Resisting Climate Hysteria

[noco]

Nioka, are you sure you haven't been watching some news clips from India or Vietnam because if you have travelled to various parts of the world you will have a deep appreciation of Australia when you return home for comparison.

As for the incurable disease of Emphysema, smoking is a high contributor to this problem, but there are also other causes such as repeated exposure to asbestos or other chemicals that are harmful to the lungs, especially over a substantial time period. I have a friend who was exposed to asbestos and who never smoked. He suffers from Emphysema and has always lived in the country. So I would say your argument is a little lop-sided.

Nioka, I heard of another case of emphysema today from a bowling colleague of mine who was a heavy smoker and ended up with this terrible complaint. To make matters worse, his wife also has the same problem and near life's end. She never smoked in her entire life. The doctors put it down to passive smoking from her husband who always smoked inside their house.

 

[Smurf1976]

I didn't see this reported in the big island press. Maybe that's evidence that ordinary people are having to choose between rent and food, power and transport, all over the nation and it's therefore not news. Maybe it's too close to mainstream experience and people are afraid to acknowledge it.

It's getting absolute saturation coverage down here on a daily basis.

As for linking it to carbon, my point is simply that there are consequences if energy prices rise. We're not just talking about "low income earners" here. Basically anyone with children or someone home all day is suffering enough already unless they're earning substantially above average income and/or have no rent or mortgage to pay.

Either that or they're one of the few who, like me, use ridiculously little power because they knew this was coming and took action to prepare for it. But if you're low income, in rented accommodation and are getting $1000 power bills then you've got a battle on your hands to still keep eating that's for sure.

As for the politics of it all, the push to go back to a single state-run energy supplier seems to be gaining momentum with Labor, Liberal and Green all seemingly now open to the idea. The wheel has finally turned there I think... And if the other states did the same then that alone would immediately cut CO2 by a significant amount simply through increased operating efficiency of existing power stations.

Interesting times to say the least. Glad I've got solar power and a wood fire to keep me warm.

 

[jonojpsg]

How very, very sad to see ordinary Australians literally in tears over the cost of electricity at a public meeting in Hobart last Friday. Ordinary families, ordinary pensioners etc who just can't afford to keep paying skyrocketing bills and who have been left with no choice other than to go without heating and, in some cases, hot water as well.

Hey smurf, as a Tasmanian as well I have been watching this fuss over rising electricity prices with a touch of frustration. The people who are in tears over huge power bills are ones in the main who have little or no understanding of how that power gets used. This IMO is what leads to their huge bills rather than rising prices.

For example, a little blow heater (commonly 2.4kW) that sits in the corner of a room and runs 12 hours a day heating that one room costs 12x2.4x20c/kWh per day or close to $5 per day. Over a 90 day billing period, that means one blow heater is adding around $450 to their bill. If people do not understand this they are much more likely to fall into the trap of doing just that.

Yes I understand that pensioners do not have access to capital to upgrade their heating source in most cases, but surely there can be a significant improvement in the size of peoples bills if they are more careful in their use of electricity.

Also, in terms of peoples overall budget, power bills probably represent about 5%. This means that a 20% increase in electricity costs over the next three years in Tassie represents only a 1% increase in the overall budget, over three years. Surely this is a storm in a teacup

 

[Smurf1976]

Yes I understand that pensioners do not have access to capital to upgrade their heating source in most cases, but surely there can be a significant improvement in the size of peoples bills if they are more careful in their use of electricity.

Fuel poverty and my personal circumstances at the time is actually what lead me to become interested in the whole area of energy, power generation and so on.

These days I get a very small bill, and earning a decent income it's not presently an issue for me. But there are plenty of people, many of them employed full time, doing it tough these days due in part to energy costs.

Consider the situation of my mother. Not working due to age, electric hot water and cooking, heat pump for heating. The last bill wasn't much under $700 and that's after the pension discount. That's a pretty large slice of mum's pension going striaght into the hands of the power industry. Over the year, it's more than 10% of her total income that goes on electricity.

But if she had direct electric heating, common in public housing (mum owns her own home so can have more sensible heating...), the Winter bill would amount to about $1300. That's nearly 4 weeks' pension, just to pay a 3 month power bill. There's plenty of people in that situation right now and it's not nice. (OK, they don't actually spend $1300 - because they go cold instead, but you get the point...).

