Do we want to follow St Jacinda and price our industry out of existence?

The Spectator, 10 July 2020

Rio Tinto’s announced closure of its aluminium smelter in New Zealand due to uncompetitive power prices this week is a reminder of the vulnerability of Australia’s four remaining smelters, all of which face sharply higher prices courtesy of government energy policies. With energy costs comprising about a third of their total costs, smelters are industry’s bellwethers of future energy competitivenessand all four of Australia’s are on national suicide watch.

As a result of subsidies to wind and solar, these expensive and unreliable energy sources have caused high customer costs, both directly and indirectly, while also diverting the nation’s investment resources into avenues that actually damage the economy.

Commonwealth and state subsidies to wind and solar energy are running at just under $7 billion a year. $4 billion of these are as a result of requirements imposed on consumers by the Commonwealth’s Renewable Energy Target and its similar provisions for roof-top installations and measures taken by state governments. Some $2 billion of assistance to renewables comes from direct subsidies.

The effect of these subsidies is compounded by their forcing out of production lower-cost coal generators. As a result, prices ar ..... Read more .....pdf version

Power companies must decide: are they about virtue signalling or cheap, reliable energy?

The Spectator, 30 June 2020

Yesterday, The Australian reported dissent within the Australian Energy Council (AEC), the industry association that represents electricity generators. Of its 24 members two, Delta and Infigen,have strongly opposed a formal AEC position that advocates the industry operating with zero CO2 emissions by 2050. This would entail the elimination of coal and gas, which presently comprise 80 per cent of electricity supply.

That position is one adopted by other industry associations like the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the Australian Industry Group which, like the Minerals Council and the National Farmers Federation, long ago abandoned reform agendas and shifted their lobbying focus to virtue signalling and special deals for their members. The BCA even welcomed Anthony Albanese’s offer to have the government join it in accepting the ALP’s policy as “bipartisan”.

By plumping for fuel neutrality, the AEC secretariat has also faced reduced access to green dominated state government bodies, which provide energy subsidies costing almost $1 billion a year.

All major industry associations now promote abandoning electricity generation from coal as the key to reducing greenhouse gas ..... Read more .....pdf version

Albo’s Claytons climate policy switch

The Spectator, 24 June 2020

In the media today, we see two contrasting ALP position papers, by Kevin Rudd in the AFR, and by Anthony Albanese in a Press Club address pre-released to some media outlets.

Kevin Rudd, in ranting against “the faceless men of the factions” claims among the ALP successes that, “We ratified the Kyoto Protocol, (in 2007) legislated a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target now delivering 20 per cent clean energy, and legislated twice for a carbon price only to be defeated by the Liberal-Green coalition”.

Rudd’s measures accelerated the trend to subsidised wind and solar, the upshot of which became clear in 2016. At that time, the increased market share of difficult-to-control intermittent generation finally forced the departure from the market of two very significant coal generators, the Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria. The upshot was first, the collapse of the South Australian electricity supply system, demonstrated the vulnerability of a system that is dependent on renewables, and secondly the doubling of the wholesale costs of electricity. ..... Read more ..... pdf version

A Democracy if We Can Keep It

Quadrant Online, 18 June 2020

In an AFR column, former Liberal leader Alexander Downer has reprised a conversation with the late Lord Carrington in which Britain’s one-time Home Secretary suggested democracy would struggle to survive. It was a view Downer rejected at the time but of which he is not now so sure. I have visited this theme in the past – for example here, here and here — and in these times of madness, when popular movements demand the sacking of entire police forces and an incident in Minneapolis sees statues of Captain Cook vandalised in Australia, I return to the theme with a marked degree of pessimism.

The reverence for democracy arose only over the last a century or so. Prior to then, rule by consent – especially with regard to taxation – had been common, as affirmed in 1215 by Magna Carta. But that did not mean rule by the people. The great Greek philosophers were acutely aware of the deficiencies of mob rule in Athens, and American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century were similarly concerned that the gentle tyranny of King George could be replaced with something much, much worse. Their belief was in life, liberty and property. John Adams wrote:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty … The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

Like it or not, Australia needs Donald Trump

The Spectator, 18 June 2020

It is difficult to imagine a more critical juncture in Australian history:

We confront a world downturn, accompanied by a new kind of cold war between the United States and China,
Our international protector, the US is going through a crisis of confidence, if not a populist revolution, that is engulfing the rule of law while within the Democratic Party, younger progressives and socialists are displacing moderates.
Australia’s helicopter money, response to COVID-19 has further damaged an economy weakened by decades of punitive energy and environmental regulatory measures undermining its comparative advantage in manufacturing, agriculture and mining. At the same time, these productive sectors have been carrying an increasing burden of social services. All this is compounded by the military folly of selecting politically correct soldiers and hardware.

President Trump right now is trailing by 13 points in the polls. The constellation of forces creating this are the virulently hostile Democrat establishment, pushed further by the rising influence of its younger green left, supported by anti-capitalist organisations like Sunrise and Antifa. They also include the Never Trumpers who preferred the corrupt Clintons and now acquiesce in a Democrat candidate under radical ..... Read more ..... pdf version

Coronavirus: We can’t spend our way to wealth

The Australian, 11 June 2020

In addressing the effects of the pandemic lockdown, the Morrison government has injected $84bn under the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs and another $688m for home renovations. The Reserve Bank of Australia has, in addition, engineered cheap loans of at least $90bn, and possibly much more.

Though sometimes referring to these measures as a stimulus, the government would deny it is going down the same path as Kevin Rudd, who spent $200bn attempting, ineffectually, to combat the global financial crisis.

A justification for this generous support is that shutdown policies causing workers to be evicted from their jobs were taken in the national interest. But now we face an economic slump.

While the federal bureaucracy, and Treasury in particular, is full of credentialed economists, they are, for the most part, Keynesian — and therefore to counter a fall in output they prescribe demand stimuli through government spending, or tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts.

A minority would have been schooled in Friedman’s monetarism and would favour creating phantom savings, which depress ..... Read more ..... pdf version

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop

Quadrant Online, 9 June 2020

Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an archaic source of electricity now being battered by upstart competitors wind and solar. Bear in mind that world electricity supply pans out at 38 per cent for coal, 23 per cent gas and 26 per cent hydro/nuclear. Wind/solar supply 10 per cent.

IRENA tirelessly advocates for renewables, saying they “could form a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” And in the purple prose so common with these green-spruiking agencies it claims, “Scaling up renewables can boost struggling economies. It can save money for consumers, pique the appetites of investors and create numerous high-quality new jobs.” Investment in renewables is amplified by other benefits, the story goes, as it is alleged to bring “health, sustainability and inclusive prosperity.” When it comes to renewables, no snake-oil salesman of old could hold a carbon-neutral candle to the likes of their modern green-lipped urgers.

IRENA would have us see renewable power installations as a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 ..... Read more

Is a COVID based slump causing an energy policy re-think?

Catallaxy Files, 2 June 2020

I have a piece in the Spectator this morning that builds upon the challenging commentaries by Senator Canavan and Craig Kelly calling for termination of subsidies to renewables and leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. These measures, and those earlier under the Kyoto Accord, drive up energy costs and are destroying manufacturing which would be flourishing under the low energy costs we could have.

Some in the ALP, especially Joel Fitzgibbon representing a coal mining seat, also agree.

Australian electricity supply has, in the course of 20 years, moved from just about the cheapest in the world to one of the most expensive. The present relative position is indicated by this graph. ..... Read more

If we want to rebuild manufacturing post coronavirus, we need to cut the cost of energy

The Spectator, 2 June 2020

In one of the most challenging commentaries by a senior politician, former resources minister Matt Canavan, advocates leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia has agreed to take actions that will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. He argues that Australia cannot afford to meet the treaty obligations which require replacing electricity generated from coal by expensive wind and solar. The subsidies this requires drive up the cost of energy and, with our high wage economy, prevents us having a vibrant manufacturing sector.

Steep electricity price increases have undermined the nation's ..... Read more

..... pdf version

Energy policy disaster continues; more intervention, less market

Catallaxy Files, 21 May 2020

The Commonwealth keeps pressing policy issues that, on the one hand, dilute the spending egregiously allocated to renewables but then divert it to the failed carbon capture and storage (CSS) adventure and to the highly speculative unleashing of cheap energy from hydrogen. It released a report of an activist-stacked and serviced committee chaired by Grant King that promoted this, as well as inching the nation closer to a cap-and-trade emission reduction program. I wrote this piece for The Spectator yesterday.

In a new initiative, the government has again appointed another committee of people who are wedded to the green energy revolution to advise on new gee-wizz tech issues. It will get the answers it expects to get and embark on another spending spree.

The government has also provided yet another “road map” compiled by the environment department for a grateful minister. This favours gas (which it says is cheaper than coal – an absurd statement regarding Australia) and the colossally expensive pumped storage option. Like all previous reports it predicts the dawn of an era when renewables will be the cheapest form of energy but does say they need to be “firmed” by attendant supplies of controllable energy (hence gas and pumped storage). ..... Read more

Why is the Morrison Government leaving the back door open to a carbon tax?

The Spectator, 20 May 2020

As part of the ABC’s climate conspiracy agenda, Four Corners this week highlighted the “anger” at the government from the senior mandarins from its failure to deliver their goal of a carbon tax. Their preferred approach was notwithstanding the tax rate would today have to be $US100 per tonne, a staggering $80 billion a year impost.

Also unmentioned was government action on the chimaera of climate change that presently costs over $4 billion a year in regulatory and direct funding. Included in this are regulatory requirements to support wind and large-scale solar (at a cost this year of $1.1 billion) and rooftop solar which this year is costing $1.7 billion.

There are two components of the Commonwealth’s Climate Solutions Package of direct spending budget on emission reductions. The first is a “$2 billion Climate Solutions Fund to support Australian farmers, businesses and communities to adopt new technologies that reduce ..... Read more ..... pdf version

Renewable energy’s destruction of the electricity supply system. Has the penny dropped?

Catallaxy Files, 16 May 2020

Remarkably, the Energy Minister joins the market manager in recognising the perverse effect roof-top renewable energy installations have on the electricity supply system. Those installations impose costs far greater than the value they tap in “free” sunlight. This is an outcome common with all wind/solar facilities.

The unmentioned fact is that there would be negligible take-up of these facilities without subsidies, which annually cost consumers and taxpayers over $4 billion and have caused a doubling of the electricity price. Though economy-saboteurs comprising greens, the ALP and the Turnbull Liberals have been the most complicit in requiring these, the policy approach has also been shared by people who claim to be conservative rationalists within the Coalition. Astonishingly, the current government remains in favour of the on-going policy of subsidising roof-top solar installations and only one MP, Craig Kelly, is outspoken about the damage being done by the subsidies to renewables! ..... Read more

Gassed-Up and Light-Headed for Hydrogen

Quadrant Online, 11 May 2020

There can be no doubting the reversion of businesses’ political advice to self-interested advocacy, in contrast to the glory days of 40 years ago. At that time there was a strong push for deregulation, but industry leaders have since backslid into promoting their particular interests, seeking subsidies (especially for energy) and, not unrelatedly, virtue-selling to deflect NGO criticism and its associated damage to share prices. I have a piece in The Spectator that addresses this.

The advice from businesses and their representatives is now best politely ignored. Firms willvirtue-signal but in acting on the advice they proffer – usually focussing on calls for some form of carbon tax – they face the test of the marketplace. As I note, business success is dominated by iron laws of profit. Those leaders who implement measures that veer too close to the quicksands of virtue-signalling will be swallowed by it.

In today’s AFR, the superb Joe Aston illustrates this by focussing on Rio Tinto which, having sold its coal interests, has recently assumed the pole position among the climate alarmists. Rio is, with Shell and BHP, dominant among the international Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) which this month has ..... Read more

Whatever happened to economic leadership from business?

The Spectator, 11 May 2020

Having reached the pinnacles of their profession, business leaders have earned the right to speak with authority and have become accustomed to having that authority recognised. Their success stems from mastering the intricacies of their own firm: what to buy and sell, how to make savings, what product innovations to adopt and so on. But these skills rarely metamorphose into political leadership – indeed Donald Trump might be unique in this respect among world statesmen.

A key reason for this is that business leaders have one overriding goal, maximising the wealth of their shareholders, whereas political success measures are diffuse.

Not having time to master wider political issues, business leaders tend to relate national interests to those of their firm, immortalised as “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”, in the (misquoted) words of a former GM president. Beyond this, business leaders ..... Read more ..... pdf version

The COVID lockdown and spendathon – was it worth it and what is to be done?

Catallaxy Files, 7 May 2020

I have a piece in Quadrant where I estimate the person-years lives saved in Australia at 80,000. Each person-year is worth, on the government’s data, $219,000, hence saving is quantified at $17 billion.

The cost in outlays and lost production I estimate at $235 billion, fourteen fold the benefits in lives saved.

If however the initial health experts estimates of likely deaths without a lockdown had proved accurate the value of the lives saved would have been $526 billion, ostensibly far in excess of the costs incurred.

But we have to be wary of applying these high values per life saved in the context of very large numbers since costs per person become increasingly unaffordable as the numbers to be saved increase. More importantly, we have to have a better fix on health projections than one that, in this cas ..... Read more

The Lockdown Strategy Called to Account

Quadrant Online, 7 May 2020

Writing in The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen has pointed out that the statistical value of life used in regulatory assessment is $4.9 million for someone expected to live another 40 years — $213,000 per year Such measures are income-dependent; in the US the value was put at $9 million and a 2012 study for Turkey put it at five and a half years per capita income or $59,000. Such measurements offend self-righteous claims that “every life is priceless” but such notions, if followed, would impose costs that would bring about other and additional loss of lives.

While Albrechtsen’s column is written in the context of coronavirus expenditure, she does not extend it to examining the worthiness of..... Read more

Revealed: the true cost of our stimulus spending

The Spectator, 7 May 2020

Relative to GDP Australian government spending to address COVID-19 has been among the highest in the world.

The Morrison government seems pleased to have been a world leader in mortgaging the future to combat the crisis. Its package, totalling $320 billion, comprises five elements:

The PM’s initially announced health spending $2.4 billion
JobKeeper and JobSeeker business support $168.78 billion
Credit support$125 billion
Access to superannuation$0.876 billion
Income support$23.839 billion

..... Read more ..... pdf version

The coronavirus can’t stop the windpower blowhards, let alone economic reality
The Spectator, 30 April 2020

For Australian energy, 2020 started precariously. The bushfires showed the vulnerability of the nation to its subsidy-induced reliance on renewable energy.

Average prices in January reached near-record levels. In addition, the market manager was forced to intervene spending over four times as much as normal — $310 million — buying services and compensating suppliers in order to stabilise the system.

In February, low demand, an influx of renewable energy, and high supplies of hydro brought about a halving of the previous month’s prices. These conditions continued in March when they were reinforced by a forced cessation of demand and ample gas supplies caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

And in April prices fell to $35 per MWh. Such levels ..... Read more ..... pdf file

A COVID-19 economic recovery program

Catallaxy Files, 23 April 2020

While the green left will use the crisis to march us to lower living standards and greater losses of liberty, the Commonwealth Government is making the right noises about reducing the tax and regulatory measures that have held us back. But do they know where to start?

The tax reforms are easy: pare back company taxes and other imposts on production.

I offered some advice in regulatory refom in an article published in the Spectator. These regulatory sins comprise areas where real economic dividends can be made, collectively greater than the losses by the Commonwealth’s generosity with our savings and future incomes. These are

Strip Back the Fair Work Commission’s functions to become similar to those in other jurisdictions: oversighting issues of unfair dismissal and human rights abuses etc.
Align land regulations for new housing development with those in Germany and US States like Texas, the Carolinas and Ohio, thereby reducing the cost of a new home by $200,000.
Curtail the creation of new national parks and address other land use measures that prevent farming, mining and logging in vast tracts of ...... Read more

Scott, Josh and Mathias: here’s how you get us out of this mess

The Spectator, 22 April 2020

The Morrison government has flagged tax cuts and aggressive deregulation as part of a pro-business road to economic recovery. A focus on stimulating rapid growth on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic is expected to guide October’s federal budget. — AAP report, April 20.

Future government action must focus strongly upon savings as a result of the 15 per cent of GDP ($340 billion) that has been spent on combating coronavirus.

Fifty years ago, the Commonwealth budget accounted for 18.3% of GDP. In the years since then, even before the current spending spree, the share had grown to 24.6%. Right now, with an extra $340 billion budgeted, the share of GDP will have become 35 %.

The nation’s phenomenal intrinsic wealth allowed Australia to prosper in spite of the growing claim on income by a largely .....Read more .....pdf file

Green Snouts Sniff a COVID Windfall

Quandrant Online, 16 April 2020

The Pope, deprived of the counsel of Cardinal Pell, the Church’s most astute voice, foolishly called coronavirus “nature’s response” for failures to act on climate change. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that coronavirus would be recruited to push for additional renewable energy subsidies to reinforce those that have already created today’s high cost, low quality electricity.

Coal Wire, an anti-fossil fuel publication, was quick to swoop on a Harvard study that said the pollutant PM2.5 exacerbated coronavirus and that coal power stations were an important source of the pollutant. Actually less than 5 per cent of PM2.5 particulate emissions come from energy production.

Also fast out of the blocks was the anti-fossil fuel head of the Paris based International Energy .....Read more

Does the Morrison government have the skills to lead us out of the recession it has created?

The Spectator, 16 April 2020

The $320 billion in costs the Australian government has incurred to sustain and stimulate the economy in light of the COVID-19 crisis is money spent for consumption without it attracting any corresponding production. It is a permanent loss that can only be retrieved by increased production. Two areas where reform could compensate for this loss of revenue are the cessation of wasteful spending and regulations in water and energy, where total savings of $50 billion are available.

But in addition to these direct savings, removal of these regulatory and taxpayer costs would unleash even larger productivity benefits in the two sectors.

For water, in Australia’s most important irrigation area, the Murray Darling Basin, the government’s actions in buying up 20 per cent of irrigators’ water for spurious environmental purposes has brought a tenfold increase in the water price, and hence its cost to farmers. At least $7 billion could be saved by the government reselling the water it holds to irrigators and recalling the funds yet to be spent.

In addition, the economy would make other gains. Water is an essential input to agriculture and the increased output restoring ..... read more .....pdf version

ScoMo’s gone as crazy as Kev, but we can still save the economy

The Spectator, 2 April 2020

When the Prime Minister and Treasurer appointed Stephen Kennedy as the Treasury Secretary, they opted for a bureaucrat who had been the architect of Turnbull’s potentially disastrous carbon tax. They would also have known him to have been a senior adviser on Kevin Rudd’s exorbitant spendathon following the 2008 global financial crisis.

Unsurprisingly, the Secretary of the Treasury recommended that the government implement a “Full Rudd” coronavirus program, suggesting the British approach was insufficiently stimulatory.  Ministers need little encouragement to embark on spending sprees but in times past Treasury used to be a brake on their ambitions. 

Australia’s spending now totals $320 billion. At 14 per cent of GDP this is a magnitude similar to that of the UK program, though larger than that of the US at least fivefold that of Japan, Canada, Korea, Norway or New Zealand. Commonwealth spending programs go well beyond maintaining the nation’s businesses and sustaining those who are unemployed and extends into Keynesian economic stimulus territory. The stimulus effect will be ..... Read more ..... pdf version

Emergency Measures in Need of an Exit Strategy

Quadrant, 25 March 2020

It started with Mirko Bagaric in The Australian — “Release super to boost economy” — who, while justifiably railing against the superannuation funds’ fees, argued that allowing people to access 10 per cent of their super could inject up to $300 million into the economy. Mirko has separately suggested that the actual amount might be $150 billion.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has accepted a watered-down version of this, which he thinks might inject $27 billion into the economy by allowing people to access $20,000 of their superannuation savings, interestingly, over two years, an indication that the malaise won’t be over soon. This is part of the fiscal package which is now at $189 billion. That’s 9.7 per cent of today’s GDP but considerably more down the road, with GDP contracting by maybe 20 per cent.

Much of the expenditure, that which seeks to cushion the costs to those worst affected, is sensible. But, even so, there has to be be an exit strategy. We have doubled the dole, for example, but when do we return it to previous levels?

Some of the money is conjured up by the Reserve Bank, which is buying shares and bonds to depress interest rates. This “quantitative easing” ..... Read more

Revealed: the Deep Green State

The Spectator, 24 March 2020

A story in the Guardian demonstrates the impotence of government against the Deep State machinery that it nominally controls.

This involved an attempt, in line with government policy, to divert money from the Emissions Reduction Fund to less harmful activities than efficiency-undermining promotion of green energy that it normally funds. The case under review was an attempt by Delta Energy to get some $14 million support for refurbishing its Vales Point plant, an outcome that would extend the plant’s life (and incidentally reduce its greenhouse gas emissions). The Guardian notes that “energy baron” Trevor St Baker is a part owner of the plant.

The Emissions Reduction Fund was set up by the Abbott Government following its election in 2013. Its Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, was an avid promoter of “direct action” which involves buying out firms’ greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing emissions by taxing coal. In fact, buying out emissions simply funds canny firms who can offer a good story, while providing negligible effects on total emissions, since the cashiered production ..... Read more pdf version

Danandrewstan: two steps forwards, one step back as energy security matters more than ever

The Spectator, 18 March 2020

The latest energy policy from the Victorian government is to place a constitutional ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration but once again permit the search for conventional gas in the state.

The proposed policy was developed in consultation with an industry/activist Independent Stakeholder Advisory Panel. The panel was chaired by the Lead Scientist, Amanda Caples, a pharmacologist, who was previously responsible for developing the state’s “strategic industry growth plans”. In announcing the policy, the Premier said it was “a science-based approach”. Presumably, he had in mind political science.

The exploration bans were first implemented in 2012 by the Coalition government under the then minister for energy — and now opposition leader — Michael O’Brien. For the Coalition back in 2012 seeking to blunt opposition from green radicals, a ban on new gas supplies seemed like good cynical policy.

There were ample supplies of Bass Strait gas and some farmers opposed gas exploration, with others wanting more ..... Read more pdf version

How to Make Things a Whole Lot Worse

Quadrant Online, 17 March 2020

Deaths from coronavirus were up yesterday (March 16) on the previous day. Although death rates lower than one per cent are being quoted, the macro data (deaths/deaths-plus-recoveries) is 8 per cent, and 15 per cent in Australia (see the chart below). Hopefully that will improve. Otherwise, if Angela Merkel is correct in estimating that 60 per cent of humankind will eventually contract the disease, we can expect over 300 million deaths. Tomas Pueyo’s brilliant analysis suggests a death rate levelling off at 3-5 per cent for countries or areas that are unprepared, but one-tenth of this for those quickly identifying and isolating those affected, and intensely treating the 20 per cent who develop the most serious symptoms. Among the latter are South Korea and China outside of Wuhan, the coronavirus’ origin and epicentre.

Despite an inevitably horrendous death toll the world will recover, leaving the virus as just another background killer, like its garden-variety cousin influenza.

For the present, the world is now in a very deep economic depression. There is no shortage of consumer demand but the basis of that demand, income from the supply of goods and services, has been or soon will be sharply curtailed. ..... Read more

Coronavirus: Pump-priming is economic folly

The Australian, 17 March 2020

In normal times we have a healthy disdain for the insights and capabilities of our political leaders. In Australia, the commentariat has just emerged from agendas that blamed them for not acting fast enough to combat the bushfire crisis — even having contributed to it — and from looting taxpayer funds to curry favour with voters in the sports rorts saga. In the US, half the population thinks their President is so corrupt that he should be placed on trial.

Yet suddenly, with the coronavirus crisis, politicians and their advisers are thought to have powers and the wisdom to turn back tides and lead us out of the wilderness.

The US is focused on stopping the spread of the disease, finding a cure and easing the discomfort of those afflicted. Britain, like Australia, has added measures to assist business with investment support. .....Read more pdf version

The Coronavirus stimulus package: not just another trip down the Swanee?

The Spectator, 12 March 2020

We have mixed messages on coronavirus: Angela Merkel has said 60-70 per cent of Germans will contract the disease, while the latest data from China and South Korea shows new cases having peaked and, in the case of China, recoveries closing in on new cases.

Aside from spending on health precautions and seeking to staunch the spread, what do governments do?

The Trump Administration is talking about ensuring those thrown out of work are looked after financially – the equivalent of community action in medieval plagues when stricken villages were isolated but fed by those nearby. In a rare flash of economic lucidity, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the government should focus on guaranteeing paid sick leave for infected workers and extending unemployment insurance for people put out of work. But Trump is also urging the Federal Reserve to embark on a financial stimulus.

Australian politicians look likely to avoid panicky measures involving economic stimulus. Hopefully this means they have learned from past ..... Read more

The last thing we need now is more costly climate virtue signalling

The Spectator 10 March 2020

Desperate to attend the September 2020 Glasgow climate change summit with a positive program, the Coalition government continues to promote, at the expense of national living standards, elitist-appealing measures that force lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The new elixir is to boost investment in CO2-free hydrogen technologies which, if not mystical, hardly require funding from Australian taxpayers. New support measures add to the $1.5 billion annual funding of a bewildering acronymic gaggle of institutions (including CEFC, ARENA, CER and CSIRO) and at least $2 billion in subsidies to wind and solar.

The Glasgow meeting is the third phase of climate change programs.

The first phase was established by the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, in which rich nations pledged to stabilise their emissions. Although only ..... Read more

Toilet paper shortages – why is Australia not a net exporter?

Catallaxy Files, 7 March 2020

It was a relief to learn that Australia is 80 per cent self-sufficient in toilet paper and there is, therefore, no need for panic buying.

But hang on a minute. First, that 80 per cent is for a market that has suddenly grown – perhaps doubled. So, there may indeed be a shortage.

What should be more worrisome is that Australia is only 80 per cent self-sufficient in an industry sector which we should be a massive net exporter. We actually import 50 per cent more wood and paper products than we export.

In days of yore, governments were always looking for value-added industries that could leverage off our natural advantages. Because we had cheap energy and bauxite, we were world leaders in aluminium production and this led to fantasies that we’d become a key part of the global supply chains for industries like automobiles (engines) and – I kid you not – for windmills (blades). Governments sank considerable funding into these ventures.

They were doomed by the labour market arrangements that, with the connivance of governments and the legal system, have priced Australia .....Read more

Revealed: the sickly state of the National Electricity Market

The Spectator, 26 February 2020

This year’s annual report from the regulatory collective that is the Energy Security Board awards itself gongs for overseeing a (temporary) spot price decline and assembling an armoury if new tools to prevent catastrophe from a system poisoned by renewable energy subsidies. Unfortunately, it declines to illuminate the additional costs this has entailed, preferring instead to give cover to the politics behind the demise of the industry’s efficiency.

The report is a consensus by the peak energy body itself and its three sister regulators, the Australian Energy Market Commission, which has custody over the market rules; the Australian Energy Regulator responsible for setting network prices; and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), responsible for scheduling supplies and ensuring supply/demand balance. It addresses the “challenge” to:

supply electricity when solar and wind are not available;
create new markets for services like frequency, voltage control, inertia, and system strength; and .... Read more pdf version

George Calombaris gets done like a dinner

The Australian, 14 February 2020

George Calombaris is a victim of the Australian regulatory state. The failure of his restaurant businesses has been greeted by a mixture of schadenfreude that a tall poppy has been exposed for having cheated his employees, and tut-tutting for not being sufficiently alive to the regimen under which his industry’s labour hire regulations operate.

In between, there have been pointed remarks about how other miscreants — for example, the ABC — have not been subject to the indignation that a commercial operator has faced for not having paid his staff in accordance with the labyrinthine government-specified rates.

There are three points that better describe what has taken place.

First, other than in the context of the highly regulated labour arrangements that cover the Australian hospitality industry, there was no fraud involved. The employees agreed on a package of wages, hours and other responsibilities; they were for the most part seasoned workers ..... Read more .....pdf version

One Word: ‘Klobuchar’

Quadrant, 14 February 2020

When the US Presidential polls had the triumvirate of Biden, Saunders and Warren (above) vying for the November 2020 date with destiny, President Trump was sitting pretty. As the poll leader, Biden was a known quantity. He was showing his age in mangling words, he had a legacy as an Obama failure, was an insider in an era when this is poison, and had a son who had benefitted immensely from his patronage and protection in getting paid handsomely for a job in Ukraine for which, aside from his father’s political clout, he was utterly unqualified. He would have been crushed by Trump’s relentless pressure as the campaign progressed.

Elizabeth Warren adoption of far-left socialist ideas combined with a fraudulent invention of indigeneity would have likewise been a victim of Trump’s acidic bluntness. Trawling the depths of wokeness (“reparations for gay couples”) she would have ended the campaign humiliated.

Bernie Sanders has never pretended to be anything other than a Communist sympathiser. He encapsulates the anti-Americanism that is ..... Read more

How the rise of environmental politics is threatening traditional allegiances – and world trade

The Spectator, 10 February 2020

Some 172 years ago Karl Marx opened the modern era of politics in proclaiming that a spectre was haunting Europe. The spectre he referred to was in the title of his “Communist Manifesto”.

Marx was talking in the context of the series of political disturbances in major European capital cities in 1848. He interpreted these as bookending the ancien regime, the evolution from which had been brutally signalled in 1789 with the French Revolution and perhaps even back in 1649 when Charles I paid the price for his “high crimes and misdemeanours”. Marx saw the events of 1848 as presaging revolution and a new era of peace and prosperity where private property would be abolished and income would be earned “by each according to his abilities” and apportioned “to each according to his needs”.

The shift to the modern state had been and continued to be evolutionary and founded on individual private proper..... Read more pdf version

Democracy becoming dominated by the politics of envy?

Catallaxy Files, 24 January 2020

Among the attendees of the recent Mont Pelerin Society were Steve K, Sinclair and me. A great many issues were discussed in the debate on liberty, efficiency, their friends and enemies.

I have a piece in today’s The Australian, which summarised my view of the more important take-aways. They include

No attendees doubted market capitalism’s higher efficiency and ability to deliver growth, including for the benefit of poorer members of society. But recent developments have undermined confidence that the model will continue to prevail.

These include the resumption of growth in the size of government and a weakening of property rights by, for example, the seizure of land usages rights. In Australia, government actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through planning laws and measures that restrain commercial activity include the increase in regulatory intrusions and permissions, like those that resulted in the Adani coalmine taking nine years to be ..... Read more

Wealth will weaken if we ever yield to populism

The Australian, 24 January 2020

This week’s Davos meeting of virtue-signallers and plutocrats was preceded last week by a meeting at Stanford University of the Mont Pelerin Society. Long dominated by Milton Friedman, among the society’s luminaries today are two former US secretaries of state, George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice.

Founded in the aftermath of World War II, the Mont Pelerin Society set out arguments that free markets based on property rights and the rule of law were the keys to delivering prosperity and freedom. Its meetings provided an intellectual bulwark to the then prevailing attractions of communism or at least to socialism.

As the 20th century progressed, the sclerotic state of the socialist world was increasingly evident. By contrast, adopting the Mont Pelerin principles saw a revived Germany and Japan, followed in the 1970s by the creation of prosperity in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. .....Read more

Renewables rent-seekers aren’t interested in bushfire prevention – or cheap efficient energy

Spectator Australia, 20 January 2020

No amount of mouth-frothing by Piers Morgan or artful deception bythe legions of renewable energy warriors published by the Australian Financial Review and the Guardian will change the facts about this summer. The severe fire season is due to dry weather (not itself conceivably a result of climate change – rainfall trends have been flat for the past century) and the accumulation of combustible material on the forests’ floors. The build-up of combustible material is a result of the criminal neglect of the authorities to undertake or, in the case of private land, to prevent cool burn-offs. Less than one-third of the recommended hectares have been burned-off.

Subsidy seekers in the renewable sector and among its media clients are hinting, sometimes even claiming, that the fires are caused by Australian delinquency in inadequately forcing the replacement of coal by wind and solar. Such policies could never have any effect on the climate. Moreover, Australia has harmed itself far more than any other nation in substituting renewables for low cost, reliable coal. This is demonstrated by these two ...... Read more ......pdf file

Time to Bight the bullet over gas scare campaign

The Australian, 8 January 2020

The NSW government is considering approving the establishment of a liquefied natural gas import facility moored off Port Kembla. This same government has erected formidable barriers to domestic gas production.

Gas imports to Australia were last considered 20 years ago. The source was to be Papua New Guinean gas, to be sent here via sub-sea pipeline, then distributed — again by pipeline — to Queensland and NSW. The then federal government liked the idea as a way of providing aid to PNG.

At the time, Santos and Origin Energy were in the early stages of developing coal-seam gasfields in southern Queensland but were struggling to secure domestic markets for their gas.

Gas prices were less than $3 a gigajoule, a similar price to that which prevailed then and now in the US but less than half today’s Australian price.

However, gas drilling methods were about to be revolutionised. In a world first, the small, privately owned company CH4 Gas drilled three ..... Read more

Soleimani’s assassination and its aftermath

Catallaxy Files, 8 January 2020

A mass murderer calling himself a general is killed on Donald Trump’s orders either and/or because he escalated terror by killing yet another American or to take him out before he escalated even further.

George W. Bush did not target him during the height of the Iraq War, when Iranian-supplied roadside bombs and Iran-backed militias were killing hundreds of American troops. By 2011, that toll had reached more than 600 and Barack Obama was the president; he too declined to hit the general. Indeed in his $150 billion Danegeld to Iran he financed that nation’s Middle East reign of terror. But Trump, who came into office vowing to pull the United States out from Middle Eastern wars, decided to cross a line two war-president predecessors feared breaching.

The reaction;

Joe Biden, said Trump had “tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox”.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the move “‘increased the likelihood of more deaths and new Middle East conflict.”..... Read more

Madrid: the climate catastrophe juggernaut trundles on

Spectator Australia, 20 December 2019

As well as nation-states, an astonishing well-funded 2,330 NGOs, many with multiple delegates, fronted up to this month’s Madrid climate conference. The macabre festival was re-located from Santiago because the Chilean populace had risen in revolt about the higher prices foisted upon them by its government following the green gods just as faithfully as the virtue signalling textbook says they must.

The objective of the successive biennial UN climate change Conference of Parties is to replace the messy cacophony of market capitalism by one that operates under the guidance of the intellectual aristocracy. The all-pervasive carbon dioxide and other gases that have been increased with the march of higher global living standards offer the catalyst for this power transfer. For, even though the evidence continues to elude us that higher emissions of these harmless gases is bringing significant, let alone catastrophic, global temperature increases/climate change, those favouring the transfer of power include alarmists, lobbyist and bien pensants guilt-ridden at the success of the West. They have marched through the institutions and assembled signatures of people, real and imagined, in support of zero emissions. They have persuaded mainstream media and politics that ..... Read more ..... pdf

Electricity supply continues is dismal march

Catallaxy Files, 11 December 2019

I have a piece in the Spectator today that draws together some recent developments in energy policy being developed in the half dozen or so agencies that control what is ostensibly, and was in earlier days, a market with supply largely from private enterprise. I also did a session on the issue with Chris Kenny.

The destruction of the once highly efficient electricity supply industry by government and bureaucratic oversight is, of course, well known. This, the most vital Australian industry, continues to hurtle towards Armageddon, courtesy of government subsidies to the intrinsically uncompetitive renewables. And the besieged Energy and Environment Minister, Angus Taylor, is in Paris defending the semi EU-type policy Australia has adopted while trying to avoid going the full Greta.

This week we had three publications from agencies that are piloting us towards the economic oblivion politicians have determined upon.

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has released its price forecast for the next few years. Halleluiah! Prices to households are falling 10 per cent the year after next after ramping up 30 per cent (250 per cent for wholesale prices) since the 2017 forced closure of Hazelwood. The ..... Read more

Cheaper power coming? Blink and you’ll miss it if our Paris goals remain

The Spectator Australia, 11 December 2019

There is a panoply of agencies regulating energy at the Commonwealth level and not all of these seem to be rowing in the same direction. The main agencies are

The Energy and Environment Department with 490 staff in energy and greenhouse — plus another 454 in its dependent agencies: Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Clean Energy Regulator and the Climate Change Authority;
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) with 283 staff;
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) with 95 staff;
The Energy Security Board (ESB) with perhaps 10 staff; and
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) with 670 staff.

Although AEMO is mainly concerned with operational issues, its CEO and a good many of its resources are heavily involved in ..... Read more .....pdf version

Good Sense Sold Up the River

Quadrant Online, 6 December 2019

Earlier this week some 3,000 irrigators and their supporters rallied in Canberra against government policy on Murray-Darling irrigation and management. With the cacophony of dozens of semi-trailers’ blaring horns, it was certainly noisy. Ominously for the National Party, their representatives were treated with considerable hostility, particular anger being directed at water Minister David Littleproud. Enduring the jeers, the Nationals would have been especially dismayed at the warm welcome for Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts.

The current drought has exacerbated a contrived water shortage that government policy has engineered in the Murray. Having set a cap on water extractions in 1999 — roughly a third of the average flow — the productive uses of this “working river” have been gradually reduced. As a supplier of a vital agricultural input to a formerly barren area that grew to supply 40 per cent of the nation’s farm produce, the river has been de-rated. At a cost of $13 billion, some 20 per cent of the flow has been diverted to “environmental” use. This has caused a five- to ten-fold increase in the price and forced thousands of far ..... Read more

Sacrificed on Victoria’s Green Altar

Quadrant Online, 27th November 2019

Victoria is the vanguard of states in major struggles over the control and use of public lands. These comprise around 35 per cent of the state, the majority of which is in parks and reserves that aim to minimise human impact. Such areas have long been seen as under-managed and infested with exotic flora and fauna. They are increasingly recognised as perilous host to ferocious and destructive fires.

The rest of the public land is state forest, traditionally available for forestry, grazing, mining and a whole range of leisure activities such car rallies, hunting, horse riding, camping and dog walking, none of which are generally permitted in National Parks.

Two developments are changing the nature of Victoria’s public lands. The first is increasing restrictions on the activities allowed in the state forests. Over the past 30 years governments have progressively constrained the use of the forests for timber harvesting and grazing. Grazing has been all but eliminated and only 6 per cent of Victoria’s public forests are available for timber production, the annual harvesting area having been reduced from 25,000 hectares 40 years ago to just 3,000 hectares today. Last week, the Andrews government announced a 2030 phase-out of all timber-getting in the state forests.

The second change is the conversion of state forest to national park and other conservation reserve categories. This not only imposes restrictions on use but is also an essential step to converting the land to Aboriginal title, which unlike Native title, grants beneficial-use and veto rights over the activities and intentions of others. Even within the remaining state forest, the government is moving to enhance designated Aboriginal groups’ influence by granting them controls over exploration licences .....Read more

The flagging economy, its causes and remedies

Catallaxy Files, 22 November 2019

Keynesian policy lever pullers at the RBA and Treasury, as well as the Opposition, have been urging the government to inflate the economy. Some are calling for deficit spending, others are urging the authoities to force interest rates even lower than the current barely positive levels. Even if ignorant of the impossibility of pump priming economies, it’s almost as if they have never seen the evidence of failures of such moves that are observable from current economic outcomes in Europe and Japan.

Australia’s economy is now stagnating – in per capita terms there is no growth. The key to this is flagging levels of private investment, the key to increased real income levels. Private investment has fallen from 18 per cent of GDP to 11 per cent over the past 7 years. In addition, its potency has been weakened. Policies that have directed funds into counter-productive or low return investment, notably in electricity and the NBN, and other measures that have undermined long standing productive capital in irrigated farming by redirecting water to environmental goals.

At his address last night to the Business Council (sans a couple of otherwise occupied bankers) the Prime Minister partly moved towards the stimulators’ position by announcing a bringing forward of $4 billion of infrastructure spending. With private non-housing investment running at $220 billion a year, even in current recession-like levels such a spending increase is unlikely to be material even if it were to be a positive stimulous.

The PM also said he was taking steps to reduce the paperburden entailed in elongated approval processes created by the relentless rise of regulation.

The Regulatory Enemies of Promise

Quandrant Online, 22 November 2019

One disturbing factor regarding the Australian economy is its sluggish growth. Per capita growth was negative in 2018/9 and has not had a sustained run above 2 per cent since the pre-2007 Howard/Costello years.

The key drivers of growth are capital investment (with its associated technological gains) and freedom from regulatory provisions that distort the direction of capital spending away from the most promising venues. The slowdown in (non-dwelling, private) capital investment in Australia over recent years is clear and as a share of GDP is illustrated below.

The share of GDP comprising investment reached a recent peak of almost 18 per cent during 2012 and has steadily fallen to under 11 per cent in the June 2019 quarter. This is the sort of level we saw post 1975, when recession and inflation brought economic recession and, in the early 1990s, presaging Paul Keating’s “recession we had to have” ..... Read more

The return of Ross Garnaut and climate nirvana?

The Spectator, 7 November 2019

This week, the Financial Review has featured a return of Ross Garnaut to the climate policy advisory role. Soothingly, he said that with the upcoming technological changes, Australia in a post-carbon world could become the locus of energy-intensive processing of minerals”. This, he said, was because of our superior “renewable energy endowment”. The renewables he refers to are wind and solar. They remain two to three times the cost of coal, gas or nuclear in electricity generation and will never be cheaper than them nor as reliable. Australia is not even particularly well-endowed in wind and solar, except in the more inhospitable and remote parts of the continent.

Exploring the perimeter of credulity, Garnaut also saw renewable energy as bringing a burgeoning hydrogen export industry for Japan and Korea. And he saw Australia as an exporter of its wind and solar as electricity via high voltage direct current transmission.

It was Garnaut’s eponymous 2008 report that armed the Rudd government’s agenda for overturning the conventional energy market.

The Garnaut report welcomed “Australia’s return to the international fold following the election of the Rudd Labor Government.” It paved the way for a massive expansion of the renewables subsidies and the Gillard carbon tax. It was largely written by the present Commonwealth Treasury Secretary, Stephen Kennedy, something that’s especially worrisome given the prominent role Treasurer Josh Frydenberg played in marketing Turnbull’s version of a carbon tax.

A Billion Reasons to Despair

Quadrant Online, 30 October 2019

The support that certain people offer for a policy is Quite often a clear indication that it is hopelessly wrong. So it is when Malcolm Turnbull registered support for the government’s intention to fling an extra billion dollars at the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to “future proof the electricity grid”.

Turnbull’s favoured green energy policies involve subsidies to renewables, both directly and by hidden taxes on consumers and in the form of the Renewable Energy Target. The policies were initiated by Howard, in a pale form, and accelerated by Rudd/Gillard. Abbott tried with only modest success to roll them back. Then Turnbull as prime minister, with then-energy minister Josh Frydenberg, attempted to intensify the policies by introducing a carbon tax, deceptively called the National Energy Guarantee. Turnbull’s attachment to this duplicity cost him his prime ministership, just as it cost him his party’s leadership back in 2009.

Australia’s green energy subsidies have transformed the nation from having the cheapest electricity among major global entities to one of the dearest. For households, the average Australian price at 25 (US) cents per kwh, is three times that in India and China, which do not have our cheap coal, and almost twice that of the US (the average of which is boosted by green fruitloop West Coast policies). We do, however, remain better placed than Germany, where the “Energiewende transition” has brought prices to 36 cents per kwh.

Australia’s deindustrialisation is certain under the policies being adopted by both the Coalition and the ALP; the next major manufacturing plant departures will be at least two of the three east coast aluminium smelters. ..... Read more

Australia’s Wealth of Complacency

Quadrant Online, 18 October 2019

NickCater in The Australian rightly lampoons a Harvard study that, by polacing its focus on manufacturing, manages to rank Australia ninety-third in the world economic complexity league table. By contrast, another study, Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report, puts Australians second in the world in terms of average wealth and the wealthiest for median wealth. These assessments inevitably involve some exercising of problematical judgements by their authors, but that aside, wealth is not as easy to measure as it might appear.

The Credit Suisse study would be heavily coloured by the fact that most of Australians’ household wealth is locked up in the homes they own. And the value of those houses is inflated threefold more than that of comparable houses in the US or France, where planning regulations are more liberal. Take away the illusory wealth represented by regulatory-driven land scarcity (in the nation with the world’s highest per-capita land availability!) and Australian’s household wealth falls to average OECD levels .....Read more

Governments created this Murray-Darling crisis

The Australian, 8 October 2019

The Murray-Darling is the only major region where irrigation plays a prominent role. Water availability there has the urgent attention of politicians because locals, unhappy at measures that have deprived farmers of water, have helped displace Nationals representatives in favour of those from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

Drought Minister David Littleproud is to meet farming representatives on Tuesday to discuss a fivefold increase in prices of Murray-Darling water. The minister attributes this to speculator hoarding together with another villain, climate change, which he says “is leading to hotter days, meaning droughts”.

Neither of these factors are the cause of the farmers’ discontent.

Although the Murray-Darling, like much of Australia, is in serious drought, this is not unusual. Other areas are seeing record rainfall; for Australia as a whole, rainfall has increased during the past century.

As for the minister’s attack on speculators, he targets an ever-convenient and populist scapegoat.
Independent ownership of water was facilitated when the rivers’ water was formally made tradeable in 2014 (before which trades were informal and ostensibly water could be owned only by the landowner). ..... Read more

We should be afraid of rising fuel costs, not climate claims

The Spectator, 27 September 2019

With the children’s week-long climate crusade now approaching its end, the United Nations meeting on climate change, accompanied by the normal release of alarmist “findings”, is well underway in New York. The New York meeting has been weaponised by the millions of children incited to take time off from school. President Trump sat through the “we’ll be watching you” rant from the unhappy teenager Greta Thunberg. The UN Secretary-General is requiring countries like Australia, judged to be too heavily fossil fuel focussed, to listen rather than talk.

Bill Gates is struck by the volume and intensity of interest among the public, which he says is “quite a contrast versus five years ago, where it was hardly discussed at all.” Starting as a scientific backwater, climate change has come to dominate the scientific community and politics in general. Within the former “think tank”, the Tasman Institute, in the early 1990s my colleagues and I wrote a string of books and papers that examined the economics of the issue recognising then the crippling costs that would result from forcing a reduction of emissions. We were joined by scientists, including Arizona State’s Professor of Climatology, Robert Balling and later by Brian Tucker who, having retired as Chief of CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Physics, committed the ultimate apostasy of decrying the climate alarmism in which he had participated in the pursuit of grants. ..... Read more

Standby for next week’s UN doomfest for climate crazies

Spectator, 18 September 2019

The push is on ahead of the upcoming UN Climate Summit to be held next week in New York. Although the most senior world leaders, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, will not attend, the UN claims that 100 heads of state will.

The official Climate Summit is proceeded by the Youth Summit to be attended by autistic rock star Greta Thunberg, yachted in from Europe at great expense to avoid burning fossil fuels in aeroplanes. Unlike the leader of the Medieval Children’s Crusade, who was not taken seriously by world leaders, then the Pope and king of France, Thunberg has met the pontiff and is feted by government and social media leaders.

The New York Youth Summit takes place alongside a weeklong global climate strike, ostensibly led by children, planned for the week Friday.

The on-going push for climate change action is centred on reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, though there are other featured issues. One of these involves chastising right-wing Brazil, often with phoney photos, for converting Amazon forests to farmland (left-wing Peru, which makes the right climate concern noises, gets a free pass). In addition, there are the kooky issues involving conversions to vegetarianism.

The agenda for dramatic and urgent action on climate change – the so-called “climate emergency” – is totally divorced from the evidence. .....Read more

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Irrigation water restraints about to become more harmful

Catallaxy Files, 10 September 2019

There is a considerable interest in water in the Murray Darling, an issue that I have written about over the two decades during which concerted attacks on irrigation took place.

Most of my articles and reports, including my latest piece in The Spectator, drew attention to the effect of taking water for environmental and other reasons from irrigators. Recent activity by farmers has given the matter some considerable profile and Alan Jones addressed it as did Peta Credlin.

The truth of the Murray Darling is that the highly irregular river flow became a working river during the twentieth century and the previously low productivity region was transformed into producing 40 per cent of the nation’s agricultural produce.

Then came claims by a group of environmental activists, the Wentworth Group including David Karoly, Tim Flannery, Anna Skarbek, who said that salt infusion caused by irrigation was crippling the region. Naturally the ABC uncritically adopted and magnified this absurdity, which nobody now takes seriously. An outcome was John Howard establishing federal intervention, taking some 450 gigalitres off irrigators, designed to placate the activists’ demands for 1,500 gigalitres. Irrigators’ water comprised 11,500 of the average flow of 34,000 gigalitres.

The bureaucratic infrastructure was in place to expand this. Then came the global warming scare, with the 2008 Garnuat report claiming that the area was certain to run out of rain and water generally so we’d better get used to it and stop all irrigation. The Garnaut report was in fact written by a Treasury officer, David Kennedy, who Josh Frydenberg has recently appointed as Treasury Secretary. ..... Read more

Regulatory attacks bringing a sad demise of the Australian economy

Catallaxy Files, 4 September 2019

The Australian economy has been flagging for many years now. Over the past year we actually saw a decline in GDP per capita and per hour worked.

There are many reasons for this but all come back to government intervention – excess spending on unproductive welfare measures, over-taxation of business income and the general regulatory morass that has come to characterise economic management.

An outcome of this intervention and major cause of the economy’s malaise can be traced back to private investment, the prime driver of higher income levels. In real terms investment has declined by 20 per cent over the past half dozen years. As a share of Gross National Expenditure, it has fallen from over 16 per cent five years ago to under 12 per cent now.

Subsidies, bureaucrats, blackouts and bills: inside our electricity disaster

Spectator Australia, 26 August 2019

The Australian Energy Market Operator is one of the half dozen different government institutions responsible for planning and managing the electricity industry. Like its sister agencies, AEMO accepts no responsibility for the transformation of an industry that over the past five years has gone from supplying the world’s cheapest, most reliable power to one of the dearest and least reliable.

There is daily evidence of the damage from climate change inspired, renewable energy-induced high electricity prices. The latest confirmation comes from Bluescope, which is opting for a $1 billion investment in the US, rather than Australia. The cause of this disaster has been the regulations subsidising high cost intermittent renewable energy.

In planning for the future AEMO claims to have abandoned a “price-based mechanism to achieve decarbonsation”. But this is pure dissimulation. AEMO is now promoting a volume-based carbon budget – instead of setting the tax and allowing this to bring about its carbon target, AEMO is setting the target directly, which will see a de facto tax emerge.

Another regulatory agency, the Energy Security Board in its 2025 plan, has the same approach, which it calls the Renewable Integration Study.

Yet another government agency, Infrastructure Australia, earlier this month published its own catechism for the future. This was also founded on policies to combat and adapt to climate change. IA costs taxpayers $12 million a year to provide a voluminous, gushing fantasy report every few years that tells us we need to decarbonise. And when it states “Policy uncertainty and poor coordination has affected investment in the energy sector” this is not an apology for regulatory ..... Read more pdf file

Another rope-seller to the hangman

Catallaxy Files, 13 August 2019

An article in the Fairfax papers today asks how we proceed to make sure that regions don’t suffer too much as a result of the inevitable triumph of renewables and the consequent demise of coal. The article represents the views of the Global Compact Network Australia (GCNA), which is funded a hundred or so firms including the usual virtue signallers: BHP, Rio, Qantas, AGL, IKEA, Shell and so on as well as charity agitators like World Vision and Care.

For Australia the article sees closures in the coal areas as inevitable as a result of technology and low carbon policies’ “disruption” (see how the social engineers hijack the contemporary version of Schumpeterian language to describe a process that has nothing to do with entrepreneurial developments).

GCNA’s answer is to follow the German blueprint and not the American one. The latter in the Appalachians, we are told, subsidised coal but its inevitable closure left an economic wilderness as its legacy. Germany in the Ruhr

‘ramped up its community and social infrastructure efforts. It built modern infrastructure, tertiary institutes, cultural and leisure industries. It played to the region’s logistical strengths, building up packaging and transport industries’ and, of course, ‘developed environmental jobs and eco-tourism’.

The article claims the $266 million package given for the Hazelwood closure is not nearly enough and wants to see coordination and far more spending.

Anyone following trade policy over the past 30 years will be aware, unlike the article’s author, of the colossal subsidies that Germany gave to shore up its increasingly uncompetitive coal mines. And the history of government promotion of particular areas is decidedly mixed – especially in Australia where the millions of dollars pumped into the Multifunctionpolis all got buried in a swamp near Adelaide. ..... Read more

The hazards of synthetic valuations of environmental services

Catallaxy Files, 7 August 2019

I have a Spectator article ($) addressing new bans on rural, mining and recreational activities proposed in 77,000 hectares of the Victorian Goldfields region north of Melbourne. The agenda involves converting the targeted area, which has no remarkable features, from State Forest to National Park.

This would prevent activities include grazing, logging, horse riding, hunting, 4-wheel driving, prospecting and mining. The more intrusive activities – logging and grazing – have already been progressively reduced as forest management has been refocussed onto environmental conservation rather than production.

The review is being undertaken by the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), an agency stacked with environmental activists. VEAC has courted the local aboriginal representatives, who are understandably solidly behind a change that grants them advisory rights and may vest them with paid duties lead to some form of native title.

VEAC also has to prove the change is worthwhile in benefits to the community as a whole.

Some 18 per cent of Victoria is National Park (plus about 13 per cent State Forest). As environmental services are public goods, that cannot easily be charged for, policy changes need to be informed about what the public would pay for redefining land from State Forest and increasing National Park land – in this case by two per cent.

To do this VEAC hire some reliable economists, well versed in the black art of “contingent valuation” that asks people what they would be prepared to pay for some environmental goods; the consultants are also practiced in the magic of estimating what recreational and productive value might be lost from the reclassification. ..... Read more

Nobbling the new gold rush

The Spectator, 7 August 2019

The rising price of gold is stimulating a boom in new activity. However, Victoria is one state government standing firm against this and other productive developments.

Victoria has a little over four million hectares, 18 per cent of the state, in areas classified as National Parks. Already, only about a quarter of this is adequately managed for feral plant and animal invasions. Public ownership also includes about 3 million hectares as state forest. A great deal of this is in the aptly named Goldfields, in the state’s Central West.

In state forest, unlike National Park, permitted activities include grazing, logging, horse riding, hunting, 4-wheel driving, prospecting and mining. The more intrusive activities – logging and grazing – have been progressively reduced as their management has been refocussed on environmental conservation rather than production.

The Victorian government has outsourced reviews of public land use to the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) to which it has appointed people with strong conservation convictions. VEAC is progressively conducting examinations with a view to reducing the extent of permitted activities that they consider intrude upon conservation. The latest targeted area is the 400,000 hectares comprising the Central West.

VEAC’s modus operendi is to have the government set it terms of reference for a report to address all the values of the area: natural, cultural, social and economic, and call for submissions from interested parties on how usages should be modified. An important step in this is to identify some “traditional owners”, vest them with authority to offer advice and duchess them around the area, inviting them to rediscover their historic attachment to the land.

Carbon reduction policies just shovelling money into a black hole

The Australian, 23 July 2019

Australian taxpayers are funding pointless and costly efforts to change the climate

The global warming scare has fathered many government policies that have penalised taxpayers and consumers. The energy and climate space is dominated by regulatory-oriented entrepreneurs seeking government funding or measures to distort markets in their favour. The Copenhagen Consensus Centre’s Bjorn Lomborg puts the global cost at $230 billion a year.

For Australia, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor is trying to bring an erosion of these costs through “masterful inactivity” — letting the programs expire. But it will take at least a decade to eliminate the $5bn a year impost paid by Australians through the subsidies and regulatory-induced costs that are undermining low-cost energy supply.

Meanwhile, extra spending is being proposed, the latest being an additional subsidy for poles and wires to allow the already subsidised rooftop solar panels to work more effectively. New fads keep emerging — the latest extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels which, in a familiar refrain, will be a future bonanza if only governments come to the party with funding.

One longstanding solution that refuses to die is carbon capture and storage. It involves stripping out the carbon dioxide from coal (and gas) generation and burying it where, it is hoped, it will stay.

In Australia, finance for this was a part of the suite of measures introduced by Kevin Rudd as prime minister. That was in 2009 when he was planning to take the world by storm as the lead player in the extravaganza of that year’s Copenhagen climate change conference. He created six quangos to foster CCS with the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, funded by an initial grant of .....Read more

When Even Bob Brown Gets It …

Quadrant Online, 19 July 2019

Some people think wind turbines are structures of beauty. Bob Brown is no longer among them and we’ve all had fun pointing out his apostasy. The half-million birds which turbines are estimated to kill every year in the US and the 200,000 German bats minced annually by the same machines might also take heart at his belated conversion, although the louder and less intelligent members of another species lately gluing themselves to Brisbane’s roads and elsewhere will probably take longer to absorb the truth about these taxpayer-supported environmental destroyers.

The sad truth is that many still see wind and solar power as the future, displacing those old-fashioned coal and nuclear plants. But even though wind and solar are said to be competitive, their supporters continue to demand increased subsidies, often dressed up as National Energy Guarantees or soft loans from the taxpayers’ greenbank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Those subsidies have caused commercial coal generators to collapse, doubling the cost electricity and savaging its reliability.

In other words, and even allowing for Brown’s Damascene conversion, idiocy continues to prevail. .....Read more

Farming, fibs and Four Corners

The Spectator, 11 July 2019

From little things, big things grow. And so, for the 60 odd years until the nineteen-nineties, we saw the land in the Murray Darling basin being developed from what was mainly arid low-yield farmland into a province producing over 40 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output.

Dams transformed the highly irregular flows of the system (the annual variation being between 7,000 and 118,000 gigalitres) into a placid river. This not only allowed some 12,000 gigalitres of water out of the average 34,000 gigalitres to be allocated to irrigation use, but also gave us a river far more suitable for recreation as well as for fish and birdlife. The Murray Darling became a working river like the Nile, the Mississippi, the Indus, and the Po.

Climatic factors mean the irrigated area of Australia is low by world standards, less than one per cent compared to 20 per cent in many well-watered poorer countries as well as in Italy, Japan and Korea. The Murray Darling is nation’s the only extensive irrigation system.

Having created a valuable agricultural resource, Australia’s predilection for (normally destructive) policy meddling has, since the nineteen hundreds, worked on tearing it down.

Activists formed the Wentworth Group (named after the five star Sydney hotel where they met) to wind back and eventually eliminate irrigated agriculture in the river system. The Group’s members, mainly taxpayer funded, have included David Karoly, Tim Flannery, Anna Skarbek, and Quenton Grafton. Lusty and utterly unfounded claims were made about the river drying up as a result of global warming, irrigation causing salt infestations, driving animal species to extinction and causing forests to die. The media, especially the ABC, took up the cause publicised these jeremiads and magnified the activists’ support.

Politicians, most of whom are constantly attuned to a cause into which they can wade and exercise political control, started ..... Read more .....pdf file

Is the AFR rejoining economic rationality?

Catallaxy Files, 4 July 2019

The AFR has spent a decade of extolling the merits of renewable energy. It has waxed lyrical on the beneficial effects of taxes on fossil fuels (aka renewable subsidies, the NEG). But, following a passage rightly pointing out the cost imposed on the nation by a gas reserve policy, comes this from the editorial in today’s AFR

The loss of baseload power from sudden shutdown of Victoria’s Hazelwood coal-fired power plant in early 2017 .… was precipitated by the force-feeding of unreliable renewable energy into the power grid. Rather than penalise the source of Australia’s prosperity, governments need to fix the policy failures that have caused the problem.

In promoting the opposite position, for years the AFR has given regular columns to the green left writers at the Grattan Institute, the Australia Institute and elsewhere. It has hosted a coterie of in-house journalists ceaselessly opining on the merits of “modern” sources of electricity – the sun and wind – marching daily to replace all their antediluvian fossil and nuclear rivals. It has approvingly cited the renewable energy scam’s boosters, including green interventionists like Garnaut and Yates as well as self-serving business leaders like EnergyAustralia’s Tanna, the appalling ex-AGL chief Andy Vesey, the cashed-up wind and solar farming subsidy-seekers, and political appointees heading regulatory agencies.

Here is just a small sample of headlines

July 25 2018: The NEG won’t stop the unstoppable march of renewable energy

August 20 2018: Thank God for renewable energy targets, state and federal

August 9 2018: NEG agreement will be our first step to energy sanity ..... Read more

The Clover Moore catastrophe

The Spectator, 28 June 2019

Clover Moore’s Sydney, with its Climate Emergency clarion call, is far from the first city to adopt the zero-emissions-by-2050 mantra. In fact, the Carbon Disclosure Project with a blue-ribbon board of trustees claiming to represent $100 trillion of funds has 43 such cities on its A-List. These include Melbourne, which demolishes Sydney’s virtue signalling credentials by having pledged zero net emissions by 2030 as far back as 2017. Previously Melbourne had even greater ambition with Lord Mayor Doyle planning in 2014 to be carbon neutral by 2020; the date of the city’s first zero emission target, set in 2003, has already passed.

In part, such actions constitute attention-seeking by local government politicians keen to extend their influence beyond bus shelters and garbage disposal. But they are also responsive. Human-induced climate change fears have come to dominate the political agenda over the past 30 years. All Australian state governments have goals to be carbon neutral by 2050 and deliver cost punishments to their citizens in order to progress to this goal. This is despite the satellite data available since 1979 having failed to substantiate claims of dangerous global warming.

In recent years, governments around the world have been drawing back from tangible actions, at least those posing threats to extinguish the cheap energy that is the touchstone of the modern economy.

Perhaps the most significant of these come from the Trump Administration taking the US out of the Paris climate agreement and winding back the emission restraints enacted by President Obama. In addition, we have:

The May 2019 Australian Coalition victory, in what was depicted as a climate change election,
appearing to have halted further expansions in renewable subsidies and carbon emission suppressing measures that attack farming.
Canadians looking set to follow the Trump example after ..... Read more ..... Pdf file

Green subsidies have sapped nation’s energy for too long

The Australian, 20 June 2019

This month Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor fleshed out the federal government’s energy policy in ways that brought howls of outrage from the subsidy-seeking renewable energy lobby. Stripping aside the rhetoric, his address had three main themes.

First, the government has subsidies in place for low-emission energy and does not intend to expand these with additional renewable energy subsidies. There will be no expansion of the existing commitments to subsidising large-scale solar and wind facilities — commitments likely to be fully acquitted by 2021 (though the existing subsidies will continue for another decade).

This has followed relentless pressure to expand the subsidies, but it is only a start. Unfortunately, no commitment was made to terminate the subsidies for small-scale rooftop facilities, even though the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission had recommended this course.

Nor was there any commitment to wind back the cripplingly expensive direct subsidies from the budget, including those through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation “green bank”.

Indeed, this week Victorian Energy, Environment and Climate Change Minister Lily D’Ambrosio triumphantly opened Australia’s “largest integrated battery and solar generator” at Kerang, a facility financed by direct government subsidies and soft loans from the CEFC.

The second strand was to reaffirm the government’s recognition that subsidies to high-cost, low-reliability wind and solar energy had undermined Australia’s energy affordability and the economy at large. .....Read more .....Pdf file

A cancerous fantasy: Australian Outlook 2019

Catallaxy Files, 18 June 2019

Two years in the making and with a release planned for shortly after a triumphant Shorten Government occupied the Treasury Benches, we now have the Australian Outlook 2019.

A team led by Dr Ken Henry, the man who developed Australia’s disastrous response to the 2007 world economic crisis, has produced a glossy with some smashing pics and charts with wonderful curly lines. The report tells us we have to confront challenges: the Rise of Asia, Technological change, Climate change and environment, Demographics, Trust, Social cohesion.

The Guardian and the AFR waxed lyrical about the blueprint, which is to shape the economy for the Brave New World. We were breathlessly told the nation is once again ‘at the crossroads’, that the report is a “call to arms” and we would, “Drift towards a future of slow decline economically and socially” unless we act now to ‘create a future of greater prosperity for all, globally competitive industries and a sustainable environment’. Ah, the sustainable rub!

The AFR approvingly quoted the report as saying, ‘The world is changing, and Australia will need to adapt much more rapidly than in the past if it is to keep up.’ The report pointed to a need to focus on:

Technology, (without which the CSIRO as prime financier would not have a guernsey), and better education, quality jobs, and better cities
Following these bromides, there is the real agenda: ‘reliable, affordable low emissions’ (near zero within 40 years). This is amplified by a call for a land shift for sustainable food fibre and fuel production with, of course, carbon sequestration ..... Read more

The Rx for Vigorous Economic Growth

Quadrant Online, 7 June 2019

he Productivity Commission’s latest bulletin shows labour productivity annual growth has fallen over recent years, from an average of around 2.5 per cent since 1975/6 down to a negligible increase in 2017/8. Capital growth was also lower and the contribution to output from capital deepening was actually negative.

This has ignited a debate on the health of the economy, especially as Greg Jericho in the Guardian points out, “Government spending accounted of 79 per cent of GDP growth in the past year – a level only marginally below what happened during the massive stimulus years of the GFC.”

But the debate about what needs to be done seems to be between the Keynesians, who want to see government stimulation through lowering taxes and increasing spending, and those who want an alternative means of government stimulation through increasing the supply of money via lower interest rates. Central planners and most of the media never seem to learn that government intervention will only exacerbate any underlying imbalance. We can only increase productivity and growth through deregulating supply and no longer discouraging savings and investment.

At least Treasurer Josh Frydenberg proclaims himself open to other options. He says, “I’ll be having discussions with my international counterparts about productivity-enhancing reforms in their own economies.” It is, however, unlikely he’ll find too many good ideas beyond those of the Trump administration at the forthcoming meeting in Japan of the G20 finance ministers. Other leaders will be promoting the stimulatory lines favoured by the RBA and Commonwealth Treasury. ..... Read more

Angus Taylor: fighting for coal and cheap power, but is it too late?

The Spectator, 29 May 2019

In contrast to his predecessor, the eminently likeable Josh Frydenberg, Angus Taylor can be abrasive and has managed to antagonise many within the industry:

State ministers for launching the proposal for government supported new firm capacity and avoiding them monkey wrenching it by not first consulting them;
The rationalists by not abandoning renewable subsidies, including those to small scale rooftop facilities, which even the ACCC said were a costly waste;
The Greens, the ALP and “Modern Liberals” for not adopting green energy policies and including in the seemingly sacrosanct 2015 Paris targets “carryover” credits from exceeding the 1997 Kyoto agreement targets. That exceeding was due to Australia preventing land clearance – without compensating the farmers who paid for this;
Subsidy seekers and much of the regulatory establishment for not embracing the “National Energy Guarantee” version of a new, increased carbon tax;
The supply industry for threats to force divestments and establish price controls;
Smaller consumers for the Minister failing to live-up to the billing given him by Scott Morrison as the Minister for lowering electricity prices;
Larger customers epitomised by Brickworks chief executive Lindsay Partridge saying, “When manufacturers start closing and companies like me start saying I can bring bricks from Pennsylvania 16,000 kilometres away and land them in Sydney cheaper than I can make them, they’ve got big problems”. ..... Read more Pdf version

Australia’s election result: a reprieve not a recovery

Catallaxy Files, 23 May 2019

Reprieve was possible but feared the worst. Steve Kates offers a comprehensive 10-point summary of why the ALP lost. I have a more succinct version in Canada’s Financial Post which highlights the key reasons being cost-pregnant green policies and the tax hikes on superannuation.

Everybody concerned about Australia’s future prosperity would be relieved at Saturday’s result. The Coalition would be entitled to believe it guarantees them six more years of government, especially as the ALP is signalling a maintenance of its current spending and climate policies.

The ALP went to the election with the most radical manifesto that we have ever seen – more so than that of Whitlam in its call upon national income. Even in their detail its policies made no sense, for example with selective increases in spending on wages, health and education that defied the institutional arrangements in place to ensure rational decisions on these matters.

And yet 48 per cent of the electorate voted for Labor or its allies. Indeed, perhaps the one reason their manifesto failed is, as Alan Kohler had said, because it attempted some integrity with tax proposals designed to cover the spending baubles that were offered. While Chris Bowen’s tax hikes were totally inadequate, even the fig leaf they provided was sufficient to shift votes, amounting to a decisive two or three percentage points, to the coalition. One would expect even less integrity in future Labor campaigns with a pretence that proposed ..... Read more

Australians voted against more climate-regulation mania, but their job's not done yet

Financial Post, 22 May 2019

The Labour/Green alliance lost promising a raft of more spending and regulations

The conservative Liberal National Coalition (LNC) went into the Australian election on May 18th as a minority government. All opinion polls predicted the Labor Party would come out of the election with a majority with a margin of 8-20 seats in the 151-seat lower house. In the event, the LNC was returned with a firm majority under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had been leader for less than nine months, following a bitter leadership battle in his party. With some results still unconfirmed, Morrison’s party is shaping up to control 78 seats to Labor’s 67, with six going to others.

