The Inaugural Golden Fleece Award – for Flagrant Fleecing of Community Resources
By Viv Forbes,
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition
has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry
leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on
Carbon Capture & Sequestration – a costly and complex process designed to
capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as
coal, oil and gas”.
It is obviously possible,
in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases,
so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these
things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of
spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes
of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.
About 2.5 tonnes of carbon
dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To
capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity
produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left
for sale - more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.
We have come to expect
stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money
on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just
drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same
electricity?
Kevin Rudd wins this award
for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the
fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show
for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class
salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.
Pumping gases underground
is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil
recovery from declining oil fields.
Normally, however, CCS will
just produce more expensive electricity.
This result is not needed
as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.
Disclosure: Viv Forbes holds shares in a small
Australian coal explorer which may benefit if the carbon tax is raised high
enough to make Carbon Capture and Burial “economic”.
Further reading:
The
Warming of the last Century is too Small to Notice
‘The warming we
have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have had
meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at
all.’ - Lennart Bengtsson, one of Sweden’s leading climate scientist.
The US govt blew through 72 million here in Arizona to find out sequestration doesn't work. Talk about throwing money down a hole(s).
ReplyDeleteSeems that if you manage to come up with a really silly idea to harness the GW scare, the sky's the limit on the funding available from us mug punters.
ReplyDelete