Climate denial and coal power fantasy of Australian government

Australia energy provider AGL, Australian Gas Light, has put the Australian government on notice that the intend to retire the old Liddell coal power station by 2022, in five years time.  This pulls a capacity of 2,000 MWh from the New South Wales state system, and from supply of the national electricity market, which is south and eastern Australia. AGL acquired the station just 3 years ago, from the generator privatisation sale of the NSW government energy provider. It is fun to watch the conservative government struggling to impose some sort of control over energy corporations and their infrastructure, in this post-privatisation era.

From media accounts this week, it appears that every time a politician meets and listens to an energy corporation CEO, the politician reports on different expectations and meanings that contradict later public utterances of the CEO. The effect is becoming a massive politician-reality distortion field. Our present politicians seem to see, hear, and speak from a different reality perspective than the rest of us.  LNP government energy policy is beholden to reality distortions from the right wing think tank worlds of climate change denial, such as the IPA - Insitutute of Public Affairs.  The IPA is funded and steered by fossil fuel corporate interests. Mr Tony Abbott and other notable LNP retards are IPA members.

The IPA is still financing and promoting climate change denial propaganda.  Its latest efforts include a "Climate Change, The facts 2017" -   The book would be more truthfully titled "Climate Change: Recycled climate denial fantasy since 1965", and the authors list is a who's who of leading peddlers of climate denial fantasy fiction.

Edited by Dr Jennifer Marohasy, Senior Fellow at the IPA, Climate Change: The Facts 2017 brings together contributions on the latest climate science from some of the world’s leading experts in the field including  . . .

The presentations of the IPA and Dr Marohasy take great delight in the contemptuous way they treat real climate science, and ignore our climate alarms. Nothing said or published over the last 50 or so years of climate change denial fantasy has altered one real fact on global warming.  In 1965, incoming President Johnson promoted this report which included major findings of greenhouse gas induced global warming.



Public Climate Science is more than 50 years old.

"Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places," said Johnson less than three weeks after his 1965 inauguration. "This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels."  - http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2015/02/president-johnson-carbon-climate-warning

Real climate scientists don't bother debating with climate denial fantasy, such as produced by the IPA, no more than we try to reason with madness. There are more than enough Universities around the world with departments steeped in the accumulation of climate science, producing graduates every year who are taught the basics. There are large numbers of books, documents, movies, and video presentations , referenced online, written in many languages,  that don't indulge in denial fantasy. Of course there are as many online materials pushing climate change denial. It is not hard to tell the differences.

The brutal logic of Climate Change.

The brutal logic of climate change, is that human emissions of green house gases have to be reduced to low levels, and methods of removing our existing overload of green house gas from the atmosphere need to be devised, in order to mitigate already massive harmful changes in global climate systems. Denial fantasy, political or otherwise,  is not going to fix this. Asking for extensions on the operation of coal power stations in Australia is a climate change denial fantasy of government. The Carmichael Adani Coal mine project is a climate change denial fantasy of government.  We cannot afford politicians in government who indulge in climate change denial fantasy.



Great expectations

The LNP politicians want Liddell to keep running and burning coal, for another 5 years until 2027. There would be great costs to this. Liddell power station was commissioned in 1971 and its accounting useful life has always been set at the end of 2022. All financial arrangements involving Liddell, including the GenTrader sale of rights to its output, and later its full sale, contracts for coal supply, maintenance and upgrades, and its most recent acquisition by AGL, have been made with this definite accounting end of life date.  The proposed closure date is not a surprise, has always been in the plan.  Liddell power station outputs about 14.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year. It also requires the thirsty consumption of large quantities of fresh water for continued power generation. The water is conveniently sourced from Lake Liddell, a reservoir supplied by the Hunter River.

NSW governments had eagerly grabbed the budget bonuses from their power infrastructure asset sales, including Liddell,  as a once only compensation for having given away the revenue stream.

AGL has now had plenty of time to learn the economics of managing Liddell, learn the directions that our futures of energy technology and global warming are going, and has publicly said that it wants to get of coal.  It did not take long after buying Liddell, in 2015, that AGL announced that it would not continue operations beyond 2022.

AGL is exhibiting the expected behaviour of an energy corporation looking for the best returns on investment, the competing economic interests of its shareholders, and the well-being of the market-place it sells energy to.

The Australian LNP Coal retards we have voted into government must be very puzzled as well as desperate. After working so hard to stop progress in renewable energy in Australia, as a long term plan, that has also crippled government support for renewable energy targets to in order to remove new generation investment needed to replace retiring coal power, they must have been expecting that Coal Power owners, such as AGL, would have automatically cheered and volunteered to keep the dirty old coal power stations burning as long as possible. I have heard quotations to the effect of "Coal contracts will still be so very cheap, so what's wrong with it?". The LNP just cannot understand what is wrong with it.

AGL has promised to put the government request to its board members.  I suspect that the AGL board members know a lot more about economics, energy production, electricity pricing and global warming reality than our retarded politicians, and the proposal to extend or sell Liddell for an extended working life will be solidly rejected.

In the meantime, its up to the Australian people to demand a better renewable energy policy from the Australia government.

Why are these retards still debating this dirty black rock?



author:
Michael Rynn
description:
Asking for extensions on the operation of coal power stations in Australia is a climate change denial fantasy of government.
keywords:
Liddell Coal Power Station NSW Australia, AGL , Request to extend operational life
og:title:
Climate denial and coal power fantasy of Australian government