Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has ramped up his criticism of the Queensland government’s new energy policy, arguing its plans to indefinitely extend the closure of coal-fired power plants will raise electricity prices and lower reliability.
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Mining billionaire and clean energy investor Andrew Forrest on Friday said Queensland had incredibly good renewable energy resources, but would be left behind if it remained wedded to old technologies.
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Critics of renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar farms describe them as intermittent power sources because they can only generate electricity at certain times of day or in response to certain weather conditions.
But Bowen said a major outage at Queensland’s Callide C coal plant in 2021 had raised wholesale prices by $30 per megawatt hour and left half a million people without power, while the average level of coal capacity that was unavailable due to outages increased by 28 per cent in the second quarter of 2025.
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“Over reliance on coal and ‘sweating the asset’ of coal-fired power is [a] far more serious threat to reliability than renewables will ever be.”
If you are wondering how anyone could ever describe coal as less reliable than renewables, Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has repeatedly demonstrated his rather shaky grasp of engineering. For example, he thinks you can store electricity like water.
Chris Bowen isn't having any of Uhlmann's 'wind doesn't always blow' rhetoric.
"the rain doesn't always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment"#auspolpic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
Queensland’s energy minister has announced the state’s coal-fired power stations will operate until least 2046 as he unveiled a long-awaited energy road map.
The five-year plan lays out what role coal, gas, wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery storage will play over the long-term in Queensland.
“The former Labor government’s decision to close coal units by 2035 regardless of their condition is officially abolished today,” David Janetzki said on Friday.
“This is a sensible and pragmatic plan built on economics and engineering, not ideology.”
The LNP has reset all of the state’s coal-fired stations back to their “technical life span end date”.
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Renewables, such as wind and solar, will continue be part of the state’s energy mix, Mr Janetzki said.
The Crisafulli Government’s Energy Roadmap is set to sign Queenslanders up for outdated, unreliable, and expensive coal power until the 2040’s – a move that threatens to drive up household bills, worsen climate pollution and put thousands of clean energy jobs at risk.
The plan sits in stark contrast to projections from the Australian Energy Market Operator, which show all of Queensland’s coal power stations closing by 2035.
Extending the life of Queensland’s ageing coal-fired power stations and considering new gas developments flies in the face of Queensland’s legislated 2035 emissions target of a 75% cut on 2005 levels, which the Crisafulli Government reaffirmed during the 2024 election less than a year ago. Extending and expanding coal and gas power stations locks in more harmful climate pollution for longer, driving more frequent and extreme weather events that harm Queenslanders.
Climate Council energy expert Greg Bourne said: “Chaining Queensland to coal clunkers for 20 years is a bet against Queensland’s future. It’s bad economics, bad for the climate, and bad for Queensland households. This is a reckless plan from a government that said it would cut climate pollution and lower costs.
“This roadmap is more of a road block to progress. Queensland’s coal power stations failed 78 times last summer, costing taxpayers billions to keep them on life support. The government is throwing good money after bad – money that should be building renewable energy and storage projects that deliver cheaper, cleaner power for everyone.”
Climate Councillor Associate Professor Joel Gilmore said: “This plan will leave Queenslanders worse off. The evidence is clear that renewables backed by storage are the cheapest and most reliable way to power our homes and businesses. Every delay in building a cleaner energy system means higher bills and more pollution.
“The sunshine state should be leading Australia’s clean energy boom, attracting investment and creating tens of thousands of regional jobs. Instead, this roadmap risks driving that investment interstate, leaving Queensland with an outdated, expensive system that is falling apart.”
For interviews please contact the Climate Council media team on media@climatecouncil.org.au or call 0485 863 063.
The Climate Council is Australia’s leading community-funded climate change communications organisation. We provide authoritative, expert and evidence-based advice on climate change to journalists, policymakers, and the wider Australian community.
The good news is this move to protect Queensland coal from the green madness will shield Queensland to an extent from the renewable follies of other states. The bad news is that protection is incomplete – those same renewable heavy states keep driving up energy prices in Queensland, whenever other states’ unreliables crumble under the strain of having to provide energy when it is needed.
From June this year;
‘Bailing out bad decisions’: Queensland slams Victoria over gas supply
Victoria cannot rely on pulling more gas from Queensland to shore up an energy system pushed to the edge by a cascading set of breakdowns and concerns over the reliability of renewables, with the pipeline flowing south already at full capacity.
Queensland’s Liberal-National government remains staunchly opposed to further propping up the southern state’s energy grid, saying it doesn’t have the gas supply capacity to keep “bailing out Victoria’s bad decisions”.
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“Queenslanders should not be penalised over unscientific decisions down south that favour ideology over economics and engineering,” he said.
“We don’t have the pipeline capacity to keep bailing out Victoria’s bad decisions. The solution to the southern state gas crisis is for the southern states to develop their gas reserves. We’re not asking them to do anything we haven’t done ourselves.”
Despite this encouraging step towards energy sanity, I don’t imagine this move will stir much enthusiasm for new Aussie coal plant investment.
There is no guarantee the new 2046 target will stick – the 2035 target could be restored by a future Queensland administration. And anyone seeking to invest in coal would also have to contend with our radical green federal government.
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has used a snow event in his electorate of New England to push his campaign against Australia’s “lunatic policy of net zero”.
Mr Joyce, on Saturday, published a video on social media as thick snow fell on the town of Bendemeer.
“A day like today, I don’t know which one is more ridiculous: [UN Secretary-General] Antonio Guterres talking about global boiling, or [Tim Flannery] – the river’s in flood – saying, it’s not gonna rain anymore,” he said in a video on his Facebook page.
“What’s sad about this really is there’s people in this little village I’m in, Bendemeer, who can’t afford to keep warm because we’ve got this lunatic policy of net zero where apparently we’re going to make it snow even more.”
“We’re not doing anything, all we’re doing is being completely cruel and hurting people.”
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His “Repeal Net Zero” bill, backed by several Coalition rebels, proposes scrapping Australia’s carbon-neutral target by 2050, a goal in line with most other developed nations.
Barnaby Joyce disappointed us in 2021, when as leader of the National Party he caved to demands to support the coalition Net Zero policy, going into the failed 2021 federal election campaign.
Since then Joyce has worked hard to redress this lapse of judgement, by organising a farmers revolt against big government and corporations steamrollering their cruel renewable agenda across Australia’s primary agricultural land;
Land owners join forces to protest at compulsory purchase of land for renewable energy transmission linesarmers from Far North Queensland through NSW and into Victoria are forming a single coalition to fight the compulsory purchase of their land for high voltage transmission lines.
Farmers from Far North Queensland through NSW and into Victoria are forming a single coalition to fight the compulsory purchase of their land for high voltage renewable energy transmission lines.
Former deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce united the farmers at a Zoom meeting last week to try and stop the 500 kilovolt cables passing over prime agricultural land including his own at Danglemah near Tamworth.
“All these farmers have to deal with transmission lines going across their land from Queensland to … southern NSW, New England, the Upper Hunter and into Victoria,” Mr Joyce said. “But none of them were talking to each other.”
I’ve got to say I agree with Barnaby Joyce. Wasn’t snow supposed to end years ago? Weren’t all the snow field entrepreneurs already supposed to be bankrupt?
There is quite a lot of snow – heaviest snowfall in 40 years, according to some sources.
Australian towns blanketed by heaviest snowfall in decades
A cold air front brought snow to parts of Queensland for the first time in 10 years
Several towns in Australia’s east have experienced their heaviest snowfall in decades, causing floods, stranding vehicles and cutting power to thousands of homes.
A cold air front dropped as much as 40 cm (16 inches) of snow on parts of northern New South Wales on Saturday, the most since the mid-1980s, said Miriam Bradbury, a meteorologist at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
Snow also settled in areas of the neighbouring state of Queensland for the first time in 10 years, she said.
Barnaby’s point that renewable energy poverty, unaffordable home heating is causing far greater hardship than any problems caused by global warming is spot on. Expensive climate virtue does not help low income people shivering in cold weather which wasn’t supposed to happen.
Alarmists are quick to jump on every heatwave, claiming every bead of sweat as a sign of the end times, but they have no explanation for why this alleged global boiling has failed to stop the snow, other than to shamelessly claim global warming causes MORE snow, whenever they are embarrassed by an excess of the white stuff.
Perhaps the truth is, global warming just isn’t a big deal, in the context of far larger natural seasonal and annual temperature variation. And global warming is far less of an issue than being unable to afford home heating, because renewables drove up your electricity bill.
In March 2025, much of Queensland was lashed, drenched and then drown by torrential rains with downpours of 180 mm in a single day, breaking records for March, swelling rivers and flooding plains. From Burketown to Winton to Adavale to Thargomindah, graziers have been isolation and suffered tremendous losses, yet their resilience shines through. The water is now moving slowly to Lake Eyre, there will also be renewal.
In March 2025, much of Queensland was lashed, drenched and then drown by torrential rains with downpours of 180 mm in a single day, breaking records for March, swelling rivers and flooding plains. From Burketown to Winton to Adavale to Thargomindah, graziers have been isolation and suffered tremendous losses, yet their resilience shines through. The water is now moving slowly to Lake Eyre, there will also be renewal.
As I comment on the deluge and the Bureau’s failure to forecast it—from the equatorial Pacific Ocean to Lake Ayre overland—I hold those still affected close, wishing them strength amid the heartache.
Where did this water come from? It began as water vapor over the western Pacific’s equatorial zone, a warm ocean expanse near Indonesia where sea temperatures above 28°C fuel intense evaporation. Think tropical convection and hot towers—cumulonimbus clouds with tremendous updrafts—drawing columns of water from the warm ocean’s surface to the very top of the troposphere.
The monsoon trough lingered at the wet season’s tail, moving this moisture inland, dumping it across Queensland’s Channel Country. Some, like Simon Turton, argue this wasn’t just La Niña but a warming world amplifying the water cycle, delivering what fell in Winton and Adavale. More likely the Bureau needs not only better tools for forecasting drought and flood cycles, but also to be monitoring volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that can seed the atmosphere with condensation nuclei.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s autumn forecast, released February 27, 2025, painted a misleading picture: warmer-than-average temperatures across Australia, with rainfall “likely to be in the typical range” and “drier than usual for most of Queensland” outside southern and southeast areas. Tropical lows and monsoon bursts were noted as possibilities, but few expected the scale of what unfolded. Western Queensland, pegged for below-average rain, instead saw its third-wettest March since 1900, with 207 mm statewide—124% above the 1961–1990 average. Winton recorded daily falls of 120–180 mm, breaking records from 1910, while Adavale’s Bulloo River surged, evacuating its 30 residents. The Bureau’s models missed the mark, underscoring a need for them to move to better tools.
In August 2011, John Abbot and I visited the Bureau of Meteorology keen to share output from our rainfall forecasting model built using commercially available AI on a laptop computer to forecast monthly rainfall. Meanwhile the Bureau are still producing hopeless forecasts using an expense to run, and expense, super computer costing hundreds of millions of dollars. We wanted to work with the BOM suggesting artificial intelligence (AI) had great capacity for more skilful seasonal forecasts.
Oscar Alves, then the head of their long-range forecasting unit, did not dispute that our AI-based model was generating more reliable monthly forecast for 17 Queensland locations, up to 3 months in advance, but that because the climate, he claimed, was on a new trajectory, our method would not work for many more years.
Oscar Alves’s boss, Andrew Johnson, the current head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, also seems to understand very little about natural climate cycles and the application of AI. Johnson is a Malcolm Turnbull appointee. Back in 2011, John Abbot and I were affiliated with Central Queensland University and funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
There are now many studies in applied mathematics and AI, already published in the scientific literature including by myself and John Abbot showing the potential application of AI for rainfall forecasting. Some of this technology is beginning to be adopted in Asia, including in Indonesia where I was part of a program with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology (BMKG). The first paper that Abbot and I got published was by the Chinese Academy of Science. They are leaving Australia behind, for sure.
Can you see me, bottom left corner? I was in Bandung with Indonesian meteorologists, some now working with the Chinese on better methods for seasonal rainfall forecasting using AI.
Since 2018, our work on monthly rainfall forecasting has been continued mostly by John Abbot, click here.
I quit mostly because of the extraordinary backlash when John Abbot and I began extending our rainfall forecasting work to climate change. Gavin Schmidt at NASA and others ran a campaign against us, not by way of coherent criticisms in the scientific literature, but as attacks on Twitter wanting the retraction of an article we had just got published. You can read my comprehensive defence of that article at climatelab.com.au, click here.
Oscar Alves and Andrew Johnson continue to fail to recognise that the world’s climate is always changing; there are cycles of different frequencies some spanning hundreds, others span thousands, even millions of years. Most importantly they can be described mathematically and forecast using AI, but it requires a new way of thinking. Even think tank employees often fail to understand that the climate has been changing, even before woolly mammoths, which are, I am told, the third-most depicted animal in ice age art, after horses and bison. Some of these people, running the institutions, would prefer to discuss ice age art than the application of AI to rainfall forecasting. Consequently, because those in charge mostly don’t seem to care, the little people, Australians attempting to earn an income independently of government suffer. When was it that Johnson before a Senate Committee claims surprise that anyone took the Bureau’s forecasts seriously.
A friend recently emailed me, awed by how this water vapour, unseen in the sky, became a flood of such magnitude. “A few days before,” he wrote, “it was just floating around until temperature and saturation made it fall to earth.” His point captures the wonder: the atmosphere holds vast reservoirs—billions of tonnes of vapour yet we only notice when it falls.
In western Queensland this last March, that falling was relentless, driven by low-pressure systems likely nudged by Rossby waves and volcanic eruptions, soaking already saturated soils. Rivers including the Georgina, Diamantina, and Cooper Creek have overflowed, submerging roads and homes drowning livestock, much of this flooding now continuing in slow-motion.
The water is on the move, heading west to Lake Eyre, Australia’s lowest point at 17 meters below sea level. The Diamantina River’s waters are already trickles into Lake Eyre North’s Warburton Groove. The main flood pulse, from Winton and Adavale, crawls through the Channel Country at 1 km/h, spreading over an area five times the size of the United Kingdom.
The prediction is the waters will reach Lake Eyre by late April, peaking from June to August, potentially rivalling fills from 2009–2011, though not 1974’s full basin flood. Evaporation and floodplains will claim much, but enough may linger to draw pelicans and tourists by winter.
For western Queensland, these rains were a paradox—life-giving yet also heartbreaking for many. Graziers welcomed dam refills, but not drown livestock and supplies. Adavale’s evacuation and Winton’s record-breaking deluge test endurance. To those still cut off, checking livestock through mud and awaiting road repairs, we see your struggle. Your stories—of neighbours helping neighbours, of facing this flooding cycle with grit—inspire us.
