Not Before Time the World is Alerted to the Evils of the World Bank

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Press Release 09/01/19 World’s Poor Better Off Without Dr Kim As World Bank Head London, 9 January: The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) welcomes the imminent departure of Dr. Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank. Appointed by President Obama in 2012, Dr Kim turned the World Bank into a green think tank, betraying its core mission of lifting the world’s most disadvantaged populations out of poverty. Under Dr. Kim, the World Bank imposed an almost total ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations, despite coal being one of the most cost effective means of generating low cost, reliable electricity. Subsequently the financing ban was extended to the upstream oil and gas industries. In October, Dr. Kim announced that the World Bank was pulling out of the long-planned Kosovo coal project, arguing that Kosovo could make do with wind turbines, thus destabilising that fragile state’s economy. Commenting on Dr. Kim’s resignation, Rupert Darwall, author of the GWPF report The Anti-Development Bank: The World Bank’s regressive energy policies (2017), said: "Access to low cost, reliable electricity is critical to transforming the lives of those in poverty. During Dr. Kim’s tenure, the World Bank lost its way and sacrificed the interests of the poor to green ideology. It is essential Dr. Kim’s successor restores the World Bank to its former role as the world’s premier development bank and ceases to pander to the green lobby."

Profound Comment from Angus Taylor -7th November,2018

"We also need a strong supply of affordable electricity when customers flick the switch. Electricity runs everything. Affordable electricity must be available on demand and not just when the wind blows and sun shines."

Energy

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Facts on Australia’s Electricity Dilemma

• It is unwise for Australia to rely on weather dependent wind, solar and hydro for electricity generation as the continent is noted for having the world’s most variable and unpredictable weather ill matched to electricity demand which is characterised by reliability and predictability.
• Unlike many countries Australia will never have much conventional hydro electricity. As the flattest and driest continent Australia’s renewable electricity must mainly come from wind and solar generation.
• Batteries and pumped hydro systems do not make electricity. All they can do is give back previously generated electricity less a discount of about 20%.
• Depending on weather conditions, combined wind farm capacity across Australia can produce as little as 2% or more than 70% of design capacity. Solar varies from 0% to about 80%. The proportion of a generator’s design capacity actually generated is known as “capacity factor”.
• The electricity grid is not a storage system. Daily, weekly or monthly averages are meaningless. Generators of all types have to meet instantaneous demand every second of every day.
• With average capacity factors of between 20% and 30%, approximately three times more wind and solar capacity is required to replace a given thermal generator’s capacity. And that assumes sufficient storage is associated with the renewables to cover their inevitable wide swings in output.
• Weather systems can dominate the entire country meaning that geographic diversity is no solution to the problem of “wind drought”.
• Solar panels produce electricity almost entirely between the morning and evening peaks of the typical demand curve so they do not reduce peak demand. And they produce nothing at night.
• The $6bn Snowy 2 project will not produce any extra water or generate any new electricity. Its sole purpose is to make intermittent renewable energy reliable to match the thermal generators deemed no longer needed. When the capital and operating costs of such storage systems is added as it must be, renewable electricity can never be considered cheap.
• In a global emissions context Australia is inconsequential. Nothing Australia does can possibly make any measurable difference to world emissions.
• With current technologies batteries and pumped hydro storages will be hopelessly inadequate to compensate for inevitable wind droughts or even to cover the 16 hours per day that solar systems don’t work.
• In a future of thermal generator shut downs and therefore limited dispatchable thermal power, surplus night time off-peak electricity will not exist. Then opportunities to recharge pumped hydro storages and batteries will be limited to unpredictable high capacity factor wind and solar episodes.
• If the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing and the storages are empty electricity is not available at any price.
• Design capacity comparisons between dispatchable generators and wind and solar generators are meaningless because of the unpredictability of “capacity factors”. To say that a wind or solar farm will power X number of households is nonsense.

Alex Campbell BE Revised 27th March 2018

Electricity prices fell for forty years in Australia, then renewables came…

Electricity prices fell for forty years in Australia, then renewables came…

Electricity prices declined for forty years. Obviously that had to stop.

Here’s is the last 65 years of Australian electricity prices — indexed and adjusted for inflation. During the coal boom, Australian electricity prices declined decade after decade.  As renewables and national energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Must be a coincidence…

Today all the hard-won masterful efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.

Indexed Real Consumer Electricity Prices, Australia, 1955-2017.

