If I’m understanding this correctly our clean energy windmills are being brought from China because they are cheaper than locally built due to a tariff?
These same windmills steel is made from burning of Australian coal?

Why do we supply other countries with our coal but we aren’t allowed to use it here?

freediver wrote on Nov 23^rd, 2024 at 1:43pm:


That is the plan in demonising coal, isn't it?

lee wrote on Nov 23^rd, 2024 at 2:41pm:


Did you cover present, past and future tense in school? Or do I need to explain how it works?

Metallurgical coal will probably never be phased out.

lee wrote on Nov 23^rd, 2024 at 7:04pm:


Do you have a point Lee, or are you just trying to ask the dumbest possible questions?

As it did with the Indigenous voice referendum, the Albanese government is drifting towards a catastrophic failure – this time over its blind commitment to an accelerated net-zero carbon emissions economy, which has been central to every major decision being taken within months of an election.

Labor is consumed with a take-it-or-leave-it belief in the implementation of a renewables-only energy policy as the underpinning of a caring and inclusive economy and the creation of Australia as a global renewables superpower.


Again, as with the voice proposal, this redoubled effort on renewable energy is supported by every Labor minister, MP and senator without question or query. There is an acceptance of the dangerous political premise that Dutton is unelectable, that the vocal support for renewable energy from leading public figures represents a popular public view and that unsupported claims or broken promises about energy costs will be forgiven.

The danger for the Prime Minister is that support from the “institutional elite”, as former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon called them, for the new caring and inclusive economic solution will further delude Labor.



Then Chalmers dropped his own renewable surprise announcing that Australia’s first and only sovereign wealth fund, the $230bn Future Fund, would have its investment priorities changed so that Labor’s pet projects – renewable energy, housing and infrastructure – had to be considered for investment. The highly successful and strongly performing investment fund – which covers unfunded public service superannuation and contributes to the budget bottom line – had never been directed before and it was clear Chalmers wanted renewable energy investments included.

Again, in the wake of global post-pandemic anxiety and Chalmers’ own warnings about threats to economic stability, how does Labor not think voters will look at a raid on the nation’s nest egg as anything else but a grab for gold to fund pet projects?

Chalmers, in the face of fierce criticism, tried to argue that nothing had really changed and that the new priorities he inserted as Treasurer wouldn’t risk the golden egg.

But Peter Costello, the treasurer-founder of the fund and later its chairman, pierced the obfuscation, declaring that if the changes didn’t do anything, then why introduce them?
“When governments direct savings to particular areas they usually end in political decisions that lose money,” he said on Thursday. Costello said Labor was claiming the new ministerial direction would not change anything, but “you don’t change things to keep them the same”.



Deluded. Bowels, Albo, Marles, Wong. Deluded.

In an enduring irony, the world’s ability to feed most of the eight billion people on the planet is due to the work of a German war criminal. Fritz Haber pioneered the use of chlorine gas in World War I and invented the process for making fertiliser from the air.

An unexpected casualty of his research on chemical weapons was his wife, Clara Immerwahr. An equally gifted chemist, she was so horrified by her husband directing the first use of chlorine gas at Ypres that she took his pistol and killed herself.

The same man, working in the same lab, invented a process that produced ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. This is the foundation of modern synthetic fertilisers, which revolutionised food production. Without it, billions would starve.

So, despite what some activists say, you can, and do, eat fossil fuel. Canadian energy savant Vaclav Smil has calculated the embedded energy in a 125g Spanish tomato bought in a Scandinavian market at five tablespoons of diesel.

And, as noted here before, a paper in the American Journal of Public Health records that “nearly 99 per cent of pharmaceutical feedstocks and reagents are derived from petrochemicals”.

So, to quote the energy experts at Doomberg, energy is life. Harnessing fossil fuels, particularly oil, drove a warp-speed leap forward in human development in the past century.

The wealth of nations is directly linked to their access to coal, oil and gas. Your standard of living is a product of the amount of energy you get to use. Just because you can’t see the process doesn’t mean you are not using it. Poor nations and poor people are energy poor.
...

Do not listen to what nations say at yearly climate jamborees, watch what they do.

Last year coal, oil and gas consumption hit record highs. The only thing that has changed is where the fuel is burned. No matter what it says, China will continue to greedily burn every molecule of hydrocarbon we don’t want. So will Russia, India, Indonesia and countries in Africa.

And while the Biden administration lectured Australia about carbon emissions, the US grew to become a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia and to extract more gas than Qatar. Under Donald Trump America will “drill baby drill” and pull out of the climate accords. Argentina will follow it.

So what on earth are we doing? We have a choice: harness the energy under our feet, stay rich and use our wealth to adapt to a changing climate; or beggar ourselves and adapt to a changing climate.

And for those hellbent on the second path, who rage against the evils of fossil fuel, it’s past time you began living out the true meaning of your creed.

Start small. Spend just one day a week actively avoiding everything derived from hydrocarbons. Call it Fossil-Free Friday. There already is a TV show that will give you a sense of what that looks like. It’s called Naked and Afraid.

Frank wrote on Nov 23^rd, 2024 at 8:18pm: