Spinning the myth of Global Warming for corporate gain

The myth of human-induced global warming has always been a mixture of scientific chicanery and businesses, seeking to leverage a competitive advantage over their rivals.

For scientists – at least those in the public sector – global warming provided the opportunity to be listened to by politicians and the public, to attend international gatherings, and be shown the respect they felt was previously lacking.

For businesses, the possibility of subsidies and imposts on rival suppliers was irresistible. Indeed, the nuclear industry was among the early proponents of the greenhouse myth, seeing it as an opportunity to ride renewable energy’s coattails and gain regulatory advantages over its fossil fuel competitors.

But the main commercial impetus came from the renewable industry, which was confident that the declining costs of the energy produced from wind farms and solar systems would fall over time, and eventually be cheaper than energy derived from coal and gas. All that was needed was a bit of a nudge from the government to get the technology over the edge.

That competitive price parity never came about. Agencies like CSIRO produce data, which indicates wind might be as cheap as coal. However, this can only be so if others build the transmission lines to get that wind power into the market, provide the balancing mechanisms within the electricity system to allow it to avoid disrupting the entire network, and, above all, supply the means by which it could be ‘firmed up’ by energy supplies not dependent on the wind and sun.

These costs rise exponentially with the forced increased penetration of renewables. A full renewable system is unfeasible at any cost.

The Australian Energy Market Operator, long supportive of the Net Zero agenda, is now alarmed by it and is calling for subsidies for transmission, subsidies that would increase the cost of the network from its current $23 billion to $100 billion. Similarly, to shore up supply the Victorian government is taking steps to subsidise coal generation that is becoming insolvent as a result of the subsidies to wind/solar that it supports.

An early estimate of the direct costs imposed by regulations and by budgetary support to renewables was a 2014 submission from the IPA to the 2014 Warburton review. This projected the annual costs by 2020 at $6-7 billion. The assessment was refined for the Australian Environment Foundation’s (AEF) response to the 2017 Finkel Review.

In his 2017 report, Finkel claimed that the transition to wind and solar PV ‘is reflected in a fall in their costs’ – even though wholesale prices doubled that year. The AEF compiled the support costs for 2016 at $4.9 billion.

The costs were updated to $6.9 billion for 2019, in a report commissioned by Senator Malcolm Roberts; that estimate was also published in Chapter 22 of Pinto et al Local Electricity Markets, Elsevier 2021.

Updated for price and budget changes, annual current renewable program costs are now over $10 billion

Initially greeted with hostility by vested interests, who recognised such analysis as a threat to their ongoing subsidies, recent reaction has been subdued. The methodology is followed by the Productivity Commission in its latest Trade and Assistance Review, though the Commission declines to put an aggregate value on the subsidies.

This cost is imposed at various points of the economy: on taxpayers and on electricity consumers but the major impact is upon the generation component – overwhelmingly on coal that formerly comprised 85 per cent of supply (and now comprises 63 per cent). Before the policies started to bite, national electricity generation cost less than $11 billion a year or about $40 per Megawatt hour. Contrary to ministerial statements, the coal supplying this remains both abundant and largely non-tradeable, while plant costs are fundamentally unchanged. Hence without government interference, coal-based generation supply would be less than half the $100 plus we pay today and to deliver it to customers, we could dispense with many of the additional system, subsidy, and transmission costs that we are incurring.

How have the costs and implications of policies designed to replace low-cost, controllable coal-generated electricity by high-cost intermittent wind and solar taken so long to be recognised and even now are officially judged to be affordable? More than anything else reversion to policies that provide cheap energy could drive the cost reductions and productivity increases are vital for increased wages. But while both the Business Council and Treasury, in its Intergenerational Report claim to understand this, their prescriptions involve subsidising energy sources (renewables, green hydrogen) that will raise costs.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/spinning-the-myth-of-global-warming-for-corporate-gain

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The Aboriginalisation of Australia

Very Left-driven

Isn’t it about time we start demanding of our taxpayer media why they are subtly driving the Aboriginalisation of this country?

SBS shows weather maps with name changes to all our capital cities. Radio National is calling us from Gadigal country. Place names such as Fraser Island are being changed to Aboriginal names. Why? With whose permission?

This is straight out of the Marxist-Leninist handbook where you tear down statues, change familiar place names, and rewrite the past.

Many claiming Aboriginal ancestry include a tribal origin in their name. People are ‘proud’ Indigenous men and women. But where does that leave us? Are non-Indigenous Australians allowed to be proud of their heritage? Why proclaim it? The insinuation is divisive.

It creates a situation where ethnicity permeates every crevice of Australia’s social fabric.

We are forced to listen to ‘Welcome to Country’ messaging on every flight, every gathering, every sporting match, and at every government event. Smoking ceremonies are conducted at every formal opening, for a charge, of course. Tributes are made to elders past and present. They are described as custodians of the land where we work and play. It is a story presented to Australians as though we are being granted a privilege to be here despite all of us being equal citizens.

There are over 3,700 registered Aboriginal corporations embedded in the social fabric of this country. The multiplier effect of their influence is vastly out of proportion to the citizens of Aboriginal descent.

Why is there any special treatment based upon heritage (instead of need)? Why are the majority made to feel as if they are aliens in their homeland?

For over 230 years, Australians of all creeds sacrificed their lives to fight off foreign tyranny. They did their best to develop the nation for the benefit of all, regardless of race.

Pre-colonial Australia was not a peaceful Utopia, nor was it a coherent, unified nation. To suggest so is to re-write the past for political interest. It was a land with over 500 tribes speaking different languages, largely engaged in constant conflict with each other which is evident from the vast array of Aboriginal weaponry and first-contact accounts from those who travelled with peaceful tribes.

Despite brand new claims to the contrary, there was no evidence for agriculture or permanent settlement. They were not in perfect harmony with the land but rather used it to their advantage the same as any other human settlement. Animals went extinct under their watch, others are still hunted toward their doom today, such as the dugong, for cultural reasons. Much of the animal killing is what we modern sensibilities would call brutal and cruel. Aboriginal culture was, and used to be valued as, a preserved hunter-gatherer society. A piece of history.

If anyone questions the re-invented Utopian version of Aboriginal history, they are decried as racist. This is an attempt to misuse a fictional version of history for political power.

And what of Aboriginality? How is it assessed and upon what criteria? As it stands, if the ‘mob’ accepts you, you are in. But with no genuine definition, the number of people claiming Aboriginal heritage has expanded well beyond believable levels to the point Aboriginal communities are concerned it is being used to gain access to special rights and opportunities that were meant to be reserved for those in need. Which is why it is always a terrible idea to use race as a qualification.

Why is Prime Minister Albanese supporting a voice that is potentially undermining the Australian democracy? Is he that foolish? Or is this a negotiation with a powerful bureaucracy for mutual benefit between what Labor wants and want a small panel of selected activists are prepared to give?

When it comes to the question of this new type of Aboriginality, isn’t it about time our politicians call out what amounts to state-sanctioned racial privilege?

It was W Edwards Deming, the architect of the post-war Japanese economic miracle, who said create a system that is open to abuse and abused it will be.

Where is our wise and honest leadership?

The Voice does not pass the pub test, yet there seems no will to address its serious flaws. Is it because Australia doesn’t have an identifiable culture and the Indigenous activists have taken the opportunity to fill the void? It is a huge irony that the very people who seek retribution have got to that position through the benefits of Western Civilisation, yet now turn on the very institutions that provided their education and prosperity. But logic does not register with the activist class.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-re-write-of-australia-straight-out-of-the-marxist-leninist-handbook

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Reparation and apology nonsense

People are starting to wake up to not only The Voice, but the philosophical reasoning behind it, which is ironically, deeply racist. Douglas Murray, in a stand-out article for The Australian, persuasively argues: ‘Australia feels like it is stuck in an apology loop because it is. And the reason that it doesn’t seem to be getting the country anywhere is because it never could – however many cycles of this you want to go around for.’

As an Englishman – and descendant of those dreaded ‘colonisers’ – Murray has the benefit of the outsider’s perspective as well as the uncanny ability and courage of speaking truth to power, especially when he observes that the emperor has no clothes. And as such, his insight into our cultural malaise really does bell the cat. As Murray writes:

As I have found when travelling the country, the typical Australian no longer seems to me to be that striding, sensible, happy-go-lucky figure of old. They seem – in my experience – to be guilt-ridden people, forever caveating their thoughts and self-conscious to an often excruciating degree.

Why? Because if you browbeat any group of people for long enough you will get that result. A cringing, creeping-through life person, who subdues their thoughts and distrusts their own speech and actions.

What’s happened to us as a nation? We used to be internationally known for our larrikin spirit which delighted to call out authoritarianism and its associated pomposity. Just think, Crocodile Dundee. But if Covid showed us anything, it’s that we now want Big Brother to tell us what to do. We’re okay for the government to take away our freedoms. And we’re more than willing to say ‘Sorry’ to people we haven’t personally offended. And not just once, but again and again and again and again.

This is where Murray really puts his finger on the heart of the issue. As Murray argues in his book The War on the West, there is a profound ethical problem with current generations apologising from the mistakes of the previous generation. And that is, they themselves are not responsible. This also means that it’s disingenuous of those who are benefiting from the confession to even ask for it. As Murray writes:

As a number of the most serious and profound ethicists of the last century have agreed, an apology can work only when it comes from someone who has done a wrong and is accepted by someone who has been wronged. If it comes from someone who has themselves done no wrong and goes to someone who has not actually been wronged, then the deal is a fraud. If such an apology is offered and accepted it is a fraud on both sides. Someone who has done no wrong is pretending to be speaking for the dead and people who have suffered no direct wrong are pretending to be able to accept an apology on behalf of people they did not know.

Sadly, even my fellow Christian brothers and sisters have fallen into this self-flagellating apology loop. Which is particularly strange – as well as more than a little troubling – when the Bible itself says that only the soul who is guilty of sin should be punished (i.e. Ezekiel 18:20).

