Energy is life and cheap abundant energy enables a cheap abundant living standard for us all.
That’s what makes the energy grid and this net zero debate in Australia so important because net zero based on real world experience rather than the models has only driven prices up and made living more expensive and more difficult for all Australians. But we’re being told over and over again that it’s just a temporary thing. This will pass. It’s just the transition that’s so expensive. In fact, we’re being told that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, cheaper even than the previously cheapest brown and black coal that has historically provided us with our base load power. But every now and again, amongst the misinformation, comes a little slip of truth. And Joanne Nova, a friend of the show, someone that I’ve been discussing these issues with for over a decade now way to make myself feel old has been on top of these lies for a very long time. And she drew the latest little bit of a slip to my attention, and she joins me now on the Topher Project. Joe, welcome to the show.
[From video] Hi Topher. It’s good to talk to you. [End video]
It’s always a pleasure to have you on. It is kind of funny to reflect. We’ve been talking about this for 13 years. Your work has been ongoing for some time and it’s amazing work that you do. I want to bring up on the screen here if anyone hasn’t been to your blog. I highly recommend it. Joanne, I’ll get you to tell us the URL and direct people to your blog. This blog post here, Renewables Will Need Subsidies Until We Get Rid of Coal, Says Government Another 10 Years. You immediately spotted the not the lie but the omission that was at the heart of this. Talk us through this and why you felt it was worthy of a blog post. What’s the admission here?
[From video]
Well, the hilarious thing about this is that it’s yet again another 10 years of subsidies. So, we’re up to already 20 years of subsidies. And the idea of subsidies was always to get it over the hump, the developmental hump so that you can get the economies of scale so that you can develop big enough factories and make it all cheap. And the problem is we’ve hit the cheap point and we’re going up the other cost side. We’re going up the scale on the other side. [End video]
Well, I’m sorry to interrupt my chat with Joanne Nova. She’s an absolute firebrand, wonderful at what she does, and I highly recommend you go and check out her blog. But who am I? Well, I’m Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and this is what I do. I bring you stories and interviews that you won’t find elsewhere to help you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And also, if you haven’t already, check out my books. There’s Good People Break Bad Laws this is all about civil disobedience in the modern age. There’s Good Christians Break Bad Laws this is about the theology of civil disobedience. There’s the DVD of my multi-award-winning documentary Battleground Melbourne. Now, you can watch this for free at battlegroundmelbourne.com. But if you do want a copy to put on your shelf, then you can get this as well. You’ve also got my t-shirts in a range of different designs, some funny, some serious, in hoodies and in t-shirts. And everything is available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy is going to help me to keep bringing you stories like this one with Joanne Nova.
[From video]
Things are getting more expensive because all the best spots in wind have been already built on the best spots with the biggest wind closest to the transmission grid. So everything else is getting more expensive. Even though the wind farms are getting bigger and bigger, their costs are not coming down. So the renewables must keep going. And the funny admission from this from Australia’s Energy Market Commission was the AEMC have quietly admitted that they need renewables until coal goes out of the market. [End video]
Just a correction there you said they need renewables. You mean they need subsidies for renewables.
[From video]
Yeah, they need subsidies for renewables until coal exits the market. Which tells you their real point here is to get rid of coal, not to support renewables until the renewables get cheap. Coal is always going to be cheaper than renewables. And so they need the subsidies until they get rid of it. And then they hint that actually maybe they’ll need subsidies after that too, which of course they will because people will cry at the cost of electricity. So what will happen is they will hide the cost. They will bury it. The cost will still be there. Our society, our community will still suffer, but it will be hidden in taxes and other things. People will say, “Oh, the big corporate evil corporates will pay.” Which of course they will pass the cost on to customers.
And we just run out of jobs, factories close, smelters shut down, as we’re seeing. And so we pay and we pay and we pay. But yeah, the hilarious thing that they’re admitting that they still need subsidies for another 10 years until they get rid of coal. And of course, Queensland has come out and said, “We’ll keep that coal if we can. We’re going to keep using coal till 2046.” So, which kind of blows away the neat plan that Albanese has come up with that we need to, you know, exit coal as fast as possible and by 2035. [End video]
Yeah. What I love about this and I thank you for drawing it to my attention because I would have missed it I love the linking of the end of subsidies with the end of coal. It’s the first time I’ve seen it done as neatly as this, which does amount to such an admission that it’s the fact that coal exists and provides so much cheaper base load power that necessitates subsidies in order for these renewables to survive. You mentioned there the way that subsidies are so often buried and hidden. An example that jumps to my mind is this recent household battery program that Anthony Albanese is so very proud of. Those are driving up the cost of power, but instead of paying for it through power bills, we’re paying for it through general revenue through taxation. And we’re building power infrastructure that’s there to basically smooth out the unreliable pattern of supply that comes out of renewables.