We care deeply and hope for brighter days as waters recede.
For individuals and communities rebuilding, the challenge is immense, yet the same water promises renewal at Lake Eyre—a rare spectacle of this land’s natural climate cycles.
May those affected by the flooding rains find strength to match the rivers’ flow and may we all carry more respect for the forces shaping our world the endless cycles of destruction and rebirth.
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Key technical papers detailing my method for monthly rainfall forecasting are listed at the Climatelab.com.au website, click here.
For Lake Eyre updates, to watch the water flow in, click in.
Bureau of Meteorology’s 2025 Autumn Long-Range Forecast 27/02/2025
The Bureau of Meteorology has released its long-range forecast for autumn 2025.
While autumn is often a time for cooler weather to begin, this season is very likely to be warmer than average across Australia and summer heat may persist into early autumn.
Rainfall is likely to be in the typical range for the season for most of Australia…
It’s also likely to be drier than usual for most of Queensland except for southern and south-east areas.
Tropical cyclones, tropical lows, storms and active monsoon bursts are still possible in the north over the coming months, which can bring particularly heavy rain.
The BBC have reported on Cyclone Alfred, which has just hit Queensland:
Hundreds of thousands of people remain without power in Australia after a cyclone brought wild weather to the east coast.
Communities in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales (NSW) were beginning the clean-up on Sunday after the storm caused widespread flooding and knocked down power lines and trees.
A 61-year-old man’s body was recovered from floodwaters on Saturday, while in a separate incident, 12 soldiers were taken to hospital after their convoy crashed en route to rescue operations.
The storm had weakened by the time it made landfall near Brisbane on Saturday night, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Sunday warned locals of the continued wild weather and risks from flooding.
“The situation in Queensland and northern New South Wales remains very serious due to flash flooding and heavy winds,” Albanese said.
“Heavy rainfall, damaging wind gusts and coastal surf impacts are expected to continue over coming days.”
In just about every story about hurricanes, the BBC invariably include a paragraph to the effect that global warming is making them worse.
Strangely this latest report fails to make any comment at all about long term trends. Could it be because cyclones have become a very rare occurrence for Australia?
This is what the Australian Bureau of Meteorology confirm that not only have tropical cyclones becomes less frequent, but there has also been a decline in the more severe ones.
Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades. At the time, it caused me much grief because the General Manager of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.
Rare Dugong marine mammal swimming over sea grass. Underwater image taken on a scuba diving trip in Indonesia
Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades. At the time, it caused me much grief because the General Manager of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.
It is the case that I was Environment Manager for Queensland Canegrowers Ltd from 1998 through until 2003 – and that I did nothing about all the agricultural pesticides. That has been a recent accusation across at my official Facebook page.
I was employed to implement the findings of a three-volume audit of the sugar industry and its environmental impacts. I got off to a good start, but in 2001, with the launch of the WWF Save the Reef campaign everything was blown off course. I’ve written about that before, including how it begun here:
I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998, long before the launch of that campaign.
A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-be-published research study had found that elevated levels of pesticide residue, most likely from cane farming, were accumulating in the fat tissue of dugongs. Media headlines followed, including ‘Pesticide in reef creatures and cane burning link with dioxin in dugong’.
I obtained a copy of the study and found it was primarily an analysis of the type and quantity of dioxins found in the fat tissue of dugong carcasses that had been killed in fishing nets. Dioxins are a group of organochlorine compounds commonly associated with industrial waste incineration. The research paper made reference to a different study that had analyzed the dioxins found in soils under sugarcane cultivation and commented that the cane-land soils and dugong fat samples both had elevated levels of the same type of dioxins.
Concerned by this news, I contacted a dioxin expert at the University of Queensland. Dr Brian Stanmore informed me that the type of dioxin considered by the GBRMPA to be elevated in the dugongs was common and the least toxic of all dioxins. Furthermore, Dr Stanmore indicated that the level of dioxins found in the dugongs was less than the national average in people in the United States. He commented that ‘it looks like the dugong is better off than we are’.
The GBRMPA study clearly stated, ‘All (dugong) carcasses were in good condition at the time of sampling. All animal deaths were confirmed or suspected (fishing) net drowning.’
However, instead of focusing on net fishing practices, the GBRMPA subsequently provided funding for a full investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET) into the likely origin of the dioxin considered to be at elevated levels in the dugong carcasses, including possible links with sugarcane production.
Two years later, the NRCET investigation concluded that the dioxin of concern to the GBRMPA was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, including in regions beyond sugarcane cultivation. Analyses of dated marine sediment cores indicated that the chemical was present prior to European settlement in Queensland. In other words, the dioxin is a naturally occurring organochlorine and not a pesticide residue. There are, apparently, many naturally occurring non-toxic dioxins.
That has never made media headlines.