I don't doubt for a moment that there are many people who lack financial skills etc and this is partly to blame. But if you're home all day in an uninsulated rented house running fan heaters then you're already spending a ridiculous amount on power. A single 2.4kW fan heater is just about worthless in those houses - get 3 of them and then you might start to feel at least a little bit warm... until the power bill arrives. And apart from shivering, there's nothing you can do about it since neither public housing nor private landlords are likely to invest in order to save a tennant money on power.

I'm fundamentally far more capitalist than socialist. But I won't deny that I have actually lost sleep on this one. Easy for me to pay a bill so small that most laugh at first (then ask how I do it...), but a lot of people are really doing it tough out there with no realistic way out of the trap. I've been there before, and I know what it's like.

What to do I really don't know. We need to look after the environment certainly. But I'm worried about creating yet another poverty trap in the process. The only answers I can come up with are effectively socialism - carbon tax then redistribute the wealth and/or use it to improve housing standards. Socialism has plenty of problems of its' own though...

 

[Julia]

This is a fairly horrifying suggestion regarding future power price rises if a price on carbon eventuates.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au...plosion-pd20100930-9RTE3?OpenDocument&src=kgb

We already have hundreds of thousands of Australians whose electricity has been disconnected due to their inability to pay their power bills.

 

[basilio]

This is a fairly horrifying suggestion regarding future power price rises if a price on carbon eventuates.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/...cument&src=kgb

We already have hundreds of thousands of Australians whose electricity has been disconnected due to their inability to pay their power bills.

Couldn't read this but the headline suggested power costs rising fourfold over the next few years. Certainly a terrifying prospect.... unless of course you are the CEO of a power company looking at MAMMOTH increases in profits that you can conveniently excuse as the result of the "need to be green".

I think much of this is just price gouging at an extreme level. I would like to see as a citizen exactly how much extra renewable energy will cost at the source of supply over comparable current figures. What I suspect is that all the companies in the chain simply want to add an extra margin on any additional initial cost. What we will pay is therefore extra cost plus margin plus margin plus.

We already see this now. For example if you decide to install solar power the following issues seem to arise.

1) It takes ages to actually get the system recognised by the power companies through their paperwork. Meanwhile you don't get any recognition for the power input.

2) You are immediately put a new substantially more expensive Tariff. You pay an extra 15-20% for the privilege of being on solar power. You also lose OFF peak tariffs

3) The already very hard to read power bills become totally unintelligible and unbelievable. In particular I havn't seen a single account which tells the customer how much power their solar unit has contributed

I think we need a Royal Commission into the whole industry and a set of firm guidelines to ensure we have renewable energy at a price that reflects real costs rather than simply market place extortion.

 

[jonojpsg]

Now really, I think this is a bit strange. I have been looking into the viability of setting up mid sized wind turbines as one off generators in Tas and I can make a business case for single turbines around 0.5MW selling to Aurora at around 4c/kWh.

Obviously they have all the associated distribution costs to cover but if they can't make a profit selling power at 20c/kWh which is the current retail price, then there's something wrong. Absolutely no need to increase that by fourfold or anywhere near it IMO.

Of course this is in Tas which has some of the best wind resource in the world, and using second hand turbines, but still...

 

[spooly74]

The simple mathematics of decarbonisation in Australia

To become as carbon efficient as Japan by 2020 would require replacing its entire coal energy with a zero-carbon alternative.

If energy demand increases by 1.5 per cent per year - a rate lower than expected economic growth - then Australia would need to build the equivalent amount of carbon-free energy of 46, 750 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plants to replace its coal generation. That is not going to happen.

Several of my colleagues in Australia didn't like the analogy, since, as they tell me, "Australia doesn't do nuclear".

So we can express the magnitude of the challenge in another way, in terms of the number of 10 MW solar thermal power plants of the sort found in Cloncurry, Queensland. To decarbonise to the level of Japan by 2020 would require 12,667 of these plants, or about 24 of them coming online every week over the next decade. That is not going to happen either.

We can play with the numbers and make different assumptions, but the results will be the same: the magnitude of the challenge implied by Australia's pending emissions trading legislation is huge, likely unachievable.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2842060.htm

but,

As part of its deal to secure government, Labor signed a formal alliance with the Greens, whose policies include the eventual phasing out of the coal industry, Australia's biggest export earner.

