Renewables Rejected: 80% of Australian Households Want Reliable & Affordable Power

For Australian households and businesses being crushed by out-of-control power prices the Paris Climate Agreement is a maniac’s suicide note.

With nothing else to justify the $60 billion being thrown in subsidies at chaotically intermittent wind and solar, renewable energy rent seekers are clinging to the notion that the deal done in the City of Light will forever hold them harmless from both political and commercial reality.

The more insane aspects of the Paris agreement are yet to bite in Australia: agriculture and transport will eventually suffer the same self-inflicted destruction that has been meted out in the power generation sector.

Australia’s cattle and sheep herds currently number in the tens of millions: 26 million beef cattle and 2.8 million milkers; sheep number around 74 million. Under the Paris deal sheep and cattle numbers will need to be slashed by more than 26% to meet its target for CO2 reductions: get ready for $100 steaks and $200 lamb roasts, washed down with $4 a litre milk.

The diesel-hungry V8 Land Cruisers, loved by city-bound outback wannabes, and the 4×4 dual-cab utes, favoured by farmers and tradies, will also become endangered species beyond 2020, when the more ridiculous aspects of the Paris CO2 targets take effect.

The political response out there in voter land to all of this pointless insanity is unlikely to favour what’s being pitched as the pinnacle of moral virtue by the hard-green left.

Those that occupy lunatic-left fringe hold it as an article of faith that Australians are losing sleep, worrying about reducing their ‘carbon’ footprint (or yours), and that every last one of them is ready to die in a ditch to ensure that we all ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future, by lunch-time, next Thursday.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Australians appear much more concerned about being able to afford their rocketing power bills and being able to get electricity, as and when they need it.

Real people put living standards above virtue signalling on climate change
Catallaxy Files
Alan Moran
26 October 2018

Leftist Economist Joseph Stiglitz, coming to Australia to collect the human rights activist “Sydney Peace Prize”, is not the only dreamer urging a carbon tax for Australia and proclaiming that climate change was not a liberal conspiracy.

As Chris Kenny notes the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) are also virtue signalling their support for such economy-crushing measures.  Oblivious to the fact that the carbon suppression agenda is really only confined to the sclerotic EU, 50 per cent of them put it as the major issue confronting the economy.  It’s as though they are cocooned in a world that has never heard of Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris Agreement or the fact that China and India will at best look to join it a dozen years hence!

While many of the AICD respondents may have expertise in how to make businesses operate profitably, they clearly are bereft of political and general economic skills.

It may well be that the company directors’ stumping up for a carbon tax and other measures designed to subsidise renewables is based on their corporate interests, since so many firms have punted, willingly or unwillingly, for renewable “investments” along with the subsidies without which none of the investments would be profitable.  Any movement to withdraw these subsidies will likely be a precursor for the rescinding of the rorts already granted and this will not look good on balance sheets.

Although the electorate is often also over-obsessed with climate change and its corollary of poverty inducement and high household electricity costs, most people are better grounded on what affects their interests.  The AICD virtue-signalling may well be self-interested but Essential has found that only 7 per cent of respondents among the general pubic put climate change and support for renewable subsidies as the key issue facing them; only 20 per cent placed it in the top three.  In terms of importance climate change may be dominant among the chattering classes but does not come in the top seven for ordinary folk.

Here are the Essential results.

There is a political message in this, though the Morrison Government seems keener on trying to minimise its differences with the ALP and the Greens, perhaps because so much of the Liberal Party is under the patronage of the Photios “moderate” wing.  Based on polling of real people, not only would going the Full Trump be good for the economy but it would, properly sold, be a major electoral positive.
Catallaxy Files

80% of Australian don’t want the government to put renewables ahead of costs, health, housing, jobs etc
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
30 October 2018

With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.

Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.

Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)

Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:
Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.

Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:
Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.

The polarising media makes out we are all so different, but it’s remarkable how closely the answers matched. Nearly the same order, nearly the same percentage. Conservatives spread their answers more (are less homogeneous). They care more about state debt and terrorism, but whatever.

The message to Conservatives for the 58th time is that they can drop the whole Paris thing, the media will go crazy, but the public won’t. Obviously it’s no accident that Abbott, Trump and Dean all won. As for the 17% of conservatives who want renewables, that’ll vanish the moment our nation starts a discussion about how expensive they are, and how pointless. Over to you Scott….
Jo Nova Blog