ZeroGravitas

Depends what you (and they) think their job is.

RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".

Russel Vaught said:

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."

Lots of other stuff affects end-user prices though.

But that's assuming the batteries can charge and discharge in full every day.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle where Snowy can act as seasonal storage with a big capacity that isn't used every day.

I think it would then also lose on price if compared with a portfolio of batteries alongside solar and wind to directly supply electricity and continually recharge the batteries over seasonal scales but that is a more complex comparison.

In general I think even good hydro schemes (and Snowy 2 is not a good one) rely on non-electrical factors to be worthwhile now batteries have plummeted in price, e.g. managing seasonal water flows for agriculture, and the electricity can be seen as an additional benefit.

Once that assumption breaks you need to avoid the costs being foisted onto people unexpectedly.

Any reasonable approach is effectively a ban at that point, like paying upfront for the whole expected lifetime cost.

This tracks with it being cheaper which it basically has been for that decade.

The market has spoken but some people who claim to like markets aren't listening.

Many people think Haber-Bosch requires fossil fuels as input. It doesn't.

Haber-Bosch requires hydrogen. Currently this is nearly always fossil fuel derived and the carbon parts that are not needed are dumped into the atmosphere.

Venting is not required, just cheap and neither is using hydrogen from a fossil source.

Pro-fossil fuel types will regularly claim fossil fuels are a hard requirement for fertilizer.

And the headline suggests this applies to biodiversity damage too.

Probably applies for health benefits too.

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/chortle-on-a-chortle/

I've seen at least one such commentator try to suddenly flip from "things are getting worse, the statistics saying otherwise are woke lies to a new narrative of Trump has saved us all by reducing crime with Fascism, yeah more fascism please!" but mostly they are sticking with what they know and relying on news sensationalism to scare old people about every crime on the planet and accusing fact checkers of being part of the conspiracy against them.

https://www.aer.gov.au/news/articles/news-releases/aer-relea...

> Power prices to fall for most customers, with bigger drops for businesses

> What is driving [lower prices] is a reduction in the cost of producing electricity. We've seen a lot more batteries and solar systems come into the electricity market in the last 12 months. They've been making the market much less volatile," Ms Savage said.

> "We've not needed as much gas and hydro generation in the evening peaks, and that's what's really cut that cost of wholesale generation."

That's a great goal, but every step along the way to it is also meaningful progress.

They currently have sites with 100% renewable power from buying PPAs for new solar farms, they have absolutely giant EV trucks, they have mini grids with solar and wind and batteries offseting diesel usage.

A lot of this is done for fundamental economic reasons and those economics continue to get better. They've committed Billions to it.

While for example Norway only has 30% fleet EVs despite already hitting near 100% sales.

It's setting up an unreasonable target for comparison to make progress look bad when even having a single battery powered truck would have been seen as amazing progress less than a decade ago.

For standard EV cars in Australia only 20% of new sales are EV, the fleet is maybe 3%. But everyone sane seems to agree that is the direction of travel.

Mentioning (without proper quantification) that the EV mining trucks aren't the majority of the fleet when cars are at only 3% is shockingly misleading.

Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...

> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.

> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.

We're now onto Captain Planet baddies. Ridiculously childish cartoon carictatures of greed and evil are now in charge

This is weird framing.

It's like MacGregor saying "you fall in love with one curly haired blonde beauty" and looking for support for that position.

> Between 2008 and the early 2010s, Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.[5][6] He acknowledged writing under the pseudonym when it was reported in 2023

Of course, the author also has a hidden fondness for the same cause, so I guess it makes sense that he's try to sanewash it as just conservatism.

Not something you'd expect to hear from a big military contractor.

It was a civil war that the US got involved in, and they supported the side that lost.

We know how to do 80% of electricity, 80% of low temp hearing, 80% of transport all while saving money, reducing local pollution and delivering better products.

The big problem isnt technical,it's the culture war that Smil is fighting on the wrong side of and which spreads lies about renewables, EVs and heat pumps.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/