Shorten’s Green/Labor Alliance: The Electricity ‘Bill’ Australia Simply Cannot Afford

 

Voters ought to think twice before installing a Green/Labor Alliance unless their objective is to destroy Australia’s prosperity, for good.

The modern Labor Party, led by Bill ‘Shifty’ Shorten, is almost unrecognisable from its roots as a party born on the back of a sheep-shearer’s strike in Queensland in the 1890s.

These days, it panders to the loony left for a couple of reasons. First, it needs votes from the smug inner-city types ready to tell you how to live your life, slamming miners and farmers, while merrily soaking up the benefits created by Australia’s endowment of mineral and agricultural riches.

These are the characters who drive German built SUVs, plastered with Stop Adani stickers, work their kids into a lather about carbon dioxide gas and fawn, in reverent awe, over windmills and their own solar-panel-clad roofs, and who howl whenever the subsidies (born heaviest by the poorest in society) to either are threatened.

Quite a few of them are running as independents, promoted by GetUp! and all backed by renewable energy rent seekers, wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers.

The second big reason Labor has lurched to the left is that the ALP gets the bulk of its political funding from the Union Superannuation funds – which past and present Labor hacks run. Those funds have invested heavily in the RE scam in this country – think Greg Combet and Garry Weaven’s IFM and Pacific Hydro – and are ready, willing and able to make even more obscene profits, should the Green/Labor Alliance take control this coming Saturday.

Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is going to fair a whole lot better than the mainstream media predicts, not least because he is feverishly promoting nuclear power generation (banned in Australia thanks to the Greens and Labor).

In the sensible energy policy stakes the UAP are joined by Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives: Australia’s Self-Inflicted Energy Crisis Screaming Out for Nuclear Powered Solution

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party are also keen to get rid of intermittent, unreliable and heavily subsidised wind and solar and, instead, to see that Australia gets High Efficiency Low Emissions coal-fired power plants.

The Liberals and Nationals (the current Coalition government) have largely surrendered the field to the renewable energy crowd: Government Surrenders: PM Hoists White Flag on Australia’s Self-inflicted Renewable Energy Crisis

If it can be called a ‘policy’, the Coalition are running on the status quo. Namely, wedded to meeting carbon dioxide emissions reductions, as dictated from Paris, and allowing the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target and the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme to continue untouched until they expire in 2031.

The subsidies that will be squandered under the LRET and SRES will add more than $4 billion a year to retail power bills, each and every year until then.

The damage to the electricity market caused by the LRET and SRES – including the opportunities for rorting and gaming the system as a result of sunset and/or calm weather and paying conventional generators to remain online ready to dispatch electricity in a heartbeat, as a result of one or other of those events – will add $billions more.

Whatever the faults and failings of outfits like the UAP, One Nation and the Australian Conservatives, at least their candidates understand the critical importance of providing affordable and reliable electricity to all Australians. Something the Coalition seem to have forgotten about; and which Labor’s 50% RET is guaranteed to destroy: Destination Destruction: Labor’s 50% Renewable Energy Target Means Wholesale Industry Wipe-out

The UAP have engaged in a marketing and advertising blitz over the last few months, pushing their energy policies, with particular emphasis on nuclear power generation.

STT wouldn’t be surprised if the UAP pick up two or three Senate seats (one in Queensland, one in WA and one in Tasmania). In any event, in rural and regional Australia and in the working class suburbs of the major capitals, UAP is likely to poll well, meaning that its preferences will determine plenty of marginal seats, especially those in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania.

But the point of this post is not political prognostication. It’s simply a warning to those ready to annihilate their country by voting for the Green/Labor Alliance.

And there’s no better messenger to deliver that warning than Professor Ian Plimer.

Ian is the author of The Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff, published by Connor Court – which we covered here: Ian Plimer: The Climate Change Delusion and The Great Electricity Ripoff

Now, over to the good Professor.

The Truth of Climate Change is Revealed at School
The Australian
Ian Plimer
16 May 2019

Bill Shorten and his allies, the Greens economic vandals, believe climate change is a moral issue. So is telling the truth.

With his elite private school education, the Opposition Leader would have learned about the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. These took place before industrialisation and were all driven by changes in the sun. He would have learned that natural warm times, like now, bring great prosperity, increased longevity and less disease, whereas Jack Frost brings death, depopulation and economic stresses.

In biology, the Labor leader would have learned of Darwinism and environmental adaptation of species. Humans live on ice and in the hills, valleys, tropics and deserts, at altitude and on coastal plains. Like countless other organisms, we move and adapt when the environment changes. Species thrive when it is warm.

From his education at a religious school, he would have learned about the apostle Thomas. One of the strengths of our Western civilisation is doubt and scepticism. Surely Shorten does not believe the catastrophism promoted by green activists and self-interested alleged experts at the expense of the nation. If he does, he is unelectable.

If he is knowingly promoting a falsehood, he is unelectable. Critical thinking was fundamental to our culture and should be embraced in policy formulation. In school science, Shorten would have learned carbon dioxide is the food of life and without this natural gas, which occurs in space and all planets, there would be no life.

He also would understand from his maths lessons that when 3 per cent of total annual global emissions of carbon dioxide are from humans and Australia produces 1.3 per cent of this 3 per cent, then no amount of emissions reductio­n here will have any effect on global climate.

A quick search would show him that whenever in the past there was an explosion of plant life, the carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. If we halve the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, all life dies.

Shorten should know that for thousands of millions of years the Earth has been changing, with cycles and one-off events such as an asteroid impact, super-volcano or a supernova explosion.

He should know that climate always changes and that the planet would be in serious trouble if it did not. There are cycles of air, water, rocks and continents. There are measurable cycles with the sun, Earth’s orbit, oceans and moon that drive climate change, especially if cycles coincide. It has yet to be demonstrated that the climate change today is any different from those of the past.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure during the past few decades, it still has not been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Yet wind and solar industrial complexes pepper the landscape allegedly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

They run on subsidies, not the wind or the sun. Wind and solar are transfering money from the poor to the rich, not saving the environment. These subsidies, paid by the long-suffering consumer and employer, add to emissions because coal-fired electricity needs to be on standby for when there is no wind or sunshine.

The amount of energy used to construct solar and wind facilities is greater than they produce in their working lives. The amount of carbon dioxide released during construction and maintenance is far more than is saved. Renewables such as wind turbines are environmentally disastrous because they pollute a huge land area, slice and dice birds and bats, kill insects that are bird food, create health problems for humans who live within kilometres of them, leave toxins around the turbine site and despoil the landscape.

Union superannuation funds have invested massively in renewable energy. Labor’s promise of 50 per cent renewables will cost electricity consumers hundreds of billions but will benefit the unions.

As soon as renewables were introduced into the grid, electric­ity prices increased and delivery became unreliable. Increased electricity costs have created unemployment, and many pensioners and the poor cannot afford electricity. An increase in renewables will make matters worse.

Does Shorten’s energy policy consider those who lose jobs and have the power cut off in his race to achieve 50 per cent renewables to fill the pockets of Labor union mates? And what about the scams siphoning off tens of billions that slosh around the world as carbon credits, carbon trading and renewable energy certificates? Rather than take this money from the poor via higher electricity prices, it would be better spent at home.

To smugly claim that valid questions about energy costs are dumb or deceitful is a loud warning bell. Shorten refuses to tell us how he will spend our money or to give any detail on energy systems that are proven failures. It is our money and, if he will not give us the financial details, we should be very scared of his shiftiness. I have never written a blank cheque for a used car. Why should I now?

Emeritus professor Ian Plimer’s latest book, The Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff, is published by Connor Court.
The Australian