Revealed: the Deep Green State

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 24 March 2020

A story in the Guardian demonstrates the impotence of government against the Deep State machinery that it nominally controls. 

This involved an attempt, in line with government policy, to divert money from the Emissions Reduction Fund to less harmful activities than efficiency-undermining promotion of green energy that it normally funds. The case under review was an attempt by Delta Energy to get some $14 million support for refurbishing its Vales Point plant, an outcome that would extend the plant’s life (and incidentally reduce its greenhouse gas emissions). The Guardian notes that “energy baron” Trevor St Baker is a part owner of the plant. 

The Emissions Reduction Fund was set up by the Abbott Government following its election in 2013. Its Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, was an avid promoter of “direct action” which involves buying out firms’ greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing emissions by taxing coal. In fact, buying out emissions simply funds canny firms who can offer a good story, while providing negligible effects on total emissions, since the cashiered production ..... Read more     pdf version

Energy in Danandrewstan: 2 Steps Forward, 1 Back

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 18 March 2020

The latest energy policy from the Victorian Government is to place a constitutional ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration but once again permit the search for conventional gas in the state.   

The proposed policy was developed in consultation with an industry/activist Independent Stakeholder Advisory Panel. The panel was chaired by the Lead Scientist, Amanda Caples, a pharmacologist, who was previously responsible for developing the state’s “strategic industry growth plans”. In announcing the policy, the Premier said it was “a science-based approach”. Presumably, he had in mind political science. 

The exploration bans were first implemented in 2012 by the Coalition government under the then minister for energy — and now opposition leader — Michael O’Brien. For the Coalition back in 2012 seeking to blunt opposition from green radicals, a ban on new gas supplies seemed like good cynical policy. 

There were ample supplies of Bass Strait gas and some farmers opposed gas exploration, with others wanting more  ..... Read more          pdf version

Last thing we need: costly climate ‘virtue signalling’

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 10 March 2020

Desperate to attend the September 2020 Glasgow climate change summit with a positive program, the Coalition government continues to promote, at the expense of national living standards, elitist-appealing measures that force lower greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new elixir is to boost investment in CO2-free hydrogen technologies which, if not mystical, hardly require funding from Australian taxpayers.  New support measures add to the $1.5 billion annual funding of a bewildering acronymic gaggle of institutions (including CEFC, ARENA, CER and CSIRO) and at least $2 billion in subsidies to wind and solar.   

The Glasgow meeting is the third phase of climate change programs.   

The first phase was established by the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, in which rich nations pledged to stabilise their emissions.  Although only ..... Read more

The sickly state of the National Electricity Market

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 26 February 2020

This year’s annual report from the regulatory collective that is the Energy Security Board awards itself gongs for overseeing a (temporary) spot price decline and assembling an armoury if new tools to prevent catastrophe from a system poisoned by renewable energy subsidies. Unfortunately, it declines to illuminate the additional costs this has entailed, preferring instead to give cover to the politics behind the demise of the industry’s efficiency.   ​

The report is a consensus by the peak energy body itself and its three sister regulators, the Australian Energy Market Commission, which has custody over the market rules; the Australian Energy Regulator responsible for setting network prices; and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), responsible for scheduling supplies and ensuring supply/demand balance. It addresses the “challenge” to:  ….. READ MORE

Environmental politics threaten traditional allegiances, world trade

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 10 February 2020

Some 172 years ago Karl Marx opened the modern era of politics in proclaiming that a spectre was haunting Europe. The spectre he referred to was in the title of his “Communist Manifesto”. ​

Marx was talking in the context of the series of political disturbances in major European capital cities in 1848.  He interpreted these as bookending the ancien regime, the evolution from which had been brutally signalled in 1789 with the French Revolution and perhaps even back in 1649 when Charles I paid the price for his “high crimes and misdemeanours”. Marx saw the events of 1848 as presaging revolution and a new era of peace and prosperity where private property would be abolished and income would be earned “by each according to his abilities” and apportioned “to each according to his needs”.    …. READ MORE 

Governments created this Murray-Darling crisis

The Murray-Darling is the only major region where irrigation plays a prominent role. Water availability there has the urgent attention of politicians because locals, unhappy at measures that have deprived farmers of water, have helped displace Nationals representatives in favour of those from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. Drought Minister David Littleproud is to meet farming representatives on Tuesday to discuss a fivefold increase in prices of Murray-Darling water. The minister attributes this to speculator hoarding together with another villain, climate change, which he says “is leading to hotter days, meaning droughts”. Neither of these factors are the cause of the farmers’ discontent. Although the Murray-Darling, like much of Australia, is in serious drought, this is not unusual. Other areas are seeing record rainfall; for Australia as a whole, rainfall has increased during the past century. As for the minister’s attack on speculators, he targets an ever-convenient and populist scapegoat. …..READ MORE

Sacrificed on Victoria’s Green Altar

Victoria is the vanguard of states in major struggles over the control and use of public lands.  These comprise around 35 per cent of the state, the majority of which is in parks and reserves that aim to minimise human impact. Such areas have long been seen as under-managed and infested with exotic flora and fauna. They are increasingly recognised as perilous host to ferocious and destructive fires.

The rest of the public land is state forest, traditionally available for forestry, grazing, mining and a whole range of leisure activities such car rallies, hunting, horse riding, camping and dog walking, none of which are generally permitted in National Parks.

