Essay by Eric Worrall
You couldn’t make this up – the very groups whose renewable energy advocacy helped create skyrocketing prices are now blaming the hardship they caused on “climate injustice”.
Climate change hits some of us much harder than others – but affected groups are fighting back
Published: October 14, 2022 10.40am AEDT
- Naomi Joy Godden VIce-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Centre for People, Place and Planet, Edith Cowan University
- Kavita Naidu Researcher, Edith Cowan University
- Keely Boom Industry/Professional Fellow, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney
All around us, climate change is worsening existing disadvantage. In Australia, we need only look to low-income households hit harder by rising energy and fuel prices, and flood responses in northern New South Wales overlooking the needs of people with disability.
These are examples of “climate injustice”. In our research on climate change and social justice in Australia, we have found again and again that people already experiencing marginalisation are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
But importantly, these are often the groups leading social movements to demand that equity and fairness for current and future generations are at the heart of climate action.
…
The real culprit of course is the push for renewable energy. Even the Australian ABC recently admitted that the green transition is driving up energy prices.
Of course we’ve known the renewable energy push will cause prices to skyrocket for a long time. President Obama let the cat out of the bag in 2009.
How do we bring down energy prices?
The solution to skyrocketing prices and alleviating hardship for poor people is obvious. We have to bring down energy prices. And the easiest way to bring down energy prices is to halt the unaffordable renewable energy push, and bring back coal.
New South Wales, where the academics are based, sits on a mountain of coal – one of the largest deposits in the world.
But coal prices are skyrocketing – how would returning to coal help?
The answer to that riddle is not all coal is equal. A lot of Australian and US coal is brown coal.
Nobody wants to buy low quality brown coal, it is full of impurities and moisture, and is simply not worth shipping. But a power station co-located with a brown coal deposit doesn’t have to care about shipping costs, their power station cost of fuel is the cost of operating a team of bulldozers to shovel the brown coal into the furnace.
Brown coal powered Australia and America’s industrial golden ages, by giving western industrial powerhouses the cheapest energy on Earth. There is still plenty of recoverable brown coal left, more than enough to revive Western manufacturing, and bring jobs and prosperity back to regions for whom a steady, well paid job is a distant memory.
Eventually even brown coal will be exhausted, but that’s a problem for another century. Trying to foresee the problems and solutions of the distant future is a fools game.
All we have to do, to help poor people with their energy bills, and to revive Western manufacturing, is choose to be prosperous again, to choose politicians we trust to embrace solutions we know will work.
Not only is there plenty of brown coal, there is hundreds of years worth of high quality steam coal left all over the world. Scotland alone has enough to last us about 300 years if only we were allowed to use it.
I didn’t realise there was so much, otherwise I would have included Scotland and Britain on the list.
Now now, Eric, you know fine well that at present Scotland is the northern part of Britain and will continue to be so until the Cheviot Hills are removed to allow the Solway and the North Sea to meet. I am of course not talking about Great Britain which is a country.
No it’s not. The country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain is the main island of the British Isles.
Yes it is now but the original Great Britain country which started in 1707 was Scotland and England together. Ireland only joined in 1800. Maybe I should have talked about the island of Great Britain ( as opposed to Little Britain or Brittany ) rather than the country.
But that doesn’t change the fact that we have plenty of coal.
You’ll upset the Welsh, boyo
No respect whatsoever for God’s Own Country.
As I understand it, from my Welsh wife, England is a country. Scotland is a country. Northern Ireland is a country. And Wales is a country. The United Kingdom is a kingdom.
It’s a very disunited kingdom
But it’s lasted about as long as Roman occupation did.
Yn gywir Jim – your wife is correct. Not only is Wales a country bur we have our own language.
OldSeaDog.
The Parcel of Rogues didn’t represent the views of the people, had they taken John Law’s alternative things might well have been different, assuming the politicians hadn’t interferred.
This may help everyone
Don’t get Kameltoe Harris started on venn diagrams…
Great Britain is the larger island of the British isles
It is that part of the UK that is not Northern Ireland. It includes a number of islands: the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebredies, Anglesey, Linda and the Isle of Wight among them. It does not include the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, which are separate Crown Dependencies.
Your Non sequitur for the day:
–
If all you Brits can’t agree what Great Britain is, it’s no wonder electricity prices are so high.
😉
Are you seriously claiming your education system is better?
“Are you seriously claiming your education system is better?”
–
If you want the best barbeque, then come to the U.S., stratavarius. Start in North Carolina and work your way through the Southern states.
–
P.S. We haven’t had an education system in the U.S. since about 1998. All indoctrination all the time.)
Northern Island is on ‘Little Britain’
No it’s not, Bretagne the P-Celtic speaking region of France is Little Britain or Breizh to its natives. The Ireland is Éire to its natives, Scotland is Alba to its Gaels and many nationalists, and Wales is Cymru.
I’ve never heard of the Isle of Linda (sic). could this be Lundy Island?
Anglesy is part of Wales – its proper name is Ynys Môn.
Eric,
During my time at the British Geological Survey in the 1980s I identified a new unexplored potential coal deposit located nearshore in shallow water. I was told by my geoscience team leader “No one gets famous for discovering UK coalfields anymore.”
“No one gets famous for discovering UK coalfields anymore.”
Possibly because such discoveries are suppressed. Not many people seem to know about this:
https://www.worldcoal.com/coal/31032014/coal_discovered_in_north_sea_674/
Eric,
Here is a amusing calculation that shows just how much biologically reduced carbon there is in the Earth’s crust and mantle.
So how much oil is there?
To answer this, I am going to go way outside the box and address the question of atmospheric oxygen.
We know from geology that the Earth in the deep past did not have an oxygen rich atmosphere. Indeed, the process of formation of banded iron stones in the Archean Ocean requires a process of chemical conversion of soluble Iron II to insoluble iron III as the biosphere ramped up the production of oxygen gas. This chemical conversion of the oceans required a lot of oxygen so how did this work?
It is generally accepted that the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere was generated by photosynthesis.
Now the current planetary surface atmospheric pressure is 101,325 Pascals and that the air consists of 21% oxygen gas. So, the partial pressure of oxygen is 21,278 Pascals, which for a gravity of 9.80665 m/s/s amounts to a mass of 2,170 kg/m^2 of oxygen for every square metre of the planet’s surface.
Now the process of generating oxygen by photosynthesis requires the reduction of oxidised carbon gas to form sugar with the effective creation of CH2 chain molecules. So, the mass ratio of Oxygen to CH2 is 16 to 14 (for every oxygen atom liberated one CH2 link is formed). This means that there must be somewhere buried in the crust of the Earth 1.9 tonnes of hydrocarbons per square metre.
Now the oil consumption question.
Total surface area of the Earth is 510,000,000 sq km.
So, the total mass of hydrocarbons in the crust of the Earth is 9.68263E+14 tonnes.
Now global annual oil consumption is 35,442,900,000 barrels which equates to 5,544,800,000 metric tonnes per year.
So, if we divide 9.68263E+14 tonnes by 5,544,800,000 tonnes the answer is 174,600 years to run the planet’s oxygen level down to zero by combustion of all of the stored reduced carbon in the Earth’s crust.
OK that’s unrealistic, so suppose we reduce the Earth’s oxygen from 21% to 20% (this is a proportionate drop of 5% of the oxygen thereby consumed) then this will allow us to burn fossil fuels from the Earth’s lithic store of reduced carbon for 8,700 years at the present rate.
Run out of hydrocarbons? Not going to happen anytime soon.
Now that is just a calculation I made for oil not coal. Let us assume a 50 50 split coal versus oil and assume that all coal will all be converted into graphite on plate subduction it into the mantle and so not available for exploitation. However, which ever way you cut this the mass of oxygen in the atmosphere tells you that the store of reduced carbon in the Earth is huge.
That calculation is predicated on the assumption that the atmospheric oxygen was generated by photosynthesis. That assumption is wrong. Most of it was generated by photolysis of water vapour by Solar UV in the upper atmosphere.
Go tell that to my goldfish, they seem to like the bubbles of oxygen gas coming from the pond weed in their fish tank.
On the Earth, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere until after life started. This was 100’s of millions of years after the atmosphere formed and the sun started shinning on it.
Wrong. Why does the Great Oxidation Event coincide with the appearance of photosynthetic bacteria?
Impressive, aligns with Immanuel Velikovsky worlds in collision insomuch as he said hydrocarbons are abundant though for perhaps different reasons, thanks for some clear back of the envelope calcs that deal with relevant orders of magnitude.
Not quite.
A lot of those reduced carbon gas molecules, “generating oxygen by photosynthesis requires the reduction of oxidised carbon gas to form sugar with the effective creation of CH2 chain molecules” are utilized to make various oxygenated carbonate molecules and stored as massive carbonate deposits.
Not utilizable as fuel.
Eric, there is plenty of coal here in the UK, but it is,or was, mostly deep-mined coal. Therefore more expensive than places where you can just drive a bulldozer into the side of a hill.
It may be high quality coal and I’m sure mining techniques have improved since UK coal mines were shut down but I don’t know if it is economic compared to other coal. The UK was shutting coal mines even as it started importing from abroad. The communist leader of the coal miners union always used to claim it was “the cheapest deep-mined coal in the world”, clearly choosing his words carefully (which was unusual).
UK has huge coal resources under the sea. Get a few hundred Nova Scotian coal miners over there and you will add another 500yrs resources. They have drawn coal from under the sea for over a century.
“Most of Nova Scotia’s coal has been mined from under the ocean’s floor, in some cases, several miles from shore.”
https://notyourgrandfathersmining.ca/submarine-mines
Wales too
Pennsylvania has the lion’s share of anthracite coal – NE PA:
“Anthracite contains 86%–97% carbon and generally has the highest heating value of all ranks of coal. Anthracite accounted for less than 1% of the coal mined in the United States in 2020. All of the anthracite mines in the United States are in northeastern Pennsylvania. In the United States, anthracite is mainly used by the metals industry.”
I take it that this is Hard coal:
“Anthracite: The highest rank of coal. It is a hard, brittle, and black lustrous coal, often referred to as hard coal, containing a high percentage of fixed carbon and a low percentage of volatile matter.”
Another report of persons hurt most by Progressive/Socialist/Marxist policies continuing to vote for the source of their difficulty. The tendency appears to be increasing, even in countries that are basically advanced, like the USA where the voters for Brandon are getting what they should have known was coming. I have never once convinced an idiot of anything and no longer try. This is not going to end well.
” I have never once convinced an idiot of anything and no longer try. This is not going to end well.”
DITTO!
Yay! Good to see you’re OK and back in action, Tom.
The problem is getting accurate information to them. Unfortunately most people get their information from government controlled media sources.
And they don’t read, all of their “ideas” are poured into their little heads
You can’t un-brainwash people, current population has been cultivated for centuries or more. Free thinkers were burned at the stake, etc, etc resulting in a gene pool dominated by a conformist herd. But the herd appears to be now longer needed so it’s looking like significant population reduction program looming on the horizon…it’s not going well 4 sure.
Academic – a they/them who specialises in religious folklore, faery tales and storytelling
In the US the switch to brown coal was due to another green scare — acid rain. Our brown coal is low sulfur. We have over 100 years of high quality coal too.
The greens blame high fossil fuel prices on —- fossil fuel. It is an easy fallacy.
It’s like the joke headline that the non-PC mock:
“ALIENS INVADE EARTH, KILL BILLIONS … MINORITIES HURT DISPROPORTIONATELY!”
Yes it’s quite clear Gaia is really Ming the Merciless with- All around us, climate change is worsening existing disadvantage
I have tried but failed to authenticate the lead graph, particularly the placement of Australia. Ed Hoskins around 2014 seemingly gave a version to Paul Homewood for Europe, then it appeared on Jo Nova in more international form about 2 years ago.
I’d like to use the graph but old stickler me would like to see it updated and referenced. Can anyone help? Geoff S
Willis created the graph in Obama might finally succeed based on a post in Not a lot of people know that. Although the screenshots in not a lot of people know article are broken, the links below the screenshots take you to the original graphs which Willis used to derive his renewables vs price graph.
This is perhaps the most comprehensive source on comparative power prices I can find.
https://www.cable.co.uk/energy/worldwide-pricing/
It’s worth downloading their methodology as well as their data to understand some of the reasons why cross country comparisons are far from easy. Even worse in the current climate of fast changing prices and massive consumer subsidies.
So far as data on capacity per capita are concerned I would look at BP World Energy Statistics, which has tables on capacity of wind, solar and other renewables. A population to derive per capita figures can be derived from their CO2 emissions data, given as a total and on a per capita basis.
HTH
HTH, Eric,
Thank you for this assistance.
There are not enough hours some days.
My concern is that sceptics show high quality, not junk like some others present.
I am not saying this graph is junk. I do not know. I want to do the right thing and validate as much as possible. Geoff S
You can see that Australia gets the best of both worlds. It has extremely high energy prices (rising 35% next year, too) and unreliable power, leading to lots of blackouts.
Did I say ‘best’?
All we have to do, to help poor people with their energy bills, and to revive Western manufacturing…
_____________________________________________
The Greens don’t want to revive Western manufacturing:
“Shutting down the whole economy is the only way of
limiting global warming to 2°C”
Yvo de Boer head of the UNFCCC
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is
the United States.
George Soros
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if
the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be
doing the right thing in terms of economic
and environmental policy.”
Timothy Wirth, President, UN Foundation
“Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way
of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to
collapse.”
Maurice Strong
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that
we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally,
within a defined period of time to change the economic
development model that has been reigning for at least
150 years, since the industrial revolution.”
Christiana Figueres – UN Big Wig
“We’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism
and overthrow it.
George Monbiot
They told us what they were going to do, and they are doing it.
Where’s the surprise?
They told us what they were going to do, and they are doing it.
“We didn’t think they really meant it!”
From the same mindset that claims “Defund the police” doesn’t actually mean “defund the police”
For some strange reason Eddie and the Hot Rods popped up in my RAM
“Don’t need no politician, tell me things I shouldn’t be
Neither no optician, tell me what I ought to see
No one tells you nothing
Even when you know they know
But they tell you what you should do
They don’t like to see you grow
Why don’t you ask them what they expect from you?
Why don’t you tell them what you are gonna do?
You’ll get so lonely
Maybe it’s better that way
It ain’t you only
You got something to say
Do anything you wanna do
Do anything you wanna do”
Of course, kids were different then. The indoctrination and propaganda bombardment had only just begun
From the article: “All around us, climate change is worsening existing disadvantage.”
What the author means is Human-caused climate change is doing this.
The facts are there is no evidence that human-derived CO2 is causing the climate to change and there is no evidence that the climate is “worsening”. It’s the same old climate and there’s no evidence it is not. The numbers show no worsening of any kind of weather event.
So the author is seeing things which are not there. Fanatical religious zealotry will cause people to do such things. That’s what is going on here it appears.
Well of course it’s only from human caused climate change. That’s what we are fighting. Environmentalists aren’t about to fight the benevolent climate that mother earth has graciously provided everyone for centuries. That would be the same as development, which is bad.
Quote:
“All we have to do, to help poor people with their energy bills, and to revive Western manufacturing, is choose to be prosperous again, to choose politicians we trust to embrace solutions we know will work.”
The trouble with this is that most of the common sense politicians have been ‘Platformed’ or otherwise ‘Cancelled’, which is typical of the tactics of a budding Dictatorship.
In this case Communism.
From the article: “These are examples of “climate injustice”. In our research on climate change and social justice in Australia, we have found again and again that people already experiencing marginalisation are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.”
What they are being harmed by is not CO2 but rather it is the imbeciles who are implementing CO2 policies that are raising prices for everyone, and of course, the poorest people, will be the hardest hit. That is always the case. But it’s not the fault of CO2, it is the fault of Alamists trying to stop fossil fuels using insane methods that do harm, not good.
These climate alarmists claim they want the best for the poor people, but the alarmists are the ones doing all the damage to the poor by making things more expensive and doing so for no good reason since they have no evidence that CO2 is dangerous or that it needs to be regulated or controlled.
The whole situation is nuts.
Their interim solution is to price energy based on income.
Their long term solution is for government to decide how much or anything people are allowed to use.
Their evidence is the EPA Endangerment Finding.
The Endangerment Finding is a political document, not a scientific proof of anything. I’m assuming you already know that.
The Endangerment Finding is what the alarmist use for their authority to regulate CO2. The Endangerment Finding needs to be rescinded as it is not based on facts.
Eric,
Are you sure that the article was not written by the Babylon Bee??
Sure reads like satire of some sort.
It must be tough being a satirist these days, creating material which stands out from the background absurdity.
Isn’t that the truth!
We did that is why we have Albio and his band of idiots.
What do you mean by “brown coal”? US power plants were generally fired with bituminous coal: eastern high sulfur or western low sulfur. With the required controls both produce very low emission power cost effectively.
google Powder River Basin coal, the feds basically dictate that’s all you can burn unless you spend a lot on sulpher scrubbers. Not sure what coal is being exported from us to china, I’d guess the high sulfur?
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/blog/insight-weekly-october-11-2022
All the coal fired power plants in Michigan scrub for SO2. They had to install that for the last round of regulations pre-2019. Many fire a blend of east & western coal.
So, a “Research Fellow, Centre for People, Place and Planet”, a plain, unadorned “Researcher” and an “Industry/Professional Fellow, Institute for Sustainable Futures” want to tell us how to live?
Thanks, but no thanks!
Romania is low in the “renewables” only because in EU hydro is not counted among renewables. Romania gets a minimum of 30% of the consumed energy from hydro, and uses hydro to balance the “renewables”. The rest of the consumption is 18% covered by nuclear sources, 10%+ from proper “renewables”, and the rest from fossil sources.
It’s not renewables per se that are stupid, but using the wrong type without planning.
Everyone knows the solution to a failed big government policy is a new big government subsidy policy and the bureaucracy that goes with it.
There reallyt is little point in making logical arguments about energy – green or otherwise. This is a religion – it is not amenable to logic.
“to choose politicians we trust to embrace solutions we know will work.”
ay, there’s the rub
What is a professional fellow?
I notice from the polemic that they have started to refer to aborigines living “on Country”
Is this the latest woke phrase?
It’s the new woke left version of the noble savage living at one with Nature when many of the ‘on Country’ settlements are tribal Hell holes like Arukun and Yuendemu. Our woke educational institutions are now full of what I’d call hippy revivalism and how tribal aborigines were such peace loving folk at one with the environment until the coming of the white man and his evil ways. You’ll have to look hard to find the truth among the inner city latte fairy dust nowadays-
The Cultural Roots of Aboriginal Violence – Quadrant Online
No misogyny whatsoever of course as that’s only among white folks-
The long history of Aboriginal violence — Part II – Quadrant Online
As for the modern day ‘Welcome to Country’ pantomime it kicked off with a couple of actors in the 1970s and it’s grown from there into fairy dust legendary status as Bolt describes-
Welcome to what’s actually your country – and to an ancient ceremony invented the other day | Herald Sun
Thanks for the links – I’ll read through them later today. I’ve read about the situation a little bit myself. It appears that the aboriginal communities are beset with alcoholism and domestic violence (as your links may detail).
When people from the First World arrived on Austrian shores, the aborigines were still living a stone age life – nasty, brutish, and short. To pretend that they lived some sort of golden life at one with nature is absolute twaddle. As you say, the soy latte crowd have romanticised a situation that never really existed.
I’ve posted a comment at the Conversation. I hope the comment stays up but the Conversation, rather ironically, isn’t keen on seeing two sides of a conversation.
We have an almost limitless supply of carbon based energy as well as nuclear. If we want to be prosperous again, the answer is simple – release this energy. The thugs stopping this release need to be defanged. Now that we are getting a glimpse at the thuggish world, hopefully the defanging will follow. If not, many will perish in the cold.
There is one state of Australia that had made renewable choices for over a century & has built the infrastructure to support it’s renewables … Tasmania.
Mostly powered by green renewable hydro – how does it maximise it’s competitive advantage? Does it have a large manufacturing base? Have businesses flocked to this most southern state?
NO, NO & NO – Tasmania simply exports its power generation to Mainlanders whilst price matching with their less reliable, higher polluting rivals ensuring the Tasmanian population sees no advantage at all from their own 100% state funded provider.
“Naomi Joy Godden VIce-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Centre for People, Place and Planet, Edith Cowan University …
Keely Boom Industry/Professional Fellow, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney”
I’m getting a picture that Australia is the most all-in country with the NWO totalitarian civilization destroyers. They seem to have the highest percapita number of climateering professors by far. Is this a mistaken notion? They have over-the-top names of institutes, “Centers of Excellence” in Climate in Coral research, distinguished chairs in the sixth and final extinction and the like.
People with titles like those above don’t even seem to be desperate as the certain end of the unraveling climate/NWO meme plays out. Even UK’s and Germany’s ordinary citizens at ground zero for this psychosis have cottoned onto it. Oz is are pretty close to Sri Lanka, the Crash Test Dummy for the Great Reset. Talk about deep psychological D*nile
Oh and stop calling your children Naomi, it’s dangerous.
You are absolutely right! I think this process is easier due to our small population. It’s cheaper to own the media, ‘the science’ and the politicians.
Just what in the H does “Climate Injustice” mean?Obama’s “War on Coal”? Brandon” “War on Fossil Fuels”?
It’s unjust that some people build their homes on a flood plain? Or in an area that has historically been visited by storms?
Depriving African nations of cheap and reliable energy because of an unproven hypothesis?
Just what in the H does “Climate Injustice” mean?
You are wrong Eric, Edith Cowan university is in PERTH and so the people you refer to also work there.
Brown coal spon coms like billioe if you let it dry out. Main technical reason for siting the power plant right next to the mine is to avoid having it sit around for any significant amount of time.
The shorter the logistics chain, the fewer things can go wrong and the lower the amount of fuel you need to stockpile before the furnace.
Very nice article Eric, well said.