Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Renewable
power reached a record share of Australia’s main electricity supply in
the December 2024 quarter, with the contribution of coal-fired
generation dipping below 50% for the first time, the Australian Energy Market Operator said.
Renewable energy sources
accounted for 46% of the overall supply mix in the national energy
market (NEM), driving quarterly total emissions and emissions intensity
to record low levels.
Higher
than average temperatures, including a heatwave across large parts of
the country in November, contributed to the highest underlying demand in
all mainland NEM regions since at least 2016.
The
maximum demand record for a December quarter was reached on 16 December
with of 33,716 megawatts (MW), while the average quarterly total demand
was 23,737 MW, also a quarter-four record.
Rooftop solar and grid-scale solar reached new output records, increasing by 18% and 9%, respectively, AEMO said.
“The
rise in rooftop solar output, coupled with record low coal-generation
availability, resulted in coal-fired generation contributing less than
50% of the NEM’s total generation for the first time,” the AEMO
executive general manager for reform delivery, Violette Mouchaileh,
said.
“Renewable
energy supplied a record 46% of the market’s electricity, peaking at
75.6% for a period on 6 November, driving emissions to record low
levels.”
Wholesale electricity prices averaged
$88 a megawatt hour (MWh) – an 83% increase on quarter four in 2023, but
a 26% decrease on the quarter three 2024 average of $119/MWh.
According
to AEMO’s report, the year-on-year price jump was linked to an increase
in coal outages – particularly brown coal, higher overnight demand and
transmission constraints.
Black
coal-fired generators recorded all-time low availability during Q4
2024, down 6.5%, while brown coal-fired output fell to its lowest level
for any quarter, down 304MW (-9.2%) from Q4 2023.
AEMO
said these factors contributed to higher overnight prices across the
NEM and to “several high-priced events in NSW and QLD on high demand
days”.
“The data confirms what we know –
unreliable coal is having a negative impact on energy prices, more
renewables in the system bring wholesale prices down, and new
transmission infrastructure is critical to keeping prices lower,”
climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen said.
“We are building an energy grid so everyone, everywhere has access to the cheapest form of energy at any given time.”
Donald Trump will sign an executive order cancelling the student visas of those at pro-Palestinian marches (Reuters: Elizabeth Frantz)
In short:
Donald
Trump has pledged to deport non-citizen college students and other
resident aliens who took part in pro-Palestinian protests, in an
executive order aimed at tackling antisemitism.
He claimed US college campuses "have been infected with radicalism like never before".
What next?
The
Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned the order as an
assault on free speech, as well as "dishonest, overbroad and
unenforceable".
Link copied
Donald
Trump has pledged to deport non-citizen college students and others who
took part in pro-Palestinian protests as part of a crackdown on
antisemitism, a White House official said.
The
US president said college campuses "have been infected with radicalism"
and that he was putting "Hamas sympathisers" who took part in the
marches "on notice".
He was due to sign an executive order on Wednesday, local time.
A
fact sheet on the order promises "immediate action" by the Justice
Department to prosecute "terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and
violence against American Jews" and marshal all federal resources to
combat what it called "the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and
streets" since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian
Islamist group Hamas.
"To all
the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you
on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you," the US
president said in the fact sheet.
"I
will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on
college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never
before."
The Hamas attacks and
the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza led to several months of
pro-Palestinian protests that roiled US college campuses, with civil
rights groups documenting rising antisemitic, anti-Arab and Islamophobic
incidents.
The order will
require agency and department leaders to provide the White House with
recommendations within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities
that could be used to fight antisemitism, and would demand "the removal
of resident aliens who violate our laws."
The
fact sheet said protesters engaged in pro-Hamas vandalism and
intimidation, blocked Jewish students from attending classes and
assaulted worshippers at synagogues, as well as vandalising US monuments
and statues.
Many
pro-Palestinian protesters denied supporting Hamas or engaging in
antisemitic acts, and said they were demonstrating against Israel's
military assault on Gaza, where health authorities say more than 47,000
people have been killed.
'Assault on free speech'
The
Council on American-Islamic Relations, a large Muslim advocacy group,
accused the Trump administration of an assault on "free speech and
Palestinian humanity under the guise of combating antisemitism," and
described Wednesday's order as "dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable."
During
his 2024 election campaign, Mr Trump promised to deport those he called
"pro-Hamas" students in the United States on visas.
On
his first day in office, he signed an executive order that rights
groups say lays the groundwork for the reinstatement of a ban on
travelers from predominantly Muslim or Arab countries, and offers wider
authorities to use ideological exclusion to deny visa requests and
remove individuals already in the country.
Australia’s
new chief scientist has said he is open to the prospect of nuclear
power playing a role in the country’s energy mix, but remained focused
on forms of energy that were “available to help us right now”.
On
his first day in the job, Prof Tony Haymet said new energy-intensive
technologies like artificial intelligence could be powered by
renewables, but that he thought serious discussions about nuclear in
Australia were likely to be years away.
“If
you go back and look at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and so on,
there wasn’t enough transparency and openness. I think the nuclear
industry has accepted the fact that they have to rebuild their social
licence to operate,” Haymet told a press conference when asked about
small modular reactors (SMRs).
“You know, for the next chief scientist in 2030 or 2040, I think you can re-ask your question.”
Haymet
said Australia shouldn’t “rule out any energy source” but said new
technologies, like AI datacentres, would require much more power in the
short term.
“So I’m looking at the slate of
energies that are going to be available to help us right now. If we wait
until we perfect wave energy or nuclear fusion, or some other source of
power, we’re going to miss the bus,” he said.
