Australian State Bans Gas to New Homes


The War on Gas is in full swing in Australia and The Guardian is loving it:

Gas connections will be banned in new homes and government buildings built in Victoria from next year.
The announcement has been backed by environmental groups and the property and construction sectors but the opposition has warned the change could increase household energy bills fuelled by higher demand for electricity.

The Victorian government announced the major energy reform on Friday as part of its plan to reach net zero emissions in the state by 2045.

The government estimates the change will save households up to $1,000 on their annual energy bills – or $2,200 if they have solar installed – and reduce emissions.

That last bit is hilarious, given electricity prices have gone up over 30% just this year alone, Australia flatly refuses to embrace nuclear (despite having the largest Uranium reserves in the world) and is shutting down its electricity generation capacity quicker than Dan Andrews can say “lockdown”.

The Climate Madness continues.

Finally, Coalition backs nuclear power


This is a transformative moment for Australian energy security. Nuclear power has been banned in Australia for over 20 years, and yet, despite its benefits, no major party has had the guts to challenge it.

Labor and the Greens are bogged down in climate madness, closing coal fired power stations at a truly alarming pace and leaving Australia dangerously short of baseload power generation. At the same time they’re still stuck in the 1970’s hippy era of anti-nuclear hysteria, leaving no viable alternatives except wind and solar.

However, Peter Dutton has used his budget reply speech to push for nuclear, a clean, safe, climate-friendly means of baseload generation:

Peter Dutton has put nuclear power and gas at the heart of the Coalition’s future energy blueprint, in a direct challenge to Labor’s climate change policy, and will wave through the ­majority of Jim Chalmers’ $14.6bn cost-of-living package.

Following the closure of the Liddell coal-fired power station and rising concerns over blackouts and gas shortages, Mr Dutton declared that in the 21st century “any sensible government must consider small ­modular nuclear as part of the ­energy mix”. The Liberal leader warned that Labor’s climate change plan was putting Australia “on the wrong energy path”, ­driving up electricity and grocery bills for households, and threatening to shut down or force businesses offshore.

“We want to see emissions go down,” Mr Dutton said. “Next-generation, small modular ­nuclear technologies are safe, ­reliable, cost-effective, can be plugged into existing grids where we have turned off coal, and emit zero emissions.”

Mr Dutton rebuked Labor – led by longtime anti-nuclear ­advocate Anthony Albanese – for being “happy” to embrace AUKUS nuclear submarines while refusing to “consider the benefits of onshore small and micro modular reactors”.

This will be a major point of differentiation between Labor and the Coalition going forward, and a clear choice for Australians who do not wish to pay through the nose for electricity from inefficient and unreliable green renewables.

Also, despite the fact that I believe electric cars are a major folly, at least with nuclear we might have enough baseload generation to keep charging the bloody things.

Link.

Australia runs out of electricity


It’s like Britain in the 1970s. I remember the blackouts and my parents lighting the house with candles and oil lamps.

But this is Australia – in the 21st century!

We now cannot afford to pay for electricity because insane policies driven by climate hysteria have crippled our generation industry.

Thanks Albo and your Green socialist mates.

Climate Madness returns to Australia


Virtue signalling on Day 2

Thanks to the Greens in drag (the Teals), we now have a radical left Labor government intent on destroying our economy to virtue signal about the climate. Seriously, I thought we’d got over all this nonsense, but apparently not.

I’m not sure about the stats right now, but Australia’s annual emissions are churned out by China every fortnight (or something ridiculous like that), so even if we shut down our economy completely and cut emissions by 100%, we will save two weeks of China’s emissions every year. Wow brilliant!

At least the Liberal bedwetters, who constantly plugged climate action and other right-on woke issues like trans rights, have all been expunged from the parliament so perhaps the party can start again being a little bit more, you know, CONSERVATIVE maybe?? Who knows, people might actually vote for it! Geez…

Occasional posts on this blog will return when my blood pressure exceeds recommended levels…

Ben Shapiro eviscerates Australia’s COVID madness


Peoples Republic of Canberra goes into 7-day lockdown… for ONE case?!


COVID madness. This insane desire for “zero cases” is as mad as the desire for “zero carbon” – totally unachievable and incredibly damaging for the population.

If this is the standard our leaders are setting, we will be locked down for a very, very long time.

Where have I seen this before?


