At the top of the list are the premiers and ministers responsible for land management, such as it is, and bushfire policy, and the public servants in their departments with jurisdiction over forests and national parks. State governments in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have palpably failed to do the most important job they were elected to do: protect the lives and livelihoods of their citizens and the health of their environment. And their public servants have failed to do the job they are being paid to do: serve the public.
I tend to agree with Thry, while I agree about the waste, waste of money, opportunity and initiatives, the Feds wield far more influence than they are willing to admit.
They'll turn up to spruik their contribution when a new freeway, tunnel or bridge opens, but they 'll evaporate the minute something like this happens with comments like it's a state issue. Yet roads, forests, farms, rivers, lakes and bays are all infrastructure.
The truth sits somewhere between State run and Federally financed.
A good example is the sale of the Port of Melb, the State made the decision and cut the deal, which the Feds had to tick off. But the Feds also claimed a big slice of the cake while the State argued it should get it all the funds! As far as I know the state lost the debate!
So much for not burning off, the gift that keeps on giving!
Run off into creeks from the rain is already killing fish by the thousands according to reports coming from East Gippsland this morning.
I must admit I'm very sceptical about the previous conditions preventing burn-off, so is my brother who is CFA and lives near a state forest. He' told me they have been begging the DSE to let them do control burns for three years and they keep getting refused permission with claims it was too dry. But he said the peaks of some areas near him had snow on them, while other peaks had been cleared of all trees for, wait for it, wind turbines!
So we suspect the real reason for missing targets and resorting to "strategic burns" comes courtesy of some bean-counter somewhere who now has a fat bonus for cutting/saving million$ from the spend on forestry management!
I think the correct term to describe the situation is "Cluster of Fork", or something like that!
Nuclear appears to be the most environmentally friendly of all the options available provided there's no meltdown...
Not to mention Japan which is now building modern coal to supplement remaining nuclear, and it's turning nuclear plants back on slowly as are some of the European states as you mention. Two reasons seem to be primary concerns, reliability of energy supply and the unsubsidised ongoing cost of green energy. Green activists make claims that countries like Japan are addicted to nuclear, but that claim doesn't stack up as many of the same countries are actually providing the green energy innovation as well.
In fairness I don't think we can compare Three Mile Island or Chernobyl to a modern plant, and as much as screwushima(Cop this autocorrect mods, some activist is taking the piss!) Daiichi now presents some problems there may have been the odd external influence. Those old plants, the design, construction and location, are relics compared to modern plants. It's like comparing a Model-T Ford to a Tesla. But in fairness, even the situation with coal plants is pretty much the same, we talk about our Latrobe Valley facilities but these are dinosaurs compared to modern plants, the main difference being the old plants lack of ability to ramp production to meet demand, they are too slow to react so they leave them running wasting far too much resource. It's like leaving your car running overnight so it can ready to go at breakfast! In fairness nuclear plants are similar, they leave them idling 24x7, but they don't consume much resource or produce greenhouse gas in that state.
This is partly true, in that micro-grids are a potential solution, but it's unlikely they are any cleaner and greener than bulk energy generation. Also as EB1 points out, the longevity of such systems is questionable with some now finding they didn't last the warranty period and the supplier / manufacturer is long gone!
Abramowitz partly ignores the transmission issue, he fails to mention it when discussing the Northern Territory.
In relation to large scale solar there are also questions to be answered as huge solar farms also have localised and global environmental effects. Something that is now being discovered and studied on the Victorian border around Kerang, Echuca and Swan Hill.
The rule seems to be as always, there is no free lunch!
Need battery storage, typically Lithium Iron variety, highly expensive to begin with and batteries dont last. One of the States in the USA is trying a mass solar storage experiment(forget which one), maybe Elon Musk and his fanboys can come up with some new technology. He is spending money on battery technology and wants to go to parts unknown with his SpaceX program so will need some inventive power systems. Wind farms dont work and are not green either given the cost/resources to build, total waste of money and generate nothing. Both Solar and Wind also have trouble integrating into the grid due to regulation creating quality issues with frequency.
All good points.
