Climate Change

Europe Shuts Down Due To “Green Energy”

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Australia is not far behind as we lurch towards the madness of “Net Zero”

From Jo Nova

UK close to nation wide blackout, while 12% of entire Germany GDP paying for energy crisis

By Jo Nova

Green Europe is running out of electrons

Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour.  As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.

Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.

These are very expensive experiments

They aren’t telling you this but UK is close to nationwide blackouts

by David Maddox , Daily Express

UK Flag, Britain, United Kingdom.

But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could go out. Two stories this week should set the alarm bells ringing. The first was that Drax had been ordered to put its (mothballed) two coal-fired power stations in North Yorkshire on standby. The second came yesterday when a power cut left 2,800 homes in Shetland without electricity. In one of the coldest snaps in recent history where energy use has been peaking, they underpinned a briefing received by Express.co.uk that Britain is teetering on the edge of a catastrophe.

According to someone close to Mr Rees-Mogg [former Business and Energy Secretary], his conclusion was: “If the lights don’t go out this winter or next it will be more luck than judgement.”

His assessment, confirmed by a Whitehall source, was the margins of available energy supply to need were so low that “just one major problem would be enough for the lights to go out.”

The reality is that Whitehall sources and former ministers have confirmed to the Daily Express the well-intentioned headlong pursuit for Net Zero carbon emissions has left the UK in a precarious position.

After becoming the minister Rees-Mogg apparently had to badger staff for two whole weeks just to get an inventory of Britain’s energy supplies. Were they slow because they didn’t want to give him the bad news, or because they had never added them up?

Britain braces for winter of factory shutdowns as freezing conditions strain energy crisis
Jacob Paul, Daily Express

Gareth Stace, director of industry association UK Steel, told the Telegraph that the eye-watering wholesale electricity prices on Monday forced all his members to shut down some production until rates went back to normal.

He said: “We’re just priced out of the market. There would be no point in the energy companies telling our members to turn off, because they know that they will. You just couldn’t keep going, you just lose money for every tonne of steel you make with [energy] prices at these levels.”

Think of what €440 billion euro’s could have done instead?

German FlagThat’s how much Germany has spent on energy bailouts and schemes since Russia invaded Ukraine. And it probably doesn’t include another 100 billion euro money bomb that was just approved in the German lower house.

Germany’s half-a-trillion dollar energy bazooka may not be enough

Reuters

Michael Groemling at the German Economic Institute (IW) said… “The national economy as a whole is facing a huge loss of wealth.”

The money set aside stands at up to 440 billion euros ($465 billion), according to the calculations, which provide the first combined tally of all of Germany’s drives aimed at avoiding running out of power and securing new sources of energy.

That equates to about 1.5 billion euros a day since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Or around 12% of national economic output. Or about 5,400 euros for each person in Germany.

They could have bought 20 nuclear reactors and secured half their electricity supply for decades to come.

Trump warned about this in 2018, but this trainwreck has been coming for twenty years.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch

Jo Nova: The coldest summer day in Australia and nobody notices

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It’s funny how the BOM is always banging on about the “hottest year ever”, the “warmest winter day on record”, “unprecedented rain”, but nobody notices the coldest summer day on record. Maybe it doesn’t fit the approved narrative

The coldest summer day in Australia and nobody notices

By Jo Nova

Weatherzone report that Thursday was the equal coldest morning ever recorded anywhere in Australia in summer time. Oddly, there were no preemptive emergency warnings the night before, no news stories announcing the area “might” hit a new record, no camera teams visited the scene and the BOM did not invent a Coldsnap Emergency Alert System to tell Australians to put on a jumper.

On Thursday, Perisher Valley in the Australian Alps got down to minus 7.0 C (19F) equaling the record set in Perisher in January 1979 and which was also reached at Charlottes Pass in December 1999.

Oddly, no one blamed this on climate change, or mentioned that it would have been worse if we hadn’t burnt all that coal. After all, without CO2, it would have been minus ten, right?

There were more news headlines about the heat that didn’t happen than there were about the cold that did.

