Fantasies of heat stroke victims rotting in the streets, and military and security leaders stepping in to protect the world from the weakness of civilian leaders.
Terrifying ‘hyperthreat’ coming for Australia as El Nino chance rises
Australia is no stranger to this danger – in fact, it’s almost become normal – but the brutal reality of what it signals is terrifying.
April 22, 2023 4:17 pm Jamie Seidel | news.com.au
This isn’t normal.
…
This is rapidly becoming the new normal.
Which raises the question, what’s the next-level unusual?
Dr Greg Raymond of the Australian National University’s College of Asia & the Pacific put just such a scenario to a group of South East Asian and Australian defence officials.
…
After four hours of high-intensity action and reaction, things didn’t turn out so well.
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Climate security researcher Dr Elizabeth Boulton, a former Australian Army logistics officer, says we know worse is on its way.
When it arrives, people will want solutions.
And in a crisis, governments turn to their military, emergency services and intelligence agencies for answers.
…
“People within the security sector are very motivated to protect their communities,” she says. “They have a sort of protective instinct. They’re citizens themselves, drawn from the wider community. And they know the taxpayer pays for the security forces. So they face quite a moral problem if they’re directed to defend a dangerous economic structure against a harmed populace.”
…
Bodies lay rotting in the streets. People are getting sick.
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Amid the social uproar and suffering, the UN Security Council declares a planetary emergency.
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“The criminal groups moved in and became the security providers of choice,” Dr Boulton says of the war game’s outcome.
Just in Hotter and hotter in China:today the temperature reached 42.4C at Yuanyang in Yunnan and 41.2C in Yuanjiang (similar name,not the same town),only 0.3C from the Chinese official national record in April. The overheated air from SE Asia is now with full strenght in Yunnan. pic.twitter.com/8FlkbdKXzU
— Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) April 18, 2023
Military connected people from multiple nations, some likely from nations with an unsettled track record of democratic rule or which are currently ruled by autocrats, being encouraged to rehearse a climate emergency in which security personnel like themselves are tempted to usurp power from the civilian government, because of the civilian government’s alleged unwillingness to take the steps needed to address the crisis.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong.
But we would expect no less from the ANU, the very same university whose deputy director of public awareness of science in 2014 explained the ends justify the means when it comes to climate propaganda:- “… What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before. …”
UNITED STATES – AUGUST 15: Manhattan skyline is dark as the sun comes up on the morning after a massive power failure caused the largest power outage in the nation’s history, affecting 50 million people in parts of seven states and Canada. (Photo by Mike Albans/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Let´s wait for it to happen.
No lights, no stoves ,no fuel pumps, no supermarkets etc , etc , but the ripper of them all no kids doing the tap, tap , tap .
Just imagine the tantrums , driving the Parents to Insanity .
The Hospitals tragedy may be avoided by emergency generators .
Seriously , it will be a hard object lesson for the unprepared , but the sooner it happens the sooner it will be fixed ..crossed fingers ,toes and testicles !
We read at RenewEconomy that the Reliability Panel is reviewing the way they rate the reliability of the grid. The Panel operates under the auspices of the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC, not to be confused with the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO). The reliability of the grid has been a matter of great concern since the closure of Hazelwood power station in 2017 brought us to the point where there is next to no spare capacity in the conventional power system that has always been dominated by coal.
Leaving out a lot of technical detail for the moment, they have woken up to the rising risk of wind droughts. The post goes on…
These risks include [events] such as “dark doldrums”, or “dunkelflaute”, where there are unusually widespread and prolonged reductions of both sunlight and wind, or it could include transmission outages, ageing coal plant failures, or other “acts of God,” or should we say acts of climate change.
Even the very forecasting of “dark doldrums” is complicated by changing weather patterns, which are becoming more extreme and mean that using historic data is not adequate for accurate forecasts.
“The nature of renewable droughts, which require long periods of weather that is similar over time (no wind, no sun), means that the Panel will need chronologically consistent weather and cannot simply over-sample from the more extreme parts of the historic weather distribution,” it notes.
