I think the current thing is quite likely an organic uprising. Things have been very very broken in Venezuela for a while now and the people there aren’t happy. Lots of people have been fleeing to Colombia for a while now and there are solid signs the election results were made up.

Over the past 5 years the monthly road deaths here in aus have been going up, because of the prevalence of those massive cars

Nuclear is a terrible fit for that though, it can’t scale up and down generation quickly, which is what would be useful with renewable. Honestly we’re better off for now trying to get to 95% renewables as quickly as possible for cheap, and filling the 5% with quickly scaling gas, and solve the last few percent a little more slowly but in a way that’s economic (and therefore will realistically happen). Nuclear is just way too slow, and if you sunk the cost that it’d take to build out the nuclear we could easily have a 100% renewable grid a lot sooner than the 20+ years it’ll take with nuclear

Or the gas companies he wants to bridge the gap…

The cost of the commissioning and decommissioning (+of course running and wast management) is enough to make it more expensive than renewables with enough storage and transmission though. Nuclear was a great idea 30 years ago. In Australia where we have incredibly good renewable resources it’s a terrible idea today.

I think a lot of the pushing for nuclear now is just as a distraction to keep fossil fuels in the mix for as long as possible, so those politicians can get their cosy board positions on fossil fuel companies after they quit politics

That’s 5-10 years in which it’s really hard to enforce though, as you can’t just have some cat trapping and taking to the pound program. So people would still let them outside you’d have the same problem at the end of your phase out period

Make it so that interest on money borrowed against residential real estate can’t be declared as a business loss then. That’ll also make speculating housing investment funds a bad idea

Renewables are cheaper and faster to build. In Australia with the renewable resources we have nuclear just doesn’t make sense to start building today.

It’s a damn gold plated skeleton though. A skeleton of transmission and storage is cheaper and a really good complement to renewables

Yep, I was talking to my grandpa about what invention his parents thought was the most significant in their lifetime, and they had said the radio. They had lived through both world wars which had brought about many many inventions and that was the one they thought was most significant.

Up to that time news was incredibly slow and you couldn’t put what was going on on the other side of the country without a massive delay, let alone the world.

Oh absolutely, but an improvement is still good. Pokies are absolutely shit and should be ripped out, but it’ll be harder to get that to happen.

It’s both, stopping one doesn’t mean you can’t stop the othet

Nah, get rid of cash for the pokies. It alone won’t help with harm reduction but the pokies are one of the most common ways to launder money in this country. People use the resources taxes buy and should be paying their fair share.

We also need cashless gaming cards with default and settable hard limits with restrictions on when you can change it to help combat the addictions.

It’s just too expensive and too slow. Renewables with the additional Transmission and storage needed to make it reliable is much much cheaper, and quicker to build. The new csiro gencost report thats coming out basically says they nuclear is just not economically viable.

Yep sorry, that was me. I still think the fees from future super are exorbitant but Australian ethical isn’t a good alternative

They shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. They were going to let through the origin buyout by brookfields

If they were buying it to build renewables, why were they okay to pay such a premium for it though? And why wouldn’t they just set up a separate generation business that just built renewables? It’s not like origin has a heap of experience in that space that they’re leveraging.

When it can be connected to the grid there’s lots of people happy to spend the money on renewables already, the big bottleneck is grid capacity and project approvals. We don’t need this buyout to still get renewables investment.

Also the accc is too fucking toothless on competition. You just need to look at how much we pay for our own gas because of the gas cartel for an example.

Australian ethical seems better on returns, and reasonably similar otherwise. There are also some ethical options on other super funds that are actually decent. Just have a look at what “ethical” means in that fund, what their returns are, and what their fees are

This falling through is a very good thing for avoiding the monopolisation of our energy landscape. Brookfields already owns the hv transmission in Victoria, as well as an electricity distributor there and a gas network.

Therefore, if they bought origin all of origins competitors would still have to use the assets brookfields owns. That doesn’t set up a good and fair marketplace and long term would have really fucked the Australian consumer.

Brookfields was saying they’d do this spending in order to distract from the problems of this acquisition

Their returns seem particularly bad though. There are other ethical super funds that well and truly out perform what they have on Their website.