But in an interview with The Australian, Mr Combet said his background as a former coal engineer, union official and MP with coal workers in his NSW electorate meant he did not believe his job was to shut down the coal industry.

"I don't agree with that. That's not part of my job at all," he said.

"I am acutely aware of the challenges that this policy presents. But people jump to these absolute positions, and I just don't think that's appropriate.

"I've got a responsibility to support those people's jobs. The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future. What you've got to do is look to how we can achieve in the longer term things like carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power stations." . . .

Coal has a future in Australia

 

[Julia]

I think we need a Royal Commission into the whole industry and a set of firm guidelines to ensure we have renewable energy at a price that reflects real costs rather than simply market place extortion.

Couldn't agree more. Governments seem to be totally passive about what's happening in this industry.

 

[sails]

IMO, there are too many differing opinions on climate change. It also seems feasible that there are very long cycles in climate and we may be simply reading something into it that is not really there. And here is an article stating such uncertainties:

Royal Society issues new climate change guide that admits there are 'uncertainties' about the science

The UK’s leading scientific body has been forced to rewrite its guide on climate change and admit that it is not known how much warmer the Earth will become.

The Royal Society has updated its guide after 43 of its members complained that the previous version failed to take into account the opinion of climate change sceptics.

Now the new guide, called ‘Climate change: a summary of the science’, admits that there are some ‘uncertainties’ regarding the science behind climate change.

I am not convinced either way at the moment but don't like the idea of carbon taxes in the event that there isn't a problem. Once a tax is in place, governments in general find it very difficult to let it go again.

 

[Happy]

Probably retrofit insulation would have some play here too.

Taking example from northern Europe where triple glazed windows are standard, we could spend some money here.
Hate to think what pink bat bandits would do with this one!

For some reason I do not blame Government for Pink Batt fiasco.
Dishonesty of operators is to be blamed, Kevin was scape goat here.

 

[Smurf1976]

Couldn't agree more. Governments seem to be totally passive about what's happening in this industry.

We're having what amounts to one step short of a Royal Commission into the power industry here in Tas. But I doubt it will do a lot of good, because...

The basic problem is that the "reforms" introduced across Australia, NZ, UK and elsewhere over the past decades directly build in huge additional costs which are necessarily passed through to consumers. That is the crux of the problem, massive inefficiencies built in to the "market" system and the way it works.

If you want to go back to cheap electricity then there is really only one solution. And that is to have a monopoly operator of generation, transmission and distribution (ie the whole industry) and abolish the concept of "retail" altogether - just read the meters and send out the bills according to set tariffs.

Whether it is privately owned or publicly owned is less important, assuming there is some regulation of profit in either case. It is the disaggregation that has introduced the huge inefficiencies, some of which directly increase CO2 emissions by the way.

In short, there are no longer any such thing as "utlities" that operate to provide a service either at profit or non-profit. The entire industry today has far more in common with a casino than with any rational engineering or economic operation principles. Higher prices are "good", low prices are "bad".

Consumers would be outraged if they realised that they are already being charged to cut CO2 emissions at the same time as power stations purposely dump steam (ie total waste of the fuel burnt) so as to force less efficient (more polluting) plants to operate and thus force up prices and CO2 emissions. The money being spent on renewables, is really only offsetting the purposefully inefficient operation of coal and gas-fired generation.

As for change, my guess is that the only real prospect of that will be after a major failure occurs sometime in Victoria, noting that the system in that state is now (due to under investment) extremely vulnerable in so many ways.

(For obvious reasons of national security etc, I'm not going to post exactly how to cripple the electricity system on a public forum. Suffice to say that there is basically no redundancy in a very key part of the industry in Victoria due to under investment and failure to build certain systems at specific sites. That is a situation which the former SECV would certainly not have felt at all comfortable with, and neither would any other utility which considered itself to have an obligation to maintain a reliable supply so far as practical).

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

Probably retrofit insulation would have some play here too.

Taking example from northern Europe where triple glazed windows are standard, we could spend some money here.
Hate to think what pink bat bandits would do with this one!

For some reason I do not blame Government for Pink Batt fiasco.
Dishonesty of operators is to be blamed, Kevin was scape goat here.

Amazing, but I'll let it pass, read your post again again Happy for enlightenment.

One of the problems we have in Australia with Weather is that we only have data for just over 200 years.

Its all weather imho.

