Yesterday morning – Friday, 28 April – the last turbine at the Liddell coal-fired power station in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley was shut down.
Yesterday afternoon, the Australian Energy Marketing Organisation issued a notice stating that electricity supply shortages could be experiences during the evening peak period.
The Liddell power station had supplied 10 per cent of the New South Wales electricity supply.
The year after next, the much larger Eraring coal-fired power station, also in the Hunter Valley, will be closed down, too.
The Eraring power station presently supplies 20 per cent of New South Wales’ electricity.
These coal-fired power stations are to be replaced by batteries which will store electricity generated at solar farms.
But there are problems.
The batteries do not exist as yet.
The electricity expected to be generated at the solar farms will be only a fraction of that, generated at Liddell and Eraring.
And new transmission lines will have to be constricted for a supply of electricity that will be intermittent.
Solar panels cannot generate electricity when there is no sunshine.
And the present network of transmission lines can transmit only a constant flow of base-load electricity.
If we are to rely upon solar and wind-generated electricity alone, thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines will have to be constructed, at a cost of billions of dollars.
This will be on top of the $159 billion Australia has committed to pay each year as “climate reparations” to Pacific island nations.
Solar farms which already exist have taken up valuable agriculture, and grazing land.
If solar farms are to generate anything like the amount of electricity that is going to be needed for industry and for households, many, many more of them are going to have to cover up more and more arable land.
This country’s ability to grow enough food to feed itself may well be placed in jeopardy.
Where wind turbines are concerned, hilltop forests are being felled to make way for them.
In Far North Queensland, what remains of the rain forest is also being cleared, for the same reason.
And for what is all of this being done?
Why are Australian’s paying enormously high electricity bills for what is projected to be an insufficient, unreliable supply of electricity?
Even those who follow the “climate change” projections admit that Australia produces less than two per cent of global carbon emissions.
Yet because Australia is classified as a “developed” country, we are being hammered.
Countries like China and India, though, are classified as “developing” economies.
They are allowed to burn as much coal and oil as they like.
Their “carbon footprint” is huge.
So what is the truth here?
Is climate change real?
Is the fear that is being spread about justified?
Is this claimed climate change being caused primarily by human activity?
Or has there been significant climate change in times past, prior to the Industrial Revolution?
Geologists and climatologist point to ice ages having taken place in ancient times.
A comparatively rapid melting of the ice about ten thousand years ago caused a rising of the sea levels by about a hundred metres.
During the fourth and third millenniums BC, massive climate change brought about the seasons we know today, according to geologists.
During the tenth and eleventh Christian centuries, in the wake of massive, world-wide, landscape-altering earthquakes, there was a warming and a drying of the world’s climate.
While during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a mini-ice age across the Northern hemisphere.
At present, independent researchers are examining historical climate records, back to the Industrial Revolution.
They have found that each decade has seen a temperature increase of, an average, 0.09 degrees centigrade.
They have also projected that by the end of this century, the world’s mean temperature may increase by one degree.
If this is so, this is hardly the extinction-causing climate catastrophe with which we have been threatened.
All animate life on this planet is carbon-based.
Without carbon, animate life as we know it would cease to exist.
As well, all plant life breathes in carbon dioxide.
If there were no carbon dioxide for plant life to breathe in, all plant life would die.
And so would we.
For we breathe in oxygen which plants breathe out.
These are very basic scientific facts.
So perhaps we really should follow the science after all.
– John Hermann
Gympie
