Slavery in Australia

Our PM, Scott Morrison, says there was never slavery in Australia.  Meanwhile, in the UK, an episode of Fawlty Towers entitled Don't Mention the War, is banned then unbanned, because it's 'offensive' (missing the whole point of the episode).   A cartoon from Broelman, showing Basil Fawlty, Manuel, and Scroto;  and a picture from the Western Australian State Library, which Fakebook banned 'for nudity' then unbanned later.

Australia: renewables pushing down electricity prices

From Bloomberg:

Record-high renewables growth is transforming Australia’s electricity landscape, pushing out coal plants and lowering prices and emissions.

Solar and wind output during the fourth quarter within the five jurisdictions that make up the National Electricity Market increased 39% from a year earlier, the Australian Energy Market Operator said Monday in its quarterly report. That helped cut power-generation emissions 5% to the lowest in data going back to 2001 and slashed wholesale prices by almost a fifth.

“Record variable renewable energy generation growth in 2019 is expected to continue into 2020, as the large amount of new capacity currently being accredited is likely to reach full generation by mid-2020,” AEMO said in the report. “During December 2019 (and into January 2020), extreme heat, generator and transmission line outages, and bushfires tested the NEM power system and led to price volatility.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government has faced increased criticism over its lack of a coherent climate policy following the devastating bushfires that swept across the country this summer. Over the weekend it confirmed its staunch support of the coal industry in the face of a growing backlash against the fuel by giving financial backing to a study into a new plant.

Renewables growth is reducing the need for coal in Australia. Source: AEMO

It's typical of conservatives, who used to be the most pragmatic and evidence-driven people on the political spectrum, that the evidence that renewables are cheaper than coal is ignored because of their cult-like obsession with coal.

Electric vehicle sales triple in Oz

From The Guardian:

Electric vehicle sales in Australia more than tripled last year but were still far lower than in a majority of developed countries, industry data shows.

The Electric Vehicle Council says 6,718 full electric and hybrid plug-in vehicles were sold in 2019, up from 2,216 the year before. Sales of combustion engine cars fell 7.8% over that period.

The release of the industry group data follows Britain this week announcing it would ban new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars from 2035. The Electric Vehicle Council said the spike in sales in Australia from a low base suggested consumers wanted the technology despite it being yet to receive the support offered elsewhere.

“The good news is that the number of Australians buying EVs is surging despite a lack of government incentives or support,” the council’s chief executive, Beyhad Jafari, said. “The bad news is that even with this strong growth, EVs still only represent 0.6% of sales. That compares poorly with 3.8% of sales in Europe and 4.7% of sales in China.”

Support for EVs was a significant point of difference between the major parties at last year’s federal election. Labor promised a target of 50% new car sales being electric by 2030.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, accused the opposition of wanting to “end the weekend” by forcing people out of four-wheel drives, while the minister for small business, Michaelia Cash, told tradies only the Coalition would “save their utes”.

[Read more here]

Note that these data do not include simple hybrids (HEVs), which are making up an increasing portion of sales:

Customer deliveries of Toyota’s hybrid electric vehicles in 2019 are on forecast to be well in excess of 20,000 vehicles, doubling the total of 11,590 hybrid vehicles sold in 2018.

Hybrid deliveries this year are expected to exceed 10 per cent of Toyota’s overall sales, up from 5.3 per cent last year and 3.9 per cent in 2017.

In the first fourth months of this year, sales of Toyota’s hybrid vehicles have risen by 85 per cent compared with the same period a year ago.

The 2019 tally of 5,613 hybrid cars represents almost 8.7 per cent of the brand’s total sales and compares with 3,029 hybrid cars or 4.4 per cent of sales at the same time last year. In April 2019, Toyota sold 1,458 hybrid vehicles or 9.6 per cent of its total sales for the month.

Hybrids account for almost half of all Camry sales this year (45.4 per cent), up from 39.6 per cent last year and 20.7 per cent in 2017.

A similar trend has emerged for Corolla, with hybrid variants now comprising 31.4 per cent of 2019 sales compared with 12.5 per cent last year and 5.8 per cent in 2017.

[Read more here]

There are no easily accessible data for EV sales in OZ, but this (old) chart from RenewEconomy shows how sales have progressed since the introduction of the Nissan Leaf in 2011.  Again, these data exclude hybrids.  Sales of 6700 (but including plug-in hybrids) in 2019 is a big jump on the 1400 in 2016.   Sales of cars with an electric engine (EVs, PHEVs, HEVs) are likely to double every year from now on.