The Labor Party had run in a de facto alliance with the Green Party (they previously had a formal alliance agreement, that lapsed, but they remain allied). Their Labour/Green alliance had lost on a platform promising a raft of more spending and more regulations including:

— New privileges to trade unions (which cover fewer than 12 per cent of workers) and pay increases for certain low-wage workers;

— Tax cuts focused on the less well off;

— Aggressive climate policies including (but not limited to) restraining coal ..... Read more

Our hard-won prosperity – and how to keep it

The Spectator Australia, 14 May 2019

Screen Shot 2019-05-15 at 10.35.07 pm.pn

The different rates of change in world income levels have provided Australia with a magnificent base on which to build our own prosperity. But, though our standard of living is testament to some success, political measures have blunted the potential level of achievement. A less regulated business regime and lower taxes especially on savings are vital to enhancing our income levels. Yet the ALP and to a lesser degree the Coalition are putting taxes on savings and have no stomach for deregulation.

Accelerating rates of change in world prosperity levels

This animated twitter graphic presents a fascinating review of the rise and fall of nations in the GDP stakes. Over the past half century, the constancy of the US, rise of Japan and Germany and the more recent rise of China and India are the dominant features. As late as 1969, Australia even crept into the top 10.

Reviewing a lengthier period, by the seventeenth century, Europe had pulled markedly ahead of the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. ..... Read more

Election promises: eating the seed corn that generates sustained economic growth

Catallaxy Files, 14 May 2019

I have a piece in the Spectator that addresses the importance of savings to provide the capital that underpins wealth creation. Savings themselves will be severely constrained where the state or other looters can exproproate them or where the state imposes regulatory requirements that devalue the savings and the benefits from their investment.

The (IMF) data (shown right) are indicative of the benefits from small government and high savings. This pattern of high savings and small government is present in the earliest European economic take-offs and in those of Japan, the “Asian Tigers” and with Chindia.

Australian government spending tends to be ratchetted up by Labor administrations with the measures not being fully reversed by conservative administrations. The more recent of these have been new policy spending initiatives in education and for people with disabilities.

There is also a mounting hostility to growth by The Greens and to some degree the ALP in political decision-making and this has resulted in growth-inhibiting regulatory policies including: ..... Read more

Dog Dirt is No Substitute for Debate

Quadrant Online, 8th May 2019

There is now a narrow path to victory for the Coalition. It relies upon them winning a couple of seats in Queensland and Tasmania, regaining Indi and making a net loss of only two elsewhere (in addition to the likely loss of Farrer to the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers). But more than one loss is likely in Victoria, and there are vulnerable Liberal seats in Western Australia.

The possible near-term saviours for the Coalition are, first, the sandbagging of seats that contain large numbers of retirees set to be adversely affected by Labor’s intended raid on their savings –a grab even more grasping than that already introduced by the Coalition. But, secondly, there is the possible gain of seats where green policies have had tangible negative effects. We recently saw the Coalition fall victim to a backlash in the NSW state election as a consequence of green water policies, hence the possible loss of the Murray-Darling seat of Farrer. The Coalition is, however, seeing possible gains as a result of green anti-mining policies, most particularly in Queensland. ..... Read more

Forget the “watergate” conspiracies: here is the truth about the Murray

The Spectator Australia, 28 April 2019

The Murray Darling River is facing a plethora of publicity: fish deaths due to mismanagement of flows by the responsible body, farmer agitation as a result of loss of irrigation water, claims that the water buybacks behind the farmer concerns have been at excessive prices and possibly corruptly made, and a report by the “Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists” with the usual claims of environmental distress.

The Basin has been a political football for the past two decades. The original initiative to insert heightened government control commenced with the ACF. Infiltrating themselves into farmer groups, always on the lookout for a hand out and ultrasensitive to criticism about their land stewardship, they formed a partnership with the NFF. A joint report in 2000 (the National Investment in Rural Landscapes) sought to extract $6.5 billion to combat environmental distress, which they said was costing $2 billion a year.

The Huge Cost of Climate Hysteria

Quadrant Online, 24 April 2019

Mark Lawson comes from a journalistic tradition which attempted to assess factual information without interpreting it within an ideological framework. His book, Climate Hysteria, draws on publicly available information, details that information, and analyses its interpretation and projections as offered by climate “experts”. It is highly readable, pulling together the both history of the climate debate and the present situation by comparing the careerists’ doom-laden forecasts against reality.

His book, as its title suggests, analyses the development of what he calls “climate hysteria” which, coupled with conferences of nations represented by their environmental agencies, has led to international agreements limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other the greenhouse gases, the latest being the Paris Agreement of 2016. Trouble is, the climate is failing to behave the way scientific analysis, as reported at planetary conferences, indicates it should. Not only have the various milestones indicating apocalyptic tipping points on the road to irretrievable disaster failed to occur, but even the minor prophecies haven’t materialised.

Consider:

# there has been no increase in wildfires, whereas more of these were claimed to be imminent in the IPCC papers

# there has been no change in global precipitation ..... Read more

Weaponising the ACCC to address cartels: more market controls planned

Catallaxy Files, 16 April 2019

Having seen the ACCC staffing levels increase 10 per cent since 2014 with a further increase of 14 per cent budgeted for next year, Chairman Rod Sims is out campaigning for additional resources to combat cartels. Sims’s views are in line with those of a predecessor, Graeme Samuel, who said ‘cartel behaviour is, in reality, a form of theft and little different from classes of corporate crime that already attract criminal sentences.’

Another predecessor of Sims at the ACCC, Allen Fels, like Sims was a long term ALP client/assister of the ALP and was rewarded with the ACCC job. Fels would mask his proclivity to intervene in markets (i.e. to “correct” them) by citing Adam Smith’s aphorism, ‘people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’

Neither Fels nor Sims would have agreed with Smith’s succeeding sentence, ‘It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice’. Still less would they recognise that the words were in the context of a chapter in The Wealth of Nations that addressed the perverse effects of government regulation in creating monopolies; indeed, government facilitation is only means by which such monopolies can persist.

Ten years ago Julie (now Makayla) Novak and I examined cartel behaviour and its supposed combating by authorities in the US and Australia. .....Read more

Renewable energy and its replacement of conventional electricity supplies

In meeting targets agreed at the 2002 Kyoto Convention, the precursor to the Paris Agreement, Australia, by preventing land clearance, reduced emissions by 100 million tonnes a year of CO2 equivalent. Comprising almost 20 per cent of total emissions, this reduction allowed Australia to claim that there had been a negligible increase over the period 1990-2012, and Australian politicians were able to bask in diplomatic plaudits at farmers’ expense.

Australia also took measures to suppress greenhouse gas emissions from energy which, in its various forms, accounts for about 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions but as electricity brings only around 25 per cent.

Electricity however is the focus of attention on emission reductions.

..... Read complete paper

Real people put living standards above virtue signalling on climate change

Catallaxy Files, 26 October 2018

Leftist Economist Joseph Stiglitz, coming to Australia to collect the human rights activist “Sydney Peace Prize”, is not the only dreamer urging a carbon tax for Australia and proclaiming that climate change was not a liberal conspiracy.

As Chris Kenny notes the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) are also virtue signalling their support for such economy-crushing measures. Oblivious to the fact that the carbon suppression agenda is really only confined to the sclerotic EU, 50 per cent of them put it as the major issue confronting the economy. It’s as though they are cocooned in a world that has never heard of Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris Agreement or the fact that China and India will at best look to join it a dozen years hence!

While many of the AICD respondents may have expertise in how to make businesses operate profitably, they clearly are bereft of political and general economic skills.

It may well be that the company directors’ stumping up for a carbon tax and other measures designed to subsidise renewables is based on their corporate interests, since so many firms have punted, willingly or unwillingly, for renewable “investments” along with the subsidies without which none of the investments would be profitable.

Any movement to withdraw these subsidies will likely be a precursor for the rescinding of the rorts already granted and this will not look good on balance sheets.

Although the electorate is often also over-obsessed with climate change and its corollary of poverty inducement and high household electricity costs, most people are better grounded on what affects their interests. The ACID virtue-signalling may well be self-interested but Essential has found that only 7 per cent of respondents among the general pubic put climate change and support for renewable subsidies as the key issue facing them ..... Read more

Socialism will impoverish you, but it won’t solve climate change

The Spectator, 25 October 2018

Writing in the Guardian, Geoff Sparrow is not the first person to call for a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the only means of markedly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In a curious conflation of this with surveys that appear to show an attraction to socialism in the part of young people, he argues modern capitalism means ruination of the planet as well as Marxian impoverishment of the worker and “the steady destruction of social welfare, a preposterously unaffordable housing sector, an increasingly sinister security state and a political culture dominated by race-baiting charlatans”.

Big call!

It is true that many people in each new generation need to be freshly disillusioned by the observed deficiencies of socialism wherever it is practiced. Seventy years after Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto we saw its principles being put into place in the Soviet Union followed, 30 years later, in Eastern Europe and China. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the self-destruction of socialism by the Chinese Communist Party testified to its failure as an economic system on top of its abysmal record regarding civil liberties. Once the Communist countries returned to capitalism with private ownership their economies started to prosper – spectacularly so in the case of China.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the self-destruction of socialism by the Chinese Communist Party testified to its failure as an economic system on top of its abysmal record regarding civil liberties. Once the Communist countries returned to capitalism with private ownership their economies started to prosper – spectacularly so in the case of China. .... Read more

The ‘Broad Church’ and its Termites

Quadrant Online, 22 October 2018

No sooner did Wentworth fall than the green-left of the Liberal congregation demanded yet further sacrifices of other people's money and hardship be laid before the altar of global warming. If the party of Menzies has been white-anted to this extent, might it not be time to burn the whole thing down?

The Liberals are proving themselves unable to differentiate their product from that of the ALP and even veering close to the Greens. The rot started with John Howard and his “broad church” approach which welcomed soft socialism into the Liberal Party in an attempt to maroon the ALP with the hard left policies.

Howard was fortunate in this approach in having a strong-willed Treasurer who could make use of Treasury without being engulfed by the men and women led and nurtured by Ken Henry, the Keynesian global warmist. But other ministers and Howard’s own policy choices started processes that caused economic harm, moving the party closer to the ALP.

Most notorious among these was Howard’s 2001 decision on renewable energy subsidies, initially to bring these inherently high cost, low reliability wind/solar sources to comprise “two per cent additional energy”. As such interventions inevitably do, this started permanent pressure for additional renewable subsidies (which Howard, to his credit, resisted while in office). Subsidies to renewables will bring their share in electricity supply in 2020 to 24% (with commercial hydro another 8%). These policies have converted the nation with world’s cheapest electricity into one with the most expensive. ..... Read more

The Warmists Are Starting to Sweat

Quadrant Online, 7 October 2018

Here's a prediction you can take to the bank: the ABC and Fairfax will be running even more inane climate-scare stories than usual. Why might that be? Because the US has taken its money and departed Paris, threatening climate careerists with the unsettling prospect of finding honest work.

Over the next week the report being finalised at a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting in Korea, will see an outpouring of alarmist material. Doom-laden factoids and forecasts will be released, all designed to head off an impending collapse in the “consensus” that reached its apogee in the Obama era. Culminating in the 2015 Paris Agreement, an EU-US axis led policy development on regulatory measures to suppress emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Most fundamentally the strategy involved bearing down on the use of coal and other fossil fuels to the electricity supply industry and replacing these sources with wind and solar.

Developed countries agreed to reduce emissions by around 26%; successful developing countries, such as China and India, said they would fall into line 15 years hence. On the strength of this dubious promise no disciplines were placed on them, while they welcomed the self-mutilating actions of the developed world which enhanced their own competitiveness. The emission-supressing coalition was rounded out by a slew of failing developing nations brought into the tent by the promise of a $100 billion annual fund to fill their begging bowls and finance the lifestyles of their elites. Fat chance of that ever eventuating. ..... Read more

Carbon taxes: many losers, some winners

Catallaxy Files, 10 October 2018

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Bjorn Lomborg drew attention to the inconsistency of the global warming costs and benefit estimates made by newly minted Nobel Prize recipient William Nordhaus, and the alarmist IPCC climate review issued out of Inchon. Lomborg, is a believer in the global warming myth but tends to think the money spent alleviating it is better spent elsewhere (his socialist background does not allow him to include an option of leaving the money with its owners!)

A New York Times article put the level of a carbon tax necessary to curtail emissions in line with an estimate of their social costs at somewhere between $135 and $5000 per tonne; the former would mean a twofold increase in Australian wholesale prices and the latter a thirteen fold increase.

Actually, though Nordhaus was a pioneer in marrying an emission reduction regime to economics, he uncritically accepted all the costs said to emanate from global warming – crop reductions, hurricanes, desertification of eastern Australia, increases in disease, lost infrastructure. Having done so, he set about estimating the level of global tax which would redirect spending and investment to take into account of these “externalities”. ..... Read more

Wasteful investment in wind/solar has a negative value

Catallaxy Files, 2 October 2018

A breathless piece by the Guardian’s Calla Wahlquist announced that Victoria’s renewable energy boom set to create six thousand new jobs. And yet the head of the renewable energy lobby group, Tristan Edis, was downbeat because the subsidies are being phased down. This is the group that claims subsidies are not really needed (or is it will soon not be needed?) because the wind and solar technology as made such colossal leaps that they are now (or will soon be) on parity with that archaic fossil fuel technology.

New “clean energy” investment in Australia was estimated in 2017 by the renewable punting Bloomberg New Energy Finance at over $10 billion. ..... Read more

Australia's faunal extinction crisis:

Submission to Senate Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry into Faunal Extinction

Recommendations

1. Recognise that there is no species eradication crisis in Australia;

2. Protect existing property rights to the maximum extent possible and fully compensate landholders for regulatory imposts to promote biodiversity conservation;

3. Provide for equivalent biodiversity conservation offsets when regulating the clearing of land for economic development;

4. Remove any legal impediments to innovation in biodiversity conservation on privately owned land;

5. Minimise the use of 'command and control' regulation;

6. Cease incurring needless expenditure and limitations on private land-holders to address this matter. Where any limitations of land use are sought, owners should be fully compensated from the public purse;

7. Remove the impediments to markets for biodiversity conservation, including by paying landholders for specified conservation outcomes and allowing biodiversity conservation obligations to be traded;

8. Recognise that the cost effective means of addressing the residual species eradications that are deemed likely is to do so directly by devising measures to eradicate feral predators;

9. Consider measures that will encourage the development of “exclosures” that eliminate feral species and prevent their reinfestation;

10. Review blanket bans on exports of certain species and instead consider mechanisms including ownership vesting to allow their harvesting. Remove the legal impediments to the commercial exploitation of Australian wildlife, including its ownership, use, domestic exchange, and exportation Read here

Victorian Government contracts for renewable energy supplies

Catallaxy Files, 13 September 2018

Victoria has announced fifteen-year contract for wind and solar capacity amounting to 650 megawatts (the giant Loy Yang is 2,200 MW but renewables only provide about one third as much electricity per MW of capacity). The price is said to be under $60 per MWH, while the state government also garners the subsidies paid by consumers under the Commonwealth’s renewable scheme. The Commonwealth subsidies forward prices are running at about $20 per MWh.

In negotiating auctions, the Victorian government agreed to a poison pill clause that would prevent a Coalition successor unwinding the contracts without severe penalty. If the contracts were as good as the government and its gushing media supporters maintain this would not be necessary.

If some of the forecasts paid for by the different proponents of renewable energy subsidies were to be realised the contracts have some superficial attraction. Two sets of future scenarios (by Jacobs) saw prices in the $70-90 per MWh range over the next decade (last year’s Victorian prices averaged $90 per MWH). Less beneficial as regards the contracts themselves would the fantasy land forecasts of ACiL (under $50 per MWh for most of the 2020s) or Frontier (which saw prices dipping below $50 per MWh before rising to $70 plus later in the decade). ..... Read more

NEM BAU and Policy Price Projections - 2

The Bitter Fruit of a Bad Green Marriage

Quadrant Online, 10 September 2018

The service was conducted by the high priests of alarmism, with politicians pledging their love for rent-seeking renewables promoters as a media choir sang of the wonders to come. Yes, we've seen wonders aplenty -- obscene power prices, economic hobbles and the further corruption of science.

Comments from Josh Frydenberg and Mark Butler show that neither the Liberals nor ALP understand – or, perhaps more accurately, admit to understanding how carbon policies are destroying the economy. Both promote variations on a theme: subsidies to renewables and penalties on coal, which together have brought uncompetitive prices. Mr Butler even repeats the shibboleth that without the National Energy Guarantee and its thinly disguised carbon tax, electricity prices, as per the latest model’s fabrication, will cost consumers $550 per year.

Mainstream Australian politicians are responding to a dominant scientific paradigm that says reductions in carbon dioxide emissions will save the world. The science is settled and all that. Only a quarter of these emissions result from electricity production, so it’s not as if the sector’s transformation to renewables could ever be a solution in itself to the planet’s alleged peril. Yet these measures are widely represented by politicians and lobbyists alike as key. Abatement policies remain in place notwithstanding the trivial effect that Australian reductions might have, especially when the developing world is taking no action and the US has withdrawn from Paris. ..... Read more

Will abandoning energy subsidies allow the electricity market to self-correct?

Catallaxy Files, 29 August 2108

Coordination of supply in network industries

Network industries involve firms cooperating in order to meet customer demands. Their success depends upon parties mutually agreeing on certain interconnection standards in order to combine components together. This need for coordination was often ensured by keeping the major supply components in-house.

Thus, railways were vertically integrated to ensure that the package comprising train types, tracks, junctions, signalling, workshops, stations and other facets could be coordinated without negotiated compromises with independent businesses. Difficulties arose in the UK system when track and trains were placed with different businesses and each attempted to foist joint costs on to the other. Some privately owned freight lines continue to operate like this – notably with Brazilian and Australian iron ore supply routes. In the case of Australia, BHP and Rio spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on legal advisors to maintain control of their rail lines and what they carry; they do so to combat constant attempts by regulatory authorities seeking to force them to open their facilities to other users. Their imperative is to avoid any interruption to their shipments, since even short delays mean huge costs.

This vertical integration was also standard for electricity supply. Not only were generation and transmission under common ownership but so also, in most cases, was local distribution. Integration ensured that the lines and the different sources of supply optimised the needs of the market. In most of Australia that meant maximising the use of the cheapest source of supply, coal, while using more flexible, higher cost gas or supply constrained hydro to fill in peaks and ensure reliability. The coal generators remain lowest cost but, since most of their costs are in fixed plant and incurred whether or not they are generating, only when they can continue running continuously for prolonged periods. Coal generators are also not easily adaptable to stop-start operations.

A Simple Rx for the Energy Mess

Quadrant Online, 23 August 2018

Power prices have ignited the current leadership crisis and there are few signs of sufficient understanding of what caused this in the political firmament or, for that matter, in the mainstream media.

Malcolm Turnbull engineered the now comatose National Energy Guarantee to disguise his ideological imperative of a planned energy system that is fundamentally based on those wind/solar/battery technologies he regards as the shape of things to come. He says:

Our primary focus is to bring power prices down.

No single measure can achieve this …. there’s no single reason why power prices have been so high and there’s no single solution. So that’s why we’re taking action right across the board, with retailers, distributors, generators. And together, our measures will deliver cheaper electricity.

Turnbull is thrashing around, looking to place the blame for the energy mess on market manipulation by retailers and deceitful price offerings. His key solutions are

price fixing disguised as some form of regulation of “standing offers”
new powers for the ACCC to order separation of vertically integrated firms; and
underwriting support for some form of new dispatchable energy.

The energy crisis was created by the subsidies to renewable energy, feted at every turn by green activists and supported by all the major research consultancies whose models saw this as a key to lowering prices, on the basis that the subsidised renewables, having their costs covered by subsidies, would bid in the market at very low prices forcing the established players to follow suit. Such regulatory initiatives neatly expropriated the established businesses, especially the coal-fired generators which, like wind generators, have low variable costs but, unlike wind, have long asset lives and do not, of course, get the subsidies.

All the major modelling firms — Frontier, ACiL, Jacobs — forecast that energy prices today would be of the order of $40 per MWh or less, compared to their actual levels of $80. All of them expect the same policies to bring overbuilding of wind with negligible marginal costs again resulting in prices of $40 per MWh two years from now. ...... Read more

Turnbull’s new approach to electricity: smoke and mirrors

Catallaxy Files, 18 August 2018

The idiocy of Turnbull’s handling of electricity policy now, once again, looks likely to cost him the leadership of his party. Faced with termination, he is seeking to extricate himself while pretending to reform the policy that has revealed his incompetence. His new proposals at modifying the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) are bromides that leave intact his destructive objectives for the electricity supply industry.

Turnbull’s automatic default position is to override the market and substitute his own perceived wisdom. Ten years ago, on a joint ticket with the ALP to close down fossil fuel electricity production and replace it with wind, he lost the leadership to Tony Abbott.

He has long considered “modern” wind and solar to be superior to the geriatric coal power stations that gave Australia the cheapest electricity in the world. Among his missions is to effect the replacement of those dinosaurs. He will not be swayed by arguments that the alternatives are dearer and less reliable and will remain so. And no amount of evidence will dissuade him that global emission reductions are either unnecessary or unachievable.

His ratification of Australia’s emission reduction commitments in the Paris Agreement the day after Trump’s election victory torpedoed that agreement was the act of a man determined to cement in a favoured cause irrespective of its impossibility. This was a gesture similar to that of another ego-maniac, Kevin Rudd, in pursuing the Copenhagen conference’s express-train to decarbonisation even after fellow believer, Barrack Obama, had accepted that the policy had to be shelved for the time being. ..... Read more

Regulatory restraints on land use: harmful to affluence and to recreation

Catallaxy Files, 6 August 2018

A couple of weeks ago I launched an excellent book, GOING ‘GREEN’ Forests, fire and a flawed conservation culture by Mark Poynter.

I recalled that in earlier years there was a body that grandly called itself the Competent Authority. It was in fact just a bunch of bureaucrats who acted as a retarder to the vehement calls of the green left for preservation of forest on one justification after another – protecting some rare critters, protecting any critters, promoting tourism, stopping erosion of river banks and so on.

So, as Mark Pointer notes, in Victoria we have gone from a situation where some 80 per cent of the forest was open to wood harvesting to now where it is 10 per cent and the industry is destroyed. Other nations have managed to keep highly productive industries – Finland has over 90 per cent of its natural forests open for harvesting.

At least in the 1980s Australia had a forestry departments that understood the dangers as well as the benefits of forestry. Burn-offs were recognised as vital to stop the very hot fires that are the result of non-management in Victoria as is also the case in California and other places where the forestry department is fused and taken over by the environmental activists.

Global myths are all part of the agitprop – the Amazon will be totally cleared in 48 days if one of the factoid’s that WWF devised were to be true. These agitators are reinforced and amplified by taxpayer funded activists within the Universities –and Mark makes special mention of those at the ANU including David Lindenmeyer, graced, as are so many radicals, with an AO. Another one, also within the Australian peerage, is travel entrepreneur Graeme Wood who funded much of the anti-logging activity ..... Read more

Australian energy policy driving us on the road to Venezuela?

Catallaxy Files, 31 July 2018

The absurdity of the oxymoronic “National Energy Guarantee” continues.

Minister Frydenberg is urging all the states to sign onto his carbon tax with its fairyland projections of declining electricity prices on the back of higher roof-top investments. (The Government and its advisers did not get the ACCC’s memo that this subsidy should, in line with developments in the UK and China, be eliminated). But the renewablesphile, fossil fuel-phobic state and territory ministers are dithering because they want to replace coal with renewables even faster than Turnbull thinks he can get away with. Such policies would, of course, only hasten us over the economic cliff.

And they are joined by others, including wind farmer Goldwind whose CEO says, “We are at a pivotal point and the structure without the substance of an emissions target which is going to really be meaningful is something I’m not sure will really move us forward.” This is the firm that claims it has sold its wind energy including the renewable entitlements for $60 per MWh (the market price without the subsidies is far in excess of that)! So much for the plinth on which the NEG stands that renewables are now or will soon be so cheap that no subsidy will emerge from the new regulatory regime!

The hypocrisy and self-serving goes well beyond this. Today we saw the release of wind farmer Infogen’s annual report. Reported revenue is $200 million this year. $120 million of this is subsidies and much of the rest boosted by subsidy-forced plant closures. Directors paid themselves $11.2 million in 2017.

And the Clean Energy Finance Corporation annual report out today illustrates the degree of wasteful malinvestments the taxpayer is shouldering in this nefarious body’s activities. In the 12 months to June 2018, new commitments were $2.3 billion ..... Read more

Modelling, Schmodelling! How to rationalise policies that would destroy the economy

Catallaxy Files, 25 July 2018

In a reprise of the feeding of the 5000 with five loaves and two fish, the Energy Security Board has offered salvation for the Australian economy with the National Energy Guarantee (NEG).

A cunning scheme has been developed by the alphabet soup of acronymic agencies charged by the government to prepare a plan to regulate the electricity market. The objectives are to gradually remove the lowest cost (coal) generators, thereby reducing emissions, while lowering prices and raising reliability. All at the same time!

The NEG proposal remains confidential, (as does Minister Frydenberg’s subsequent offer to the state energy ministers) in spite of it being leaked to all major news outlets. Under the scheme, the existing generators are predicated to stay on line as long as needed – even though their economics is undermined by rival wind/solar generators. These are currently favoured by the $80 per MWh subsidy under the Renewable Energy Target (RET) ($40 for rooftop solar). To place this in perspective, the total price before the policy madness started to bite was $40 per MWh. Under the NEG, renewables – apparently, in a tax boost to government, including hydro – will benefit from an energy intensity scheme (aka a carbon tax).

The level of the carbon tax under the NEG is carefully disguised and is likely to fall both on generators and retailers, the former because the coal generators will have to accept a price discount on their contracts as a result of the increasing level of low emission electricity the retailers must source. Of course, like any other cost the new carbon tax will be passed on to customers. The fossil fuel generators also face a forced reduction in output as the “must run” renewable generators get priority. ..... Read more

Energy: Addicted to Waffle and Disaster

Quadrant Online, 18 July 2018

Like dogs with a taste for worrying sheep, politicians' destructive meddling with our energy regime appears to be a compulsion. As Australia's debacle grows ever more ruinously absurd and an election approaches, has it not occurred to them that betraying the flock invites summary justice?

Over the past year, we have seen the misnamed report into “energy security” by Chief Scientist Finkel, the ACCC’s report (“restoring electricity affordability”) — and now a new annual report by market operator AEMO. These are in addition to a couple of dozen reviews into specific market-machinery matters and the regular reports from Code administrator AEMC, price and informational regulator AER, and AEMO.

All these outputs derive from resources poured into government management of a sector to provide reports produced by people who are not participants in the actual supply and use of electricity. Ostensibly, the reports are trying to undo the mistakes made by the predecessors of those currently in the regulatory chairs and their political masters, mistakes that have needlessly doubled the cost and reduced the reliability of electricity. The market meddling, mainly the subsidising of renewables, has robbed Australia of its natural position as the home of the world’s cheapest power into the most expensive.

The latest AEMO report follows the now well-trodden path to disaster. It ostensibly offers a blueprint for what it regards as “the least-cost option for an orderly transition to renewables”. As AEMO chief Audrey Zibelman says, “We are witnessing disruption across almost every element of the value chain … Care must be taken now more than ever to manage this transformation in order to minimise costs and risks and maximise value to consumers”. But there is no discussion of this transformation being caused by subsidies, the latest encapsulated in the 26% emission reductions said to be required by the Paris Agreement.

Is there logic in Bjorn Lomborg’s climate change proposals?

Catallaxy Files, 15 July 2018

The Australian’s opinion piece writers on the energy and climate change issue include Judith and Henry as well as Maurice Newman, Chris Kenny and Graham Lloyd. They are all doing terrific work in addressing the myths and self-serving agitprop that has the main political parties in thrall.

But where does Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg fit in with this? Articulate and courageous, he converted himself from being a member of Greenpeace and a climate change believer into a skeptic of sorts. He did so 20 years ago, after critically analysing but failing to repudiate Julian Simon’s assessments that environmentalists’ alarmism is unfounded.

His position became that any environmental damage humans might be creating would easily be solved by technological developments and that these developments would come all the more readily and cheaply if we refrained from imposing costs on the economy.

He was excoriated for this apostasy in Denmark and elsewhere, (including by establishment academic journals like Nature and the Scientific American) as only a reformed leftist can be.

Even so, back in 2008, he was named one of the “100 the most influential people on the planet” by Time, a “global leader for tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum, and “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by The Guardian. ..... Read more

National Energy Guarantee

Submission from the AEF, 6 July 2018

Summary

Government policies, largely involving renewable subsidies, have caused Australian electricity costs and prices to escalate and to become among the highest in the world. The NEG shifts the basis of the deleterious subsidy regime to become an emissions intensity scheme or carbon tax.
Though ostensibly responsive to the Paris Agreement, the NEG is actually an industry policy proposal designed further to shift Australia to an “inevitable transition to a clean energy future”.
On the basis of harmful and cripplingly expensive subsidies, renewables have much increased their market share. But their on-going need for subsidies, as well as undermining the industry as a whole and increasing prices, indicates an on-going lack of commercial competitiveness.
The NEG’s claim to bring about policy certainty is not credible:
- The Paris Agreement is dysfunctional, applies to at best 20 per cent of global emissions and will inevitably collapse.
- The political forces within Australia have vastly different aspirations for renewable energy and coal.
The NEG will not promote reliability since the absence of this is a consequence of the many interventions it seeks to pursue by alternative means. In attempting to proceed along this well-trodden path many billions of dollars will be wasted and prices to households and businesses will remain cripplingly high.
The only sensible policy approach is for the government to unwind all subsidies and to call for tenders for new despatchable electricity generation on the basis of long term contracts.
All these issues aside the NEG is seriously remiss, even within its own framework because it:
- Does not reduce emissions at least cost.

Discriminates in favour of some electricity customers and suppliers in favour of others

...... Read submission here

Wind forces up electricity prices in direct and indirect ways

Catallaxy Files, 2 July 2018

Different generator types earn different average prices in electricity markets. Australia’s National Electricity Market can see prices at anywhere between $14,200 per MWh to -$1,000 per MWh in response to different demand and supply situations. The price variability provides incentives for suppliers to stand ready to take advantage of high price situations, thereby also evening out the actual price.

The average price is now $80 per MWh, double the level that prevailed prior to the regulatory measures that favour wind forced major coal stations to close.

Hydro provides the ideal supply source to supply the peaks since water supply limits its availability to run but it can switch on and off quickly. This makes it an ideal balance to other fuels both for peak operations and to take advantage of sudden price surges caused by unanticipated demand increases or plant breakdown. The Snowy system runs, and was always intended to run, when demand and hence the price is high. It produces on average about 4500 GWh of electricity a year, 13 per cent of its theoretical capacity of 4100 MW.

Wind and solar are the opposite of hydro and can only run when the weather conditions are appropriate. Being non-dispatchable and dependent upon the weather, unlike coal, hydro and gas, they cannot take advantage of high prices to be ramped up to take advantage of high price periods in the wholesale electricity market. ..... Read more

Domestic gas shortage averted – not even nearly beneficial

Catallaxy Files, 23 June 2018

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) recently produced forecasts that gas availability would not be a constraint on electricity supply over the coming years, notwithstanding the tremendous increase in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports. AEMO projects the following picture.

The expanded LNG demand is supplied by the export oriented west coast gas facilities (which produce about half of the nation’s gas) and by the, mainly Queensland, unconventional gas resulting from fracking. It is this Queensland gas that has been the subject of controversy as the availability of terminals to allow its export has caused the domestic gas price to rise from a traditional $3-4 per petajoule to over $12 before settling at its present level of around $9 per petajoule.

Particular concern was the supply of gas for electricity generation (GPG in the above chart). Gas provides about 10 per cent of electricity (wind, solar, rooftop about the same; hydro 7 per cent). Last year’s high prices led to government jawboning and threats to the east coast miners that they would be forced to divert some supplies from exports, unless they did so “voluntarily” ..... Read more

NEG: Standing Fast on a Sinking Ship

Quadrant Online, 18 June 2018

With the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), Australia is locking itself into more and more intensive greenhouse gas emission restraints, when the Paris Convention that is the supposed framework for such action is falling apart.

Of the nations which signed on to the Paris Convention, only the developed countries have any commitments to take emission restraining measures, at least for the next 12 years. Led by China, at 30% of emissions, the developing countries, including India, the Middle East oil producers and the former USSR, account for some two-thirds of emissions. Those signing on to restraints account for only 30%. ..... Read more

Here are the policy commitments:

Energy policy, price escalation and the destruction industry competitiveness

Catallaxy Files, 8 June 2018

For some in Australia, the renewable rich UK electricity market is a beacon.

Wind produced 15 per cent of the UK’s electricity in 2017 and was running at 29 per cent earlier this year bringing Emma Pinchbeck, executive director of RenewableUK to opine, “The move to a smart, renewables-led energy system is well underway.” Greenpeace UK’s energy campaigner, Nina Schrank, added, “The plunging price of renewables is allowing low carbon energy to replace coal and gas”.

The green soothsayers spake too fast! Calm weather in the nine days to June 7 brought wind’s share down to around 4 per cent and forecasts are for such conditions to persist for another fortnight.

In a prequel to developments planned in Australia, subsidies to wind in the UK have led coal to virtually disappear. Years of destructive regulatory measures in the UK have transformed what was, in 1990, the world’s first genuine competitive national electricity market into a high cost system. Ministers, as is their wont, are panicking, and planning to subsidise a new nuclear power station to paper over the giant fissure their policies have created.

As in Australia, there was in the UK a near unanimity among the political classes inhabiting the swamp that wind and solar are the waves of the future. Renewable subsidy was piled on renewable subsidy and coal, the lowest source of supply and originally the backbone of UK generation, is virtually defunct.

In Australia the interventions in the market in favour of wind and solar created a doubling of the wholesale price once the measures started to bite in 2015. A tiny reduction in retail prices announced by Origin this week led Minister Frydenberg to declare that, “We are through the worst of it, we have turned the corner when it comes to energy prices. I’m very confident that my colleagues and indeed the states and the territories see the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) as being in the national interest”. ..... Read more

Superannuation funds’ “ethical” investment behaviour

Catallaxy Files, 30 May 2018

The debate ignited by the Productivity Commission over the effectiveness of superannuation funds as pension funds contains some enigmatic facets. One is that the funds themselves, especially the trade union dominated “Industry Funds”, tend to make their investment choices overwhelmingly at arms-length on the advice of professionals.

Many funds use the same advisers hence might be expected to have a similar portfolio. Moreover, in that respect, the work of the trustees is confined to selecting the optimally priced advisers. This may well be a good thing and might have implications regarding the proposal by the PC to have an expert selected list of 10 “best in show” funds as well as the alternative proposal by Peter Costello to have a national safety net government fund.

Funds seek to differentiate their competitive offerings in a number of ways. Investment funds, other than those adopting a highly conservative risk-averse approach, aim to beat the average value gain of the market, which is why they hire expert consultants. Some seek to focus on particular areas – technology, mining, infrastructure and so on. Others seek to exclude particular firms or types of firms on social grounds.

Conventional theory going back to H. M. Markowitz. (1952. The Journal of Finance, Portfolio Selection) is that the goal is risk reduction, which is achieved by diversification, and that departures from this by denying participation in any particular sector is likely to reduce returns. ..... Read more

Liddell is just part of a bigger battle

The Spectator Australia, 22 May 2018

Like a border skirmish that develops into a global conflagration, John Howard’s policy to require “two per cent additional energy” be met with renewables has escalated into a measure destroying the electricity market. Back in 1998, the idea sounded good: give renewables a leg-up while they march to their inevitable destination involving cost-competitively displacing fossil fuels in electricity supply.

In the interim, an immediate bonus would be that the subsidised renewables, being virtually all sunk and no variable cost, would automatically bid into electricity supply taking whatever price they could get. This would, so all the modelling demonstrated, bring lower market prices from the get-go.

There was a shadow of guilt by those who recognised that a subsidised product, in depressing the price of coal-generated electricity with its huge fixed sunk costs would be partially expropriating those investments. Moreover, in having “must-run” characteristics the renewables’ intermittent nature imposed unanticipated stop-start costs on the dinosaurs they were to replace.

But few gave much thought to these considerations – after all, it was said, the investments themselves were made many years ago and were overdue for the scrap heap. .....Read more

Long on Spending, Short on Discipline

Quadrant Online, 12 May 2018

There is no evidence whatsoever that increases in income redistribution over the past 15 years have brought any improvement in national happiness, no matter by whichever yardstick you might care to measure it. Yet from Treasurer Scott Morrison, more of the same

Governments normally sugar-coat budgets, packaging a combination of give-aways and, increasingly, cross subsidies, with boasts of how much of our money they are returning to us. Fifteen years ago, Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull sparred over whether the top income tax rate should be 30% (Shorten) or 35% (Turnbull). Neither, of course, had any resolve to confront the lower level of spending that such reduced funding would entail. Neither now seriously proposes a maximum less than 46%.

The key budget issue is spending. In terms of the Commonwealth, this has been a gradual, if interrupted, upward trajectory since the late 1960s. The government share was pushed along strongly in the ALP administrations, followed by the Coalition pegging back spending somewhat, but never totally. Spending commitments are made and undoing them is extraordinarily difficult. Politicians recoil from taking back funding from those who receive it and have come to consider it as no less than their right and due. The prospect they will change their votes looms large. As a result the Commonwealth spending share of GDP has risen from 18% in the early 1970s to today’s 25%, give or take a whisker of a percentage point. ..... Read more

Turnbull’s chosen energy supremo says wind is cheaper than coal

Catallaxy Files, 5 May 2018

On Thursday, at the Energy Users Conference, the government’s chosen head of the chive quango running the electricity supply industry, Kerry Schott, remarked that coal plants could no longer compete. According to The Australian (her speech has not been made public) she said “you are unlikely to see a new coal-fired generation plant unless there is a change in technology and a decline in the price of coal”.

Had she simply wandered off her politics-free advisory role and opined that, given the level of agitation against coal, a new plant is unlikely, her remarks would have been unexceptional. But her clear inference is that coal is now behind exotic renewables in the price pecking order.

This shows an unawareness of the 1000 plus generators under construction around the world, including in Japan where coal’s role has been elevated to supply 30 per cent of electricity by 2030, with 36 new plants, compared to 10 per cent previously envisaged. Nor is she aware of different generation costs, including that of the thorough analysis commissioned by the Minerals Council which showed new coal plant, even with costs to reduce emission levels (though not the elusive carbon capture and storage technology), could be built in Australia to be profitable at $40 per MWh

If renewable plant could be built to provide energy at such a price we would now still be seeing electricity at the $40 per MWh price we saw in 2015 before the renewable bite brought a doubling of prices. Renewables, as well as getting the $80 per MWh market price also get the Renewable Energy Target (RET) subsidy of $85. There are alleged renewable contracts at some $60 but in all cases the subsidy would be added to this. ..... Read more

Wage regulations: yet another measure undermining living standards

Catallaxy Files, 23 April 2018

See saw Marjorie door
Johnny shall have a new master
He will earn but a penny a day
because he can’t work any faster

The unions have found a cause in Barry’s– a brother and sister run café in Melbourne’s Northcote. United Voice got a big enough crowd to fill a TV screen to protest against “wage theft”.

The café was paying casual staff the (lower) permanent staff rate but giving them free coffees and meals. The ABC, which as a taxpayer financed supplier can readily afford to pay the wage rates designated by some isolated umpire, was offering great publicity to the union campaign.

Quite reasonably, one of the owners said of the employees, “I presumed that when they accepted the job, they were happy with what they were getting.” Such a statement would be obvious in any other transaction – we are rightly outraged when the ACCC declares that petrol cannot be discounted because the discounter may hurt their competitors – but fortunately such distortions are rare in transactions involving goods and services. Not so with wages, and the restoration of the union control with a Shorten ascendency would offer the certainty of additional rigidities and cost escalations being ..... Read more

Emissions and the meeting of energy ministers

Catallaxy Files, 19 April 2018

Ben Potter, who as a useful idiot, was leaked a copy of the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) report by the Victorian Government, reports today that the states are likely to sign off on the NEG at their meeting tomorrow. Potter is excoriated by Terry McCrann in today’s Herald Sun for his pandering to green energy myths.

NEG has twin features of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector together with a measure that ensures wind supply has a firming contract to compensate for its inherent unreliability.

Former Senator Ron Boswell entered the fray with a piece in today’s Australian calling for Liddell to be replaced saying,

“Some have likened the option to socialism. Rubbish. The energy market was socialised by intervention a long time ago. A $45bn subsidy and guaranteed market share for renewables is not socialism? Would the car market be a real market if the government said 23 per cent of cars sold had to be a Tesla and that Tesla would receive a subsidy of $30,000 for every car sold?” ..... Read more

Energy Battlegrounds and Furphies

Catallaxy Files, 13 April 2018

I have this piece in this morning’s Australian which addresses the direction of energy and climate policy in light of Josh Frydenberg’s Press Club address. Aside from demonstrating how the renewable program has wrecked the electricity supply industry and brought a doubling of prices, it has two main themes.

First, it demonstrates that government statements bend the truth in saying that the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) will be neutral between energy sources.

The NEG will be set to achieve aspirations for a level of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector in line with the government’s Paris commitments on greenhouse gas emissions and will oblige suppliers to adjust their energy sources accordingly. It is, in short, a mechanisms under which suppliers contract more renewable energy than they would without the NEG and less from fossil fuel generators. This is accomplished by, in effect, the fossil fuel generators paying a price penalty and the renewables getting a price bonus.

Secondly, there’s the Liddell closure issue. Supply security and price is uppermost in the battleground over this and has brought calls for some Coalition MPs for direct investment in new coal fired generators. The outgoing head of the electricity industry lobby group, Matthew Warren thinks the planned Liddell closure would not be a problem but politicians and regulators are not so confident. .....Read more

Australians suffer as big emitters get a greenhouse gas free pass

The Australian, 13 April 2018

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg’s tour de force at the National Press Club on Wednesday and his opinion piece on this page yesterday show a man on top of his brief and using it to smite the ALP and the Greens as well as those on his own side promoting direct investment to counter the continued damage being done by renewable energy subsidies.

Renewable subsidies have caused a doubling of wholesale prices by forcing the premature closure of coal generators. Requiring electricity retailers to buy wind and solar energy, soon to be 23 per cent of supply on the way to 40 per cent, gives them a subsidy of $80 per megawatt hour on top of the market price of $85/MWh. That market price was $40/MWh before renewables forced the closure of key power stations such as Victoria’s Hazelwood and the Northern in South Australia.

The minister cited data showing that renewable subsidies were costing electricity consumers $60 a year but, on top of that, by raising all wholesale prices, they had increased the burden by another $300 a year. And the burden on businesses is far greater since firms’ wholesale component of electricity costs is much higher than that of households.

Frydenberg’s message is that we must advance cautiously towards a renewable energy future, the certainty of which he endorses on grounds of increased cost competitiveness of renewables and public and diplomatic pressures to abandon coal. ..... Read more

Trump's breakthough on trade rules

Catallaxy Files, 11 April 2018

Though under pressure from the Mueller investigation seemingly trying to establish a link between Russian influence on Trump and the pornstar Stormy Daniels who claims a one night stand with Donald a decade ago, Trump seems to have kicked yet another goal.

Following Trump’s pressure on China and others to bring about greater “fairness” in international trade rules, China has blinked with promises to reduce tariffs and open the economy to greater investment. The Australian’s Cameron Stewart, a critic of Trump, gets the message. Predictably, John Kehoe, the AFR’s man in Washington, called upon his fellow visceral anti-Trumpers to label President Xi’s the promises a nothing burger and empty promises. The AFR is fortunate in having, in Jennifer Hewett, a more balanced writer doing the op eds on the issue.

Another who misses out on the developments is Julie Bishop. Taking a break from attending sporting occasions with her beau, Australia’s Foreign Minister is giving a speech today at La Trobe University, in which ‘Ms Bishop will again denounce the Trump administration’s move toward a “full-scale trade war” with China while laying out a “clear-eyed” map of challenges under the federal government’s foreign policy white paper.’ Bishop herself is little more than a mouthpiece but her words are a dreadful commentary on those formulating Australian foreign and trade policy. ..... Read more

Energy policy takes center stage

Catallaxy files, 10 April 2018

The action is getting hotter on the energy front. Having been in a small minority for years, readers and writers on catallaxy are now finding themselves closer to the mainstream on the policy on energy/climate.

To recap, the recent initial incendiaries were thrown by backbencher Craig Kelly in forming the Monash Forum and calling for the abandonment of the renewable energy subsidy policy which is destroying the competitive fibre of the economy. Unnerved by the whole process Mr Turnbull then moved once again to gently suggest to AGL that it might defer the next planned power station closure (Liddell in 2022).

I covered the developments here and Judith covered them here in a critical article about the market regulator Audrey Zibelman that brought Ms Zibelman to castigate the AFR for alleged misrepresentation (not that this caused the AFR to pause in its rooting for renewables and claiming AEMO as a cohort).

AGL rejected Mr Turnbull’s legendary persuasiveness. It now claims precedence over the government as the nation’s social arbiter, saying the closure must go ahead since Australia must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Some part of this is a rationalisation for the huge profits AGL earns from closing down capacity and boosting prices – the firm earns 80 per cent of its profits from the coal that it demonises. ..... Read more

Can the backbench energy revolt steer us back low cost electricity?

Catallaxy Files, 4 April 2018

It all came so suddenly.

Over the Easter break a ginger group of Coalition backbenchers, the Monash Forum, was announced. Chaired by Craig Kelly, one of the few MPs who has really studied the economic disaster that greenhouse policies are causing, it counts at least 20 MPs as members including Tony Abbott, George Christensen, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews.

The forum’s manifesto states opposition to all subsidies and argues that no private company will now invest in coal given the risk that government policies have imposed. It proposes a new government owned 2000 MW Victorian brown coal power station (about the size of Loy Yang A).

If nothing else, at one stroke the Forum has changed the agenda. The PM has joined Energy Minister Frydenberg in calling for a neutral technology policy which he says the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) provides. Maybe it does if you forget about

the on-going wind/solar subsidies that give small scale roof top facilities a subsidy of $40 per MWh (the full commercial cost of coal in those far off days of 2015) and wind farms $85 per MWh; plus in both cases state government support and direct support from the budget – in all over $5 billion a year.
the $4 billion plus that is to be spent by the Commonwealth in Snowy2
increased coal royalties especially in Victoria
a gaggle of groups financed by governments who decry fossil fuel power as archaic and maintain- as they have for the past 30 years – that renewable power will in any event soon be cheaper. ..... Read more

Why some power bills are poles apart

Alan Moran, Herald Sun, 30 March 2018

Electricity bills have doubled over the past three or four years.

The main reasons are twofold.

First, state and federal governments have required retailers to source increasing shares of the electricity supply from low reliability wind and solar, which receive subsidies from consumers hidden within their bills.

These costs to consumers are amplified by the subsidised electricity forcing the closure of low cost and dependable power stations like Hazelwood and the South Australian Northern Power Station. As the electricity regulator confirmed yesterday, the forced closure of these power stations reduced competition and brought a sharp rise in wholesale prices.

The second cause for the price increases has been increased charges for network use - the poles and wires, which comprises the largest component of household electricity bills.

Victorian and South Australian consumers avoided much of these excessive network costs.

That’s because, as shown in a recent report by the ALP tax funded “think tank”, the Grattan Institute, excessive network price increases were largely confined to government owned networks.

In fact, the average network cost in the privately owned Victoria system is one third less than that in NSW. ..... Read more

Beware of propaganda organs extolling new electricity power

Catallaxy Files, 29 March 2018

While the ACCC’s Rod Sims may have had a Damascene conversion when he noted that he would like to get the price of electricity down half a dozen years after the reason for the price surge became obvious (hint look at the forced growth of subsidised renewables). What he will do about it, short of reinforcing the cries on this blog to abandon regulation, is anybody’s guess. (Post script, the Australian Energy Regulator which is housed within the ACCC, having been in November 2016 asked to report on price rises in the wake of the Hazelwood closure, reported today that ……. the price rises were caused by the reduced competition following the Hazelwood closure!).

One direction where the regulators need not look for advice is the well resourced agitprop on-line daily, Reneweconomy. The publication never skips a beat in telling us how cheap batteries, wind and solar are (it seems to have a down on that other magic pudding, Snowy2, probably because they have not come to the fund-fest).

In a recent analysis it got pulled up by the more cerebral publication Watt Clarity . ..... Read more

Remedial Ed for Renewables Fans

Quadrant Online, 29 March 2018

The fall from grace of the Australian electricity industry has been breathtaking. At the turn of the century, Australia had perhaps the world’s lowest-cost, most competitive electricity industry. This rested on cheap, low-sulphur coal, which was responsible for 85% of generation, ample supplies of gas, and modest but useful hydro-electricity generation capacity.

Reform in the 1990s harnessed these assets to create a low cost, highly reliable system. The reforms included:

a national electricity system that required competitive provision of generation and retailing through a spot market and power contracts,
privatisation of most of the industry, and
disciplined pricing of the monopoly networks.

Seventeen years later the low-cost market-based system had collapsed. Electricity price increases, having risen somewhat less than the Consumer Price Index, started to surge after 2008 ..... Read more

Tariffs and trade: not that simple

The Spectator Australia, 13 March 2018

The attention attracted by US import duties is important on many dimensions.

Alan Kohler, in the process of suggesting that Trump might be deliberately trying to start a trade war, pointed out that the policy communication came at a press conference, following talks with steel executives. Right at the end of the press conference, the President unexpectedly announced, “Twenty-five per cent for steel. It will be 10 per cent for aluminium. And it will be for a long period of time.”

The action was not taken on anti-dumping grounds but under national security provisions, which are anchored on ‘domestic production needed for projected national defense requirement’ determined by a review by the Secretary of Commerce in conjunction with the Secretary of Defense. Previous US actions under this provision have numbered only 14 and have focussed on parts of industries with clear defence implications, like Integrated Circuit Ceramic Packaging (1992) and Antifriction Bearings (1988). The provision does not require that exporters have been cheating.

Although, ostensibly these were neither anti-dumping measures nor an attempt to save specific jobs, these considerations have been prominent in the consequent rhetoric from the President ..... Read more

The Snowy scam, the Donald and death of Australian industry

The Spectator Australia, 6 March 2108

It seemed too good to be true: Snowy being bought by the Commonwealth from state governments in what appeared as a money creation process – the Commonwealth had no apparent increase in debt or other costs, while Victoria and New South Wales got $6 billion for their Snowy shares. The reason behind the acquisition was to simplify the political process whereby the Snowy 2.0 pump storage project is pursued.

The credibility of innovative balance sheet practices aside, what we also now have is a major electricity generator owned by the government operating as a rival to other businesses in a market which is highly competitive. The Minister for Energy is responsible for the government’s energy policy and is also the shareholding minister of the major entity.

How does that role of maximising the value of one entity gel with the ministerial role of ensuring the lowest possible sustainable price for electricity for the nation? Some conflicts of interest issues in electricity supply have arisen in the past with union pressures requiring over-staffed government owned electricity networks and the allegations of government owned Queensland generation entities with market power ratchetting up prices to the benefit of their shareholder (and at the cost of the consumer) ..... Read more

Hysterical claims drown out the facts on water

Herald Sun, 2 March 2018

The South Australian election has temporarily benched the political struggle over water use in the Murray-Darling.

That region, responsible for over 35 per cent of Australia’s agricultural output, has become a political football with farmers facing pressure from greens and green academics.