For most of the 20th Century the Australian grid was hotch potch of separate state grids and mini grids. (South Australia was only connected in 1990). In 1998 the NEM (National Energy Market) began, a feat that finally made bad management possible on a large scale. Though after decades of efficiency gains, Australians would have to wait years to see new higher “world leading” prices. For the first years of the NEM prices stayed around $30/MWh.

But sooner or later  a national system is a sitting duck for one small mind to come along and truly muck things up.

Please spread this graph far and wide.

Thanks to a Dr Michael Crawford who did the original, excellent graph.

Extreme Greens and Poverty

I have long argued that if humans wish to contain population growth we need to do everything possible to lift standards of living in the world's poorest (and fastest growing) countries. Extreme green ideology has been a massive barrier. Here is the latest example.

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Press Release  Embargoed until 00:01 BST Friday, 13 October New Report: World Bank "Abandons The Poor" London, 13 October: A new report: The Anti-Development Bank: The World Bank's Regressive Energy Policies by the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) finds that the World Bank has abdicated its primary mission of tackling poverty in the developing world. The report, written by author and former Treasury adviser Rupert Darwall, with a foreword by the distinguished economist and former World Bank research administrator, Professor Deepak Lal, comes as ministers travel to Washington, DC to attend the annual World Bank meeting. The report finds that the bank’s energy policies are hurting development and making poor countries poorer. By embracing high-cost, low-reliability renewables and restricting clean coal financing, the World Bank is guilty of “an inhumane and senseless attempt to try and save the planet on the backs of the world’s poor,” Darwall says. In line with the demands made by developing countries, he argues that the World Bank should lift its 2013 ban on financing coal-fired power stations and help the world’s poorest by supporting the next generation of low-emission power stations. He calls on the World Bank to abandon what he says is "its damaging advocacy of renewable energy for countries that can ill afford the costs and risk of flawed technologies that rich countries have yet to solve". The Anti-Development Bank: The World Bank's Regressive Energy Policies (PDF)     Foreword by Professor Deepak Lal The best way for me to introduce this paper is by outlining how the World Bank (WB) turned into the Anti-Development Bank, as suggested by its title. In the mid-to-late 1980s, I was the research administrator at the World Bank. Towards the end of my tenure, during the annual meetings between the bank and the International Monetary Fund, green activists were abseiling down the bank’s Washington headquarters protesting against its purportedly anti-green activities. This pressure seemed an emergent threat to the bank’s mission to alleviate poverty through efficient growth and so, with the support of the Vice President for Economics and Research, Anne Krueger, I responded by proposing a World Development Report on the environment, now the WB’s flagship publication. The report was published in 1993, well after I had left the bank. The authors included two of my former colleagues at University College London, Wilfrid Beckerman and David Pearce. It was a balanced report which, as the WB’s president Lewis Preston said in his foreword, argued for ". . .a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of alternative policies, taking account of uncertainties and irreversibilities that maybe associated with ecological processes. Some would prefer a more absolute approach to protection, but for policy-makers with scarce resources seeking to raise the well-being of their citizens in an environmentally responsible manner, it is essential that tradeoffs be clarified in a rational manner and cost-effective policies designed." This paper shows in detail how this injunction is no longer adhered to by the current WB President Dr Jim Young Kim. He has overruled the cost–benefit estimates of the superiority of coal-based over solar- and wind-based power generation produced by his own economic staff, justifying this by reference to a wish to cut global emissions of greenhouse gases. In 2013 the bank adopted anti-coal funding policies, which, as the paper shows, prioritises the green environmental agenda over its core developmental mission of poverty reduction. How has this come to pass? The turning point came when, in the mid 1990s, with the opening up of world capital markets to most developing countries outside Africa, the bank had three choices, as noted by Anne Krueger: • to downsize and concentrate only on the countries that are truly poor, and phase out activities in middle income countries • continue to operate in all countries, focusing on the ‘soft issues’ of development, such as the environment, women’s rights, labour rights and the encouragement of NGOs • to shut down. The new President James Wolfensohn chose the second option. I argued in my Reviving the Invisible Hand for the third. The arguments of this paper provide further support for my position. I commend this paper to all those who are sincerely concerned with alleviating poverty – particularly in Africa, since China and India no longer need World Bank money or advice – and who are not seduced by the siren voices of the eco-fundamentalists. Deepak Lal is a British development economist of Indian origin who has held academic posts at Oxford, University College London and the University of California. He was a member of the Indian Foreign Service and a former Research Administrator at the World Bank. He is currently James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at UCLA. He is a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council.