The pattern, duplicated across many countries, is clear.  Petrol/diesel sales are slumping, prolly because consumers are waiting to buy an EV/PHEV/HEV, while sales of cars with some sort of electric engine are exploding.  And many consumers are settling for HEVs because EVs are still too costly but with a hybrid, they can still cut their greenhouse gas emissions as well as their petrol bills. 

A burning nation led by cowards

From Hugh Rimington of 10Daily:

Among those determined to do nothing about climate change, the arguments have shifted over time. We know them all too well. But here’s a reminder.

1. It’s a hoax.

1. It’s corruption. Climate scientists are scammers getting rich on grants.

1. It’s a mental illness. People reflecting the science are “alarmists”, “warmists” and “catastrophists” recklessly damaging the mental health of children.

1. It’s something we can’t talk about -- especially when the weather and bushfires are behaving precisely as the science predicted they would behave.

The trouble is, across the country people who have believed this stuff are having to swap their tinfoil hats for fire helmets. The predictions of the scientists are playing out exactly to the script. Reality is biting.

Now the coal lobby and its many paid-up mates have a new argument:

“Not even if Australia completely de-industrialised could we make the slightest difference.”

And broadly speaking, that’s true. Our emissions, at less than two percent of global totals, will not be decisive in the fight. Therefore, it follows, we can change nothing. So let’s sprout new coal mines all over Queensland, and leave the issue to someone else.

And how gutless would that be?

In a nation that rightly reveres its ANZAC ideals, here’s a reminder: Australia has never beaten any deadly threat on our own.

We didn’t defeat Nazi Germany on our own.

But we did join the fight.

We didn’t defeat Japanese imperialism on our own.

But -- by heaven -- we were in the fight.

We did what we should be doing now. Seeking allies wherever we can find them, goading them into action, showing our willingness for the fight, and getting stuck in.

The sacrifices being asked of us in combating a warming planet are nothing compared with the sacrifices our men and women gave in two World Wars.

This is not a green issue. It should be a galvanising call for Australian patriots everywhere -- one that binds farmers with those in country towns, and all those in the teeming suburbs of our cities.

But from Canberra: nothing.

Where are the Curtins and the Menzieses? Where’s the national bloody leadership?

We are a burning nation led by cowards. It’s time we all got a lot more angry about it. And then looked each other in the eye, shook hands, and got on with it.

Source: 10Daily

Oz—too small to matter?

Our cockwomble of a PM, Scott Morrison, denies a link between climate change and our unprecedented bushfires (it's just arsonists), denies that climate change is even happening (it's all natural),  but if it is, we (Oz) only emit 1.3% of global CO2 (so we're helpless to stop climate change), and anyway, switching to renewables will devastate the economy (rubbish).  This farrago of half-truths, lies and obfuscations is accepted and magnified by the Murdoch press and media channels, and isn't properly questioned and refuted by other "centrist" media.  Only The Guardian and the ABC have been any different.

Here are some excerpts from a piece by Simon Holmes à Court in The Guardian, and it addresses the claim that Oz is too small to matter when it comes to climate change.

Australia’s unforgiving, unrelenting and unprecedented fires have demonstrated so clearly that the climate doesn’t recognise tricky “Kyoto carryover” accounting and doesn’t care for juvenile finger pointing at other countries.

With a warming climate, this brutal summer is a preview of what will become a regular occurrence in our lifetimes. More and more Australians realise that climate change is a clear and present threat.

Our only chance to maintain our standard of living, and our economy, is if all countries rapidly decarbonise. Many are committed to this, Australia is not. We cannot expect global progress if we ourselves aren’t prepared to at least pull our weight, let alone show any leadership.

Yet, we have a prime minister who looks into the camera and speaks to a people in survival mode and deep trauma and waves away our responsibility. He claims that we are responsible for just 1.3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, as if we are irrelevant.

Australia is the 14th largest emitter out of 208 countries. If all countries with emissions under a “measly” 2% were lumped together we’d together be responsible for almost as much annual emissions as China and India put together.

Australia has never been irrelevant and we certainly aren’t now.

Australia has the highest emissions per capita of all major nations. The average Australian has four times the carbon footprint of the average global citizen, significantly due to our unusually high reliance on coal for electricity, the poor energy efficiency of our vehicles and buildings and the high domestic emissions from coal and gas extraction and processing.