This is something that Australians, I think, are finally waking up to, and I’d love to get your thoughts on that. But I’m mindful of a thing that I say to you every time we talk, which is surely it’s got to be over soon. Surely we can’t be more than another couple of years away before all of this collapses. But there is a sense that people are beginning to see through the scam more than ever before.
[From video]
It is shifting. We are over the hump and on the slide down the other side. But of course, the damage is still ongoing. So, how long will it take? But we definitely have. Yeah, I mean there was another story I covered this week where I said they’re looking for an escape hatch and it was a Sydney Morning Herald story where they were saying that, you know, did the Paris Agreement work? Well, we think it did. So, they’re already starting to say that Paris Agreement was cooling the world despite the fact that emissions are still rising, that most of the countries don’t even have targets. Only the rich countries have targets that matter and most of them are not meeting their targets. And despite all that, they’re saying that yes, the numbers are in. See, these people are innumerate. I think this is another thing we don’t talk about enough in society how some people just don’t cope with numbers. And the idea that the Paris Agreement is starting to cool the world to me, that’s an escape hatch. They’re looking for a way to back down out of this climate religion and still say it was useful. It was a productive thing and the Paris Agreement was worth doing. So, it’s an escape hatch. [End video]
That actually brings to mind the hole in the ozone layer. There is a big debate now about whether the hole in the ozone layer was purely cyclical and it was always going to close back up again, or there are Greens activists that say, “No, we saved the world by getting rid of CFCs and these various things that were destroying ozone. That’s why the ozone hole has closed back up again.” It does have a certain feel about it that they’re beginning to look for a narrative that will allow them to get out an escape hatch, as you call it. You mentioned the numbers and numeracy. I did a video recently explaining the bid stack and how that works because I think you’re spot on. The fact that actually a lot of the people in this space let alone a lot of Australians generally who don’t live and breathe this stuff just don’t actually understand how electricity is priced and how that really does disguise a lot of the costs and a lot of the impacts of the cost of renewables.
But there’s the numbers side of things in terms of costs. You were chatting with me off air just before we came on about how they’re also making claims around the numbers of deaths that are going to be caused. And fill me in a little bit because this is a story that passed me by. There’s apparently a study that has managed to calculate how many deaths in Europe we will see as a result of an Australian offshore gas project. Did I get those details right?
[From video]
You did. You did. I’m calling this the climate oracle. They have spoken and the ABC soaked it all up of course with no hard questions. So they’ve come out with climate models and the prophets have said that 484 people for exactly 484 people will die in Europe because of the Scarborough gas project that is going to operate off in the next 30 years. [End video]
Is Scarborough going to open and these people are going to drop dead? What’s the time lag there?
[From video]
I think it’s a 30 or 40-year they’re talking about lifetime emissions and this was the staggering thing. They put up headlines saying hundreds of people will die because they think that’s important, and yet of course thousands of people die every week in Europe and 484 people, even if it were true (which it probably isn’t), is going to be spread over 30 years and like really honestly who cares? And they calculated wait for it that the entire 30-year Scarborough project including scope 3 emissions, which is everything you can think of, would only warm the world by 0.039°. So that’s 4 ten-thousandths of a degree. [End video]
Yeah. Yeah.
[From video]
That’s 4 ten-thousandths of a degree. And I’m thinking, you guys are crazy. Once you explain this to Australians, they’re going to say, “Wow, is that all? Gee whiz. How can we possibly shut down the Scarra project to stop the world from warming by 4 ten-thousandths of a degree? It’s nothing.” And the 484 deaths are so biased and overestimated because we all know, as I’ve said a million times, that there are 6, 10, or 20 times as many deaths due to cold as there are due to heat. And that even applies in Brisbane. So even in sunny Brisbane, the studies show six times as many people die midwinter as die from heat waves in summer. We also know from those heatwave deaths that after we see a spike in deaths from a heat wave, six weeks later we will see a drop and that kind of bounce comes because heat waves it’s called harvesting, which is a dreadfully dark morbid word but harvesting means they’re simply taking those who would have died in the next six weeks.
