weathering, or ocean cycles?
As I said in The Australian: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream.
A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At the end of a free trade, both parties have something they prefer.
To create demand for emissions permits, the government threatens onerous fines to force people to buy a product they otherwise don’t need and most of the time would never even have thought of acquiring. Likewise, supply wouldn’t exist without government approved agents. Potentially a company could sell fake credits (cheaper than the real ones) and what buyer could spot the difference? Indeed, in terms of penance or eco-branding, fake credits, as long as they were not audited, would “work” just as well as real ones.
Despite being called a commodity market, there is no commodity: the end result is air that belongs to no-one-in-particular that has slightly-less-of-a-trace-gas. Sometimes it is not even air with slightly less CO2 in it, it is merely air that might-have-had–more-CO2, but doesn’t. It depends on the unknowable intentions of factory owners in distant lands.
How strange, then, that this non-commodity was at one time projected to become the largest tradable commodity in the world – bigger even than the global market for oil…
Desperate Shorten Threatens Australian Economy
I woke up to the news on the ABC this morning that Bill Shorten wants to take a proposal to the ALP National Conference that would make it policy to at a target of 50% renewable electricity by 2030.
It seems that Shorten is as thick as two short planks- not only is this likely not achievable, but it will drive the cost of power through the roof either through direct charges to consumers or through ever increasing Government subsidies.
The drama about changes to the Renewable Energy Target earlier this year was not driven by anti-renewable ideology as the media and the ALP portrayed it. It was basically about the fact that there was no way we could achieve the 20% by 2020 mandated by Kevin Rudd and consequently there would be massive penalties imposed on the electricity generators, driving up the price of power.
Here is the thing. Renewable energy, most likely in the form of solar will soon become economically viable. It is almost competitive with the cost of installing new coal powered generators, which is the only reason why AGL announced with great fanfare it would not be investing in any new coal-fired generators.
By the time we get to 2030 it is quite possible that new solar power stations will produce power so cheaply that existing coal powered stations will be closed down and replaced by power, simply by the laws of economics. The technology around both the generation and storage of power is going through such a revolution at the moment that it will make financial sense to invest without subsidies and targets imposed by Government.
Andrew Bolt’s take, complete with pretty pictures:
Shorten vs the economy: demands higher power prices
Under pressure on leadership, Bill Shorten lurches even more to the Left, promising a policy that will savagely increase the cost of electricity:
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is set to unveil a bold climate policy goal requiring half of Australia’s large-scale energy production to be generated using renewable sources within 15 years.
This means more than doubling green power but without using more of the hydro electricity that so far produces most of it. (Labor won’t build more dams.):
That vast expansion of wind and solar will not happen without paying a fortune in subsidies and forcing consumers to use more green power, givenhow expensive it is:
This will potentially cost taxpayers and consumers billions more each year, when we already subsidise green power by around $3 billion a year.
Effect on global warming?Nil.
Effect on the economy? Business lost, jobs lost.
Coal’s Death A Little Exaggerated
The ABC’s Four Corners (again) joyfully announced the death of coal the other night wheeling out a bunch of anti-coal advocates to agree with one another. It seems that coal might be a little like Mark Twain- great news for mining regions and for Australia generally. And of course the campaigners always show their total ignorance of the subject in the fact that coal is essential to steel making- so there is coal even in wind turbines!
‘‘The end of coal’’ was the tagline for a Four Corners’ “analysis” of the coal sector [on Monday]. It was Episode 14 of Series 3 of the Four Corners’ critique of the mining industry….
Facts were in short supply, wishful thinking was not. A trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds activist groups and co-funded the development of an Australian anti-coal strategy in 2011, was wheeled out as an objective observer…
First, it is claimed that coal is a dying energy source and its use is being phased out. Not so. According to the BP Review, over the decade to the end of 2014, coal use grew by 968 million tonnes of oil equivalent. That is 4 times faster than renewables, 2.8 times faster than oil and 50 per cent faster than gas. That’s hardly justification for a requiem.
