Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Carbon, damned carbon

What did your mother tell you about lies when you were small? Apart from don't tell them that is. If you tell a little lie you will have to tell a bigger one to cover it up and and then a bigger one to disguise the second and so on.

If you base a policy on a basic untruth the sequelae from that will get more and more preposterous as time goes on. So it is with Kyoto and my power bill. SWMBO was doing the accounts last night whilst I was doing something much more entertaining (making marlin lures for Mozambique, since you asked) and she let out a low whistle at the magnitude of the demand from Genesis. This sudden increase was not because I had put the Obald backyard aluminium smelter on double time, it was because electricity is getting inexorably more expensive.

And it is about to get a whole lot worse. Someone in Gummint has the temerity to say that because New Zealand has to be seen as a 'world leader' (give me a break, we couldn't lead the world in brewery piss-up organising) in green power generation we will generate 90% of our power from renewable sources by 2025. It fails to point out that this is not possible and to get even close very expensive forms of power generation will have to be used to meet our emission targets - which are mandated by the bloody Kyoto nonsense. There is a big chinwag about all this in Bali (very nice) at the moment and clean green New Zealand is missing its Kyoto targets by 12-15%. Who cares? Well the gummint cares and in order to look good it announces that they will discourage the building of gas fired power stations. Power generators say 'sod off' we are going to build them because it is the only sensible way to generate power in the real world. The government returns to type and just bans them. Except when you have to have one because the touchy feely renewable ones don't work as there has been a stationary high over the country for three weeks. Or you can have a gas power station if you haven't got a dammable stream sitting at the bottom of the middle paddock. Oh, and you can have one if you run an aluminium smelter (so I'm alright then).

And, dear Mr Great Unwashed, all this bollocks is not going to cost you a bean because it is also introducing an emissions trading regime that would require large emitters like coal and gas fired power stations from 2010 to buy carbon credits to cover their emissions. Eh? And who is going to give the money to the power companies so they can buy these twenty first century vials of snake oil? I'll give you a few minutes to work it out for yourself.

It is just a complete load of crap. However you don't get much carbon belching out of nuclear power stations, do you?

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