Allan presents some actual facts to counter AFR's 'alternative facts'

Northcote’s Allan O’Neil has written in response to an Australian Financial Review Editorial and although the letter was published online it was thought to too late for publication in the AFR’s hard copy.

Alan wrote:

The Weekend AFR’s editorial on our “energy crisis” has bought hook, line and sinker some very convenient untruths. It blames the tightness of the domestic gas market solely on moratoria imposed by the Victorian, NSW and NT governments and then in the next sentence blames problems in the electricity market on “ever-larger volumes of intermittent renewables being fed into the grid with incentives provided by the same governments”.

The only material financial subsidy for new large scale renewable generation over the past decade and a half has been the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target, in place since 2000. None of the State/Territory governments mentioned has operated any scheme providing similar subsidies.

As for the tightness in the gas market, your editorial also claims that “the gas feeding the Gladstone LNG plants was developed against the prices and volumes it could fetch on international markets”. This might be true if the only gas feeding those projects was sourced from the Queensland coal seam gas (CSG) fields developed by the project proponents to back their capacity investment in the Gladstone LNG facilities. However it is widely known in the industry that those new CSG developments have been slower and higher in cost to develop than assumed, and that the LNG consortia, caught short for supply, have been sourcing significant volumes from already developed gasfields across the south-eastern states that had previously been supplying only domestic users.

The Gladstone LNG facility.

The impact of state government gas moratoria has been at most marginal, given the relative volumes of previously “domestic” gas hoovered up by the LNG consortia, and any new gas which might now have been available from fields developed in the absence of those moratoria. In Queensland, Shell and PetroChina hold a reported 9,000 PJ of already discovered but undeveloped gas not subject to any moratorium. To argue that a cheaper way to relieve pressure on gas supply would be to explore for, assess, develop, process and transport currently undiscovered gas in less prospective regions like onshore Victoria, in preference to large already discovered resources like Shell’s, seems completely fanciful.

The real “problem” in the gas market therefore seems to be the (un)readiness of domestic users to pay the same prices that the LNG consortia have been prepared to pay in order to fill their supply gap.

The real problem in the electricity market has of course been the partisan craziness, ideology, and blame-gaming that has characterised climate-change policy at Federal level for the last decade, and shows few signs of abating. Editorials like the AFR’s, based less on facts and more on “fake truths”, don’t help any of this.

Tesla eyes off the mass car market

Elon Musk with the new Tesla Model X.

The eye-catching falcon-wing doors that adorn Tesla's Model X set it apart from other big and expensive SUVs. But like the firm's Model S, a stylish and speedy saloon, the biggest difference lies under the bodywork: it is powered by a battery.

Tesla has accelerated into the automotive fast-lane by making electric cars that appeal to rich folk keen to burnish their credentials as environmentally aware techies. But at the end of March, it is launching the Model 3, a cheaper vehicle aimed at the upper end of the mass market. It will be a far harder sell.

Tesla has hitherto thrived in a niche. Other carmakers crammed bulky and expensive batteries into petite "city" cars. Tesla put a bigger power-pack into large and expensive ones (prices start at $70,000), more readily absorbing the cost of the battery. This also gives the cars a decent range of more than 250 miles (400km) between charges, and lightning acceleration.

Read the Australian Financial Review story in its Weekend section - “Backed by low costs Tesla aims for the mass car market.”

(Most everything about the concept that has driven Elon Musk is to be admired except that the firm is created in and aimed, without apology, at the private market.

Privately owned cars and privatization of what is now public are contrary to the direction the world needs to take if it is to mitigate and avoid the worst implications of climate change.

The innovative thinking and human energy behind the Tesla concept urgently need to be applied to understanding how the best attributes of modernity can be preserved, while humanity, even if it grows to nine or ten billion in number can continue to live in a contented manner.

Privately owned transport and the privatization of the public realm (both in space and  infrastructure) is contrary to what we need – Robert McLean.)

Denialists are not fools says Mark Latham

Mark Latham

Former Labor Party Leader, Mark Latham, was never shy of speaking his mind and he does just that in a recent article in the Australian Financial Review.

Discussing climate change Latham says: “It would be comforting to believe that the denialist army is composed of fools. This is simply not the case. Many of the denialists are accomplished and educated people. It would also be comforting to think that they represent a small island of unreason in an ocean of rationality, like people opposed to immunisation. This also however is not true.”

The Latham opinion piece - “Climate change denial not just for fools” – was published on April 20 this year.