In Australia, Coal Remains King
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) which includes the Mining & Energy workers.
As such, the opposition isn't likely to take action that threatens the jobs of union members.
The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy, this represents a real challenge for any prospective government.
We've already seen what happened to the Australian dollar when China's northern port of Dalian banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources for 2019 at 12 million tonnes.
Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. An obvious place to start would be to recreate the manufacturing industries that have all but been destroyed[1].
[1] Written as someone with an electronics manufacturing business in Australia.
We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business...
(The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).
I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me.
The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference.
Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine.
8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better.
56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better)
The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!
One reason for installing fiber is because it's superior infrastructure. It's not simply a gigabit network and gigabit speed is a irrelevant. Fiber will happily transmit hundreds of terrabits per second given the right endpoint hardware. It's install once and reap the benefits for many, many decades.
Another reason is because you don't know what innovations will arise from pervasive fiber connectivity until you have it and there is a ready market for those innovations. Just like mobile phones unlocked all manner of innovations no-one could foresee.
Australia could have been at the forefront of internet connectivity, instead they have a third rate network for billions of dollars spent, all due to political interference.
Though I would say that apartment buildings in the metro areas could have just used Fibre to the basement, that would have been fine. Let the building landlords upgrade the connectivity based on demand from the occupants.
Also because a lot of attention had been fixated on the speed of the infrastructure, that let the Liberal party call it overbuilding and unnecessary, and now we have a dog's breakfast of shitty technologies used. Meaning a varied network street by street, house by house, all a mess, and nobody has a clear understanding of what the NBN is meant to be.
If the aim is to engineer a 'paradigm change', maybe it should have been tested a bit more first. Something like the old charter-city idea. It is a mistake to look to the political sphere to sustain a grand paradigm shift. They change direction every couple of years, and they aren't very technologically inclined right from the get go.
As it was, the NBN rollout looked a lot like a desperate and poorly planned giveaway to the independent electorates where it was first rolled out. Might even have been able to do it in a bipartisan way, although that is a lot to ask for, if not for that. As it happened the NBN was a political stunt on introduction.
I spent 6 months living in a house with no internet, waiting to get connected to the NBN. The house I rented before that had ADSL and was fine. I couldn't really tell the difference between ADSL and fiber, but the 6 month break from the internet in between does make a comparison hard.
Some people get unlucky and don't have a good copper cable. They aren't normal cases. The copper network was fine. I hope your troubles on rainy evenings isn't too bad, but it isn't proof of anything much. Except maybe that nobody is stupid enough to maintain a cable that is about to be ripped up by the government.
And Gigabit is certainly not overkill when viewed on a 50-year timeframe, which is realistically how long this infrastructure is(/was) meant to last.
"Gigabit will make sense later" is what they were telling people 35 years ago too. Back then they were explaining to people that you'd be able to watch movies at home some day. Yup, you sure can and of course you don't need anywhere close to a Gigabit to do it.
The applications for household Gigabit remain a mirage decades later.
So... They are ripping out the copper going into people's houses, and replacing it with - Copper. Yeah.
The point was primarily the future-proof-ness of the proposed network. Much* of Australia's copper infrastructure is old and dodgy and it was common for technicians to solve water ingress issues with plastic bags and tape.
* I don't know specific numbers, but there's a wealth of amusing anecdotes about rotten copper in Australia's infrastructure.
Gigabit has changed my life after moving away from Australia.
Maybe I should have clarified that it was gigabit capable. They weren't offering gigabit speeds to home users yet. Technically it was 2.44Gbit shared between each group of 24 homes.
This is not overkill, it's how the GPON standard based fibre works. Any fibre you're going to install anywhere is going to be gigabit capable. That's what the standard is.
It was not more expensive to put in gigabit fibre than to put in 100Mbit fibre.
Plus, even if it was - why would we install something that is only okay for now, rather than something future proof and rip the whole thing out to replace it later? Why build a country wide network that's only fast enough for five years?
Also, you have no right to claim to speak on behalf of everybody regarding your personal speed requirements.
Coal has few friends on the buyer side. There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. What are the coal-friendly parties in Australia saying about that?
My take on this is I think the Liberal party, which once took a centre right position has now been hijacked by the far right wing of the party.
Many of these right wingers don't believe climate change is real and in fact the leader of that right wing faction has been quoted as saying 'climate change is crap'.
> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years.
Australian coal will be still be selling for many years to come, only because it is generally of a much higher quality than coal from other source.
But it is definitely a dead end industry and the country would be wise to start moving away from coal as a source of income.
Coal is used to make steel. Unless the mettalurgists have come up with something I don't know about that isn't going away any time soon - my understanding is that Queensland coal is mostly metallurgical. Victorian coal is too dodgy to export, so overseas buyers don't matter.
NSW and the Hunter Valley are very exposed to the thermal market. They sink or swim based on how much gets burned in power generation.
Which type: metallurgic (used to make steel) or thermal (for power)?
Metallurgic coal is the more expensive, loved kind (as you need it to make buildings) and that is what Australia produces, at ~40% of total exports by volume (not sure via value). https://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodi... BTW: that is 3X the next biggest metallurgic coal exporter (the USA).
> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years
Where are you getting that figure from? Coking coal looks pretty solidly in growth from what I know.
1. Coal is used for for generating electricity because it's the cheapest. Its buyers aren't loyal friends, its buyers want the cheapest.
2. The price for new wind/solar plants is dropping quickly, and if that goes on at the same rate as recently, then at some point in the next few years, building new wind/solar plants becomes a cheaper source of electricity than operating existing coal-fired plants.
The price might not go on dropping, but I think there's a real chance it does, and if it does drop far enough and coal's customers actually want the cheapest, then one of the two key markets for coal withers as fast as customers can switch.
EDIT: That ">50%" might be high. I glanced at wikipedia: "About 75% of coal mined in Australia is exported […] and of the balance most is used in electricity generation" and: "Coking coal generated A$22.4 billion of export revenue in 2012/13 financial year with thermal coal bringing in A$16.1 billion". But I mixed up value and volume.
Mining somewhere in the range of $250B of which coal is roughly $50B, in a $1.5T economy. It's obviously significant but "Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" is patently false.
That's pretty much the line that the current federal government are pushing though.
Not so much. Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. By and large the profits flow overseas, and once you make this exception, minerals account for only around 8-15% (depending on who you believe) of the economy.. and falling.
And coal is only maybe a quarter of that. About the same as tourism, atually. And mining accounted for only around 3% of employment at the height of the boom (compared with 15%or so for tourism).
You're right on both fronts, the mining companies are automating everything they can and whole political parties were formed to take an axe to the minerals resource rent tax!
However in terms of exports, Minerals/Ores/Gems/Metals accounted for 64.4% of Australia's top 10 exports in 2018. Australia’s top 10 exports accounted about three-quarters (79.5%) of the overall value of its global shipments. [1].
[1] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/
Our third biggest export is motor vehicles and parts mainly from VW/BMW/Mercedes Benz/Toyota but we dodged the Holden/Ford bullet by making cars that could be sold locally and worldwide.
The current government is very much pro-coal and have spent the last six years working hard to hinder the renewable sector.
The opposition is much more renewable friendly.
The polls suggest there is a growing mood in the community for action on climate change, which might see the current government removed. Time will tell.
However if the current government do manage to hang on then Australia's love of coal will definitely continue for at least the next three years.
"Britain records first coal-free week since the Victorian era, thanks to gas, nuclear power and renewables"
(Admittedly, that was 56.7% natural gas, so not nearly as renewable as I'd like...)
On the other hand burning "beautiful, clean coal" only yields CO2 and a bit of SO2.
Natural gas, being mostly methane, has the highest proportion of hydrogen of any fossil fuel, but it still emits at least 50% of the CO2 of coal for the same energy production:
A quick google suggests that both these assumptions are correct, so it still seems like a big improvement per KwH versus coal.
Not strictly true. Right now we're importing just over 4% of our energy needs with 2.7% of that coming from the nuclear power loving French.
Why oh why are we not investing more in the manufacturing of renewable energy products and services?
The Liberal-National Party.
If this is true then the only reason not to approve the coal mine from a CO2 perspective is to increase the cost of coal, thereby making renewables more attractive. You can effectively accomplish the same thing with taxes.
Australia should tax the mine as much as it can without pushing it off shore, and focus on reducing its own carbon emissions.
The coal fight currently going on here in Australia is over the new Adani mine which is a thermal coal mine.
https://phys.org/news/2013-05-electrolysis-method-green-iron...
This is not cost effective compared to the standard method, and only small scale prototypes exist.
Australia had the world’s 15th largest greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 and its citizens’ per-capita contribution is around three times the global average.
It is the world’s second largest coal exporter and recently became the top exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). Its electricity system remains heavily reliant on coal, despite ramping up the use of gas and renewables, especially rooftop solar.
It is also highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including extreme heat, drought, bushfires and agricultural impacts.
Based on its current trajectory, Australia is off track on its international pledge to cut emissions 26-28% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
the solution is clearly to promote harvesting of introduced species at scale, while also creating an export market around unique australian products from flora and fauna - because of the lack of natural predators and the general disinterest in controlling their population as a food resource - kangaroos, a native species, are breeding completely out of control and rapidly exhausting their natural environments, and the giant inland deserts grow bigger every year. you add to this powder keg a general lack of understanding between a remote and rural population which must deal with in-climate conditions mentioned above and a well meaning but uninformed city population which fails to grasp the situation and wants to promote a laisse faire attitude towards sound ecological management and you get political wedges which always tiptoe around the major issue.
the idea that australia will create some sort of tech hub to compete with india, china, south korea, japan, singapore, hong kong etc is ridiculous. look at a world map and corresponding population density.
What is the basis for the assertion that population density is required for a competitive tech hub?
it also helps to take geography into account, rivers, especially equatorial rivers seem to be a good predictor for millennial success of the humans who settle there. if you look at australia it is river poor, largely isolated from favorable trade winds and sits below the equatorial zone of predictive success.
Maybe if we started selectively breeding them they would be farmable in a few hundred years?
I also suspect that when considering transportation costs, chicken farming is probably more energy efficient than industrialised kangaroo farming. If Australia had a more developed hunting community, it would provide a good protein source for rural/regional communities though - like deer and boar do in the USA.
Why not introduce Kangaroos into the wild in the USA or other landmasses, if they are ecologically efficient?
A change in Australian culture to eat more kangaroo might help a lot.
https://theconversation.com/how-aboriginal-burning-changed-a...
They also hunted to extinction multiple species of Megafauna:
Next chapters? Indonesia[1]... Poland...[2]
Coal is doing "good" despite green energy hype.
[1] https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/film-exposes-indon...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2018/dec/14/...
https://www.ft.com/content/674ce754-6b9b-11e9-80c7-60ee53e66...
There was a recent incident where environmental damage has been caused by the same company at the same port they'd use for the new mine: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-03/adani-faces-multi-mil...
Adani's use of the British Virgin Islands as a tax haven (backing up cam_|'s point about profits from Australia's massive mineral deposits flowing overseas): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-02/adanis-tax-haven-ties...
The above is relevant to current politics as multi-national tax avoidance / evasion / minimisation has been a hot topic in the last 12 months.
Australia's "leadership" has really dropped the ball on preparing Australia for a changing economy, and it's the people that depend on coal for their day-to-day livelihoods (not the fucking investors) that are left holding the bag. There is no national plan with how to deal with displaced miners (as far as I know).
The Labor party (not to say they're overall much better than the current government at decent leadership) tried to improve Australia's communications infrastructure with their Fiber to the Home NBN project, but that's now less than a shadow of what it could have been, and the political will to repair it just doesn't exist. Add to that the recent laws about mandatory data retention and legislating the ability to secretly force developers to add backdoors into their software, and Australia's reputation in the growing "digital economy" stakes has being going in the wrong direction for nearly a decade.
Australia, with it's plentiful sunshine and wide open spaces had an opportunity to lead the world in renewables, particularly solar. Nope, fumbled that too. For the last seven years there's uncertainty around government policy and funding for solar and wind farms, so there just aren't the number of projects that there would have been with a bit more federal encouragement. Much of what's been built in the last few years has been a result of progressive state governments.
Australia got the biggest lithium battery in the world in a well-publicised deal with Tesla / Elon Musk. The Prime Minister and his party ridiculed it rather than celebrating being the leadership of a progressive country - because it was implemented by the state, not federal, government. That's how pissy Australian politics has become.
Ironically, agriculture is another of Australia's great strengths, and that's already feeling the effects of climate change with the increasing frequency of "once in a hundred years" scale floods in Queensland, and almost annual EL Nino and La Nina weather patterns (which are the two extreme ends of the spectrum). Not that agriculture is particularly environmentally-friendly, depending on what agriculture it is, but it's a more permanent economic base than minerals.
There are too many powerful people in Australia who got to where they are because of, primarily, coal. It's understandable that they're defending it to the hilt, it's human nature to cling to what you know. Unfortunately, in this case, as a group they're powerful enough to hold back the entire country and only an election has a chance to loosen the grip just a little bit. Evidence of the dangers of being a one-trick-pony too successfully for too long.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/second-fish-kill-in-d...
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-million-dead-fish-environmenta...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/10/news-corp-rick...
"The Australian" is a newspaper owned by News Corp, which is run by Rupert Murdoch who, despite no longer being an Australian citizen, is a strong Liberal Party (Australia's current coal-loving government) supporter, so much so that he was instrumental in the process of removing the previous leader of the party for, basically, not being conservative enough:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-sp...
Such is the power of the very few at the very top, OUTSIDE of government.
It's funny, but that sounds an AWFUL lot like the Terra Nullius argument used to disposes Indigenous people of their land.
Australia's "wide open spaces" are home to flora and fauna that are unique and worth preserving. The idea we'd want vast swaths of solar destroying the natural environment - one that is unique and wonderful - is odd to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w really changed my mind on this. I was pro-nuclear before seeing it, but am even more so after.