Lizzie at 6:50 …
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
 June 29, 2024 6:28 am

“In Groupthink, suspected disbelief lasts until someone breaks and goes, nah, fackit, no really, this is crap…”

…

Good observation, Sancho

As I said, one of us is having a Biden episode, because I don’t remember saying that.

Roger
 June 29, 2024 9:22 am

Arthur Sinodinos will be along any minute now to vouch for Joe Biden.

Greg Sheridan had to write a “Trump wins debate” article through gritted teeth.
He glossed over the debate and started quacking on about the various policy development think-tanks the Dimocrats have, and how the debate rules helped Trump … rules set by the Biden camp and CNN.
He doesn’t think the debate will determine the election. He regards Biden’s performance as “stumbles” like mispronouncing the name of a Russian diplomat, or forgetting the date of some event from the distant past. He doesn’t see it as evidence of catastrophic and irreversible cognitive decline and what that means if he is elected for another four years to the most powerful office in the world.

Real cost of renewables is in your power bills

Chris Uhlmann, The Australian 29 June, 2024

There is a moment of profound irony in the New Testament when Jesus tells Pontius Pilate he has come to bear witness to the truth. “The truth,” Pilate replies. “What is that?” Consider what the author had in mind. Pilot has Christ, aka The Truth, standing right in front of him and he cannot see it.

If you prefer the movies to scripture then truth is also on trial in A Few Good Men when Colonel Nathan Jessup cracks under cross-examination by Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee.

Jessup: You want answers?!

Kaffee: I want the truth!

Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!

Confronted with uncomfortable truths, many prefer their own version of reality.

And so it was when the Energy Institute delivered its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. For over 70 years this report has done the world a great service by simply recording the energy it is consuming.

For some, the truth of this year’s report was confirmation of the extraordinary progress being made by weather-dependent generation.

The Energy Institute declared “New wind and solar installations outpaced all other additions to the global energy mix in 2023”. Carbon Brief agreed that, “In 2023, wind and solar combined added more new energy to the global mix than any other source, for the first time in history.”

This is true. Renewable energy is rising in the world’s primary energy mix, hitting 14.6 per cent, and the share of fossil fuels is falling.

But look closely and the two reports committed what was once seen as the cardinal sin of journalism, burying the lede.

The big story wasn’t hard to spot; it was in the first line of the Energy Institute’s media release.

“Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels,” it said.

Fossil fuel consumption in the world’s primary energy mix did fall, by 0.4 per cent, but it still accounts for 81.5 per cent of the stuff that makes the world work. Oil production increased by 1.8 million barrels a day to reach a new high of 96 million barrels a day in 2023.

Let’s stick with the zeitgeist and put the good news on coal first. In Europe and North America coal consumption “has been in constant decline over the past 10 years”. But then, this: “Global coal production reached its highest-ever level, beating the previous high set the year before.”

“Whilst China is by far the largest consumer of coal (it beat its own record set in 2022 and now accounts for 56 per cent of the world’s total consumption), in 2023 India exceeded the combined consumption of Europe and North America for the first time ever,” the report says.

The only thing that is changing with coal is where it is burnt, and not much of anything has changed with the world’s consumption of oil. It all nets out to an increase in carbon emissions, exactly the opposite of what the world says it wants to do.

In Australia this week the search for a needle of truth in the energy haystack focused on the alleged ruinous cost of nuclear energy.

Having a debate about energy costs is vital because if they continue to rise it will cripple industry and further beggar the poor. The starting point should be serious scrutiny of the cost of the renewables-dominant system the government favours and what it will do to the retail price of power.

Recall Labor’s pledge to cut power bills rested on the dubious claim that wholesale electricity prices would fall because when wind and solar generate it, the fuel is free.

This thesis was neatly summed up in the beginnings of an energy haiku penned by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

“The sun and wind don’t send a bill.”

Alas, the retailer does, and prices keep going up.

