By Ben Eltham

Did Australia’s largest solar power project collapse because of government inaction? Details about government funding of low emissions technology projects are thin on the ground. This week saw the collapse of Solar Systems Pty Ltd, the company building what was to be Australia’s largest solar power station in Mildura in Victoria.

As Solar Systems’ website dolefully announces, “administrators are undertaking an immediate assessment of the operations and financial position of the companies with a view to continuing the operations on a reduced scale in order to restructure and sell the business as a going concern.”

That’s going to be hard, because Solar Systems is far from operational. Sadly, it’s not even built. The giant solar collecting tower that was going to generate 154MW of electricity in peak operation has yet to be constructed, and Solar Systems apparently needs hundreds of millions of further venture capital funding to build it. 950 jobs were expected to be created through the life of the project; more than 100 are reportedly now in jeopardy.

A year on from the fall of Lehman Brothers, the difficult state of global venture capital markets means the receivers have a tough task on their hands. According to administrator Stephen Longley, who The Australian’s Lauren Wilson tracked down for comment earlier this week, Solar Systems had burned through their original $150 million in capital developing the technology for the solar plant, then realised they needed more cash to bring the project to market.

Seeking another $50-100 million in capital funding, Longley told Wilson that Solar Systems “landed in the US to do roadshows the week (investment bank) Lehman Brothers collapsed”.

It wasn’t always like this. Way back in 2006, the Mildura plant was launched to great fanfare by the Howard and Bracks governments with promises of $125 million in Commonwealth and state funding. Canberra promised $75 million to the plant through a Howard-era funding scheme known as the Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund. There was plenty of positive publicity, especially for a government still highly skeptical of the Kyoto process and under fire for its fossil fuel sympathies.

But as has emerged this week, none of that $75 million of federal money ever arrived. In fact, only $500,000 of the promised $125 million in funding was ever paid to Solar Systems by the Victorian government - and neither state nor federal government officials will say why.

When I rang the office of Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources Peter Batchelor, and Federal Minister for Resources Energy and Tourism Martin Ferguson trying to find out, the responses were revealing.

According to a spokeswoman from Batchelor’s office, “The Victorian Government is disappointed that this promising solar technology start-up business has been unable to raise the additional capital needed for its ongoing development.

“Our Energy Technology Innovation funding is tied to the project, not the company. We are talking about taxpayer’s money and milestones had to be reached for that money to be given.

“The Government supports the demonstration of technology, but is not in the business of giving loans to private companies with taxpayer’s money.”

Victorian taxpayers might be surprised by this last statement, as it is exactly what the Brumby government has promised AquaSure, the consortium building the $3.5 billion Wonthaggi desalination plant, should it be unable to find enough money.

Martin Ferguson’s office was even terser, in keeping with the gruff style of their minister. A spokesman confirmed that none of the promised $75 million of federal money had been dispensed to Solar Systems, and added that “it’s too early to make any assessment of either the company or the project’s future; both of these are being worked out by the administrator in the coming months.”

That start-up technology firms occasionally go bust is not news. But what is news is that governments supposedly committed to seeing more renewable power connected to the Australian grid idled while $125 million in budgeted funding sat in state and federal coffers.

Neither the Victorian nor the federal Energy departments were prepared to tell me what the “milestones” were that Solar Systems hadn’t met. And, because of the murky conditions surrounding the award of hundreds of millions of dollars of government renewable energy funding, we may never know.

This is because many of the grants that our governments are giving to companies for their renewable energy projects are “commercial-in-confidence”, a classic cloaking technique that allows important public policy decisions to be veiled in contractual secrecy.

The Mildura solar plant, for instance, was one of five projects funded under the Howard government’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund. The other four all went to big carbon projects, including Chevron and its partners for the $50 billion Gorgon gas development,and International Power, the company that operates Hazelwood power plant.

Little is publicly known about either the status or the progress of the grants awarded to these five projects, which add up to some $335 million. Neither Martin Ferguson’s office nor the Department of Energy were prepared to comment on the Fund. Indeed, the Department of Energy’s spokesman, Tom Firth, either could not or would not disclose whether the other four projects had met their milestones or received their promised funding.

Newmatilda.com has been able to ascertain that at least one project, the retrofitting of the Callide A coal-fired power plant in central Queensland with carbon capture and sequestration technologies, has received $50 million from Canberra, and is apparently progressing toward a possible demonstration in 2011.  As for the Gorgon development, we know that it has only just received federal approval from Peter Garrett’s Environment department - and that in any case the technical feasibility of carbon sequestration underneath Barrow Island is thus far unproven.

No-one connected to the other three projects funded by the Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund - including Chevron’s representative for the Gorgon project - got back to us.

