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#netzero

4 posts4 participants0 posts today

#Auspol #GinaRinehart #SussanLey #Liberal #Labor
#NetZero

Jason Koutsoukis. The Saturday Paper 23 Aug 2025
‘Long may she reign’: How powerful is Gina Rinehart?

“Back in March, when Coalition strategists still gave themselves half a chance of winning the coming election, Gina Rinehart asked to meet Sussan Ley.

If the gift link here does not work, and you would like to read more, please let me know

“When Dutton became leader two years earlier, he quickly fell under Rinehart’s sway, flying to Perth just days after taking the Liberal leadership and later adopting much of her policy wish list – especially on nuclear power, public service cuts and attacks on “wokeness”.

In a blistering opinion piece this week in Rupert Murdoch’s metropolitan tabloids, she denounced net zero as a threat to industry and the basic functions of daily life. She branded the Paris climate accord as “living standards-destroying”.

wrt Labor:

“The optics were clear: while Rinehart has not sought a private audience with Albanese, her companies have a reserved seat under his imprimatur…

It is a neat division. As a political actor, Rinehart is kept at arms-length – no private audiences, no privileged channel to the prime minister or the kind of closeness she enjoyed with Peter Dutton. As a business owner, however, her company is treated like any other major player in the resources sector…”

The mining companies, [former treasurer] Swan recalled, never grasped the democratic fact that Australians owned the resources being dug from the ground…

“As Rinehart presses her campaign against net zero while doubling down on her Trump investments, the question for both sides of politics is no longer whether she matters but rather how much longer they can afford to let her set the terms of the debate.
If she succeeds, she won’t just be shaping the Coalition’s platform – she’ll be pulling the centre of Australian politics further to the right than it has been in a generation.”

thesaturdaypaper.com.au/share/

The Saturday Paper · ‘Long may she reign’: How powerful is Gina Rinehart?By Jason Koutsoukis

Driving today, I happened to listen to #Parliament (I know, stupid thing to do, right?), the reading of a bill to do with renewables or net-zero, and some #numpty from the #LNP mob took the floor to #debate the bill from (and I quote) an engineering perspective (end-quote). Well…

He started talking about social licences, then moved on to lack of profitability, dropped a few sentences about offshore wind turbines being an eyesore (who’d wnat to look at them all day from their beach side living rooms? Dear, dear.) and ended up talking about poor marketability… that’s when I switched off. Judging by the content of his speech, he wouldn’t know what #engineering is if it smacked in full in the face.

Are all these anti-renewable dunces complete and utter idiots or are they having us on? The former I think.

I seriously think that if more of the electorate heard their representatives debating bills and at QT, 80% of these members of Parliament would’nt get back in at the next election. Perhaps we ought to have street corner speakers blarring away for the entire sitting of Parliament (a la North Korea) to wake the electorate. We’d start with the Feds and then State and Territories. We’d only have to do it for a couple of days I reckon.

With AOL killing Dial Up Internet I was curious what still exists. I've found that there is over an estimated 160,000 people still using dial up in the US as their only connection (there are others using dial up as a fallback)

data.census.gov/table?q=intern

Earthlink quietly shut off dial up access in early 2024 (best I can tell).

Incredibly Juno and NetZero both still offer 10 free hours of dial up a month (and unlimited subscriptions).

Replied in thread

@isleofeigg Sounds to be like you're leading the way to #netzero. You'd be an interesting study. I suspect that for most of the world, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that means it's relatively cheap and easy to get to ~90% renewable power with a good spread of solar, hydro and wind with storage to fill in the regular short term gaps. But the last few percent is diminishing returns. At that point, should the focus be reducing fossil fuel use in other energy hungry sectors?

There are four solar panels feeding the IT battery system, which has cancelled the entire house load (even the antifa torrent server is running on this!). Meanwhile the other panels are blasting my utility meter backwards and building a credit for winter 😆