Besseling is on a bus to nowhere
Piers Akerman – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:31 pm)
THE sad tale of independent State MP Peter Besseling’s campaign bus really tells it all.
473 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S IGNORANCE v INTELLIGENCE TAX
Tim Blair – Thursday, March 17, 11 (11:58 pm)
Ross Garnaut has such delightful ways of expressing himself.
Serious but not fatal
Andrew Bolt – Friday, March 18, 11 (07:01 am)
For updates on the nuclear emergency at Fukushima, go here. The problem remains serious, but still no one has been killed or is likely to be, although two workers are said to be missing.
There is reason to hope that power can be restored to the electric pumps that cool the spent nuclear fuel that has been in danger of overheating through later of water cover The International Atomic Energy Agency reports:
Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that engineers were able to lay an external grid power line cable to unit 2. The operation was completed at 08:30 UTC.
They plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.
The panic this emergency has induced is astonishing.
Garnaut fools us about China
Andrew Bolt – Friday, March 18, 11 (06:18 am)
Gillard Government warming adviser Ross Garnaut’s tricksy answer is likely to mislead people - and casts further doubt on his impartiality:
TONY JONES: But have you any indication that (China is) going to reduce the number of coal-fired power stations they have currently on the drawing boards? Because if they build them all, we’re in serious trouble.
ROSS GARNAUT: Oh, well, first, they are reducing the number of coal-fired power stations. They’re getting rid of a lot of small, inefficient, environmentally very unfriendly power stations, replacing them with super hyper-critical plants that, for coal, have very low emissions.
But, yes, you’re quite right in the premise of your question. It’s a big challenge if you’re still building coal-fired power stations no matter how environmentally clean they are as coal stations, it will still increase emissions.
In fact, China is increasing its number of power plants by the week:
If China’s carbon usage keeps pace with its economic growth, the country’s carbon dioxide emissions will reach 8 gigatons a year by 2030, which is equal to the entire world’s CO2 production today. That’s just the most stunning in a series of datapoints about the Chinese economy reported in a policy brief in the latest issue of the journal Science.
Coal power has been driving the stunning, seven plus percent a year growth in China’s economy. It’s long been said said that China was adding one new coal power plant per week to its grid. But the real news is worse: China is completing two new coal plants per week.
There are also doubts how much greenhouse friendly many are:
Most recently, construction of coal-fired power plants in China and India has been increasing rapidly with minimal application of pollution controls.
And if China backs off its huge push for more nuclear power following the emergency in Fukushima, it could be forced to rely even more on coal and gas, pushing up emissions even more:
In reaction to the ongoing nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, authorities in China are suspending approvals for planned nuclear power plants.
Garnaut and Julia Gillard’s attempts to paint China as a leader in the fight against global warming strikes me as not quite honest. It’s obviously meant to stop us from concluding the truth: that anything we do to cut our emissions will be overwhelmed by the growth of China’s.
The Chinese regime is developing nuclear energy at a rapid pace and officially plans to increase capacity to 40 gigawatts by 2020. Yet some officials have said that figure may be raised to 80 gigawatts—that’s eight times the current capacity in one decade.
Garnaut also misrepresents the primary reason for the closure of the dirtier coal-fired stations:
Australian Coal Association executive director Ralph Hillman told The Australian Online the closure of stations in China was to alleviate health concerns, not to reduce carbon emissions…
“They’re shutting them down largely to address health concerns from their mercury emissionsrather than their CO2 emissions,” he told The Australian Online.
Labor’s fear campaign is better
Andrew Bolt – Friday, March 18, 11 (05:52 am)
Julia Gillard isn’t sure whether she’s against fear campaigns of for them. From the same ABC Adelaide radio interview yesterday…
Gillard against fear campaigns:
... a scare campaign from Tony Abbott will be a reliable feature of our world in the same way the sun coming up every morning is a reliable feature of our world. That’ll happen.
Gillard for fear campaigns:
We do face a future with rising temperatures. That will mean more extreme droughts, more bushfires, increased cyclone activity. It’ll cut into jobs, because it’ll cut into things like food production. In the Murray Darling there’ll be less water around, less food production. It means it will cut into things like tourism. It’ll bleach coral in Great Barrier Reef and 60,000 Australians are actually involved in businesses that rely on the Great Barrier Reef being there.
Gillard against fear campaigns:
Now, Mr Abbott will run his scare campaign, that’s what Mr Abbott does...Well, in the face of a fear campaign, and Mr Abbott ran a vicious fear campaign against the flood levy and he doesn’t even bother talking about it anymore. Now, we’ve got another vicious fear campaign,
UPDATE
Michelle Grattan puts it mildly:
As she struggles with the web’s stickiness, Gillard is on the right policy track in wanting to price carbon, but is often held back by sounding less than credible.
I wouldn’t have bought Green’s excuse
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 17, 11 (06:37 pm)
Media Watch’s urbane host Jonathan Holmes thinks the ABC’s Drum editor Jonathan Green is a goose - but buys his denial that he has a bias towards any old slop that slimes a conservative:
(A) curious article was posted on the Unleashed section of this very site (The Drum). I didn’t read it at the time, but reading it now, with the benefit of hindsight, I got something of the same feeling of train-wreck-watching. Its author ... sported the unlikely moniker of Alene Composta.
According to The Drum’s editor, Jonathan Green, the piece was quickly taken down because it had “appeared inadvertently in a pre-legalled form. “On advice… we thought it safer to take it down”.
So I can’t post a link to it here.
Actually, I will, because I sincerely doubt Green’s excuse and see no legal problem with what is clearly satire.
But I can say that it dealt with the question of why certain members of the NSW Liberal party had apparently taken to calling Premier Kristina Kenneally a moose. Ms Composta suggested that the word ‘moose’ can refer to female genitalia, and that such a meaning would come naturally to your mind, “if you are a troglodyte, knuckle-dragging NSW Liberal”....I have to say, as someone who’s been working off and on for the ABC for 30 years, and for the BBC for a dozen years before that, if an unknown blogger had offered me a piece like that for publication on an ABC website in an election period, I’d have run a mile.
Especially this person. In an email introducing herself to Jonathan Green, she invites him to read another piece she’d written, titled “The Brown Stain On Tony Abbott’s Soul”. It attempts to explain the leader of the Opposition’s language - it was posted shortly after the “shit happens” episode - by reference to his past. It’s scatological, virulently anti-Catholic, and concerns itself with a wholly imagined episode or episodes of sexual abuse, of which a young Tony Abbott was supposedly the victim.
“Feel free to examine my other writings” wrote Ms Composta to Mr Green, with a link to her blog, which is coyly titled “Verdant Hopes”. If you do that, you find that it’s a blog that’s of very recent origin, and that it contains a plethora of leftist rants punctuated by mooning about her pet cat. To my eye, the blog is quite clearly a parody.
Indeed. So why did Green not realise it? Was he blinded by his Leftist bias with this and other anti-conservative smears he’s had to pull, and which Holmes lists?
Green denies it:
“My gullibility… was a result of my enthusiasm for what I thought was an interesting story that illuminated something of the inner workings of the political process… It was a sort of news excitement if you like, and not based on any political preference.”
Now, Alene Composta is grateful to Holmes - “my champion” - but I’m surprised he should have accepted Green’s denial of an anti-Liberal bias, given the email Composta sent Green, suggesting he run her piece:
Dear Jonathan,
would you be interested in a formal version of this post?
It seems to be that if we can link the Liberals to this crotch talk then there is still a chance we can nudge the election toward Labor, or at least do something to limit what looks like it will be catastrophic damage inflicted by voters.
If you prefer to give this assignment to one of your regulars (Kellie Tranter, for example, who writes much better and faster than me, I admit), I would not object.
The important thing is that we do everything we can, use every tool we know, to help Kristina out of the jam some silly moves and a lot of Murdoch venom has put her in.
Yours,
etc
As Alene notes:
The scheme and the urgency is all there, laid out in our correspondence.
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