Responding to Haymet’s comments, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said many of the world’s largest economies included nuclear in their energy mixes.
“What
do the chief scientists in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada,
what do they know or don’t know that [the energy minister] Chris Bowen
somehow has worked out?” he told a press conference.
Haymet said there should be a “civil debate” about energy, noting research in the US on more advanced forms of nuclear energy.
“There
are actually lots of candidate energies that might be great for
Australia once they’re built, once we’ve paid the cost of developing and
eventually building them and then deploying them.
“The
trouble they all have, including my favourites, is they’re up against
an incredibly cheap competitor in solar and wind, and that is really the
commercial factor arresting those energies.”
The CSIRO’s GenCost report in December
reaffirmed that electricity from nuclear energy in Australia would be
at least 50% more expensive than power from solar and wind, backed up
with storage. Electricity from SMRs would be significantly more
expensive again, with the report rejecting opposition claims that
nuclear power plants could be developed in Australia in less than 15
years.
Dutton
said the report had been “discredited” and claimed its findings were
influenced by “a heavy hand of Chris Bowen in all of this”.
The
former chair of the Antarctic Science Foundation and high-level working
groups on climate change, Haymet has also held senior roles at the CSIRO, with a particular focus on oceans.
At the press conference alongside the science minister, Ed Husic, Haymet strongly backed his former colleagues in the CSIRO.
“You
may not be surprised to hear that I think the CSIRO report is a very
fine piece of work. I don’t know of any mistakes in it, and if you do,
please let me know. Having been inside CSIRO, I see the care and the
diligence that goes into these reports,” he said.
A
quarter of the people who get most of their information from social
media believe climate change is a conspiracy, according to a survey
commissioned by researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University.
Exclusive: Monash
University study suggests those who rely more on newspapers and public
broadcasters more likely to score highly on ‘civic values’
Those who believe global heating
is a conspiracy get most of their information about news and current
events from commercial and social media, according to a study by
researchers at Monash University.
The study,
led by Prof Mark Andrejevic and Assoc Prof Zala Volcic, found that those
who relied on social media as the main source of news scored lower on a
measure of “civic values” than people who relied on newspapers and
non-commercial media.
Civic
values were defined as an individual’s belief in democratic
institutions and practices, as well as their openness to considering
perspectives that challenged their own.
Respondents
were asked questions such as “When you encounter information about
politics that challenges your point of view, what do you tend to do?”
and provided with multiple choice answers.
Study leader Mark Andrejevic says ‘it has become something of a truism that social media is not great for democracy’. Photograph: Branko Soban/Monash University
For
the climate change question, researchers asked whether “fluctuations in
the climate are the result of natural cycles that take place regardless
of human activity”.
Of those who got most of
their news from commercial TV and radio, 37% agreed with the statement.
Of those who got most of their information from social media, 25%
believed climate change was a conspiracy.
Conversely,
those who disbelieved in conspiracies about climate change were more
likely to get their information from public broadcasters ABC and SBS.
Only 2% of those whose main source of information was public radio and
6% of those whose main source was public television believed the climate
crisis was a conspiracy.
Andrejevic
said the most striking finding in the study – titled Mapping Civic
Disposition, Media Use and Affective Polarisation – was that almost 60%
of the 2,000 Australians surveyed who said their main source of
information about news and current events was social media fell in the
bottom half of the civic values scale.
However,
the majority of those who relied on newspapers, public broadcasters and
online news aggregators fell in the top half of the scale.
“Free
speech is based on the idea that people have been educated enough in
the values of civil society to be willing to engage in good faith
discussion, but what you see online is that doesn’t happen at all,”
Andrejevic told Guardian Australia.
“We wanted
to see how the different media actually cater to scoring higher or lower
on this set of values that we think are important for democracy.”
Earlier this month, Meta announced it will get rid of factcheckers on
its platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, a decision some critics
say will accelerate the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
“This
is why it’s been so interesting to hear in recent weeks how social
media is actually turning away from factchecking: because they’re
pretending – and I think it’s a pretence – that they’re being more
hands-off; but they’re not hands-off, because they build these
algorithms to pump stuff into our feeds,” Andrejevic said.
“Algorithms
do that based only on commercial values: is it viral, will it get
engagement, will it get attention? Not at all on: is it important,
accurate or useful for participating in democracy?”
Despite
the rapid growth of social media, commercial television remained the
most popular source of news and information, with 28% of survey
respondents relying on it for information, compared with 27% for social
media.
Channels Nine, Seven and Ten, along with commercial radio, were the main source of information for 34% of the population.
The
survey, conducted by Essential Research, found that those who relied on
commercial TV scored even lower than those who relied on social media:
63% were in the bottom half of the civic values scale.
Those who scored highest relied primarily on ABC radio: 67% in the top half of the scale.
“It
has become something of a truism that social media is not great for
democracy,” Andrejevic said. But in his view, “no one has really
systematically tested that until now”.
What Andrejevic and his colleagues tested was the relationship between media use and civic values, rather than the impact of social media.
“We
have created something of a new category, which focuses on the attitude
people take toward the content they encounter and how this reflects
democratic values,” he said.
More research was
needed, however, to determine whether social media platforms fostered
lower civic values or simply catered to them.
“We don’t have the evidence to answer that,” Andrejevic said.
“It
could be that social media just attracts people who score lower on
these questions; and people who listen to ABC radio tend to score higher
because they seek that out.
“But one thing we can’t say, for example, is that social media makes people have lower civic values.”
