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Any chance you two can * off to a PM and just spam bullshit to each other there?

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IHurley and owen87 it is getting pretty circular and boring and people are getting sick of it evidenced by the number of reports coming through.

Let's wind this s**t up. Nobody's convincing anyone else of anything they don't already believe.

You've got to declare a winner or it wasn't worth the ticket price
 
Lot of angry people in Country Victoria again. Recent floods have been savage.

Word of mouth (I've done zero research) is that after the floods of 2011 up Rochester way a whole lot of plans were proposed and both sides of politics ignored it. Whether it's true or not I don't know but the "State ends at Calder" brigade is running rampant up this way again.

A mate of mine was offered sympathy for losing his home in the "1 in 200 years" flood by a local members offsider. Except he's already rebuilt from the 2011 floods.
 
Lot of angry people in Country Victoria again. Recent floods have been savage.

Word of mouth (I've done zero research) is that after the floods of 2011 up Rochester way a whole lot of plans were proposed and both sides of politics ignored it. Whether it's true or not I don't know but the "State ends at Calder" brigade is running rampant up this way again.

A mate of mine was offered sympathy for losing his home in the "1 in 200 years" flood by a local members offsider. Except he's already rebuilt from the 2011 floods.

forget la nina - it actually feels like we are having a monsoon style wet season, all these heavy humid days with a daily afternoon dump, feels very familiar of the tropics
 

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Don't be ridiculous. Coal is dead. Nobody will ever use it again. So coal prices couldn't possibly have risen.

Sure it has. By renewables. Trillions of dollars worth of them in Europe, Australia, the US etc. An enormous expense. If we had spent all that on coal plants would our electricity have been a) more plentiful; or b) more scarce?

Lucky we have the renewables right?

If renewables worked they would make all high cost generation unnecessary so the cost curve would shift downwards and we would experience vastly lower prices.

That's how it works. Improved technology means more electricity generated but at a lower average and marginal cost.

If renewables can't even supplant the absolute highest cost electricity generation then do you understand what that means?

It means that literally every dollar we've spent on them has been wasted.

I'll ask again. If the money we've spent on solar panels, wind turbines and unicorn farts had been spent on coal/gas plants instead would we have more or less scarcity in electricity?

My dude I realise you've got a massive hate-on over renewable energy but you're fundamentally misunderstanding how the electricity market operates.

This is from AEMO, the organisation that determines wholesale energy pricing in Australia. They're saying that at times when renewable energy dominates the supply of electricity, prices often fall into the negative - essentially paying people to use more (or paying batteries to recharge). I've included a link so you can see yourself.
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Here's The Age explaining again how wholesale pricing works
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The thing stopping the cost reductions from renewable energy from being passed on to the consumer is that feature of the market that says that the highest bidder (ie. the most expensive generator) sets the price. More renewable energy generation capacity will eventually push the prices down because there will be enough of it to meet demand without the market needing to buy anything from gas powered generators.

The reason private businesses are quite happy to build wind turbines and solar farms is that they're currently getting gas generator pricing for electricty that's much much cheaper to produce.
 
Lot of angry people in Country Victoria again. Recent floods have been savage.

Word of mouth (I've done zero research) is that after the floods of 2011 up Rochester way a whole lot of plans were proposed and both sides of politics ignored it. Whether it's true or not I don't know but the "State ends at Calder" brigade is running rampant up this way again.

A mate of mine was offered sympathy for losing his home in the "1 in 200 years" flood by a local members offsider. Except he's already rebuilt from the 2011 floods.
It'd be true, most councils in Victoria and NSW do their own flood mapping and modelling and often they'll go a step further and ask the consultant to provide mitigation options too.

Generally these don't get brought to fruition because:
  • The impacts on the waterway and surrounding environment are deemed unacceptable by EPA. This is usually number 1.
  • The mitigation involves development on private property or repurposing of existing crown land that people aren't willing to give up.
  • Councils rarely have the money to fund a capital works project of that size and the cost/benefit to the state rarely adds up. Sad to say but the way infrastructure in Australia is funded has become hyper-partisan and if you don't live in a swing seat then it takes seriously good business cases to get funding.
An example I know where they have actually done some serious flood mitigation capital works is Tamworth NSW where they've got an earth levee and flood wall running the length of the CBD and a built up road embankment on the other side of the river. That works, but if you look at the aerial photo of Rochester there's no hope of building something similar without acquiring a few blocks of private land. In some places the answer is easy and in others it isn't.
 
I told you. How could gold jewellery get into continuous coal seams unless the coal was produced recently? Either the gold jewellery was produced millions of years ago (ie before humans are thought to have existed) or coal was produced recently.

And how many dead dinosaurs (or trees) does it take to produce a coal seam hundreds of metres thick?

