Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
Earlier this month The Australian’s Chris Kenny posed the question: Have we hit Peak Stupid?
Our colleague Robert Gottliebsen indirectly answered him on Monday and it was with a two-letter word, not a three-letter one.
Kenny posed the question in relation to climate and Covid-19 and mostly climate.
Here was the Prime Minister telling people, Kenny highlighted, with a straight face – Albo was not doing stand-up – that he intended to change the climate to a more benign setting so they would no longer be troubled by natural disasters.
Personally I thought the PM was rather restrained. I was expecting him to channel former US president Barack Obama and his “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. Further, Obama made that modest claim when he’d only just won the Democratic nomination to run for president; well before he could, well, actually do anything.
And indeed, with our Albo, he could have been even more modest; claiming only that ‘this’ – his election – was the moment when the rise of our rivers began to slow and our continent began to heal. No more flooding rains, just endless drought.
Well, now we’ve got, according to Gottliebsen, just about the most ludicrous proposal ever conceived in Australia – “that gas-rich Victoria import high-cost liquefied natural gas from Queensland”.
Making it even more ludicrous, to Gottliebsen, is that the Victorian gas could be got without fracking as opposed to the Queensland gas.
To Victoria’s Dark Green Labor government – my description, not his – fracked gas is just so much more evil than drilled gas; or in Gottliebsen’s case, gas that has to be separated from water.
Something that, according to Gottliebsen, would be a ‘three-fer’ – Victorians would get the gas they need for heating etc and the generation back-up for wind and solar that could accelerate the closure of coal-fired power stations and the water released would droughtproof Gippsland.
Peak stupid, Chris? Nah, we’re just getting more and more of it, spreading out around the world like Covid on airliners out of Wuhan.
Where does all that fracked Queensland gas go? Almost all of it goes overseas, with more than two-thirds going to just one country alone: China.
They can use it, and some, but we can’t. Their CO2 emissions are politically invisible, ours only literally so. Unlike the WA government of years ago, the Queensland government never insisted on ‘reserving’ some of it for Queenslanders, let alone the rest of Australia. Furthermore, we are desperate for China to start buying our coal again, to use in their coal power stations as we close all ours down.
Peak stupid? In May the World Economic Forum reported that “coal-powered electricity generation rose by 9 per cent in 2021 to 10,042 Terawatt-hours (TWh), marking the biggest percentage rise since 1985”.
And no, the WEF is no shill for the coal industry.
It’s the exact opposite; it’s the Darkest shade of anti-fossil fuel Green, pushing climate change like there will be no tomorrow.
Let me put that increase in context. Global coal-generated electricity increased by 908TWh in 2021. Our total – total – electricity generation was around 265TWh in 2021.
So the world increased its coal-fired generation, in one year, by more than three times our total electricity.
And where is much of that coal being burnt for power? According to WEF, over 50 per cent was in, well, China alone, followed by over 10 per cent in India.
Let’s round off with Biden desperately pleading with the Saudis to pump a lot more oil to offset the Russians – while doing everything he can to close down oil production in the US.