“As such, the panel is considering the need to develop a number of chronologically consistent, weather biased solar, wind and demand adjustments to be applied to existing model inputs.
“That effectively means that the modelling will adjust the period-by-period shape of the demand profiles and solar and wind inputs to reflect a lower solar and wind contribution and rerun the simulations.”
The panel notes that different countries have different measurements and different standards – some defined as loss of load expectation (LOLE), loss of load probability (LOLP), or loss of load hours (LOLH).
LOLE is defined as the expected proportion of time for which the available generation capacity is insufficient to meet demand at least once per day. LOLE is commonly used in Europe, where Ireland targets a LOLE of eight hours per year; France targets three hours per year, and the Netherlands targets four hours per year.
I think that the Reliability Standard needs to be revised to assess how often there will be a break in the continuity of supply of wind and solar power to the grid. In other words, the number of windless or effectively windless nights per annum or per decade when RE, that is wind, solar power and stored RE will break down and the grid will go black unless it is kept up by conventional power (some mix of coal, gas, hydro and nuclear power) that has been kept in reserve to back up or “firm” the intermittent input from sun and wind.)
The LOLEs at present are applied to grids where there is still a great deal of reliable power in the system so they are only concerned with limited blackouts which sacrifice some consumers for the sake of the grid as a whole.
Wherever there is a seriously diminished supply of reliable power due to the success of net zero policies, then windless nights are a real danger. Britain and Germany have passed that point and we have reached the point where the closure of another coal plant or two will produce a crisis whenever there is a windless or near windless night.
That is the threat that I tried to convey in the first briefing note that I wrote for the Energy Realists, using the term “choke point” to signal the sudden death nature of choking or drowning where people are completely deprived of oxygen. The comparable situation is deprivation of windpower when it really matters, that is, when the supply of dispatchable or reliable power has been reduced to a critical level that Britain, Germany, Australia and probably some states in the US and elsewhere have reached lately.
The RE enthusiasts focus on the high points of RE penetration in South Australia on sunny and windy Sunday afternoons (100%) or the penetration across the NEM on sunny and windy afternoons where it is now routinely near 50% and often approaching 60%. They foster the illusion that our progress towards 100% RE will be sustainable, and on a good afternoon we are over half-way.
In fact we are not being dragged towards net zero by the ever-higher penetration of RE because we are moving towards that destination like a convoy that moves at the speed of the slowest vessel. The “slowest vessel”, the weak link in the chain, the lowest point of a flood levee or a fence is the windless or near windless night
Consequently wind droughts are about to take centre stage in the net zero drama. The 64,000 dollar question is – how did they escape attention until they are about to crash the system? Spoiler alert, I think the irresponsible authorities in the met bureaux of the world used the wrong metric for “wind resources” namely the average wind velocity.
According to Mission Australia, climate anxiety is a leading cause of mental health issues in young people.
Youth Survey Shows Need for Action on Impact of Climate Change Concerns on Youth Mental Health
Published: 20 April 2023
Orygen and Mission Australia are calling for urgent action to address the impact of climate change concerns on the mental health of young people in Australia, following new research showing strong links between the two.
The 2022 Mission Australia Youth Survey shows 1 in 4 (26%) young people in Australia are ‘very’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about climate change, and nearly 2 in 5 (38%) of those respondents also experienced high psychological distress.
The survey of 18,800 people aged 15 to 19 showed that young people who reported being ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about climate change were more likely to report:
high levels of concern about coping with stress
their mental health as ‘poor’ or ‘fair’
higher psychological distress
low subjective wellbeing
feeling more negative about the future
The 2022 Youth Survey found that half of respondents (51%) identified ‘the environment’ as one of the most important issues in Australia today. Some young people are more worried about climate change such as those who identified as female or gender diverse, and those experiencing financial difficulties.
In-depth statistical modelling shows that the link between climate concern and psychological distress as well as the negative future outlook were genuine and not impacted by common risk factors. This link was also stronger among young people who identified as gender diverse, Indigenous, or those living in regional/remote areas.