While no media outlets have mentioned this cold record, many have run the story that temperatures might reach 48C this weekend and they issued plenty of warnings. As it happens the 48C was a fizzer on Saturday (the hottest was 44.9), and looks like missing tomorrow too (the forecast peak is now 45C). Hence imaginary heatwaves beat actual cold.

Apologies to Northern Hemisphere friends in winter, we know “it’s nothing”. But it is supposed to be hot here in December. Yet snow has continued to fall on Australian ski fields in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania this year with a “staggering 25cm” falling on Perisher just days before summer officially began.

 

From Jo Nova

Jo Nova: Corals On The Nullarbor

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Jo Nova reports the astounding find of corals way above current sea levels. Maybe we could restore those coal fired power stations, burn some fossil fuels and restore the reef.

Corals covered the Australian desert once – maybe they’ll grow back if we screw in the right light globes?

The remnants of a long gone coral reef are not in the water here, but on top of the cliff. This is what real climate change looks like:

Bunda Cliffs, Nullarbor, Great Australian Bight. Photo.

The whole coral reef is now 100 m out of the water | Bahnfrend |

Nullabor plain map. Australia

The Nullabor Plain.

It turns out the high plateau desert called the Nullarbor was once a coral reef. It’s a thousand kilometer stretch without a tree that’s now about 100m above sea level. Obviously it’s a wilderness that’s begging to be restored to its true Miocene glory. The question is whether we can put on enough solar panels to save this reef, or if we can melt the Antarctic and raise the oceans…

Researchers looking at satellite images spotted a suspicious looking dome and ring (below) . They figured out it was not a meteor crater but probably a former coral atoll. It’s about one kilometer across and corals built this (probably) 14 million years ago. Tectonic shifts lifted the land out of the ocean. If only the polyps had put in a carbon tax?

The Nullarbor is a bit special because the surface is well preserved. There is not a lot of rain, no rivers to speak of, humidity is low, storm surges don’t wash over it and sediments don’t settle on it. Plus the nearest glaciers are in New Zealand.

““So even though it’s exposed, it’s kind of like a land that time forgot … the erosion is so slow, [these features] get preserved for millions and millions of years, kind of capturing a snapshot of how environments were at different times.” —WA Today

Coral Dome, remnant, Nullabor Australia

Coral Dome, remnant, Nullabor Australia

Once fish frolicked in the afternoon sun among the anenome here. Now there is saltbush.

This is the kind of climate change we need to teach children at schools. Geological, not Gretalogical.

Imagine the effect if students knew almost nothing was permanent, life was adaptable, and the climate changed all the time.

Coral reef nullabor

The remnants of a 14 million year old reef

ScienceAlert:

Mysterious Reef From Millions of Years Ago Discovered in Vast Australian Desert

Most of Australia is now arid and dry, with vast inland deserts. Millions of years ago, though, during the Miocene, the continent was teeming with life; not just dense, thriving forest ecosystems, but huge inland seas.

“Through high-resolution satellite imagery and fieldwork we have identified the clear remnant of an original sea-bed structure preserved for millions of years, which is the first of this kind of landform discovered on the Nullarbor Plain,” says geologist Milo Barham of Curtin University in Australia.

The ocean that covered the Nullarbor started to dry up around 14 million years ago, exposing the shallow-water limestones deposited during the middle Cenozoic.

That means the Nullarbor is effectively a clean record of geological processes and features dating back to the Miocene.

“Evidence of the channels of long-vanished rivers, as well as sand dune systems imprinted directly into limestone, preserve an archive of ancient landscapes and even a record of the prevailing winds,” Barham says.

“And it is not only landscapes. Isolated cave shafts punctuating the Nullarbor Plain preserve mummified remains of Tasmanian tigers and complete skeletons of long-extinct wonders such as Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion.”

That’s not all. “At the surface,” adds Barham, “due to the relatively stable conditions, the Nullarbor Plain has preserved large quantities of meteorites, allowing us to peer back through time to the origins of our Solar System.”

REFERENCE

Lipar et al (2022) Enigmatic annular landform on a Miocene planar karst surface, Nullarbor Plain, Australia,  Earth Surface Processes and Landforms.  https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5459

Army Bushmaster “E-Tanks” Work Great If You Can Find A Charging Station

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From Daily Declaration:

Army Takes Us For a Ride With Its New E-Vehicle

Daily Declaration by Guest Writer

e-vehicle

If we are to rely on e-vehicles to transport our soldiers through warzones, the Australian Defence Force is certainly doomed. Perhaps we should consider an even more environmentally-friendly, natural means of transport.

Last month, amid great fanfare, an electric version of the battle-tested Australian Bushmaster (a concept E-Protected Mobility Vehicle) was launched in Adelaide.

The original, diesel-powered Bushmasters built in Bendigo served in the Afghanistan theatre. So impressive were they that allied combatants including the Netherlands and Britain purchased 120-plus of them.

Currently, 20 Bushmasters are en route to active service with the Ukrainian Army. Other defence force customers of the Bushmasters include New Zealand, Fiji, Japan and Indonesia.

The diesel-powered vehicle has an operational range of 800 kilometres.

So, now, an all-singing all-dancing concept electric prototype is ready for Army trials. It is anticipated that these e-Bushmasters will be silent and not generate the heat signature of a diesel vehicle.

Limitations

According to your ABC News of August 11, it is anticipated that the e-vehicle will have an impressive operational range of 1,000 kilometres.

That is not yet the case, according to the Defence Department’s release of August 19, which says: “The first version has about a 100-kilometre range, but a planned larger battery should increase this to 350 kilometres. There’s also work to mount small external generators, increasing the range to about 1,000 kilometres.”

A small detail missed in the media hype was that the e-vehicle could not drive to the Adelaide launch. This was confirmed by the Minister’s office, which said the e-vehicle was transported from Newcastle (NSW) on the back of a motorised vehicle.

Lumbering Death Trap

The e-vehicle is a child sired by the Army’s “Power and Energy Paper” of March 2020.

The lithium battery utilised in the e-vehicle features high-speed recharging; about three hours at an EV station; or, if the crew pull up outside a farmhouse and use the household plug, about seven hours.

An inconvenient feature of the large lithium battery is that if a bullet or shrapnel pierces its casing, the crew will probably be roasted alive. If it should happen in dense scrub, there is the possibility of a bushfire.

A convoy of E-Bushmasters rolling at 100 kilometres per hour from Melbourne to Sydney (870 km) would, with nine stops at EV points, take 36 hours (1½ days) to arrive; while the same 870-km trek in outback South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia or the Northern Territory stopping at farms to recharge would take 72 hours (three days). Diesel-powered Bushmasters can cover the same distance – with driver breaks every two hours – in about 11 hours (half a day).

But do not despair; Assistant Minister for Defence Matt Thistlethwaite said the electric Bushmaster is part of building a “future ready” Army.

Standard Operating Procedure for an army field-force convoy movement is to place the slowest vehicles in the lead. A worry for any convoy commander if he was moving a mixed convoy of motorised and e-vehicles would be the requirement to halt every 100 kilometres to recharge the electric units.

Moreover, not all e-vehicles would stop at the same location because some might “run out of puff” after 90 kms, others at 95 kms, or 98 kms, well short of the recharge point. A convoy with 20 e-vehicles would require a recharge point with 20 EV stations or 20 power points at a farm.

Missing in Action

A timely lesson for the Army comes from the Gloucestershire Constabulary, which boasts the largest full electric fleet in Britain, 91 vehicles. Its problem is simple: the force cannot respond to crime because the batteries “keep going flat”.

Police and Crime Commissioner Chris Nelson said officers had experienced problems finding recharging facilities in the county as the e-vehicles “run out of puff”, and staff needed to change police cars.

Police Scotland invested £20 million ($A34 million) providing 23 stations with e-vehicles but no EV charging points. When their vehicles were plugged into the station’s regular power point, the latter blew up. Now the e-vehicles are left at council car parks overnight with officers reverting to combustion-powered vehicles.