The result is that potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money sits in Treasury coffers, committed to projects that may never happen, on conditions that remain secret to the public. Australia’s 20 per cent by 2020 renewable energy target looks a long way away.

Did Martin Ferguson’s department fiddle while Solar Systems collapsed? We may never know - unless the Greens or other opposition parties ask some hard questions in the next round Senate estimates hearings. Read more here.

By Andrew Orlowski, UK Register

Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.

The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years - defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It’s “bad timing”, admits the magazine’s environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It’s the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year - causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.

“We have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it,” Latif told the magazine.

A historical comparison of recent warming contrasts the UN IPCC accounts of Thermageddon - based on climate models - with the post-1800 trend which shows a gradual warming. Little seems out of place in recent times except the predictions, says Dr Syun Akasofu, Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and former director of the Geophysical Institute.

Aksasofu says multi-decadal oscillations, discovered within the past decade, account for the variability.

Earlier this summer a mathematical study also predicted cooling, and won an unusual endorsement from the Real Climate website, the blog founded by Al Gore’s PR company and staffed by advocates of the manmade climate change theory.

In a paper entitled Has the climate recently shifted? Professor Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonsis, mathematicians at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the authors engage with the problem that temperatures have failed to follow the predictions made by computer climate models.

In the paper, Swanson and Tsonis correlated data from the ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the North Pacific Index and found that synchronisations occurred four times - in 1910-20; 1938-45; 1956-60; and 1976-1981. After three of these, the climate shifted too. When coupling between the systems was high, climate invariably changed.

The recent cooling, which they suggest started in 2001, is an indicator of a phase shift. (Others point out that discounting the freak El Nino weather event of 1998, which raised temperatures by 0.2C, there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.)

This cooling, which appears unprecedented over the instrumental period, is “suggestive of an internal shift of climate dynamical processes that as yet remain poorly understood,” they wrote.

“The apparent lack of a proximate cause behind the halt in warming post 2001/02 challenges our understanding of the climate system, specifically the physical reasoning and causal links between longer time-scale modes of internal climate variability and the impact of such modes upon global temperature… the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained…

This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020,” Swanson wrote.

The confidence that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will result in significant long-term increases in temperature is founded on knock-on effects, or positive feedbacks, amplifying the CO2 effect. Large positive feedbacks imply “runaway” global warming - aka Thermageddon.

But even the basics are fiercely contested. Does a warmer climate mean more or fewer clouds, and do these trap even more heat, or act as a sunshade, cooling it back down again? Clouds are so poorly understood, you can take your pick. So if the climate isn’t getting warmer, the theory requires the view that the energy must be “hiding” somewhere, mostly likely in oceanic heat sinks.

But neither the feedbacks, nor the oceans, are currently being kind to contemporary climate theory.

Read story here.

Obama’s global warming policies have few US followers - and fewer on the global stage
Paul Driessen - 8 September 2009

“Few challenges facing America - and the world - are more urgent than combating climate change,” President Obama has asserted. “We will make it clear that America is ready to lead.” The President and Al Gore are certainly ready to lead. But how many will follow?

Even in America, and certainly on the world stage, the two increasingly look like Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. As they tilt for windmills, and against a “monstrous giant of infamous repute” - climate disasters conjured up by computer models and Hollywood special effects masters - their erstwhile followers are making politically correct noises, but running for the hills.

The House of Representatives passed a 1400-page energy and climate bill - by a razor-thin margin, and only after Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman packed it with enough last-minute deals to protect favored congressional districts, buy votes, and curry favor with assorted special interests. Not one legislator actually read the bill - which would create a trillion-dollar cap-trade-and-tax industry, ensure that energy and food costs “necessarily skyrocket,” kill jobs, and impose an all-intrusive Green Nanny State.

Republicans want to control what people do in their bedrooms, insists the old canard. Democrats, it appears, want to dictate what we do everywhere outside of our bedrooms. And Sancho Gore wants to become the world’s first global warming billionaire, by selling climate indulgences, aka carbon offsets.

The reaction has been predictable - by anyone except House and White House czars and czarinas. Citizens are livid over yet another attempt to use a purported crisis to justify further expanding the government and spending billions more tax dollars for alarmist research, activism and propaganda, just ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. Global warming continues to rank dead-last in Pew Research and other polls that actually list it as an issue. Rasmussen puts the President’s approval ratings at 46% and falling. Zogby reports that 57% of Americans oppose cap-and-trade bills. Manufacturing states, which get 60-98% of their electricity from coal, worry that the only thing they’ll export in ten years will be jobs. Democrat senators from those states worry that the energy and climate issue will be “toxic for them during midterm elections,” says Politico magazine.