Two developments are changing the nature of Victoria’s public lands. The first is increasing restrictions on the activities allowed in the state forests. Over the past 30 years governments have progressively constrained the use of the forests for timber harvesting and grazing.  Grazing has been all but eliminated and only 6 per cent of Victoria’s public forests are available for timber production, the annual harvesting area having been reduced from 25,000 hectares 40 years ago to just 3,000 hectares today.  …..READ MORE

Good sense sold up the River

Earlier this week some 3,000 irrigators and their supporters rallied in Canberra against government policy on Murray-Darling irrigation and management.  With the  cacophony of dozens of semi-trailers’ blaring horns, it was certainly noisy. Ominously for the National Party, their representatives were treated with considerable hostility, particular anger being directed at water Minister David Littleproud. Enduring the jeers, the Nationals would have been especially dismayed at the warm welcome for Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts.

The current drought has exacerbated a contrived water shortage that government policy has engineered in the Murray. Having set a cap on water extractions in 1999 — roughly a third of the average flow — the productive uses of this “working river” have been gradually reduced.  As a supplier of a vital agricultural input to a formerly barren area that grew to supply 40 per cent of the nation’s farm produce, the river has been de-rated.  At a cost of $13 billion, some 20 per cent of the flow has been diverted to “environmental” use. This has caused a five- to ten-fold increase in the price and forced thousands of farms out of business. ….. READ MORE

Madrid: climate catastrophe juggernaut trundles on

As well as nation-states, an astonishing well-funded 2,330 NGOs, many with multiple delegates, fronted up to this month’s Madrid climate conference. The macabre festival was re-located from Santiago because the Chilean populace had risen in revolt about the higher prices foisted upon them by its government following the green gods just as faithfully as the virtue signalling textbook says they must. The objective of the successive biennial UN climate change Conference of Parties is to replace the messy cacophony of market capitalism by one that operates under the guidance of the intellectual aristocracy. ….. READ MORE

Renewables rent-seekers: uninterested in bushfire prevention, or cheap energy

No amount of mouth-frothing by Piers Morgan or artful deception by the legions of renewable energy warriors published by the Australian Financial Review and the Guardian will change the facts about this summer. The severe fire season is due to dry weather (not itself conceivably a result of climate change – rainfall trends have been flat for the past century) and the accumulation of combustible material on the forests’ floors. READ MORE

We should fear rising fuel costs, not climate claims

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 27 September 2019

With the children’s week-long climate crusade now approaching its end, the United Nations meeting on climate change, accompanied by the normal release of alarmist “findings”, is well underway in New York. The New York meeting has been weaponised by the millions of children incited to take time off from school. President Trump sat through the “we’ll be watching you” rant from the unhappy teenager Greta Thunberg.

The UN Secretary-General is requiring countries like Australia, judged to be too heavily fossil fuel focussed, to listen rather than talk. Bill Gates is struck by the volume and intensity of interest among the public, which he says is “quite a contrast versus five years ago, where it was hardly discussed at all.” Starting as a scientific backwater, climate change has come to dominate the scientific community and politics in general.

Within the former “think tank”, the Tasman Institute, in the early 1990s my colleagues and I wrote a string of books and papers that examined the economics of the issue recognising then the crippling costs that would result from forcing a reduction of emissions. We were joined by scientists, including Arizona State’s Professor of Climatology, Robert Balling and later by Brian Tucker who, having retired as Chief of CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Physics, committed the ultimate apostasy of decrying the climate alarmism in which he had participated in the pursuit of grants.

Robert Balling worked in cooperation with science blogger Warwick Hughes to demonstrate that long-established Australian weather stations remote from an urbanisation effect had recorded no increase in temperatures. In 1992 Balling quipped that we should not knock climate alarmism. He noted it was providing him consultancy work that doubled his professorial salary and the satellite data, first established in 1979, in a dozen years would prove the furore to be a hoax and by then he’d be about ready to retire!

He was right about the data, which has failed to substantiate the warming forecast by climate models, as the graphic below demonstrates — and the only model accurately tracking the data does not incorporate an amplification effect of CO2 from water vapour.

But Professor Balling was sadly wide of the mark in understanding the deceit that scientists, radical leftists and businessmen could muster to extract government funding out of consumers and taxpayers.

Indeed, the lack of corroboration of the forecast global temperature increase has simply spawned other supposed markers of the catastrophian agenda like regional temperatures increases, drought, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise, polar bear demise and so on. Each of these has also proven to be unfounded but a leftist media, academia and political class remains unmoved.

As evidenced by the censorship by Australian university and taxpayer funded The Conversation, the alarmists are entrenched in the education establishment and have become increasingly strident in seeking to suppress the voices and scientific findings of the climate realists.

Business leaders, even when they doubt the alarmists’ forebodings, are obliged to do them homage to avoid both direct activist pressures and those representing fearful investors. A group of 500 investment firms, said to represent $35 trillion in global assets, is calling for additional measures to meet the Paris targets. In Australia, some 87 major companies, representing a combined market capitalisation of $US2.3 trillion, have signed onto a zero emissions pact. Governments’ go-to businessman, Sir Rod Eddington, after years of promoting the renewable subsidies that have destroyed industry competitiveness now says, “I believe in markets.” But he does so only to oppose government intervention to redress the adverse effects his preferred regulatory measures have caused.

Supposedly to settle the matter, Alan Kohler has called for a Royal Commission on climate change. He is not the first to do so – the late Professor Bob Carter also wanted one. But as cynics have said, “you don’t call a Royal Commission unless you’re certain about its findings”.

In line with his views and business interests, Alan Kohler would see a Royal Commission headed by alarmists like David Karoly, Will Steffan and Tim Flannery and ideally with current Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, the author of the hysterical Garnaut Report, heading up the Secretariat. Now that he is seconded to the University of New South Wales, Michael Mann, the creator of the now discredited “hockey stick” climate trend, could also be a candidate.