The e-Bushmasters engaged in a limited conflict in the remote outback or even in rural areas and “running out of puff” would certainly meet the Army’s “silent” criterion.

Natural Alternative

While it is easy to criticise a work in progress, any correspondent worth his salt should provide an interim workable solution that will work until the Army’s R&D e-vehicles are perfected before we face an invasion or shortage of liquid fuels.

Luckily, there is a solution to this self-defeating “carbon-constrained economy” nonsense: the camel.

Australia has (perhaps) a million feral camels roaming the Outback. Australian soldiers rode camels into battle during World War I in the Mesopotamia campaigns. Camel trains were used in remote Australia as each animal could carry 100 kilograms of stores, or be harnessed in teams to haul wagons.

In a military emergency, camel teams could haul “out-of-puff” e-vehicles to the nearest power point. A good camel will travel at five km/h; so, she’ll be right, no urgency; the troops can wait.

The Army’s use of camels would be an innovative carbon-reduction “work in progress” of Labor’s Climate Change Bill, now before the Senate, and would easily impress the UN’s climate barons and other assorted global-warming alarmists.

___

By Tony O’Brien.
Originally published at News Weekly.
Photo: Assistant Defence Minister Matt Thistlethwaite inspects the electric-powered Bushmaster armoured vehicle.

The Downside of Net Zero In 100% Green Canberra

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From Jo Nova:

  « 

In “100%” Renewable Canberra people are queuing to hang out in warm libraries, and the air is more polluted

Kill trees, pollute the air, punish the poor and protect coal underground

Just another day in Green heaven.

Canberra Wood Smoke

Wood smoke over Canberra   |   Photo from Clean Air Canberra

The Australian capital city Canberra in midwinter is often minus 1 to 5 degrees C in the morning. Australian homes can get very cold and with heating bills rocketing, things are defacto becoming like life in Berlin, which is in a pre-War energy crisis. No one labeled Canberra public halls as “warm spaces” and they definitely aren’t open at night (it’s the public service!), but crowds are arriving at libraries just to escape the cold.

The ACT Government are a Labor-Green alliance, and are proudly, exuberantly “100% Renewable”, but won’t dare cut the cord to the coal plants that keep the lights on, making the claims of being 100% renewable a form of 100% false advertising. Even the ABC admits that the ACT itself only generates 5% of its own power, and 80% of the energy coming to the ACT through the wires is from fossil fuels. They pay off some distant wind farms to balance the theoretical gigawatt-hour tallies, and sponge off the states around for cheaper backup and stability that the coal plants provide.

But as electricity prices rises 14% of Canberran’s are heating their homes with wood. This has predictably increased actual air pollution. So now there is a movement to ban wood fires.

If only there was a 300 year supply of cheap fuel to burn at centralized clean power stations…

Like all Green policies putting fashion before facts, they get the opposite of what they aim for.

FLAT WHITE

Canberra: where electricity is a luxury the poor can’t afford

Tina Faulk, The Spectator

Public libraries in the National Capital are now considered, by staff and patrons alike, to be ‘community centres’ where people come to read, use the computers, charge their phones, and use the toilets. It’s where clients of the NDIS, escorted by carers, are brought and propped up in their wheelchairs in front of computers or seated in deep armchairs by the magazine stands. Some, abandoned by their carers, shout incoherently for attention. Newly arrived migrants – Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians – jostle for attention of the library staff, asking for translation assistance with various forms and declarations.

Our libraries, warm and welcoming, have a crowd at their doors before the 10 am opening.

Groups of women discuss where they go to get warm:

One [woman] who recently ‘VR-ed’ (Voluntary Retired) still goes back to her old workplace, usually late morning, when the security guard who remembers her gives a nod and a smile as she settles into one of the comfortable settees in the reception area.

How sad is that — going back to her old workplace foyer just to stay warm?

Wood heaters in the firing line as temps drop and pollution rises

Lottie Twyford, Riotact

A recent report showed woodfire heater smoke is the largest source of winter air pollution in Canberra. Currently, around 14 per cent of people in the ACT use a woodfire heater as their main source of heating.

