Mixed Greens: Rupert Murdoch’s tilt at ‘ridiculous’ windmills

It’s not clear what “windmills.qads” are, but judging by the tweet below, it’s pretty clear that News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch does not heart wind energy. In what he describes as the “greatest news of (the) decade,” the publisher of The Australian and The Wall Street Journal this morning tweeted that there was “plentiful energy for century or more,” and – without any reference to a source – went on to say that “gas means half carbon emissions and no need for ridiculous windmills… .”

Obviously, this is not the view of the IEA – who have warned that booming gas development will do little to reduce global CO2 emissions, and may even make them worse; and who this month released a report predicting that wind power would be the second biggest contributor to global renewable electricity generation by 2017. Nor is it the view in South Australia, or of Canberra’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, or of the energy analysts at Bloomberg new Energy Finance, or of the majority of the Australian public for that matter – and somebody should tell someone in the US, where they have just hit the 50GW mark of installed wind capacity for Q2 of 2012.

It is, however, the oft-published view of certain News Ltd columnists (here, here, and here too) – and, more recently, was the view published on the WSJ editorial page. It also happens to be the outspoken view of Donald Trump.

In other news…

Japan’s nuclear power industry has lost a record $46 billion since the Fukushima tsunami and meltdown in 2011, wiping out seven years of profit, reports Bloomberg: “Then came the bad news.”

The federal government last week announced four additions to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation board, with Michael Carapiet, Ian Moore, Anna Skarbek and Andrew Stock agreeing to join chair Jillian Broadbent for a five-year term.

Another blow to Victorian brown coal development this week with The Age reporting that Victorian government confirming it has reclaimed a huge brown coal allocation in the Latrobe Valley after the companies – Anglo American and Shell – promising a clean coal-to-liquid project on the site failed to meet development milestones.

And in another blow to Tony Abbott‘s political development, Coalition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull has today come out and backed the Gillard government’s view that the “gold-plating” of state government electricity infrastructure has contributed to Australia’s power price rises much more than the carbon tax. Abbott, meanwhile, has been doggedly arguing that the price rises are wholly down to the carbon tax.

New satellite images from the European Space Agency have revealed that sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth’s polar caps. The Guardian reports that preliminary results from the probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres of summer sea ice has disappeared from the Arctic ocean over the past year.

And in South Australia, the Advertiser reports that the state’s coastal councils have been warned they will not be able to save some esplanade areas from rising sea levels caused by climate change.