"One of China’s principal strengths is its ability to harness cheap and reliable nuclear and coal-fired power.
Contrast that with Australia’s energy policies deliberately hostile to coal and nuclear power, and it’s hard not to conclude that our political betters are in cahoots with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).
... 20 years of massive subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar have sent retail power prices in Australia to the top of the leader board.
A brief dalliance with a tax on carbon dioxide gas helped that surge.
Before subsidised renewables came on the scene, Australia enjoyed the cheapest power prices in the developed world.
Now, with a substantial penetration of unreliable wind and solar, energy hungry businesses are simply dumped from the grid when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, whenever those collapses coincide with general spikes in demand.
Power rationing is the new normal.
Mineral processing and manufacturing are in their death throws.
The destruction of those industries has left a weak and vulnerable Nation even more so.
Notwithstanding recent concerns over CCP sabre rattling, trade sanctions against Australian exports and diplomatic bullying, the Federal Coalition government is thoroughly ignorant and apparently impotent when it comes to addressing its energy policy.
Unable to promote coal and incapable of promoting nuclear energy ...
The CCP must be delighted every time an energy rich nation like Australia starts babbling about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions and throwing even more subsidies at wind and solar;
thereby rendering its power supply unaffordable and unreliable.
... Australia only has itself to blame.
... our elected representatives who are always ready to accept and act on the admonitions delivered by climate cultists within the EU and US
– the same band of self-promoting rent seekers that wrecked Europe’s power supply,
who are all set to wreck America’s, and would readily destroy what’s left of Australia’s.
Alan Moran takes a look at the last days of Rome.
Green Eurocrats threaten our industries
Spectator Australia
Alan Moran
17 March 2021
The EU has long sought to impose its carbon dioxide abatement policies on the rest of the world.
... the European Ambassador in Canberra Australia, Michael Pulch ... now says we will face tariffs unless we further lift the penalties we place on the use of the low cost, high CO2 emitting coal that accounts for two-thirds of our electricity generation.
This has been followed by the EU parliament’s determination to avoid having its industries suffer a resultant competitive disadvantage by calling for a $65 per tonne levy on the carbon content of imports from nations not deemed to be doing enough to match the EU’s own self-injurious measures.
Ambassador Pulch’s hectoring is accompanied by gratuitous advice that by forcing us to fully dismantle our low cost, reliable coal generating supply, the EU will be doing us a favour.
He says this will encourage us to develop a technological breakthrough in having ‘green’ hydrogen power replace hydrocarbons together with the development of all those rare-earth materials that are essential to the supply of clean energy.
... Before to the Trump victory in 2016, the EU was joined in its policy stance by a like-minded US.
This was thwarted by strong push-back from the coal-reliant rapidly growing developing countries led by China and India but also including Indonesia and Vietnam alongside other nations in our region.
Trump’s victory put an end to the US/EU common front but the Biden Administration is on steroids in reversing Trump’s policies.
The Biden team signaled their agenda by terminating approvals for the Keystone pipeline, which was to take Canadian oil to US refineries on the Gulf of Mexico and resurrecting domestic emission control regulations.
Biden has also started along the path of banning fracking for oil and gas, a process that has transformed the US from an oil and gas importer to a net exporter.
The US Administration’s determination to seize and reinvigorate the global decarbonisation process is also evident with its convening of an international climate assembly on April 22.
In addition, Biden has started making a string of carbonista appointments including recycling Obama era climate warriors
including John Kerry as the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change
and former head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy,
in the White House as well as carbon tax proponent Janet Yellin to Treasury.
... John Kerry is playing the ‘soft cop’ to the EU’s ‘hard cop’, arguing that border protection might destabilise world trade and should be only used as a last resort.
That approach offers scant comfort but was supported in comments from Mathias Cormann, the in-coming head of the OECD.
After long maintaining that green power is not only beneficial in arresting the fallacious claims that carbon dioxide might lead to significant adverse climate change,
the alarmists have now been forced to recognise that the decarbonisation of economies will be costly.
Those costs will be amplified if some countries reject their vision of windmill and solar power (and the mirage of hydrogen power) replacing hydrocarbons.
This places Australia in a serious position.
Unlike China and other major users of coal, the nation finds it constitutionally difficult to pander to the latest fashionable requirements without establishing machinery to put such measures in place.
... Australia’s bureaucracy and media acts as a Fifth Column in urging-on self-harming measures.
Thus, the AFR this week called for a carbon tax, without recognising that the $7 billion a year that consumers fork out to support renewables in taxes and regulatory requirements already constitutes such a tax.
The bureaucracy has never bothered to estimate (or at least to publicise) the tax effect of current measures.
Pressures to decarbonise economies have far more serious economic effects on Australia than economies with nuclear and considerable hydro power.
We will need strong diplomatic skills, which we do not have, to weather the coming political storm without further damaging our competitiveness and living standards by penalising coal (and gas) to ensure their replacement by inherently high cost, low reliability wind/solar energy."