Can't agree with the last paragraph. Increasing CO2 is not beneficial for most countries therefore should be reduced. However I agree the ACT is deluded.

I imagine at night as you drive down Canberra Ave the street lighting is dazzling but turns off-colour the minute you drive into Queanbeyan. Squeaky clean must stop at the border. Also Tasmania that might end up with 8 GW of hydro and wind capacity within its own borders admits it needs gas for some industrial processes. ACT is thus the fairest of them all.

A misconception is that the purchase of green certificates means for example that you are using solar power at night. Or that overnight emissions are somehow more than displaced during the day. Yet for some reasons emissions stay the same. The ACT is kidding itself along with some other strange ideas emanating from the federal bureaucracy.

Can't agree with Taswegian's first comment, but I agree with you, Don. There is no serious scientific or economic research to suggest that reducing emissions is the optimal use of our resources. I've argued all century that the future is unknown, it will always surprise us, and that we should develop the capacity to deal with whatever unknown future befalls. This requires smaller government and more emphasis on initiative, innovation, entreprenurship and resilience. The Global Financial Crisis, the pandemic and the China situation surely support my argument.

Agree Don, except for the last paragraph, where you claim increasing CO2 is beneficial. I get that there may be a case to flood glasshouses with it? To kill parasites and increase the foliage? However, this may not increase nutrient value or the taste test?

As to the contested claim? Have to agree with your take.

The lowest solar voltaic has gotten down to and only with huge economies of scale, has been 5 cents PKWH and only applicable to daylight and around midday, midsummer? Has to be supported by overnight gas, which bottoms out at 5-6 cents per, if your own the gas reserve?

Other than clean coal and that is actually possible, if inordinately expensive? Baseload just has to be nuclear if one can accept that one example is cleaner, safer and cheaper than coal or the much vaunted renewables.

Furthermore nuclear has per giwatt hour, a record of fewer fatalities than all the other sources of power, including renewables!

Moreover, just 8 grams of thorium has enough inherent energy to power your house and car for 100 years without refueling.

The cost of mining, recovering and refining that 8 grams? Around $100.00 AUD. That's one oxford scholar a year! And the sole reason for al the oppositionfrom big nuclear, the coal lobby/fossil fuels and big pharma. Given one of the byproducts would likely kill big pharma's cancer treatment and palliative care, profit sheet!

If I were to step out my door and fill a one cubic metre box with dirt, I could probably recover 8 grams of thorium, that's how abundant it is! And as alluial deposits we can locate with side looking radar, enough to power the planet for one thousand years.

Finally sanity has prevailed and the prohibition on thorium R+D has been lifted in the U.S.A. And NASA scintist and nuclear technologist, Kirk Soresen, given a lead role with the U.S. atomic agency to solve the one minor issue of tritium?
Alan B.

Perhaps countries battling with extreme weather are faking it, just like Covid. The ACT should have a realtime electricity dashboard in the manner of King Island
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/hybrid-energy-solutions/success-stories/king-island
That way we could see if some time they claimed to be using say 15% of the NEM's hydro it wouldn't seem consistent with 1.5% of Australia's population.

I note in their annual publication that land use gets a major accolade as a net CO2 sink.
https://www.environment.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/1508976/ACT-GGI-report-2018-19.pdf
Last summer's Namadgi and Orroral fires released a large amount of CO2 if that somehow doesn't get mentioned in the next annual report that will be a bit suss.

Thanks Don for your post.
I have been putting just that for some time and it is nice to have
someone putting a similar line.
I have taken the argument a bit further.
It is no good just installing more turbines, they have to be in other
places. In fact the multiplication of turbines has been said to be
12 times the nameplate rating grid demand.
However that requires an area covered by the grid about the size of Australia.
In smaller countries the problem gets much worse.
To reduce the area I suspect would be inversely proportional to
the exponential of the size reduction.
In other words we could never afford such a grid !
I have tried to explain this to greenies but they reject it out of
hand but can never give reasons why.
One got really bad tempered about it.

When I find myself in COVID Trouble

Mother Nature said to Me

X megawatts of renewable - enerGy

And in Canberra Times of the ACT

At least there’s Warden's philosoPhy
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/profile/854/ian-warden

Thank Christ for our National Broadcaster

ABC

[Chorus] ABC, ABC, ABC, ABC

Begone all this COVID

Away from Me

and "Youse"
(as Queenslanders say :)