In 1995, around 11,000 of the system’s 32,000 gigalitres were allocated to farmers (about 2,500 gigalitres is for drinking water) when state governments agreed to issue no more irrigation licences.

Green activists then orchestrated hysterical claims focussing on the state of the river. “Our continent is falling apart”, said the catastropharian Tim Flannery-led “Wentworth Group of concerned scientists”. Other bloodcurdling assertions claimed, “salt is destroying the rivers and land like a cancer”, and that animals and plants were facing extinction. .... Read more

Housing regulations: a blow to the poor and to everybody’s living standards

Catallaxy Files, 1 March 2018

The information that the price of new housing land in Melbourne jumped 36 per cent last year might be great news for existing house owners who can expect a further leap in value of their main asset but it is a disaster for those who are renters or seeking to purchase a home.

The average Melbourne house price at the end of 2017 was $817,000 with Sydney at $1,117,000. Across Australia, house prices adjusted for general inflation increased 34 per cent over the past five years, notwithstanding a slight fall in prices last month as restraints on foreign buyers started to bite. And although new stock of housing is only a small proportion of the total housing stock, its costs are the main driver for all housing prices.

The average Melbourne lot price of $329,500 is rapidly catching up with the $480,000 cost of a new lot in Sydney. This is in contrast to the costs of new housing blocks in those US cities which have a permissive approach to new development on their outskirts. Thus, in Australian dollars, fully developed lots in Houston and Atlanta sell for $70,000 – $100,000 and average house prices in those two cities are $300,000 and $350,000 respectively. ..... Read more

Deregulate energy market and go back to coal

The Australian, 22 February 2018

The catastrophic outcome of government energy market interventions is palpably clear. As the latest new regulatory body, the Energy Security Board, diplomatically puts it: “Fifteen years of climate policy instability ... (have) left our energy system vulnerable to escalating prices while being both less reliable and secure.”

Australia has seen electricity prices double since 2015 and the once reliable supply is now suspect. From enjoying the world’s lowest cost electricity a decade ago, Australia now has among the most expensive.

The main cause has been subsidies and regulatory favours to renewable energy — chiefly wind — that have forced the closure of reliable coal-fired generators, particularly Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria. Without these subsidies, costing about $5 billion a year, there would be no wind or solar. Not only are customers and taxpayers slugged with the subsidy costs but the outcome also has been to raise prices and reduce reliability. ..... Read more

Courts refuse to protect Australian private property rights

Catallaxy Files, 19 February 2018

Last week, the Federal Court confirmed that property rights in Australia are held at the whim of governments. The Court was hearing an appeal in the Peter Spencer case.

This is an issue I covered on several previous occasions, for example here, here, here and here.

In a nutshell, Peter Spencer was a NSW farmer whose land was devalued from a worth of $9 million to $2 million by the regulatory actions of the NSW government which progressively reduced what he might do on the land. In the end, the NSW government offered to buy his land for the $2 million – its devalued worth stemming from its regulatory actions – but Mr Spencer rejected this. The government’s actions were unquestionably “takings” of Mr Spencer’s property rights. But, according to the original judgement, he was due no compensation and the offer by the NSW government was therefore generous! ..... Read more

The Future of Energy

Adelaide, 6 February 2018

We have seen the wholesale price for electricity rise from under $40 per MWh with very little trend up until 2012, and was still $40 in 2015, to its present level of around $90 per MWh

Wind has risen from nothing in the early part of the century to a share of over 10 per cent today. All of that wind is dependent on subsidies currently around $85 per MWh. In addition, there is the roof top solar (subsidised at $40 per MWh plus advantageous export tariffs). Rooftop solar is logged as a reduction in demand.

Due to its abundant coal supplies, Australia had perhaps the cheapest electricity in the world ten years ago. As a result of the renewable subsidies it is now among the most expensive. Aside from increased direct costs to households, this has immense adverse consequences for the competitiveness of Australian industries and hence the nation’s living standards.

We can reverse direction and perhaps the demonstration effect of the US will provide the catalyst. Read More

Politicians have stacked the deck against cheap coal

Herald Sun, 2 February 2018

Nobody should believe what any Australian government minister tells them about energy.

Influencing politicians are self-interested lobbyists, and voters who have fallen for green falsehoods that the coal fired power station that supply four fifths of our electricity are dirty and no longer needed. Many politicians have themselves drunk deeply from that Kool Aid.

Their policies have led the nation into an abyss of high electricity and gas prices, with uncertain reliability.

A few years ago Australia had the world’s cheapest electricity and low cost gas. But Government programs stacked the deck against cheap coal-generated electricity and prevented the search for and development of new gas supplies.

We have just gone through two weeks of a conventional summer and, while the electricity supply had only minor outages, prices have doubled. That’s what happens when supply is reduced.

The current crisis of high electricity prices and supply shortages stems from the closures of Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria and the Northern Power Station in South Australia .... Read more

Excessive house prices: land use regulation and not immigration is the solution

Catallaxy Files, 28 January 2018

Tony Abbott must surely be the only possible route by which Australia can emulate the benefits that the US is now reaping from the election of President Trump.

While being a more refined politician than The Donald but falling short of many of our hopes when in office, Abbott shares Trump’s goals of small government, and like him contests Political Correctness, and is pro-liberty and democracy. Abbott’s unadvertised selfless, personal charity work among Aboriginal communities marks him as unique, possibly differentiating himself from any other politician in the world.

In his agenda, Abbott identifies several policies that most of us would welcome, at least as a start. They include:

Stop all new and frivolous spending to fix the budget
End further subsidies of intermittent and unreliable energy
Keep Jihadis off the streets. Stop hate-preachers
End funding for bully bureaucracies and welcome straight talking

Scaling back immigration numbers to include some genuine political refugees among a general programme largely limited to those that offer a net benefit is to be welcomed. But not because this would take the pressure off house prices. Pressure on house prices is not derived from immigrant numbers – and certainly not from the immigrants from basket case countries that are causing social problems. ..... Read more

US economy surging in spite of some economists’ despondency

Catallaxy Files, 28 January 2018

Although the economic cycle points to a downturn in the US, growth and especially the stock market is surging. A newborn confidence is evident and the tax reforms are augmenting investment and hence economic health. That growth in investment was already evident prior to the passage of the tax reforms ....Read more

Government induced power crisis averted, for now

Catallaxy Files, 21 January 2018

At 12 PM on 19 January the electricity market manager, AEMO, to its own and everybody’s great relief announced “VIC AND SA ENERGY SUPPLY REMAINS SECURE”.

It had been a knife edged couple of days with hot weather bringing high electricity demand (even though much of Australian industry remained on vacation). As often occurs on hot days, wind velocity was low and this, the fabled modern source of electricity, was feeding in less than half its capacity. On the spot market, prices reached $14,000, once, as often happens during periods of excess strain on generators, one of the Loy Yang B generating units had to close down. Here is a graphic (right) of the prices .... Read more

Renewable Energy: the mad saga continues

Catallaxy Files, 17 January 2018

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) lobbies hard for renewable subsidies and estimates global “clean energy” investment at $333 billion. This excludes hydro-electricity other than Politically Correct “small hydro”. Some 85 per cent of expenditure is in wind or solar with the rest including biomass, electric vehicles and waste-to-energy.

In a press release of 16 January, BNEF includes this graphic (right) of Australian renewable investment trends ..... Read more

Snowy 2: the policy of despair

Catallaxy Files, 10 January 2018

Snowy Mark 2 as a pump storage is designed to use cheap off peak power to pump water uphill to a reservoir so that it can be used at a later stage when electricity prices are high. It does not create any new energy – in fact it requires some 15 per cent of the available energy to be used up in the pumping process.

Starting out with a $1.5-2 billion estimated cost when announced by Mr Turnbull in March of last year, a heavily redacted feasibility study has now put the cost at $3.8 to $4.5 billion but this is likely to increase when a further iteration is published in April and excludes some considerable upgrade costs to the transmission system. Snowy would be hoping consumers would fund these though electricity rules ostensibly require the generation facility to cover such costs. Transmission costs are likely to be at least $3 billion and Judith Sloan’s speculative $10 billion cost may well prove conservative.

Unperturbed and donning his political salesman’s hat, Minister Josh Frydenberg endorsed the project but he would do that wouldn’t he? He claims to favour Snowy 2 partly because, like all those wind farms, it creates “up to 5,000 jobs” presumably in construction. I bet the 5000 jobs could be multiplied many times over if the crews did not use modern machinery! The Minister suggested the alternative fast start generation would entail $180 billion in Tesla power walls.

Snowy’s CEO says “As for claims that the economics don’t stack up — I refute them categorically. Snowy 2.0 can be funded off our balance sheet, while delivering a healthy internal rate of return of 8 per cent.”

Well, he would need to get that through his shareholders. It would be easy to do this with the spendthrift Commonwealth which owns 13 per cent but the NSW (58 per cent) and Victorian (29 per cent) are less likely to agree. If the Commonwealth wished to proceed it would need ..... Read more

Inventing benefits from regulations reducing farmers’ use of water

Catallaxy Files, 10 January 2018

An article by the excellent rural reporter Sue Neales, examined the sales and purchases of irrigation water rights for agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin (agriculture uses about 90 per cent of water collected in dams for industry and personal consumption). The focus of the article was on the overseas purchasers of the water rights, the prices of which have risen strongly – high security rights now trade at $3000 per megalitre, more than tenfold the price 15 years ago.

Reasons for this increase include enhanced agricultural demand from overseas, but the most significant cause has been the curtailment of water supply for agricultural use and its diversion to a panoply of environmental uses. The policies (and John Howard started the ball rolling) are taking 2,750 gigalitres per annum from the region (out of 7,000 gigalitres “high security” and 10,000 gigalitres in total of water available) from productive agriculture to uses designated as “environmental”.

These diversions from productive use started with claims about salinity, which were driven by the ACF and WWF and supported by their spokespeople in the government owned media showing pictures of salt-infused farmland. The facts are that only 0.4 per cent of farmland showed any signs of salinity and almost all of this was due to natural salt outcrops.

The initial production-suppressing measures were built upon during the millennial drought ..... Read more

Frydenberg: Saviour or Suicidal?

Quadrant Online, 5 January 2018

The Member for Kooyong, mooted as a prime minister-to-be, earnestly believes he is cushioning the cost impositions of the disastrous renewables program. His timidity, and an apparent wish to cruel rival Tony Abbott's return, may damage his prospects while definitely harming the nation.

In the slow news period that is the first few days of the year, The Australian broke a story about dissension in the Coalition ranks regarding the “in principle” decision, announced by Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, to allow Australian firms to acquit their carbon dioxide emission obligations by buying overseas credits.

Mr Frydenberg was at pains to say this merely advanced a decision to “consider” these measures taken when Tony Abbott was at the helm. And when Mr Abbott and others denounced the option of overseas emissions purchases, which will, of course, be either totally bogus or downright fraudulent, Minister Frydenberg made a smart-alec comment: “It is worth noting that Mr Abbott’s position on international permits is closer to the Greens than that of Australia’s big employers.”

hat disingenuous remark was made in spite of the minister being fully aware that Abbott’s position now – and then – was diametrically opposite to that of the Greens. And, to the degree that business leaders favour the policy, this reflects their interests in reducing the costs of the carbon impost that the present Prime Minister and the opposition leader require ..... Read more

Trump making headway

Catallaxy Files, 29 December 2018

Just in case there is any doubt about the media and Trump, here is a graphic from a Pew Foundation study that shows media attitudes to Trump and the previous three Presidents in the first 60 days of their first terms.

Trump has faced unprecedented hostility from a media that overwhelmingly shares a green left PC frame of reference.

Drudge however shows that Trump ended the year with 46 per cent approval, exactly the same as Obama in spite of the latter benefiting from representing a media with the same goals and attitudes.

The US tax act and Trump’s rejection of the Paris Agreement has brought widespread scorn in the media and among the political class. But it is bringing solid gains, like that of the Pratt Group pledging $2 billion of new investment in paper facilities in the US as a result of the highly competitive tax and energy environment Trump has created and we even see the state of Pennsylvania seeking to attract Australian energy intensive businesses with its low energy costs stemming from fracking friendly policies.

Will this force a re-think in Australia? Doubtful in the case of Turnbull and his supporters who prefer mediocrity, placating green troglodytes and the approval of the international community .... Read article on Catallaxy Files

Where to start with spending cuts

Catallaxy Files, 23 December 2017

Australia’s policy dice is loaded in favour of more spending and regulation. Major expansions in recent years have been on education, people with disabilities, the national broadband network (NBN) and renewable energy.

Even those rare politicians who are genuinely concerned about excessive spending are reluctant to oppose those lobbying for such measures and the votes they promise. Nonetheless an injection of personal responsibility would be useful even if limited to the most egregious and misleading programs politicians have introduced – the NBN and solar rooves being cases in point – just as business leaders pay a personal price for deceit of shareholders.

I have a piece in the Herald Sun today (“How to cut $26 billion in government spending without even trying”) where I point to the progress towards a better budget balance having been overwhelmingly driven by revenue increases; the agreed savings in a $460 billion a year budget comprise a mere “rounding error” of 0.02 per cent .....Read more

How to Save $26BN in Government Spending Without Trying

Herald Sun, 23 December 2017

This year, the Commonwealth’s mid-year budget review shows some progress towards reducing the nation’s $30 billion deficit.

That was thanks to increased taxation revenue – mostly due to exports from mining that, ironically, have had to defeat the headwinds of draconian regulatory impediments.

Lower government spending has made a trivial contribution. Savings agreed by the Senate amount to about $100 million a year (the Senate rejected another $500 million a year proposed savings). The agreed savings in a $460 billion a year budget comprise a mere “rounding error” of 0.02 per cent.

And yet we see astronomical government waste, which offers many avenues for expenditure reductions.

We could save $1.4 billion by giving the ABC and SBS to their controlling worker-collectives, leaving them, like other media, to find willing payers for their services.

We could cut out all but emergency foreign aid, which rarely brings benefits other than to consultants and corrupt politicians, saving $3 billion .... Read more

AGL: impoverishing the nation to boost its bottom line

The Spectator Australia, 14 December 2017

The supporters of renewable energy continue to claim – as they have for the past 30 years – that wind/solar is or soon will be cheaper than energy from coal generators. Even so, renewable energy supporters continue to lobby for ongoing subsidies, which today provide $85 per megawatt hour on top of the spot price of $80.

Renewable energy, on the basis of forward markets, will continue to receive a subsidy of $50 per megawatt hour in the next decade. Work commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia showed that a new coal generator in Australia would be viable at $50 per megawatt hour. This price is consistent with that behind the 1,600 new coal generator units currently planned mainly in Asia. Those new developments scotch the myths, recently reiterated by AGL CEO Andrew Vesey, that new coal would not be able to attract financing.

NAB, now under Ken Henry’s green oversight, says it won’t lend for new coal but there are plenty of other sources and anybody looking for such financing would start with the following top 20 suppliers:

AGL’s proposed power station closure would ensure continued excessive electricity prices

Catallaxy Files, 10 December 2017

Yesterday AGL confirmed its plans to close the Liddell coal powered electricity generator in 2022. It did so in the face of calls from the government – even by notorious green aficionado Malcolm Turnbull – for its life to be extended.

AGL epitomises the sort of firm that Warren Buffett invests in – that is a “business any fool can run, because someday a fool will”. It has previously been managed by a fellow fresh from running a Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Paul Anthony, who wiped out much of its value leaving it to now retired CEO Michael Fraser to rebuild value. Fraser did so largely by some astute purchases of coal generators including the planned-to-be-closed Liddell. AGL is now Australia’s largest energy supplier and on top of the 2,000 MW in Liddell it has over 6,000 MW in major fossil plant capacity (Loy Yang A, Bayswater and Torrens Island) plus other smaller fossil fuel plant and, of course, some wind generation.

Under its present management, led by American Andrew Vesey, the firm has taken the opposite tack to that adopted by his predecessor, firmly embracing the notion of wind and solar energy and lobbying for increased and longer-lived subsidies, without which that form of electricity could not be viable. Renewable policies have been responsible for Australia losing its pole position in electricity competitiveness transforming the industry into, on some measures, one of the most expensive in the world. ..... Read more

Musk magic and the Tesla torment

Catallaxy Files, 2 December 2017

Bad luck for the much hyped Tesla battery when the grand opening in South Australia yesterday coincided with storms that brought power outages in its immediate vicinity.

Designated as reliability-proofing a state that has seen the future of electricity generation more clearly than Lincoln Steffens saw how effectively the infant USSR would work , it was launched with the usual puffery of how it could power 30,000 homes for an hour in the event of a blackout. This leaves 737,267 South Australian homes without even that amount of comfort.

In December’s Climate News issued yesterday, I had this to say

The giant Elon Musk battery designed to future proof South Australia was completed on time on 1 December. The battery charges up when prices are low and feeds into the grid when they are high. The battery is also contracted by the government to provide fast-response stability services. It will allow 100 MW of power to be produced for about one hour – enough to supply five per cent of South Australia’s demand.

Euan Means estimates that to enable a grid size storage adequate to serve a renewable energy dominated UK would require 1.8 TWh at a notional cost of £48 billion with pumped storage, if such a scheme were feasible. To do it with Musk-style South Australian batteries would require 14,000 of these 129 M

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The Coronavirus stimulus package: not just another trip down the Swanee?

Renewable energy and its replacement of conventional electricity supplies

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