Did you fossils fax that to each other or use a mojo machine?
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Canât beat the good old reliable pigeon post. BTW Ben when are you getting rid of your coal fired banjo and getting one powered by renewables.
The Captalist thieves (i.e. shareholders and union superannuation funds) bought them when Socialist incompetents like Cain and Brumby smashed the States finances to run up an insurmountable debt.
If you like I can give you examples of how the unionists rorted the SEC in the good old days.
If you had taken the time to actually read the report instead of going into your usual knee-jerk communist reaction you may have noticed that it was 50 yo brown coal generators that were keeping the prices down.
15 years past its planned lifetime, Hazelewood was not only producing more power than all the wind turbines in Australia combined, it was doing it at 1/3 of the price.
In the one year since closedown the price of power in Victoria has risen 85%.
The Left wanted it, the Left got it, now suck it and see.
One last point, why is it the power price rises imposed by the Labor Party are good but power prices dictated by market forces are bad?
I refer specifically to the statements by the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has had who said if we increase the price of electricity people will use less and that will lower emmissions and save the world.
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Just noticed, you left out the two most expensive ones, why is that?
Abbot really said that? Most insightful thing that âsuppository of wisdomâ would have said.
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Onion eater.
Nuff sed âŚ
Because you Muppet, this is what the report you posted that I read said.
If you had read it is says little about wind or solar energy.
And seriously sorfed while I would concede that John Cain has little to be proud of in terms of ecomonic management, you cannot level that at John Brumby. While he may have been colourless and drab, he was financially prudent.
And tell all lies you like about the SECV, but it was competent and kept prices under control, with long term plans to move out of dirty brown coal.
And you know that I am referring to the replacement for the earwax eater who was in turn replaced by said wax muncher.
Your referrals are in your head. What you actually wrote is what I responded to.
Except the overspending was NSW and Queensland. How many solar and wind farms have gone in there between 2005 and 2011?
Ha. The RSL has released a statement taking exception to the Colaition coal lobby group calling themselves the âMonash Groupâ as it is using the name of a famous military leader for âpolitical posturing.â
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Should call themselves the âFossil Groupâ.
Clear, succinct, ⌠and so very very apt.
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You Really Have To Admire Some Liberals!
Rossleigh
Ok, you probably noticed something about the Monash Forum in the mediaâŚ
But just in case you havenât, basically, the Monash Forum is a group of backbench Liberals which includes Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Craig Kelly and a number of others who are even more irrelevant than the aforementioned trio. Their aim is to stop the âdemonisationâ of coal.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Coal has been demonised by a handful of Christians linking it to the fires of Hell and therefore itâs been associated with demons in much the safe way that Matthew Guy has been linked to underworld figures just because he has the occasional lobster with a mobster. Totally unfair.
As is the suggestion that many of us heard as kids that Santa would leave lumps of coal in our stocking if we were naughty. How innaccurate! Clearly itâs only the very best children whoâd be given lumps of that good-for-humanity coal stuff!
So anyway, this Monash Forum has the intention to remind us all how absolutely necessary coal is for cheap power. It takes his name from John Monash, a man who, while once very useful, is now â like coal â dead.
There have been suggestions that the group has evolved from the so-called âMonkey Podâ. Although the suggestion about evolution has angered some in the group because they donât support evolution in any shape or form.
George Christensen has encouraged various Nationals to also join the group, prompting one Nationals senator, John Williams, to tell the media that while heâd yet to see the groupâs pledge or manifesto, heâd texted back saying that he was keen to join because anything pro-coal was just fine by him. He further added that if AGL didnât want to sell the Liddell power station, then the Government should compulsorily acquire it and run it. After all, itâs not like that would be socialism or subsiding an inefficient industry.
Anyway, the group is also suggesting that the Government should intervene and build Hazelwood 2.0 because well, it just should because spending $4,000,000,000 on a new power station is no problem, just so long as itâs a coal-fired one and not one of these new-fangled renewable ones.
Josh Frydenberg told us that the Government and the Monash group wanted the same thing. As far as I can ascertain, nobody in the media asked him if that were the case, why did the group feel the need to form. I mean, itâs not like thereâs a sub-group of Liberal backbenchers forming to press the case for company tax cuts.
Whatever, the group is assuring us that coal has a future and that thereâll always be a need for it. While some silly greenies believe that coal and oil will one day run out, itâs clear that the Monash Forum believe that there are sufficient fossils in the Liberal Party itself to provide coal in the future.
Yep, like I said, you just have to admire some of these Liberals. In spite of all the opposition from people who know what theyâre talking about, they bravely go on, insisting that coal is the way to go. No, the scientists donât know what theyâre talking about. No, the industry experts are wrong too. And AGL, why on earth would you shut Liddell when just a few hundred million dollars will make it as good as new? Better even. The free market just doesnât work sometimes because it doesnât deliver the outcomes we want, and then we need to tweak it so that our biggest donors get the money in their pockets, so that they can continue to be our biggest donors⌠How many other people could go on in the face of so much opposition and continue to deny reality like that? Iâm sure I couldnât.
And no, this isnât a threat to Malcolm Turnbullâs leadership. Of course not! Didnât Malcolm once say that he could never lead a party that wasnât as serious about climate change as he was. While some of you have taken this to mean that all his talk about climate change was just empty, populist rhetoric from a man who makes the characters from film âLa La Landâ look complex, I would argue that this is a promise heâs certainly kept.
Thereâs no way anyone could consider that Turnbull has led the party in any sense of the word.
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The best part is that Monash was renowned for embracing new technology to gain a tactical advantage. Heâd be rolling in his grave.
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Not only that, but with Rupert backing this bunch of fkwits, heâd be ropable after the way the anti Semite Murfoch senior ran him down in his press & tried to diminish his remarkable achievements continually simply because he was a Jew.
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Really? Need to brush up on my history.
Next thing today, the government have press ganged Alinta Energy into saying they might be interested in buying the Liddel plant. AGL have said they donât even think they want to sell it because theyâve already planned the succession and an engineer who has worked on preserving old coal thermal plants past their used by date reckons itâs a really big financial risk (not to mention health risk) and might work for a very short time.
Krakow: When worried Poles ominously lament âWinter is comingâŚâ, it is not the arrival of zombies they fear, or even of the cold weather itself.
Rather, they reel for some six months of smog caused by the mass burning of coal for domestic heating across the country.
Some areas have been measured at times to be more polluted than Beijing and it is estimated that 45,000 people die each year due to the high level of pollution the coal burning causes.
Eva Ciesielska, a 39-year-old resident from Krakow, has been battling what she believes
are air pollution-related illnesses that have affected her family since they moved from Canada to Polandâs second largest city. Krakow is estimated to have some of the poorest air quality in the world.
Ciesielskaâs husband and their two daughters, Zoe, 9, and Lena, 6, have continuously suffered from severe respiratory difficulties, their routines overwhelmingly conditioned by treatments and preventive measures to cope with pollution. The family often dons masks inside if they need to open the windows.
â[The nebuliser] makes breathing better whenever we have issues (such as) a bad cough or helps when we canât swallow due to throat infections," Ciesielska says. "What it does is make all the bad stuff go out, so we spit a lot after that. The breathing gets better. However you canât ever get totally rid of the infections or the problems caused by the air pollutionâ.
According to a World Health Organisation report on air quality, 33 of the most polluted 50 cities in the European Union are in Poland. This has earned the country the title of âEuropeâs Beijingâ.
But for many, all of this comes as a surprise. Poland sees the dark clouds to be less associated with the extreme levels of pollution in Western economies, and more with the poor air quality in
other areas of the globe, such as Asia.
Despite this appearing to be an obvious environmental and public health emergency, politics and conservatism have brewed a toxic mixture standing in the way of cleaner air for Poles.
With powerful coal industry lobbies influencing decision making, and with hundreds of thousands of jobs dependant on the coal industry, the real scope of the problem has been blurred.
Sunny days shrouded in thick layers of smog are dismissed as foggy by incredulous Poles who believe there is more at stake politically, than their health â let alone the environment.
âI wrote several messages to the European Union, basically a cry for help, like: âDo something. Weâre dying here. Red alarm!â," Ciesielska says referring to pollution codes used in other European cities.
âThey [the government] arenât making this public because they donât want people to panic ⌠if we were to go alarm, red alarm, every time we had it [extreme levels of smog], we would not function. Society would go crazy. There would be people in the streets, they would protest, they would be loudâ.
Polish Health Minister Konstanty Radziwill has attempted to shift the discussion surrounding air pollution â which he described as a âtheoretical problemâ â to blaming health hazards on ârealâ problems such as people smoking.
That backfired as it inspired activists to calculate the effects of smog in terms of cigarettes. According to anti-smog activist group Krakow Smog Alarm, breathing Krakowâs air on a
daily basis is akin to smoking 2500 cigarettes a year, or roughly seven cigarettes a day.
The debate over pollution and sudden international attention has struck a deeper nerve.
Since the ruling conservative nationalist Law and Justice party took power in 2015, it has rallied under the banner of Polish identity and independence being under attack, and has initiated laws reflecting that position.
The ruling that has earned much international criticism makes it illegal to imply Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
But it is in the coal mines of Poland that concerns over identity and sovereignty merge and seem to take centre stage: the coal industry is a great source of national Polish pride and identity, spanning generations, so much so that on December 4 parades are held to honour coal miners and their patron saint, St Barbara.
This sense of collective pride and identity surrounding coal has its origins in what many see as Polandâs national existential roots, buried literally deep in its mines.
Emilia Wesolowska, 36, the daughter of retired miner, who is pregnant with her first child understands the industryâs cultural significance.
âIt wasnât just the [mining] company giving work to the people, but it kind of also sponsored the local âenvironmentâ like some orchestras, sports events. Sports venues were owned by coal mines. So if a coal mine was shut down, it wasnât just the sacking of the people,â Wesolowska says.
"[Before the pregnancy] I used to try to spend as little time as possible outside. But I wasnât that obsessed with that. But now ⌠I do stay at home, honestly, because Iâm really scared that if I spent too much time outside, it wouldnât be good for my baby.â
In a country often occupied by neighbours throughout its troubled history, coal has represented what its citizens perceive as precious energy self-sufficiency and political sovereignty. As a consequence, the issue of air pollution and its internationally sanctioned solution - shifting to cleaner sources of energy - is deemed âun-nationalistâ by many, and a ânon-issueâ brought up by âLeftistsâ and âunpatrioticâ elements of society. That makes Polandâs complex relationship with the fossil fuel a âcanary in the mineâ for the countryâs wider political climate.
For many Poles, while an ideological battle is being fought on the political and public arena over
smog and the coal industry as a whole, the consequences of air pollution are far from being
theoretical.
Poland has been under increasing pressure by the European Union to cut greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global climate change, and subsequently to diversify its energy mix to include cleaner energy sources as well as scaling down its reliance on coal.
Meanwhile, adding to the local feeling of isolation caused by increasing disagreements with the EUâs directives, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in February that between 2015 and 2017, Poland breached the limits of concentration of pollutant particles in the atmosphere, or PM10.
While this ruling does not translate, at least for now, into fines that could mean billions of zlotys for Warsaw, Poland must present measures to tackle the problem.
This, along with plunging world coal prices and increased coal production costs, has threatened the highly subsidised Polish industry and its scores of highly politicised and socially sensitive jobs.
Unions and industry lobbies maintain that Poland must rely on coal at least for next 15 years unless the economy is to be allowed to plunge, bringing back memories of dreaded hardship.
However, the controversy and the threat of heavy fines have already produced some positive effects. On the day the ECJ ruled against Poland on its emissions, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki presented a plan to tackle the smog problem with measures such as thermal modernisation of buildings, so that households are expected to slice their reliance on coal in half.
Even though the measure is welcomed by activists and concerned residents, critics worry whether the government will indeed place what they see as the interests of Poles ahead of those of the coal industry.
As Poland increasingly draws attention in the international arena and steers towards a collision course with the EU on mounting issues such as refugee quotas, its clampdown on the independence of its judiciary and on its environment policies, it is preparing to host the next UN Climate Conference in Katowice, the Silesian coal heartland, at the end of this year.
Apprehensive Poles wait to see whether Polandâs concerns with its image and identity will lead it to clean up its act both at home and internationally ahead of the summit - or to entrench itself deeper in its coal pits.
Interesting article (from The Age on Sunday) about the reliance on coal in Poland, because people still use it to heat their homes.
Hopefully it doesnât allow David Irving to say that nasty gas found at Oswiecim, near Krakow. better known by its German name of Auschwitz, doesnât try to tell us that coal, not Zyklon-B, caused all those deaths.
Abbott and his Monash club will say itâs an April Foolâs Day joke. Unfortunately their foolishness extends across 365 days, not 1 (plus of course the extra day every fourth year).
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Someone get them on the phone to Canavan about our amazing âclean coalâ. They wonât know themselves! Or Kelly, or Andrews, or Abetz, or Abbott, or Joyce or one of the others now that theyâve officially outed themselves as shills.
Abbott has his fingers in the pie. They could borrow from him and call themselves âThe Suppositories of Wisdomâ. Canberraâs most â â â â backwards, industry clam grubbing, braggadocious, self servers masquerading as the heroes of every deluded and confused voter.
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Coal was dead but now it lives.
1948, Yallourn Gasification Plant.
Watch as Labor ushers us into a brave new world.
70 years later Victoria is still relying on NSW black coal.