Orygen and Mission Australia say the results warrant an urgent response, recommending four key actions to address the issue:
Ensuring future government youth and mental health strategies include actions that address the relationship between climate change and mental health
Partnering with young people when designing actions to mitigate climate related mental health impacts
Providing training to professionals working with young people to identify and manage climate-related stress
Funding targeted research focused on the impacts of climate change on youth mental health
“The impact of climate change on mental health is an emerging, but significant issue that is likely to grow as climate change becomes more severe,” said Orygen Senior Biostatistician and Environmental Epidemiologist Dr Caroline Gao, who co-authored the report with colleagues from Orygen, University of Melbourne and Mission Australia.
The report suggests that while concerns about climate change may contribute to a young person’s psychological distress, it is also possible that pre-existing psychological distress increases the likelihood of worry and concerns, including about climate change.
“We believe urgent action is required to better support young people. We want to reduce the impact of climate change on psychological distress, foster hope and avoid despair, while still motivating positive climate actions.”
Dr Gao added, “Young people are particularly vulnerable to mental ill-health; the onset of almost half of all mental health disorders occurs before the age of 18. With the extreme climate occurrences that have occurred in Australia over the last three years, it is likely that climate concerns are contributing to the exacerbation of mental ill-health for some of our young people.”
Mission Australia’s Executive of Practice, Evidence and Impact Marion Bennett agrees, adding: “Young people in Australia are telling us that the threat of climate change and the increasing regularity and severity of extreme weather is harming their mental health and wellbeing.
“We can see in this report that young people who experienced financial difficulties in the past year are particularly concerned about climate change, which aligns with what Mission Australia frontline staff see among some vulnerable young people that we support through our community services and housing.
“Young people overwhelmingly want action on climate change, and Australia must act to reduce the harm young people are experiencing.
“We urge governments to update their youth and mental health strategies so there is increased access for all young people in Australia to mental health services, to raise awareness and to upskill professionals in the realm of climate-related distress. It’s also important that governments partner with young people to co-design solutions that will address their climate-related mental health concerns.”
Dr Gao added, “We are currently conducting a programme of research with our partner organisations to support a better understanding of the impact of climate change on young people’s mental health as well as evidence-based resources for professionals working with young people.”
Mission Australia is a Christian charity whose focus is outreach and assistance for the homeless and other people in distress.
Climate change anxiety and mental health issues are leading to other serious problems. According to Dr. Alex Wodak, a leading Aussie drug rehabilitation specialist (now retired), climate anxiety is a factor driving young people to destroy themselves with hard drugs.
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First, the threshold step is redefining drugs as primarily a health and social issue rather than primarily a law enforcement issue. Second, drug treatment has to be expanded and improved until it reaches the same level as other health services. Third, all penalties for personal drug use and possession have to be scrapped.
Fourth, as much of the drug market as possible has to be regulated while recognising that part of the drug market is already regulated, such a methadone treatment, needle and syringe programs, medically supervised injecting centres. It will, of course, never be possible to regulate the entire drug market. We have regulated parts of the drug market before. Edible opium was taxed and regulated in Australia until 1906 and in the United States Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903.
Fifth, efforts to reduce the demand for powerful psychoactive drugs in Australia have had limited benefit and require a new focus. Unless and until young Australians feel optimistic about their future, demand for drugs will remain strong. Young people, understandably, want more certainty about their future prospects, including climate, education, jobs and housing affordability. Change will be slow and incremental, like all social policy reform.
As Herb Stein, as adviser to President Nixon said: Things that cannot go on forever don’t.
Drug prohibition cannot go on forever and will be replaced by libertarian paternalism. Thank you.
…Source: Wayback Machine (the original link from 2019 no longer works)
Of course the risk of kids turning to hard drugs and depravity to fund those drugs is only one possible consequence of youth climate anxiety. Youth climate anxiety is driving the mushrooming of radical groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Rising Tide, an alphabet soup of youth driven radical environmental groups whose members regularly expose themselves to danger of injury or death by stopping trains, stopping traffic, vandalising buildings or artworks, or glueing themselves to roads.
I doubt politicians will listen to Mission Australia’s plea for intervention, given their ill considered education policies, which in some cases promote mandatory alarmist climate indoctrination, are likely the main cause of youth climate anxiety.
At Cape Otway Lighthouse overlooking Bass Strait, the highest daily January temperature ever recorded is 43.3°C on 24th January 1982, and the lowest January temperature ever recorded is 3.3°C on 2nd January 1900. In between some 30,000 (365 x 82) daily maximum and minimum temperatures were recorded by a succession of lighthouse keepers at 9am each morning, every day of every year.
Across the landmass of Australia men and women have been diligently recording temperatures for more than a century. At Cape Otway Lighthouse daily recordings began in January 1865, and continued until April 1994. At Brisbane airport the record begins in 1929, and manual recordings from mercury thermometers continued until 31st July 2022. Temperatures are now only recorded using a platinum resistance probe by an automatic weather station (AWS) at both Cape Otway lighthouse and Brisbane airport, and most other weather stations spread across the land mass of Australia. To be clear, there are no longer any manual recordings from a mercury thermometer at Brisbane airport, these ceased in July last year.
Many technical people will argue that while a mercury thermometer will still be accurate when it is 100 years old, probes – essentially measuring temperature as electrical resistance, as voltage, through some wires connecting the platinum to a data logger – will suffer from corrosion and electrical noise soon after installation and thus the recordings are less stable and will also drift especially in harsher environments.
Meanwhile, I’m often told, especially by ordinary folk, who confuse the Bureau’s probes with digital thermometers, that an AWS is surely more reliable because it will capture the exact hottest time of day, and because these instruments are more precise.
It is the case that even though the highest temperature in any 24-hour period occurs in the afternoon, maximum temperatures are manually read from a mercury thermometer at 9am the next morning. Then the thermometer is reset, by shaking, that causes the column of mercury to collapse back down into the tube, only to rise again as air temperatures rise during the day. The column of mercury will rise to the highest air temperature and become temporarily ‘stuck’ by a constriction in the tube with some 40 seconds or so of inertia. Measurements from a mercury thermometer are less spikey than measurements from a probe. Nevertheless, a mercury thermometer will capture the highest daily temperature, as long it is manually read and reset every day.
Despite the large range in daily temperatures – 40°C at Cape Otway Lighthouse and many other Australian locations – I am always surprised at the consistent patterns that quickly emerge, including in geographically distant locations, when I crunch Australian Bureau of Meteorology temperature data converting daily temperatures to monthly and yearly averages, and so on. At least this is the case with temperature data for the period from about 1908 up until about 1996, which is the period when temperatures were recorded using mercury thermometers in Stevenson screens across Australia. The data is more reliable for northern Australia back another 20 or so years, because from the late 1880s Clement Wragge, against the advice of southern meteorologists, was replacing Glaisher stands with Stevenson screens as the official shelter for mercury thermometers. He was always ahead of his time and sacked with the creation of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1906, and fled Australia in 1907. Wragge had been appointed Government Meteorologist in Queensland in 1887 and by 1893 had established 16 first order meteorological stations, 36 second order stations and 45 third order stations and 398 rain stations. Queensland thus has some of the best and longest temperature records for anywhere in the world, that were assumed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1906.
Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory Lighthouses, both in Victoria, had Stevenson screens installed in 1902 and 1905 respectively. I crunched the numbers on these temperature series for a scientific paper that I had published with John Abbot in the international climate science journal Atmospheric Research in 2015.
We began that research paper with mention of one of the first detailed studies of climate change in Australia that was by E.L. Deacon published in the Australian Journal of Physics back in 1953. Deacon identified a period of significantly higher mean summer maximum temperatures during the period 1881 to 1910, than during the subsequent period 1911 to 1940. This early study, based on measurements from mercury thermometers, concluded that ‘the good consistency of the changes suggests the cause to be mainly climatic rather than changing observational technique or exposure’ (p. 213). To be clear, the professor was claiming the thirty years before 1910 to be hotter than the next thirty. The graphs in the Deacon study show cooling to circa 1950 and I report this same result for Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory in our 2015 study. Modern reconstructions more usually have stripped away the cycles and show a mostly consistent linear temperature increase from 1910 consistent with global warming theory.