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You can read more of this story in the piece I wrote for the IPA Review back when they regularly published me, the article is called ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation’.
“… There are no words to describe the environmental devastation that these so-called ‘green’ ‘renewable energy’ projects have already wreaked on QLD and will continue to do so …”
“… There are no words to describe the environmental devastation that these so-called ‘green’ ‘renewable energy’ projects have already wreaked on QLD and will continue to do so …”
Good Afternoon Kilkivan Action Group!
Our wonderful friend from FNQ, Carolyn Emms of Rainforest Reserves Australia, has created a QLD Parliamentary e-Petition calling for a moratorium on all renewable energy projects in QLD.
Please take 30 seconds (seriously, that’s all it takes) to click on the link and sign this very important petition.
Even better, could you please have all your immediate family members sign and then forward it to your extended families and friends. Post it on Facebook, IG, X – wherever you can spread the word. There are no words to describe the environmental devastation that these so-called ‘green’ ‘renewable energy’ projects have already wreaked on QLD and will continue to do so under the current political landscape here in QLD and across the Nation.
Wishing everyone a wonderful Sunday evening.Warmest (or should I say coldest because it’s bloody freezing in Kilkivan today!) Regards, Katy McCallum Kilkivan Action Group
The petition is available here. The petition is only open to residents of Queensland, Australia.
It is easy to dismiss the value of petitions – why would a powerful politician care what a bunch of anti-renewable campaigners think?
But this year is different. This year is an election year, and the green politicians who currently run Queensland are clinging to power by their fingernails, because of public anger over multiple policy failures. Even a few thousand votes could tip the balance in the upcoming election.
So this year, more than most years, every gust in the political wind will be closely watched by politicians on all sides. More than ever, this year your voice really does count.
Even for an incoming state premier, Steven Miles has had a busy first week.
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Miles had already set out to make climate change one of the themes of his first week in office, even before ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper flooded the state’s north. Two Fridays running, the student of Al Gore has rolled out major green announcements: doubling the state’s emissions reduction target to 75% by 2035 in his first announcement as premier and banning new gas developments from the state’s far western river systems, an election promise dating to 2015.
Miles is eager to build a consensus around the economics of the transition: a link between city and bush, right and left.
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Miles hopes he has found the answer.
“It’s my job to convince [people] that addressing climate change isn’t a threat to jobs, it’s actually a way to protect jobs,” Miles says.
“If you look at the high-emitting industries in places like Gladstone and Townsville, they’re going to lose their global customers if they continue to be reliant on such high levels of fossil fuel energy.
“So the best way we can protect those jobs is by providing them with renewable energy so that they can sell their products into markets that increasingly want green, aluminium, green steel, green products. And similarly, if we get it right, we can also attract new industries.
“In the past, they we’re attracted to our cheap, plentiful fossil fuel-based energy. In the future we will have cheap, plentiful, firmed renewable energy.”
The problem with this plan is cheap, plentiful, firmed renewable energy does not exist.
Batteries are impossibly expensive. Available dam sites are way too distant and wouldn’t provide enough capacity. And if the plan is to firm using natural gas or coal, there is no need to build the renewables – it would always be cheaper just to build the natural gas or coal, and forget the renewables.
Net Zero cannot and will not happen, with current technology choices.
Why is my home state of Queensland cursed with such a parade of economic fools?
If international demand for coal drops, the industry will scale back and realign on its own. There is no need to talk coal down and try to kill it off.
The one hope of political sanity in Queensland, Queensland is also home to One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party. Katter is aligned with remote rural regions, and supports ethanol mandates, but they also oppose emissions reductions. One Nation has a sound climate policy. Both have more palatable energy ideas than any of the current mainstream parties.
Personally I expect a significant short to medium term drop in demand, but not because of Net Zero. The economically incompetent Xi Jinping Chinese Communist regime is doing every wrong move you can imagine in the face of their realestate sector collapse, their government is pouring money into well connected but already failed industries, and doubling down on useless infrastructure projects – all the failed policies which made the 2008 GFC so painful in the west, and more. But nobody can predict when that circus act will come unstuck.
Whether it’s wiping out millions of trees across the Scottish Highlands, turning Germany’s Black Forest into sawdust and smoking ruins or ripping the Amazon basin apart to extract the millions of tonnes of balsa wood it needs to build hundreds of thousands of 50-80m turbine blades each year, the wind industry’s ‘couldn’t care less attitude’ is prone to rankle those with real affection for the natural order and the glorious world we live in.
One such character is Dominic Legoe. Dominic has over 30 years’ experience in engineering design, business development and project management, including designing ports and harbours and associated infrastructure.
Dominic has joined the growing chorus of outrage about the Queensland and Federal governments providing the ‘green’ light for the wind industry’s planned and obviously deliberate destruction of Queensland’s pristine dryland tropical forests.
In the following piece – which is an edited extract from a longer paper available in full here (PDF) – Dominic lays bare what’s in store for Queensland, its wild and rugged wilderness, and its peaceful rural communities, if the wind industry is not stopped dead in its tracks.
Queensland’s Renewable Energy Transition Madness Dominic Legoe 5 September 2023
Now is the time to act to stop the Queensland government approving an environmental disaster!
The Department of Energy and Public Works (EPW) has released two papers:
which spell out a plan for the widespread destruction of huge regions of ancient rainforest for the purpose of installing swathes of wind turbines from Brisbane to Cairns. And it is all up to Tanya Plibersek now to make the final decision to proceed or amend or reject this proposal. We need to tell her no!
Extent of the Proposed Destruction Currently there are only seven operating wind farms (utility scale) in the state, yet the plan calls for forty-eight wind farms more wind farms to be constructed. The nameplate capacity of the Proposed & ‘in Construction’ wind farms is over 33,000 MW whilst the current existing wind farm capacity is about 1,000 MW. For every turbine there needs to be an allowance of 200 hectares for each 4.5 MW (source SuperGrid Infrastructure Blueprint’- September 2022). Based on that rate, the land required for 33 GW of wind farms is 1.47 million hectares which is about the same as a quarter of Tasmania.
From Wilderness to Industrial Zones These proposed wind farms will be built in pristine wilderness areas so they will be as close as possible to the main existing 275 kV transmission line that runs all the way up to Cairns. These steep and previously inaccessible areas of the coastal ranges that have escaped 200 years of agriculture will be cleared to make way for the turbines and their access roads. For example, the Chalumbin region, which is a site of importance for Jirrbal cultural history, is now threatened with a major wind farm proposal
Most of the proposed wind farms (North of Gladstone) are located adjacent National Parks, conservation reserves and some in areas previously earmarked to be National Parks. For example, these areas have been identified as the site for the proposed Upper Burdekin wind farm complex and the Chalumbin wind farm.
You can get an idea of the degree of damage caused when you look at the Mount Emerald wind farm which became operational in 2018. The turbines are sited on top or near the top of the range. The turbines for Mt Emerald are small in height compared to the more recent projects and proposals.
Fast-Tracked Environmental Destruction
A major issue with wind farm construction works to date has been the very poor waste management and erosion controls as practised for these site works. A particular runoff concern is the damage it is likely to cause to the Great Barrier Reef. To ensure that the approval process for wind farms has minimal impediments the Queensland government has pushed through a special Act of Parliament (State Code 23: Wind Farm Development) which side steps all prudent Environmental Impact Studies as a part of the approval processes. Wind farms are about the only development in the state that has only a minimal review before wholesale land clearing is approved.
What you can do The proposed Roadmap is just a fuzzy feelgood document that allows for the entire eastern section of Queensland to be opened up for rapid and unchecked land clearing, habitat destruction, erosion and runoff that will put the Great Barrier Reef in danger.
Please email the Queensland Government before 22 September 2023 atREZRoadmap@epw.qld.gov.au to demand a complete rejection of this Roadmap and call for an alternative that has orders of magnitude lower environmental impact.
Using other people’s to offload personal guilt is hardly virtuous, but the wind and solar scam has attracted plenty of guilt-laden oligarchs looking to atone for their (often obscene) wealth doing just that – and using taxpayer-backed subsidies to conjure up all manner of new ‘green’ scams, like ‘green’ hydrogen.
Using other people’s to offload personal guilt is hardly virtuous, but the wind and solar scam has attracted plenty of guilt-laden oligarchs looking to atone for their (often obscene) wealth doing just that – and using taxpayer-backed subsidies to conjure up all manner of new ‘green’ scams, like ‘green’ hydrogen.
Australia’s Twiggy Forrest, is just another blowhard billionaire eager to squander taxpayer’s money. Forrest made his $billions digging up large parts of Western Australia and shipping it to the Chinese, among others.
Wallowing in a mountain of cash from iron ore sales – at record prices – he’s been targeting the renewable energy scam, with over-the-top plans for the mass production of what eager rent-seekers call ‘green’ hydrogen.
Like every well-connected rent-seeking spiv, he recoils at the thought of staking of his cash on his grand green hydrogen fantasy, instead he’s demanding untold $billions in subsidies for something that he, quite evidently, appreciates will never make a buck on its own.
With that object in mind, Forrest set up Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) a first-rate rent-seeking operation designed to gouge whatever it can from gullible governments, on the (hazy) premise that it will use wind or solar power and turn it into hydrogen gas, something that has never been done at scale and is completely uneconomic, thanks to the laws of physics, especially the immutable rules of thermodynamics.
STT has already pointed out Twiggy’s Condor killing exploits in Argentina’s southern Patagonia region, where FFI plans to spear thousands of wind turbines to, you guessed it, produce so-called ‘green’ hydrogen, all heavily subsidised by Argentina’s taxpayers, of course.
Closer to home, Forrest’s plans include wiping out thousands of hectares of virgin rainforest and eucalypt woodland in Far North Queensland for exactly the same purpose.
The Australian’s Nick Cater reports on yet another woke-washing scandal.