You cannot have failed to notice that the sixth IPCC tome has recently been released, warning that we have less and less time before we “destroy the planet“. Take a look at the following for example:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year […guess…]. 

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. 

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control

As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. 

Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study. 

″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said. 

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

Sounds terrible right? Except this was published in 1989, and they were talking about the year 2000…

H/t: WUWT

Lockdown protesters are foolish, but many share their frustration


Zero cases is a pipe dream

Yes, it was very silly to gather in large numbers to protest the ongoing lockdowns in the states of New South Wales and Victoria. It will give ammunition to our lockdown-addicted governments to keep them going even longer.

But many will sympathise with the immense frustration that the protesters are feeling, especially with no end in sight for us here in Sydney. Will Gladys just keep extending the lockdown until next week? Or next month? Or next year? Who knows. There is no clear path out of the government’s misguided aim of zero cases.

All we have to look forward to is more restrictions, stretching out into the distant future, as we see our economy crippled, businesses dead, our kids’ education stunted, and the mental health of our citizens plunging further and further into despondency.

Even the UK Telegraph newspaper has noticed [$] Australia’s impossible aim of zero cases, in particular in South Australia:

Expert opinion appears to be unanimous that – in the long term – we are going to have to live with Covid, such that the sooner we get to herd immunity, the better.

For Australia to try to live on an entirely Covid-free basis is probably about as sensible as sitting on the beach at low water ordering the tide not to come in. The consequence a millennium or so ago was simply that King Canute got wet feet. The consequence of these lockdowns today is much more sinister.

Bizarrely, the public mood here seems, by and large, to accept the damage – likely to be permanent – done by these lockdowns. There is a hope here that vaccination, which is slowly being rolled out, will prevent any cases of Covid among the vaccinated.

Fat chance of that! In the meantime, South Australians are clapping their hands and singing along, just as teacher asks.

We are all thoroughly sick of the lurgy and we are all thoroughly sick of lockdowns, especially when that seems to be the first line response for state premiers. We all thought the worst was over in 2020. But no, here we are, over half way through 2021, and we’re essentially back where we started.

It’s time for governments to abandon the impossible target of zero cases and learn to live with the lurgy.

Paris Accord mandates climate indoctrination in schools


Creating a generation of Gretas…

In our brave new world post-Trump, where far Left dogma is the only speech allowed, independent social media sites are shut down by Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, and anyone with differing views will be sent to “re-education camps”, is it little wonder that climate indoctrination will now be forced on our children?

Lessons in climate change, the environment and how to protest will be compulsory subjects at all schools worldwide as part of the Paris Agreement, under plans being developed for this year’s UN climate summit in Glasgow.

Teaching children about the environment, the green economy and how to take action against government to stop environmental harm are considered essential parts of preparing future workers for what campaigners say is the third industrial revolution.

[…]

EarthDay says a climate-­educated and environmentally literate global public is likely to be “better placed to take part in the green jobs revolution, make better sustainable consumer choices, become the next generation of sustainable entrepreneurs and hold leaders to account”. Ms Rogers said if current trends continued, energy and technology needs of the future would all be owned and controlled by big technology companies and China.

The Australian ($)

We can all look forward to yet more hectoring and badgering from our little ones, permanently hyperactive on the climate Kool Aid poured into them in our educational establishments…

Blowing the dust off Australian Climate Madness


Biden restarts climate madness…

So it looks like I will have to polish up my blogging again as once again we descend into another era of climate madness. With the election (installation?) of Sleepy Joe as President, the pointless climate action agenda is firmly back on the table, as the Washington Post breathlessly reports:

Within hours of taking the oath of office as president Wednesday, Joe Biden intends to sign more than a dozen executive orders and direct nearly 100 agency actions aimed at unraveling Donald Trump’s environmental policies, as he works to cement the government’s role in safeguarding air and water, protecting endangered species, and combating climate change at home and abroad.

Biden will order federal agencies to review scores of climate policies enacted during the Trump administration and, if possible, to quickly reverse them. Nearly half of the regulations the new administration is targeting come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues ranging from drinking water and dangerous chemicals to gas mileage standards.

A cry for survival comes from planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear,” Biden said in his inaugural address. Listing the challenges the nation faces, he pointed to “the battle to save our planet by getting the climate under control.”

Link

As I type this, apparently the Exec Order rejoining the Paris Accord has been signed…

Welcome back to Climate Madness.