Who Picks the Winners in the Australian Electricity Market?

Last week, Reuters published an interesting piece about Australia's progress on renewable energy - For those who can't be bothered reading the article, I'll summarise it for you:

• The Aussie government recently committed to generate at least 20% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2020. To support this goal, it put in place a scheme called the Renewable Energy Target (RET).  
• Although it is still early days for the RET, it appears to be working pretty bloody well. So well in fact, that we seem set to beat the 20% by 2020 target (perhaps even generating as much as 25%), if things continue.
• Because of this success, "The Australian Coal Association (ACA) has argued that the RET should be abolished completely because it unfairly picks winners in the electricity market."

I do not intend to write another scathing post about the hypocrisy of the ACA's position - Blind Freddy can see that a highly profitable industry that still sucks billions of dollars from Australian taxpayers every year is taking the piss to argue that their competitors shouldn't help themselves to a small serve from their feeding trough…

I'll try not talk about the ACA at all actually, because I think it's time that Aussies started to talk about the big picture...

Australia is one of the richest countries on the planet and we have a tiny population. Our land abounds in Nature's (renewable energy) gifts. We have boundless plains on which to harvest solar, wind, and geothermal energy. For fuck's sake - hasn't anyone noticed that our home is girt by sea? Maybe we might look into some marine and ocean energy? 

Nature and history have picked the winners in the Aussie electricity market, not the RET!

What is wrong with Aussies these days that we just let the ACA get away with spouting that kind of crap? We should all march down there and tell them to shove it!

The Big Issues: Anyone up for a Game of End-Times Bingo?

I'm an avowed atheist, but apart from occasional lapses, I try to limit my anti-supernatualist "preaching" to light-hearted piss-taking of thick-skinned religious friends.

Wherever we sit within the many spectra of faith systems though, a conscious concern for Sustainable Human Flourishing forces reflection on the positives and negatives of religion… For me this is especially true at times like this when such madness is again on display in places like Cairo and Benghazi - insanity that has reached my adopted home of Belgium and even as far away as my erstwhile secular homeland of Australia. At times like this, I must pause to reflect on the potential for religious extremism to affect those that I love.

I have to say though, that while I consider religiously motivated terrorism to be a real danger, it seems a massively over-hyped threat when compared with two elephants that quietly share a room with today's most popular religions, specifically:

The Big Issues: The Greatest Challenges of Our Time

I think that the most deliciously idiosyncratic thing about Belgium is that we are right at the heart of all that is good and bad about Europe. So many interesting and potentially world-changing discussions happen right here.

Living close to Brussels also means that I can gatecrash some of these discussions at the various European institutions based there. I have no affiliation with these institutions beyond the fact that my tax dollars help to support them, but I honestly consider "Europe" to be an amazing achievement - even more so because normal people like me are encouraged to participate occasionally.

On Wednesday, for example, I went to the European Parliament with a couple of friends to watch a presentation based on the book "The Greatest Challenges of Our Time" by László Szombatfalvy.

Important note: You can and should get your free download of this enlightening book (or read online) in English, French, Swedish, Spanish, and more languages coming...

Before we go any further though, I should warn you that this is a pretty straightforward wrap-up post. It contains lots of information about a fascinating presentation, with many interesting links, but I apologise that I don't have time right now to add too much of my typical rambling, opinionated commentary.

Also, since the link between the presentation and this blog should be self-evident, I won't waste too much of our time tying everything back to Sustainable Human Flourishing.

The Little Things: Trying to do better

Although this blog is supposed to be my ramblings, we're all too busy to waste time with bad writing. So, from now on, I will try to be more disciplined by leaning on a literary hero of mine...

George Orwell was one of the most important and powerful writers of modern times, and if you know him, you will know how beautifully he wrote on topics related to human flourishing. Did you also know how forcefully he campaigned against lazy writing though?

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend his Politics and the English Language essay, published in 1946, in which Orwell criticizes (amongst other things) "ugly and inaccurate" written English.

In that essay, Orwell even goes so far as to propose a "Remedy of Six Rules" as follows:

"What do we want?""How the heck are we supposed to know?""When do we want it?""Now!!!"

I am sick of hearing otherwise reasonable people making unreasonable demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. I can't count the number of times that I've heard...

"... they will never make a difference if they only protest against something! Why don't they just tell us exactly what it is that they are protesting for?"

The Big Issues: When Should We Stop Burning Fossil Fuels?

I often hear people making statements like - "There is no point reducing my carbon footprint, because anything that I do is insignificant compared to increases in developing countries."

Realistic people convince themselves that this is a realistic position. Sensible people make the sensible choice to enjoy life now before the oil runs out. Rational people come to the rational conclusion that we are ripping ourselves off if we don't gorge on the cheap fossil fuel pie - Nobody will leave the last piece of the pie on the table out of politeness, right?

Sure, we'll move to cleaner, more expensive fuels later, but only when we really need to. You've heard this all before, haven't you?

A Little Thought Provoker: What's up with all the earthquakes lately?

We seem to hear about some new seismic event almost every other day, and from a quick check of the Web I’m not the only one wondering whether the earth might be falling apart...?

The Google-equipped inquisitive mind finds a figurative tsunami of pages exhorting that recent natural disasters are signs that we are in the "End Times". At time of writing a Google search for "earthquakes, end times" yielded literally millions of results (Well, for me it does anyway)

When pondering Sustainable Human Flourishing, religion of all flavours warrants very serious cogitation, so you can bet that I'll share some thoughts on biblical end times prophecies in later blogs - today though, I want to share an interesting hypothesis that I came across in my search for “the truth” about all those earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc...