Green electricity is fueled by your taxes and extra charges

[Andrew Bolt]

The ABC, Fairfax journalists and green carpetbaggers are today demanding even more taxpayer handouts for green power. They have already helped to force through a law obliging us to make 23 per of our electricity come from more expensive power sources such as wind and solar. Now they want cheap loans, too, supplied by taxpayers.

And all the time they claim that forcing us to us more expensive green power actually saves us money:


Australian Solar Council chief executive John Grimes accused Tony Abbott of playing “cynical politics” after the Prime Minister insisted on Sunday that his government “supports renewables” but wants to “reduce the upward pressure on power prices"… ”Tony Abbott is keeping people trapped paying higher electricity prices,” Mr Grimes told Fairfax Media.

You are being hoaxed. The more wind and solar power we use instead of cheap coal, the greater the overall cost to us.

As for this latest controversy, once again you are being misled:

Political storm? Adam Gartrell, Fairfax, yesterday:


Tony Abbott has dramatically escalated his war on wind power, creating a new cabinet split and provoking a warning he is putting international investment at risk ... The government has ordered the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation not to make any new investments in wind power projects ... Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann have issued the so-called green bank with a directive to change its investment mandate, prohibiting new wind funding. It’s understood the directive was issued without the approval or knowledge of Environment Minister Greg Hunt, angering the minister.

Just wind. Greg Hunt, Twitter, yesterday:

The Fairfax story today is factually wrong and is a misleading beat up.

More Hunt:

Fairfax was told on Friday that the mandate reflected the agreement with crossbench senators — as detailed in a letter from myself to the senators that was tabled in the Senate and widely reported at the time.

And yet more from the Minister:

This agreement was extensively discussed between and jointly approved by Minister Cormann and myself.

Fairfax are blowhards. Hunt again:

I fully support the changes to the CEFC investment mandate and any suggestion to the contrary is categorically wrong. Claims that I have been “angered” are a complete, absolute and utter fabrication.

The Hunt Twitter tornado finally calms with these tweets:

I’ve been repeatedly critical of the CEFC investing taxpayer funds in projects such as existing wind farms, rather than focusing on solar and emerging technologies. Our policy is to abolish the CEFC but in the meantime it should focus on solar and emerging technologies as was originally intended.

UPDATE

To hear how the ABC pushes green claims almost without question - and certainly without questioning global warming or the difference green power would actually make - hear Fran Kelly’s interview with Environment Minister Greg Hunt this morning.

The ABC not biased? Shame on the ABC bosses who repeat that brazen lie.

UPDATE

Reader Mark M consults a dictionary:

Luddite - noun1.a member of any of various bands of workers in England (1811–16) organized to destroy manufacturing machinery, under the belief that its use diminished employment.

Reader Mark M cites an example on the ABC yesterday:

Mike Seccombe on Insiders at 7.25 mins - “It just goes to show that this government is pretty “luddite” when it comes to anything to do with renewable energy.” But anyone with a slightest grasp of knowledge of human history knows that coal power replaced windmills. It is luddites like Mike Seccombe who argue we return to them.

UPDATE

If only the Government really were at war with green power:

Forget the hysteria generated by the Fairfax media, the opposition and the Greens over the government’s so-called war on wind.

Wind-driven electricity generation in Australia could just about double in the next five years regardless of the government’s directive to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to steer clear of wind farms and solar rooftop panels in new investment. The growth will be driven by the Renewable Energy Target, which underpins the projects courtesy of a subsidy paid by electricity consumers and legislated targets, rather than concessional loans from the government.

The question at the heart of the government’s decision to change the CEFC’s investment mandate, revealed at the weekend, is whether wind turbines and solar rooftop panels on homes are still emerging technologies…

Far from being a surprise, the government’s desire for more start-up loans for solar rather than more funding for wind was flagged in a letter from Environment Minister Greg Hunt to the crossbenchers last month when an agreement on changes to the RET deal went through parliament.

As The Australian reported on June 28 last year:

THE Clean Energy Finance Corporation is likely to be directed away from lending to wind farms in favour of programs that ­support the Coalition’s “direct ­action” plan such as energy-­efficiency schemes and leasing for solar hot water systems.... Senior government sources have told The Weekend Australian the CEFC could be instructed to favour direct action-style programs such as providing leasing for households to install solar hot water systems and for energy-­efficiency programs instead of wind farms.

[Andrew Bolt]

Courtesy of The Pickering Post


There were some things Abbott wasn’t prepared to do to gain Government in 2010... one was to “sell my arse” to Bob Brown, the other was to plaster the beautiful Aussie landscape with wind turbines. Julia Gillard was willing to do both, and anything else that secured her the keys to The Lodge.

In a previous article I said the problem with windmills is that they will all become unserviceable and useless at the one time. These hideous turbines have a life span of between 10 and 15 years and replacement costs will not attract the generous subsidies that allowed them to be built in the first place.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s slush fund consisted of a borrowed and unimaginable amount of $10 billion (by 2010 Rudd had already drained the treasury dry unnecessarily).

But one of the requirements needed to dip into this borrowed bank was that only uneconomic green schemes were eligible.

Applicants who wanted a piece of Bob Brown’s deficit bank had to show that other financing alternatives had been exhausted. In other words, every crazy green scheme had to have already been rejected as uneconomic by investors who can do simple sums when it comes to their own hard-earned.

Gillard had instructed the CEFC to hurriedly hand out as much in subsidies as was legally possible in the lead up to the 2013 election... (A) because she knew the contracts would be irreversible, (B) she knew struggling farmers would agree to have wind turbines installed and (C) it was clear the ALP/Green Government would lose Office even with a change back to Rudd and there would be nothing the Abbott could do to reverse it anyway.

With the Greens certain to hold sway in the Senate from their 2007 six-year terms it became impossible to rid Australians of one of the most costly and destructive of the Brown/Gillard land-mine deals.

Of course they are both now in voluntary retirement sucking off the taxpayers’ teat and laughing their cosmetically challenged heads off.

One of these delightful people is intent on saving whales aboard the Green Peace while the other is intent on saving her own neck from upcoming Victorian Major Fraud Squad charges. (Once Blewitt and Wilson are charged, and they will be, Gillard is back in the witness box.)

The best course to take with these carpets of visual- and noise-polluting windmill disasters is to join two D9s with a heavy duty chain and keep motoring until every last one is flattened.

Is it any wonder the world is finally waking up to the UN’s IPCC global warming hoax. The object of publicly-funded green energy financing is to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gasses but since its inception the C02 level hasn’t changed at all yet, through normal climatic variations, North America, Europe and even Australia is experiencing record cold winters with snow extending to the Queensland border for Christ sakes.

If these ridiculous windmills are responsible for this new cold then that’s reason enough to get rid of the hideous things.

Please give us back our C02 cos we need to grow stuff to eat and we are using more coal-fired energy just trying to keep warm!

When the normal financial checks and balances of democratic free enterprise is replaced with disastrous, no penalty, taxpayer funded programs of the far Left, pull the covers over your head and pray, because that’s exactly what we’ve got with these damned windmills.

The damage wreaked by Rudd/Gillard/Brown/Rudd and a prospective Shorten carries Greek overtones.

[Neferti]

Question.

Do want people to comment or are you just posting reams of stuff you gleaned off Andrew Bolt's site? Most of us read the "original" in any event.

Please explain.

[Andrew Bolt]

Once again you are being deceived by Fairfax’s global warming ideologues:

Australia is perfectly placed to become the next global superpower of renewable energy, the “Saudi Arabia of solar” for the coming century.

While Saudi Arabia has barrels of oil, we have an abundance of sunlight to fuel solar power and wind to power turbines, plus enough geographical space, modern infrastructure and a stable political system to house such an industry on a massive scale.

Really? If it’s that easy and that obvious, then why don’t investors just produce all that fantastic solar and wind power? What’s stopping them?

Ah. The catch. That power actually costs much more than electricity from coal or gas. And that’s the little catch that’s not mentioned: that these investors actually want you force by government to use their product and pay more for it.

This kind of reporting by Fairfax is a disgrace. It is deceiving people for an allegedly higher purpose.

UPDATE

Even worse, The Age prints this alarmist tripe from Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School:


Towards the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed, large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water. Some small island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, will be close to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, on which entire regions depend for drinking water, will be melting away. Many habitable parts of the world will no longer be able to support agriculture or produce clean water.

It is disgraceful - even disgusting - that The Age can publish this rubbish unchallenged.

In fact, the “current trends” actually show no real warming of the atmosphere for 18 years. These trends show a rising in sea levels over the past 25 years of just 3.3cm a decade that in no plausible scenario will put “large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam ... under water” within the life-time even of our grandchildren, even without taking into account any engineering over the next century to mitigate any risk. As for more deserts, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted there was only “low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century”. The glaciers in the Himalayas have actually been stable, and are not shrinking, as claimed.

And this fantastical doomsaying, riddled with error, cherry-picking and exaggeration, is from an academic at Colombia Law School? Accepted for publication by The Age? Are facts and reason really so irrelevant now in public debate?

Seems so. On goes the rank scaremongering;

Our children and grandchildren could be confronting a humanitarian crisis unlike anything the world has ever faced… To make calculating easy, let’s assume 100 million people will need new homes outside their own countries by 2050. Under a formula based on historic greenhouse gas emissions, the United States would take in 27 million people; Europe, 25 million; and so on. Even as a rough estimate, this gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Seriously? Global warming driving all those millions a year out of their countries over the next 35 years? After 18 years of no atmospheric warming? And Europe blithely accepting 25 million of them - nearly the population of The Netherlands and Belgium combined?

On goes the fear-mongering, ignoring recent science that contradicts the scare:


Just south-west of India is the low-lying island nation of Maldives. Before its president, Mohamed Nasheed, was deposed by a military coup in 2012, he rose to global prominence as a voice of endangered island nations by staging an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight his country’s likely fate. Last year, he told me about his message to developed nations. “You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much,” he said. “Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.”

