Essay by Eric Worrall
A glorious vision of green steel, green cement, green fertiliser, green hydrogen and a green energy export business. Prosperity revitalised. Shame the numbers don’t add up.
Albanese just laid out a radical new vision for Australia in the region: clean energy exporter and green manufacturer
John Mathews Professor Emeritus, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University
Elizabeth Thurbon Scientia Associate Professor in International Relations / International Political Economy, UNSW Sydney
Hao Tan Associate Professor, Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle
Sung-Young Kim Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Discipline of Politics & International Relations, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University
Published: July 14, 2022 6.03am AEST
Our clean and green transition is bigger than just renewables
Since Labor took office, we’ve heard a lot about our future as a renewables superpower. Often overlooked is the fact this would mean not just generating renewable electricity and green hydrogen at vast scale but also investing in new industries and processes to grasp as many opportunities as we can.
This would mean investing in upstream industries such as solar array fabrication and electrolyser manufacture, as well as downstream industries such as green steel, green cement and green fertiliser. These new green products would be produced using locally generated supplies of green hydrogen and cheap clean renewable power, as economist Ross Garnaut has outlined.
Green energy is no longer a niche concern. Australia’s largest companies are leading the way.
Andrew Forrest’s new spin-off company, Fortescue Future Industries, has begun constructing a $1 billion project building green hydrogen manufacturing components, cabling and renewable generation in central Queensland. This single project is expected to double the global production capacity of green hydrogen. It will make Queensland home to a new green hydrogen fuel and components export industry.
If our new government can pull this off and turn vision to reality, we could embrace a new green growth economy and begin our own green industrial revolution.
Better yet, Australia could finally make full use of its abundant land and renewable resources to fast-track the clean economic development of our Indo-Pacific neighbours.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/albanese-just-laid-out-a-radical-new-vision-for-australia-in-the-region-clean-energy-exporter-and-green-manufacturer-186815
I understand why people who prize order find this vision beautiful. The world remade, happy workers toiling in the sun, building a better future. A daydream, a worker’s paradise. In my experience though, the authors of such visions rarely picture themselves toiling in the sun alongside the other workers.
The vision of course is false. The numbers don’t add up, and have never added up. S&P’s massive copper shortfall. Billions of tons of material we just don’t have, a government funded chimera, a colossal, doomed waste of resources which will leave us poorer.
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Well, green energy already exists, and in fact has long traditions in the past. Take, for example, sailing ships. Completely green. Good enough for Francis Drake? Good enough for me.
Sailing ships…those were the days, weeks to transport goods unpredictably around the world, nothing perishable of course, sending people up masts in gales on starvation wages, yes the peasants knew their place in those good old days. Send the people you don’t like to Australia – oh wait…
Slightly off-topic: Sri Lanka has “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour”
https://www.treasury.gov.lk/web/national-policy/section/summary
Goes with that
“The Rise & Fall of Sri Lanka”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2022/07/17/the-rise-fall-of-sri-lanka/
Includes
“Sri Lanka PM: This is how I will make my country rich by 2025”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/
And on the attempted memory hole
“The WEF questioned after deleted Sri Lanka PM article is recovered by Wayback Machine”
https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/07/13/the-wef-sri-lanka-wayback-machine/
“If our new government can pull this off and turn vision to reality, we could embrace a new green growth economy and begin our own green industrial revolution.”
If government has to pull it off it will be a disaster technically and economically. That’s what the science tells us! I’m amazed that the Australian activist scientists are so unmoved by what is clearly the end of The Utopia dillusion in Europe. Uh…you’re next!
I suspect these people are brain dead.
know
In order to be braindead, they first need to have a brain.
Keep looking, maybe they dropped it in a corner somewhere …..
Ask Joe.
Mayhap I-gor (not Ee-gor) took it on accident?
Ahh, Abey something is it…
It’s in a jar by the door, right alongside Eleanor Rigby’s face in the other jar by the door.
Green leaders are inexperienced, incompetent and incorrigible.
Does eating bugs sound like “Utopia” to you?… Notice in every scenario the “elites” give up nothing!
Ha, you’ve gotta laugh – especially when someone else in this thread mentioned sailing ships
The Standard Diet aboard those little ships was ‘Ships Biscuits‘
Basically a mix of fat and wheat flour (no yeast) formed into ‘biscuits’ and the baked/cooked.
After some weeks at sea, the sailors became bored with them and, frankly, hated them.
They instinctively knew that they were ‘wrong’ and once they started falling ill with scurvy, they were exactly correct.
But, after several weeks at sea, assorted ‘bugs’, weevils and maggots would invade the Ship’s Pantry and feast themselves on these biscuits.
And the sailors loved them.
The bugs added variety, texture, flavour, animal protein & fat but especially, the bugs vastly reduced the carbohydrate (sugar) content of the sailor’s fayre.
And being in close proximity to all the other folks onboard ship, you became acutely aware of how theirs and your own body worked and what was/was not ‘Good To Eat’
Thus the start of the (proper) Ketogenic or ‘Atkins’ diet = animal fat & protien with very little sugar.
Shame about the Vitamin C and often that was a case where you could do nothing else but cry.
Because the worst affected sailors were those bringing spices from the Far East, especially on the return trip to Europe where the wind was against them all the way.
Huge numbers became very ill and died from Scurvy.
If only they’d known – the holds of their ships, their precious cargo, those dried herbs and spices, were chock-a-block full of Vitamin C
How sad is that..
One is left wondering, did the bugs and weevils, as do all critters on this Earth except us, make their own Vitamin C
(All you need to do so is (Glucose) sugar = exactly what Ships Biscuits were)
Is that why the sailors loved eating the weevils & maggots more than the biscuits? Each one was a tiny Vitamin C factory.
Funny old world innit
Some years ago, a group of doctors investigating vegan diets were puzzled by the fact that vegans in India were in good health whereas their equivalents in Europe were sickly and anemic. The answer came in the weevils and other insects the Indians were consuming inadvertently in their grains and pulses!
Who’s the fourth guy in the image at the back. I get Stalin, Lenin, Marx and ?
Might be Friedrich Engels.
Or Bernie Sanders?
Same philosophy…all those communists are pretty much interchangeable.
Yes, it would definitely be Engels.
The caption says “1953 Soviet Art, slightly modified”
Now I’m curious, what was modified? One thing that seems out of place is a flag with black, green, and yellow.
Yes.
Trotsky?
Puzzled about the Green Hydrogen.
Hydrogen is supposed to be difficult and expensive to produce.
http://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-fuel-basics
It’s easy to produce. You use electricity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis and then you use the hydrogen to produce electricity with fuel cells. It will run by itself forever completely cost free. I’m looking for green investors to make my dream a reality – a mansion by a private lake in a country without extradition.
There’s an entry in the plan for when the engineers are supposed to deliver their miracle…
It is easy and cheap if you start out with something that has a high energy potential like methane but if your going to use a carbon fuel, it’s better just burning it instead of breaking it down. If you start out with a low energy potential like water, it’s pretty inefficient extracting the hydrogen and thus costly. About the only way it might work is if the power comes from a nuclear source and you have excess power at night after you shut down all the peaking power. Current reactors tend to be constant output so you can’t lower the power when you don’t need it. Your only option is to find something to do with the excess power. This may not be as much of an issue in the future if there are more electrical cars out there.
Dena, heaven knows I’m not arguing with you about that but it does seem that’s exactly what Duke Energy has to do, albeit with undesirable consequences.
Duke Energy application points finger at solar for increased pollution
http://bit.ly/2qU0grH
…“After committing $2 billion in tax credits, and more than $1 billion in electricity overpayments for solar power, we now learn from Duke that nitrogen oxides have actually increased, and that CO2 may be headed in the wrong direction,”
…“Renewable energy sounds good, but it performs terribly. If you want electricity available when you need it, you don’t want intermittent, unreliable, renewable energy,” Kish said. “It’s like a cancer on an efficient grid, with its ups-and-downs forcing other sources to pick up the slack in the most inefficient ways, which, in some cases, are more polluting.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-13/andrew-forrest-backs-nsw-green-hydrogen-plan/100534458
“Premier Dominic Perrottet says a hydrogen strategy unveiled by the NSW government that aims to help the state hit net zero emissions by 2050 is “world-leading”.
Key points:
Premier Dominic Perrottet and billionaire Andrew Forrest unveiled the plan in Sydney today
The new hydrogen strategy signals a transition away from coal in NSW
It’s expected the plan will attract investment from growing overseas markets
The strategy provides up to $3 billion in incentives for green hydrogen production …..”
