According to The Guardian, the Australian Government is “more concerned with the impact of short term electricity price rises on a small number of highly energy-intensive manufacturers” than solving the climate crisis.
Our world is facing irreversible destruction – and still there’s no urgency in Australian climate policy
Lenore Taylor
Mon 5 Oct 2020 17.00 AEDTFor Australians, the national trauma of fires burning through 18 million hectares of bushland earlier this year is raw and ongoing. But since then the US west coast and Siberia have also burned. China,Bangladesh, India and parts of Africa have suffered catastrophic flooding. Death Valley recorded possibly the highest ever temperature on Earth, at 54.4C. In February the Antarctic temperature rose above 20C for the first time. In March the Great Barrier Reef suffered its third mass bleaching in five years. In June it was 38C inside the Arctic Circle.
None of these events can be attributed entirely to global heating, but scientists are clear that their frequency and ferocity are signs of impending climate catastrophe, of irreversible destruction. What they have warned of for decades is coming to pass.
But there’s still nothing urgent about Australia’s policies on climate and energy. We persist with the great pretence that we can continue to power industry and manufacturing with our abundant fossil fuels, ambling along with plans for a “transition” at some unspecified future time.
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But federal policy appears more concerned with the impact of short term electricity price rises on a small number of highly energy-intensive manufacturers, businesses the Grattan Institute calculated between them employ about 1,000 people.
As energy analyst Tristan Edis wrote in Guardian Australia recently, this government used to argue against a carbon price because renewable technologies were too expensive. Now that solar and wind are clearly the cheapest means of new electricity generation, they say we don’t need a price because renewables are too cheap. Instead they insist we need government-funded research into other technologies, ones that might reduce the emissions from continued use of fossil fuels, to some extent, some day.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/05/our-world-is-facing-irreversible-destruction-and-still-theres-no-urgency-in-australian-climate-policy
I don’t understand why The Guardian author Lenore Taylor is complaining.
The Aussie government is right. If Solar and Wind are the cheapest form of energy, they no longer need government assistance. A rapid transition will occur without further government intervention, driven by the self interest of investors.
Let’s see, if you punish carbon, pushing its price up, and reward Expensive Unreliables with subsidies and mandates, and then pretend the other costs associated with introducing said energy into the grid (like needing extra backup power, new transmission lines, etc.) don’t exist, presto! Expensive Unreliables are suddenly “cheaper”. It’s like magic.
Bruce that’s what I find so frustrating. When we built our house in the country, we were happy to see that power was available. Just a small plot as they go at fourteen acres. It cost us $30,000 to have a transformer and poles installed outside our land so that we could connect to the grid, some people pay more.
My question is, why is it expected that the government pay to upgrade a system
to support a power source that is not even likely to be around in the long term. Let the developers pay for the upgrades, and while they’re at it they can plan for the not to distant future when they need to be decommissioned.
None of this has been thought through even now, they just keep trashing the planet to supposedly solve a problem that is of pure invention. Absolute insanity.
“government used to argue against a carbon price because renewable technologies were too expensive. Now that solar and wind are clearly the cheapest means of new electricity generation, they say we don’t need a price because renewables are too cheap.”
That suggests to me that they are after the money as a power play that has very little to do with climate emergencies or need.
This has been a great thread to read. RickWill has made the idiot scheme of the political class, and various rent seekers pretty clear. Pass a law paying an exorbitant and non-market price for exported rooftop solar. Non-rooftop folks must pay a high price for power. This leads to the entirely artificial view that off-grid is cheaper than on-grid — i.e. as RickWill says,
Surely an indentical scheme could make food, paper, clothing, and even steel cheaper to produce at home than to purchase from industry. It runs division of labor in reverse, undoing half a millennium or more of progress. Super! It shows at once why government mandated pricing leads to ruin.
The way to put a stop to this madness is make rooftop solar participate in a day-ahead auction for electrical power delivery. Have the various small producers compete against one another. Then we will see just how much cheaper “producing your own” really is.
“Why it will be too cheap to meter” – Proponents of nuclear power in the 50’s
Why do promoters always hype the hell out of everything. LOL. Full circle.
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