CHAIRMAN of Australia’s “Climate Change” Authority Matt Keane, the NSW Liberal leftist Environment Minister who once proposed making half of the cars in NSW electric, is burning up taxpayer money at another UN climate conference, this time in Belem, Brazil.
Keane, looking smug, videoed himself spouting off in front of a large, hanging colour circle, representing the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals – entirely appropriate for a Liberal politician sold out to globalist objectives and employed by a Labor-Green federal government.
“The world hasn’t raised the white flag — even if the White House has,” Keane posted on X, where he attracted hundreds of very negative comments.
“At COP in Belém there’s real momentum for stronger climate action. Deniers lost the science fight, so the new denial is delay. Australia should cut emissions to drive jobs and prosperity,” he said.
George Schulte, an electrical engineer, slammed Keane as a “brainless nitwit who can’t even understand what science is”, and posted a diagram showing how the real scientific works versus “climate science”.
“There is no denial in science. But then again: You are just another stupid politician,” Schulte posted.
The public anger against the likes of Keane and his environmental bureaucratic elite is palpable, and was reflected in the federal Liberals voting against the “Net Zero by 2050” policy – even if the party maintained support for cutting emissions (a sop to Liberal voters who might be tempted to switch to the Teals).
Opposition to “climate change action” at Liberal and National grassroots level has been strong, due to the obvious failure of the policy to “make electricity cheaper” and do the opposite – to the extent now that what remains of heavy Australian metal processing industry is now in serious danger of closing down.
People in the regions are also alarmed by the invasive nature of wind and solar farms whose giant connector lines cut swathes across cropping and grazing paddocks and other rural infrastructure.
In Victoria, farmers and their rural supporters have banded together to stop Ausnet building it’s invasive network of 70-metre transmission towers and lines.
Replacing Australia’s 18 or 19 coal-fired power stations with wind, solar and batteries is economic suicide because of the widely dispersed an intermittent nature of wind and solar. These widely dispersed renewables operations need to be connected with a vast new power line network that must be backed up with battery banks and gas turbines to fill the many gaps in generation.
Meanwhile the coal fired power stations are not being maintained to standard and left to fall into disrepair as “old technology”. The reality is that Australia’s biggest coal-fired power stations have been in service since the 1960s, supplying inexpensive, bulk electricity 24 hours a day.
But government messaging reflected by media in recent years has been that these coal-fired power stations are “passed their use-by date” and on the way out. Nuclear is dismissed as “too expensive”, even though the final cost of the national renewables network has been put as high as 1 trillion dollars.
The Institute of Public Affairs has been warning against the renewables system for the past decade and a recent report demonstrated how an electricity supply system built on renewables is the most expensive of all options.
The underlying reason for this is the massive difference between the energy density of coal and oil versus wind and solar.
A study c omparing energy densities by Bradley E. Layton of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Drexel University, notes that “a single gallon of gasoline contains approximately 40 megajoules of chemical energy. Dividing energy by volume yields an energy density of ten billion joules per cubic meter.
“Gasoline is ten quadrillion times more energy-dense than solar radiation, one
billion times more energy-dense than wind and water power, and ten million times more
energy-dense than human power.” Coal has an energy density 50 to 75% that of oil, but still massively higher than wind or solar energy.
