Guest essay by Eric Worrall
OK, he is making one change. Aussie PM Scott Morrison will spend $263 million on carbon capture, and $275 million building coal powered clean hydrogen hubs, which won’t capture carbon, at least not straight away.
Australia commits $539m to green energy projects as it works towards net-zero emissions
By Sarah SwainLara Pearce
6:12pm Apr 21, 2021Australia has committed $539 million towards greener energy, as it works towards net-zero emissions.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison today pledged $275 million for four new hydrogen hubs to create the clean, renewable energy.
Hydrogen is the most common chemical in the universe.It can be produced as a gas or liquid, or made part of other materials, and has many uses such as fuel for transport or heating, a way to store electricity, or a raw material in industrial processes, according to the government.
…
Mr Morrison said the hydrogen hubs would connect hydrogen generation with industries that will utilise it.
The nation will also spend $263.9 million on carbon capture and storage.
…
Read more: https://www.9news.com.au/national/carbon-emissions-australia-scott-morrison-climate-usa-joe-biden/b1818b89-042a-4de1-bd30-8b2a80292cd7
I suspect the fake clean hydrogen joke will catch on. Greens want a hydrogen economy, because hydrogen. And greens want clean energy. The hydrogen part is workable, just. The green energy / carbon sequestration part will never work on the scale required.
By building the marginally viable hydrogen economy part, and promising to add the unworkable clean energy part in the future, politicians buy themselves a little time, make it look like they are moving in the direction greens want.
Of course we would all be better off with politicians who completely rejected the idea of squandering taxpayers money to appease greens, but there are not many politicians with the balls to tell greens exactly what they think of their green energy ideas. Having said that, a politician who squanders hundreds of millions of dollars on fake climate solutions is a bit more tolerable than a politician who squanders trillions of dollars.
The articles I have read state that Shouty has pledged the funds, not made any commitment. There will be a call for a federal election in a few months for early next year, maybe even end of this year.
Not much on the table to choose from. Labor will be a disaster, and ScoMo really needs to be booted out and a more princpled, conservative leader installed.
I agree. But I would not like to see any more leadership spills, we’ve seen enough over the last 10 years or more to make Australian politics seem like a pantomime.
Remember to export more coal to China to pay for these pledges in the great shell game, if China will accept Aussie coal with enough bowing and pleading and sucking up.
Australia has found new markets for the high grade coal.
There are always smarter people somewhere all for high grade coal
The politicians need the cojones to tell the Greens that their anti-nuclear dogma is a crock, based in Soviet dezinformatsiya. If they really want zero-emission electricity, the only existing viable technology is nuclear.
As the Greens are inherently hysterics, they will not be convinced, but it is the casual, low information voter who buys into green propaganda that the politicians are afraid to challenge that really matter in the end. Most people are not True Believers.
Hydrogen is something that has one impossible problem, low density even as a cryogenic liquid, and a multitude of problems that could be but haven’t been solved. Leakage and embrittlement might be solvable problems, but hydrogen is just too low density for general use. Of course, if one has a hydrogen-carbon chain, hully gee, one can store much more energy at room temperature and no pressure.
Sorta – ‘Right’ politician in Australia need to remember that people who vote Green are NEVER going to preference them over the ALP. They are not your core. They are not even swing voters.
Keep your core happy and target swing voters.
Greens are NEVER going to vote – even in Australia’s 2PP system – in a way that is going to support a Conservative political party, so basically they should be completely ignored. You will save yourself time and effort, you will more that likely impress your core supporters and, most importantly, you will annoy them.
You can’t please everyone. Don’t even try.
Craig from Oz said [Greens are NEVER going to vote – even in Australia’s 2PP system – in a way that is going to support a Conservative political party,]
It is fascinating then that the NSW State Govt is so green in so many things they do. Premier Gladys Berejiklian has increasingly revealed herself as a Green over a year or so.
Forget hydrogen. Gliders. Gliders are the future of air travel.
I thought it was hot air balloons. Either that or zeppelins.
I am with you Scissor gliders is the answer. I have an upgrade idea we could bring in. Solar powered gliders. If the wings were covered in completely zero mass solar panels maybe solar paint with just a little mass, then with an initial catapult launch to take us above the clouds we could deploy our folding prop and sail on into the sunset…
What do you think?
Don’t you think flying into the sunrise would be more appropriate for a solar powered glider?
Thats what the ancient Egyptians believed but in boats.
The future of air travel is NO air travel. Just look at the grounded fleet in Australia.
have to admit I LIKE IT that way
clean skies and peace n quiet
There is plenty of peace and quiet when you are dead. Take that option. Another moron less will make the world a better place for the rest of us.
The skies are clean near me and I am under the flightpath of Sydney airport. What I do like about flightpaths, and rail lines, is the noise is regular. A plane sounds pretty much like any other, like a train. You get used to it. But then on a road you get some DH riding a “Hog” with no baffles in the pipes at all times of the night and day and that will wake you up.