Bob Carter might have picked former BoM head of research Bill Kininmonth, former Professor of Physics at JCU Peter Ridd, and Professor Ian Plimer, and perhaps the world’s most distinguished climate scientist, Richard Lindzen.

There is no middle ground in this debate and one certain outcome is that a Royal Commission report would be rejected by its authors’ opponents. Positions and interests are entrenched. Even politicians with the determination and confidence of Donald Trump tread warily. Trump appointed the distinguished climate scientist Will Happer as director of the National Security Council with a view to empanelling a climate science review but senior White House officials stonewalled the proposal fearful that it might prejudice the President’s re-election.

As part of the justification for their subsidy claims renewable energy proponents are constantly telling us that the economics of wind/solar will soon mean cheaper electricity. But this is a constantly receding mirage. Last year the leading energy consultancies ACiL and Frontier forecast 2020 electricity prices averaging $52-55 per MWh. The outcome is contracts selling at $91 and $112 for NSW and Victoria respectively. Three years ago, the price was under $40 per MWh.

Eventually, the inferior economics of renewable energy and realisation that the world climate is in its normal permanent change must bring a collapse of the climate crisis malignancy. Countries showing scant regard for emission suppressing policies – China, India and most developing countries as well as the US – will experience much faster growth forcing others to abandon their own ambitions. But Robert Balling’s dozen years is already 25 years and unless the substitution of high-cost renewables brings an (unlikely) collapse of the energy system, Australia’s continued excessive energy prices and economic underperformance will persist for many more years.

2019 Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture

The 2019 Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture will involve a lecture tour by Dr Peter Ridd on the scientific reliability of the claims that human activity is irreparably damaging the Great Barrier Reef. Between 12 and 20 August 2019 Dr Ridd will deliver his lecture in the Queensland sugar towns of Bundaberg, Mackay, Ayr, Ingham, Innisfail and Cairns.

Bookings for any of these Lectures may be made at our Events page.

Dr Peter Ridd

A major issue in science has emerged over the last decade known as the “Replication Crisis”. Around half of the literature published in a wide range of scientific disciplines has been subsequently found to contain serious flaws. This remarkable and worrying statistic is being addressed in a number of ways by various scientific funding bodies, research institutions, and scientific academies around the world. but with limited success to date.

In his Commemorative Lectures, Dr Ridd will point out that the system of peer review — the primary quality assurance mechanism that is used in science — is grossly insufficient. This is particularly so for science that is used to make important and expensive public policy decisions such as those that seek to address the adverse impacts of human activity on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

Dr Ridd will demonstrate that many of the threats to the GBR, are likely to have been greatly exaggerated. They include the impacts of sediments and nutrients from agricultural runoff and the impacts of climate change — whether natural or human in origin.

Dr Ridd will propose that far more rigorous quality assurance processes need to be introduced so that scientific results can be made more reliable. This is all the more important when legislation — which seeks to regulate the human activity that is thought to be associated with negative environmental impacts — is based upon poorly quality controlled scientific results.

The Lecture Tour is in the process of being extended to include Townsville and Melbourne in September. The details will be announced once they have been settled.

The scare is settled? Have climate catastrophists won?

Alan Moran

19 March 2019

Evidence does not seem to matter in the debate on human-induced climate change. Hardly anyone is listening to reason. Minds have been made up.

A substantial majority of people considers human-induced climate change is underway. They do so even though temperatures and ocean levels have not risen beyond their long-term trends, there is no increase in extreme events, no increase in flooding, droughts, or forest fires. And iconic features like the Great Barrier Reef are under no stress.

Countering every solid piece of evidence showing climate stability are unscientific claims that a particular occurrence of flooding, drought, hurricanes, and hot weather is proof of the opposite. Even Barnaby Joyce is on board when he says, “No one is seriously arguing the climate is not changing; I’m driving along the road now and the trees designed for our climate, eucalyptus, are dying. The creeks are dry and have been for years now; droughts are the rule and not the exception and their duration is brutal.”

A majority is equally unconvinced by the palpable evidence of higher electricity prices and a less reliable network due to a replacement of controllable fossil fuel generation by intermittently available renewables that require both expensive back-up and high-cost transmission. The simplistic cry that renewable energy is free and must be cheaper than those ancient coal generators is accepted by professionals outside the industry, and some within it. It is becoming a dominant perspective of bankers, doctors, lawyers as well as teachers.

Brian Fisher’s study of Australian policy options to reduce emissions found the Coalition policy of cutting emissions by 27 per cent involves a tax of $263 per tonne of CO2 and that of Labor, for a 45 per cent reduction, would mean a tax of over $900 per tonne (the abolished 2013 carbon tax was $24 per tonne). Costs of Labor’s policy would be $1.2 trillion (two-thirds of annual GDP). That of the Coalition is a “mere” $80-90 billion. Addressing the Fisher report, Labor’s Mark Butler showed wilful incuriosity in claiming “firmed” renewable contracts are “only” $70 per MWh (itself almost twice the price previously prevailing) when the average market price is around $100.

Against studies showing renewables to be expensive, we see other reports from the government-funded research agencies like CSIRO, the Chief Scientist, as well as from commercial interests, maintaining that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel driven energy. Renewable energy supporters, usually without acknowledging an incongruity, also advocate subsidies via tax breaks or regulations to penalise fossil fuels. Those subsidies are often, like the “National Energy Guarantee” and the Renewable Energy Target, clothed in misleading language with the (intended) result that people do not recognise them as costs. For example, hardly anyone installing rooftop solar panels in Australia understands that half the cost of the energy the panels generate is unwittingly financed by other electricity customers.