Twiggy Forrest, Chris Bowen caught in green hydrogen fantasy The Australian Nick Cater 10 April 2023
Whatever plagues Chris Bowen’s mind it is clearly not self-doubt. So it is not unreasonable to assume he stands by his prediction that Australia will be a renewable energy superpower in seven years’ time.
Bowen told the National Press Club in December 2021 that by 2030 thousands of Australians will be employed exporting renewable energy to Asia, via submarine cables and shipping deep-frozen green hydrogen offshore.
Green hydrogen is to renewable energy enthusiasts what gold was to ancient alchemists: the universal panacea that frees the human soul from disease and corruptibility and transports it to a perfect and everlasting state. They believe it holds the key to turning dilute, fickle sources of energy, such as solar and wind, into something vaguely useful.
That is the view of Andrew Forrest, a miner turned born-again renewable energy entrepreneur. Forrest’s company, Squadron Energy, is Australia’s biggest player in weather-dependent renewable energy. He is on record as predicting that renewables could squeeze coal out of the market by the end of the decade. But the real breakthrough will come with the development of green hydrogen, which, he claims, is Australia’s greatest resource.
“To make it, all you need to do is run electricity through water,” he told a Clean Energy Council summit in 2021. Water is the easy part. Generating the eye-watering quantity of electricity needed is a more formidable challenge.
Let’s assume global demand for hydrogen reaches 300Mt by 2050 and that the green energy superpower Australia is going to become produces one-15th of that total, as an influential Deloitte report suggests is possible. That would require about 900TW of electricity, which is roughly 3½ times Australia’s current annual output. The absurdity of the numbers sends green hydrogen into dreamy land even before we confront Forrest’s insistence that we do it with two hands tied behind our back.
For Forrest, the only genuinely green electricity is generated by weather-dependent renewable energy. The Minerals Council canvasses carbon capture and storage as an option but Forrest reckons that would be cheating.
Small modular nuclear reactors are out of the question too. “I just don’t think it’s necessary,” Forrest told Sky News last year. “When you’ve looked at all the renewable energy that we in Australia and the world (have), we have so many thousands of times more energy, which is fully renewable, which uranium isn’t.”
Yet no amount of Forrest’s spin can overcome the iron law of energy density. Coal requires 25 square metres to generate a megawatt of electricity. A modern small modular nuclear reactor requires less than one square metre. A wind turbine plant typically requires more than 2000 square metres per megawatt, which means that even in a country as vast as Australia, the supply of available land is quickly exhausted.
In Queensland, where Squadron Energy is investing billions of dollars, wind and solar developments are being pushed beyond the boundaries of farmland into native scrub. In a rational world, Apple’s announcement last week that it was pulling out of a deal to purchase energy from Squadron’s proposed wind plant in the Upper Burdekin would be the beginning of the end for unreliable renewables.
An environmental assessment, released in December, found that 769 hectares of koala habit would be destroyed if the development goes ahead. It would involve the clearance of 662ha of Sharman’s rock wallaby habitat, 709ha of greater glider habitat and 754ha of habit that provides sanctuary for the red goshawk.
That a wind turbine development should even be considered on such a sensitive site shows how desperate the sector has become. Pushing renewables in such far-flung territory adds considerably to the cost. It requires wide roads to be cut through hillsides and the bulldozing of native tree, plus extra transmission lines.
The sheer weight of minerals needed for the construction of wind and solar plants brings other challenges, as Siemens Energy chief executive Christian Bruch acknowledged. “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly need 10 times the material (compared to) what conventional technologies need,” he said. “If you have problems on the supply chain, it hits wind extremely hard.”
Squadron’s Upper Burdekin development was already looking less profitable after it was forced to reduce the number of turbines from 139 to 80. Add to that the opprobrium foisted upon it by Apple’s withdrawal and the project looks to be in trouble. The kind of hydrogen Forrest is proposing is only green in the sense that it is technologically unripe.
Current international demand is so low as to be effectively non-existent compared to our exports of natural gas and coal. If international demand starts to accelerate, what’s to stop others cornering the market? The competitive advantage will belong to the jurisdiction with the cheapest electricity, and that’s not going to be Australia.
It’s little wonder that many with an eye on the capital markets are wondering if green hydrogen will ever get off the ground. In February, a meeting of federal, state and territory industry ministers called for the 2019 green hydrogen strategy to be “revised and refreshed” in the light of international developments.
President Joe Biden’s absurdly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act offers $US580bn of incentives for green innovation. Guy Debelle, a former Reserve Bank deputy governor, warned that Australia is at risk of being left behind by countries with generous subsidies, lower renewable energy costs and closer access to major industrial markets. He said the government would have to devote at least $15bn in public funds to counter a global hydrogen “subsidy arms race”.
A head somewhat cooler than the one sitting on the shoulders of the federal Energy Minister might conclude that this isn’t a fight Australia needs to be in. It would be better to focus our attention on the green economy games we can win; lithium, for example, where we are the world’s largest exporter; rare earths, where we’re the world’s second-largest producer; or cobalt, where we rank third.