Even companies that had eagerly sought seats at the negotiating table are now gagging. ConocoPhillips, Caterpillar and others finally realize that cap-and-tax will severely penalize them and their customers. Not even the climate is cooperating. Outside of Dallas, 2009 has brought some of coldest summer days on record across the US. Near freezing temperatures nipped at crops, and gas heaters were sine qua non at an August 29 outdoor wedding in Wisconsin. The Farmers Almanac predicts a brutal 2009-2010 winter.

In Europe, every longitude has a platitude about saving the planet. But EU countries that agreed to slash greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels are well above their Kyoto Protocol targets - Austria by 30% and Spain by 37% as of 2008. And despite new commitments to cut emissions 40 years from now, you don’t need tarot cards or entrails to predict the more probable EU emissions future.

Germany plans to build 27 coal-fired electrical generating plants by 2020. Italy plans to double its reliance on coal in just five years. Europe as a whole will have 40 new coal-fired power plants by 2015, columnist Alan Caruba reports. The Polish Academy of Sciences has publicly challenged manmade global warming disaster hypotheses. And only 11% of Czech citizens believe rising carbon dioxide emissions caused global temperatures to climb 1975-1998 - and also caused them to rise 1915-1940, fall 1940-1975, then stabilize and decline again 1998-2009.

Australia just voted down punitive global warming legislation. New Zealand has put its emissions bashing program in a deep freeze. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic aid bluntly dismissed any talk of following President Obama’s quixotic lead. “We won’t sacrifice economic growth for the sake of emission reduction,” he told reporters at the July 2009 G8 meeting.

Chinese and Indian leaders are equally adamant. China is playing a smart hand in this high-stakes climate poker game, drawing up plans to combat global warming sometime in the future, and gradually improve its energy efficiency and pollution control. However, it is building a new coal-fired power plant every week and putting millions of new cars on its growing network of highways. So is India, which will double its coal-based electricity generation and produce millions of Tata and other affordable cars by 2020. “India will not accept any binding emission-reduction target, period,” Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has stated. “This is a non-negotiable stand.”
India and China have a “complete convergence” of views on these matters, Ramesh added. No wonder: 400 million Indians still do not have electricity; 500 million Chinese still do not. No electricity means no refrigeration, to keep food and medicines from spoiling. It means no water purification, to reduce baby-killing intestinal diseases. No modern heating and air conditioning, to reduce hypothermia in winter, heat stroke in summer, and lung disease year-round. It means no lights or computers, no modern offices, factories, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals.

Fossil fuels are “gradually eliminating poverty in the Third world,” observes UCLA economist Deepak Lal. Any call to curb carbon emissions would “condemn billions to continued poverty. While numerous Western do-gooders shed crocodile tears about the Third World’s poor, they are willing to prevent them from taking the only feasible current route out from this abject state” - oil, gas, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric energy development. The situation is intolerable, unsustainable, lethal and immoral.

The only way India and China would agree to cut their emissions is if the United States cut its emissions 40% by 2020, says Ramesh - back to 1959 levels and pre-JFK living standards, when the US population was 179 million (versus 306 million today). No way will that happen. So Asian energy and economic development will continue apace. And rightly so, to foster human rights and environmental justice.

All is not bleak, however, for Canute Obama’s impossible dream of controlling global temperatures. British politicians remain committed to slashing CO2 emissions and replacing hydrocarbons with wind power. Unfortunately, the biggest UK wind projects have been abandoned or put on indefinite hold - and a growing demand/supply imbalance portends still higher energy prices, widespread power cuts, rolling blackouts and energy rationing, the Daily Telegraph reported on August 31. Brits may soon trade their stiff upper lips for contentious town hall meetings and ballot-box revolution.

The Democratic Party of Japan’s landslide victory in the August 30 election will likely create a new coalition government tilted strongly to the left. The DJP has pledged to cut carbon dioxide gas emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 - though this will likely strangle economic growth and job creation, especially if one coalition partner’s opposition to nuclear power becomes DJP policy.

Then there is Africa, where leaders appear ready to support curbs on energy use - in exchange for up to $300 billion per year in additional foreign aid, “to cushion the impact of global warming.” That will be nice for their private bank accounts, but less so for Africa’s 750 million people who still don’t have electricity. Those people will simply be sacrificed, to prevent natural or fictitious climate disasters.

Of course, the real goal was never to control the climate. It was always to control energy use, lives, jobs, economies, transportation and housing - and usher in a new era of high tax global governance. The American people are increasingly saying they’re not ready to grant that power to Obama Gore & Company.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.