The agenda setting is virtually complete within the developed world, where every country has implemented carbon emission restraining measures at some cost to their economies.

Dire warnings on what we are doing to the earth are flung out by America’s best known Congressional representative, Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez. But every Democrat Presidential candidate is signed onto climate change legislation, normally citing this as a means of simultaneously saving the planet and creating vibrant new industries. The measures involved would build upon the Investment Tax Credit, which lowers a solar project’s capital costs by about 30 per cent, and wind projects’ Production Tax Credit, which pays about $22/MWh for energy generated, a subsidy of 50 per cent.

President Trump rejects the emission controls central to the Paris Agreement and has rescinded Obama era requirements making CO2 capture and storage (CCS) mandatory for new coal plants. However, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, extended and expanded the 2008 tax credits for CCS. The credits are $50/tonne ($35 when used to enhance oil recovery) but even with this support, only one plant is in operation.

And where there is push-back, as in Canada, the Conservatives adopt a form of subsidy like that in Australia which involves subsidising selective emission reduction programs.

Trump, however, remains a real hope as his policies show a widening gap between costs and economic performance of the US compared to other developed country economies.

And while most of the developed world will engage in virtue signalling, for the developing world this takes a backseat. Coal is talismanic, it is core to supposed causes of climate change while remaining the cheapest and most reliable source of electricity and the backbone of the future global electricity supply. Nothing Australia, nor indeed a coalition of developed countries, can do will alter this trend. And nothing Australia can do will reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide. As illustrated below, Australia has little more than one per cent of the global operating capacity of coal generators. Approved additions in China alone are four times the total Australian plant.

Source: Coalswarm

Many consider that the ALP/Green policies would soon, if implemented, be recognised as harmful and lead to an early electoral debacle. This may be wishful thinking. After all, Venezuela’s socialists survived five elections by assembling coalitions of the poor and a bloated public service who willingly voted for a party offering them favours at the expense of the affluent and foreigners. They did so even though this impoverished the nation. In the past, the only ALP government with a preconceived radical anti-capitalist agenda was that of Whitlam in 1972. The Hawke/Keating government was in many ways a reformist improvement on the Fraser government it replaced, while Rudd campaigned on paring back the size of government.

For many conservatives, the strategy to prevent a disastrous climate policy-induced downsizing of the Australian economy is to campaign on less drastic “me-too” platforms. Such an approach is akin to that which characterised conservative policies in the post-1945 period when rear-guard actions are fought against a seemingly inevitable but unpalatable shift to socialism. It took outstanding leadership of Reagan and Thatcher to capitalise on observable failures of anti-market policies to stop the rot.

Somehow those tutoring the children demonstrators, the great majority industry leaders, politicians and the public service including, if court decisions are a guide, the judiciary are on board with the notion that global warming is taking place as a result of carbon dioxide emissions. This misconception is compounded by another – that counteracting it by banning coal generation, perhaps all mining, in Australia is both feasible and low cost. The only outcome of such policies is an acceleration of the damage those in place have already done to the economy.

Alan Moran’s latest book is CLIMATE CHANGE: Treaties and policies in the Trump era.

The Myths of the Murray Alan Moran

The Spectator 17 February 2019

Over the past century, the Murray Darling river’s naturally highly irregular flows have been transformed to convert it into the tranquil, ever-flowing waterway that has allowed the Basin it serves to become the source of 41 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output.

Green activists have, however, demonised irrigated farming by promoting myths about the river being under environmental stress. Such claims have been further amplified by fictitious and disproven claims that the precipitation into the catchment area will be much reduced due to supposed global warming.

As a result, one quarter of the water previously used for agricultural activities dependent on irrigation has been reallocated to environmental targets, including transforming the mouth of the Murray from its natural salt-infused state into freshwater lakes. Mismanagement of these environmental flows was critical in causing an unprecedented fish kill in 2019.

The cost of the Basin Plan in derating the region’s agricultural potential has been tragic, for the region. In aggregate terms this is likely to be in excess of $3 billion per annum at a time when agricultural export opportunities are promising. The measures adopted in the Basin plan were reactions to ill-founded and refuted concerns about human damage to the environment. The Commonwealth should cease incurring costs in preventing water use for irrigation and should re-sell the water it has banked to those willing to pay for it.

The Murray Darling Basin’s Development

In the period 1922-1939 the Murray saw the Hume Dam and other facilities transform it into a river no longer swelling and drying in response to annual precipitation. Having been developed over the twentieth century into a tranquil working river, largely responsible for allowing its basin to become home for 41 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output, the waters of the Murray Darling are now being re-allocated to non-productive uses.

In 1995, around 11,000 of the system’s 32,000 gigalitres were allocated to farmers (about 2,500 gigalitres is for drinking water) when state governments agreed to issue no more irrigation licences.

Green activists then orchestrated hysterical claims focussing on the state of the river. “Our continent is falling apart”, said the catastropharian Tim Flannery-led “Wentworth Group of concerned scientists”. Other claims included, “salt is destroying the rivers and land like a cancer”, and that animals and plants were facing extinction.

None of this was true – land salinity, for example, affects only 0.4 per cent of Australia, almost all of it due to natural salt outcrops. And, a century of Murray-Darling dam building and the accompanying management had replaced the irregular, salt infused waterway that the explorer like Charles Sturt found in the eighties, with today’s continuously flowing river.

