EXCLUSIVE: The 8 Dire Visions of our Future from the Ghost of Clean Energy Future

From the Gillard Government’s Clean Energy Future website:

Q. Will the Renewable Energy Target be continued?

A. Yes. The Renewable Energy Target will ensure that 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020.

That is code for thousands more of those landscape blighting bird killing human health destroying whooshing wind totems!

With the passing of the Clean Energy Future legislation, two new fat bureaucracies will be created - the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) which will coordinate around $3.2 billion in existing grant funding programs supporting research, development and demonstration of new renewable energy technologies.

That’s over $13 Billion dollars and counting – no wonder Julia Gillard needs the Carbon Dioxide Tax because no one in their right mind would fund the purchase and installation of wind turbines with their own money.

Here are 8 dire visions of our future from the Ghost of Clean (Renewable) Energy Future.

ONE:

The heavy industrial manufacture of wind turbines emits far more Carbon Dioxide emissions than what they will ever save when they finally do operate.

TWO:

And they kill birds – lots and lots of birds.

THREE:

And they affect the health of people who live close by – lots and lots of people.

FOUR:

And Greens leader Bob Brown wants thousands more of these landscape blighting bird killing whooshing wind totems!

To the Greens, our bird life, landscape and personal health is expendable.

FIVE:

Within a few years, thanks to Julia Gillard, Greg Combet and Bob Brown our once-beautiful countryside will have been ravaged by towering wind turbines which are absurdly insufficient for our energy needs and which exponentially inflate our energy bills to levels only a mad person could consider right or just. Unfortunately, it is just such mad people who are in charge of our environmental and energy policy.

SIX:

In addition, wind turbines require an extensive network of backup coal or gas power stations to provide energy on calm days! When the wind doesn’t blow, wind power doesn’t flow. The intermittent nature of the wind means that fossil-fuel power stations have to be kept going, or inefficiently powered up and down. Besides, the total power produced from even the biggest wind farms is so small that, as a strategy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions significantly, wind power is a failure.

SEVEN:

Julia Gillard and Bob Brown have mandated that 20 per cent of our electricity generation must come from wind turbines by 2020 which to them may look like an obvious way to cut our carbon dioxide emissions but it will surely send us broke in the process. Just look at Spain where 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every 1 “green job” created.

EIGHT:

Julia Gillard has pledged to cut Australia’s Carbon Dioxide emissions by just 5 per cent by 2020.

To get all those cuts domestically would be to run a chainsaw through the Australian economy. We would have to close power stations and literally turn off the lights.

So Treasury felicitously comes up with the conclusion that we will cut our emissions by only 58 million tonnes by 2020 via the installation of wind turbines – which are useless – and we'll buy Carbon Dioxide abatement permits from foreigners covering the bigger portion of 94 million tonnes.

It is now time to call to a halt to Australia’s economically suicidal drive for "renewable energy" and cancel immediately Australia’s disastrous wind farm building program. If we don’t our health, landscape, bird life and economy will be irreparably damaged forever.

Typical Build Specifications of a Standard Wind Turbine

The average towering wind turbine being installed around beautiful Australia right now is over 80 metres in height. The rotor assembly for one turbine – that’s the blades and hub – weighs over 22,000 Kg and the nacelle, which contains the generator components, weighs over 52,000 Kg.

All this stands on a concrete base constructed from 26,000 Kg of reinforcing steel which also contains over 190 cubic metres of concrete (that’s over 190,000 litres of concrete).

Each and every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2,500 Kg of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up around Australia.

The lake of toxic waste at Baotou, China. Rare earth processing plants in the background.

The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty and toxic - involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product - that only one country does it - China. This year it flexed its trade muscles and briefly stopped exporting neodymium from its inner Mongolian mines. Forget Middle East oil, how’s that for dangerous reliance on a volatile foreign supply.

Gillard government will allocate over $13 Billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to help fund even more of these useless monstrosities and as already demonstrated above, wind turbines create more Carbon Dioxide emissions in their manufacture than what they can save once they ever become operational, they kill thousands of birds and bats each and every year they are in operation, they affect human health, blight our beautiful landscapes, cost a fortune to install and maintain, require 24/7 back-up gas or coal power source (so what’s the point of them in the first place?), cost on average 2.2 jobs for every 1 job and to top it off, they don’t reduce our Carbon Dioxide emissions one iota and the Australain taxpayer will still be forced by the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future legislation to buy billions of dollars worth of foreign Carbon Dioxide abatement certificates from snake oil salesman from dodgy 3^rd world countries who will never cut an ounce of Carbon Dioxide emissions. In short – we have all been conned.

Wednesday 12^th October 2011 will be a day of infamy as history will record the passing of the Clean Energy Future legislation as the end of the Australian democratic capitalist era and mark the beginning of the new Australian eco-socialist era.

May God have mercy on our souls as the progressives – the ALP and Greens - have sold theirs in the name of Gaia.

Steve is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and lives in Buderim Queensland.

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Andy is on holidays in a country that still values free speech and will probably never ever introduce a Carbon Dioxide Tax. He shall return to Eco-socialist Australia on Monday.