In which the pond can change pace, thanks be unto the Caterist and Sam from petrol land ...

 

What a relief it is to set news of assorted genocides aside and start a fresh week with the reptiles.

The news hadn't been good ... there was AP reporting on an airstrike...

And Simon Tisalll had moaned in the Graudian, Nato's failure to save Ukraine raises an existential question: what on earth is it for?

Well yes, and it got personal for the pond when its favourite coder had to enlist ...

At least Sam the man had done his best to provide some relieving good humour and Adam Serwer had taken up the challenge in The Atlantic, scribbling Why Was Alito Flying the Flag Upside Down After January 6? (possible paywall)

Amanda Marcotte had chipped in at Salon with Samuel Alito's snide denial of his Jan. 6 flag is just as ugly as flying it in the first place.

But the real comedy came with Serwer and this post from butterfly land... featuring an alleged expert in judicial ethics, though the pond must use the words 'expert' and 'ethics' loosely to allow the full scope of the comedy ...

The pond suspects that's the first time it ever featured a butterfly posting, but now it was beyond time for a change of pace and yesterday the reptiles served notice that it was time again to talk of nuking the country to save the planet ...or perhaps carbon storage, or perhaps gas ... whatever, yadda yadda ...

By this morning the reptiles had settled a bit and gone back to the important business of ignoring the assorted actual genocides ...

So much easier to get copy out of talk of a Gaza grenade than out of actual full-on bombing of women and children ...

The pond notes that the Major was still MIA and so simpleton "here no conflict of interest" Simon held the far right fort in the digital edition, but down below in the comments section, the climate ferment continued ...

Ted can be put aside - he didn't add the NBN to Malware's many follies - there's only so many times anyone can listen to Ted going on about Snowy - and so can Mark Scott blathering on in full defensive posture - because the Caterist was at it again ... and naturally the first snap showed off a tremendous bit of kit, designed to make the Caterist and the readership salivate in a most unseemly way ...

 

Then it was on with Finland - not, it must be noted that splendid contribution to culture, Tom of Finland - because the Caterist does much more than investigate the movement of floodwaters in quarries ... these days he keeps the company of greenies ...

Around this point the pond would usually reference that piece by Adam Simpson in The Conversation ... Nuclear power makes no sense for Australia - but it's a useful diversion from real climate action, and that listicle ...

Stage 1: climate change is not happening (arsonists cause bushfires, not climate change)

Stage 2: climate change is happening but is not human-induced (solar activity causes climate change, not humans)

Stage 3: Australia’s emissions are too small to make a difference, so why should we try?

Stage 4: climate change is happening and human-induced but there are other more pressing priorities (the “coal is good for humanity” argument)

Stage 5: nuclear small modular reactors are the only viable path to net zero (these reactors are an example of a “burgeoning nuclear industry” in the US)

Stage 6: if small nuclear reactors turn out not to be viable, large nuclear reactors are the only path to net zero.

So here we are with the Caterist in his long journey from stage 1, though the pond suspects that deep in the Caterist heart he's still in stage 1, much as the pond suspects he still thinks he knows more about flood waters in quarries than most. After all, he clearly knows a lot about how to loot cash from the taxpayers' paws ...

Then came a video on the same theme, carefully neutered by the pond ...

It seemed at this point that the pond should revert to that earlier story, you know the Eric Johnston outing, the EXCLUSIVE disarmingly headed Why this eco-warrior thinks nuclear stands a chance ... though it was headed a little differently on inspection, and naturally evil, whale-killing, threatening windmills were immediately featured ...

The pond didn't bother with more of the cut and paste, it just cut to the chase with the word salad ...

