Mad King is the energy gaslighter-in-chief:
Resources Minister Madeleine King has warned that decreasing gas supply faster than demand will lead to “shortages, supply disruptions and high prices”, while also “worsening poverty and inequality”, launching a strong economic defence for the fuel source’s role in underpinning the nation’s clean energy transition.
Really? What about the gas export cartel that delivered the worst energy shock in fifty years in 2022? This was the third such shock in a decade as it siphoned Aussie gas to China.
In theory, gas should be part of the solution, but, thanks to successive captured governments, in practice, it has become the most significant problem in the energy transition.
In fact, the one great upside from today’s heat wave is that we are using less gas:
Unseasonably warm and sunny weather has helped push coal power generation to a new low, further undermining the economics of ageing plants that are being forced to ramp down through the day to avoid losses but are still needed to keep the lights on.
More to the point, the heat wave has pushed gas usage down and the price with it:
It is gas, not coal, that sets the marginal cost of electricity. Falling gas has crashed the electricity price:
If you think Mad King is bad. Spare a thought for Dingo Bowen. Albo’s fake left corporate whores are even worse on actual carbon output, which is barely down at all since 2005. Crikey has a good description of the scam:
Under Labor’s flagship safeguard mechanism, around 215 big carbon emitters face a hard carbon budget of 1,233 million tonnes of CO2 for this decade, and their collective emissions must be below 100 million tonnes in 2029-30. In practical terms, however, they only have to get their net emissions below a baseline that essentially starts at their current emission levels and declines by a maximum of 4.9% per year. Even so, many of those facilities — coal mines, gas plants, cement factories, steelworks — won’t be capable of achieving this, or the investment required to upgrade them in order to do so is too great for their owners. They’ll instead rely on surrendering carbon credits for the portion of emissions above the baseline (meaning the financial impact for the first five years or so won’t be significant for most facilities).
And from a climate perspective, even if the carbon credits are legitimate, all they will do is cancel out the warming effects of the emissions above the line — the planet still has to live with the majority of emissions that sit “below the line”. If the carbon credits do not represent real and additional abatement, or the sequestered carbon is later released into the atmosphere (via, say, drought or fire), not even the emissions above the line will be neutralised. The planet will have to live with the full warming effects of all the emissions from the facilities for centuries to millennia.
But for a government that wants to convey the impression of climate action while keeping our biggest emitters in business — particularly those in heavy manufacturing, a sector prized by Labor — ACCUs, regardless of integrity, are a crucial part of industry policy. They’re a form of carbon budget subsidy for heavy emitters, allowing them a cheap mechanism for avoiding reducing their emissions under the pretence of offsetting them.
Pretending to care is the core of fake left ideology in everything it touches.