In addition to being driven by green fictions, the Murray-Darling water policy also seeks to ensure freshwater in the lakes at the Murray mouth. Paradoxically, that water allocation actually modifies nature by feeding lakes that would be naturally brackish water.

Green activists and their supporters in academia and the bureaucracies have continuously raised the ante on the amount of water sought to be taken from farmers to remedy concocted environmental ills. In 2002 they sought 1,500 gigalitres of irrigators’ water (14 per cent of the total) and the Howard Government settled for 450 gigalitres.

But the new radicalism of anti-modern farming was fermenting a more potent brew. In this it was assisted by the millennial drought – wrongly forecast as a turning point for water availability due to presumed links between precipitation and massively reinforced passions about calamitous climate change.

The post 1980 notion of anthropogenic induced climate change and its adverse consequences to mankind was embraced by politicised scientists from the outset. Their work has continued to provide fuel for regulatory action. Thus, in January 2008 the nine authors of an influential CSIRO report, An Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on the Nature and Frequency of Exceptional Climatic Events, fallaciously declared:

Over the past 40 years (1968-2007), exceptionally hot years are typically occurring over 10-12% of the area in each region, i.e. about twice the expected long-term average of 5%. By 2010-2040, the mean area is likely to increase to 60-80%, with a low scenario of 40-60% and a high scenario of 80-95%. On average, exceptionally high temperatures are likely to occur every one to two years.

Even prior to then, in 2005 alarmist Tim Flannery, boosting the case for the Sydney Desalinisation plant, had said:

If the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia.

And in April 2007 as Australian of the Year, he said:

What we now know is happening around the world is that rainfall may be declining in some areas – in the order of 10 to 15 to 20 per cent over a 50 year period. We’ve seen that in south-east Australia.

Ross Garnaut, another of the climate alarmists to whom the government turned, opined in his review issued 30 September 2008 (Chapter 15.3):

Declining runoff in southern Australia is a significant threat to the continuation of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin. … Existing strategies for managing water supplies were developed in the second half of the 20th century, during a period of higher rainfall, and are not suited to a progressively drying climate.

Rather less soberly, Professor Garnaut, described as the government’s top climate change adviser, warned that if climate change was not tackled it would destroy the Great Barrier Reef, end agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin and wipe out the country’s snowfields.

The passage of time has demonstrated all these jeremiads to be utterly incorrect.

Regulatory measures and agriculture in the Basin

The litany of alarmist statements were meat and drink to the mixture of underperformers who typically hold the agriculture portfolios and even more so for those on the cataclysmic bandwagon like Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Burke. They provided a catalyst for regulatory intrusion and Shadow Water Minister Tony Burke says the cap which prevents Government from buying more water from the nation’s food producers would be removed under a Labor Government.

The AEF has been highly critical of the measures taken with regard to the Basin. In our December 2015 submission to Senate Select Committee on the plan we said

The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) supports the submission to the Committee by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy, who was a founding director of AEF. Accompanying, and forming part of, this submission is a report prepared for AEF by Dr. Marohasy in 2012 Plugging the Murray River’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary, which demonstrates that The Australian Government’s $10 billion plan to “save” the Murray-Darling by reconfiguring upstream irrigation so that more water is sent to the Lower Lakes, Murray’s mouth and Coorong, is based on a false premise; a misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of the Murray River’s estuary and the coastal processes that continue to shape it.

This reconfiguration amounts to a substantial reduction of water available to farmers and communities upstream and important upstream wetlands and other natural upstream environments through the Murray/Darling basin in effect to preserve an artificial fresh water environment in the Lower Lakes created by the barrages or dykes constructed during the 1930s, which dammed the Murray River’s estuary stopping the sea tides and making Lake Alexandrina wholly dependent on Murray River flows.

The AEF went on to point out that it is essential to get right the balance between conservation and productive use of water through the Murray/Darling basin. To do that we argued first, for an examination of the costs of withholding from productive use of some 3000 gigalitres of water – over one quarter of that previously used for irrigation – mostly to maintain an artificial fresh water environment in the Lower Lakes; and secondly, to ensure that these costs are outweighed by the conservation benefits. Instead, the Basin Plan gives an absolute priority to the meeting of environmental flows with no cost/benefit estimates.

The Plan’s goal is one that oxymoronically “droughtproofs the environment”. The dams and other interceptions have converted a natural environment of drought and flood into a stable system that moderates these extremes, with benefits to irrigators and other users of the river.   At huge public expense in pursuit of goals that ostensibly seek to bring about a return to an idealised mythical natural environment, the regulatory management now being put in place is undoing this.

A review of the Basin Plan by a SA Royal Commission headed by Bret Walker supported this pre-eminence of environmental goals. Mr Walker was critical of the Basin Authority for taking some economic and social factors into account in determining the volume of water for irrigation as well as the seemingly sacrosanct environmental needs that are alone permitted to be considered under the Water Act. In this respect the Commissioner resembled a Flannery clone basing his criticism on the authority’s failure to consider “catastrophic” climate change, and to act on the best available scientific knowledge when determining how much water should be recovered for the environment across the basin,

Mismanagement of the system is a key feature. Well over 200 gigalitres of water has flooded the Barmah-Millewa forest since Spring 2018, which has been attributed to operational losses. This has meant farmers have stayed on zero allocation. If the 200 gigalitres were used to produce rice, that would mean 200 000 tonnes and $100 million of real income being produced.

Similarly, there was a massive, probably unprecedented fish kill in 2019 due to the draining of the Menindee Lakes in 2016 and 2017 to save on evaporation; that excessive release meant the low inflows in 2018 could not be supplemented, bringing about a later diminution of the water’s oxygen levels in the Darling. It is a bitter irony that the management of flows under the Basin Plan targeted at environmental improvements have had the opposite effect.