Second, investors are not walking away from coal… One of the anti-coal movement’s own groups, Bankwatch, has complained that global financing for coal mining rose to $US66 billion in 2014, up from $US55bn in 2013 and a 360 per cent increase from 2005.
The third claim is that renewable energy is capable of replacing fossil fuels, including coal. Not likely. In 2014, if the world had relied on renewable energy like wind, solar and biomass for primary energy, then the world would have had just 9 days of heat, light and artificial horsepower….
The campaigners also claim that major consuming nations are turning away from coal. But the International Energy Agency predicts that China will add 450 gigawatts of coal fired power over the next 25 years. That’s 40 per cent larger than the entire US coal fleet….
Energy starved India is also expanding its coal use and is expected to become the world’s largest coal importer in the next decade…
In forecasting the end of coal, the campaign narrative also skips lightly around the fact that coal is used in the production of 70 per cent of the production of the world’s steel. Given that there is 225 tonnes of coal in every offshore wind turbine, it is hard to see how coal is doomed in a world with strong growth in renewable energy.
The Solar Power Plant That Runs on Natural Gas
So, get this, environmentalists worked everyone up into a lather about global warming- now on pause for over 18 years- and the need to use renewables- which are green, safe and just dandy (don’t mind that the “free” energy costs three times as much as the “dirty” stuff”).
So in California they built a you-beaut solar thermal plant which fries birds by the thousand and which actually needs natural gas to keep it running smoothly- for up to 4 hours a day they burn those awful fossil fuels to keep the turbine spinning.
That my friends, is why no rational person should ever vote Greens or pay any attention to an “expert” with the word sustainable in his/her job description.
From WUWT:
Solar Fossil Fueled Fantasies
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach.
Sometimes when I’m reading about renewable technologies, I just break out laughing at the madness that the war on carbon has wrought. Consider the Ivanpah solar tower electric power plant. It covers five square miles in Southern California with mirrors which are all focusing the sun on a central tower. The concentrated sunlight boils water that is used to run a steam turbine to generate electricity.
Sounds like at a minimum it would be ecologically neutral … but unfortunately, the Law of Unintended Consequences never sleeps, and the Ivanpah tower has turned out to be a death trap for birds, killing hundreds and hundreds every year:
“After several studies, the conclusion for why birds are drawn to the searing beams of the solar field goes like this: Insects are attracted to the bright light of the reflecting mirrors, much as moths are lured to a porch light. Small birds — insect eaters such as finches, swallows and warblers — go after the bugs. In turn, predators such as hawks and falcons pursue the smaller birds.
But once the birds enter the focal field of the mirrors, called the “solar flux,” injury or death can occur in a few seconds. The reflected light from the mirrors is 800 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Either the birds are incinerated in flight; their feathers are singed, causing them to fall to their deaths; or they are too injured to fly and are killed on the ground by predators, according to a report by the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory.”
– David Danelski, Solar: Ivanpah Solar Described as Deadly Trap for Wildlife,” Riverside-Press Enterprise, April 8, 2014.
But of course, that’s not what made me laugh. That’s a tragedy which unfortunately will be mostly ignored by those good-hearted environmentally conscious folks suffering from chronic carbophobia.
The next oddity about Ivanpah is that despite being powered by light, it is light-years away from being economically viable. Like the old sailors say, “The wind is free … but everything else costs money”.
But being totally uneconomical doesn’t matter, because despite costing $2.2 billion to build, Google is a major shareholder, so at least they could afford to foot the bills for their high-priced bird-burner …
Read the rest here
Tony Abbott Wants Fewer Wind Farms
If renewable energy really was cheaper we would not need a RET or subsidies or a plethora of rent-seeking organisations demanding quotas and subsidies. If it was free as the advocates like to tell us, the big energy companies would abandon coal technology tomorrow. If Australians really wanted more renewable energy as the Greens and Labor want to believe, we would all be ticking that little box that says “Please charge me more to use green power.”
Facts:
- Windfarms are ugly
- They produce lots less energy than it says on the box
- Their output is irregular and difficult to engineer for
- They cost more than conventional power
- They kill birds, including endangered species.
