The Australian Academy of Contrivance

Is the Labor government’s drive for 43 per cent CO2 emission cuts by 2030 — and net-zero by 2050 — a tad unrealistic? As Climate Minister Chris Bowen has mentioned, the CO2 cuts require 22,000 more 500W solar panels each day from now till 2030, and at least one new 7MW wind turbine every day to 2030.[1] We are to hook all this gear up with more than 10,000km of high voltage pylons. That’s about seven times the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane, as the rather exhausted crow flies.

Unrealistic? Not at all, according to the experts at the Australian Academy of Science. In a submission to government on July 14, the Academy wants the targets close to doubled. It says the emission cuts by 2030 should be 74 per cent[2] and net-zero should be brought forward 15 years to 2035, 12 years hence. So make that roughly 40,000 new solar panels every day – bought from China, I assume- and daily installation of about three 7MW turbines until 2030.

The Academy’s acceleration will up our net-zero cost of $3 trillion , but whether it doubles it or quadruples it I have no idea. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 has already had a five-fold cost blow-out to $10 billion-and-rising.

What’s a 7MW turbine involve? The 180 biggies for the Macintyre windfarm in Queensland are only 5.7MW. A turbine of 7MW is a 110m tower of steel and concrete on a vast concrete base, with total height, including 160m blade diameter, close to 200m. (These blades defy recycling). Each turbine involves about 200 hectares of cleared land, along with rare and highly-toxic minerals and lubricants and more than 20 tonnes of copper.

So what, says the Academy climate experts, pencilling in more than 5000 of these beasts by 2030! I hope all the construction isn’t wasted – the turbines’ output is zero during the wind droughts across the Eastern States that can last for days, lulls overlooked by turbine advocates.

The Academy is, ahem, apolitical. Its science policy director, Chris Anderson, has his name on the July submission. He has a Monash University honours degree in history and a Melbourne University Master’s in Public Policy. Pre-Academy, he had been adviser and then chief of staff for six years to Labor Senator, Rudd-Gillard minister and factional warrior Kim Carr. Mr Anderson reports to Academy CEO Anna-Maria Arabia who attained Academy leadership in 2016 after three years part-time as policy director/principal adviser for then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.[3] 

The submission says,

The Academy supports building to this more ambitious target – noting the effort and behavioural changes that must be made to get even close.

To give you a feel for the “behavioural changes”, there’s some overseas reports. A UK government-funded report from Cambridge University engineers late last year says that to dump CO2 by 2050 – never mind by the Academy’s 2035 – UK construction sites would have to do without CO2-intensive bricks, glass and cement. The group’s previous report said that for the UK to get to zero-2050, all flying and shipping must stop, beef and lamb are to be severely rationed, along with home cooking and heating. Car traffic (even when it’s all electric) must fall by 60 per cent. These two reports, sensibly, don’t assume that presently untried or half-baked technologies will come to the rescue of our comfortable lifestyle.[4] Our Academy’s submissions swarm with such get-out-of-jail-free cards.

But this net-zero push is all impracticable anyway, because the world’s mining industry can’t possibly output the extra metals and materials needed, as the International Energy Association (IEA) has indicated. To meet the theorised demand for “clean energy technologies” by 2040, the IEA says key minerals supply must increase between two and four times. Electric vehicles and battery materials alone (graphite, copper, nickel etc) must increase by ten to thirty times.[5] But finding and developing even one new ore body involves a decade or more, assuming green lawfare doesn’t strangle such a project at birth. Adam Creighton in The Australian this week wrote,

Indeed, to accommodate the desired rollout of electric vehicles, the mining and processing of the minerals that underpin them, such as cobalt, nickel and lithium, would need to increase by several thousand per cent by 2040, according to Mark Mills, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute.  “If it were to be achievable, it would be the largest single increase in demand or the supply of metals in all of human history,” he said.

Undeterred, the Academy’s submission begins pamphlet-style: “It is beyond dispute that climate change is one of the greatest threats to Australia’s social, economic, and ecological well-being.” Beyond dispute? Well, Australia’s crop output and wheat yields, and global yields, were at record or near-record levels last year after a century of healthy global warming plus CO2 fertilisation. And Australia’s social well-being has never been higher, thanks to $244 billion earnings from our energy exports last year. These economic foundations are threatened not by climate change but by green fatwas and lawfare against fossil-fuel production, abetted by the Academy, GetUp, the Greens and the metropolitan Aboriginal Industry. And ecologically, added CO2 has greened the planet and shrunk deserts equivalent to two and a half times the Australian land mass, according to peer-reviewed research co-authored by the CSIRO.

The Academy submission continues, avoiding mention of that emissions powerhouse China,

While we have a real need for action, Australians cannot do what needs to be done on our own; we share one planet and atmosphere. Along with every other citizen of every other country, Australians need action to be taken – locally and globally.

It is imperative, therefore, that Australia work with all members of the global community to achieve more ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction than those that have been announced so far.

As a rich, developed country, Australia should play a leadership role in mitigation and adaptation to climate change. We should lead by example; our actions should be clear and our ambitions achieved. We should pursue a ‘do as we do’ style of leadership, not a ‘do as we say.’

The unmentioned China is not only dwarfing the emissions of the entire Western world, but last year was approving two new coal-fired electricity plants a week, for a year’s increase that is four times Australia’s total coal-fired electricity of 23GW. In mid-July, dictator Xi Jin-ping brutally rebuffed Biden climate envoy John F. Kerry in Beijing. Xi announced that China would generate energy at a rate and type to suit itself, regardless of Paris Accord pieties.[6] With China heading for record-high emissions this year, I doubt Xi will notice Australia “leading by example”. Across Europe, governments and voters are now pushing back against net-zero folly and expense.

Further perusal of Academy work turned up its surprising point (if I read the woozy syntax correctly) that being critical of the Chinese communist dictatorship smacks of “McCarthyism”.[7] The paper was co-authored by the Policy Director Anderson and specifically endorsed by the Academy president and CEO. McCarthyism is a 70-year-old term obscuring that Cold War US institutions were indeed riddled with Communist spies, traitors and sympathisers, as proven by the Venona code-breakers.[8]

The Academy’s July submission continues that Australians should not only blitz their own emissions, but “embrace our responsibility” and “intensify efforts” to measure and cut indirect emissions from our huge coal and gas exports (“Scope 3” emissions) and indeed from “all sources”, which might mean farm fertilisers and cow belches (probably harmless anyway).

By taking these actions, Australia can contribute to a comprehensive and better global response to climate change, managing our own future and that of the planet.

Intrigued by the Academy’s style, I’ve been checking out its other submissions and policies – including its “Yes” support last June for the referendum which does some dogmatic re-writing of history.[9] It has not yet submitted on PM Albanese’s draft censorship bill threatening $2.75 million fines (or 2 per cent of turnover, whichever is higher) for tech giants who host “misinformation” causing “serious harm” on their platforms.[10] But here’s from the Academy’s submission last August, which urged amendments to the Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation to make the tech giants harass and censor unwelcome media.

The Code currently excludes professional news content that is published under a publicly available editorial code, except where a platform determines that specific instances fall within the scope of disinformation. However, some Australian news outlets are havens for climate science misinformation – so this exclusion undermines the ability of the Code to guard against such denialism.

This exclusion allows climate science denialism and other misinformation to flourish, either through lack of enforcement of the disinformation provision of the Code or failure of news outlets’ misinformation to meet the higher bar of being considered disinformation. For example, a UK report recently found that Sky News Australia and its media personalities are a key source of climate science misinformation globally, including during the late 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference … Clearly, the Code was not sufficient to address the traction of climate misinformation from Sky News Australia during this time.

Read the Academy’s full horror-show here: “Shut Them Up, Argues the Academy of Science“. And recall how much alleged “misinformation” during COVID turned out to be valid and vice-versa.

