NSW solar households to subsidise coal power

In a new twist, the NSW Government has announced that from tomorrow, those generating solar power to the grid will be paid less for each kWh than what they pay for coal power from the grid.

Everyone knows that NSW hasn't had a competent government for many decades (regardless of the political party in power). It introduced an extremely generous solar incentive scheme whereby households could install a grid connected solar system and be paid at least 60c for every kWh produced. This was a gross payment scheme. There was a size limit of 10 kW for solar systems to take part in the scheme. (NSW had the most generous scheme in Australia on a c/kWh basis, given it was a gross payment scheme. However, in the ACT, some people have installed the maximum 30kW system and earning 45c/kWh or more. Victoria pays 60c/kWh but on a net feed-in basis and only for systems up to 5kW in size.)

Needless to say any idiot could work out that this returned better than shares, term deposits and property, so the scheme was very popular.

Like a pendulum out of control, the NSW Government has now swung back the other way and decided to kill off the NSW home solar industry by limiting the amount paid to solar generators to 20c/kWh. This is considerably less than people have to pay per kWh (some people are reportedly paying more than 40c/kWh in NSW during some daylight hours). So anyone considering solar in NSW will now find they'll be effectively paying the power companies for every offsetting kWh generated from their solar system.

As I said, it's common knowledge that requirements for election or appointment to the NSW government include gross incompetence, corruptibility, idiocy and the ability to flip flop. This action demonstrates all of these traits.

At last - internet censorship has died

The Australian Labor Party was proposing to censor the internet. At last that proposal seems dead and buried with the Liberal Party saying they will oppose it if in opposition, and ditch it if they are elected to govern.

Not sure yet what will happen to the proposal to spy on the browsing history and emails of all Australians. Let's hope that never sees the light of day either.

Conroy still hasn't a clue about how the internet works. Remember his "spams or scams coming through the portal"?

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Let's take a holiday...

I've just been surfing and came across this, offering food for thought...

Impasse on mitigating climate change

Yesterday Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that the ETS legislation is being postponed to 2013. In the USA, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has pulled out of the climate bill, or has he? The fate of this legislation is up in the air.

None of this is good, but nor is it cast in stone. Australia's federal government will be holding elections this year. If by some miracle the Greens got the balance of power, something might happen sooner rather than later and we could yet have a better result than the current ETS.

LEIGH SALES: So is the current situation, then, nothing better than the Rudd ETS?

BOB BROWN: Well it actually is, because the Rudd ETS, which would have given $24 billion to the big polluters and the Gratton study which we've seen released in the last 24 hours showed that $20 billion of that would have been effectively wasted taxpayers' money, would have not achieved the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that's required, but would have locked us in to a failure to achieve the necessary reduction for the next 10 to 15 years. We weren't going to allow that to happen.
What we have put forward instead of a proposal to reward the big polluters, a proposal to put a levy onto the big polluters, as Professor Garnaut recommended, so you've got the money to stimulate business, but you also immediately get a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, something the Rudd scheme would not have done.

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2884198.htm

In the USA, the situation is still not very clear. It seems that the kerfuffle over there is because Democrat Senator Harry Reid was going to push through the Immigration Bill ahead of the climate and energy bill. But now maybe he won't.

Keep an eye on ClimateProgress for the latest developments on energy legislation in the USA.

Clive Hamilton in Huffington Post

Another article on the criminals who are intent on destroying the world.

Clive Hamilton starts off:

Is it strange that Sarah Palin, who once thought Africa was a country, now quotes verbatim from emails stolen from Britain's Climatic Research Unit or that Lord Monckton, a leading English climate denier, addresses a Tea Party rally in America?

The Tea Party movement doesn't seem to appreciate the irony of being in raptures over a British peer, when it is named for the The Boston Tea Party, which was a direct action by colonists in Boston against the British government.

Professor Hamilton describes the ever-increasing level of intimidation that scientists are subjected to:

One symptom of this shift is the ongoing campaign of cyber-bullying directed at climate scientists themselves. Any climate scientist in the news now receives a torrent of aggressive and abusive emails. As Stanford's prominent climatologist Stephen Schneider says: "It's ugly death threat stuff; 'You belong in jail,' 'You should be executed.' [This] never happened... a year ago. [But] now it's off the charts."

Read more here.

Prof Jones and CRU praised & vindicated again

CRU scientists have just been praised for their efforts in a report which once again showed any claims of scientific impropriety and dishonesty are completely false and unwarranted. The review was led by Lord Oxburgh and comprised an international panel of leading experts of impeccable character and credentials. It assessed the integrity of the research published by the Climatic Research Unit in the light of various external assertions.

Will deniosaurs recant their allegations which have again been shown to be completely wrong? Probably not, because there are unfortunately some scurrilous people who are not interested in the truth, only in pushing their own twisted agenda.

As a taster from the Oxburgh panel report:

"We believe that CRU did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records at a time when it was unfashionable and attracted the interest of a rather small section of the scientific community."

And more:

"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention..."

"...In detailed discussion with the researchers we found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda. Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of centuries as possible. All of the published work was accompanied by detailed descriptions of uncertainties and accompanied by appropriate caveats."

And for the critics:

"We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU. They seem also to reflect a lack of awareness of the ongoing and dynamic nature of chronologies, and of the difficult circumstances under which university research is sometimes conducted. Funding and labour pressures and the need to publish have meant that pressing ahead with new work has been at the expense of what was regarded as non-essential record keeping...."

"...Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."

And in regard to FoI:

A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context.

I agree with them – FoI shouldn’t apply to academic research. I doubt very much that was the intention when FoI was introduced. It just happened that no-one anticipated it would be used to query research, let alone to try to stop research and to threaten scientists, as it has been. It was designed to make administrative decisions more transparent

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We cannot simply ignore those who want to destroy what we have. We still need to put in the effort to let people know the extent of the harm we are doing to our world by emitting CO2.

But it's also past time to start taking action individually and collectively, to minimise the harmful effects from the impending climate crash.

And there is a lot we can do, starting with reducing our power bills by being a bit more careful. Some of us will invest in solar power and hybrid cars, which are becoming more affordable. We will urge government to wean us off dirty coal. Geothermic, wind and tidal power are real alternatives that must be used more widely.

We can and will reduce carbon emissions, and with minimal cost if we act quickly - and get a cleaner, greener earth to enjoy.

Melbourne's long summer draws to an end

Six weeks into autumn and Melbourne's record run has ended. The 123-day run of temperatures of 20C or more had it's last day on 10 April, just over four months from when it first began. Yesterday (11 April) the temperature reached a maximum of 18.2C at midnight. Today's maximum was 17.6C at 1:00 pm.

The previous record run in 2000-01 lasted just over two and a half months (78 days), so this summer was quite exceptional.

Hobart's record run of temperatures of 17C or more ended on 2 April, lasting 105 days compared to the previous record of 72 consecutive days. This is only the seventh time since records began that Hobart has had 50 or more consecutive days with a maximum of 17C or more.