Stephen Wilson, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland, has tackled this myth in a new report for the Institute of Public Affairs titled “The Ruinous Cost of Free Energy”.

He points out what all energy ministers ignore: that the cost of wholesale electricity is not set by the lowest cost of generation on the National Electricity Market. It is set by the highest. And the size of the bill for consumers and taxpayers does not rest on the wholesale price alone. Australians will pay for the total system cost.

But even the wholesale electricity price won’t fall across a year under the government’s plan, because the frequent troughs of weather-dependent generation must be covered by something and whatever that something is will be expensive.

Wilson notes the cheapest system is the one we inherit, engineered in the 20th century on a foundation of low-cost mine-mouth coal.

Gas and energy expert Saul Kavonic says price spikes and scarcity in energy will cause manufacturing to be “unsustainable”.

“It can provide bulk electricity at a wholesale cost level in round numbers of about $50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) or in other words 5c per kilowatt-hour (kWh).”

With the retirement of coal, and the rise of wind and solar, the balance has shifted to an era where gas dominates price setting, as it fires up to cover renewable generation troughs. Even if gas only “meets the last megawatt of demand, it sets the spot price for all generators operating at that moment across the entire market”.

“(If) an extra unit of gas for the marginal generator is about $10 per gigajoule (GJ), then the wholesale electricity price at that moment will be about $100/MWh, which is 10c/kWh.” So, double what we once paid and entirely a function of covering the limitations of variable renewable energy.

The truth of Wilson’s thesis played out in what happened to the wholesale price during the recent cold, still nights, but this is just a halfway house on the road to ever more expensive power. The next phase will be worse.

“If the system is to be operated only on wind, solar and hydro power, with energy shuffled in and out of large and small storage assets and devices, the generation cost averaged across the energy for the total interconnected system will approach $200/MWh (20c/kWh) or more,” the report says.

“The further the system moves away from the inherited generation system in the coal-based ‘$50 cost zone’ through the gas-based ‘$100 cost zone’ and towards the wind- and solar-based ‘$200 cost zone’, the more the actual outcomes for final consumers are likely to escalate to even higher price levels.”

Wilson concludes that the lowest cost system is the one we have, and the next-lowest cost system is one built on new baseload power plants, whether they be coal or nuclear. And the focus of this entire debate should be: How do you generate zero-emissions energy without a catastrophic fall in living standards?

No doubt Wilson’s thesis will be furiously contested. But time will out. The truth will be written in your electricity bill.

Some inconvenient truths to point out to any renewables enthusiasts in your sphere of influence.

Article by by Peter Jennings, The Australian 29 June 2024
Forget the media circus, Julian Assange put our brave soldiers’ lives in danger

PETER JENNINGS

Now that he is out of His Majesty’s Belmarsh Prison, we will come to know the real Julian, not the figure managed so artfully over the past decade by the Assange fan club. 

Julian Assange has returned to Australia and into the arms of his family after reaching a plea deal with the United States.
Anthony Albanese is, as usual, describing the situation rather than defining it. “Look, I think that there will continue to be different views about Julian Assange and his activity,” he told a media gaggle on Thursday. The Prime Minister is just relieved that “this saga is over”.

Albanese should be worried that the next phase of the saga is about to begin. Whatever Assange has in mind for his future, it won’t involve being obliging to Albo.Could the Prime Minister even articulate the “different views” that people are supposed to have about Assange? We are unlikely to find out.Albanese had the sense to stay away from Canberra airport although the instinct must surely have run deep to jump into C1 with Toto and charge for a photo opportunity. The challenge for the PM will be to milk what credit he can from facilitating the return of a driven, deeply idiosyncratic individual with the potential to become a deep headache for the political left.

Assange’s WikiLeaks shot to global prominence on July 25, 2010, when it released online what it called the Afghanistan War Diary – 91,000 reports “written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, (and including) intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details”.

This act flung Canberra into a panic. What if these reports gave targetable details of Australian military operations, or named ­Afghans working with Defence or intelligence? I was deputy secretary for strategy in Defence and was tasked to lead a process reviewing the leaked material. The context is important. We were fighting a bloody counter-terrorism war at the time. 
On June 7, 2010, sapper Jacob Moerland, 21, was killed by an improvised explosive device in the Mirabad Valley of Uruzgan province. Injured in the same explosion was sapper Darren Smith, 25. He was evacuated by helicopter and later died of his wounds. On June 21, privates Scott Palmer, 27, Timothy Aplin, 38, and Benjamin Chuck, 27, all serving with the special forces, were killed on operations in a Blackhawk helicopter crash. Then on July 9, private Nathan Bewes, 23, was killed and another soldier wounded by an IED in Uruzgan’s Chora Valley. 

A fortnight later, Assange’s WikiLeaks release of uncensored battlefield reports put our forces, indeed the whole of the international coalition in Afghanistan, and the many brave Afghans fighting with us, under serious risk.
The only group that could benefit from this tactical information was the Taliban.

I mention the names of these fine soldiers to help the Prime Minister understand how it is that some people may have “different views” about Assange. Many more ADF deaths and woundings followed. The essence of political leadership is to separate the spin from what truly matters rather than pretend that different views are just happy celebrations of ­diversity.
On Sky News on Wednesday, The Australian’s Washington ­correspondent Adam Creighton argued that “in the 14 years this stuff’s been out there, you know, there has basically been no damage at all”. “Those who attack Assange, they claim that, you know, he has caused enormous danger to various people but I just don’t see that has been borne out in reality. And frankly, even if it is true then that’s the price of, you know, knowing the truth.”“The truth” looks different looking backward from, you know, the safety of a television studio.

At the time, in the middle of Australia’s most serious combat operations since the Vietnam War, Assange threw a bomb into the middle of the ADF.
No one was taking this risk more seriously than Stephen Smith, then foreign minister, soon to become defence minister, and Kevin Rudd, who in June 2010 had just lost the prime ministership, but would become foreign minister in September of that year. WikiLeaks kept throwing bombs. In October 2010, 391,832 combat reports from Iraq were put online, again uncensored. And beginning in November 2010, tens of thousands of State Department cables started to be released. 

The Australian Washington Correspondent Adam Creighton discusses whether Julian Assange’s publishing of classified material on Wikileaks was justified.One of those cables, marked secret, reported that in 2009, then prime minister Rudd told the US embassy that Afghanistan “scared the hell out of him”. He was right to be so worried.

It is by no means clear that the material put online by Assange did not cause deaths. After President Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in ­August 2021, we know that the ­Taliban targeted Afghans who worked for the International Security Assistance Force. The combat reports have never been taken off the WikiLeaks site. The release of the State Department cables caused significant disruption to Western intelligence operations globally, including the urgent withdrawal of exposed agents. Some of Assange’s supporters may celebrate that as a dismantling of an evil state apparatus, but that would be a case of not “knowing the truth” so much as just being unable to handle it. 

The biggest geopolitical beneficiaries of WikiLeaks were Russia and China. They don’t indulge quirky libertarians like Assange. By contrast, the democracies, particularly the US, suffered. Reading through the combat reports and the cables, the picture that emerges is not one of the Deep State malignly plotting, or that of a war machine endlessly committing war crimes. These are fantasy views, animating fringe-dwellers on the hard left and right of politics.What is revealed is flawed democracies fighting confused wars with barely coherent strategic planning, imperfect knowledge and limited resources. Mistakes get made. The benefit of the US and Australian systems is that we will regularly admit to the fault.

A fair reading of the State Department cables would judge that American diplomats are, very often, savvy judges of character and political processes.
Is it news to anyone that the US embassy thought Rudd was a “control freak”?As a Defence official closely engaged with a variety of different governments, I can reveal that the heart of modern democracy is not an all-knowing, all-controlling “Deep State” – you will find that only in China. What we have is the Shallow State – something that looks more like a sweaty and short-sighted clown troop riding the dodgem cars. 

Based Politics Podcast Co-host and Journalist Brad Polumbo says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange acted “reckless” and in a “haphazard way” to leak sensitive US documents.That is what WikiLeaks reveals. Spare me the nonsense about fearlessly exposing the truth. 
What happens next? Assange could turn his gaze towards how successive Australian governments have increasingly misused national security classifications to cover up political stupidity.It has been a long time since the security classifications of “confidential”, “secret” and “top secret” have been used, as intended, to control information of genuine ­national security significance. 

The government failed to release a recent report by David Peever on innovation and the Defence Strategic Review by Stephen Smith and Sir Angus Houston, and they did so on spurious national ­security grounds. 
Albanese has created a new role for himself as the bringer-home of incarcerated Australians. He does not mention the Islamic State ­jihadi brides and children returned in October 2022 in his roll call of success.
The good news for Albanese is that DFAT reports 318 cases of Australians imprisoned overseas in 2022-23, including 49 in China, 47 in the US and 30 in Vietnam. Will they all get a phone call from the Prime Minister upon return? How about a private jet with Rudd and Smith in attendance? One hopes both these gentlemen are profoundly embarrassed by having to accompany Assange. That could only have been a prime ministerial call and was completely unnecessary.On Thursday morning ABC Radio, Stella Assange asked only for privacy for her family in comments reminiscent of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, surely the only close competitors for such media attention. But I can’t see ­Julian marketing his own brand of dog biscuits. 

Instead, he may consider politics. In an election for half the Senate, a 14.3 per cent vote – a “quota” – lands a Senate position. With global name recognition, Assange will threaten the Greens for a Senate spot in any state in the country. Assange previously ran for a Senate position for the WikiLeaks Party in 2013. An early disturber of Assange’s privacy might be a call from Adam Bandt who, presumably, would rather have Assange in the Greens tent than out of it. Bandt could see Assange as a political threat. There are plenty of inner metropolitan seats in Sydney and Melbourne where Assange would stand a solid chance off knocking off a Labor or Greens incumbent.

For the rest of us, including the thousands who maintain onerous security clearances, the image of Albanese’s grinning phone call welcoming Assange home will ­linger. Given the government’s obsession with secrecy and information control, common decency and a touch of political astuteness would suggest the PM should give Assange a wide berth. Assange was found guilty by our closest ally of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. The man is no hero. The same action would put any Defence official in prison. Albanese should acknowledge that, out of respect for the thousands of loyal Australians who ­uphold our national security.
 
Peter Jennings is director of Strategic Analysis Australia and was executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute from 2012 to 2022. He is a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department (2009-12).

Biden’s FB page.
“Folks I may not walk as easily or talk as smoothly as I used to.
I might not debate as well as I used to.
But what I do know is how to tell the truth”.
FMD.
“I am a sandwich short of a picnic but I will tell the truth … if I can remember it”.

Taped conversation in the DNC conference room late last evening, after the debate.

” Are you on drugs, man. We can’t print 38 million fake ballots and not get caught”.

Lots of contributors here have health issues as the years pass. So here is an encouraging remark from Edith Wharton:

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways”.

Where’s m0nster?

The content of what Biden had to say, eh, m0nster.
Let’s go to the CNN transcript …

We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.

Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.

Makes sense to me.

Dover makes a good point.
To replace Dementia Joe as candidate necessitates replacing him as President – not legally, but politically.
Putting Kamala in the big chair, even with adult supervision, is untenable.

FMD. Nick Shirley goes out and asks folks, mainly black, before and after the debate who they’re going to vote for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyXHQHqJpEs

Biden’s latest slogan …
“Sure, I’m shithouse.
But I’m the best we got.”

Googled “Ruinous cost of free energy” and got zero on Stephens research except a link to Ulhman article and useless white noise

Ditto, RD.

Will have to have a look around the IPA site.

Several other links to his work, though.