Back in 2015, I was continually trawling through the Bureau’s online raw temperature database constructing long and continuous temperature series, seeing cycles of warming and cooling, often corresponding with periods of drought and flooding respectively, and assessing these temperature series against various criteria including the skill of the monthly rainfall forecasts that I was generating with John Abbot.
Back then, we were working on a new technique for forecasting monthly rainfall using artificial intelligence. John would feed the temperature series, along with temperature and pressure gradients from the Pacific Ocean, into his computer program that used artificial neural networks (a form of artificial intelligence, AI) to generate monthly rainfall forecasts. At the time, it was easy to show that our seasonal rainfall forecasts were more accurate than equivalent forecasts made by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology using a supercomputer. Our comparisons were published in the peer-reviewed literature.
In 2015, when I was assessing the quality of long, continuous temperature series as input to the artificial neural networks that John Abbot and I were using to forecast monthly rainfall, I wrote to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology asking for parallel data. I knew that at both Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory lighthouses, the Bureau had transitioned from having the lighthouse keepers record the maximum temperatures from the mercury each morning, to having the temperatures, I initially thought, also recorded automatically from a platinum resistance probe. I wanted both sets of measurements and to compare them.
I subsequently discovered that the mercury thermometers were removed on the very same day the probes were installed. At Cape Otway lighthouse the mercury thermometer was removed on 15th April 1994. This mercury thermometer had been faithfully used to measure maximum temperatures at Cape Otway lighthouse since 1865, for 129 years! Then suddenly this beautiful (I see beauty in some number series), long and continuous temperature record was ruined, by the change in measuring instrument.
Cape Otway lighthouse overlooking Bass Strait. My stomach churned when I learned that the mercury thermometer was removed the same day that the probe was installed on 15th April 1994, so there is no parallel data for this location. The Bureau nevertheless drops down temperatures from April 1994 back to the beginning of the record and by minus 0.5C on the basis of the installation of the probe within an automatic weather station (AWS).
I remain concerned that the Bureau has an unconventional approach for recording temperatures, taking one second extrema rather than numerically averaging measurements over one minute as is recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation.
It is important to average readings from the probes, if they are to be comparable with readings from mercury thermometers, because the mercury thermometers respond more slowly to temperature change on a minute-by-minute scale.
The Bureau has a policy of maintaining mercury thermometers with probes in the same Stevenson screen for a period of at least three years when there is a change in site or equipment. This policy, however, was completely ignored on 15th April 1994 at Cape Otway. And while the mercury thermometer had been reliably recording temperatures at Cape Otway for 129 years, the probe that was installed needed replacing after just 14 years, on 11th November 2010.
Without any parallel data to make the comparison, the Bureau nevertheless, in 2014, made changes to the temperature series at Cape Otway Lighthouse during one of many subsequent routine remodelling of this data in the creation of the official ACORN-SAT series that is used to report on climate variability and change in the Bureau’s annual climate statements.
Specifically, temperatures at Cape Otway were dropped down by 0.5 °C for the 84 years from 1994 when the probe was installed, back to the beginning of the official ACORN-SAT record that only begins in 1910. According to the ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary published at that time, the temperatures were adjusted/dropped-down from 15th April 1994 back to 1st January 1910 by 0.5 °C, citing the ‘cause’ for the discontinuity in the temperature series as installation of an automatic weather station (AWS).
This is an extract from the Bureau’s ‘ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary’ that was provided to me via journalist Graham Lloyd in 2014. This document is not publicly available and has been updated since 2014, with the changes that are regularly made to the ACORN-SAT data base.
