Thursday 28th of March 2024

burning company fat...

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Australia’s billions in fossil fuel subsidies are under the spotlight in a new report as the US puts pressure on other countries to stop handing money to the sector.

Left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute has combed through recent federal and state budgets, finding there has been $10.3 billion in fossil fuel subsidies this financial year.

Most of it – $7.84 billion – is from a federal government fuel tax credit scheme, which provides a refund to industry for diesel.

  

The Australia Institute’s Rod Campbell said spending taxpayer money in such a way was irresponsible from an economic perspective and inexcusable through a climate lens.

“Coal, oil and gas companies in Australia give the impression they are major contributors to the Australian economy but our research shows they are major recipients of government funds,” he said.

“Yet again, Australian governments are going against the tide of global trends and good climate policy.”

US President Joe Biden has committed to ending fossil fuel subsidies and is urging other nations to follow suit as he pushes for global action on climate change.

Supporters of the fuel tax credit scheme argue it is not a subsidy.

The Fuel Tax Credit Alliance – including the Minerals Council of Australia, the National Farmers’ Federation and the peak oil and gas industry body – say it helps keep companies competitive.

But the Australia Institute said it was a subsidy as it gave a refund to major fossil fuel users on a tax the rest of the community pays.

-AAP

 

Read more:

 

 

assange2assange2

scomo of preachering to the converted...

 

Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked a packed Pentecostal convention to “raise up the spiritual weapons” against “identity politics”, which he claimed was an “evil” presence harming Australia’s young people.

“I need your help,” Mr Morrison told thousands of attendees at the Australian Christian Churches national conference on the Gold Coast last week.

The PM spoke of what he deemed “threats” to the concept of community in Australia, listing social media and identity politics as “corrosive” elements.

 

“If you look at each other not as individuals but as warring tribes, it’s easy to start disrespecting each other … that’s why people start writing stupid things on Facebook,” Mr Morrison said.

“We all know how that is corroding and desensitising our country and our society, not just here but all around the world, and I think it’s an evil thing.

“We’ve got to pray about it, we’ve got to call it out.

“We’ve got to raise up the spiritual weapons against this.

“It’s going to take our young people. It’s going to take their courage. It’s going to take their hope. It’s going to steal their hope. We’ve got to pray about that.”

 

he Australian Christian Churches describes itself on its website as “a movement of over 1000 Pentecostal Churches” and “representing more than 370,000 constituents”.

It was formerly known as the Assemblies of God in Australia.

Hillsong founder Brian Houston was its president between 1997 and 2009.

 

Many in the crowd at the Gold Coast Convention Centre were surprised to see Mr Morrison arrive on stage for a 25-minute sermon on the opening night of the conference on April 20.

Several attendees posted on social media that his speech was a “guest appearance” or “random”.

Mr Morrison’s address was not publicised by his office, nor publicly advertised on the ACC’s website ahead of time.

A video of Mr Morrison’s address was recorded by the pastor of a Queensland church, who was in the audience at the conference and later posted it online for his congregation.

It was later found and republished on social media by the Rationalist Society of Australia, a secular group.

Opening his address by referring to Australia as “the great south land of the holy spirit”, and acknowledging his “great brother” in Employment Services Minister Stuart Robert in the audience, Mr Morrison spoke for several minutes on community and family, before asking the thousands in the audience to “keep building community in this country”.

The PM said he “worried about” the concept of identity politics, which he defined as people being “only defined by what pack you’re in or what group you’re in”.

Mr Morrison warned such thinking could see people “lose your humanity”, and blamed it for creating “evil” in society.

“It’s such a corrosive thing we’re seeing take place. Sure, social media has its virtues and its values. It enables us to connect with people in ways we never have before,” he said.

“But those weapons can also be used by the evil one and we need to call it out.”

The “evil one” is understood to be a reference to Satan.

The PM asked people to stand up against such thinking, to “help” him to “remind Australians how precious they are and how unique they are”.

“You must be strong, you must be courageous, and you must not be discouraged,” he said.

In closing his speech, Mr Morrison spoke of the “absolute privilege” he felt as Christians around the country sent him and his wife, Jenny, many books and letters – joking he had a “library” building up – and how he had sought to comfort people doing it tough.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/04/26/scott-morrison-church-pentecostal/

 

Did I say FUCK OFF SCOTTY? I don't think I said it, but should have... If you have an opportunity, please deflate his tyres, because they're going to explode with so much godly goody hot air being pumped into them.

