Tony Abbott

The man will be missed.*


* For his comedic genius, obviously.

Tony Abbott is an Asshat Part MMMCCXLVIII

If, as the environment movement contends, fossil fuels are the new tobacco, then Australia has cast itself as a sort of swaggering Marlboro man, puffing away contentedly as the rest of the world looks on quizzically.

As other countries look to transition to low-carbon alternatives with one eye on crunch climate talks in Paris later this year, Australia is pushing ahead with an expansion in coal extraction that its conservative prime minister Tony Abbott insists is “good for humanity”.

A series of huge mines planned for outback Queensland would, at capacity, produce nearly enough coal to match Germany’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The federal government has just approved another mine, further south, on the fertile farming plains of New South Wales. It will be allowed to operate until 2046, a full 26 years after the point when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the world should stop emissions rising to avoid disastrous global warming.

The mine, to be operated by Chinese state-owned firm Shenhua, has caused consternation among farmers, with agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce rebelling against his own cabinet colleagues by branding the approval “absolute madness” and “dopey”.

Both mines will liberate coal to further escalate Australia’s huge export industry, predominantly to India and China. The government’s rationale is clear – coal is here to stay and there is a moral imperative to provide it to the world, ideally reigniting Australia’s fading mining boom in the process. Any contrary view, such as the Pope’s, has been branded “unchristian” in the Abbott-friendly, Rupert Murdoch-owned press.

“For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity,” Abbott said late last year. “Coal is the foundation of the way we live because you can’t have a modern lifestyle without energy, you can’t have a modern economy without energy.

“So if we are serious about raising people’s living standards in less developed countries, if we are serious about maintaining and improving living standards in countries like Australia, we have to be serious about making the best use of coal.”

Indeed !  Why do you hate poor people, environmentalists ?  Stupid Malthusian Marxist Big-Government Bureaucrats standing in the way of basic human progress and prosperity !  Why shouldn't developing nations be allowed to play as much a part (full knowingly) as we played (somewhat knowingly, perhaps) in destroying the ability of the planet to support advanced ecosystems, and human civilisation ?  And while we're at it, we should also encourage every nation to develop nuclear weapons.  Why should the developed nations have a monopoly on the power to destroy all of humanity at the touch of a button ?

According to recent polling by the Lowy Institute, 50% of Australians agree that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem” – up 14% since 2012. Asked what Australia’s primary energy source should be in 10 years, 43% of respondents cited solar power. Coal was selected by only 17%.

But it is doubtful whether Abbott will be swayed, either by scientific or economic evidence or, despite his undoubted ability as a political survivor, poor polling.

As he wrote in his book Battlelines: “To a conservative, intuition is as important as reasoning; instinct as important as intellect. A way of life has far more demonstrative power to a conservative than a brilliant argument.”

Earlier, in the article, Abbott is referred to as a 'a poor man’s George W Bush'.  Bush was never so eloquent, but that sentiment in bold, scares the shit out of me.  That kind of anti-rational bullshit might well serve as the epitaph on our species' tombstone.

Tony Abbott is an Asshat Part MMMCCXLVII

Government pulls the plug on household solar

The Abbott government has opened up another front in its war on renewable energy by pulling the plug on investments in the most common form of alternative energy, rooftop and small-scale solar.

As a storm raged over the government's directive to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to no longer back wind energy projects, it emerged that it has also put a stop to solar investments other than the largest industrial-scale projects.

The solar industry has been left fuming by a letter to the CEFC by Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in which they direct investments in household and small-scale solar to be "excluded" from the $10 billion fund in future.

The draft investment mandate calls for "mature and established clean energy technologies … to be excluded from the corporation's activities, including extant wind technology and household and small-scale solar".

Currently, about a third of all CEFC investments involve small-scale solar. The corporation, which has produced more than a $1 profit for the government for every $1 invested, was assessing $500 million in finance for solar projects valued at more than $1 billion.

There are 1.3 million rooftop solar systems in Australia and most households receive publicly-backed rebates to install, but the CEFC has made a priority projects that help people who do not own their own homes, those who live in apartments and community groups to invest in solar panels.

...

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".

Mr Grimes said the CEFC had made it possible for low-income people and retirees to invest in solar and take advantage of the power bill savings that flow.

"Tony Abbott is keeping people trapped paying higher electricity prices," Mr Grimes told Fairfax Media.

The government tried and failed to abolish the profit-making CEFC after failing to get Senate support and its latest strike against wind and solar is expected to further scare renewable energy investors away from Australia, Labor and the Greens claim.

..

Shadow environment spokesman Mark Butler said: "These proposed changes go well beyond Tony Abbott's opposition to the aesthetic values of wind farms - it's a wholesale attack on renewable energy.

"Tony Abbott is broadening his assault on renewable energy technologies putting thousands of Australian jobs and billions of dollars in investment at even further risk."

Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon thing.  Here we are in 2015, decades after we were first warned about global warming, and at a time when even the PRC in China are embracing renewables, we have governments in the US*, Canada, the UK, and Australia all actively working against renewable projects, such as windfarms & solar, and championing greater investment in fossil-fuels.

And in this case, it would seem it isn't even about money.  $1 profit for every $1 invested sounds like a pretty good investment to me.  This is just being an asshole for the sake of it.  It's the politician's equivalent of those assholes in the US, who 'roll coal', ie modify their vehicles to release black smoke on demand, then wait till a Prius shows up in their rearview and blast them.  I really do despair for humanity.


* I'm referring here of course not to Barack Obama, but to the Republican assholes in Congress and elsewhere.

Always Someone Gonna Bring Us Down

Also from news.com.au,  there's this cheery perspective:

Musician Anthony Hegarty also fired up at another point, accusing the politicians and spin-masters on the show of ignoring climate change and taking advantage of indigenous communities in exchange for mining royalties.

“Where are you all going to be with all that money and nothing left to eat and nothing left to drink and nowhere to go,” said the Antony and The Johnsons band member in response to a comment from political consultant Grahame Morris about the deal with indigenous communities over uranium mining.

“Do you think you’re going to f**k off to paradise elsewhere that you’re going to ascend to heaven?

“What are you thinking? You gotta dream forward, you got to wake up.”

Earlier, Mr Hergarty said 50 per cent of the world’s species will be extinct in the next 70 years and that unless governments “changed track” we were “all doomed”.

“You’re doomed, I’m doomed and your children will be doomed,” he added.

Fun times, everybody !

Forget Yucca Mountain

WHEN you hear the words ‘nuclear facility’, Chernobyl and Fukushima spring to mind.

So it’s no wonder many Aussies baulk at the thought of producing this radioactive material, let alone storing it in our backyard.

But this scenario will soon become a reality as the Commonwealth pushes ahead with plans to build our first nuclear waste dump — just where it is to be located remains the sticking point.

Well, not in our backyard, certainly mate !  Damn foreigners forcing their nuclear waste us on sensible coal-burnin' Aussies !

...at the end of next month around 28 steel canisters of reprocessed nuclear waste is set to return home from France and the government needs to find somewhere to put it.

Australia produces nuclear waste in the form of medical byproducts, and spent nuclear fuel from its research reactor. We don’t have the facilities to process it here, so it is sent offshore. Under international agreements, the processed material has to be returned to Australia and stored here.

But speaking of which...a dump for nuclear waste in Australia, huh ?  An almost entirely desertified island-continent...

...with an almost uninhabited interior and the vast majority of its population on the coast...

Why aren't we sending ALL our nuclear waste to Australia ?  C'mon guys, you know you need a second economic outlet as China's economy starts to stall and they don't want quite so much coal and cattle anymore.  Win-Win !

And while the storage facility will only house Australian nuclear waste, Mr O’Neill said Gindalbie was open to storing international waste if the government allowed.

“If we can meet the requirements and there is a profit in it and it can be undertaken safely and everybody was on side, then yes we would (be open to it),” he said.

At present, a Royal Commission is being held in South Australia to examine the feasibility of developing a nuclear storage facility which would house not only our waste but international waste.

There ya go !

*For any Americans reading this, I didn't bother identifying Australia on the maps, but it's the big island in the lower right...No, no, those are New Zealand...No, that's New Guinea.  The.  Big.  One.**

**Just kidding.  I would never mock anyone based on national stereotypes.  Ever.  Honest.***

*** But apropos of nothing, what's up with the Brits. and their terrible teeth ?

Humanity Sucks Part MMMMDLXXII

The Australian government is undertaking frantic diplomatic efforts to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being listed as “in danger” by the UN, amid rising international concern over the opening up of a vast region in the state of Queensland for gigantic new coal mines.

A draft decision on the reef’s status is expected to be delivered by the end of this month ahead of a meeting of Unesco’s world heritage committee in Bonn, Germany in June. Unesco has already expressed its concern over erosion of the reef, which has lost 50% of its coral cover over the past 30 years.

It has emerged that Australian ministers and diplomats have visited 19 countries that provide committee members, including Portugal, Japan and Jamaica, in recent months in a desperate lobbying effort to avert an internationally embarrassing blacklisting for the ailing reef.

An “in danger” listing for the huge marine ecosystem, the world’s largest living entity, would prove highly problematic to mining companies attempting to open a massive fossil fuel frontier in Queensland’s Galilee basin, an area of underground coal the size of Britain.

Critics insist the Galilee basin projects would devastate global attempts to stay within a carbon ‘budget’ to avoid runaway climate change.

Good grief.  Are we really so stupid a species as we seem determined to prove at every opportunity ?  When the coral (and all the other multitudinous life it supports) is gone, it is gone.  The coal is going nowhere.

I Was Only Nineteen (The Lancer Band/Redgum)

The Lancer Band:

And the original: