Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Glencore and other major players in Australia’s mining and heavy industry sectors are threatening to shut mines and factories, and divert all investment elsewhere, unless Aussie energy prices fall back to internationally competitive levels.
Manufacturers warn of more Glencore type decisions
Australia will be denied new investment and will watch more of its refineries and smelters close unless the price and security of energy can be resolved, business leaders warn.
Speaking after Glencore warned it may shut its Mt Isa copper smelter and its Townsville copper refinery within a year, big manufacturers like BASF and the Tomago aluminium smelter respectively warned there was limited chance of new investment in Australia and that further job cuts were likely.
Tomago chief executive Matt Howell, who runs Australia’s largest aluminium smelter, said the company was considering cutting production due to “ridiculously high” wholesale electricity prices which would result in job losses.
“It is under active consideration,” Mr Howell told The Australian Financial Review. “We’ve been quite clear with the government that if the wholesale prices do not come down we will have to reduce our load, exactly the same as [Rio Tinto’s] Boyne smelter in Gladstone had to reduce load which means shedding jobs and contractors which we don’t want to do.”
…
“The prices are still way too high. They should be coming down by half or more than that,” he said. “We should be an energy super power with the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the world. We’re not seeing that now.”
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A mining and heavy industry walkout would be catastrophic for the Australian economy. While mining only comprises 7% of GDP, it is widely acknowledged to be a significant source of economic growth, as well as a provider of famously well paid jobs for blue collar workers.
Mining is also a major source of export earnings used by the Australian government to service Australia’s small but rapidly growing government debt.
Electricity prices have skyrocketed in Australia in recent years, thanks to ideologically motivated roadblocks to Australian domestic gas exploration, regulatory hostility towards the Aussie coal power industry, and government attempts to favour the use of unreliable renewable energy over stable baseload fossil fuel sources.
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Beliaik, I think they say the cost of producing the coal is allowed as a deduction from tax payable. The Greens and other loons call this a “subsidy”.
I’m looking to flee this penal colony.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/27/south-australias-absurd-electricity-prices-renewables-are-not-to-blame
Well, we finally have a real hockey stick graph
BTW, when the planet was new the atmosphere was CO2 and water vapour that came out of volcanoes, the dominant gases from such sources. That was all eaten up by plants that evolved to do this until it was mostly converted to oxygen and the plants ceased to increase then reduced as their fuel was cut. The carbon went back into the ground to be recycled by plate tectonics 200M years later. This went on until there was so little CO2, a trace level under 0.01%, that it naturally levelled off. Plants ate all the CO2.
Question: Why would plants stop responding to increases in CO2 because of where it comes from, by consuming it to an equilibrium level where it limits their own growth, as before through geological time? The evidence of planetary existence says that plants ate the volcanic CO2 and the temperatures did not run away. And as we know, all the so called climate science modelling (not real science) debate is about a short period of very small increase within the noise of a very chaotic andunpredictable climate system, far more unpredctable and complex than economic models, with no laws, just numerical modelling that abuses some laws within its sctructure.
Reality is we are towards the end of a short interglacial between ice ages. Coming soon, in the next 10,000 years or so. 12 Degrees K fall, ice sheet on Norther Hemisphere for 80K years and Ocean levels dropping 300-400 feet, coral mountains, ports left stranded up the hill. All very predictable. But VERY slowly, we have time to move the first technological civilisation elsewhere, once we get used to the idea of a changing planet we have to adapt to and cannot control, and dump the delusional pseudo science for profit. Assuming the self seeking delusional ego fuelled idiots people prefer to elect haven’t promoted global catastrophe for humans who follow them by then, of course.
I meant less than 0.1% CO2, sorry.