AGL and Coal !

AGL and Coal

Coal and Renewables

GREG SHERIDAN

The case against coal is coming apart at the seams

• The Australian
• 12:00AM January 26,GREG SHERIDAN
• 

  Foreign Editor

  Melbourne

  

Consider truly irrational government policy, and I don’t mean Don­ald Trump. We are a nation blessed with abundant energy sources — coal in all guises, gas in enormous quantities, a major portion of the world’s uranium.

We export these and other raw materials in huge amounts all over the world. Our national wealth, everything we take for granted in our living standards — Medicare, schools and hospitals, the police, even the ABC — rests on those exports. Yet, as part of our muddle-headed, erratic, irrational, episodic and excessive efforts to combat climate change, we have not cheap electricity, as you would expect, but hugely expensive electricity, which is now, a la South Australia, increasingly unreliable. We also burden ourselves with one of the most cumbersome industrial relations systems in the world.

As a result, an operation like Alcoa’s Portland smelter might well have shut down. To forestall that we will now give that smelter $230 million of taxpayer money. Massively increasing costs, then massively subsidising to compensate those costs, is surely a world- class template for irrational policy.

One reason our policy is so irrational is that our debate is so ill-informed. Almost all of our climate change policy has a deep inheritance of irrationality about it. The Rudd and Gillard governments created a vast phalanx of climate bodies that had essentially propaganda roles, like church mission societies, to spruik the danger of climate change and urge the most radical and costly actions possible to address them.

They half-convinced Australians — they certainly convinced the ABC — that emissions trading schemes, and carbon taxes of the kind we so dolefully had for a few years — were sweeping the world. Those Australians whose foreign travel consists mainly of Tuscany, Paris, London and New York could half believe this as Eur­ope did impose a costly ETS and some American states had similar schemes. But as someone who spends a lot of time in Asia I knew it was absolute baloney. The propaganda Australians were being fed was just completely misleading.

This week in an interview with The Australian, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg gave the government’s definitive view of ETS schemes. “Internationally, economy-wide carbon trading schemes have been bedevilled by collapsing prices, criminal behaviour and industry opposition,” he said.

Although he has elsewhere said the government was not planning to change the renewable energy target, Frydenberg levelled the same broad criticism at artificial schemes generally.

The solution to reducing carbon emissions, he persuasively ­argued, lies in technological development. Renewables will be some part of this, but cleaner coal and gas, and in many countries other than Australia, nuclear power, will be the backbone of reliable energy with reduced carbon emissions. No one knows precisely how much climate change is occurring or how much of it is caused by human activity. It is the most basic common sense on a risk-management basis to reduce emissions and it is also good to clean up the air for environmental purposes beyond climate change.

It is true that nothing Australia does will have a measurable effect on the global climate. It is also true that whatever happens with climate change we will be much ­better able to deal with it if we are still a rich country rather than a country that has impoverished itself with excessive climate change actions.

Most of the ETS schemes around the world are either duds or yet to be implemented. Many of them are Potemkin village style arrangements that allow their governments to talk the talk without imposing big costs on their economies.

The many levels of deception and slipperiness in all this is evident in a million examples. Germany is hailed as a hero for abandoning nuclear energy. So it imports electricity from France, which is generated by French nuc­lear power plants, and from Pol­and, which comes from coal-fired stations. In the five years to 2015 Germany constructed coal-fired power stations with a capacity equivalent to seven times that of the Hazelwood station closed so spectacularly in Victoria.

You hear constantly on the ABC that coal is coming to an end. This is a perfect post-truth mantra. It is spectacularly the inverse of ­reality. Japan, for example, is planning 45 new coal-fired power stations with 20,000MW of capacity. Any line in any official report anywhere, and indeed in countless NGO propaganda pamphlets, which seems to be critical of coal, or indicates a limitation on its use, is instantly beaten up by our climate change propaganda industry into a further death-of-coal story.

Yet the International Energy Agency shows that coal makes up more than 40 per cent of world electricity generation. That will decline as a proportion of global energy, in no small measure because of gas, to somewhere between 28 per cent and 36 per cent by 2040. But even that proportionate decline includes a very big absolute increase in the use of coal.

The new coal-fired power stations will be mostly clean coal, that is, much lower emissions per unit of energy than traditional power stations.

