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Abbott & NLP: x2 Lost Wars Already, #3 Renewable Energy

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pietillidie 



Joined: 07 Jan 2005


PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:15 am
Post subject: Abbott & NLP: x2 Lost Wars Already, #3 Renewable EnergyReply with quote

Fresh from losing the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq, Abbott and the NLP are now have a new enemy in their sights: Renewable energy.

Apparently, hunting for terrorists in the Tora Bora region was too easy for them; the next test of True Glib Manhood (TM) is defeating the wind and the sun.

Yep, that's right, Jesus has told Fruitcake and Friends in a vision also received by oil-funded terrorists that renewable energy must be stopped before it takes over, improves the environment, de-funds ISIS, de-funds corrupt governments and corrupt corporations, creates higher-paying jobs, and moves to consumer device status as part of everyday life.

First, it was the War on Wind. That's right, the Devil's own Whirling Blades of Death just have to be stopped:

The Aged wrote:
Tony Abbott has escalated his war on wind power

Tony Abbott has dramatically escalated his war on wind power, creating a new cabinet split and provoking a warning he is putting international investment at risk.

Fairfax Media can reveal the government has ordered the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation not to make any new investments in wind power projects.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-has-escalated-his-war-on-wind-power-20150711-gia3xi.html

But why stop at wind when the heat from the Devilish Flames of Sky Hell only make the visions more lurid, and the voices louder?

The sun! The sun! Someone please stop the sun! Especially, of course, competitive access to the sun.

The Aged wrote:
Government pulls the plug on household solar

The Abbott government has opened up another front in its war on renewable energy by pulling the plug on investments in the most common form of alternative energy, rooftop and small-scale solar.

As a storm raged over the government's directive to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to no longer back wind energy projects, it emerged that it has also put a stop to solar investments other than the largest industrial-scale projects.

The solar industry has been left fuming by a letter to the CEFC by Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in which they direct investments in household and small-scale solar to be "excluded" from the $10 billion fund in future.

...

Shadow environment spokesman Mark Butler said: "These proposed changes go well beyond Tony Abbott's opposition to the aesthetic values of wind farms - it's a wholesale attack on renewable energy.
"Tony Abbott is broadening his assault on renewable energy technologies putting thousands of Australian jobs and billions of dollars in investment at even further risk."

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/government-pulls-the-plug-on-household-solar-20150712-gian0u.html






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HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:20 am
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93 million miles from Earth.
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Culprit Cancer



Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne

PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:22 am
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His mates in the Electricity and Coal Industry are set to lose billions. Stop Solar, stop the sun. Shocked
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:24 am
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OK I'll try not to do Solar stop the sun so much.
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Dark Beanie Gemini



Joined: 06 Feb 2004
Location: A galaxy far, far away.

PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 2:10 pm
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And at the same time, giving approval to a massive coal mine in prime farming land...

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/water-issues/battlelines-drawn-as-rich-liverpool-plains-put-on-the-coalmining-map-20150710-gi7u6w

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:27 pm
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Guy Rundle says pretty much everything PTID and I have been arguing on these topics, just more eloquently:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/07/20/rundle-abbotts-gutting-of-renewables-is-not-just-dumb-its-treason/

Quote:
Abbott's gutting of renewables is not just dumb, it's treason
Guy Rundle


When the time comes for a truth and reconciliation commission into what the Abbott government did to the country, the gutting of the Renewable Energy Target and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation will surely be one of the most prominent issues. To placate and persuade a bunch of brown and old energy providers, the government is willing to reach into such bodies, rip out their funding, direct them away from successful programs into speculative ones, and attempt to destroy an entire sector with deliberately introduced uncertainty.

There’s a lot of weird cultural stuff going on too — all this nonsense about how ugly half-a-dozen wind turbines are, occupying 10 degrees of a 180-degree vista. In their own right, turbines are elegant. Compared to pylons marching across the landscape — which attracted no criticism — and open-cut mines, they’re aesthetic masterpieces. But the right are so desperate to do them down that they will use arguments that used to be associated with “deep ecology” Green positions.