“I used to be at it a lot more,” he tells The Australian. “Every time you had to defend renewables back in the early 2000s, or even the 90s, you were facing the conventional sector. You were fiercely criticised and fiercely opposed.”
The fight would also make him an easy political target, and this had high stakes. The 61-year-old Entrecanales is the public face of one of Spain’s richest families, with a fortune estimated at more than $5.5bn.
“Now they want to work with you, they want to do as many renewables as you.”
Valued at more than $12bn on the Madrid stock exchange, Acciona today has more than 13GW of mostly wind renewable capacity around the world, including several major projects strung across Australia’s east coast. There is another 2GW scheduled to come on-stream in coming years. By comparison, Australia’s biggest generator AGL has a plan of building 12GW of renewable generation by 2035. Origin Energy has a target of 4GW installed by the end of this decade.
On Friday, Melbourne’s RMIT University awarded Entrecanales an honorary doctorate of business for his contribution to sustainability and innovation across engineering, energy and infrastructure.
In his speech to doctoral graduates at the RMIT’s city campus, Entrecanales mapped out a new business ethos that sought to put financial outcome on equal footing with environmental and social impacts.
A big theme for Entrecanales is regeneration, including Acciona’s own journey over the decades from a family-owned engineering firm to a fierce green corporate with operations across more than 50 countries.
It was in the mid-1990s, after a stint as a Wall Street banker, when Entrecanales recognised the potential of climate change and population growth to have a profound impact on the world.
Since then (he was appointed chair and CEO of Acciona in 2004) he has rebuilt his family’s engineering company around mitigating climate change and social infrastructure. At each step, he has taken bigger bets, including some that caused heavy losses following Spain’s euro-crisis crash. But any challenge only makes you stronger, he says.
Bigger purpose
Entrecanales told RMIT’s graduates that businesses need to have a purpose beyond accumulating wealth. In the speech, he said the transformative potential of corporations “is greater than ever”, and in some cases businesses can play a bigger role than governments to bring about change.
He asserts companies should aim for more than “net zero” aiming to neutralise their impacts. Instead, they should be seen as “dynamic innovators”, capable of finding solutions that extend beyond simply avoiding negative impacts.
“Our role is evolving to what we might define as a regenerative role,” he told the graduates.
In an interview, Entrecanales says “a very forward-looking” Australia is well along the road to its renewables journey, but there are still many details to be ironed out. Transmission and getting the permits in place now represents the biggest bottleneck and likely means that Australia will miss its 2030 targets. 
Permitting and growing resistance to building renewables, including the loud “not in my backyard” movement, isn’t just an Australian issue, Entrecanales says. He comes up against it all around the world. But this corporate ecowarrior has been fighting for a long time.
“Think about what the effects of climate change are. If you can come up with a better solution, let me know, I’ll be all over it,” he says. “We’re already at 1½ degrees such as temperature income increase, we’re probably heading for 2 or 3, the impact on the rural way of life is going to be terrible, and we need to do something about this.
“Like most things in life, it has a little cost, which is the visual impact in some areas. But it doesn’t impede wind or doesn’t impede agriculture.”
A big advantage of renewable energy infrastructure is that it is “removable” from wherever it is installed.
“We will find a better technology, but at this stage this is what we have as the best source of energy with the existing technology. And we need to decarbonise.”
Nuclear targets
Significantly, he thinks Australia won’t be able to go all the way with renewables and there will still be a need for conventional energy here. This is likely to be gas as a peaking energy solution through to 2050.
Renewable energy at best will supply somewhere in the 80s in percentage terms of the total grid. He points to Spain that has largely been able to extract itself from conventional energy with all renewables and some nuclear.
He anticipates the next question before it can be asked. Any nuclear solution for Australia needs to be thought through carefully, he says.
“To be totally honest, I think nuclear would be great. The criticism nuclear receives is (on waste) is definitely a worry, but the climate change worry is bigger.
"I do not think nuclear is competitive. And if you go to the examples, the three European examples – basically the Finnish, the French and the English power plants – in three cases the prices at which they are they will be producing electricity are just beyond the belief.
“They are a multiple of what can be achieved in any other renewable resource. Then if you add the fact that they have been under construction for 20 years. Only the Finnish one has come into the market lately, the French one is not even close. And definitely Hinkley Point in the UK is not even close.”
He says small nuclear reactors deserve examination for marginal gains in the grid, but the clock is ticking.
“If we need to get there quickly, we haven’t got the time. Renewables are here, effective and work,” he says. “And that’s my point about reversibility of renewals. If in 20 or 30 years down the line, we have a new alternative, fine. What we cannot continue doing, is this – it is irreversible.”
Regeneration
Acciona has a big presence beyond just wind turbines in Australia. Its engineering arm is building the massive transmission lines and other infrastructure linking NSW’s wind and solar projects in the state’s Renewable Energy Zone, based around Dubbo.
In Sydney, it built the massive light rail project that now cuts through the city centre. While Sydney quickly embraced its new sleek light rail, the multi-year construction was an engineering challenge with tensions flaring on all sides of the project.
At one stage, Acciona launched legal action against Transport for NSW, alleging the scope of the project had changed dramatically. The action was later withdrawn. Entrecanales says on major infrastructure builds, sometimes there are disagreements when complications arise.
We had differences, we managed to find common ground, and now we are on good paths,” Entrecanales says. “And we are respectful, and we hope a respected partner.”
Indeed, Acciona is now working with the same NSW agency on the Western Harbour tunnel project, as the name implies, involving tunnelling underneath the harbour to ease congestion on the Harbour Bridge. It is also working on the city’s ambitious Metro West scheme.
In Victoria, Acciona has been awarded the first leg of the politically charged Suburban Rail Loop tunnel and for several years it has been working on the state’s level crossing removal project. Entrecanales demands that each contract, whether rail, tunnelling or even energy, minimises environmental impact but maximises social impact.
When we finish the project, Acciona needs to have left an improvement on what was there before, he says.
An example is one of Brazil’s biggest infrastructure projects, a metro line Acciona is constructing in Sao Paulo. The build goes past some of the poorest parts of the city of 12 million.
“There is a lot of gender imbalance, so we have created schools for women to participate in the construction sector and as workers. And that’s been revolutionary, because it never happened before.”
In one of his engineering plants that is building the tunnelling infrastructure for the Brazilian project, some 70 per cent of the workforce are female. That, he says, is regeneration at work.