What’s more, if reparations are to be paid, then just how many nations will be expected to financially contribute? What’s more, should we set up a genetic database to discern who is in fact eligible? This ever-diminishing inherited guilt is almost impossible to calculate and if attempted, the potential consequences would be disastrous. As Murray rightly points out:

The issue of reparations now comes down not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/douglas-murray-bells-the-cat/

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Destructive Leftist influence on Australian education

One in three Australian school children, according to the latest Naplan results, are falling well behind in literacy and numeracy. A cynic might be tempted to compare that number with the approximately one in three Australians who voted for Labor at the last election. For sure, it’s a facetious comparison, but, alas, not an inaccurate one. There is no question that now, fifty years on from the Whitlam government and its disastrous experiments in corrupting young peoples’ minds with socialist claptrap, we can safely conclude that the modern Australian left has wilfully damaged the intellectual development of two generations of Australian children.

That is not to say there aren’t any bright kids out there. There most certainly are. Australian ingenuity, resilience, optimism, determination, entrepreneurialism and go-getter qualities still thrive amongst many of our great youth. But they have been egregiously betrayed by an academic system that has starved them of the great minds and works that should be their birthright. Denied them the critical thinking and academic robustness that is essential to living a positive and productive, not to mention an intellectually fulfilling, life.

Even those kids who do thrive academically and achieve good results have been seriously damaged thanks to a shockingly low standard of education built largely upon leftist ideology and Labor/Greens dogma. Gay propaganda fills the walls, anti-white racist theories abound and our extraordinary academic traditions are wilfully ignored. Only this week we learned of a school in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire where pre-school kids are forced to write essays apologising for British colonialism. This is intellectual child abuse; Marxism’s ‘long march’ at its most pernicious.

As with everything the left touches, and pours money into, the results are invariably the same: failure. So more money is poured in. And the failures continue to mount.

The reason is simple. The entire modern leftist approach of ‘we know what is best for you’ is wrong. They don’t know and never did know. Individuals must be free to make mistakes, be free to bounce back, be free to explore unorthodox ideas, be free to challenge and be free to dream of a better way. Sadly, the entrepreneurial flame of so many of our youth is now being wasted in the dead ends of eco-alarmism and woke ideology. Schools and universities teach unrelenting propaganda and ‘consensus’ rather than the free thinking that is critical to genuine progress and insight.

Bedwetters of the Liberal party fool themselves that the ‘times have changed’ and that in order to attract younger ‘more progressive’ voters the right needs to adopt left-leaning policies and priorities. The opposite is true. Having marinated in a sludge of toxic environmentalism and grievance politics throughout their entire childhood, what young intellectually-deprived minds desperately require is alternative stimulation, not more of the same.

For sure, many kids will lazily hang on to the dreary, soul-sapping self-loathing of wokeness, complete with its climate doom-mongering and sinister Malthusian ideology. But exposed to the tantalising and forbidden spark of an alternative, positive, optimistic, freedom-loving, modern conservatism, many young minds are capable of being inspired. Having spent most of their childhoods being brainwashed into believing there is no future worth striving for because the planet is doomed to disappear in an imaginary climate inferno sometime in the next (5? 12? 20? 50? It keeps changing) years, and having been convinced that their ancestors were either blood-thirsty racists or imprisoned slaves, it must surely be wonderfully refreshing to hear the alternative conservative perspective: climate change is at best a hoax, at worst a manageable phenomenon, we are not doomed, we have all the available technology already to hand to reduce emissions to zero if we are so inclined, not that we necessarily need to, and our ancestors, black and white, were extraordinarily gifted and caring people, many of whom gave up their own lives to ensure we get to enjoy the nourishing fruits of our culture and our history.

Indeed, what is needed from the Liberal leadership is not more pandering to the left, but quite the opposite: a determination to vociferously and energetically oppose the left’s fraudulent agenda wherever and whenever it pops its ugly head up.

Youth and rebelliousness have always gone hand in hand. The cunning trick of the modern left has been, through our education system, to convince these adolescents that ‘climate activism’ and ‘being an ally to LGBTQ+’ or ‘supporting the Voice’ is somehow a rebellious action. It is not. It is as mainstream and as boringly unimaginative as you can possibly get. These gullible kids have been hoodwinked into supporting the big, pampered, all-powerful, elitist and monied end of town.

During the late 1970s, the rebellious rock ’n’ roll culture had itself become bloated, pampered, self-indulgent and lazy, unrecognisable to the original rebels of the early 1960s. Appalled that these cocaine-addled, squillionaire LA rock stars somehow represented them, angry kids found their own way to rebel, as punks.

The only credible radicalism and anti-authoritarianism on offer to today’s youth is to oppose woke intolerance and the left’s brainwashing and racist grievance ideology. Call it ‘punk conservatism’ if you will.

Let’s hope the indomitable Aussie spirit can once again rise to defeat the freedom-hating socialists ruining our children’s future prospects and prosperity.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/intellectual-child-abuse/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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