Ian Campbell Speaks

Mongo On The Loose With Power
There's an old joke I heard from a gorgeous Norwegian woman who I knew in my distant youth:

"What happened to the psychopathic-child-molesting-serial-killer-rapist-mongloid that escaped from the asylum in Norway?"
"I don't know."
"He was last seen running Sweden as their PM"

This joke reflects how I feel about our Environment Minister; that he is somehow a malevolent mongo escapee, that finds himself in power.
Anyway, here's his spin on the solar power initiative of the Federal Government.

TONY JONES: Is this the one occasion when you can proudly say that the Government's initiative is all about smoke and mirrors?

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: I think that what we've seen here is a policy that's been in place for a couple of years now. We've gone through a very diligent process of looking at all of the options; I think something like 30 submissions we received, trying to get a part of this half a billion dollar fund, and today the Treasurer has announced the first two projects.

I think it demonstrates what the PM has said from the Pacific, is that there is not going to be a silver bullet solution. You do have to deal with cleaning up fossil fuels, you do have to fast track making solar a mainstream energy source. You have to do energy efficiency, you have to change how we use our land, we have to stop deforestation globally. We have to transform our transport fleet. We have to do all of those things to achieve the target that the globe needs to achieve during this century if we are in fact to avoid dangerous climate change.

TONY JONES: Let's start with what's been called the ‘world's largest solar energy plant’. What sort of area does it cover?

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: Well, ultimately it's going to cover many hundreds of hectares. This is the first part of a program. We hope that with the success of the demonstration plant, we'll be able to roll this out not only up in Mildura, but ultimately in places like China, over hundreds and hundreds of hectares.

TONY JONES: If it works and you repeated the project around the country, what is the potential? How much of our power could potentially come from the sun?

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: Well, looking at the problem globally, the Professor Socolo Study from Princeton University is saying that providing, say, roughly 700 times the solar energy currently used in the world will produce about one seventh of the challenge.

If you think of the challenge of having to double the world's energy supplies in the next 50 years, and to stabilise greenhouse gases you have to use about seven different technologies, and one of them is solar, this particular technology has the I hate to use all these mathematical statistics, Tony, but they do, sort of, break it down to bite sized chunks. But this technology has the potential to improve the efficiency of solar by about it improves the effectiveness by about a sixth. So you use about a sixth of the energy to create the same power. So it's a massive transformation in terms of efficiency. And when you think the Princeton study says you need to increase solar penetration by roughly 700 times across the global, then this is a big step forward. So proving it here in Australia, using Australian technology, Australian know how, and then being able to export it very quickly, for example through the Asia Pacific Clean Development and Climate Change mechanism, I think that today is in fact a really, really historic day for Australia.

TONY JONES: I've done a few rough sums here: The Treasurer says the project will power about 45,000 homes. There are about 8 million households in Australia. On those figures, if you built 178 of these solar powered stations just like the one down there, you could supply power to the whole country. Does that sound right?

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: Yes, it does, but I think, again, it falls into the trap Tony, of saying this is the silver bullet. What has exercised my mind for a couple of years is that China is growing at the rate of a city of Brisbane every month. You can talk about a few homes in Australia, but when you, say, drive through the Xin Zhen Province, as I did last Thursday night, and see a city of 12 million people that didn't exist 18 years ago, you realise that you have to not only do these large scale, breakthrough solar projects.

Not very convincing is it?
You get the feeling that the Nats are applying the blowtorch in the backrooms because this year marks the first time in in a decade in power that the Federal Government has even acknowledged there's a serious problem with Global Warming. Really, the legacy of this Coalition Government won't be its record of economic management as it wants it to be; it will be the fact that they were well and truly in denial at the wheel while this problem grew and grew. And when nations around the world worked up an agreement to curb it, they said, "Nup, it's not in our interests".
This following bit had me choking:

If the Hazelwood project works, you could have every single brown coal fired power station in Australia producing energy with zero, or very low emissions. So I think, rather than wanting to put all of you eggs in one basket, it is sensible for the Government to invest taxpayers' money in a range of technologies that are very importantly you can't ignore the world. This is truly a global solution. I mean, trying to get an effective global agreement post Kyoto is incredibly important, but in the meantime finding technology transfer mechanisms so that you can get these technologies developed in a place like Australia, and very quickly moved into places like China, is really the front edge of the problem and the challenge.

TONY JONES: I understand. But can you just explain to us why solar generated electricity is actually going to be more expensive, once the plant is up and running, than coal fired electricity, since it comes from the sun?

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: These are issues that we will know more about once this plant is up and running, once we know that it's built, that all of the engineering challenges this is what a demonstration project is all about. We will know all of those costs, we will know what it costs per unit of electricity, then we'll know what it will look like as it's expanded.

The bit that had me spewing was 'Trying to get a global agreement post-Kyoto..." For heaven's sake weren't we the nation that said 'no' to the Kyoto Protocol? What credibility have we got when we go in to the next round of discussions?

So... you can suddenly feel the urgency with which they're now viewing the problem. Uhh, It's really late in the day, guys. Letting the issue go to seed, while going on silly little crusades to save the whales, for the last 10 years was a really bad choice of spending time and resources.
The thing about this government and its horrible, woeful, dreadful, abysmal track record in tackling Global Warming is that it has made me yell and scream as if I were a Greenie.
Which, I am not.

Then there's this:

IAN CAMPBELL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: My strong conviction has been, for a couple of years now, that Australia should be and will be the leader in solar technologies in the world. That is already happening, although people on the Left of politics keep putting down our achievements. You can't beat going to Xen Zhen Province and seeing the largest solar photovoltaic installation in Asia, built using and solar cells made at Homebush by BP Solar, and installed by an Australian company in China.

Australia's been the leader in Solar power technologies since the early 1980s. For Ian Campbell to suddenly notice this and find conviction in it 2 years ago is truly a sad state of affairs. These were known components, known commodities. Where was he during the 1980s and the 1990s? Presumably, he was in that Norwegian asylum.
I really do hope he googles his name and finds my critique of his pathetic, sub-standard work as Environment Minister.