All this scrummage is just left wing politics looking for a cause.

gg

 

[Julia]

If you want to go back to cheap electricity then there is really only one solution. And that is to have a monopoly operator of generation, transmission and distribution (ie the whole industry) and abolish the concept of "retail" altogether - just read the meters and send out the bills according to set tariffs.

I'm guessing this is extremely unlikely to happen. Do you think there's any chance that it could, Smurf?

 

[Smurf1976]

I'm guessing this is extremely unlikely to happen. Do you think there's any chance that it could, Smurf?

Highly unlikely given that for most states we're talking about dismantling an entire financial market, a move that would hurt many "big boys".

That said, if it's going to happen anywhere then it would almost certainly be in Tasmania in the not too distant future. Widespread community outrage over the situation at present, no financial market to worry about dismantling and the reality that the whole lot is now back in government ownership anyway makes it a far easier proposition.

My own guess is that we'll go part of the way but not fully. I can't see it going back to a full "utility" model largely due to the massive fight it would entail between the state government and the ACCC given that this would be creating a monopoly. But there's an awful lot of pressure on the state government to scrap the present model. My guess is they'll go far enough to win votes, but not so far as to be needing an army of lawyers to fight the ACCC.

As for the other states, I just can't see it happening anytime soon although I do note that the industry is, very slowly, reassembling the integrated utility model of its own accord due to the efficiencies it presents. At some point in the future, we'll probably end up with two or at most three major utilities just as we have relatively few major banks, airlines, supermarkets, communications networks and so on. I can't see anything drastic happening in the short term though outside of possibly Tasmania, and even there it is far from certain.

 

[wayneL]

Anyone in doubt about the putrid totalitarian mindset of the ecofascists should watch this video put out by campaigners in the UK.

Warning: This may be disturbing for some people. It is certainly tasteless and a spectacular own goal as it appears to have had precisely the opposite effect than intended.

 

[Logique]

...but don't like the idea of carbon taxes in the event that there isn't a problem. Once a tax is in place, governments in general find it very difficult to let it go again.

Agree completely. More danger in overreaction.

Interesting psychology at work here. The 'change' part is the ill-omen to the green religion. We learned this from activist forays into leafy places. There is a stylized way that forests should be. This should never change. Just so with climate. If it changes in the near term, that's bad, and man must prevent this.

Climate has always changed. I learned in school about the carbon cycle. It goes round and round, but carbon in = carbon out. We're not making new carbon. But of course, I was forgetting, the science is 'decided'.

 

[professor_frink]

Anyone in doubt about the putrid totalitarian mindset of the ecofascists should watch this video put out by campaigners in the UK.

Warning: This may be disturbing for some people. It is certainly tasteless and a spectacular own goal as it appears to have had precisely the opposite effect than intended.

Surely that was someone having a lend? That couldn't possibly be serious

 

[professor_frink]

Ok maybe it wasn't a joke

http://www.1010global.org/uk

Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called 'No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain's leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis - writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we've taken it off our website. We won't be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

I must say I'm at a loss as to how these guys thought this was going to be interpreted as funny. Killing children is funny now?

I'm sure skeptics would be well pleased with this turn of events though. The pro climate change movement have just voluntarily portrayed themselves in a similar light to terrorists:

"if you aren't with us, we'll blow you up"

They should have just gone the whole hog and shown some images from 9/11 to really get their point across! Look for this in the follow up campaign- If you don't believe in climate change we'll fly airplanes into your buildings and kill you all. This can be followed up with some tasteful images of climate change deniers falling to their deaths as they leap out of burning buildings.

 

[basilio]

Ok maybe it wasn't a joke

http://www.1010global.org/uk

I must say I'm at a loss as to how these guys thought this was going to be interpreted as funny. Killing children is funny now?

I'm sure skeptics would be well pleased with this turn of events though. The pro climate change movement have just voluntarily portrayed themselves in a similar light to terrorists:

"if you aren't with us, we'll blow you up"

They should have just gone the whole hog and shown some images from 9/11 to really get their point across! Look for this in the follow up campaign- If you don't believe in climate change we'll fly airplanes into your buildings and kill you all. This can be followed up with some tasteful images of climate change deniers falling to their deaths as they leap out of burning buildings.

What a xxxxing appalling promo ! Just cannot fathom how that idea and it's execution (sic) got put onto you tube.

I think the 10/10 concept was/is really great. But not like this... It should be titled

"How to self destruct in 3 minutes"