The Saltbush Club

Olympic Dam’s Gold Medal Performance

By Bob Day

It is exactly 50 years since Western Mining first discovered the massive gold, silver, copper and uranium ore body at the aptly-named Olympic Dam in South Australia. A golden anniversary indeed!

But discovering the ore was just the beginning.

The fight to allow uranium mining at Olympic Dam was brutal.

The ruling Labor Party, under then SA Premier Don Dunstan, was vehemently opposed to uranium mining and particularly opposed to uranium mining at Olympic Dam.

Canton Cabbage or China Revisited

By Howard Dewhirst

After memories of WWII began to fade, Australians began to drift away from the mother country’s culinary habits, from meat and two veg, beans on toast and spam and chips to more exotic dishes such as Canton Cabbage. Almost every town of any size had a Chinese restaurant and a Greek café, and little else that was ‘exotic’. However, when Mao united China under his northern umbrella, Peking, the Cantonese name for the city, was replaced by the Mandarin language Beijing, and Canton became Guangzhou, even though Cantonese is its inhabitant’s first language. So, now that Canton is no more, do we need a new name for this exotic dish?

While naming places is China’s business, there is an argument that we do not need to change our language to please others, as some have done, witness the recent fad of spelling the English name of Turkey in the Turkish script as Tűrkiyé, because that’s what their President wants. Would you believe that two of the letters he is insisting we use, are not in our alphabet? Yes, I can import them on my PC or iPhone, but why should I?

LABOR PRIME MINISTERS BEN CHIFLEY AND BOB HAWKE SUPPORTED NUCLEAR POWER… AND SO DOES UK’S NEW SOCIALIST PRIME MINISTER

By Cliff Reece

In 1947, the Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Ben Chifley (pictured above left next to Bob Hawke) – famous for his ‘The Light on the Hill’ speech, which has resonated down the years as epitomising the Labor philosophy – first guided the thinking of Australians towards nuclear power.

The establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission was well on the way when the Chifley Government was defeated in 1948.

At no stage during the earlier years of the Labor Party were they against nuclear technology. The Uranium-Australian Policy which was formulated by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) during those years included the following:

A Pilot Plant for Net Zero

By Viv Forbes

Both solar and wind energy have fatal flaws – solar stops when the sun goes down or if a cloud blocks the sun; wind fails if the wind is too strong or too weak. But every day we hear of some fantastic and expensive plan to keep the lights on when these unreliable energy twins stop work.

The latest thought bubble from Mr Bowen (the Australian Minister for Generating Blackouts) is for him to be able to drain the energy from electric car batteries to back up a failing grid. He suggests that batteries could also power the house or sell energy into the grid. (They are already scheming on how to use smart technology to prevent homeowners from charging their own batteries when flicker power is fading.)

The Titanic scale of floating wind turbines quantified

By David Wojick

Source: https://www.cfact.org/2024/07/17/the-titanic-scale-of-floating-wind-turbines-quantified/

My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.

Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.

Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.

New US-EU Methane Rules Won’t Affect Temperatures

By Steve Goreham

Originally published by MasterResource.

In March, the US Environmental Protection Agency published new methane emissions regulations for the oil and gas industry. The European Union enacted new rules to reduce methane emissions from the energy sector in May. Agriculture is also being targeted regarding methane. But methane regulations, even if established worldwide, won’t have a measurable effect on global temperatures. However, they will raise costs for energy and food, impacting consumers and businesses.

On March 8, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its rule on methane emissions for the oil and gas sector. The rule is intended to “reduce wasteful methane emissions that endanger communities and fuel the climate crisis.”

Battery Baloney, Hydrogen Hype and Green Fairy Tales

By Viv Forbes

How low Australia has fallen – our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate”, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, plus heaps of batteries and new power lines can power our homes, industries AND the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards?

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions – the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

When Climate Alarmism Enters The Courtroom And Climate Facts Are Left Outside

By Dr. John Happs

“Climate lawfare is now a well-established route to avoid the checks and balances of democratic legislation. It subverts the legal system of a country, often with the help of activist judges, to impose the ideological preferences of an elite of the climate industrial complex on wider society. The total number of climate change court cases is growing worldwide and has more than doubled since 2017 ….”

Continue reading: https://papundits.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/when-climate-alarmism-enters-the-courtroom-and-climate-facts-are-left-outside/

Beyond Mad Max with Dystopian AI

By John Mikkelsen

The dystopian future predicted in the Mad Max movie franchise may be closer than ever and it won’t take World War 3 to make it a reality.

To me the only ones worth watching were the original and its sequel starring homegrown hero Mel Gibson. Those drab desert landscapes from Mad Max 2 on, were traversed by fast supercharged fossil fuel powered vehicles without a single EV on the horizon.

So while the Teslas pile up unwanted at Port Melbourne and sales of EVs are declining globally, they represent just the tip of the iceberg on which the Western world seems destined to founder in its mad rush to offset climate change “driven by CO2 emissions.”

The fact that climate always changes and it’s mainly driven by natural cyclical forces beyond our control, is overlooked by political leaders pushing the green dream of “renewable energy” focussed on the unreliable intermittent sources of solar and wind power.

Climate Activists Are Wrong About Which Energy Source Reduces Air Pollution

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in the Washington Examiner.

Today’s media are filled with concerns about air pollution. But few people know which energy source has produced the greatest modern reduction in air pollution. The answer isn’t wind or solar energy.

During the 1950s, my grandfather had a coal furnace in his basement, like many homes in Chicago. Five days after a winter snowfall, the snow was covered with a visible black film of dust from coal furnaces. Our younger generation does not know the original reason for “spring cleaning.” Every spring, homeowners would wash their inside walls to remove coal dust.