But, and isn't there always a but !
Almost all Coles and Woolies are tenants in somebody else's buildings.
Rooftops are usually car parks.

"Recent polling from Greenpeace shows that nearly 70% of people think big businesses should set a target of 100% renewable energy, while 67% of people would prefer to work for a company that uses renewable energy".

Because most people are too polite to tell these pollsters to bugger off, or they feel threatened by climate loonies. And, it's easy for people to say what other people should do because they don't have to do anything themselves.

100% renewable energy? Rave on!

"Climate change is impacting Australian families now."

No. Climate change is not impacting Australian families. The high cost of electricity, brought about climate nutters and rent-seekers, is what is impacting Australian families, who made their feelings known at the last climate change election, after Green/Labor threatened to make things even harder for them.

'Australian companies' - most of them now multinationals - will do what is best for them; and, they will whack Australian families even harder to pay for it.

Bazz,
Where there's rooftop parking, it's much much much better to have it under the shade of solar panels than in full sun.

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ttbn,
Do you seriously think the severity of the bushfires is unrelated to climate change? Or that the bushfires aren't impacting on Australian families?

The high cost of electricity is indeed impacting on Australian families, but more solar power can bring it down.

Sounds like a great deal/huge payday for the solar panel industry and installers!

However, like all of these vested interest diatribes, ignores the mountains of toxic waste this industry creates, and where it is simply dumped? To eventually wind up in our oceans/food?

Ignores other carbon-free alternatives that are even more sustainable and what's more available 24/7and not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.

Doesn't change the transport industry dynamics and our absurd reliance on imported carbon-based fossil fuels.

doesn't lessen or limit our dependance o the export of coal oil or gas to prop up our economy. Doesn't make desal affordable or make irrigation (essential) more affordable.

Doesn't stop the exodus from the land by the dairy industry, just pads the wallets of installers for a time!

If I could afford it I'd get completely off the grid! Or agree to officially sanctioned murder, to get off of this parisite's paradise, energy money-go-round.

Cover every roof with panels and add in batteries that triple outlay cost and guess what?

We'd still need dispatchable power to keep the trains and trams running the factories churning the irrigation pumps sucking furiously, the desalination projects all but melting down with overload. And peak demand that hugely exceeds capacity as every air conditioner in the land is turned on and operates at maximum day and night! And in places like Bunnings. Woolworths, and Coles! As the airconditioning and freezer capacities are strained to their limits.

And when they're not? Cause huge problems for the grid! TBC.
Alan B.

Only someone with no math could possibly believe alternate energy could possibly replace even 70% of our current power requirements.

Until these clowns endorse gas, clean coal & nuclear power generation, we know they are merely useful idiots, doing the work of vested interests in the wind & solar industries.

Cont. the mendacious and diabolically disingenuous solar panel industry keeps insisting that renewables are cheaper than coal!

And not necessarily so. If one covers ten or twenty square miles with solar voltaic panels one can get day time power to below that of gas, @5cents PHWH. And needs gas backup turbines or somesuch to kick in when the sun goes down or demand exceeds capacity. ROM coal? 3 cents, PKWH?

And while the power from huge scale of economy projects may prove the solar installer's claims? They're are not applicable to joe average. Or anyone living below the poverty line, around 40% of us?

Solar panels start to degrade in around 25 years as they become less and less efficient! Not hail proof nor able to withstand cyclonic winds!

Just add to insurance premiums the first foreseeable consequence!

Vested interest will always argue their case through a prism and with vested interest blinkers on?

We've more solar panels on more roof now than at any time and the take-up, even with generous subsidies may have plateaued, hence this and other similar, vested interest articles? even as we transition through the worst drought in living memory. And Australia/flora and fauna burns!

True environmentalists do not selectively present their alternatives but are open to all sane/saner sustainable alternatives.

Vested interests, on the other hand, are terrified of the other more sustainable, carbon-free or carbon-neutral alternatives that beat their preferred model hands down as cost-effective and affordable, sustainable, alternative energy paradigms! TBC.
Alan B.

"ttbn,
Do you seriously think the severity of the bushfires is unrelated to climate change?".

Yes I do. And so does the IPCC whose spokespeople have recently repeated that climate change has had NO effect on bushfires or the drying out of the land. You just listen to, and read, the bits that suit your extremist ideologies. Summers in Australia continue to be the same as they always have. You need to start reading history.

Not a bad idea, provided Coles and Woolworths let their customers know that prices of goods sold in their supermarkets will go up as a result. If their customers are happy with these price increases, well and good, but I suspect so many people are doing it tough in Australia at present that they won't welcome higher food prices.

EVERY building should have solar panels and a solar HWS on its roof ! !

"And if the 14 largest telecommunications, IT, and technology companies - like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone - powered their operations with 100% renewable energy, it would lead to 1GW of new wind and solar projects, enough to power over 600,000 homes, and create around 2,000 construction job-years."

Yet more wishful thinking!

With 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone would have service outages during coincident sunless, windless and drained back-up battery periods -- hardly the way to run modern, reliable telecommunications services.

Cont. It is only a question of time before we cannot give coal away? Unless or until we can come up with a practical affordable alternative. And doable!

We robotise coal mining! To reduce the eternally mounting cost and remove the control of the CUMEF from it! Then take washed coal and cook it with flameless heat. Could be a solar thermal project built on reclaimed coal mines. or where once stood power stations? Then the gas scrubbed and passed through fractional distillation to remove any CO2 as dry ice.

Then the storable gas pumped into a national gas grid, that could use existing energy corridors! And available on-demand 24/7!

Methane/NG is a reductant and therefore extends the life of any such pipeline by reducing or eliminating oxidisation.

Also transmitting energy as gas would remove most of the current transmission and distribution losses, remove the necessity of boilers, turbines, and staging transformers and all their associated maintenance costs! Over 75% of the current combined cost of reticulated and gold plated, price-gouged energy!

The methane then fed into the client's onsite ceramic fuel cell(S) Where the exhaust product is mostly pristine water vapour!

We build something like that here as a clean coal demonstration product that is actually cheaper than all the much-vaunted renewables and we will sell coal until all we have is holes in the ground!

Robots will work 24/7, won't strike, control the labor party, take sickies, demand overtime rates or leave, holidays etc, won't die of black lung disease etc.

Incidentally, may be able to replace coal with hydrogen in steel smelting

And we can make hydrogen from methane by passing it through a catalyst that hives off a few hydrogen molecules to make methanol, a substitute for fully imported petrol.

Any jobs lost in the transition, replaced by the new much more permanent fuel technologies! TBC.
Alan B.

There is absolutely no link between Co2 and temperature, in fact scientific fact clearly shows (from ice cores in Greenland and conclusively backed up from ice cores from Antarctica) that over the past 500 or so million years there is no correlation between Co2 and temperature. The opposite over long time periods is scientific fact.

Had it not been for man’s contributions to Co2 resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, it was possible the declining levels of Co2 occurring naturally may have been devastating as at around 150ppm Co2, all vegetation begins to die. So thank you man made Co2, the more the merrier.

3 thousand odd years ago when Co2 levels were much lower than today, temperatures were approximately 2 degrees warmer. Man survived and thrived, another couple of scientific facts which are conveniently denied.

Current global temperatures are well within natural climate variability, another inconvenient scientific fact being ignored.

The current fires have resulted from normal weather and man made impacts at the local level. Ever heard of drought and strong fuel loads with associated high temperatures and strong wind, all within the bounds of natural variability.

It's official! Today's SMH reports: "NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean says "no one can deny" that climate change is to blame for the smoke haze choking Sydney as bushfires burn across NSW.

In the state government's strongest comments yet on the link between climate change and bushfires, Mr Kean said: "This is not normal and doing nothing is not a solution"."

Minister Kean shows his hypocrisy by effectively "doing nothing" to prevent the severity of bushfires. As the minister responsible for national parks and wildlife services, he virtually completely disallows controlled burning in national parks, thus making them high-risk areas with massive fuel buildup. He keeps his fingers crossed that there would be no lightning strikes and that potential arsonists would keep well clear of those areas.

If he were serious, he should acknowledge that yesterday's thick smoke haze over Sydney originated mostly from intense fires in non-hazard-reduced, parched national parks, combined with unfavourable winds.

Yes and global warming caused the volcano on White Island to erupt.
There, we were all waiting for someone to say that were we not ?

And don't forget the CO2 emissions that were generated by that volcano.

It would not surprise if the climate change alarmists claim that those emissions were human-caused -- by way of tourists triggering the volcano by walking onto its crust.

ttbn,
> so does the IPCC whose spokespeople have recently repeated that
> climate change has had NO effect on bushfires or the drying out of the land.
Do you have a reference or that claim? I find it extraordinary because it contradicts their earlier claims and goes against simple logic – I really don't see how anyone could deny that bushfires are more intense and harder to stop when the air temperature is hotter.

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Bernie Masters,
More solar panels means less in the way of electricity bills - so if anything, the prices would go down.

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Raycom,
Why is it so hard for you to comprehend that 100% renewable energy doesn't mean disconnecting the gas powered power stations? It means installing so much renewable and battery power that we don't need to use them to provide a reliable electricity supply. It could alternatively mean getting all the gas from renewable sources.

Galen,
> There is absolutely no link between Co2 and temperature,
There's a very strong link between CO2 and temperature. Which is what you'd expect if you were familiar with the laws of physics.

> scientific fact clearly shows (from ice cores in Greenland and conclusively backed up
> from ice cores from Antarctica) that over the past 500 or so million years there is no correlation
> between Co2 and temperature. The opposite over long time periods is scientific fact.
That's been thoroughly debunked - see http://skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation.htm

>Had it not been for man’s contributions to Co2 resulting from the burning of fossil
>fuels, it was possible the declining levels of Co2 occurring naturally may have been
>devastating as at around 150ppm Co2, all vegetation begins to die.
Firstly it's not all plants. There are three variants of photosynthesis: C3 C4 and CAM. It's only the C3 plants that have difficulty coping with low CO2 levels, and even then, they don't just die out.
Secondly, our atmosphere has had low CO2 levels before.
Thirdly, CO2 levels are so far above 150ppm that it's as irrelevant as the fact that CO2 is toxic at high concentrations.

> 3 thousand odd years ago when Co2 levels were much lower than today,
> temperatures were approximately 2 degrees warmer.
Greenland temperatures were higher then, but global temperatures were lower.
But the problem isn't that our planet is warmer than it has been for thousands of years; it's that it is still getting hotter.

Aiden,
Your debunking is far from a reputable site which is not surprising.

Please explain this then http://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Temperature-and-CO2-levels-over-600-million-years-Source-MacRae-2008_fig1_280548391

Galen

"Do you have a reference or that claim? I find it extraordinary because it contradicts their earlier claims ...".

It does. Unlike you, they have kept up with events. People like you, once your minds are made up, you never change them: either because of pride, you can't admit you are wrong, or you are just plain pig headed. You are useful idiots for crooks. Do yourself a favour, read more, and open your mind.

Alice Springs recently had a 12 hour outage because of reliance on renewables and failed battery backup. The cause? A big cloud. What jokers. Any idea how much mining is required to produce solar panels. And as for the disposal of used/failed panels? That's right no one has thought of it. Maybe we could send them to Asia to dump in the rivers.

hi all,

Climate change is the least of our issues. It is fast becoming irrelevant and yesterdays issue.

What is coming is AI, 5G and quantum computing.

These will destroy most jobs. Tinkering at the edges with climate 'science' and 'renewables' is pretty irrelevant.

All those new machines, technological advances, and massively more complex and complicated communications are going to require increasing (huge) amounts of cheap power ... 24 / 7.

if you think the major companies, you quote, will retard their labor cost cutting, robotic and machine innovations as well as complex communications, and instead choose to support irregular and intermittent energy supply ... well you're living in fantasy land.

They will do what suits their needs. If 24/ 7 reliable power isn't supplied by renewables ... well use your brains .. they'll do what's in their self interest.

One of my mates, developed the drone technology to oversee open cut and long wall mining in one of the major mining companies. He's working on developing the software to replace management and all contracting control with AI.

Very soon most mining jobs will no longer exist. They'll be replaced by machines, AI and electronics. All of which will require mains or battery recharge from mains.

As an aside the only jobs remaining in most economies will be leadership positions, menial jobs or jobs requiring judgement, where AI and robots are not cost effective. eg childcare, farm jobs.

High levels of Emotional Intelligence, not IQ or Education, will be central to almost all employment opportunities.

Cheers

Aidan, you are stretching credibility by implying that gas power is renewable energy.

100% RENEWABLE ENERGY means 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY

And, because of the big cloud that cut off the the of the power in Alice Springs, two power bosses were sacked. The cloud got away.