As usual, Andrew Forrest uses other people’s money. Maggie Thatcher had something to say about that.
“This would mean investing…” In other words, put me on the central planning committee so I do not have to work in the sun. If you little peasants would just toil harder WE can do it!
If the project is so promising why are billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian and Andrew Forrest of Fortescue Minerals Group happy to share the supposed fantastic profits with taxpayers, why is there not a queue of banks offering support or is it just another case of privatizing profits and socializing risks?
This is more like the plot of “The Producers”, or just a plain old Ponzi scheme. The guys running the scam make money, the lawyers, accountants, officers, make money, the investors/owners/taxpayers lose it all.
The decline of the teaching of mathematics is taking a heavy toll on the ability of our political, academic and administrative community to think clearly.
It is a symptom of a much deeper problem, namely the increasing tendency in the West to rely on wishful and magical thinking rather than logic and numbers.
What the hell are these idiots teaching the kids of today? Rhetorical question, I don’t need an answer. The destruction of the nation is at hand.
Numbers are racist and are a tool of white supremacy. They are irrelevant, doncha know.
Pie in the sky. And destructive.
You peasants should be happy to toil in the fields to prop up us (we?) elites who are masterful planners…
Watched a broadcast from a greenie wearing polyester clothes, using a mobile phone, wearing glasses, usually made of some kind of plastic. Do as I say not as I do. Great example of double standard. If they were genuine they would be wearing natural fibre clothes for a start.
At least bamboo underwear!
This is what the typical communistic dream looks like living in a world of ideologic delusion that will end in failure.
They might be affected by the Unicorn Virus that infects only Nationalist socialists’ morons
From the article under discussion…
“Better yet, Australia could finally make full use of its abundant land and renewable resources to fast-track the clean economic development of our Indo-Pacific neighbours.”
So… What are we going to call this?
“White Man’s Burden”?
Colonialism?
Cultural Smugness?
Energy Imperialism?
Blade and Panel Predatory Loan Policy?
Basically, whatever we call it, the authors of this article seem to see nothing wrong with treating our neighbours as quaint little simpletons who are unable to manage their own internal affairs properly.
Yes. Well done everyone.
(Also, for those playing at home, White Man’s Burden is the concept on ensuring less developed cultural-geo groups are not forced to ‘reinvent the wheel’ in order to enjoy the fruits of technological advances. It is a somewhat difficult concept to discuss as there is a subjective line between “Hey, we invented sanitation and germ theory of disease, let us help reform your cities so you can enjoy not dying of Cholera” and “Let us Superior People take over the administration of your country and enforce our world views on your culture”.
(As originally named – Kipling – the idea was that the advanced nations of the world (which in the context of the time were ‘white’) had a moral and ethical obligation to share and help the lesser technologically advanced. Global (and well meaning) welfare if you will. Its… an interesting discussion.)
Yes
That is exactly why the Residential schools for natives in Canada were created.
These people were Victorians and saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilization with a duty to drag others along
Exactly the same as todays green blob
Four academics without engineering or practical science backgrounds get together to write an article about engineering and science…sounds like the start of a bad joke.
You just make a media grab feelgood announcement-
Concerns electric vehicles still won’t be affordable for many by 2035 when ACT bans sale of new petrol cars (msn.com)
and don’t concern yourself with the minor details about the NEM grid-
Gas and electricity demand hitting ‘record highs’ in Victoria (msn.com)
Mandate and legislate and it will all happen just like tapping the touchscreen.
“…The vision of course is false. The numbers don’t add up, and have never added up.”
Of course they add up. You’re just using the wrong numbers. If you would figure the numbers correctly, you would find that these businesses will be oustanding successes— at making the investors and the politicians they buy to approve these schemes extremely wealthy.
Yes, Aussie taxpayers will get nothing out of this except debt, misery, inflation and blackouts but solving energy issues and reducing CO2 was never the point, was it?
The only green thing about this scam is the color of all the money these crooks are going to fleece Aussie taxpayers out of.
You forgot green poverty and green hunger.
It is cheaper to cross oceans using diesel than Dacron. Sailors wisdom.
Fuel is expensive but wear and tear on your sails and rigging is much more expensive.
Small boats use sails because they cannot carry enough fuel for the crossing.