That’s good. But no one should doubt that coal use will grow. China, which has sold its rhetorical flourishes on climate change as though they were real action, plans to increase coal use by 14 per cent between 2015 and 2020. In 2015 China added 52,000MW of coal power.

The IEA says that India’s coal-fired power capacity will increase by almost 140 per cent by 2040, or 162 times the capacity of the closed Hazelwood station.

China has not even committed to a peak emissions target, merely a year, 2030, when it will get there, and many estimates are that it will double its emissions in the process. Most of China’s real action involves modernising its energy system, building new coal stations that emit far less carbon per unit of power than the ones they replace. The chief benefit and motivation for this is not concern about global climate change but the desperate need to improve air quality.

You’ll hardly ever hear any of this because it doesn’t conform to the dogma of the massively publicly subsidised climate change religion. The obvious best way forward for Australia is cleaner coal, more gas and — God help us — one day, nuclear. But that would require rational policy that may be beyond us at the moment.

Global Warming and Energy

Last Monday fortnight Gail and I were in the audience for  QandA at the ABC's Ultimo studios. The panel included U.K. scientist Brian Cox, Federal Minister for Science Greg Hunt, and newly elected One Nation-Senator Malcolm Roberts. Cox is a former rock band player and could fairly be described as a "showy" celebrity scientist. Roberts sees Global Warming/Climate Change as a fraudulent fad unsupported by empirical facts and with no clear "cause and effect" supporting case. I am inclined to agree with him.

Cox came prepared with a graph which purported to show ever increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (no argument there) with a strong correlation to increasing warming. At one stage he threw this graph and other documents across the table at Roberts, who in spite of pressure including ridicule, bravely 'stuck to his guns'.

I am delighted to discover a thorough analysis of Cox's graph which shows it to be an outdated widely discredited document-see here.

I submitted a question"Does the Panel believe that Australia is right in pursuing a high cost energy policy?" 
Not surprisingly it was not chosen for submission.

Last night we attended a presentation at the Sydney Institute by Finance Minister Mathias Cormann. He was his usual professional self and he made good consistent points on the Coalition's "jobs and growth" theme. Afterwards I raised with him the apparent contradiction between 'jobs and growth' and high energy costs, the direct consequence of pursuing the Government's Renewable Energy Target, putting Australia's businesses at a competitive disadvantage. His only response was "that is our policy". I suggested to him that as Finance Minister he should be very concerned with having a high energy cost policy with very dubious environmental benefits.

I was surprised that the matter was not otherwise raised, as I believe that with ever increasing mechanisation, energy costs will become an even bigger competitive element than labour costs. The US is demonstrating this already.

Renewable Energy Targets (RET)Disaster

Thank God for sensible organisations like the IPA for providing factual common sense.
http://ipa.org.au/news/3545/energy-ministers-need-to-facilitate,-not-limit,-consumer-choices

Cheap Energy-The single most important competitive factor.

