JoNova Smell the desperation

Here in Oz, political lives are in turmoil. Suddenly “load shedding” is the topic de jour, and there are hit lists of suburbs in the firing line. It’s a long list.  Welcome to your green future.

The language is ramping up.  The SA state government is talking of a “dramatic intervention in the electricity market”.

The plans are “advanced” but they apparently don’t know what that intervention is. It could be a script for “Yes Minister”:

 Premier Jay Weatherill said the plans were well advanced, and all options remained on the table.

“One option is to completely nationalise the system,” Mr Weatherill said.

“That’s an extraordinary option. It would involve breaking contracts and exposing us to sovereign risk and the South Australian taxpayers to extraordinary sums of money. “It’s not a preferred option but we’re ruling nothing out at this point.”

Even if there were no more blackouts in SA, how much stress is added by not knowing if the electricity will be cut off without warning? How many people are preemptively running air conditioners early or all day?

Is it a “state of emergency”?

The Federal Minister thinks so, the […]

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The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

A plan by former Republican officials to tax carbon dioxide emissions is similar to one considered by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before she launched her presidential bid.  She opted not to support a carbon tax after polling showed it would be “lethal in the general” election.

Old-Guard Republicans — including former Secretary of State James Baker, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former cabinet official George Shultz — met with White House officials to pitch a carbon tax-and-dividend plan to President Donald Trump.

The Republicans’ plan would reduce environmental regulations in exchange for a gradually increasing carbon tax, the revenues of which would be given back to Americans to offset higher costs of living and build support for fighting global warming.

Their plan is similar to one considered by the Clinton campaign in 2015 of imposing a greenhouse gas emissions “fee,” or carbon tax. The campaign opted not to support a carbon tax after polling showed it would be “lethal in the general” election.

A March 2015 Clinton campaign memo looked at a gradually rising $42 per ton carbon tax-and-dividend plan where revenues are handed out to American families in the form of rebates. Families would have to pay, on average, an extra $1,300 in energy costs a year, but would get a $15,73 rebate.

The proposal by former GOP officials writing on behalf of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) calls for a $40 per ton carbon tax that gives families up to $2,000 in rebates of offset higher energy costs.

The big difference between the two carbon tax proposals is that CLC wants to pair it with regulatory reform. CLC argued “[m]uch of the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide emissions would be phased out, including an outright repeal of the Clean Power Plan.”

Clinton, on the other hand, wanted to keep the Clean Power Plan in place, but her campaign memo suggests “using some share of the revenue for corporate income tax reform, and/or link it to a lifting of the crude oil export ban or approval of new oil and gas infrastructure” to build GOP support.

But while CLC Republicans push a carbon tax, Clinton never did because of how poorly it polled.

“We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax. It all sucks,” Clinton campaign chair John Podesta wrote in a 2015 email to campaign aides.

It’s not surprising carbon taxes poll so poorly. Even the Clinton campaign found it would drastically raise energy costs.

Clinton’s tax would have raised gasoline prices 40 cents per gallon and electricity prices 21 percent on top of costs from environmental regulations already put in place by the Obama administration, according to the 2015 memo published online by Wikileaks.

The memo, put together by Center for American Progress senior fellow Pete Ogden, notes that “with the increase in energy costs, the increase in the cost of non-energy goods and services would disproportionately impact low-income households.”

“Higher energy costs for government and for energy-intensive investment materials (e.g. steel, cement) would also likely be passed on to households,” reads Ogden’s memo.

Only a handful of Republicans support a carbon tax. The Republican Party platform for 2016 opposed a carbon tax because it “would increase energy prices across the board, hitting hardest at the families who are already struggling to pay their bill in the Democrats’ no-growth economy.”

Full story

 

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The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

The then-premier, Mike Rann, aggressively pursued a policy to make the state a world leader in the adoption of renewable energy, particularly solar and wind. Mr Rann sold this move effectively, his pitch bolstered by climate change alarm in a nation gripped by drought.

By 2006, he was basking in praise from renowned campaigner and former United States vice president Al Gore, who declared SA was “one of best examples of any state in the entire world where you see how leadership can make a tremendous difference in promoting renewable sources of energy”.

Many in the state agreed, convinced renewable energy would help tackle climate change while, particularly in the case of solar panels, providing affordable power.

Mr Rann’s successor, Premier Jay Weatherill, zealously pursued the same agenda, in late 2015 declaring the state was “running a big international experiment right now” on incorporating wind and solar.

Clearly, renewable energy is an important part of Australia’s electricity mix. But SA shows the perils of going too hard, too fast on the energy transition path and placing ideology before pragmatism.

Baseload generators are struggling for economic viability in the face of subsidised renewables or, in the case of Port Augusta’s coal-fired power station, have closed. But renewables are intermittent — meaning they rely on the wind blowing and the sun shining. As Wednesday night’s induced blackouts disastrously show, this means we sometimes simply do not have enough electricity to power the state.

There have been numerous warnings. The Advertiser in 2015 revealed deep concerns about more blackouts and higher prices after Port Augusta power station’s closure, in May last year.

Alarmingly, the first crisis arrived soon after, when key employers were on the verge of shutting down as power prices surged during storms.

Then the entire state was blacked out on September 28 last year. Storms toppling high-voltage transmission pylons were blamed by Mr Weatherill but wind farms were unable to continue producing. This contributed to a statewide shutdown, rather than a confined blackout.

Inarguably, it also showed the reliance on the interconnector to Victoria, which failed. Since then, there have been another two storm-related blackouts, highlighting our fragility.

Then, on a typically hot summer’s night on Wednesday, more than 90,000 households were blacked out to maintain the grid as demand outstripped supply.

The gas-fired Pelican Point station should have been turned on but wasn’t. It’s a sign of how little room for error there is in our renewable-reliant energy mix.

SA has become a laughing stock — a state that, literally, cannot keep the lights on. Even more disturbingly, we’ve become a place where big business like BHP Billiton cite the risk posed by unreliable power supply.

Mr Weatherill has backed Mr Rann’s renewable legacy to the hilt. Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis says we have a right to be angry. Yesterday was their ground zero, the time to admit a serious problem and offer clear solutions, rather than vague promises of an eventual fix. It was a far from convincing performance.

South Australians are seething. We have been let down by our state and federal politicians. They must display true leadership to provide a basic utility — reliable and affordable electricity.

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Watts Up With That? From the SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (CSIC) and the department of “climate change, is there anything it can’t do?” comes this: Climate change responsible for the great diversity in horses A study led by CSIC points to environmental factors in causing the rapid expansion of species over the last 20 million years Changing environments and […] http://ift.tt/2ly5xho