The government went to Glasgow to sell its net zero emissions by 2050 policy to world leaders. The policy was based on heroic assumptions like green hydrogen becoming the cheapest source of electricity, and solar power, which presently costs $70 per MWh as long as suppliers dictate demand, falling to $15 per MWh.
Now we have the “modelling” ostensibly behind the policies the government took to Glasgow. It projects increased incomes of $2,000 per head by 2050. These increased income levels are pure conjecture involving
• avoidance of a pariah tax by the rest of the world on all Australian borrowings,
• a new array of “critical minerals” that will more than fill the anticipated gap in mining output and exports from a forecast halving of coal. These developments are said to be the result of a wise government gathering taxes and redistributing them to sound ventures that politicians and public servants are uniquely capable of foreseeing.
• further gains from ‘unknown unknowns’ technologies that are even more far-fetched than those identified.
The modelling assumes the beneficial redirections of income, largely comprising the tax and spend of $20 billion are equivalent to a carbon tax of $24 per tonne. Even the green-infused International Energy Agency puts the necessary tax for net zero at $US75 per tonne and more grounded estimates are in the hundreds of dollars.
The government will claim that its policies are better than those being incubated by the ALP. But we already are spending as a nation some $19 billion a year in taxes, regulatory impositions and investments made possible only by those taxes and regulations. Our living standards are being seriously diminished by the drain on our production potentiality from policies actuated by a myth — a myth that insists that without them dangerous climate consequences will follow.
See the entire piece at the Spectator
Am I lucky this morning?
As Judith Sloan wrote in an excellent Spectator piece on the Business Council backflip on the basis of alleged modelling, enonometric modelling was invented to make voodoo look good.
As though diverting capital into green schemes will yield dividends for the punters.
We may have a more receptive audience when the proverbial starts hitting the fan in the northern winter, but spare a thought for the old and poor people who will die for want of affordable power.
ABC online had a piece last week by two reporterettes on urban heat islands in the western suburbs of Melbourne & Sydney, with “backfill” housing developments resulting in more brick & concrete and less green space. They cited an academic who said that hundreds of Australians die prematurely each year from heat stress, presumably because they can’t afford air con.
Where’s the “social justice” in that?
Politicians feel they can get away with a lot by setting targets that are beyond their likely career or even life.
Morrison could ruin this country, retire with a pension, and then eventually lowered into the ground while massed choirs of j’ismists and retired parliamentarians intone tedious panegyrics on how great he was.
We should institute a law where, if a creature like Morro authors a disaster and it can be demonstrated that he had the means to know better but opted to avoid it, we can dig up his remains and subject them to humiliation on pay-per-view.
Some people are squeamish about visiting the sins of the father on the children but since that wobbly imposter is ruining our children’s lives perhaps this ought not to be dismissed on reflexive morality. Unless they denounce the old fraud and pay back money that they benefited from, paid to their father under the pretense he was helping, then they leave themselves complicit.
Maybe Morro might feel a little less sanguine about bleeding us white in that case.
A bit like what happened to Oliver Cromwell then he Mother Lode.
Agree re Scumo . . . As for Cromwell . . . he was right !
Morrison was quoted in The Australian recently as saying that when new technology reached the right price targets it could “be commercialised and introduced at scale.”
I’d love Steve Kates to take this absurdity apart, but my take is that Morrison is making it all up as he goes along. According to him, falling price expectations act as signals to entrepreneur-innovators who will all cheer once Angus Taylor’s hopeful targets are met.
Taylor’s giving Rhodes scholarships a bad name.
Death by heat stress is nonsense, there is no reason to die from heat as long as you are hydrated and not exposed to the direct rays of the sun.
Anyone who dies from heat, and also from covid, is almost certainly so close to falling off the twig due to other causes then it takes the merest puff of wind (metaphorically) to end it all.
And if you are uncomfortable in hot weather, as I am, affordable air conditioning is a gift from the technological gods!
Er…that was my point, Rafe; for many at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum it is not affordable thanks to government intervention in the electricity market in favour of renewables.
I wax and wane about Scomo’s modelling issues. On one hand I say ” What a croc.” but on the other I say ” If your continually confronted with all the made up climate modelling why not respond with your own set of make believe. ”
It’s almost amusing to hear the believers complaining about someone else’s assumptions.
Anything short of not turning up, or showing up to tell them Climate Change is just another word for Communism, is a vote the their retarded Climate Change ideas.
This is why conservatism is dead – it has conserved nothing, as all it does is delay the inevitable as they pander to find a middle-ground with those that cannot be satiated.
Governments can commission ‘modelling’ to show whatever they want it to show. Modelling is just another form of corruption.
Do I understand this correctly ?
Make Green Hydrogen with solar electricity so as to use it to generate electricity ?
Surely I have misunderstood ?
The govt’s climate modelling and policies should be taken almost as seriously as China’s commitments to decarbonise its economy. Until the world’s major emitters get serious, Australia should not financially damage its economy in exchange for little or no impacts on global atmospheric CO2 levels.
“Surely I have misunderstood ?”
You have not.
No-one who has looked at the numbers has said it makes sense.
Same as “CO2 = bad, therefore ban petrol and use electric car” which runs on coal-fired electricity, which produces more CO2 then petrol, even if the storage was 100% efficient, which it is not.
Same as “Dams are bad for the environment (Franklin river anyone?), but we need storage so let’s spent billions on more dams that would be lucky to cover 10% of required power”
Same as “your old car is polluting – get a newer, cleaner one” while ignored the energy used to build said car, especially their “high-tech” batteries (in terms of “cradle to grave” and over 160,000km, a Prius requires the emission of more CO2 than a 5.7 V8 Commodore, as well as having more toxic chemicals to dispose of and more stuff that can’t be recycled)
One of the few people who has bothered to do a cost/benefit analysis is Bjorn Lomburg and he is denigrated by the leftists because he wants to do the most benefit for the least cost.
As Jordan Peterson points out, there are 200 “goals” in the UN’s “sustainable development” agenda, but there is, and will not be, no priortised list for them. It’s all bluff and bluster, lots of light and noise signifying nothing. Make work. Feel good about yourself for being virtuous stuff.
Which would be fine if it didn’t cost those least able to afford it the most, if it didn’t involve taking “subsidies” from those without assets and giving them to those with assets, if there was one side of politics that was for and one against. But we have all the bad parts of those, and no-one prepared to even state the bad parts.
Poor fella, my country.