Australian Climate Madness

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.

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.

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.

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.

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