Carlton Supporters Club

Did he see the Solomon Islands fiasco coming, and if so did he do anything to head it off?

And if he's so concerned about the Chinese threat, why didn't he stop the lease of the Darwin Port to the Chinese?

Don't give me the line that the Federal Govt didn't have any role in that deal; if he'd wanted to stop it, he could have made sure it was declared against the national interest or used the Fed Govt's power over a territory to bring it to heel. It seems he's only interested in playing the tough guy by lobbing insults or doing a deal for nuclear submarines in 2038.

The Solomon Islands Opposition Leader claims he warned Australian officials last year that China was negotiating a military pact which could see a base established on the strategically located Pacific nation.

Former Army intelligence officer and University of New South Wales Professor, Clinton Fernandes, says China is making strong headway in Papua New Guinea just like it has in Solomon Islands.

"The next item on the agenda is the Daru Island area off Papua New Guinea which is going to have a Chinese presence and before too long a pro-China party will win the national elections in Papua New Guinea," he said.

Professor Fernandes said the same factors are in play in Papua New Guinea as in Solomon Islands, where Australian foreign aid is seen as not effective in countering China.

"We also interfere in their politics — when the Solomon Islands wanted to build an undersea internet cable between themselves and Sydney — we insisted which company would get that contract," he said.

"The current Prime Minister of Solomon Islands hasn't forgotten that episode and the same dynamic is in play in Papua New Guinea, when a large part of the aid budget actually comes back in salaries to foreign consultants".

Solomon Islands politician 'extremely disappointed' Australia ignored warnings of China military deal, abc.net.au
Let's not forget the way they pleaded with Australia for action on climate change as rising sea levels threatened their very existence, with one leader brought to tears over it.

Australia 1.3% of the annual world's emissions ... all replaced by China in a mere 16 days.

If you include Australia's export of fossil fuels (coal etc) then Australia's contribution to emissions is 5%. And the Australian Govt has been one of the leaders of attempts to undermine global action on climate change.

A world-first shipment of liquid hydrogen from Australia was declared momentous – a pivotal moment as the world clambers for clean liquid fuels to bring global greenhouse gas emissions to zero.

Prime minister Scott Morrison said the consignment – loaded on to a purpose-built Japanese ship at the Port of Hastings in Victoria – marked the beginning of a new clean energy export industry for Australia.

Despite the celebratory fanfare and two government ministers at the port for a photo-op, the reality is something different.
Experts say the climate credentials of the technology being used to produce the hydrogen – using brown coal – are highly questionable.

“The project’s current configuration is not clean. In fact, it is incredibly dirty,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, head of industrial decarbonisation at Bloomberg NEF.

To bring emissions down, HESC says a commercial operation would capture CO2 released during one of the stages of production (the gasification phase carried out in the Latrobe Valley) and then use the Victorian government’s CarbonNet project to store the CO2.

But the CarbonNet project – which is targeting potential geological formations off the Victorian coast – doesn’t yet exist and, if it does go ahead, the Victorian government says it won’t start operating until the end of this decade.

All of this raises the prospect of coal-based hydrogen – which the Morrison government is happy to describe as “clean” – hitting a global market at a time when some analysts believe it will be already priced out by zero-emissions hydrogen derived from renewable energy.

Bhavnagri told Temperature Check he doubts using coal to make hydrogen could have any commercial success.

He said assuming the project could capture and store a significant amount of CO2, the carbon footprint of the hydrogen would still be higher than producing hydrogen from gas with CCS and “much higher than producing it from renewables”.

“If it’s more complex and more costly and more polluting than making hydrogen from renewables, why would you do it?”

I won't write too much here we have an energy thread.

I understand a large chunk of Australia's export is black coal used for coking not energy, and even when we transition to clean energy that won't change as the demand for coking coal as steel production will not diminish even though steel mills move to greener energy, the coking coal is part of a chemical process to make steel not part of the energy production.

Not sure we export much brown coal, it's is mostly used domestically for energy production.

The coal everybody wants to trade is the black stuff, it sells at a far higher price, so much so there is a lot of R&D going into techniques to turn brown to black. The higher the black coal quality the better the alloys you can make.

Interestingly Japan mostly buys black coal for it's high tech energy production, black coal burns cleaner so it's easier to deal with the waste, Japan's technologies eliminate about 80% of the waste emissions. Protestors will still rally against this but as a short term transitional solution that technology is as good as immediately shutting 80% of your coal fired power plants, actually for Australia it would be equivalent to shutting even more than 80% because the brown coal we burn for energy is not as clean. The only long term viable solution is still nuclear be it fission or fusion, several countries that historically closed nuclear are now reversing the decision, they have become woke to the lobbyist tactics.

Solar, wind and other renewable energy lobbyists tend to just lump coal(pun intended) all in the same basket.

PS; When Australia stops selling black coal or supply is limited, China and India do their best to get it from other sources like Borneo and the Amazon Basin! The lobbyists paint us as vandals, but the truth is far more complicated.

China love our better quality coal and we love selling it to them and Europe are reliant on Russia for natural gas and wont apply sanctions in that area. Its a strange world of contradictions we live in.....

Green hydrogen is therefore on track to be competitive with coal-fired hydrogen production by 2025 with costs of under $2 per kilo.