Scary. Pity the facts: that recent research highlighted in the New Scientist shows that 18 of 29 low-lying islands like the Maldives have actually grown in size, and many others have been stable.

The Age should be ashamed of itself. It’s allowed the green faith subvert any commitment to telling its readers the plain truth - and all of it.

[freediver]

They should get rid of MRETs and various other subsidies and slap a flat tax on CO2 emissions. There are far cheaper ways to reduce emissions than green energy.

[Rorschach]

Why in the world should we tax CO2 emissions?

[IQS.RLOW]

They should get rid of MRETs and various other subsidies and slap a flat tax on CO2 emissions. There are far cheaper ways to reduce emissions than green energy.

They should get rid of them all. All completely useless taxes that do sweet fuck all except redistribute wealth and foster rent seekers.

What sort of a fucking moron actually begs a government to tax them?
Fucking lunacy...

[Andrew Bolt]

Normally the Left is hair-trigger fast to hype even the slightest health risk of a new technology. But when that new technology is the crucifix of their global warming faith it’s a very different story:

Groundbreaking research from Germany on low-frequency “infra­sound” adds to the recent body of work that is challenging wind energy proponents’ insistence that turbines are not linked to health complaints reported by those living close by.

The international project led by the National Metrology Instit­ute of Germany (PTB) concludes that exposure to infrasound below the range of hearing could stimul­ate parts of the brain that warn of danger. It finds that humans can hear sounds lower than had been assumed and the mechanisms of sound perception are much more complex than previously thought.

The researchers do not claim the results are definitive regard­ing wind turbines and health impacts, and say more work is needed.

But the research builds on recen­t work in Japan and Iran — and investigations by NASA dating back to the 1980s — that suggests the health science of wind energy is far from decided and would benefit from further inquiry...

[Andrew Bolt]

Under pressure on leadership, Bill Shorten lurches even more to the Left, promising a policy that will savagely increase the cost of electricity:

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is set to unveil a bold climate policy goal requiring half of Australia’s large-scale energy production to be generated using renewable sources within 15 years.



This means more than doubling green power but without using more of the hydro electricity that so far produces most of it. (Labor won’t build more dams.):


That vast expansion of wind and solar will not happen without paying a fortune in subsidies and forcing consumers to use more green power, given how expensive it is:




his will potentially cost taxpayers and consumers billions more each year, when we already subsidise green power by around $3 billion a year.

Effect on global warming? Nil.

Effect on the economy? Business lost, jobs lost.


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[Andrew Bolt]

Here comes another multi-billion-dollar green catastrophe, uncosted by Labor

Not costed, not modelled and not effective in “stopping” warming anyway. The truth behind Bill Shorten’s impossible “aim” of doubling renewable energy in 15 years - without hitting power prices:

Labor has failed to detail the cost to consumers and electricity generators of its ambition to rapidly accelerate Australia’s renewable energy use to 50 per cent in just 15 years…

With business, unions and Labor figures expressing dismay at the calculated shift to the Left on climate change, incoming ALP ­national president and opposition environment spokesman Mark Butler struggled to spell out the impact of the surprise policy.

He equivocated on the crucial question of whether ratcheting up the use of heavily subsidised ­renewables such as wind farms and rooftop solar panels would bring down household electricity prices, saying “there are too many factors in the electricity system to be definitive about this’’…

The policy on renewables — ­released two days before the party’s national conference — did not go to shadow cabinet, leaving some Labor MPs feeling ambushed­ and angry, but was discussed by the leadership group…

Modelling undertaken last year by Deloitte Access Economics showed the existing RET pushed up electricity prices, costing the economy up to $28 billion and a net loss of 5000 jobs…

Interviewed on Sky News, Mr Butler had difficulty explaining what an increase in renewables would mean for household electricity prices. He said all the modelling, including for the government’s review on the RET, showed “adding additional electricity puts downward pressure: that doesn’t mean there aren’t other price pressures’’.

What a joke:

The Labor Party has commissioned no modelling on the impacts of its proposed 50 per cent renewable energy target, saying it will consult on “the finer detail” of the policy when it is in government…

Asked to release Labor’s modelling, [environment spokesman Mark] Butler said it relied on reports that were “all in the public realm” including from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, ClimateWorks, and “some of the government’s own modelling”.

Adam Creighton:

Labor’s plan to require half of ­Australia’s electricity to come from renewable sources such as wind and solar power will greatly sap productivity and could significantly boost retail electricity ­prices, as more unwanted supply is forced into a market already groaning under excess capacity.

The renewable energy target, due to reach 33,000 gigawatt hours by 2020, would need to surge to 110,000GWh by 2030 to meet Labor’s ambitious policy, accordin­g to ACIL Allen…

ACIL chief executive Paul Hyslop said: “If this were met by wind power it would require 10,000 to 11,000 additional turbines … with capital costs for the turbines alone of $65 billion.

ACIL said the total capital cost would be in the order of $100bn — about three times the cost of the National Broadband Network.... Frontier calculated the net economic cost of Labor’s policy to be $35bn in today’s dollars..