There is no such thing as "renewable" energy - such hocus-pocus would go against the laws of thermodynamics!

http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/energy_is_neither.html

To Aiden: "More solar panels means less in the way of electricity bills - so if anything, the prices would go down." I don't know what world you live in but, in my world, solar panels cost money to buy, install and maintain. Payback period for most domestic installations is 5 or so years and maybe economies of scale might give supermarkets payback periods of 2 to 3 or 4 years. But the bottom line is that the supermarkets would need to find the large sums of money to pay for solar panels on the roofs of their leased buildings and this money either has to be borrowed at a cost or taken out of profits.

Every Australian family produces enough biological waste to power their domiciles.

And passed through two-tank Aerobic and anaerobic closed-cycle smell free digestor will produce enough methane gas to power their homes 24/7!

Replacing the stationary engine with a ceramic cell creates more than a 50% salable energy surplus. Byproducts include, sanitised high carbon soil improver reusable sanitized nutrient-loaded reusable irrigation water and endless, free, domestic hot water!

Yes, systems like this are pricy, but if funded by a government plan, could be paid off over time by a quarterly payment equal to the average power bill, and by the sale of the surplus energy into microgrids?

If this material is not treated as proposed it goes on to break down naturally and like compost or worm farms becomes a source of greenhouse gases.

And if the water used to flush it is not recycled, then it flows down to the sea as millions of annual litres of wasted irrigation water.

Other sources of CARBON FREE energy include nuclear. Where some of the nuclear waste product could be used in breeder reactors that allow as much as a total 5% of the potential energy locked up in nuclear waste to be liberated, or in MSR, as much as 98%?

Given sanity, rare common sense and pragmatism prevail, we will become the world's safest repository for stored nuclear waste and earn annual billons for providing the service!

But before we bury it? We should reprocess it through (walk away safe) MSR's To liberate the available energy in MSR by a further 98% of the unspent energy!

And provide all but free power for the nation for thousands of years as we reduce the half-life of this material from thousands of years to just 300!

And a worthy goal in its own right! As would be implementing and rolling out cooperative capitalism as the economic paradigms to run them!

But only if you want maximised productivity and efficiency, along with the most affordable production paradigm!
Alan B.

Bernie Masters,
Our big supermarket chains have no problem getting credit, and in the current economic climate practically all big businesses would jump at the chance to invest in something that pays for itself in as little as four years.

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Yuyutsu,
Of course there's such a thing as renewable energy. It's renewed by nature (mostly the sun, though for some geothermal energy the source is radioactive decay). Nobody said the energy had to come from an unlimited source. Trying to redefine well used expressions gives pedants a bad name!

As for the second law of thermodynamics, we just don't know. It seems inconsistent with observations on a cosmic scale, though there's no theoretical reason for it to be.

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ttbn,
> It does. Unlike you, they have kept up with events.
That's one possible explanation. A highly unlikely one considering how illogical the claim appeared to be, but rather than dismissing it outright I tried a quick Google search and after that proved fruitless, I asked if you had a reference.

And of course you didn't. Instead I saw an extremely accurate criticism of yourself, misdirected at me.

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Galen,
The reputability of a site does not depend on whether you agree with its conclusions. Do you have any objective criticism of it?
BTW it has a page which might help you understand that graph you linked to:
http://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past-intermediate.htm

But since you asked me for an explanation I'll provide one too:
Atmospheric CO2 is only one factor affecting climate. Others include albedo, vulcanism and solar strength.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

runner,
Unfortunately in the NT there was a huge procedural failure - they didn't know when to switch their power station on!

And you're wrong about nobody having thought of the disposal of solar panels. See http://reneweconomy.com.au/arena-targets-solar-panel-recycling-in-new-15m-funding-round-28956/

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Raycom,
Gas power from renewable sources (as Alan also suggested) certainly is renewable energy. But you're missing my main point: The objective of reaching 100% renewable energy is to remove the need to ever resort to using fossil fuels, not the ability to do so in an emergency.

I wish I was Hasbeen. sailing around the Pacific in a 40 foot yacht with a dozen handpicked virgins as crew.

Way to go, Hasbeen! Rockerfeller set the standard on how all men want to die.

Aiden,
The problem I am talking about is the mantra which includes the false narrative that more CO2 the higher the temperature. It is scientifically untrue. Notwithstanding all the other factors, we are in a natural climate warming phase, it has very little to do with anthropogenic impacts.

Galen,
>The problem I am talking about is the mantra which includes the false narrative
> that more CO2 the higher the temperature. It is scientifically untrue.
That depends what you mean. If you mean that CO2 is the only factor determining temperature, or that it will always override all other factors, then of course that's untrue. But scientists aren't so stupid that they can't account for other variables. And when they do, the narrative becomes true. More CO2 will always have a warming effect on climate.