Analysis of air quality shows the impacts of smoke are worse down south because the shape of the valley and temperature inversions hold pollutants closer to the ground. In 2020, there were 37 days in Tuggeranong when pollution levels were above acceptable levels; of those, 13 can be attributed to woodfire heater emissions, Mr Davis told the ACT Legislative Assembly.

The local newspaper is running stories about the “right temperature” to heat homes to. They suggest 18°C (colder than the public buildings in Germany which are now set down to 20°C). A few years ago I stayed with a friend in Canberra and the room was 11°C (and it was only May!).

Read the full article here

And what happens when that renewable drought is 1 terawatt hour?

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From Jo Nova and Matt Canavan

 

And what happens when that renewable drought is 1 terawatt hour?

Australia has added more unreliable wind and solar than anywhere on Earth but when an energy crisis strikes, and those prices are still on fire, the solution is more of the same.

Senator Matt Canavan, The Australian

Map, Australia, Victoria, Vic.

As rest of the world wakes up on coal, we’re closing it down

Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”

The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.

[The energy regulator’s] recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.

How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.

This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW’s Hunter Valley shut a 400MW unit in April. Its other three units (a total of 1200MW) will shut next April. Then, in 2025, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, also in the Hunter, is due to shut.

By the end of the decade, our energy regulators warn, almost two-thirds of our coal-fired power could shut.

And Victoria is just one state.

Indeed, across the world there are 345 new coal-fired power stations being built. What is the argument against Australia building just a few to guarantee our energy supplies?

A new ultra-supercritical coal-fired power station built in Australia would increase our emissions by about five million tonnes a year. That would mean global emissions would go up by 0.014 per cent. The world has warmed around 1C after 600 billion tonnes of emissions. So this new coal-fired power station may increase the temperature by 0.0001 of a degree over its life.

Yet we are told a new coal-fired power station would worsen climate change and create more bushfires, floods and all manner of other natural disasters. These arguments are nonsensical yet go unchallenged in polite society.

Matt Canavan is a Liberal National Party senator for Queensland and deputy leader of the Nationals in the Senate.

The Energy Crisis

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Australia is now reaping the fruit of the Green madness, and will continue to do so for at least the next decade, or longer if we pursue the Net Zero madness.

Last night, NSW was warned about a potential power shortage from 6 pm to 8 pm. Rolling blackouts were a possibility, we were told.

We dodged the proverbial bullet last night, but it could be on again tonight. If not tonight, then maybe next week. We are only two weeks into winter, and this is where we have got to. Then there is the next peak season, called summer.

The solution to this situation, we are told is more solar and wind power. Solar power will not make a scrap of difference in the evening peak in winter, because it is dark. Here in Narrabri for the last few days it has been very calm, so not much wind power either.

For the last 20 years, successive Governments have been telling us that we have to move away from “fossil fuels” for our power generation. The result is that generator companies have taken the hint and not invested in maintaining or upgrading their facilities. So, over the next few years, coal-powered electricity will virtually disappear from Australia. Ironic, when we have so much “clean” coal in this country that we are sending overseas.

At the same time, the same Governments have been telling us that gas is a good “transition” power source. It is true that gas generators are more responsive to demand and gas produces more energy per tonne of CO2 emitted. But, these Governments have also prevented the gas companies from extracting coal seam gas from most of the country.

So at the time when we most need natural gas as a backup for our electricity grid, there is a huge shortage because of Government policies. The world price of natural gas is high because of the Russia- Ukraine war, and we have lakes of it underground just waiting to be tapped.

Now we have this crazy situation where the electricity regulator has imposed a price cap on wholesale electricity of $300/MW hr (The price used to be about $30, that is how bad things have got). At this price natural gas power generators cannot make a profit, so they don’t want to operate. We have a couple of coal-fired generators under maintenance that was delayed, because there is no point in spending too much on them when they will close in a couple of years anyway.

This is where following the policies demanded by green activists gets you to. The next few years are going to be worse as we close down coal. When electric cars become a significant part of the vehicle fleet, the demand for electricity will be double what it is now.

It is actually worse than that, when you consider how people live. You get home from work, what do you do? Plug your car in, turn the heater or air conditioner on (full blast at first because you’ve been out all day), put the kettle on, then turn on the stove to cook dinner.

That time from 6 pm to 8 pm, when the sun has gone down and the wind is usually calm will for ever be a tight wire act for our power system.

Welcome to our brave new future of Net Zero.

The Globe Refuses to warm

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From wattsupwiththat.com

The new Pause lengthens: now 7 years 6 months

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The new Pause has lengthened by another month. On the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, seven and a half years have passed since there was any trend in global warming at all. As always, if anyone has seen this surely not uninteresting fact mentioned in the Marxstream news media, let us know in comments. One of the best-kept secrets in what passes for “journalism” these days is that global temperature has not been rising steadily (or, since October 2014, at all). It has been rising in occasional spurts in response to natural events such as the great Pacific shift of 1976 and the subsequent strong el Niño events, rather than at the somewhat steadier rate that one might expect if our continuing – and continuous – sins of emission were the primary culprit.

To forestall the usual whingeing about “cherry-picking” from the climate-fanatical trolls, here is the entire HadCRUT4 record of monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies for the 172 years 1850-2021. The trend is a not particularly catastrophic half a degree per century equivalent. Oo-er! Stap me vitals!

The HadCRUT4 dataset, now at last updated to the end of 2021, shows no global warming for almost eight years:

The significance of these long Pauses should not be underestimated. IPCC (1990, p. xxiv) confidently predicted 1.8 K global mean anthropogenic warming from 1850-2030. Of this, 0.5 K (HadCRUT5: Morice et al. 2021) had occurred by 1990, so that the projection was equivalent to 1.3 K over the four decades 1991-2030, or 0.34 K decade–1. However, observed warming from January 1991 to December 2021 as the mean of the monthly UAH lower-troposphere and HadCRUT4 surface monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies, was 0.5 K, or 0.18 K decade–1. Even if all warming since 1990 was anthropogenic (which it was not), IPCC’s finger-in-the-air prediction has proven to be almost twice outturn.

Meanwhile, soi-disant “leaders” on both sides of the Atlantic, having half-wittedly committed themselves to the Party Line on climate so sedulously peddled for so long by the Desinformatsiya directorate of the KGB (now FSB) and by the many Chinese agents of influence (such as the “Confucius Institutes” at many Western universities), dare not lose face. They cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong, that they have been fooled, and that they have needlessly and expensively ended the free market in energy supply. They cannot brin themselves to change their catastrophic and unaffordable energy policies, even in the face of the fact that it was their eagerness to suppress competition from coal-fired power-stations in the name of Saving The Planet that was the chief source of funding for Vlad the Invader’s special military massacre in Ukraine.

Read the rest of the article here

Great News About Climate Litigation

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From the IPA:

IPA TODAY

Federal Court Decision A Welcome Move Against Climate Litigation

Written by Morgan Begg

15 March 2022

The Institute of Public Affairs has today welcomed the Federal Court of Australia’s finding that the federal Minister for Environment does not owe a duty of care to protect Australian children from climate change.

“Today’s decision was a long overdue display of common sense from Australian courts,” said Morgan Begg, the Director of the Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs.

“The Australian courts should never have entertained the farcical attempt to prohibit mining and energy projects through the judicial backdoor.”

“The Full Court of the Federal Court today unanimously overturned a May 2021 Federal Court decision that found the federal Minister for Environment, when deciding whether or not to grant approval to a coal mine development, owed a duty of care to Australians under the age of 18 to avoid causing them personal injury as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide emissions.”

“The Justices were putting it lightly when they said the duty would have been “incoherent and inconsistent” under the legislation.”

“It would also be incoherent and inconsistent with a system where decisions about economic development and energy security are made as part of a democratic process,” said Mr Begg.

Morgan Begg

Morgan Begg is the Director, Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs