TRAINING a donkey for The Everest would be easy compared to prepping the LNP for the big race. The big race isn’t the next election, by the way – a glittering but secondary event – but an older, weightier contest: the good fight to ensure truth wins out over lies. On the causes beloved of the left – most founded on fiction and cousins only once removed from psychological pathology – the Coalition has first given up and then feigned zeal for a tangential irrelevancy. Think Tony Abbott and free speech, Scott Morrison and religious liberty or Peter Dutton quibbling over the commas and font of the Voice. Liberals and Nationals are chaperones of decline. However disabused I am of their worth, last Tuesday I was still astonished to hear what Barnaby Joyce said to Paul Murray on energy and electricity. The homily was so shameless I thought it would be reported as news in its own right. Not so, as it happens. I guess there are few things more ex than a doubly former deputy. For your edification, I transcribed the quote from the video:
See, you wanted 2050 zero emissions, you wanted to be, you know, enlightened. Well, here comes the bill. The bill’s turning up. Every time you buy fuel, there’s your 2050 bill. Every time you buy groceries – because of the cost of fertiliser and the cost of transport – there’s your 2050 bill. Every time you pay for power – and it’s going to go through the roof, it is going to go absolutely through the roof – there’s your 2050 bill. And when you hear people talking about renewables, they are lying… It is not possible. What you will see – unless we decide to go nuclear; and they’re not courageous enough to go down that path – you are gong to suffer the sins of what’s happening now in the UK. It is coming to you. It is happening to you now. You are becoming poorer. You are paying more from your wallet. It is hurting. But you voted for it.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Australians had no choice but to vote for it in May’s federal election – thanks to… Barnaby Joyce. Beguiled by News Corp into a half-smart tactical accedence in October 2021, then Prime Minister Morrison was only a negative vote away from repudiation on net zero by 2050 when the Nationals held a party room vote on the subject. They meekly approved, convinced they could get away with it in their regional constituencies by all the “safeguards” on offer (read: pork). Joyce was known to be against the policy but he couldn’t win over his own colleagues and he didn’t resign on principle. What this meant for voters then – and does mean from now on – is that Australia is a one party state on emissions. By attempting to electorally neutralise climate, the LNP enabled a suicide cult and signed you up as a member. The day in early November 2021 that I saw reports of Morrison’s plan to spend $250 million on getting 1.7 million electric conveyances on the road by 2030 was the day I ceased being a Coalition voter.
Unfortunately, Opposition Leader Dutton’s way out of climate Jonestown – nuclear advocacy – is another mistake born of the foolish idea that ceding to your foe the moral premise and skirmishing for polemical leftovers is smart politics. It isn’t and never has been. Not because we shouldn’t have as many reactors as we need to power businesses, industry and households. A domestic electricity bill in a country with 1,692,700 tonnes of uranium (or 28 percent of the world’s reserves) should be a two-figure affair. No, the problem is this: to call for a revolutionary novelty that your own side of the aisle was too afraid to inaugurate for eight and a half years only entrenches the lie of ‘climate crisis’ still further and vindicates its promoters. Here’s Dutton last week: “If you don’t like coal and you don’t like gas, unless you believe clean hydrogen is about to be a reality, then what else firms up renewables?” The message here is that we’re all climateers now but only the LNP wants to have a “conversation” about going nuclear. Instead, the alternative Prime Minister should repudiate net zero and promote coal, gas and nuclear because they’ll keep the lights on, reduce the cost of living and make us richer and more powerful. The truth: give it a shot.
And if the LNP throughout Australia cannot promote the above then they are anti-Australian and closet communists one and all and filth.
You give the current mentality of the electorate far too much credit. There was a choice at the last Federal election: the so called freedom parties. Yet there was NO massive flight of votes from the Liberal to them. Rather, the big swing was from the soft zero proposed by the Liberals to the very hard and high cost power so rabidly promised by Labor, Teals and the Greens; all massive winners.
Make no mistake, politicians are excellent in judging the mood of the electorate, otherwise they would be out of a job. There is nothing wrong with what Mr. Joyce has written. The lunacy of the mob continues to be such, that if the LNP made cheap, clean, coal power their centrepiece against Labor’s zero, they would be totally wiped out (as in the last WA elections). As it is, we still have a very viable opposition.
You, I and the other sane people in this blog and a small logical minority in Australia, have to somehow survive the insanity and chaos inflicted by most of those around us. Nowadays, one lunatic feeds of another in their rush to promote even bigger idiotic schemes to destroy the old, moral fabric of society. This is snowballing from the 85% of Australians who supported the destruction of the family as a sacrifice to the gods of same sex marriage. You are very optimistic that you can turn these zombies around. They are the same lynch mob baying for net zero now. As Mr. Joyce implies, the only way they can be woken from their insane stupor, is if they are hurt very, very, biggly by the consequences of their stupidity and their noses rubbed into the resultant smell until they nauseate. And even then, who knows!
How come so many here still do not get it? How come so many on this blog, and elsewhere, are doing calculations for a non-existent future.
I will repeat…. it’s like a train-load of Jews arriving at Auschwitz and the passengers being surprised at how little food, bedding etc etc etc there is for them “these Nazis are nuts. They haven’t got a clue how they will provide for six million of us when we ALL get relocated. Crazy krauts!”
The elites / elitists want the masses to suffer; to get it good and hard. The actual morons are the middle /upper-middle class folk who somehow believe / hope they will be included in the privileged group doing the rogering, rather than getting it themselves.
And that’s all it is. The snobs think they will be in the saddle. They think by feeding the crocodile they will not be eaten by the crocodile. FFS: renewables have never been about providing ANY kind of nice future for the masses!
John.
As I recall, the WA liberals were wiped out in WA as their emissions reduction policy was the most aggressive in the country. So aggressive everyone thought Kirkup a new euphemism for something starting with F but still ending in up.
Their strategy was to chase votes from people who will never ever vote fir them.
That, and WA electors convinced the government kept them safe in the isolated little island.
Morrison was The Trumble candidate and despite at times talking a good talk and even winning an election pushing back against this insanity, he vindicated the vipers support.
Party politicians that don’t have the support of their party don’t last long, it’s why the left use every possible tool to make them think the public support positions the left support. Or at the least run dead.
It’s been interesting to watch Albo squirm about the republic, the libs would do well to take notice and pin the alp hard now, while the media is on the band wagon. In the end they need a mechanism to rally popular support, they do not. Trump does though and that’s why they hate him.
They timidly say we should have a conversation about it. Libs and Nats are trundling this conversation line out over and over like frightened mice. This really gets up my nose.
HELL NO!
They should be promising to build 4 full sized nuclear power stations by 2030 and promising to enforce the retention of the coal power fleet until at least they’re up and running.
Take your stupid conversation and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Thank you C.L., you’ve nailed it.
Less than two years ago I attended a function and sat next to a Liberal backbencher. Nice person. I politely asked him if, over the next few years, the Liberal Party will do with gas what it’s done with coal over the last ten years, basically say nothing, do nothing and actively capitulate to the progressive left’s demonisation of gas, the way coal has been demonised and is now a four letter word. This Liberal agreed with me but all he could do was shrug his shoulders. It was clear that he and others had given up the fight.
It’s funny reading your wonderful missive, because I was only thinking of similar last night but your words, as always, are the most articulate and precise. The Liberal Party, under that joke called Scott Morrison and with the connivance of cowards like the Beetroot Man, committed suicide last November, philosophically and electorally. The worst thing about that decision, along with others like throwing more money at their ABC, leaving the religious freedom bill until the eleventh hour, banning the drilling of oil and gas off NSW, was that it was a desperate attempt to appease voters who would never ever vote Liberal..and in the meantime spitting in the face of the Liberal base. And now I can’t stop laughing at the party’s sudden nuclear conversion. Where was such talk prior to the election? There was silence, nothing after the disastrous November decision, nothing in the lead up to May election, perhaps some spruiking of nuclear power as a energy source may have abated Labor’s win…..may, may, may. Instead that joke of a PM clowned his way to electoral annihilation and it wasn’t funny to watch. At least in the Ukraine they have a real clown.
I haven’t even mentioned Morrison and the Liberals’ Covid response, one day saying there’ll be no vaccine mandates, the next day saying nothing whilst Australians are losing their jobs because there are mandates, silence whilst Australians were having their rights trampled on, silence when Australians, usually Victorians, were being bashed by a politicised thuggish police force. I could go on, the examples are numerous. But strangely, Morrison had a lot to say about our SAS soldiers, about Cardinal Pell, about Christine Holgate, about the alleged in the Brittany Higgins case, usually abusing parliamentary privilege in the process.
And the coup de grace…..Morrison collected portfolios the way a tinpot South American leader collects medals.
The Liberal Party is dead.
Excellent article, CL. is it me or has Vicki been dumped as a columnist?
Wot Mantaray said.
The political elite long ago abandoned any pretence of hiding their contempt for the mug punter voters.
In my experience, even polite queries to the state and federal MP receive first evasion, then derision, then smears in response, these days.
Given what I take to be CL’s observation that whatever may be done to alleviate the climate crisis only buys into the argument that there is a crisis, going coal etc would indeed be a defusing of whatever is unfounded in crisis presuppositions; and doing so would set free a new field of discourse.
Fertiliser and grocery bills are up because not zero emissions but because of fossil fuels.
Getting to net zero is a positive for the economy and prices in general on every study I have seen.
This reminds me of Sky after dark blaming renewables for the last blackout Melbourne had when it was caused by the intermittent, unsafe and unreliable coal fi red power stations.
a new coal fired power station would take 8 years to build be over twice the cost of existing coal fired power and still have units breaking down.
nuclear power is half as expensive again as well as taking 15 years to build and wait for it a price on carbon to be competitive with coal. Probably around $60!
Nailed it, C.L.
This is exactly the same message I’ve been trotting out to friends and family in the slight hope they will see the light.
However I don’t see a significant turnaround in their attitudes against fossil fuels because they are well and truly brainwashed. I assume the rest of the population is the same and any groundswell of opinion against renewables will not occur.
So unfortunately we are in the hands of politicians to lead us back to sense and sensibility. LNP will not do it so we are left with the doomsday scenario – when all turns shit (as it will) then, and only then, will the population demand coal, gas, and nuclear.
In the meantime, “preppers” are well advised to advance their planning.
21 century version of “Tractor production has increased a record -51% this year!”.
Imagine being a hundred year old commo.
I see Von Trampis is peddling more incoherent drivel.
Non Mentis
Getting to net zero is a positive for the economy and prices in general on every study I have seen.
Hahahahaha! “Studies”, is there anything they can’t do? More computer models, devices that simply reflect the biases and opinions of those who commission them.
Melbourne had when it was caused by the intermittent, unsafe and unreliable coal fi red power stations.
Are you claiming that ruinables are reliable and continuous sources of electricity? Except when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, of course.
a new coal fired power station would take 8 years to build be over twice the cost of existing coal fired power and still have units breaking down.
Eight years? Isn’t that about the half-life of ruinable generators? And the coal fired generator would operate for around six times that, or three times the life of the ruinable generator. And what, pray tell, is the cost of replacing ruinable generators every 15 or so years? And the cost of disposing of the non-recyclable components?
The beauty of Non Trampis is that he is the litmus paper tha represents the stupidity of the average Australian voter. Convince Non Trampis to vote for clean coal and you’ve convinced the Australian electorate. Good luck with that. I appreciate the difficulty the Liberals are having. Even when electricity will be priced beyond the reach of many people and everybody will be affected by the coming power blackouts; even when you piss on the head of such people, they’ll just shrug it off and deflect that it’s raining. And Darwin’s evolution theory won’t work because there’s more of the same type of mentality being churned out by the commie dominated education system. The only answer I can see is that the few sane people left, not rely on any politician, but insulate themselves from the stupidity of these morons and somehow quarantine ourselves from the shit that will hit us.
well don’t read studies you would merely get a headache!
I am claiming that the last blackout was caused by the highly intermittent, unreliable coal fired power station whose units broke down badly.
Indeed the only reason we did not see black outs recently was because of solar power.
wind generators are recyclable and when they are replaced they generate electricity now even in wind droughts so they are no longer intermittent like coal power.
By the way since the industry is now in private hands do you want to hazard a guess why they are steering a million miles away from coal power.
Typical deplorables. Want highly unreliable highly priced power that the punters can pay for. now that would increase the bills that joyce is talking about.
Can’t even admit the present energy crisis is caused by fossil fuels
Trampo is not the average voter, he is a semi literate leftist shill. His job is to repeat every single leftist position as though it is fact without actually providing any facts that might be able to be refuted. The idea is that through repetition, these positions become fact.
When a fool like Turnbull runs the main opposition to the leftist diversions from reality, we end up with leftist dribble becoming accepted as fact.
Ask Dutch farmers how it all turns out, their government is trying to nationalise their land under the guise of climate disaster.
Posted elsewhere in a different but related context –
Little has changed in millennia:-
(Isaiah 59:14, ESV)
Apparently a new feature of the latest iPhone is that you can set it up to only charge when there is sufficient power in the grid from renewables. Californian dweebs are excited that they will only be able to charge their phones at certain times of the day.
This is a religion that gives Pharisees a run for their money for piety and conspicuous displays of virtuous mortification.
What? That is gobbledygook in purest form.
There is an iphone app for San Francisco called Snapcrap so citizens can report human faeces they encounter in public places which they then report to the authorities for clean up.
Not Trampis says:
14 September, 2022 at 11:16 am
Bwahahaha – Now the NPC ain’t even trying…It’s given up.
Get another double-shot troll. The performance is pitiful.
Don’t show any of this to your handlers or comrades. You might discover what happens to useful idiots they no longer find useful.
Name a few of those studies.
Hopefully by people who understand capacity factor and who don’t measure energy in Megawatts per hour.
Every time you get asked for some concrete evidence to show you understand the material, you always fail to deliver.
Non Mentis
Indeed the only reason we did not see black outs recently was because of solar power.
Coal fired generators only fail when the sun is up? How convenient.
wind generators are recyclable and when they are replaced they generate electricity now even in wind droughts so they are no longer intermittent like coal power.
Is that why the “recyclable” turbine blades are cut up and buried in landfill? And wind generators no longer require wind? Does that make them unicorn fart generators?
By the way since the industry is now in private hands do you want to hazard a guess why they are steering a million miles away from coal power.
Please sir, please sir, I know this one. Because subsidy farming is more profitable?
I left my shart in San Francisco.
I’ll see myself out.
Homer is very funny. He clearly hasn’t worked in an industrial plant position, or he’d know better to spout such hilarious stuff.
First thing that happens, Homer, when a pollie says something is about to be banned in five or ten years because XXX (whatever fad XXX happens to be that hour) is the site managers stop putting in the maintenance and sustaining capital that they would otherwise do to continue production of the asset.
We’ve been in this stupid situation for a decade now, no wonder the equipment is breaking down.
On the other hand the empirical lifetime of a windfarm is about 15 years, and a battery less than 10. So the sustaining capital for those is going to be much much worse than for a coal plant with nominal life of 50 years.
Bruce has obviously not read any AEMO reports on why investment is low. Indeed the Chairman of Origin recently admitted they had tried to get too much out of the coal fired power stations they bought for a song. Clearly Bruce hasn’t worked in a public company.
No because renewables are sooo much more cheaper
I was just reading last week that for the world to go renewable will require 4,000 million tonnes of copper alone; 1,000 times the world’s annual supply.
Much more will probably be required on an ongoing basis.
And that’s not accounting for all the other, far rarer metals also required.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, greenies in the U.S. don’t want new mines opened up there for these metals, so no doubt they would have to come from places like China predominantly, and Africa.
Non Mentis
No because renewables are sooo much more (sic) cheaper (sic)
Yet you decline to take up the “solar challenge”, because you regard household batteries as not economic?
the Chairman of Origin recently admitted they had tried to get too much out of the coal fired power stations they bought for a song.
Translation from PC speak: we thought we could screw a few years out of them without wasting money on maintenance, it turned out badly, but we still did OK, and saved lots on maintenance.
PS, how about you provide links to all the studies you have read, so that we can assess their value.
Haha. I have three AEMO webpages bookmarked (I like this one best: simple and to the point). But I don’t listen to the CEO. His predecessor was a US green, so I doubt he’s much better.
And, haha, my whole career after PhD has been working for ASX listed companies. Several decades in science, engineering, computer modelling and financial analysis. I even had my models and spreadsheets formally audited. Might know a bit about such things actually.
Getting things like pumps going when there’s no fitter around, or reattaching a tank agitator at midnight on New Years Eve neck deep in magnetite slurry or digging out a roaster on New Years Day west of Tennant Creek, yep you can ask me about all that. And the electrical supply for such things. Sheesh, lefties.
Non Mentis
No because renewables are sooo much more (sic) cheaper (sic)
Larry Fink from BlackRock.
We need to be honest about the fact that green products often come at a higher cost today. Bringing down this green premium will be essential for an orderly and just transition.
It seems that the big investors don’t agree with you about “renewables are sooo much more (sic) cheaper (sic)”. Perhaps you should listen to engineers more? Fink thinks that what is now, and what might be in the future are not necessarily the same. Perhaps you should commission a study to “prove” that you are correct?
So why should they get one cent in subsidies courtesy of the taxpayers then?
Analogously, it’s a rigged market, with governments effectively using taxpayers’ money to prop up one business with the intention of forcing all competition out of the marketplace.
Superb piece and highlights why the banter on The Cat for the last 8 years has been that the Liberal Party in its present form (Nats included), needs to be destroyed. It does, they’re all a disgrace.
And Homer….. what a chin dribbling spastic. A monty level of arse clown. Are they the same person?
Trampo is used to dropping names like AEMO and any other appeal to authority he can make in conversations to win arguments. It probably works in verbal conversations for him because most people will think the he wouldn’t intentionally lie. He’s been caught out here exaggerating and making things up that informed commenters know to check everything he says.
The reason he almost never provides links to actual evidence is because his assertions almost never line up with any actual evidence.
Snot reminds me of an old Bee Gees number (slightly modified) –
How Do You Mend A Broken Fart
The petulant, look-at-moy-MOY Pirate of PantsAnts is back… again. Someone mentioned that he attended Knox Grammar. Makes sense. It looks like he’s taken more than a few knox to the head.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11209427/Peter-FitzSimons-Australia-republic-campaign-call-rid-Queen-monarchy-5-notes.html
C.L.
We need a better troll than NT!
CL, I think you have chosen the wrong bogey. This issue isn’t about politics and has not been about politics for some years. Investors have simply withdrawn from fossil fuels. So it’s futile to argue for political intrusion as the markets have moved elsewhere. Right now there are multiple large investments underway all over Europe that are primarily about shifting from fossil fuels. That is, they’re more about carbon than about profits.
In Australia it seems to me the politicians have largely ignored the issue and now the risk is that coal will retire and nothing will be in its place.
Wind power is base-load reliable even without wind?
Huge if true!
I think it’s more accurate to say they were monstered by governments to withdraw – which is not how markets work.
Fossil fuels and the power stations they drive are still big business in China, India and elsewhere. In any case, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. Electricity security built on fossil fuels is not incompatible with ongoing R&D. That was always happening anyway.
wind generators are recyclable and when they are replaced they generate electricity now even in wind droughts so they are no longer intermittent like coal power.
Snot could be referred to as a “wind generator”.
CL: my impression is quite different. The investors have been increasingly active in recent years, adopting a risk based view. Insurers even more so. It would be quite hard to find a market based investor that is actively building a coal plant profile anywhere. China isn’t a market so you can’t say either way, but it’s government is promoting renewables very heavily and moving away from subsidised coal.
Foo Fighter says:
14 September, 2022 at 6:30 pm
How does the [fake] anthropogenic “climate catastrophe” figure in “informing” the market?
No wonder, China is making gazillions from wind turbines and solar panels, and the raw materials needed to make them!
I get that, Foo, but the “risk” they’re assessing is state-sanctioned disincentives and orchestrated reputational onslaughts from climate campaigners.
We shouldn’t get conned by the good citizen allure of “world” policies on energy anyway. It is perfectly rational to argue that nothing Australia does will make any difference to the temperature or to emissions – so we’re going to do what’s best and most affordable for ourselves. If somebody invents a perpetual motion machine, great – we’ll buy one. Also, supply of the rare resources needed for panels and batteries etc in perpetuity cannot be sustained. It’s an illusion.
Insurers whole business model is based on evaluating risk, that particularly includes the risk of government intervention. When you say investors, that’s a very large group. Which investor, regardless of individual, institutional or superannuation fund would invest in something that they think a politician can and will make illegal? Markets are basically risk vs reward engines, what that means is that as governments increase the risk of making fossil fuel companies illegal, they will have to offer greater rewards to continue to raise capital.
Ironically, both the market distortion of Chinese capital and the us money printing mmt palaver have meant that raising capital for anyone has been relatively cheap. This is coming to an end and in light of this and that sovereign risk for fossil fuels is both going to be risky and required to keep the power on, my bet would be these will give some pretty good returns for less risk than than the markets anticipate.
I can say for sure that insurers are influenced by realised risk. Overall, the unusual weather events of recent times and the scientific views provided by most authorities have been the drivers.
Authorities don’t provide scientific views, scientists do. Authorities enforce rules created by politicians. I don’t see insurers going out of business because they have so badly judged the risks due to climate based events being catastrophic. The recent floods in Australia for example were neither unprecedented or unpredictable. Many insurers refuse to insure for flood in large tracts of those areas because they are on a flood plain and have a history of flooding that goes back a long time.