I am investing in buggy whips and barge poles. Easy and cheap to make. Slim margins but I am counting on the subsidies to make my money.
It won’t mean much to readers outside Australia, Johannes Leak’s cartoon today in The Australian is a cracker.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/
Headline links take you to a subscription page.
try this
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/cartoons
is this it ?
https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/fc580ee74a0446519ade995a4d27b3b4?width=1440
In Australia, we are hoping that Scott Morrison can fool and satisfy the Green Blob without doing any serious damage to Australian society and the economy. We hope that we can avoid the titanic meltdown now underway in the USA and elsewhere that the Green Blob has infected.
I believe that is his objective, supported by the remaining real Lib-Nats in the Coalition, but as you alluded to the global “Green Blob” is a problem, an octopus with tentacles pulling economic and foreign affairs levers in many places
Consider the latest Sleepy Joe example and problem.
Green Blob- I like that. Reminds me of the movie, “The Blob” that came out back in the early ’60s. It crawled around and if it got on your leg, it’d climb up and melt you. The Green Blob just melts brains.
This is the essence of
Morrison is trying to stay in the middle and not offend/appease both sides (which exist within his own party as well in the general population). Meanwhile he cops criticism for inaction on “Climate Change” and ruining the economy with subsidies and other supporting legislation for renewables.
Lets print more money. Australia is onboard with that. Do Australians print money too? Just asking because no one ever said they do.
Hard to say. Inflation is rising, so probably. The national debt is a comfortable 41% of GDP as of 2019, but I suspect it will be significantly higher if ScoMo travels the green road.
Yup.
I love reading the explanations of online economists telling us that it won’t cause inflation or ruin the economy. More dollars, same amount of actual assets. No problems here, move along….
The only increase seems to be massively inflated house prices so far. We’ll see what happens when that bubble pops.
Sort of like how a group project for minds so full of potential usually ends.
Qantas engineers are preparing a tender for air ships to replace their aircraft fleet.
Eric, they are just bad Wizards.
The Wizard of Oz | 75th Anniversary “Wizard Revealed” | Warner Bros. Entertainment – YouTube
LOL 🙂
I encourage all technically oriented WUWT readers to read this GE White Paper on the state of technology for hydrogen powered turbines, and all the technical engineering issues surrounding hydrogen.
“Hydrogen for power generation: Experience, requirements, and implications for use in gas turbines”
https://www.ge.com/content/dam/gepower-new/global/en_US/downloads/gas-new-site/future-of-energy/hydrogen-for-power-gen-gea34805.pdf
The engineering issues discussed in this White Paper are basis for any informed discussion of hydrogen’s current problems and inability to produce electricity and thus replace natural gas without significant NOx production.
So .. are these “Greens” in a large majority? Do their wild great power and influence? Are they particularly well armed and prone to hold influential people hostage? If these things do NOT pertain, why do their wishes override the vast majority who have no interest in climate whatsoever?
What am I missing? Does no one study real science or economics any more?
What you’re missing, in no special order..
Also, but actually part of Magic Thinking, is the idea that spending shed loads of money makes, or means, you are rich.
IOW: ‘Things Have Never Been Better’
But as the cliche/joke goes:
Q: How do you make a small fortune?
A: Take a large fortune and spend most of it
That is exactly what is happening inside the Hydrogen scam.
The ‘large fortune’ is all the energy resource inside the fossil fuel feedstock and the ‘small fortune’ is the energy you get (back) from the hydrogen you’ve made
Thermodynamically and as far as resource use is concerned, it is:
The Economics of the Mad-House
or
The policies and practice of kindergarten
But, if it makes you, your friends, cronies and (stressed-out and Dopamine deficient) voters happy, so what?
Happy = Good
Thus, spending money = Good
Adults acting like children, maybe not so
As you might have guessed, most of my “questions” were intended to be rhetorical, but your answers made some sense. Thank you for the effort. In short, the electorate the for whom all these “green” measures are intended are largely fictional, a pastiche composed of a very small group.
Greens in Australia poll about 9% of the voting mass.
Remember in Australia it is compulsory to vote* so there is an argument that the majority of their supporters read the title and think “environment? That sounds nice”. They typically dominate the ‘Youth Vote’ of first time (aka – still living with Mummy and Daddy and yet to take out their first loan) voters who believe in the usual ‘someone else should pay for it’ bollocks youth embrace.
Deep down most of them are actually open Marxists.
The ABC is about 60% Greens voters, so if you believe state run media is ‘influence’ then yes, they have some of that. Fortunately they rarely get enough senate votes to hold the balance of power so most of the time they can be safely ignored. Unless you are food. Sarah Sea Patrol may eat you.
*Compulsory Voting is a bit of a lie. You have to ‘attend’ and get your name crossed off, or at least convince the AEC that you had a good reason to ‘forget’ to vote. You can be fined for not voting, but I understand it is easy to get out of it these days.
Thing is that once you have your name crossed off there is no legal way they can force you to actually fill in your ballot paper. You cannot leave the voting area with a ballot paper, but no one can make you correctly fill it out. Voting is secret. You can write ‘INFORMAL VOTE TURNBULL IS A PRICK’ on your ballot and there is ZERO legal recourse.
As long as they cross your name off, you have ‘voted’.
With the exception of compulsory voting, what you have described is a close approximation of here in Canada. We have the CBC (also openly Marxist) pretending to have its hand on the country’s pulse. We’re expected to believe that the obviously indoctrinated kids are how the country thinks. Then there is Trudeau (nuff said about him).
theyre very small BUT loud and the agitprop govt funded abc runs their viewpoint 100%
so people mistakenly believe theyre more plentiful than they are
and all of the abc is socialist inspired govt free educated and paid very well BY govt to psyop the people
against their actual remit I add
As I explained to Craig from Oz, there are close similarities between your country and Canada. That could be due, in part, to the fact that we both have a Marxist, state media organ. The CBC is also just agitprop. One small correction … in fact education is not free, but state run schooling is.
Another problem is that councils, where people actually live, are literally infested with green activists.
They are not even a majority, but they have influence on insecure people who want “responsible”, “sustainable” solutions. They appeal to emotions, not reason and to the desire of many young people for simple answers
In so many words, virtue signalling is more important than being virtuous. The presence of social media is colouring every facet of our lives.
To debate
Oz spending hundreds of millions is very much like the USA spending trillions
Someone should point out to the Greens a simple truth, hopefully one, even they can handle.
When they trot out the usual “hydrogen is the most common element in the universe” which as far as we know is true, well, until we find the missing mass everyone is looking for, which might change things.
I digress.
When they say, we can use the clean most abundant element in the “known” universe, someone should remind them, it is so abundant but it is beyond our natural world. It is not abundant or freely existent here on Earth.
Nature has rejected free hydrogen.
It has locked it away, because it is too volatile to allow into the open air. Nature performed a neat trick on hydrogen. It took the most volatile of elements and forced it to live permanently locked away with oxygen, the element required to enable its combustion. The result produced the worlds most common and effective fire suppressant, water. After 4.5 billion years of Earth being here, hydrogen other than being the most common known element in the universe unfortunately, there is zero available here? Why is such a common element so absent from our normal experience of living, do we think? Perhaps the Greens know the answer?
We should ask them?
Without mankind’s engineering ability to break it out of Nature’s favourite hydrogen hideaway, i.e. water, we don’t have a single atom available. That engineered process requires more energy input than the evolved hydrogen produced, can return.
While that remains the case as defined by the second law of thermodynamics, hoping hydrogen (other than in a nuclear fusion reaction) will give you some energy gain, is wishful thinking.
The second law of thermodynamics states, even if hydrogen is cracked using excess solar induced wind power, stop laughing at the back……..
Hydrogen, will always be a net energy consumer.
.
Hydrogen is lacking on earth because gravity is insufficient to keep it here. It’s all out in space.
It’s all out in the sun actually.
Wrong. It’s Stupidnium. Just look at Urf Day. Stupid on steroids.
Speaking of which:
That echo you hear represents the vacuity of Kamala’s thought process, as well as that of the Biden administration on all things Green, on Energy, on Economics, and the Planet.
Politicians believe that promising stuff has no consequences.
How is hydrogen workable? How to you store it, how do you transport it, and how do you use it?
So 410 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere (0.041%) and most of it comes from sources that are not controlled by people. So why try to reduce human emissions?
Australia signed the UN IPCC Kyoto Japan Agreement late 1990s and met every emissions reduction target thereafter, one of the very few signatory nations that did. The unelected UN Officials have since tried to block Australia from claiming Kyoto target credits to offset Paris Agreement targets.
Australia signed the Paris Agreement in 2016 following the Paris Convention late in 2015. And to date (2021) continues to achieve the targets we agreed to meet.
Along comes President Biden and his climate hoax gang demanding more from Australia, one of the US’s closest and most reliable allies?
There are two words in rough Aussie language: first begins with “F” and the second with “O”.
President Xi Jinping of China said his country would “strictly limit increasing coal consumption” in the next five years and phase it down in the following five years. . . . Mr. Xi repeated his pledge from last year to draw down carbon emissions to net zero by 2060. And, in a pointed reminder to his host, President Biden, he said that the industrialized countries of the West had a historic responsibility to act faster to reduce emissions.
Of course, The first step will be to build the COAL fired power stations to fuel these hydrogen hubs.
Then the “hydrogen using industries” can crowd around these coal fired power stations 😉
Good luck using carbon capture at the power station in the picture at the head of this story.
That was Hazelwood Power Station in Australia’s Latrobe Valley. It used to produce ~25% of Victoria’s power but was shut down by the lefty Labor government and is in the process of being demolished.
Many years before the Lease ended and with substantial reserves nearby of brown coal the fuelled Hazlewood.
The Leaseholder was effectively forced to abandon the business by the State Labor leftist Government.