The pond will extract from that the relevant text ...

He anticipates the next question before it can be asked. Any nuclear solution for Australia needs to be thought through carefully, he says.
“To be totally honest, I think nuclear would be great. The criticism nuclear receives is (on waste) is definitely a worry, but the climate change worry is bigger.
"I do not think nuclear is competitive. And if you go to the examples, the three European examples – basically the Finnish, the French and the English power plants – in three cases the prices at which they are they will be producing electricity are just beyond the belief.
“They are a multiple of what can be achieved in any other renewable resource. Then if you add the fact that they have been under construction for 20 years. Only the Finnish one has come into the market lately, the French one is not even close. And definitely Hinkley Point in the UK is not even close.”
He says small nuclear reactors deserve examination for marginal gains in the grid, but the clock is ticking.
“If we need to get there quickly, we haven’t got the time. Renewables are here, effective and work,” he says. “And that’s my point about reversibility of renewals. If in 20 or 30 years down the line, we have a new alternative, fine. What we cannot continue doing, is this – it is irreversible.”

Now show your skill as an editor, and from all that extract the heading, Why this eco-warrior thinks nuclear stands a chance.

That's why the pond ran the whole word salad, so that stray readers could test their ingenuity.

And now to the last of the Caterist ...

 

Luckily the pond held over an infallible Pope, hoping for a change of pace that would suit his infallible work ...

Forget Albo, surely there's room for the Caterist in this dreaming ...

The pond realises it bangs on a little, especially when confronted with genocide, but please allow a bonus indulgence ... you see, we might not need to nuke the country to save the planet, there might be other ways to sort the problem, and quikstix too ...

Now before we go any further into the pie in the sky bye and bye, a word from our sponsors ...

How thoughtful of them to take that nasty mention of "petroleum" out of the organisation's name, and now back to the salvation at hand, though anyone wanting to note stories about CCS might like to start with this one ...

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has been touted as a technology that could help lower Australia’s emissions. But does it stack up? Let’s cut through the spin and look at the facts.

Key points:

• Carbon capture and storage (otherwise known as CCS) is a licence to ramp up emissions.
• CCS will never be a ‘zero-emissions’ solution.
• CCS is eye-wateringly expensive. 
• Chevron’s Gorgon Gas Plant in WA, which is the biggest attempt at a CCS project in the world, is a big, expensive failure

Oh dear, best get on with the sponsor's message ...

Any other thoughts?

CCS IS A LICENCE TO POLLUTE

Carbon capture and storage is a licence to ramp up emissions. Around the world, CCS projects are being built to allow for continued oil and gas production – A use that still makes up almost three quarters of world CCS projects, not reduce emissions. In Australia, the coal and gas industry is pushing for CCS so it has a license to keep its polluting projects going, not because it wants to cut emissions.

IT’S EXPENSIVE

After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars invested around the world, including here in Australia, there is little to show for it. In fact, when CCS is attached to coal and gas power stations it is likely to be at least six times more expensive than electricity generated from wind power backed by battery storage. Every CCS project that has been undertaken so far has resulted in significant delays and massive cost blowouts. Even when they get a project up and running, CCS trial sites like Chevron’s Gorgon gas plant continue to belch out huge amounts of pollution.

Worldwide, CCS trials on coal-fired power stations have been monumental failures. The few that have got off the ground have grossly exceeded budget and schedule, massively underdelivered on carbon promised to be captured, and are now mostly shuttered. No company is prepared to underwrite a CCS project for the life of storage, leaving that risk to taxpayers.

Sorry, no time for that, back to the final gobbet of the sponsor's message ...

Good on ya Sam, good on ya reptiles ...

Meanwhile, the trial of the century (thus far) is in its closing stages and will soon resume, and the pond was delighted by the story in Politico Fox News Is Flipping Trump's Trial Coverage on its Head ...

...NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, a close Fox observer and biographer of Murdoch, notes in an interview that by showing Trump repeatedly outside the courtroom, the network makes it appear as if it is adequately reporting on the intricacies of the trial — even if its coverage is scant. He adds that the TV airtime Fox has given to the Trump congressional surrogates lined up outside the courtroom to testify for their man provides a similar impression.
“This is one of the classic modules or templates that Fox has to offer, the simulacrum of news rather than the actual coverage,” Folkenflik says.
What’s significant about the lopsided Fox coverage is that it implies the real news — and the real trial — isn’t happening inside the courtroom where the prosecution and defense argue before a jury drawn from a pool of citizens and before a genuine judge, but from a shabby 15th-floor lobby just steps from where the official trial has convened.
The lobby is Trump’s forum of preference, a place where the defense’s case is the only one considered, a place where the TV public and not an impartial jury judges him, a place where he controls what is admissible, and where he and not some pesky judge determines how long arguments run. “Trump justice,” if you want to call it that, is like Trump University and Trump golf courses and Trump hotels. He’s in charge, and his word is the first, the last and the only, except for scattered questions from the press, which he chooses to acknowledge or ignore.
Trump’s aim has been to displace as much of the trial coverage as possible with his soliloquies. With Fox’s help, he’s accomplishing that goal. Trump’s legal mentor, Roy Cohn, would pull a similar trick when fighting in court. The rule of law allows only so much leeway inside the courthouse, Cohn knew. But after the proceedings ended for the day, Cohn frequently pleaded his extrajudicial case to the press on the courtroom steps. Like Cohn, like Trump.

Like climate science, like lizard Oz distractions, whether nuking the country or offering pie in the sky in the carbon bye and bye ...

But at least that leads to some good 'toons, with Luckovich in form ...