>Notwithstanding all the other factors, we are in a natural climate warming phase,
> it has very little to do with anthropogenic impacts.
There is in a natural climate warming phase. I think you might have misread someone else on this board who said the sun was in a waning phase!

Dear Aidan,

«It's renewed by nature (mostly the sun, though for some geothermal energy the source is radioactive decay)»

Sun energy is not renewed, but dispersed and wasted, eventually heating the entire physical universe evenly.
The sun can only produce "new" energy by fusing more hydrogen atoms into helium thereby converting some of the mass-energy of these atoms into radiation-energy, but the hydrogen in the sun will not last forever.

Yuyutsu,
I'm well aware the hydrogen in the sun won't last for ever. But we can't prolong its life.

Renewable energy has a specific meaning in our language. Your attempt to redefine it to make it impossible is disingenuous.

Dear Aidan,

«Renewable energy has a specific meaning in our language.»

I am well aware that "renewable energy" has a specific meaning in the language of some political groups.
If you identify with any of these groups then your stating "in our language" is correct, but then this language is no longer English or scientific.

Modification of language for political ends is not something new - it was described in Orwell's famous book, "1984", where English is reconstructed to exclude the possibility of expressing anti-regime views. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

In this particular case, the anti-scientific term "renewable energy" was coined to depict certain, politically-desirable, sources of energy as "good", as opposed to "non-renewable energy" which is considered bad. A more honest approach would be to call the politically-desirable sources of energy, "progressive energy" as it corresponds to the ways the above political groups wish to move into, as opposed to "regressive energy" that corresponds to ways they wish to forsake.

I will not go along with such attempts to convey a political preference through misleading subliminal messages.

Yuyutsu,
It is you who's trying to manipulate the language to politicize this. And think Greta Thumberg has the most appropriate response: HOW DARE YOU!

Your attempt to turn conservatives against renewable energy by trying to relabel it "progressive energy", based on the LIES that its existing meaning is confined to certain political groups, and no longer English nor scientific, is something I'd expect from some of the dinosaurs on this board, but I genuinely never thought you'd stoop that low!

What follows is a quote from the back pages of New Scientist (Dec 7 2019):
An Article in The Australian caught Feedback's eye this week - or to be more precise, a pull quote in an image shared on Twitter that can ultimately be traced back to an article in The Australian.
"There are no carbon emissions" it read. "If there were we could not see because most carbon is black", it – for some reason – went on.
We were grateful to the author of those words fro splitting a hair so fine that Feedback had assumed its circumference was bound by a single atom.
Carbon emissions aren't, of course, composed exclusively of carbon. In a similar vein, we feel obligated to point out that humans cannot, in fact, shed crocodile tears, no statements can ever be made by the White House as it is a building with no record of sentience, and word salad isn't strictly a vegetable dish made from phonemes, but rather a meaningless garble involved in the service of a ridiculous point. Possibly – but possibly not – concerning climate change.

[Apologies for my two typos in the above quote: "article" shouldn't be capitalized, and "involved" should have been "invoked".]

Dear Aidan,

I appreciate your effort to correct your inadvertent typing errors. This respect for grammar and correct spelling is sadly a rare commodity nowadays.

I do not know this Mrs. Thumberg which you mentioned, perhaps because I keep away from this social-media and all the stupidity therein. I have not politicized the term "renewable energy" because it is already a political term - all I did was to merely observe and note that fact, just like the boy who stated "the king is naked!".

While I protested the use of the term "renewable energy" and the subconscious thought-groove that it is likely to lead into, objecting to the use of this unscientific and political term does not amount to objecting to the actual sources of energy which the users of this term denote by it. You may in fact observe that I mentioned nothing in praise, condemnation or preference of any particular energy source.

If you do not like the alternate name that I suggested, i.e. "progressive energy", then please feel free to provide a different name for this set of energy-sources that you have in mind, provided that the chosen name clearly refers to the political preference behind this set rather than to a scientific impossibility. Remember, I never said that this preference of certain energy sources is bad or wrong, only that you ought to own your preferences for what they are.

The expression "crocodile tears", while far from stating a biological truth, at least has no hidden agenda and does not mislead any reasonably-intelligent person to believe that it has to do with crocodiles.

Finally, it is clear as crystal that carbon is not black, for diamonds are made of pure carbon!