Mismanagement aside, it remains the AEF view that a careful specification of the environmental goals of any expenditures should be made and set against the costs involved. This view has been reinforced by our examination of the findings of the Productivity Commission (PC), in its recent review of the Basin Plan. The PC summarised the program as:

The Australian Government earmarked $13 billion to implement the Plan, including:

•  $3.1 billion to purchase water entitlements for the environment. $2.7 billion of this has been spent to recover 1227 gigalitres (GL).

•  $4.8 billion for investment in modernised water infrastructure, with $3.9 billion spent. Of this, $2.8 billion has been invested in projects that delivered 677 GL of water savings to the environment.

•  $1.3 billion for supply measures, of which $34 million has been spent on developing projects.

•  $1.8 billion to recover an additional 450 GL to pursue enhanced environmental outcomes, of which $14 million has been spent.

•  $2.0 billion for other programs and activities, with $1.9 billion spent. Almost $8.5 billion has been spent, and $4.5 billion is still to be spent by 2024.

The PC concluded:

Significant progress has been made. About 20 percent of the water that was available for consumptive users a decade ago is now dedicated to the environment.

About $6.7 billion has been spent to recover about 2000 gigalitres (GL). Water recovery is within five per cent of the July 2019 target.

The arrangements for managing environmental water are working well, with evidence of improved ecological outcomes at the local and system scale.

As a result of the reduced supply the price of “permanent” water allocations has risen fivefold. These prices become costs that are factored into the overall cost of produce.

The PC was critical about the machinery of the Plan’s management, lack of political oversight and absence of transparency. Yet, aside from identifying the fact that the compensation farmers got for selling water was usually adequate for them, the PC report offers little evidence of the plan bringing improvements on the system’s environment, still less does it evaluate any such improvements against the $6.7 billion already spent. Nor does the PC review offer means of measuring the impacts and outcomes that are associated with the Plan.

These omissions are most unfortunate given the profound uncertainties that exist in our scientific knowledge of the complex ecology and hydrology of the Basin, not to mention the economic and social consequences associated with changing water use there. In the debate over the Plan these uncertainties have received little or no acknowledgement, let alone attention, even from scientists and other specialists in these matters.

This is remarkable. Public funds have been used to buy and quarantine from commercial use over 10 per cent of the water in the nation’s most productive agricultural region. Yet, we have no metrics that define the outcome desired and no measurements that allow such an outcome to be tracked. This should not come as a surprise since many within the environmental pressure groups have radical goals that involve the displacement of irrigated agriculture and the human communities that depend upon it. Any restraints on the use of non-environmental water are merely stages towards that goal.

The way forward

Reform must follow the suggestions of Australian Environment Foundation in its December 2015 submission to the select committee on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which noted:

• A key rationalisation for the diversion of water in the Murray-Darling Basin from irrigation to environmental uses was the notion that the activity was leading to salinity with costs to both commercial agriculture and to environmental values. These concerns were misplaced – salinity has proven to be easily controlled and the water is less saline today than it was 35 years ago.

• The more contemporary scare centred on supposed global warming leading to climate change that would reduce the water available. Rainfall data has proven this to be unfounded – there has been no reduction in precipitation across the basin.

• The cost of the Basin Plan in de-rating the region’s agricultural potential has been enormous, especially to the once prosperous communities living within the region. In aggregate terms this is likely to be in excess of $3 billion per annum with a serious impact on the ability of Australia to take advantage of the export opportunities stemming from the rapidly developing nations to our north.

• The measures adopted in the Basin plan were reactions to ill-founded and disproven concerns about human damage to the environment. The Commonwealth should cease incurring costs in preventing water use for irrigation and should start re-selling the water it has banked to those willing to pay for it.

Energy policy: the $72 billion fair dinkum disaster

Alan Moran, The Spectator Australia, 26 February 2019

Energy and climate change policy in Australia and other western democracies is now, along with immigration and its associated fear of imported third world violence, the cutting edge of the political divide.

But in Australia, the Liberal Party’s policy over the past 20 years has converged with that of the Labor Party and latterly the Greens to favour increased subsidies to electricity generated from wind and solar.  This has knocked out lower cost, more reliable coal generators and doubled wholesale prices, with costs further enhanced by a consequent need for more spending to offset wind’s unreliability and on poles and wires.

The Liberals (supported by Labor) have responded to these regulatory induced cost increases by requiring retailers to reduce prices, a measure that is certain further to deter efficient investment, bringing still higher costs.

To establish credentials among virtue signalling global warming alarmists and renewable energy subsidy-seekers, Scott Morrison has also announced a new version of the Labor-lite policy approach. The new policy entails an additional $2 billion – albeit over 10 years – of “Direct Action” expenditure on renewables, lowering farming output, subsidies to pumped storage and other misanthropic policies. It comes on top of existing subsidies to wind and solar.

The deleterious effects of these policies on efficient supply are further enhanced by state government restraints (bans in the case of Victoria) on the search for additional gas supplies.

The malaise of increased electricity prices compounded by less certain reliability reflects seductive agitprop describing renewables as being freely donated by the sun and wind.  Free they are, but harnessing them and delivering the diffuse power they provide is very expensive.

According to the exhaustive evaluation by Solstice, while a new coal plant could deliver electricity at a cost as low as $40 per MWh, the best wind could achieve is $64 per MWh with solar at $90 per MWh and both wind and solar also require firming contracts in view of their unreliability. These lift the cost of wind by over $30 per MWh.

