Abbott government flailing on green energy

So far the results are not encouraging. The Liberal Party is still constrained by John Howard's lunatic Renewable Energy Target legislation of 2000; legislation which has imposed serious costs on the Australian economy but most importantly, has impacted on the poorest sectors of Australian society with very large increases in electricity prices.

Much of these increases are attributable to massive investments in wind-power and to a lesser extent in domestic solar installations. Wind power is unique in that the output from a wind turbine is worthless since it cannot be called to generate when demand requires. Wind power only happens when the wind blows – and if it blows at 3 am, then some coal or gas burning power station has to off-load to make up for this unwanted and destabilizing power injection. But South Australia had many square miles of these useless symbols of religious passion and legislative idiocy, and the cumulative cost burden has run into many billions of dollars.

The Abbott Government is proposing "direct action" to reduce Australia's emissions of CO2 to 90 percent of what they were in 2000. This is lunacy beyond the bounds of satire. The costs are high but unquantifiable. The rewards for this expenditure, in terms of the justification used for it, are invisible. Even if carbon dioxide does have an impact on global temperatures – a proposition for which there is no evidence of any kind - in fact the evidence is all the other way - an Australian contribution of this dimension would be impossible to detect either in global temperatures or in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

So this policy is a measure of the Abbott Government's commitment to "evidence-based policy", and it appears that any such commitment is mere wind.