My friend works at at glass and plastic bottle recycling facility.
Sometimes he's sent an hour each way from one side of the city to the other just to collect 20 plastic 600ml bottles.
Clearly this is not financially viable, but somehow government subsidies make it so.

Armchair,
I think your friend is having you on.

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Bazz,
So is there anything, other than your mistake and your prejudice, which leads you to believe there's a problem with the economic viability of renewables?

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Fester,
The main problem with nuclear power is it's an expensive option. Everyone promises it will be cheaper in the future, but those promises have not eventuated yet. Meanwhile the cost of renewables has plummeted.

Well you can think that, but my friend is also my housemate and tells me about it and that the same thing happens every single week.
A normal business could not survive these costs but with government subsidies it's not a problem.
Anything to please our foreign masters over in Brussels it seems.

Can and bottle recycling is actually quite lucrative, but only because the government is willing to throw money away to claim its great on climate change agendas.
In truth the truck he drives pumps out more fumes into the environment than it saves recycling the bottles it collects.

Actually Aiden, he just showed me the EXACT stats of his pickups which he has on his phone.

Take an average day he spent 4 hours going to pick up 3500 bottles.
If you take them to the depot yourself you get 10 cents a unit, if you have them picked up you get 8 cents a unit.

The company makes 2 cents per bottle picking them up.
3500 bottles x 2 cents = $70

Now take into account the cost of wages to pay my friend,
- then add in the cost of fuel for the truck,
- as well the $1000 cost of hiring the truck each week.

How does it make money Aiden?
If not propped up by government subsidies?

Aidan

Cost depends on the metric you choose, and the metrics seem to be chosen to fit an ideology rather than to determine what is a better option for the community.

As the French are demonstrating, nuclear generated electricity is about a third of the cost of German renewable energy. As renewable energy relies on gas fired power for 24/7 reliability, the recent gas price hike makes electricity more costly. I applaud your enthusiasm for renewables and think that they have many applications, but I think trying to power Australia with them is economic suicide.

Dear paul1495,

Yes indeed, the rhetoric and fear mongering of the right has reached such ludicrous heights that people like CM think they can sit there and roll this like "In a sense Communist insurgency has changed from the French and Russian Revolutions" off their tongue without challenge.

It is just normal hyperbole for them now. No regard for how utterly stupid such statements are. Perhaps they largely inhabit likeminded forums where they can get away with it. Thankfully there are a few of us left on here who are prepared to pull them up.

For one of them to have to reduce the gains of renewable energy to a communist insurgency speaks to how much they have been placed in a corner of their own making.

The world really will go to hell in a handbasket if these clowns get more traction.