From the ABC:
Tony Abbott wants fewer ‘visually awful’ wind farms, wishes Howard government never implemented Renewable Energy Target
Updated
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described wind farms as “visually awful” saying he wishes the Howard government, of which he was a member, had never implemented the Renewable Energy Target (RET) policy.
“When I’ve been up close to these things, not only are they visually awful, but they make a lot of noise,” Mr Abbott told Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones this morning.
His comments echoed those of Treasurer Joe Hockey, who last year described wind turbines as “utterly offensive”.
Mr Abbott said changes before the Federal Parliament to reduce the RET were designed to prevent wind farms from further spreading across the Australian landscape.
“I would frankly have liked to reduce the number a lot more but we got the best deal we could out of the Senate,” he said.
“And if we hadn’t had a deal, Alan, we would have been stuck with even more of these things.”
The target was initially created in 2001 by John Howard and subsequently strengthened by Labor to “at least 20 per cent by 2020”, calculated at the time as being 41,000 gigawatt hours of electricity.
But energy efficiency gains since then mean that 41,000GWh would have represented a figure closer to 27 per cent of 2020 electricity needs.
The Federal Government has sought to cut the target, saying it wanted one more in line with original 20 per cent target.
Changes to the RET legislating a 33,000GWh target have passed the Lower House but not the Senate — a point on which Mr Abbott appeared to be unclear.
“What we did recently in the Senate was reduce, Alan, reduce, capital R-E-D-U-C-E, we reduced the number of these thing that we’re going to get in the future,” he said.
Mr Abbott also said he would have preferred the Howard government had never created the RET in the first place.
“Knowing what we know now I don’t think we would have gone down this path in this way, but at the time we thought it was the right way forward,” he told Jones.
Opposition spokesman for the environment Mark Butler said he was “stunned” by Mr Abbott’s comments.
“Renewable energy is enormously popular in Australia,” Mr Butler said.
“People want more renewable energy, not less, because of the obvious economic and environmental benefits of creating clean energy from free resources like wind, solar and waves.”
Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said Mr Abbott’s comments could harm the industry.
“This is the guy that’s held out — he’s trying to cut to give certainty. In fact, he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want the industry to exist at all,” Senator Waters said.
Abbott set out to destroy viable industry: Australian Wind Alliance
Australian Wind Alliance national coordinator Andrew Bray said the comments exposed the Government’s true intentions on the RET.
“These comments are extraordinary. Our Prime Minister has just admitted to setting out deliberately to destroy a viable industry in Australia, one that could provide jobs to many Australians, investment to regional communities and new income to farmers,” Mr Bray said.
“Not only that but he regrets that he wasn’t able to gut the industry even further.
“The Government has always maintained that it was cutting the RET due to an oversupply of electricity.
“But it’s obvious that rationale was just smoke and mirrors to cover up their real intent: to destroy wind energy in Australia.”
A Senate committee initiated by several independent senators is currently underway into whether wind turbines cause illness.
Medical reviews, including one by Australia’s premier medical research body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, have found no clear link between wind turbines and reported symptoms.
So You Want To Be Coal Free by 2100?
Earlier this week, the G7 countries proudly announced a target to be free of fossil fuels by the end of the century. What a joke, setting a target for something when the date is long after they are all no longer on the planet.
But if such a thing is possible and even desirable, why are the same countries actually increasing their usage of coal?
The brave new religion of global warming where lip service is far more important that actual deeds. The exact opposite of true faith.
From Jo Nova:
Forget momentum for renewables. Five of the G7 nations increased their coal use
Spot the contradictions. Oxfam want us to believe we can be “coal free” in France, the UK and Italy by 2023. Then they tell us that most of these richest of rich nations are already trying and failing to do that. They are using more coal.
Then there is a nifty graph below, which seems to suggest that in these same nations solar is cheaper than coal. If solar is so cheap then, we don’t need any schemes, markets or subsidies. Right?
Welcome to reality — even the richest greenest nations need more coal:
Five of the world’s seven richest countries have increased their coal use in the last five years despite demanding that poor countries slash their carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, new research shows.
Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France together burned 16% more coal in 2013 than 2009 and are planning to further increase construction of coal-fired power stations. Only the US and Canada of the G7 countries meeting on Monday in Berlin have reduced coal consumption since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.
The US has reduced its coal consumption by 8% largely because of fracking for shale gas. Overall, the G7 countries reduced coal consumption by less than 1% between 2009-2013, the Oxfam research shows.
A tad ambitious?
The UK could feasibly stop burning coal for its energy supply by 2023, according to Oxfam’s report.
…. and in the US and Canada by 2030
There is a reason Africa is poor and Africans want to come to the West.
The briefing paper comes as nearly 200 countries meet in Bonn ahead of crunch climate talks in Paris later this year, and shows that G7 coal plants emit twice as much CO2 as the entire African continent annually, and 10 times as much as the 48 least developed countries put together.
Read the full article here. If you have trouble understanding the map, consider this. Some parts of Australia that are too remote to be connected to the mainly coal-fired national electricity grid have discovered that solar power is cheaper than using diesel generators to power the town. Therefore the whole of Australia is coloured as solar is cheaper than “conventional.”
Another Dud Climate Prediction Now Falsified
I don’t know how this guy (that’s Flannery not Blair!) and his mates sleep at night.
From Tim Blair:
IMAGINE PAYING THIS BLOKE $180,000
Tim BlairTuesday, June 09, 2015 (1:06pm)
Just imagine:
Flannery’s solution, proposed immediately following his no-ice prediction:
Sometimes we actually cut off a leg to save the patient, and in this case, we may need to inject sulphur into the stratosphere to cool our planet. It’s going to change the colour of our sky, it’s going to change the amount of sunlight we get; but we may need to do it to buy ourselves a bit of time. Unfortunately we have foot-dragged for so long that we are now in a position where those very unpalatable remedies may have to be resorted to, even if they are dangerous.
People actually took this seriously, back in the day.
More Greenpeace lies
Amongst all the spin and lies amongst the environmental movement at the moment, there are none so shameless as Greenpeace and WWF.
Here is the latest Greenpeace con job.
From Andrew Bolt:
Greenpeace cons you about the Reef. How can you trust a word it says
Andrew Bolt
MAY212015(7:41pm)
The Greenpeace ad, claiming our Great Barrier Reef is being destroyed:
But wait. That picture of dead coral is actually of coral in the Philippines, and was lifted from another Greenpeace publication:
Even more amazing, Greenpeace had actually used that picture to demonstrate how coral killed by a cyclone could actually grow back. Don’t panic!
Apo Island’s community-managed marine sanctuary is considered one of the best of its kind in the world. Established in the mid1980s, the sanctuary became a beacon of hope that damaged reefs can, with proper protection, management, and community buy-in, be restored back to health. ..
Strong storm surges decimated the corals and washed them ashore. The sanctuary, once known to be teeming with marine life was left devastated and now resembles a coral graveyard. Fortunately the reefs on the other sides of the island were spared. But while the damage to the sanctuary was significant not all was lost because marine life around the island was already healthy…
Apo Island’s success story has always been a model of hope for the Philippine seas.
What a con. Here’s Greenpeace using a dodgy picture to push a dodgy scare about a dodgy warming theory – with the result that it’s likely to drive away tourists.
It’s also pretending nothing is being doing to “save” the Reef, when in fact more than $2 billion of taxpayers’ money is being spent over the next decade to protect it.
Has Greenpeace no shame?
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35 Years of Satellite Temperature Measurement
It’s interesting to see how satellite measurement of earth temperatures over the last 35 years compares with IPCC predictions. The satellite measurements are important because they are entirely free of human interference in “adjustments”, “homogenisation” and other statistical manipulation that so-called climatologists engage in to support the carbon monster myth.
To summarise the graph, actual warming since 1980 is just 0.2 degrees while the climate models wrongly predicted an average temperature rise of 1 degree.
And we still spend billlions of dollars a year on this nonsense!
New Life Narrabri 