The other major issue with large centralized systems is energy transmission, at the moment moving power around the grid is very inefficient and there are no real world viable solutions to this problem at the moment. I read somewhere that using current technologies if we had to transmit power from Perth to Sydney we might lose as much as 40% in heat due to the resistance of the transmission lines and losses at joins. Some countries including Australia are experimenting with Ultra High Voltage(UHV) or Energy(UHE) transmission lines, but it looks to be both very expensive and very unreliable.
With current transmission systems the more energy you have to move the more inefficient they become.
With UHV it's the reverse, the higher the voltage you use the more efficient it becomes. Just don't go anywhere near the transmission lines as the current systems fails with lightning like results!
This is a real problem, because all major economies are invested in long term in fusion energy research, and fusion is a process that improves in efficiency with increasing size. So you need a large centralised system to be very efficient at generating fusion energy, but then you have to distribute it a long way to make use of the massive facility!
Totally stupid to bankrupt the country on new technologies that simply DO NOT work.
We should have had nuclear 40 years ago. Why in the hell should we impoverish ourselves when we are so rich in resources and then end up paying more for power than any other country. Because we are dead dumb. No other country would tolerate it. 1.3 % of the world's emissions. BFD !!!
Yes, the whole per capita vs total emissions debate bends to political will and is primarily bogus. Per capita doesn't mean much if you are a postage stamp economy with a with low density population like Australia, so it's really just used by extremists to name and shame.
The real unequivocal issue is total emissions. Everybody knows the major polluters in this regard, having a massive under-resourced low economic status population gets all your per capita emissions average down across the board.
But those realities cannot be used as an excuse for a lack of action by any country.
I'd bet London to a brick that it's doable. Between the various forms of clean(er) energy, we can do way better than the current situation.
That is surely correct, once the political leverage from the old world is broken, in this regard the energy debate is very reminiscent of the electric car debate.
I do take issue with alarmist calls banning modern nuclear energy, it's clearly Australia's cleanest greenest fastest solution to both greenhouse emissions and base-load energy. Musk's batteries are probably filthy, just that they are manufactured NIMBY, and manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells full of rare earth elements is not that much better, but again they are made NIMBY. All three industries hang their hat on being cleaner and sustainable in the future without having a ready-made solution!
Lucky for us China's and India's pollution hasn't yet applied for a travel visa so it's stuck inside their borders, so we can keep importing our solar cells, wind turbines and storage batteries. All we have to do is dig everything up and ship it to them first to be converted and returned in a convenient to use package. Scotty from Marketing calls that "a trade deal", we can even have the stuff shipped in tightly packed parts to save on freight called "good economic management", then assemble the lot here called "Creating jobs!"
Nuclear is an almost perfect fit with desalination plants whose salty emissions, somewhat ironically for the protesters, now seem to be doing localized good for the oceans. Given it's highly likely pure fresh water will become, if it is not already, one of the world's most precious commodities, we better quickly get good at making it!
There is some irony when the coal industry claim nuclear pollutes the globe with a few kilograms of waste, but deny that billions or trillions of tonnes of greenhouse emissions have a discernible effect. Of course we now suspect that in micro-doses those old world coal fired power stations issue more radiation in total than many of the major events of the past, allegedly even far exceeding atmospheric nuclear testing.
Time to stop f@#%ing around and move away from old technologies. Climate change or no climate change. Other countries have shown the way.
Yes, sensible actions in the face of a potential risk. The key words being "action", which means do something, and "potential risk", which means something bad might happen!
The trouble is in Australia we have ScoMo in charge, who seems credulous regarding climate change denialism. ScoMo "Wants to Believe" the conspiracies, the real question is perhaps why?
Other Liberals like Turnbull and Abbott had motives that were relatively clear, be they hard right economics or the Small "L" conservatism.
Scotty from Marketing is a weather-vane, and not a very good one it seems because he can't definitively find his way-point! His lack of commitment perhaps presents the highest risk to Australia of all political positions, because we could lose on both fronts, the economy and the environment!
