How does Greg Hunt live with himself?

Renewable energy target in the spotlight

Excellent article by Peter Martin that effectively raises the question in the title to this post, without directly asking it.

Trouble ahead

UK could face widespread seventies style blackouts - The Independent

The UK faces widespread power cuts for the first time since the 1970s, according to the Government's own predictions.

Demand for electricity from homes and businesses is set to exceed the available supply within eight years....

The latest figures cast doubt over the Government's pledge that renewable sources can make up for lower output from nuclear and coal.

They were slipped out in an appendix to the Low Carbon Transition Plan, which was launched in July. The main document set out a target for "clean" technology - such as wind, wave and solar - to supply 40% of the country's power by 2020.

But the extra section suggests that there will be a shortfall by 2017, when the "energy unserved" level is predicted to reach 3,000 megawatt hours per year...

By 2025 the situation is expected to worsen, with the shortfall hitting 7,000 megawatt hours per year.

That would be equivalent to an hour-long power cut for half of Britain over the course of a year.

Actually, in some recent stormy summers in Brisbane, we've had a lot more than an hour-long power cut in a year.

Having a normal one in Aussie wingnut land (climate change and energy edition)

This comment appears at one of the offspring blogs of dead Catallaxy after a fairly ordinary (that is, by Rafe standards) post whinging about renewable energy:

Meanwhile, the rest of us are agog at how the Murdoch press has turned on a dime, no doubt confusing/dismaying its rusted on readers:

 

I haven't seen much on Twitter about how Sky News is covering this, only this, also from Kevin:

So, Murdoch is trying the tactic of populist anti-climate change advocacy on Sky News, while trying to convince readers in the most populist titles of print that its real and the government just has to act.  

How's that meant to make sense?   When can we expect the Sky News hosts to start attacking the editorial line taken by their companies print editors?    

And as for the government line, Katherine Murphy was nice and scathing on the weekend:

Keith Pitt, the resources minister, made headlines this week when he opened the boondoggle bidding on net zero. Pitt told Phil Coorey at the Australian Financial Review if Scott Morrison wanted agreement from the Nationals on a net zero target ahead of the Glasgow climate conference, he should put $250bn on the table.

Yes, that’s “b” for billion.

According to Pitt, if this transition was actually on, Australians taxpayers should bear the risks. Pitt floated a cartoonishly bad idea where taxpayers would underwrite the financing and insurance of fossil fuels – including for overseas-owned companies – all because naughty Australian banks weren’t inclined to make bad bets.

If you’ve missed Pitt’s parable of the bad banks, let’s recap that quickly: bad banks are now more interested in virtue signalling to their obnoxiously woke inner-city clientele than backing salt-of-the-earth fossil fuel projects in the regions.....

But before anyone could say Venezuela, Pitt’s Queensland Nationals colleague Matt Canavan – a former Productivity Commission economist now apparently estranged from capitalism – was out and about with a different parable.

Canavan told a mildly startled Kieran Gilbert on Sky News that Australians should be prepared to pay higher interest rates in order to stare down international financiers managing carbon risk in global markets. Canavan’s Big Idea™ was actually wilder than Pitt’s, but it attracted significantly less attention.

RET worries

I see that IPA aligned economists are getting all aroused at the prospect that, having lost out on the fake and hysterical free speech crisis they tried to whip up because Andrew Bolt wouldn't apologise for mistakes made in a column, they may have an Abbott government "win" on the Renewable Energy Target.   (The rumour being that key figures in the government are wanting to have it killed off entirely.)  Julie Novak, for example:



From what I can make out, the economics of electricity production in this large country are rather complicated, and in an ideal world, all countries would price carbon with consistency and at realistic levels to wean the planet off burning carbon, and all electricity production, retail and transmission would work the same across our own country, and you genuinely could have a situation where you let energy companies work it out for themselves without the need for the additional spur of a government mandated RET.

However, given the world (and Australia) is not so simple, the RET is one element of a multi-pronged approach to energy, and letting it stay does not represent an economic problem of any significance.   Removing it now that it has been in place for so long is actually a lot more trouble than it is even theoretically worth. 

And one thing is clear - given that the free marketeer economists aligned with the IPA have no problem at all with it actively promoting pubic and political disbelief that there is even a problem to address regarding climate change, their opinion on the merit of the RET is not worth a pinch of poop. 

Julie Novak is, of course, completely and ludicrously wrong in this morning's tweet, in response to a rare column in The Australian supporting the RET:



Get real, Julie.  

Creighton is not to be trusted

Labor’s renewable energy target policy would waste $100bn | The Australian

Renewables and energy costs

One thing has become pretty clear - the economics of government renewable energy targets are complicated, and modelling this type of policy's effects can be all over the shop, often seeming suspiciously prone to making assumptions that suit the interests of the modeller.

I would not trust any initial wildly negative reaction to Labor's apparent decision to increase the renewables target dramatically.   I don't even trust the Grattan Institute on this topic.  Wildly optimistic modelling is probably wrong too. 

"Say anything" Clive

No, Tony Abbott, nothing about the Senate negotiations was 'normal' | World | The Guardian

As Lenore Taylor notes:

This is, after all, the bloke who said this week, while launching a
publication on the renewable energy target:, “When it comes to fighting
climate sceptics you have to persevere.”

But before the election, asked on the ABC whether he agreed that
global warming would have a big impact on Australia, he said: “No, I
don't believe that's so. There's been global warming for a long time. I
mean, all of Ireland was covered by ice at one time. There were no human
inhabitants in Ireland. That's how the world has been going over
millions and billions of years and Ross Garnaut knows that's true, so I
think that's part of the natural cycle.”

Surely this wild inconsistency has to sink in soon through the skulls of the unengaged voters who got him in?

Against wind power

Matthew Stevens: The answer isn't blowing in the wind | News | The Australian

This is an interesting article explaining why wind power is not the great benefit that it would seem. For example:

...even in those states with the most ambitious renewables targets, South Australia and Victoria, the net effect of wind power on carbon dioxide emissions will be negligible, if not illusory. According to another recent study, if Victoria reaches its target of 1000 megawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2016 (the state currently boasts about 120MW of wind capacity), its share of national greenhouse gas emissions will fall from 32 per cent to 28 per cent by 2020.

But in raw numbers, Victoria's power plants will be pumping out 24 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2020 than they do in 2006 because, quite simply, Victorians will be using much more power.

I suppose it can still be argued that it is better to have some of that electricity produced by clean wind power than an alternative CO2 producing means, otherwise the total future CO2 output will be even higher than that already bad forecast.

But it would seem that the more important message is that, in reality, windpower is just fiddling around the edges of the problem. What's worse, such fiddling can give an impression of significance that is undeserved.