Evangelicals are gonna kill us. Of course, the Scomofo guy is an idjit, but he is supported by even more idjits. Fires are God´s will, God´s will is for the sinful to be punished, if your house burns/you die, it is because you are a sinner… Of course, all excuses are valid for money to flow.
Remember the fires in Greece? Divisions between land plots became blurry and many people profited from the chaos to grab land.
This idjit is promoting coal in summer at 40+ degrees, in the middle of the worst fires they have known. His point is…? He is also forcing people to shake his hand for photo ops. Why? And instead of allocating money to the fire fighters, he is asking people to donate to his political party. Why?
Read this and be angry:
What kills me is that Australia had a population of feral cats. This Administration was planning to poison them by the millions. Now, I betcha they will go on with the plan… with whatever animals are left. Because their God says men are to rule over the beasts and hence, the environment is theirs to trample. Ooops, the Bible says we are stewards, not to bake the sheep into a stew…
Ah nothing. These are the Australian fire experts. They run their models based on projected temperatures and bush dryness and they tell the central government disaster is imminent. Morrison wouldn’t listen to them because he’s paid by the coal industry to deny climate change is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Oh no doubt it’s a perfectly predictable and crystal clear outcome. Things with many moving parts like this are always easily prevented. Especially in hindsight.
And obvious too is that energy based on abundant resources is an equally clear evil.
The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales.
It’s ridiculous to blame climate change when we know there has been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, said Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA.
Like, say, solar energy? Australia is ideal territory for PV. Almost the entire country receives >5 suns/day on average. It has a lot of dry, flat land that’s neither use nor ornament, so why not put solar farms there? The breakeven point for solar at current world prices ($0.7-$0.8/watt) is about 2.5 suns, which means Australia could, if they wanted to, generate clean energy at a much lower price point than fossil fuels. To be clear: coal-fired energy is more expensive than solar. Depending on the implementation details, I’d estimate about 50% more expensive.
Of course, you’ll always get people coming out of the woodwork saying, yeah, but what happens when the sun doesn’t shine at night, hahahaha? Well, use something else. There’s no law that says you have to use only one thing or t’ other. But passing up an opportunity to save money is just pure pigheadedness.
Anyway, the “it’s all because of coal and climate change!” thing is a red herring. It isn’t climate change, or fossil fuels. Australia has always had a brittle climate, and it’s always had fires. We know this because it has a lot of plants that have evolved to only germinate and thrive after fires. The problem is that humans have drastically altered the Australian landscape, so that fires happen more regularly and with more negative consequences. Reforesting with appropriate native species would be possible, but it would take a lot of time and effort. Australians just don’t seem to care that much; they appear perfectly content to just abuse what they have until they back themselves into an ecological corner.
That’s factored into the cost estimate. At 5 suns, PV without battery backup etc is roughly one-third to one-quarter the price of fossil fuels, depending on the nature of the load. But you’re quite right that that’s not useful in many real-world applications.
There are various tricks that you can use for load-balancing other than storage. The net saving, as I said, would be about 50% over fossil fuels.
People value continuous because our entire way of life has been load-matched to sources that only work well when they’re run continuously. In fact energy policy is often arranged to avoid running power stations down and up again because it messes up the whole economics of the thing.
The general fucked up state of the planet was a completely foreseeable result of energy policies over the last 200 years. How about contributing something useful to the discussion?
This implies that every 2020 outcome was “completely foreseeable” in 1820.
I mean, I was born at night but not last night.
However, via this insight I perceive that you perhaps started this thread to express some rage. I don’t want to stand in your way, so I’m happy to bow out.
That link you posted is a press release from 2013. Check the PDF at the bottom.
From further down the same link, there is more recent information:
2019-2020 is already the most destructive bushfire season since the 2008–09 Australian bushfires and the most widespread in recorded history, having already burned nearly 6 million hectares of land (there’s more currently burning, but lets talk about what’s already gone), destroyed over 2,500 buildings (including over 1,300 homes) and killed at least 17 people.
And we’re not even halfway through the season.
For comparison – these are the other “most extensive” fires we’ve seen:
I hope you’re right but it doesn’t look too good right now. Also as technology improves we need to adopt those technologies. ScoMo is being paid to push a reliance on an old fossil resource and an old technology.
Sorry, Wookie, but it is a massive disaster and it is a totally catastrophic event.
In fact, it’s absolutely off the scale, and we’ve probably only seen less than 1/3 of the total for the summer. Already millions of animals dead, and likely several complete species extinctions owing to the scale of the fires and the limited distribution of remaining populations of many small animals like dunnarts, mountain pygmy possum, and even koalas. Not to mention the millions of tons of CO2 that needn’t have been lost to the atmosphere, which will only make climate change worse.