Forcing substitution of existing low-cost coal energy by high-cost wind/solar energy panders to those who have swallowed, contrary to the evidence, the myth that human development involving fossil fuel use is bringing dangerous global warming.

The vocal support of climate alarmists is bolstered by that of others who claim that getting out of coal/gas/oil will not be expensive since wind/solar is cheaper.  Nobody making that claim has sufficient confidence in it to adopt its corollary: the elimination of subsidies supporting these forms of energy.

Economic modelling analysis of the effects of renewable regulations has offered diverse forecasts.  Such analyses are dependent on their assumptions about future costs of different energy forms, the ability of economies to adjust rapidly and the costs of such adjustment. What is certain is that three-quarters of our exports are from mining; without fossil fuels – the goal of the green left – these would disappear leaving Australia’s living standards closer to those of the third world than first world countries.

Less implausible than most such studies is a recent one by Brian Fisher.  This finds the effect on energy prices from the ALP’s goal of 45 per cent emission reduction target would reduce GDP $144 billion a year by 2030.  He also estimates that what the present government considers to be sound administration, its 26-28 per cent emission reduction target, would still mean GDP $19 billion lower in 2030.

Over the past decade, renewable energy “investments” in Australia have soaked up some $72 billion in capital. None of this would have taken place without subsidies.  By forcing the closure of lower cost coal generators, that expenditure has had a negative value-added.  It has more than cannibalised available capital and in doing so has contributed to the very low levels of productivity growth Australia (like other, similarly placed countries) has experienced.

Businesses, including those owned by governments, with existing coal and hydro generation assets, have seen a massive profit bonanza from the doubling of prices that has been the outcome of the subsidies to renewable energy.  This is most tellingly illustrated by the NSW coal generator, Vales Point, sold in 2015 for $1 million and now worth in excess of $700 million. The big three with coal assets (AGL, Origin and EnergyAustralia) have made corresponding gains, as have the coal generators owned by the Queensland government and the major hydro assets in Tasmania and the Snowy.

Such windfall gains are by-products of regulatory measures rather than from meeting new or expanded customer needs.

The way forward has to include the removal of all subsidies to wind and solar but, given the proclivities of governments to intervene in the energy market, such measures may now be insufficient.  Loss of investor confidence in the stability of energy policy may now require additional assurances, perhaps in the form of contractual guarantees.  Such an approach is envisaged in the government’s Underwriting New Generation Investments (UNGI) but that program is at pains to provide scope for renewables to also gain further subsidies.

If the UNGI does represent half a step to redressing the subsidy to renewable energy, it is accompanied by multitudes of steps backwards.  Not the least of these is the cavalcade of regulatory barriers placed one after another before the prospective Adani coal mine in Queensland. This is a message to all investors that politics is raising the cost of doing business in Australia.  Then there is the dictum in the Rocky Hill case by the head of the NSW Environment Court which would seem to ban all future coal mining, or at the very least exorbitantly raise its costs by requiring expenditure on offsetting emission reductions.

In addition, we are seeing investor associations, reported by the Australian Financial Review, especially by funds with extensive exposure to renewable investments, placing pressure on coal industry mining firms to desist or slow down coal investments.

Almost all the portents for the immediate future of the Australian energy system (and hence for the Australian economy) are negative.  Aside from the minor conservative parties and a handful of Coalition politicians, the politics is driven by focus group analyses which report people being in favour of ‘free stuff’.

There is little stomach for leadership by politicians who either support the prevailing ideology or, valuing their careers above the public good, prefer not to explain that the free stuff is both paid for and undermines the low-cost electricity from which Australia should be benefitting.

Sub-optimal economic performance is therefore set to continue.

Longer term relief for Australia may have to await the results of the outcome in strong economic performance stemming from the leadership that President Trump is demonstrating in abandoning costly measures that require suppression of carbon dioxide emissions. Trump has shown commendable scepticism about climatic catastrophism.  Moreover, he has recognised that actions by the US – indeed the entire western world – can have no climatic effect in view of the explosive growth of India, China and other developing nations, growth that is powered by fossil fuels, the resulting emissions of which now dwarf those of the rest of the world.

Trump’s leadership is already paying dividends with US growth outpacing that of other developed countries.  Energy-intensive industries, including those of the Pratt Group, are responding by shifting the balance of new venture spending towards the US.

But it may be some time before Australia awakens to the self-inflicted injurious policies that have transformed the nation’s energy supply from the world’s cheapest to among the world’s most expensive.

Labor’s energy deal: Shorten facts, but you’ll pay more

Sucked in by spurious claims of the loss of 99 per cent of all coral reefs, mounting natural disasters, a permanent drought in the Murray Darling, and illusions that fossil fuels are archaic, Labor is preparing to announce its energy policy.

Earlier this week, in a dummy run, Energy spokesman Mark Butler claimed, in the context of apparent public support for renewables, that we can up the government’s 23 per cent renewable energy share, which includes about eight per cent of (currently unsubsidised) hydro, to 50 per cent and also see electricity prices fall.

Bill Shorten is to formally launch the ALP “have our cake and eat it” policy on Thursday. This comes at a time when wholesale electricity prices for 2019 are around $95 per MWh, more than double prices just three years ago.

