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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I would be surprised if a green hydrogen factory run on solar power could produce enough surplus energy to pay for the cost of the solar panels.
Otherwise why would a billionaire need government financing? Government financing is how scoundrels make a profit from an unprofitable enterprise.
Every day at sea during an ocean passage time must be set aside for sail repair. Chafe points identified and patches glued or sewn on. Running rigging replaced from stores as required at great expense to later replace. Then on arrival in port the sewing machine is hauled out, sails inspected and seams resewn where chafe has worn through the threads. Hundreds of feet of seams needing constant vigilance.
Or you could install a diesel engine and get 20 thousand hours of carefree operation before failure on average.
The death of a science due to politicization is analogous to a caterpillar being parasitized by the injected eggs of an ichneumon wasp. The eggs hatch into larvae which eat the caterpillar from the inside, hollowing it out. Eventually only the dead husk of the caterpillar remains but the multiple offspring of the ichneumon hatch forth into the world.
Thus what was once climate science now only has the appearance of a science from the outside; but it is full of larvae of political activists which are busy destroying the functional and living elements of the science. Essential foundations such as climate records, and even logical structures such as falsifiability and the null hypothesis, are being destroyed. Geological climate reconstructions are being magicked into conformity with pre-ordained CO2 dogma. Soon all that will be left are the names and logos of scientific societies and journals and universities, but no science, only activists.
And this has not happened only to climate science. It happened previously to radiation biology when it was decreed that the science must serve the political function of shutting down the nuclear industry. This was to be achieved by inflating the dangers of ionizing radiation and birthing the corrosive fiction of the linear no-threshold radiation carcinogenesis (or mutagenesis) hypothesis-fact. This burdens the nuclear industry with needless and costly regulations and redundant measures, renders politically impossible the disposal of nuclear waste and allows activists to say with affected innocence “nuclear is interesting – but way too expensive”.
Now this ichneumon parasitization is being injected into another science – biological evolution. Ironically the arguments of creationism are being turned against classical Darwinian evolution not by bible-belt evangelicals, but by (equally religious) scientists concerned about the political correctness of evolution. The language and paradigm of life from natural selection and sexual reproduction are an awkward fit with current emerging political narratives, particularly that concerning gender, trans-gender and sexual orientation. The question for instance of what – if anything – is a woman, or a man?
So the new synthesis brings in a crowded and confused narrative of apparently new (but generally not new) ideas and mechanisms, such as epigenetics and statistical models of group selection. By the familiar smoke-and-mirrors wave of a wand, these new arguments sufficiently confuse the evolutionary and selective basis of living organisms to allow activists to effectively deny the need to acknowledge biology in political decisions, definitions and power structures.
Extended evolutionary synthesis – Wikipedia
So science after science is being hollowed out by the ichneumon larvae of political activism. Any science that causes any kind of obstruction to the advancement of the progressive political empire must be wasp-injected in this manner. More and more, science is servile to politics. As Russell Brand puts it so well – “don’t follow the science because the science only follows the money”. Science must be shaped to serve and not oppose new political mandates. And they’ve now got an efficient mechanism of changing science from the inside. Ironically it borrows from the same nature whose truths it so fears – the subversive, deadly genius of the ichneumon wasp.
I don’t care how many billions Andrew Forrest spends on green energy as long as it’s his own money.
He won’t use his own money as he is a carpetbagger.
A vision of an unsustainable utopian society funded by unsustainable creation of fiat money plucked from organic and natural printing presses.
In the medical field we call it ganGREEN and the affected area must be cut off or it inevitably kills the individual.
Who did that picture – it is Authentic Commie!?
I live where, maybe, Andrew Forrest will build our green energy future in Central Queensland. To do it, huge swathes of native forrest mixed with farmland will need to be cleared. It’s next to an LNG plant, coal port and coal power station. The area is a wild life wonderland, full of birds, marsupials, and other wild life. It’s on a estuarine harbour, full of fish, sea grass and a big coral reef at the harbour entrance.
Forrest and his friends are going to destroy the Area putting in renewable energy . All because some Professors can’t do some basic, very simple maths. They are going to destroy the environment to “save the planet”
I am upset. There is nothing I can do.