 

Meanwhile this scummy hypocrite will let Julian Assange rot in a UK prison...

 

assange2assange2

under the aussie sun...

In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.

Ever since the agency was founded in 1974 to measure the world’s energy systems and anticipate changes, the yearly World Energy Outlook has been a must-read document for policymakers the world over.

 

Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.

Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.

“When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,” Chase says.

“I see it as the limits of modelling. Most energy system models are, or were, set up to model minor changes to an energy system that is run on fossil fuel or nuclear. Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%.

 

“We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”

This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.

The deep history begins with a succession of US presidents and the quest for energy independence. First was Richard Nixon, who in November 1973 announced Project Independence to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil. Then came Jimmy Carter, who declared the energy transition the “moral equivalent of war” in April 1977 and pumped billions of dollars into renewable energy research, which came to a screeching halt when Ronald Reagan came to power.

But by then, interest had been piqued in Australia.

The father of PV solar

The solar cell was invented when Russell Shoemaker Ohl, a researcher in Bell Labs, noticed in 1940 that a cracked silicon sample produced a current when exposed to light. However, little improvement had been made until the contribution of Martin Green, a young engineering professor working out of the University of New South Wales.

Born in Brisbane, Green had spent some time in Canada as a researcher before circling back home in 1974. A year later he had started a PV solar research group working out of a small university laboratory built with unwanted equipment scrounged from big American engineering firms.

His first experiments, alongside a single PhD student, involved looking for ways to increase the voltage on early solar cells.

“Pretty soon, we started beating all these groups in the US in terms of the voltage we could get,” Green says. “Nasa had a project that had six contractors working on it. We beat them all.”

Not long after, Green and his team began to raise their ambitions. Having boosted the voltage, the next step was building better quality cells. Their early efforts broke the world efficiency record in 1983 – a habit the team would continue for 30 of the next 38 years.

In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.

It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.

Rise of the Sun King

Out of this whirlwind of activity, the Chinese solar industry would be born largely thanks to an ambitious physicist named Zhengrong Shi.

Born in 1963 on Yangzhong Island, Shi had earned his master’s degree and come to Australia a year before the Tiananmen Square protests. He had spotted a flyer advertising a research fellowship and talked Green into bringing him on as a PhD student in 1989.

Shi would finish his PhD in just two and a half years – a record that still stands today. By the time he became Dr Shi, he had so impressed Green that he stayed on as a researcher.

With time, the university was increasingly looking to commercialise its world-leading solar cell technology and struck up a partnership with Pacific Power in 1995. The government utility sank $47m into a new company called Pacific Solar. A factory was set up in the Sydney suburb of Botany and Shi was made the deputy director of research and development where he quickly earned a reputation for resourcefulness and precision.

“Zhengrong basically ran the company,” Green says.

Shi stuck it out for a few years but in November 2000, he was made an offer. At a dinner held at his home, four officials from the Chinese province of Jiangsu suggested the 37-year-old researcher and Australian citizen return to China and build his own factory there. After some consideration, Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi where he founded SunTech with $6m in start-up funding from the municipal government.

Shi’s arrival caused a stir. The ability to cheaply build conventional PV solar panels with 17% efficiency was far beyond what his competitors were capable of.

“That was a shock to them,” Shi says. “When they saw we were making solar cells of large area and high efficiencies they said, ‘wow’.

“The first reaction was: that’s the future. Everybody said that’s the future. But they also said it was one step too early. What they meant was that there was no market for it yet. In China at the time, if you mentioned solar, people thought of solar hot water.”

All that would change when Germany passed new laws encouraging the uptake of solar power. Quickly it became clear there was a massive global demand and the world’s manufacturers were struggling to keep up with supply.

Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3bn and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.

Having shown the way, the Chinese PV solar industry began a massive expansion. SunTech alone boosted its production capacity from 60 megawatts to 500MW, and then to 1 gigawatt in 2009. The company grew so fast, its supplies of glass, polysilicon and electronic systems needed to build its panels came under strain, forcing it to invest heavily in local supply chains.

“And then, you know the rest,” Shi says.

Dirt cheap power – at a price 

As with the rest of China, the rate of technological development in the PV solar business makes for an industry that builds itself up one day, tears itself down the next, and then remakes itself again the day after. With razor-thin margins and cut-throat competition, everyone is always one step away from falling.

Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.

Upon discovering the bonds didn’t exist, Shi was removed as CEO of his company and a year later SunTech would file for bankruptcy protection when it couldn’t repay a $541m loan that fell due in March 2013.

Whatever befell SunTech later, the Macquarie University emeritus professor John Mathews says the company played a pivotal role in changing both China and the world forever.

In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.

“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.

“They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”

Today Green and Shi keep in touch. Both are working on new projects. Shi is overseeing a new company while 72-year-old Green is looking for new innovations to explore.

One such innovation is the stackable solar cell. Though still a niche technology very much in the early stages, the basic idea is to lay a material over a solar cell in order to boost its power output.

“We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.

“The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.

“It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/25/insanely-cheap-energy-how-solar-power-continues-to-shock-the-world

 

Read from top.

 

Free Julian Assange Now !!!

god told him to burn more gas...

 

The Federal government is set to build a taxpayer-funded gas-fired power plant in the Hunter region of New South Wales, in what would be a major intervention in the electricity market.

Key points:
  • The PM threatened to build the plant last year if the electricity sector failed to fill the gap left by the closure of the Liddell power station
  • The plant is expected to be built at the site of the former Kurri Kurri aluminium smelter near Newcastle
  • Mr Morrison gave the market until this Friday to make a final decision

Prime Minister Scott Morrison last year threatened to build the plant, through its company Snowy Hydro Limited, if the electricity sector failed to fill the 1000 megawatt gap left by the closure of the Liddell power station in 2023.

Mr Morrison cited modelling from the government's Liddell taskforce which suggested power prices in NSW could rise by 30 per cent if that capacity is not replaced.

"If the energy companies choose to step up and make these investments to create that capacity, we will step back," he said in September.

"If not, my government will step up and we will fill the gap."

Mr Morrison gave the market until April 30 — this Friday — to make a final decision.

EnergyAustralia subsequently proposed a 350MW gas peaking station in the Illawarra and AGL put forward a similar-sized project near Newcastle but both companies put their plans on hold following the release of last year's renewables-focused NSW energy infrastructure roadmap.

Sources say EnergyAustralia has continued to negotiate with the government, which is optimistic the company will approve its Tallawarra B project by Friday.

Even if it gets the go ahead, the government is still expected to proceed with plans for a gas-fired power station at the site of the former Kurri Kurri aluminum smelter near Newcastle.

The new station would be built by Snowy Hydro and have the capacity to generate 750MW of "on-demand" electricity.

A spokesperson for Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the government had been clear that industry has until 30 April to "reach final investment decision on 1000 MW of new dispatchable capacity in NSW."

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-29/government-gas-fired-power-plant-nsw/100102888

 

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The idiotic evangelical Scomo has seen the miracle of gas... It's produces nearly as much CO2 as a coal-fired power station, but the godian Scomo cannot stop himself from believing in god's gassy farts. This is no way to edge your bets against global warming — nor even make electricity cheaper. All this will do is cost an arm an a leg and make the price of gas reach the upper atmosphere. Scomo does not want to admit that he is wrong because he is in charge of cooking the books of allocated moneys to the renewables. HEY, SCOMO (I was going to say moron, but I won't), THIS ISN'T THE WAY TO SAVE GOD'S PLANETOID...Repent for your sin of burning something more...

 

Meanwhile if you have a minute to spare, please DEMAND THE RELEASE OF JULAIN ASSANGE FROM PRISON. You would make yourself popular and this would be the best good deed ever one can do...

the melting...

Glaciers are melting more quickly, losing 31 per cent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years ago, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world's mountain glaciers.

Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers have been losing more than 298 billion metric tonnes of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature.

The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 71 billion metric tonnes more per year than it was from 2000 to 2004.

Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years.

Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-29/satellites-show-world-s-glaciers-melting-faster-than-ever/100103340

 

Read from top.

 

 

See also: https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26175

 

The melting of the ice is giving us a false sense of security... As the melting occurs it absorb a lot of energy which will eventually become "pure" added heat in the global warming process. According to Gus calculations this switch/crunch will happen in June 2032, even if some ice is still in the process of melting. 

 

Free Julian Assange today, you effing morons in charge of political hubris (bullshit) !!!!