It is noteworthy that the direction of this adjustment contradicts the expected effect of changing to a probe, which would be that the probe might measure warmer than the mercury. This is stated in the Bureau’s own Research Report No. 032 by Blair Trewin:
In the absence of any other influences, an instrument with a faster response time [a probe] will tend to record higher maximum and lower minimum temperatures than an instrument with a slower response time [a mercury thermometer]. This is most clearly manifested as an increase in the mean diurnal range. At most locations (particularly in arid regions), it will also result in a slight increase in mean temperatures, as short-term fluctuations of temperature are generally larger during the day than overnight.” (Page 21)
In more recent iterations of ACORN-SAT, the Bureau has changed this ‘adjustment’ for the Cape Otway lighthouse temperature series to minus 0.54 and removed reference to the automatic weather station, now claiming the change is made for statistical reasons – all the while not listing the statistical test undertaken or the level of statistical significance. The statistical difference was apparently ‘discovered’ by comparing temperatures as measured at Cape Otway lighthouse with temperatures at up to 10 ‘nearby’ reference stations.
It is impossible to know the exact difference between the maximum temperatures as recorded by a mercury and probe at Cape Otway lighthouse because no parallel data exists.
There exists, however, parallel temperature data for 38 locations spread across the landmass of Australia. After three years of wrangling, then an appearance at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on 3rd February, John Abbot was able to establish that 15 years of parallel data exists for Brisbane airport, and he was provided with just three years (August 2019 to July 2022) of this data on the Thursday before Easter.
This is an extract from the Brisbane Airport Field Book. Temperatures as shown were recorded on 1st August 2019.
It took me two days over Easter to transcribe these manual recordings, that had been diligently entered at 9am each morning for every day (bar two) of that three-year period by Bureau employees at Brisbane airport.
Once I digitised these values, I tested them for statistical significance and found the temperatures as measured by the probe were significantly different from the temperatures as measured by the mercury (n=1094, p<0.05).
This is not surprising given the spread of values that are not randomly distributed with the probe recording hotter than the mercury 41% of the time, recording the same 32% of the time and lower 26% of the time.
On two occasions the probe recorded 0.7°C warmer than the mercury.
For the first five months of data (August to December 2019) the probe records cooler than the mercury at Brisbane airport by a daily average of 0.2C. From January 2020, the probe records on average warmer by 0.15C. The overall daily difference is some 0.35C.
These findings are not consistent with claims made by the Bureau that there is no public interest in releasing the parallel data because the temperatures are the same whether measured by platinum resistance probes in automatic weather stations or more traditional mercury thermometers.
I’ve had several academics phone and email me over the last few days asking for assistance in locating the parallel data for Brisbane airport online. I have explained that this was never provided to me in an electronic form, but rather as over a thousand handwritten pages on the Thursday before Easter. I manually transcribed the handwritten entries over Easter and undertook preliminary analysis of this data.
**** The feature image is a photograph from page 4 of The Weekend Australian from last Saturday. You can read the article online, click here.
A Business Insider reporter learned how “brutal” a road trip in an electric vehicle (EV) can be when he was forced to bundle up instead of using the heater in his car to try to maximize his range. After the trip he commented, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t curse these silly electric cars under my breath once or twice.”
Business Insider’s Tim Levin drove the new Toyota bZ4X electric SUV from New York City to Washington, DC and back, and discovered that he was forced to spend roughly a quarter of his time charging his electric vehicle. But it got worse from there.
“I hit the road back to New York on a chilly morning with 176 miles of range. When I went to turn on the heat, the indicated range plummeted to 125 miles,” Levin wrote.
Therefore, Levin had to make a decision: stay warm and charge twice, or turn off the heat — given the effect that it has on the vehicle’s battery life and range — and deal with the cold. He chose the latter.
Australian drivers also experienced their share of EV woes recently;
In Australia EV owners were forced to queue at Gundagai, while returning from an Easter holiday;
Easter weekend photo sparks concern over Australia’s electric vehicle future
10/04/2023
A lengthy queue at an electric vehicle charging hub in Gundagai on Good Friday has given a glimpse into Australia’s EV future “unless we get some urgent planning underway”.
Matthew Bailes, who was driving from Melbourne to Sydney in his Tesla, snapped a photo of the situation.
“It was a 15 minute wait,” he told Tony Jones, filling in for Neil Mitchell.
At least Gundagai wasn’t a freezing cold trail of misery like Tim Levin’s New York to Washington DC trip, that comes later in the season in Gundagai.
What can I say? The only way to make EVs work in a remote town like Gundagai without massive wait time inconvenience is large subsidies, to fund enough chargers to prevent queues during busy periods like holiday peaks. And probably onsite diesel generators to provide the electricity, if EVs ever become a significant presence on the roads.
Or maybe EVs could tow a diesel generator on a trailer, to provide a continuous popup charge during long trips.
Victoria’s energy minister has urged private companies to help do the heavy lifting in the state’s transition to renewable energy, saying the revived public State Electricity Commission (SEC) will not crowd out the market.
Lily D’Ambrosio told an industry event on Wednesday that less than a quarter of the renewable energy required to meet the state’s 2035 emissions reduction target would come from the SEC, and called for investment to produce the remaining 20.5 gigawatts that is needed.
D’Ambrosio assured private companies that the SEC was not designed to be “crowding out the market for private investment”.
“There’s lots of room and we need all of you who’ve got an interest in this space to come and continue to build, knowing that there’s plenty to be done in our state,” she said.
“We need to see 25GW of new [generators] between now and 2035.”
In 2022 Victoria was voted the hardest place to do business in a business survey. The following was published in Australia’s premier financial paper, the Australian Financial Review. Our equivalent to the Wall Street Journal;
Victoria is the hardest place in Australia to do business, says survey
Victoria has been ranked as the highest-taxing state with the largest public sector and most red tape, making it one of the hardest places in the country to do business, a damning new report finds.
More than half the national businesses polled said Victoria was the hardest state to do business in. Four out of five said they had difficulty accessing the labour and skills they needed and only 7per cent said the Andrews government was doing a good job of reducing the cost of doing business.
Victoria ranked well in some areas such as infrastructure (the government released a Deloitte report on Tuesday that put the value of major projects at $174.4 billion) as well as utilities, research and development, and higher education. But the state’s productivity levels have fallen badly over the past decade, and the time and cost of setting up a business has risen to the highest of all the states.
The 2022 business survey is no outlier, there are stories from 2023, 2021, 2020, 2018 describing the difficulties of doing business in Victoria. Plenty more where they came from.
Why is Victoria such a difficult place to do business?
I believe the problem is decades of worker centric government. Labor union affiliated socialist politicians have dominated Victorian politics for much of the last half century, and have heavily tilted the table in favour of workers rights. Even on those few occasions when “conservatives” have won elections in Victoria, they aren’t what most Americans would recognise as conservative, they tend to be more closely politically aligned with US Democrats than Republicans.
As a result of the long term bias towards workers rights, labor union organisers enjoy strong legal protections, which they have sometimes been accused of abusing.
Large construction projects, even green projects, are frequently marred by accusations of organised labor standover tactics.
THEAUSTRALIAN UPDATED 2:11AM NOVEMBER 20, 2010, FIRST PUBLISHED AT 12:00AM NOVEMBER 20, 2010
UNIONISTS at Victoria’s desalination plant have been using strong-arm tactics on job recruiters to force the hiring of preferred union members.
This is according to intelligence from operatives who conducted a spying operation code-named Pluto Project.
The extraordinarily generous wages and conditions on offer, the forcefulness of union figures and the pressure on builders to meet tight construction deadlines for the Brumby government’s $5 billion-plus plant had led to numerous unacceptable hirings, sources said yesterday.
“A number of people hired on that site have never even worked in construction or on a site before,” said one senior source.
“Managers have been giving in to compulsory unionism because the union dictates who will work on the site. Supervisors go through the induction office and say ‘to keep sweet with the unions, put these people on’.
This is just my take on the situation. Whatever the real reason, investment in Victorian green infrastructure is not proceeding as fast as Premier Dan would like.
One of the Victorian Government’s responses has been to revive direct public ownership of energy infrastructure, to fund some green projects, and invite private investors to put up cash to fund all the other projects they want completed. They are at pains to assure private investors have nothing to fear from government funded renewable projects competing with private projects.
