China’s bullying backfires: Australia ahead in trade spat
The events might come from a Hollywood script. School bully (China), annoyed over being left out of games (lucrative overseas…
Knowing Thomas Cromwell’s fate only increases the tension: The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel, reviewed
In 1540, he, himself, Lord Cromwell fell victim to the king’s caprice. His execution brings to a close one of English literature’s great trilogies, says Mark Lawson
Blacklisting sceptics
The shunning of alternative scientific opinions
Countering disasters
The near hysterical insistence by green groups that Australia’s undoubtedly very bad bushfire season is the result of man-made climate…
Hydrogen’s all hot air
Faced with evidence that the Paris Agreement on limiting emissions is being ignored, including news that China is building or…
Energy notes
LNG is the new coal With the media spotlight focussed on activists, the Greens and even Pacific nations complaining about…
Green notes
Renewables fail to pay their way The problem with continued calls for ‘sense’ in the Australian energy market including a…
It’s China, not climate
Despite constant doom-saying over climate and commentators wringing their hands over floods in Queensland and droughts in NSW and Victoria,…
Emissions Notes
We’ll never leave Paris
Electric fantasies
A looming Australian federal election and the increasingly bitter carbon wars have resulted in a series of campaign promises that…
Tipping point of hysteria
Since the dawn of the climate debate in the late 1980s, any number of tipping points for the earth’s ecosystem…
Slippery oil industry
When oil prices spiked to $US140 ($A193.85) a barrel in 2008, veteran analysts declared that prices would reach $US200 or…
No real pain in Paris
When the infighting over the Liberal leadership raised the possibility that Australia might join the United States in exiting the…
Renewables becalmed
As Australia’s electricity grids strain to cope with demand and government efforts to foist yet more renewable energy on them,…
Patchwork power
The Australian summer has passed with only the occasional blackout, although a possibly grim winter, once unseasonably warm weather in…
Paying for steel jobs
Indian billionaire Sanjeev Gupta is now in the same category as American entrepreneur Elon Musk in that any absurd idea…
The unacceptable cost of renewables
Parts of Europe may be tearing themselves apart politically over the vast costs of adopting renewable energy, but Australian voters…
No charge in electric cars
Imagine ordering a population to evacuate from the path of a hurricane if they only had electric cars to drive.…
Climate excuses
Tony Abbott may have annoyed the climate change mob with his speech in London (see Diary), but a far more…
In space, no one can hear you screaming for cash
Such is the mystique of Elon Musk that he is able to make the absurd declarations that he will launch…
Hype is renewable
The announcement of a $650 million solar power plant near the South Australian town of Port Augusta brought forth the…
Batteries fail to spark
Elon Musk is such a good salesman that, despite formidable and blindingly obvious problems, he has managed to convince everyone…
Reinventing energy policy
While the Liberal party tears itself apart over whether a Clean Energy Target as proposed by the Finkel report delivered…
Green power fantasies
The cool phrases among the proponents of green electricity are ‘distributed networks’ and ‘micro networks’ which, we are told, will…
How to ignite gas
One of the major surprises of the energy debate in Australia is that both the South Australian Labor Premier, Jay…