Thus, when Joe Hockey and Daniel Andrews met in the ABC studios foyer in Melbourne last week, it was Hockey who complained that a few turbines were disturbing the vista of Lake George. Why? Because a landscape devoid of human markings is preferable to a hybrid one? Isn’t that Green paganism? Turbines are beautiful, not merely physically, but because they’re a visible reminder that we are exiting the fossil fuel era.

Which is why many on the right find them so repellent. Because they’re from the future, not the past, announcing a way of life in which we live with the planet rather than having to dominate, extract and despoil it to live prosperous lives. Gerard Henderson, doing his sad clown act on the Insiders couch, gave the game away: “I grew up in Victoria, which was made by brown coal, I love it. It made the state”, to which Fran Kelly shot back “yes, last century”. If all the right have in their kick to argue for brown energy is nostalgia for a time when the Earth was the domain of humanity given by God, etc, etc, then they’re in deep trouble.

They know it, too. The rise of things like household solar presage far greater shifts than alternative energy models and competition to existing supply; such new forms of power undermine the very form of value on which a high-profit energy sector is based. The plain fact is that the spread of household solar and the advance of a two-way grid is not merely an expansion of private competition — it is the beginning of a socialisation of the grid, and of the production of energy in society. And much more beyond that.

This radical effect has crept up on people because the only prior model of socialisation we have known is state-nationalised enterprises, a la the old State Electricity Commission of Victoria. Such statist social democracy arose in the 20th century, for a variety of political and economic reasons. In the ’80s, it was unbuckled into privatisation — which produced some efficiencies and investment through profit and competition, which were quickly swamped by higher energy prices and underinvestment as take-away profit margins were widened.

Thus we became accustomed to the idea that a “socialist” form of managing energy was the old, bad way, and private capitalist methods were superior. So few, least of all Big Energy, saw coming the technological revolution, which would make a form of energy supply possible that was socialised, while being independent of the state. Rooftop solar is 2% of the energy supply. One way or another it will start to grow exponentially. Once it passes a critical point, the grid will be neither a private nor a state entity, but a social one. As other technologies grow and proliferate — such as the CSIRO’s printable solar cells — establishment and repair costs will plummet. Sooner rather than later, in new build, roofs will be cells, and the distinction will collapse entirely. With the advancing revolution in battery storage, the “grid” will cease to exist in its current form. The “grid” will be a network of shared abundant power, the production/consumption division collapsed.

That’s a ways away — though closer than you think — but what terrifies Big Energy is the transition to it, which is a long slide zone of unknowable investment and profit effects, headed only one way. Headed only one way, without the intervention of a capitalist state, that is. Where at one stage of national development the capitalist/social democratic state saw its role as connecting science, technology and production together, the neoliberal Australian state now sees its role as decoupling them.

Why? Because all that capitalism now has on its side is the maintenance of scarcity. That becomes all the more urgent as technological development, driven in various areas by the exponential advances governed by Moore’s law, swamps existing scarcity so comprehensively as to destabilise basic rates of profit. Property and the market were once forces of innovation — now, with so any committed to spontaneous tech development, open-source sharing and hybrid involvement/investment models, there is a faster mode of co-operation and innovation. So capital must put the brakes on. On everything. Which is why a government like Abbott’s now gives the appearance of being a gangsterish bunch of rent-seeking enforcers. Their only job is to hold innovation back. They abolished the minister of science position, because science itself is now their enemy.

Why isn’t there anyone in the Labor Party who can speak to this, with some form of vision, tying amazing technical developments to families in the burbs having easier, more prosperous, cleaner, greener lives? Quite aside from Labor paralysis, there is labour paralysis too. The labour movement doesn’t know what to do about these rapid shifts, even if it recognises them occurring. The Labor/Labour complex needs to come up with a comprehensive answer to the imminent crisis of jobs and work about to envelope half a dozen industries, including energy. If they stay isolated and simply defend increasingly low value — and often boring, dangerous and unpleasant — jobs as they are, without any sort of transition plan, then they will find their only ally is Old Capital, which makes its money by exploiting them.

They won’t even have the rest of the working- and working-middle class with them — since people will be itching to convert to self-funding solar and half-a-dozen other new technologies, and will eventually resent the obstruction of things that will improve their lives. As these technologies challenge the basis of capital itself, so too will they challenge the fundamental divisions of class. If Labor doesn’t get ahead of this, the Greens will — and in a decade this broad, high-tech working-middle class will become their class, and Richard Di Natale’s forecast of a 20% vote will look modest in retrospect. Labor in the 21st century is on the way to following the fate of the British Liberal Party in the 20th — a once mighty progressive force, reduced in a short passage of time to a rump, victim of a refusal to tackle the contradictions inherent in its program.

What should Labor or the Greens do about rooftop solar? Be audacious. Instead of copping this RET nobbling sweet, advance the idea that basic rooftop solar should be given away free. It is, by one measure, the app, of which new energy is the output — and who pays for Google, or Adobe PDF? Move us forward, beyond rent-seeking, to the new material economy. Help people bootstrap themselves, and the country, to a radical cost reduction. Yes, it will be attacked — pink batts and all of that.

But Labor or the Greens need to have the argument, and make it part of the wider argument about the radical changes engulfing us. That’s a Keating style of politics, but the degree of change is greater than anything Keating had to deal with. He was simply ordo-liberalising a labourist social democracy. Australia’s whole economy, its rate and process of accumulation, employment and output, is being colonised by the advance of post-capitalism. None of the equations that the dim kids who do commerce were taught in their textbooks are going to work anymore. With every passing year, they will be less accurate about reality than they were the year before.

We may be slow to do this, but others won’t be. China in particular. For a decade or so, China was held up in the West as a message to the greenies, etc, about what a really muscular capitalist society was doing. Trouble is, it wasn’t a capitalist society — it was a big capitalist sector inside a dirigiste socialist society, with five-year plans, state industries and the works. Having used brown power to generate two decades of 10% growth per annum, it is now using state direction to make a fast transition to renewables. Why? Not purely, or even primarily because of global warming or pollution, but for what China has been seeking since Western powers occupied it in the 1830s: a return of self-determination and national autarchy, i.e. total self-sufficiency. The delusional belief — contrary to all appearances — that China is not racing to a point where it can eliminate all imports, brown coal included, is delusional. Ultimately, it is a last surviving example of a magical belief in white-skin privilege. The brown people will always need our brown coal. Not soon they won’t.

This is what makes the conduct of Abbott and Co. so genuinely traitorous, rather than simply slack, decadent, etc, etc. Because the advanced areas of the world — such as northern Europe and China — are well on the road to post-capitalism. They’re pioneering multi-levelled, multi-dimensional economies of interlinked social-market-national enterprises. Crucially, they’re dependent on transforming import sectors, such as energy and materials (i.e. for construction), into homegrown zero marginal cost outputs, which reinforce each other (your solar-powered 3D printer in your 3D-printed home prints out your new solar cells). This stuff ain’t coming. This is here. Any nation that wants to retain its independence in this new world better develop this stuff fast.

Conversely, any nation that doesn’t, will commit itself to a form of backward dependency reminiscent of the underdevelopment of the third world in the post-WWII era — dependent on global markets of steadily decreasing value, and caught in an under-accumulation trap. That is not only where we’re heading, it is where we are being driven by this government, the rent-seeking sectors that donate to its parties, the unions that will not think ahead, the Labor leaders drawn from those unions, the dimwitted “experts” of the financial pages, the delusional nostalgists of the IPA, etc.

I’m against the death penalty — but when the truth and reconciliation commission comes for a government that has trashed everything from the CSIRO on down, I may be willing to make an exception.

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Dave The Man Scorpio



Joined: 01 Apr 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:34 pm
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Why do we have such Idiots in Charge of the Country
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swoop42 Virgo

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:52 pm
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Dave The Man wrote:
Why do we have such Idiots in Charge of the Country


Because we have many more idiots willing to vote for them.

Perhaps we should start exporting our idiots?

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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:32 pm
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swoop42 wrote:
Dave The Man wrote:
Why do we have such Idiots in Charge of the Country


Because we have many more idiots willing to vote for them.

Perhaps we should start exporting our idiots?


Top idea, we could put them on boats and send them to Indonesia.

Or do live exports to somewhere. Hipsters would be good, export them to China, they could be used by wig makers.

Only problem would be who would decide who the idiots are and where to send them. Maybe we could vote on it? Uh Oh, I smell a government department being funded and some good ole fashioned bureaucracy.

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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:43 pm
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^ Having praised Rundle last week, let me withdraw all of it. That is a disgusting, bilious, and vacuous article. Treason ? Does he know what that really means in English ? In favour of the death penalty for the government - I mean, WTF ????

I think the premise of the article might have much in its favour - the energy model will change, as it always has - but I think that it's possible for people to actually disagree with that, without my needing to drench them in Robespierrean, unrepressed violent fantasies.

Before the energy model changes, the technological challenges of cost, including capital cost, spare capacity and intermittency/storage will have to advance considerably. Rudle seems to airily assume that these are already solved.

This idea that somehow the globally-omnipotent Australian government is holding the world back from new energy technology, or that such new technology will not be adopted in Australia when it is cost competitive, is hard to believe. As is the idea that big energy gives a nanosecond's thought to whether the Australian government funds renewables or not. As geopolitics goes, it's an Australian pre-Copernican view of the world.

I hope the new energy paradigm comes soon, not least to reduce the risk of terrorism as the stakes shrink in the battle for resources and wealth that underpins militant Islam.... but when it comes, it'll not be government subsidy that makes it happen. If the Government had started Google, they'd probably still be doing strategic review papers on the idea of a search engine.

By the way, Rundle seems to think Google is "free". It's not. Who pays for Google ? You do. I do. There's a Google levy in most products you buy, paid for by the manufacturer for having Google push their products at you through search. It's a business, and it works. But it's less transparent (if more efficient) than what it replaced, and to suggest that this is somehow a new, wonderful paradigm of free stuff is very strange.

Rundle writes some great articles. This is technically-detached wish-fulfilment with Mugabe-like menace thrown in. Maybe he was having a bad day.

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Dave The Man Scorpio



Joined: 01 Apr 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:55 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
swoop42 wrote:
Dave The Man wrote:
Why do we have such Idiots in Charge of the Country


Because we have many more idiots willing to vote for them.

Perhaps we should start exporting our idiots?


Top idea, we could put them on boats and send them to Indonesia.

Or do live exports to somewhere. Hipsters would be good, export them to China, they could be used by wig makers.

Only problem would be who would decide who the idiots are and where to send them. Maybe we could vote on it? Uh Oh, I smell a government department being funded and some good ole fashioned bureaucracy.


Then would anyone then be Left in the Country Rolling Eyes

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:46 pm
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Mugwump, I think you take his final paragraph far too literally - I'd say it's a pretty clear use of exaggeration for effect.

The charge of treason, on the other hand, is one I happen to agree with 100%. What else do you call wilfully and malevolently sabotaging the country's future in order to keep the old energy sponsors on side? I'm not sure the Mata Haris of the world could claim to have achieved half as much as this government has.

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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:34 am
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^ if those same words had been used by a rightist commentator about the Greens, David, I think you'd be (rightly) appalled.

Treason - often met with capital punishment - is aiding an enemy which wants to subjugate your country with force. You might not like the energy companies but their products keep your lights on and they run no armies. Defining those who disagree with you as traitorous is a totalitarian itch.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 11:27 am
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I think you're misunderstanding my position. I bear the old energy companies no ill will at all; they were obviously essential industries in the past and will continue to be important until the time comes that we have a fully renewable energy sector.

The problem here is that many of our government's sponsors recognise that this (necessary) transition is slowly killing them. Thus, it's in their interests to delay and discredit the transition as much as possible. While unethical, it's quite understandable that they would do this; what is truly appalling is that our government has taken their side instead of the Australian public's. We know why they are doing this, of course; these are their sponsors, and without their money and propaganda, their chances of being re-elected would be significantly reduced. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement that just happens to be irreversibly damaging our country's economic future.

You may not agree with placing that in the same category as, say, selling an enemy country our military secrets. Fair enough, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that it's any less ethically bankrupt or that the long-term consequences for the country will be less damaging.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 11:51 am
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Mugwump wrote:
Treason ? Does he know what that really means in English ?


Treason: The betrayal of one's own country by waging war against it or by consciously or purposely acting to aid its enemies.

Right now, by far our country's worst enemy is climate change. Everybody knows that. Everybody admits that. Even Abbott pretends to know it. Climate change is our enemy and Abbott is a traitor, not just to Australia but to the whole world. Treason is the correct term, there can be no other.

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