Arriving at that conclusion, however, requires clear strategic thinking, indifferent to headlines and uncontaminated by hype. Policy formation in the 24-hour media cycle rarely happens that way. The Australian
The Greens’ hypocrisy on energy is laid bare by their silence on Twiggy Forrest’s not-so-green wind farm plans Sky News Nick Cater 8 April 2023
Talking the talk on climate change is easy.
Walking the walk is somewhat harder, as Apple has discovered since it embarked on its journey to make its products carbon neutral by 2030.
Last August, Apple struck a deal with Twiggy Forrest’s Squadron Energy to buy 500MW of electricity annually from the yet-to-be-built Upper Burdekin Wind Farm in far north Queensland.
“It’s actually really cool to be able to do it in Australia,” Apple’s vice president of environment, Lisa Jackson, told a Fairfax newspaper.
“Because the country is sort of facing this climate challenge head-on recently. We feel like it’s perfect timing.”
This week we learned that the timing wasn’t so perfect and the deal wasn’t so cool after all when Apple announced it was pulling out.
The supposed clean energy project turns out to be dirtier and meaner to nature than Forrest might have hoped.
The environmental statement for the project paints a devastating picture of the bloodbath that might result from the construction and operation of 80 giant wind turbines in a remote area rich in biodiversity.
The statement released quietly before Christmas warned there would be an “unavoidable significant residual impact” on four endangered species.
It would require the clearance of 662 ha of Sharman’s rock-wallaby habitat, 709 ha of greater glider habitat, and 754 ha of habitat that offers sanctuary to the red goshawk, the most endangered bird of prey in Australia.
And then there is the koala.
The construction of the wind turbine plant would bulldoze 769 hectares of koala habitat, an area three times larger than the Brisbane CBD. No wonder Apple decided to pull out.
It was only a matter of time before the headlong rush for wind and solar collided with the iron law of energy density.
There is no getting around the physics: dilute sources of energy like wind and solar require huge amounts of land.
A modern nuclear small modular reactor requires less than one square metre to produce a megawatt of energy.
Coal-fired generation requires 25 square metres per megawatt. A wind turbine plant typically requires more than 2,000 square metres per megawatt.
Even in a country as vast as Australia, the land bank starts to run low.
Which is why the Victorian government is pushing ahead with offshore wind turbines despite the technical challenges and the estimated $29 billion cost.
It is why the Queensland government is spending $5 billion on a new transmission line to turn remote areas of the state into renewable energy zones.
Upper Burdekin is just one part of a chain of approximately 550 turbines which would stretch for hundreds of kilometres along the Great Dividing Range from the Barron River west of Cairns to Lotus Creek south of Mackay.
Three of the 14 wind plants are already operating and one is under construction. All of them will create significant environmental damage, some within areas of outstanding national beauty.
Of the many well-funded environmental lobby groups in Australia, only one, WWF Australia, has been courageous enough to challenge the green energy mantra and recognise the permanent damage being caused to native wildlife and natural landscapes.
WWF-Australia’s energy transition manager, Cam Crawford, told The Guardian: “We called for the project to be substantially downscaled or relocated to already cleared land with good wind resources. We welcome Apple’s decision this week. It shows leadership and a commitment to renewables that are good for climate and nature.”
There has been silence from the Greens, which seems odd for a party that more than any other has exploited the koala for political ends.
In October last year, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young introduced a Save the Koala Bill into Federal Parliament which would place a moratorium on the destruction of critical koala habitat.
Hanson-Young blamed the villainy of the Morrison government and coal mining companies for the koala’s plight.
Together with the effects of climate change, she claimed, the koala faced extinction within decades.
Hanson-Young said the threat was reason enough to stop the expansion of BHP’s Peak Downs coal mine in Queensland and MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion in the upper Hunter Valley once owned by Rio Tinto.
“Stand strong, stand up for the koala,” she urged the Senate in a rousing second reading speech. “Stand up for your conviction and ensure that big companies like BHP cannot continue to make profits off the destruction of koala homes.”
As it happened, neither project carries anything more than a hypothetical risk to koala habitats.
The original EIS for Mount Pleasant recorded no koala sightings nor any sign of koala scats or scratches.
At Upper Burdekin, by contrast, the environmental report sighted several populations whose foraging grounds and shelter face a real and concrete threat from the development of an industrial wind plant.
We need a word far stronger than hypocrisy to describe the Greens’ double standards towards koala protection.
If they were genuinely committed to reducing human impact on the environment, they would denounce the sins of big wind and big solar as loudly as they condemn big coal.
Today’s preening, morally arrogant Greens possess neither the courage nor intellectual honesty of their founding leader Bob Brown who led objections to Tasmania’s giant Robbins Island wind turbine development.
“We have alternatives for renewable energy,” he told the ABC four years ago. “We don’t have alternatives for extinct species of birds.” Sky News
Blinky Bill’s homeland bulldozed to make way for wind turbines.
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