Oh and there's one other small thing.

Titan. It's a moon of Saturn. It has vast reservoirs of hydrocarbons. Did dinosaurs also invent space travel and then die en masse throughout the solar system?

Titan isn't the only place in the solar system to have hydrocarbons mind you but it has them in abundance. So how did they get there?

You and owen obsess about "expertise" - apparently defined as anybody who agrees with you - but the crux is not expertise but "corroboration" or "reconciliation". If the beliefs of a particular field are corroborated by observations in a separate field (whose adherents are objective about the validity of the first field) then it is likely the first field is valid.

Oil being a fossil fuel is not corroborated by any observation in any other field. Whoever believes in it, isn't any kind of an expert.

Do you have any photos of of the gold jewellery embedded in coal seams? Has there been any in depth investigations into these examples or is it just somebody making unsubstantiated claims? What mechanism simultaneously supports both a rapid, recent deposition of coal and it's burial in some cases under more than 1.5km of rock?

I'll focus on this for a bit because honestly it couldn't be more wrong
Oil being a fossil fuel is not corroborated by any observation in any other field. Whoever believes in it, isn't any kind of an expert.

When living things die they leave what are called biomarkers. These are chemical and isotopic signatures that a great deal of research over a number of decades has shown can only come from something that was once alive. In the context of petroleum these are used to charactarise the deposit and help the geologists understand it's origins - the better they understand it the better decisions can be made about it's economic importance or where future exploratory drilling should be done. Aside from geology, the fields of biology, chemistry, and physics (in the case of isotope analysis) are all important and all support the contemporary theory of oil formation. Petroleum development can also be directly observed in it's various stages, from deposits of organic rich sediments on the seabed, their decomposition in deeper drill cores, kerogen formation in shales, to the eventual end product.

Here's an article explaining a bit about isotopic biomarkers: The curious consistency of carbon biosignatures over billions of years of Earth-life coevolution - The ISME Journal

Regarding extraterrestrial hydrocarbons, as someone who is clearly keenly aware of logical fallacies you must surely recognise the non sequitur you have invoked here. There are well understood processes for the formation of hydrocarbons without the involvement of living organisms (for example: Miller–Urey experiment - Wikipedia), but it is faulty reasoning to extend that to claim that all hydrocarbons have been formed that way.
 
The thing stopping the cost reductions from renewable energy from being passed on to the consumer is that feature of the market that says that the highest bidder (ie. the most expensive generator) sets the price.
The highest bidder should be bidding vastly vastly lower than they were 30 years ago because, according to you, we've had a massive increase in investment in low cost generation. This means that we don't need any high cost generation.

Here I'll even do the maths for you.

30 years ago we had coal and gas. Because of gas (the highest cost bidder) the price was, say, 10c /kwh.

Now, we have replaced the most expensive generation with ultra cheap renewables generation so the price of electricity is 5c /kwh.

Of course, the price didn't actually fall did it?

So we haven't replaced high cost generation with low cost generation we've replaced the lowest cost generation with much higher cost generation (even higher than gas).

The costs from renewables stem from the fact that you rarely get electricity generation close to capacity and you often can't generation at all. The true cost of renewables is therefore actually the cost of a wind turbine/solar panel plus the cost of storage (or back up gas generation).

And I did like your post on the formation of oil where you admitted that 100.0 per cent of the hydrocarbons in the universe were formed by abiotic processes except the ones on Earth where 100 per cent (or near enough to) of hydrocarbons were caused by dead dinosaurs. And your reasoning for this is that we can find biological material in oil fields.

If there's biological material in an iron ore deposit does that mean iron comes from dead dinosaurs?
 
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Economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division): “Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.” … The net of it is clearly we haven’t made any progress.”
3.8 trillion dollars.

All spent on magic beans.
 
And I did like your post on the formation of oil where you admitted that 100.0 per cent of the hydrocarbons in the universe were formed by abiotic processes except the ones on Earth where 100 per cent (or near enough to) of hydrocarbons were caused by dead dinosaurs. And your reasoning for this is that we can find biological material in oil fields.

If there's biological material in an iron ore deposit does that mean iron comes from dead dinosaurs?

Spent all day fishing yesterday and didn't have time to respond. No fish but there was some tiny coal deposits in the bottom of a cliff which reminded me you still haven't explained how coal forms rapidly and recently, and ends up buried under hundreds of meters of rock. Surely you have a link to some website explaining it even if you can't be bother typing it all out.

Anyway, lets apply your Titan logic to another type of extraterrestrial hydrocarbons...

We know that certain meteorites (carbonaceous chondrites) and comets contain amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). These extraterrestrial amino acids have not been formed from biological pathways, and using your logic neither have amino acids on earth (which we know is not the case).
 

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