So we see a reduction in death six weeks later. We don’t see that with cold spikes. When they kill people, the cold spikes are not harvesting forward. They’re actually taking lives younger than could have been. So, you know, again, everything about this was a joke. And by the way, apparently Andrew Forrest helped to fund that research work. There’s an undeclared vested interest. [End video]
Yeah, I’m sure there was no finger on the scale at all. You know, I’m mindful of the amazing work that Senator Matt Canavan has done on this cold death versus heat deaths issue. He recently took someone I don’t recall, this wasn’t a planned part of the interview but he took someone to task over the issue of there not being cold deaths included, or excuse me, the reduction in cold deaths being included in the projections as to what the impact of climate change was going to be. And if you’re going to calculate deaths, well, you need to include both sides of the ledger. And that would immediately obliterate almost every single argument, every almost every single health-related, death-related argument against a little bit of warming would do most of the world quite a lot of good.
It strikes me though that there’s so much information and there is so much noise and fury around this issue that it’s very, very difficult for people to kind of find someone that cuts through the crap, which is what I try to do. It’s what I tell people. I consider you to be another person who very much cuts through the crap. Could you tell my viewers where they can find you, where they can follow you and follow your work because you do such a wonderful job of exposing these stories, breaking them down and making them digestible.
[From video]
Thank you, Topher. I’m writing at joannenova.com.au. If you search for JoNova, you’ll find me and all the people who hate me, which is, you know, always a mark of achievement. But yes, just joannenova.com.au. And I try and bring something new to the debate all the time. I’ve been talking about those heat-related saving life-saving things for at least 10 years now, and it is the numbers are so strong on that. There was one study by Gasparini that showed twentyfold, and it was across 74 million people around the world in 13 countries or something, that there were 20 times as many deaths in winter as there are in summer. We are mammals. We are warm-blooded. We like the warmth. We live in the warm places on Earth. We don’t live in the cold places on Earth. This whole myth and idea that cooling is good for us and that warming is bad is just such a false creation.
So yes, and to get back I guess to your point earlier about electricity prices and the bid stacks, which you covered so well the big falsity there is the way they talk about wholesale prices for electricity being half-hour prices. So they say, “Oh, the wholesale price for wind is, you know, it’s negative. It’s cheap,” ignoring the fact that it’s got subsidies as well to be negative. But they don’t talk about the total system costs. And it’s the total system costs which bring in all of the other things we need to make the electricity stable, to keep the frequency normal, to add all the transmission lines. Lord, those transmission lines they just cost a fortune. And of course the pumped hydro, the Snowy Mountain elephant all of those other costs, they get put into the system costs and that’s what really matters and why our retail costs are not going down. [End video]
Yes. Well, it’s true that the sunshine and the wind blowing is free. Turning that into electricity that comes out of your plug at home that’s the bit that’s quite expensive and that’s the bit that tends to get us.
[From video]
Can I just say the coal underground is free, too. You know, it is. It’s sitting there waiting for us to do something useful with it. [End video]
It’s also stored solar energy in what has to be one of the most efficient batteries on Earth because it doesn’t lose its charge over time. It just sits there for millennia and doesn’t seem to run out of its charge. We can dig it up thousands of years later or who knows how long later and burn this stuff. And it’s just stored solar energy. I really don’t understand what the problem is. That all seems like solar energy to me.
[From video]
Well, and we’re just returning the CO₂ to the sky. In the long scheme, we’re talking 400 million years. It is just carbon neutral. It’s a very long cycle. [End video]
It’s all carbon. Well, we’re on a biosphere. It’s all carbon neutral around here. We’re not taking on any more. We’re not losing any. So, look, Joe, thank you so much for joining me here on the Topher Project. I do encourage people to go and check out your blog. I will also put the link to check out the video that I made about the bid stack for those who need to wrap their minds around that and understand just how exactly renewables could be our most expensive form of energy and yet claim to be the cheapest. It does kind of make sense when you understand the absolute monstrosity, in my opinion, that the bid stack is. But thank you, Joe, so much for coming on.
[From video] Thank you, Topher. [End video]
Well, that was Joanne Nova. I’ll put the link to her blog in the description of this video along with a link to my earlier video that’s all about the bid stack and how that works so that you can understand how they get away with these lies about renewables being the cheapest when in actual fact they’re anything but. But they manage to hide the truth inside the bid stack. That link to that video will be in the description of this one. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. Check out my books, DVDs, t-shirts, and hoodies at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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