Snowy Mk 2 – a Symptom of a National Subversive Malady

By Bob Brock

The lack of critical comment on the recently announced Snowy Mk 2 in the mainstream media is seriously disappointing, but perhaps understandable since it is not generally understood.

The attraction of Snowy Mk 2 rides on the back of the iconic name of the truly heroic 1940s to 1970s Snowy Mountains Scheme that, with the St Lawrence Seaway in North America, was one of the world’s great civil engineering projects of the 20th century. Snowy Mk 2 is an opportunistic plan to use that iconic name to gain public support for an expensive project to make the Government’s flawed renewable energy policies workable. It has none of the nation-building qualities of its original namesake.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme.

The original Snowy Mountains Scheme was predicated on diverting some of the easterly flowing water from the Snowy Mountains that went into the Tasman Sea to the dry western plains for irrigation. The diverted water was to be distributed on the basis of five thirteenths to each of NSW and Victoria and three thirteenths to South Australia, and was to be provided free. The scheme was to be financed at least in part by electricity generation.

Snowy Mk 2 – the reality.

Snowy Mk 2 on the other hand will not provide any additional water. And the electricity it can generate (only about 70% of the electricity it consumes), will be used to spasmodically support the proliferation of unreliable renewable energy projects with the claim that it will lead to cheap affordable electricity.

We are being told lies. There is no evidence that the electricity provided under this plan will be anywhere nearly as cheap as our electricity was some 20 years ago when it was mainly generated by coal fired power stations and we had amongst the cheapest electricity in the world. Nor has anyone yet defined the term “affordable”. Claims that renewable energy will be cheaper “in the future” are just claims and are without substance. There is no evidence from other countries that an introduction of a substantial proportion of renewables into the mix has reduced costs. Their introduction in Australia has clearly coincided with a considerable increase in our electricity costs. Significantly, the Australian Government has never indicated an end date to subsidising renewable energy.

We have not been told about the economic viability of Snowy Mk 2 in comparison with an equivalent 2000MW coal fired station such as Liddell in NSW. It is inconceivable that the commercial value of Snowy MK 2 as might be assessed by its Net Present Value would be at all competitive with that of a coal-fired power station. To start with, Snowy Mk 2 has a reported limit of 175 hours of water storage and would only produce electricity intermittently on an ad hoc basis, whereas the coal fired station would produce marketable electricity indefinitely at over 90% availability. Nor have we been told whether any commercial assessments of Snowy Mk 2 have been enhanced by assuming that its revenues would include an income boosting renewable energy subsidy, or even worse a double subsidy, one for the energy used in pumping the water up the hill and another for the energy produced in running it down again. And would any assessments include the cost of heavy interconnectors, remembering that the main centres of electricity usage in NSW and Victoria are far removed from the Snowy Mountains?

Our present Energy Regime.

Energy companies are taking advantage of the present system – understandable as it is not against the law to do so. But we have created a favourable system for them under the false belief that private operators can do things more cheaply. It is a false belief because twenty years ago when our electricity was “world class cheap” our energy industry was mainly owned by the states. But then of course we didn’t have mandated renewables or subsidies!

The system that has been concocted with arbitrary guidelines based on unverified climate change criteria is that:

Firstly, renewable energy must be included in our energy mix, or off-set with the purchase of phoney “green” certificates to pretend it’s renewable and does not release “carbon”.

Secondly, renewable energy is subsidised to give it a commercial advantage over conventional energy produced from burning fossil fuels.

The outcome of this regime is that energy companies have been generating windfall profits at the expense of consumers. AGL’s 2018 net profit was $1.6 billion.

What Problems are we Solving?

We have not been told exactly what physical problem we are solving by the introduction of renewable energy into our electricity supply. All we know is that it will assist us to conform to the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the arbitrary dictates of the unelected bureaucrats of the UN who are governing more and more our lives with their Globalisation plans. Repeated claims from many virtue signallers that we must reduce environmental harm caused by “carbon emissions” are claims that have never been substantiated with real empirical evidence. Reference to reports that 97% of scientists agree is neither evidence nor true.

Remember too that CO₂ is not shown as a pollutant in Australia’s National List of Pollutants.

The background of the Climate Change hoax.

Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Chairman of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit had the stated philosophy:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” and also:

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”

Curtailing greenhouse gas emissions was to be the vehicle to bring this about. While it is claimed that CO₂ is the main greenhouse gas that must be curtailed, we have not been told that water vapour (and there is quite a lot of it in the atmosphere on a cloudy day) has a far greater greenhouse effect – but water vapour can’t be taxed or controlled to reduce industrialisation or to generate revenue at a cost to consumers.

And a quote by the Club of Rome: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… .All these dangers are caused by human intervention… .and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself… .believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or… .one invented for the purpose.”

So we have a philosophical motive.

What is also not widely known is that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to which Australia has agreed, and that advocates greenhouse gas reduction measures should be adopted, in 2015 also required developed countries to contribute some $200bn a year by 2020 to combat climate change in underdeveloped countries.

Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCCofficial: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy… Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Thus we also have a commercial motive.

Conclusions.

Australian Governments, State and Federal, with a complicit media, have been beguiled into adopting policies developed by foreign bodies that are not in the interests of Australians.

How can we be saved from this treasonous foreign influence and once again become an independent sovereign nation?

Bob Brock

Bob Brock is a graduate Civil engineer who worked for some six years on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and finished up as Project Engineer on the Island Bend Project that won an Australian Construction Achievement Award.