I suppose the views of last year’s Nobel Laureate in physics John Clauser are suppression-worthy. His favoured climate model has cumulus-cloud feedbacks as a dominant thermostatic control. He told a Korean quantum conference (see transcript) this month that there is no climate crisis; the peer review checks have broken down. “In my opinion,” he has said, “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” His views also include that “misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience” . As a result the IMF abruptly cancelled his seminar talk scheduled for July 25. Obviously the Australian Academy would not want ‘misinformation’ from Nobel physics laureates to cast doubt on its climate papers like “The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world” (2021).^[11]

The Academy did make an interesting, albeit timid, submission last January on Australia’s legislative ban on nuclear energy. It complained that Australia needs more nuclear experts – “there are as few as three permanent experimental nuclear physics researchers in Australia … These nuclear science capability gaps affect a broad range of fields, including medicine, space radiation, quantum technologies, and defence.” The submission strangely omits mention of emissions-free baseload nuclear power generation, which is unpalatable to the Albanese government.

However the Academy does say its position is unchanged since its 2019 submission on nuclear power by then-president John Shine to the Morrison government.

I looked that up to find Professor Shine calling for an end to government bans on nuclear power plants and strongly endorsing small modular reactors (SMRs) as “a low carbon option that can potentially enable Australia to meet its emission-reduction obligations while providing affordable and safer electricity”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Nationals, who are also advocating SMRs, can be thankful they’ve got the Academy on their side in this stoush with Prime Minister Albanese.[12] Other submissions include:

Clean Energy Superpower-dom

On December 20, 2022,  the Academy made a submission to the parliamentary inquiry on “Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower” (whatever that is). The Academy extolled “opportunities to export electricity to South-East Asia via undersea high voltage direct current cables”. Just three weeks later the $35 billion Sun Cable solar project near Darwin, for Singapore’s benefit, went into voluntary administration in a welter of acrimony.  For a laugh, visit the scheme’s vainglorious and still-active website, redolent with the pong of over-ripe hype and bovine extrusion. Over-spending and failure to meet milestones were reportedly behind the collapse. (On July 26 the Canadian ATCO group scrapped its small “green hydrogen” project in WA, taxpayers kissing goodbye to $29 million in subsidies from the Renewable Energy Agency).

Noting the harmful impacts of wind/solar electricity on the countryside and on biodiversity, the submission found a vague solution in “social licensing” to operate, thus mollifying farmers, land-owners and Aborigines. It urges, in a new variety of federal socialism, that

Strong national leadership, for example, through a Green Energy Commissioner or existing body such as Infrastructure Australia, can coordinate investment, development, and use of green energy infrastructure and resources to eliminate wasteful duplication and ensure competitiveness.

 The submission supported what it calls “a just transition” of workers from officially-condemned fossil-fuel industries into “green energy jobs”. It followed the Academy’s Future Earth conference in 2021 to work out the “just adaptation” strategies. What Future Earth actually delivered as opening plenary speaker was fake Aborigine Bruce Pascoe discussing how whales circa 12,000BC warned his mob in Bass Strait about sea-rises, upon which his peace-loving people joined their peace-loving mainland cousins (shields an optional fashion accessory). 

Carbon Capture, August 2022 and July 2023:

The Academy knows emission-cutting sums don’t reach its targets for saving the planet. It has explained,

There is a compelling need to identify what novel scientific and technological approaches might be possible, as well as improving the scalability of existing technologies to address this critical challenge.

It wants to balance the climate ledger by getting CO2 pulled out of the air on a massive scale through “Carbon Capture & Storage” (CCS), and storing it safely for hundreds of years. In itself this requires enormous energy. In 2022 worldwide there were 30 such plants in operation, capturing 42 million tonnes of CO2. In Australia there’s 4-6 million tonnes operational with another 9 million tonnes in prospect in 2025-26. Not much of a ‘wow!’ given that energy-related Co2 emissions are running at 37 billion tonnes a year. The Academy complains that

Australia has no policy to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. In its April 2022 Report, the IPCC identifies that meeting the modelled 1.5°C pathways requires a net negative carbon dioxide emissions volume of 20-660 gigatons by 2100.

Taking the mid-point of that vast range as 320 gigatonnes, that’s nearly ten times current annual human-caused emissions. In 2008 Labor’s PM Kevin Rudd, to make a good impression at an international conference, announced $100 million a year in research dollars for his Global Carbon Capture & Storage Institute, literally more money than its execs knew what to do with. (Rather like PM Turnbull’s $444m out of the blue in 2017 for studying the non-threatened Barrier Reef). Rudd’s vision was for CCS by 2050 to be grabbing 9 billion tonnes of airy CO2. After 15 years the results are derisory.

Electric Vehicles

In a submission on National Electric Vehicle Strategy last October the Academy urged that people be forced out of their petrol/diesel vehicles as “an integral part of our national emissions reduction imperative.” How the grid is to cope with the extra EV demands, doesn’t trouble the Academy. In this case its pipedream is for Australian-designed and produced batteries for next-generation EVs. It acknowledges that current lithium EV batteries are horrid environmentally (just ask the poor kids who mine the minerals in Africa), vulnerable to ageing and prone to annoying fires.

So Australia should pursue creation of next-gen batteries of sodium-ion, along with “fibre batteries and liquid solar-generated fuels such as hydrogen.” If you’re wondering, fibre batteries are millimeters-thin and feeble additions to wearable “smart clothing” and electronics. The global market by 2031 is estimated at a minuscule $US420 million. The Academy concluded, “Australia can develop an end-to-end battery production supply chain, from fundamental research, built in Australia, for the benefit of Australians and the world.” I hope so, notwithstanding that China already has a 60 per cent global dominance of EV battery production.

The July submission with which I started, finishes with a rhapsody in green:

Australia has a lot of strengths; all we have to do is develop them and use them wisely. We are not a superpower but we can be a voice for good.

 With that flourish, the writers probably e-scootered to Manuka in quest for a CO2-free celebratory beer.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 on-line from Connor Court here.

[1] Bowen’s calculation is 40 per month.

[2] From 2005 levels

[3] I don’t know if other ex-Labor alumni are ensconsed at the Academy.

[4] “We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track. For twenty years we’ve been trying to solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting new technology options are being developed, it will take a long time to deploy them, and they won’t be operating at scale within thirty years.”

[5] IEA: “However, a concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (climate stabilisation at “well below 2°C global temperature rise”) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.”

[6] According to the China-dominated United Nations, China continues to get climate concessions as a “developing” nation. Xi said, “the pathway and means for reaching this goal, and the tempo and intensity, should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others.”

[7] Academy: “Rising concerns about Chinese technological advancements have resulted in investigations into links between US-based scientists and China, leading to Chinese claims of McCarthyism—a claim familiar to Australians.”

[8] I’ve yet to see the movie Oppenheimer and how it handles that fact.

[9] “The Academy recognises that this continent was falsely declared terra nullius, or nobody’s land, to legitimise British settlement, and this was corrected only in 1992 when the High Court of Australia recognised the continuous connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the land. The Academy observes that the adoption of terra nullius was profoundly detrimental to generations of Indigenous peoples.” See Michael Connor on the terra nullius fiction.

[10] Plus, “ACMA would be able to establish and enforce its own industry standard. Violations of this standard could lead to companies being fined up to $6.8 million or five per cent of their global turnover.” 

[11] It’s a vanity project, with the authors citing their own works multiple times, especially chair Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (16 self-citations), Mark Howden (11 times) Lesley Hughes (10 times), Will Steffen (10 times), and David Karoly and John Church (8 times). Even Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, who is supposed to be reviewing the document, is reviewing herself as she’s cited seven times in the references.[2] Reviewer Jason Evans is cited nine times. Another reviewer is Martin Rice, who works for Tim Flannery’s propaganda outfit Climate Council, but he features only four times in the body of the report.

• [12] The plan followed what The Australian on Dec 5, 2022 (paywalled) reported : “Anthony Albanese has scotched a push by South Australian [Labor] Premier Peter Malinauskas to restart the nuclear debate in Australia, citing waste and safety concerns as key reasons nuclear should not be considered as an energy option.”