A headline screamed that Victoria could face power outages this summer. The reason? No, not those “unreliable” renewables. It seems that a couple of those coal fired power stations need repairs and can’t be relied upon if we have a hot spell. Yep, only coal can give us baseload power… Except that it can’t always because it keeps breaking down.
Then we had Matt Canavan telling us that a company was “weak as piss” for refusing to deal with Adani. According to him, all these companies such as the banks who refused to lend them any money and various others are just surrendering to the demands of activists. Now, I don’t know how many of you have had dealings with a bank but I have found that when I try to persuade them to lend me money, then they try to ascertain that 1) I have the means to repay them and 2) I am the sort of person who is unlikely to default on the loan. In the case of Adani, the company responsible for the mine is effectively insolvent.
Before Matt Canavan starts suggesting that I’m “weak as piss” and that Adani has many assets and plenty of money, Adani isn’t one single company. There are many aspects to its business and they’re not all under the one umbrella. It would sort of like a person having a number of aliases. And just like a person with a number of different names, banks tend to be suspicious if you produce statements which don’t have the same name as yourself and explain that these accounts are yours but you keep them under a different name so that people can’t get hold of them when you don’t pay your bills.
Not that I’m accusing Adani of any such thing. I’m just suggesting that banks may have been more worried about lending money to a company that may suddenly go into liquidation and the only asset they have is lumps of coal and access to as much water as they want. Perhaps it would be a better business model to leave the coal in the ground and just sell the water…
Of course some of you will be thinking that I’m just another greenie opposed to fossil fuel on ideological grounds. That’s not exactly true. I’m happy to destroy the planet for future generations because what have future generations ever done for me. No, my objection is one of pure economics.
Just like Scottie’s decision to follow the “Chosen One” into battle and protect oil tankers in the Persian Gulf…
You all heard Donald T-Rump refer to Himself as the Chosen One, didn’t you? That wouldn’t have been so bad had He not looked to the Heavens as he said it.
Anyway, the USA have torn up the agreement with Iran and now they feel the need to protect ships because Iran seems to think that it doesn’t need to abide by an agreement once it’s been torn up. Typical of those evil regimes that don’t acknowledge America’s right to do exactly what it likes and commandeer most of the world’s wealth for a mere six percent of the world’s population!
That’s why we need to send troops and ships halfway round the world. To protect fossil fuel. Although maybe it would be better just to save the fuel by leaving them home, but then that’s the sort of logic that climate change deniers use to attack any opponent who dares to fly to a conference…
Speaking of climate change deniers, did you hear that David Koch died of prostate cancer? Very sad. I mean, prostate cancer is so slow. Couldn’t he have got one of the more speedy cancers. Ok, that sounds harsh and one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but now that some media organisations are calling him a “philanthropist”, it’ll take years to explain to some people that the word doesn’t mean greedy fucker who was prepared to use their money to spread misinformation and kill the planet.
Of course, that’s just my opinion and everyone has the right to an opinion. Even Andrew Bolt who managed to be appalled that Pell lost his appeal. Bolt, who knows more than scientists about the state of the planet, informed his readers that the jury got it wrong and the judges got it wrong. They were probably just swayed by reading the hundreds of pages of evidence, whereas Andrew keeps his mind clear by only thinking about his own opinions. Probably why he dropped out of university: all that learnin’ was confusing him and making him aware that there were people who actually studied things.
So to sum it all up, renewables are too unreliable to provide power when the reliable coal breaks down, Adani’s backers are shifting the narrative so that any delays are the result of protests not the company’s perilous business plan, we’ve joined another coalition of the willing which is even smaller than the last one, David Koch has died, Pauline found the Uluru climb more difficult than her usual attempts to annoy thinking people, Pell is still in prison, Andrew Bolt is Andrew Bolt, and Donald Trump finished off the week by ordering US businesses out of China which had a rather negative effect on the stock market. It’s strange that a president that was meant to be so pro-business and anti-big government now sees his role as telling businesses not to trade with a particular country, but there you go.
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