‘Perilous journey ahead’ under Victoria’s energy overhaul
Clean energy investors have warned of an investment drought and large energy users say their survival will be threatened unless the Victorian Labor government gets its radical plan to revive state ownership of electricity supply exactly right.
Big industry fears they will be slugged with higher prices and be forced to take on more risk under the plan by a re-elected Andrews government to revive the State Energy Corporation to invest, own and retail renewable power.
The fears voiced by the group representing companies such as Brickworks and Bluescope Steel came as major renewables investors said they won’t invest the tens of billions of dollars required to meet Victoria’s proposed 95 per cent renewables target for 2035 if they are disadvantaged in any way against the new state player.
…
Private investors could face being squeezed out of new investment in energy under the plan, which the industry super sector – which would co-invest with the SEC – lined up to back. Morgan Stanley labelled the plan “a net negative” for major suppliers AGL Energy and Origin Energy.
If Premier Dan signs up to China’s Belt and Road, and the deal turns out to be a debt trap, anyone who invests in Victorian green energy infrastructure will be on the hook to service that debt.
The takeaway from the Victorian Government’s harsh treatment of compensation claimants over their heavy handed lockdown tactics, in my opinion is don’t expect any sympathy or help from the Victorian Government if your green project encounters a few road bumps.
Hands up who wants to sign up to the opportunity to invest in Victoria’s renewable energy push?
Update (EW): Rud Istvan points out Victoria’s state debt is enormous compared to other states. From the AFR in 2022:- “… Victoria’s net debt in absolute dollar terms is forecast to be larger than the total combined of NSW ($115 billion), Queensland ($39 billion) and Tasmania $5.2 billion) in 2025-26. …”
Update 2 (EW): Battleground Melbourne, which gives detailed eyewitness accounts of the brutal police tactics used to break up that freedom protest I mentioned, was played at Australia’s CPAC 2022. The protestors were unarmed, there were women and kids at the protest, they expected to be allowed to stage a peaceful protest.
Notwithstanding some absurd outbursts from the fringe, the fight is now over what form climate change action should take.
I departed Australia three years ago, cutting my sabbatical short as Covid-19 spread and lockdowns ensued. I had just lived through Black Summer, a climate change-fueled disaster marked by unprecedented heat, withering drought and destructive and deadly bushfires. Though I had come to Australia to research the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events, it instead became my lived experience.
The governing Coalition had left a trail of death and destruction, both figuratively and literally. Thousands of homes were destroyed, dozens of lives lost, 24 million hectares burned, and Australia was shunned from an international climate summit over the then prime minister Scott Morrison’s climate intransigence. Meanwhile, the rightwing Murdoch media machine continued to spew climate disinformation, cynically blaming the devastation on arson and “back-burning”. Things appeared pretty bleak. Yet at the same time, I sensed that something had changed.
…
The good news? After nearly a decade, Australia once again has a meaningful climate policy, after ongoing and somewhat heated negotiations between the Albanese government and the Greens. One can quibble over whether it goes far enough. But Greens leader Adam Bandt put it this way: “To everyone who is despairing about the future and wants real climate action, today you should have a spring in your step, because it shows we can take on the coal and gas corporations and win.”
Will Albanese go the same way as Rudd? Sadly it is possible he will win a second term. The Conservative opposition in Australia is deeply fractured thanks to reckless attempts by mainstream conservative Liberal and National Party leaders to swing too far to the left, such as their unconvincing embrace of Net Zero, just before the last federal election.
Conservatives will eventually regroup, and Albanese will stumble. There are already storm clouds on Albanese’s horizon in the form of looming energy shortages. Sooner or later these problems will substantially impact the lives of ordinary Australians.
Aussie voters are no different to other countries, when we feel economic pain, lose our jobs, or suffer housing insecurity, we lash out at whoever is in charge.
When the pendulum finally swings back to the right, we can all look forward to reading tiresome essays from Mann about what a missed opportunity the Albanese years were.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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