Some countries have chosen Filthy Rich while others choose Clean Broke, Scotty from Marketing seems to have found the secret 3rd path Filthy Broke!
Observers now probably suspect with Scotty from Marketing it's all about Scotty from Marketing, no wonder he idolizes Trump!
Concerns about Mann’s research included: . . . I'll stick to footy hereonin. You're in the cult. No facts, or even reality, will sway you.
Reality does sway me fiction doesn't!
Your Mann accusations are old news, dredged up and re-played ad infinitum in the remote hope it influences some general public. It's pointless raising them in this debate because the accusations have long been disproved by multiple investigations, some even chaired or sponsored by climate change skeptics. In some cases the skeptical protagonists were even forced to publish very public apologies!
Repeating false accusations won't make them suddenly become true, it's not Kansas, you're not Dorothy, no matter how often you speak or write the fantasy it will remain fake, fiction will not become reality, even News Ltd accepts that now!
Why do you do this to yourself, you do know Professor Michael Mann was also exonerated, in fact his critics tried multiple avenues to get him removed and his work discredited and they lost every time!
Pretty much every conspiratorial xxxxxxxGate associated with the intial IPCC report, at least those investigated that were not so crazy as to be immediately disregarded, including ClimateGate, AmazonGate and HimalayaGate have been dismissed.
I don't mind you offering genuine counterpoints to the claims of Human Induced Climate Change, Climate Change or Global Warming in general, because debating and defending such assertions is how science works. But not when you are offering the conspiracy theories of the lunatic fringe which you seem to have nothing but credulity for, and worse use of allegedly fraudulent sources to assert fraud by genuine climate scientists!
Why do I say allegedly fraudulent sources, because nobody knows where or who corrupted the data they quote in their weird erroneous articles, they may in fact be victims of a fraud and genuinely believe it to be the case that the world is out to fool them.
Both Dyson and Happer are forces in science, world leading CO2 experts - and you just diss them.
Nope that's a straight out lie.
In their fields of nuclear physics and maths Freeman Dyson and William Happer were leading scientists, but on CO2 Emissions and Climate Research they are just offering unqualified opinions like everybody else! Some of Happer's alleged claims actually fail the basic math tests discussed earlier, I've no idea why because he was more than capable to doing the math which makes some of his assertions false! Maybe they aren't really his claims at all like those earlier examples offered as statements by Kear.
For example Happer's alleged claim that the Sun is responsible for the measured Climate Change not Humans is just physically impossible and we know nothing has changed to alter that in thousands of years!
Maybe Happer is just taking the piss sometimes and winding up the conspiracy theorists to expose the nutters!
The exoneration was official and came from the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee, the committee which conducted the enquiry for the UK Parliament.
The links you provide are not official, they are opinions!
Climategate never happened right? All innocent grade school banter?
You mean Professor Phil Jones, the guy that Climate Change Denialist's had dragged before the UK Parliament only to see fully exonerated. A case they initiated and then labelled a conspiracy when it didn't go their way!
Then the same fringe groups tried to disparage Professor Jones' team in an an investigation chaired by the former head of Shell UK(Yes chaired by the former head of an oil company.) Which also cleared Professor Jones' staff and stated they acted with rigour, honesty and integrity.
The following is reproduced from a 2013 self published article by Dr David Kear. Dr Kear has impeccable credentials as a climate scientist, and to his advantage, was educated when universities schooled students in how to think, and didn’t tell them what to think. He died in 2019 aged 95.
Except Kear allegedly wasn't a climate scientist but a geologist!
He was another like Freeman Dyson (Physicist) who took issue with Human Induced Climate change in his later years, and his self-published articles have been somewhat corrupted to support radical climate denialists. Kear had a right to an opinion as any do, but like Dyson not all opinions are equal and a geologist's opinion is not equal to a genuine climate researcher's opinion. btw., Kear's alleged primary problem with the science was in the language used to describe minimums and maximum measurements, he didn't have much of an issue with most of the actual numbers or measurements presented, and he mostly debates whether warming was human induced or natural occuring, not if it was real!
Is anything you've found to support your opinion going to be accurate?