Don Aiken Talks So Much Sense

DON AITKIN

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‘But wouldn’t it be useful to move to alternative energy anyway?’ #9 My perspective on climate change Posted: 13 Apr 2016 01:58 PM PDT The quotation in the title of this essay comes from something I noted down in 2010. It was part of a comment somewhere, and it carried the implication that even if you didn’t think AGW was a real problem there were good reasons to go down the alternative energy path. Why was alternative energy a good thing? Well, it was said to be ‘free’, would continue forever, and didn’t require the use of fossil fuels, which were not sustainable even if they weren’t bad for the planet. I had a particular interest in solar energy, because the Australian Research Grants Committee (ARGC) had pushed considerable funding into a group at the University of New South Wales who were improving the efficiency of solar panels. I had used solar heating panels in the early 1980s to warm a swimming pool, and they were quite effective at that task. But these new solar cells were something else again, able to capture 40 per cent of the sun’s energy, which could then turned into electricity. I needed some ‘priorities’ to persuade government that the ARGC and later the Australian Research Council (ARC) should have more money, and solar energy was one of them. I’m sure I added at the time that Australia was one of the countries that could benefit most from solar power, given the abundance of sunlight everywhere, especially in the inland areas. That was an argument that had some weight at the time. Most readers will know that the efficiency of the panels has improved since then, and that their price has also come down. Doesn’t that mean that the future is really going to be one of solar energy? My answer is — at least at the moment — maybe, perhaps in the long run, but not in the foreseeable future. The two problems with solar power are storing it for later use, and garnering enough of it to make an appreciable difference to the needs of the electricity grid for constant and reliable electricity. If the whole world were to be powered by solar energy (assuming some kind of superior storage for evenings and cloudy days) you would need 500,000 square km of land devoted simply to the panels — an area the size of Spain. And you’d need more to provide the interconnections. Until these two problems are solved, solar energy will only be a small part of national grid systems. In 2014, thirty years after solar cells had become practicable, the sources of electricity for the eastern Australian grid were: coal 73 per cent, natural gas 13 per cent, hydro 7 per cent, wind 4 per cent, rooftop solar 2 per cent and biomass 1 per cent). The rooftop solar panels wouldn’t be there at all were it not for substantial and continuing subsidies for their installation, and they are not suitable for every dwelling. In any case, the commercial and industrial uses of electricity outweigh those of domestic origin. You will read from time to time how there are provinces in Germany that get 50 per cent of their power from alternative sources, and that on one day South Australia, which has little coal, managed to get an equivalent fraction of its power from alternative sources (wind and solar). In my judgment these results come from seeing what is happening through rose-tinted spectacles. In 2014 the whole alternative sector contributed just 30 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs, and 11 per cent of total energy needs. What is more, solar energy collection has probably reached a peak in Germany, whose power needs are greatest in winter, when the availability of solar power is at its lowest. In South Australia, the nearest supply of electricity from outside the State is Victoria, and there the source is the brown-coal power stations east of Melbourne. Brown coal is indeed the dirtiest of coals; it is used in Germany, too, because that is the chief coal available there. It is not coincidental that after Denmark (which tries to rely on wind), Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, and that South Australia has the highest electricity prices in Australia. The aim of the subsidies to alternative energy is first to improve the efficiency of solar and wind as contributors to the grid, and eventually to make them competitive with fossil-fuel generation, so that coal will no longer be used to generate electricity. Why would we want to do that? Well, that is the AGW orthodoxy: if coal-fired power stations are closed, then there will be fewer greenhouse gas emissions and the planet will be saved. The earlier essays in this series suggest that the AGW scare has little validity, that coal is a useful and relatively cheap source of electricity, while burning it increases the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which all plants depend on for their food. The ACT Government has spent a lot of money and effort on trying to make the national capital ‘carbon free’, at least in its use of electricity. To study what is being done there is to be embarrassed at the empty showmanship of what is nothing more than a political initiative, whose aim is to convince Canberra voters that they are doing something really worthwhile with their high electricity prices. In fact, all the ACT Government is doing is to increase the number of solar and wind-powered sources to a point where their total output would be something equivalent to the total electricity demand within the the national capital. But anyone who flicks a switch within Canberra will find that her power is still coming from the grid, at the ratio set out above, with coal leading the way at 73 per cent. While I have some  leaning toward solar power, and would be perfectly happy for much more public funding of solar R&D (without subsidies for roof-top installation), I have virtually none  for wind turbines, unless you are a long way away from the grid and there is some useful wind much of the time. Both solar and wind are intermittent, which means that something else has to be available as a back-up all the time. Electricity grids are there to provide just  the right amount of electricity all the time as needs change. In winter where I live there is a sudden surge in demand for power around 5 pm, when it gets dark and a couple of hundred thousand households go into evening-meal mode. Grid operators know this, and are ready for it. In most Western grids, the back-up is a gas turbine, which can start producing power almost at once. The gas, of course, is a fossil fuel, a form of methane, which AGW scary people like to point to as the real devil. The need for back-up means that it would simply be impossible, with current knowledge, to have any large system solely powered by wind and solar. And the higher the proportion of alternative energy in the grid, the greater the need for greater back-up. It is a real, and at present quite unsolvable, problem. Wind turbines have almost everything going against them. They are expensive, the CO2 already generated in making them is enormous, they require rare earth minerals which are in short supply, they kill birds, some people living near them hate the sounds they make, and no one would want one across the road. Their value in the grid is always grossly overstated by those who operate them or want to put them in. You will hear that a particular turbine installation will power 45,000 households. And it would, if it ran all the time at optimum speed. The real value is usually a quarter to a fifth of that stated. In my judgment, they are a waste of time, energy and money, and should be dismantled. I could say all the above without reference to the positive value of carbon dioxide and the weakness of the AGW scare case. The world is not short of coal, natural gas or oil. But once governments start down a particular road, with goals, regulations and subsidies, it is very difficult for them to stop and change course. So many promises and quasi-promises have been made; so many companies have started up on the expectation that these conditions will continue forever; so many public servants have been employed to regulate the system; and so on. And of course such a large proportion of the electorate has been persuaded that all this is not only good for the planet, but effective and efficient as well. It is none of those things. Next: But aren’t 97 per cent of climate scientists sure that humans are causing global warming? Further reading: There is a lot of useful stuff on the Internet, usually by engineers. You will also find lots of pro-alterntive-energy stuff, usually by people who want to sell you something, or industrial associations with the same intent. It is another of those matters that really hasn’t changed in the last few years, save that governments everywhere seem to be backing away from more subsidies. I have written a lot myself, which you can consult by going to the magnifying glass icon on the top right 0f the screen’s home page, and typing in ‘solar’ or ‘wind turbines’, or whatever you wish.

The Renewable Energy Dilemma

Renewable energy claims are unsustainable

Renewables also hurt the poor through higher prices

September 9, 2015 by Larry Bell

Whereas “renewable energy” conjures up visions of wind, solar, and tidal power, “clean” energy sources that will last forever to power the world into a “green,” sustainable future, it won’t happen without an Orwellian restructuring of the world’s social and economic fabric as envisioned by the UN’s Commission on Environment and Development more commonly known as the Bruntland Commission.

Chaired in the late 1980s by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, the commission set about to advance what appeared to be a noble and desirable cause.

Its foundational report, titled Our Common Future, stated: “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable in order to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations.” So far, it seems pretty hard to argue with a goal like that.

Unfortunately, while it would be great if wind and solar power could accomplish this, their potential capacities and reliabilities just aren’t there.

As for tidal power, applications for utility scale power generation are both unproven and doubtful. Ditto for geothermal, which is another geographically and capacity-limited source.

In other words, none of these “renewables” offer anything remotely close to a sustainability panacea . . . either now or likely ever. Nuclear power, breeder reactors in particular, come much nearer to making a real difference, yet never seem to get the same credit.

As Roger Andrews observes in his August 26 Energy Matters: Environment and Policy blog, the Brundtland Commission went on to link sustainable development objectives to eradicating world poverty . . . again something that sounds really good. Its report stated: “Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable development requires meeting basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes.”

Sure, let’s all agree that poverty is a truly tragic condition.

The big rub here is that eradicating poverty won’t be accomplished by depriving desperate world populations of access to affordable and reliable energy — those who now depend upon animal dung fuel for heating, cooking, and water purification — people who lack electricity essential for refrigeration to keep perishable food safe or provide periodic lighting.

And that’s exactly what is happening through international lending programs that emphasize costly and anemic “renewables” while denying vital funds needed to develop abundant local fossil fuel resources.

So the Bruntland Commission offered another condition. In order to raise underdeveloped countries out of poverty, “Sustainable global development requires that those who are more affluent adopt lifestyles within the planet’s ecological means — in their use of energy, for example.” In other words, the solution is for rich countries to send money and become subordinate to a U.N.-run world government which will ensure equal distribution of financial and natural resources.

Needless to say, that world government would also decide what common lifestyle levels and ecological means are acceptable.

Such decisions must include social engineering to control optimum population size. As Our Common Future admonishes: “Sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.”

Hey, it’s merely a guess, but perhaps limiting access to affordable energy might be a very effective means to accomplish that desired population reduction.

If any of this sounds familiar, you might understand that the Brightland Commission’s sustainable development mantra provided the foundation for the UN’s Agenda 21 program, which calls for reorienting lifestyles away from consumption, encouraging citizens to pursue free time over wealth, resource-sharing through co-ownership, and global wealth redistribution — beginning with ours.

A 1993 UN report, titled Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, proposes “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources.”

The report emphasizes that “this shift will demand a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

Last year President Obama’s Council on Sustainable Development was organized to develop recommendations for incorporating sustainability into the U.S. federal government. Predictably, grant programs issued through HUD, the EPA, and nearly every other alphabet agency will spread their Kool-Aid policies throughout the nation.

As Tom DeWeese forewarns in a “Reality News Media” blog, while such grants will be represented as voluntary, expect ongoing restrictions on energy use, development, building material, plumbing and electric codes, land use and water controls, public transportation, and light rail subsidies, and pressures for communities to impose politically correct and economically disastrous and socially unsustainable Agenda 21 development plans.

Welcome to life in the ant colony they have in mind.

The Coal Seam Gas Industry

Quite the clearest, balanced description I have read-

World-first export LNG bonanza poised to set sail

• ANDREW FRASER
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• DECEMBER 27, 2014 12:00AM

• Print
• Save for later

Methane Rita Adrea enters Gladstone Harbour yesterday to take on the first shipment of LNG gas from Curtis Island. Picture: Murray Ware Source: Supplied

AUSTRALIA’S export liquefied natural gas industry on the east coast has begun with a large ship berthed in Gladstone Harbour filling up with the first batch of LNG made from coal-seam gas in western Queensland.

The British Gas-owned Methane Rita Andrea is bound for Asia when it leaves Gladstone in the next few days, its final destination depending on who is willing to pay top dollar for its liquid cargo.

Australia exports about 24 million tonnes of LNG worth about $14 billion from the North West Shelf off Western Australia, but what is happening in Queensland is a world first: converting coal-seam gas to LNG for export.

Combined, the two industries, one off the west coast and the other one the east coast, have the potential to make Australia the biggest exporter of LNG .

The federal government has forecast that LNG exports could rise to 80 million tonnes by 2018, valued at $60bn.

The new Queensland industry promises much. A 2013 study claimed it would deliver $22bn in revenue to the state government through royalties and payroll tax and $162bn in revenue to the federal government over the next 20 years.

The BG plant is the first of three $20bn plants being built at Curtis Island on the northern shore of Gladstone Harbour that will convert the coal-seam gas to liquid natural gas. The other two are set to come on stream in the next year.

While the output of the other two plants will largely be sent to specific destinations, BG is a large spot trader and already sends ships into Asia carrying liquid natural gas. The specific destination of the Methane Rita ­Andrea will be guided by which buyer needs the LNG next week.

The construction of the three giant plants has led to 40,000 people being employed; after the construction phase tapers off, the industry estimates it will employ up to 18,000 in long-term jobs.

The industry looms as Queensland’s economic saviour. At a time when coal prices are down and the coalmining industry is shedding jobs, the arrival of the coal-seam gas into liquid natural gas industry is forecast to lift the state’s economic growth from 2.5 per cent this year to 5.75 per cent in 2015-16, taking Queensland from one of the slower growth rates to the fastest.

It is also an industry that many see as putting groundwater in farming areas at risk and possibly contaminating much of Aus­tralia’s most productive farmland.

So far, about 5000 farmers have signed access agreements with coal-seam gas companies that will allow the companies to place wells, many only the size of a basketball court, on the farmer’s property. There are 6000 wells on Queensland’s western Darling Downs, but as the industry grows, more wells will be drilled as others dry up — in total, there could be up to 40,000 wells sunk in the gasfields around Chinchilla and Roma over the next 20 years.

The movement of Australian gas into the global market will also push up domestic gas prices. People overseas are prepared to pay more for gas than in Australia, so local prices will also rise.

Gas has been running through the specially-built pipeline from the gasfields to Gladstone for about a year, and once it reaches Gladstone, it is placed in what is effectively a giant freezer and converted to liquid form for transport. When it reaches the other end, the process is reversed and the liquid is heated until it turns into gas again.

A spokesman for BG Group, which came into the industry when it took over Queensland Gas in 2008, said the mechanical testing of the plant had finished and the storage tanks were yesterday being cooled, ready to produce and store sales LNG.

“This is done by cooling the gas to -162C. The process reduces the gas by about 600 times its original volume, making it easier to transport economically over vast distances. There remains work to do, but we are on schedule to start loading LNG into the first ship to carry a cargo from Curtis Island.”

It’s taken about 10 years to get the industry to this point, after coal-seam gas was seen as a far more environmentally friendly fuel source than coal as its greenhouse gas emissions are considerably less than coal.

The original proponents of an export coal-seam gas industry were all Australian companies, but all have partnered with large overseas energy giants to make the projects viable.

The opposition to the industry has come together under the banner of Lock the Gate, and its president, Drew Hutton, said there had been an unseemly haste to push the industry.

“In years to come, people will look at the decisions made now and the way we’ve sacrificed good farmland and water for an industry which has such a limited ­future,” he said.

“Coal-seam gas, like coal itself, will end up as a stranded asset as people realise that the future is in renewable energy … what we’ll see in the next 20 years is the ­impact on the underground water supply, which will put at risk some of our best farming land.”