China and India haven’t yet peaked their emissions – unsurprising given their stage of development – but both are decoupling emissions from development such that their average citizen will never have the carbon footprint the average Australian has now.

The “too small to matter” argument is logically absurd, but it is also morally bankrupt and economically reckless.

We all know that throwing one piece of litter out the window wouldn’t ruin the environment, but if all did we’d soon be surrounded by rubbish.

How about voting? It is a foundation of our democracy that nobody’s voice is so small as to be meaningless.

Likewise, if any one taxpayer stopped paying tax we all know it wouldn’t make a measurable difference to the government’s bottom line, but if everyone stopped paying tax it would smash consolidated revenue.

So when did we become a nation of shirkers? We’ve always punched above our weight. A young Australia was immensely proud of the troops committed to the first world war, even though the Diggers comprised less than 1% of the Allied Powers. We are only 0.3% of the global population but are gutted whenever we’re not near the top of the Olympic medal tally.

The UN Environment Program recently announced that global emissions need to reduce by 7.6% every year for a decade to keep warming below 1.5C. With no emissions reductions projected, it’s no wonder that Australia’s climate policies were recently ranked dead last among 57 nations.

Meanwhile, other countries are embracing the challenge.

In November I visited a cement factory in Belgium that is trialling a low-cost technology – originally developed in Australia – for decarbonising cement manufacture. Globally, the cement sector is responsible for around 8% of emissions, as growing developing countries urbanise.

In Essen, in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, I saw a technology that allows power-hungry aluminium smelters to operate well (and increase profits) in renewable-dominated grids. The technology was first developed in Gladstone and partly Australian-owned before being sold offshore.
 In nearby Duisburg, I visited ThyssenKrupp, a major German industrial company with a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The company has embarked on an ambitious plan to decarbonise steel production, also responsible for around 8% of global emissions, with the ultimate goal of replacing coal with hydrogen. ThyssenKrupp is also developing technology to combine “waste” gases with “green” hydrogen – hydrogen produced with renewable energy – to synthesise chemicals such as methanol and ammonia, providing a pathway to lowering emissions from aviation and agriculture.

As these economies wean themselves off coal the demand for hydrogen will skyrocket. With the potential to harness vast quantities of low-cost renewable energy, Australia is well placed to become an energy superpower in a decarbonised global economy.

None of the major industrial companies I visited in Europe sees decarbonisation through a sacrifice lens. There’s no talk of “economy wrecking targets”. Rather, having accepted that the economy must be decarbonised, they are rushing to seize a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, Australia is a world away, in every sense. A rich, talented, capable nation is being held back by a lack of honesty and a lack of imagination – a nation held back by the vested interests of those who profit from the extraction and sale of gas and coal.

Our prime minister is paralysed, unable to acknowledge that fossil fuel emissions are changing the climate, and that the changing climate is hurting Australians.

To which I would add: if Australia, one of the richest countries on Earth, with one of the highest per capita emissions, refuses to do anything about its emissions, how will we be able to ask China, a much poorer country, with much lower per capita emissions to cut hers?  But it is essential that China cut her emissions if we are to avoid 3 degrees C rise by 2100.  1 degree has been bad enough, and as emissions continue to rise, things will only get worse.

Areas burnt in Australia

2018 California fires burnt 2 million acres; the 2019 Amazon fires 2.2 million; and the 2019 Siberian fires 6.7 million.  In 2018 Sweden, in the Arctic Circle, lost 1.6m acres. In the Arctic Circle!
 

So far Australia's 2019/20 fires have burnt 12 million acres.

Catastrophic bushfires the size of Belgium.  Record heat and drought.  Smoke so bad the sky is dark red--in NZ. 

And still the government denies and lies. 

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE US TAKE CLIMATE ACTION?

Source: The Guardian

Australia's fire hell

New Year's day, 2020.
Diamond Beach NSW
Photo by Martin von Stoll

And still our utterly useless and cretinous PM denies that these unprecedented fires have anything to do with climate change and global heating.

Unprecedented natural disasters

Laura Tingle is a journalist with the ABC, Oz's independent public broadcaster. Scott Morrison (alias Scroto) is Oz's PM, and leads the completely misnamed "Liberal" Party.  He is a vicious climate denialist.  Since switching to renewables would reduce electricity prices, the real objection to doing something about climate change by the Right isn't just because they're in the pay of coal and oil, but also because the Left is in favour—their knee-jerk response is to oppose.   Shameful.

The quiet Australians

By Ozzie cartoonist Cathy Wilcox