In claiming that its more intensive subsidy policies will lower overall electricity prices, the ALP platform is supported by the same confident predictions that have favoured existing renewable energy subsidies. Such predictions rest on modelling exercises by the main energy modellers, Jacobs, Deloittes, Frontier, Repu Tex, and ACiL. These presume that wind and solar generators, with a subsidy presently standing at $80 per MWh. Read more

Renewable subsidies destroy low-cost electricity

In meeting targets agreed at the 2002 Kyoto Convention, the precursor to the Paris Agreement, Australia, by preventing land clearance, reduced emissions by 100 million tonnes a year of CO2 equivalent.  Comprising almost 20 per cent of total emissions, this reduction allowed Australia to claim that there had been a negligible increase over the period 1990-2012, and Australian politicians were able to bask in diplomatic plaudits at farmers’ expense.

Australia also took measures to suppress greenhouse gas emissions from energy which, in its various forms, accounts for about 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions but as electricity brings only around 25 per cent. 

Electricity however is the focus of attention on emission reductions. Read here

Socialism will impoverish you, but won’t solve climate change

Writing in the Guardian, Geoff Sparrow is not the first person to call for a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the only means of markedly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In a curious conflation of this with surveys that appear to show an attraction to socialism in the part of young people, he argues modern capitalism means ruination of the planet as well as Marxian impoverishment of the worker and “the steady destruction of social welfare, a preposterously unaffordable housing sector, an increasingly sinister security state and a political culture dominated by race-baiting charlatans”.

Big call!

It is true that many people in each new generation need to be freshly disillusioned by the observed deficiencies of socialism wherever it is practiced. Seventy years after Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto we saw its principles being put into place in the Soviet Union followed, 30 years later, in Eastern Europe and China. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the self-destruction of socialism by the Chinese Communist Party testified to its failure as an economic system on top of its abysmal record regarding civil liberties. Once the Communist countries returned to capitalism with private ownership their economies started to prosper – spectacularly so in the case of China.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the self-destruction of socialism by the Chinese Communist Party testified to its failure as an economic system on top of its abysmal record regarding civil liberties. Once the Communist countries returned to capitalism with private ownership their economies started to prosper – spectacularly so in the case of China. .... Read more

2017 Review of Climate Change Policies

Pursuit of policies designed to supress emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” is severely harming the Australian economy with no compensatory environmental benefits. We address this in the context of energy, land clearing and forestry.

In the case of energy, measures taken to suppress carbon dioxide emissions have been centred on regulations to promote renewable electricity supply (especially wind and solar). These have, over the past 15 years, transformed Australia from having one of the world’s cheapest electricity supplies to one of the most expensive. This takes a direct toll on household bills. But far more damaging is its indirect costs in undermining what once comprised the key national comparative advantage of cheap energy inputs. Policies forcing higher energy costs destroyed cost advantages across manufacturing, mining and agriculture to the great detriment of living standards.

Land clearing restrictions were devised to meet the 1997 Kyoto Protocol under which Australia agreed to limit its emissions of greenhouse gas to an eight per cent increase by 2012. Those restrictions reduced Australian emissions by 110 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, without which Australian emissions in 2012 would have seen a 21 per cent increase.

To bring about these land clearance reductions, the Commonwealth in cooperation with the Governments in NSW and Queensland adopted planning regimes that prevented land being cleared for agricultural purposes. Not only did this deprive the nation of valuable resources for agricultural expansion but the land was taken from its owners without any compensation. One estimate is that the costs in terms of devalued land worth were $200 billion. Though relaxed in recent years, such measures remain in place and an ALP Commonwealth Government has said it would fully re- implement them.

In the case of forestry, what commenced as a policy to ensure a balance of timber-getting and environmental conservation has resulted in a virtual cessation of commercial native forestry in Australia. This has throttled a valued domestic industry. Its effect has been augmented by stringent regulations on timber imports, under green pressure, to combat the import of timber supposedly to assist in preventing illegal logging overseas.

The rationale for all these policies rested on supposed global detrimental effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Irrespective of the merits of the science behind that rationale, its implementation possibilities were never more than flimsy.

Global measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were ostensibly enhanced as a result of the Paris Agreement of 2015, but this had severe shortcomings. Chief among these was that, although developed nations agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by over 26 per cent, there were no disciplines on developing countries to take similar action except far into the future. Developing nations comprise a growing 60 per cent of global emissions. With the election of President Trump, the US will cease its own abatement program. This renders the Paris Agreement worthless and means Australian policies are a form of pointless self-harm.

The measures addressed in this submission are only some of those Australia has introduced to pursue a meaningless and impossible goal of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. The measures should be rescinded at the earliest opportunity. see here

Australia's faunal extinction crisis

Australia's faunal extinction crisis:

AEF Submission to Senate Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry into Faunal Extinction

Recommendations

1. Recognise that there is no species eradication crisis in Australia;

2. Protect existing property rights to the maximum extent possible and fully compensate landholders for regulatory imposts to promote biodiversity conservation;

3. Provide for equivalent biodiversity conservation offsets when regulating the clearing of land for economic development;

4. Remove any legal impediments to innovation in biodiversity conservation on privately owned land;

5. Minimise the use of 'command and control' regulation;

6. Cease incurring needless expenditure and limitations on private land-holders to address this matter. Where any limitations of land use are sought, owners should be fully compensated from the public purse;

7. Remove the impediments to markets for biodiversity conservation, including by paying landholders for specified conservation outcomes and allowing biodiversity conservation obligations to be traded;

8. Recognise that the cost effective means of addressing the residual species eradications that are deemed likely is to do so directly by devising measures to eradicate feral predators; 

9. Consider measures that will encourage the development of “exclosures” that eliminate feral species and prevent their reinfestation;

10. Review blanket bans on exports of certain species and instead consider mechanisms including ownership vesting to allow their harvesting. Remove the legal impediments to the commercial exploitation of Australian wildlife, including its ownership, use, domestic exchange, and exportation   Read here