I used to walk over it almost every day when I worked at a coworking space in the old Lonely Planet HQ building. I think a lot of locals drive over it without ever realizing it's there.
The only reason that natural gas prices in Australia have gone up in the past 10 years is that gas producers in the eastern states were able to start exporting gas as LNG.
As of 2023, Australia is the world's second largest LNG exporter (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262074/global-lng-expor...) after the US (take that Russia!) and ahead of Qatar. Great for the gas exporting cartel but not so great for ordinary Australians in eastern states who now pay the same for gas as people in Tokyo. (And Aussies wonder why manufacturers keep leaving...)
Banning domestic gas usage for new homes (which the fools running Victoria, the state I live in, have done) will do nothing for emissions but will mean that the gas cartel can make even more money exporting LNG to Asia. Bravo!
The exception is Western Australia which is also a massive LNG exporter but has stricter domestic reservation requirements than the eastern states.
What you seem to be saying is that Australians had gas that was artificially cheap because it wasn't being bought and sold at international market rates, and once that started happening and the market was no longer distorted by trade limitations, the fair market price was not longer attractive to Australian customers.
(Personally, I think all countries, to the extent that they can, ought to both reduce domestic fossil fuel use and at the same time impose strict limits on its export. We're all better off if it just stays in the ground.)
It wasn't "artifically" cheap nor was the market "distorted". It was merely the physical reality prior to the innovation of LNG.
It would only be fair to say it was artifically cheap, say, if the Australian government was imposing tariffs or subsidising production. I don't think it was doing that, and as it was, the producers were sufficiently incentivised by the market to produce and sell gas domestically.
Mail (physical means of communicating in writing and print) and email (connecting two people with digital signal) are similar but not a great comparison when comparing consumption of natural gas. Technology literally created additional markets for the same material, by modifying it so it could be transported more efficiently over long distances. I think you could say the new methods of natural gas production and storage are more efficient just as easily as saying the old methods were simply inefficient (it would have been possible to pipeline gas from AU to markets across the ocean, but it didn’t make economic sense because it would have been terribly costly and thus an inefficient use of resources)
> Mail (physical means of communicating in writing and print) and email (connecting two people with digital signal) are similar but not a great comparison when comparing consumption of natural gas.
What?
You are missing the point. We're talking about "markets" not the specific "tech/substitutes." It could be any technology disruption. Such disruption doesn't mean the prior status quo IN THE MARKET was inefficient. The tech shock just resets equilibrium.
Further, your explanation is circular, and I propose it has to do with muddling terminology and concepts.
Here's one inconsistency. Either the markets didn't exist (You said they need to be "created."), or they did exist, but a pipeline connecting them was too expensive.
> Technology literally created additional markets
> it would have been possible to pipeline gas from AU to markets across the ocean, but it didn’t make economic sense
It's clearly a bad deal for Australians, who now pay higher gas prices, but not for international importers, who probably pay less because of increased competition.
Higher gas prices is good for fighting climate change - it makes renewable energy more competitive. Now, is the opposite the case for, say the Japanese, who import gas from Australia? Are they less incentivized to switch away? Probably somewhat, but less so, because of transaction and transportation costs.
>> will do nothing for emissions
> How can that be?
Because a reduction of domestic gas usage will just be diverted to less efficient LNG exports.
Given that by far the largest source of Victoria's electricity generation capacity is from dirty brown coal [1] if anything banning domestic gas usage might even make emissions worse since it will force people to use only electricity for cooking and heating.
> Direct consumption emissions are eliminated.
Ah, so burning Aussie natural gas in Asia (after it's been liquified and then turned back into gas) is somehow better for the environment than just burning it in Australia?
The chart you link to shows that Brown Coal, as both a total, and as an overall percentage of the grid, is decreasing, with renewables increasing.
Indeed, if you look at the three Brown Coal generators in Victoria[1], Yallorn is due to shut down in 2028 taking ~30% (1480MW) of that away, followed by Loy Yang A in 2035 which will take another ~40% (2200MW) of that capacity.
So, banning new LNG appliances now, and starting that migration will have a net positive impact.
This is true even if the LNG continues to be burned overseas if it's replacing coal fired generation capacity.
Is the correct strategy to wait to regulate gas usage until every country on earth does the same? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Someone always has to be last.
If you want to help the environment, you regulate both gas usage and exports. The goal is to keep gas in the ground, where it belongs, not to move it to other countries.
Except gas exports are largely being used to retire brown coal burning which is even worse for the environment than LNG. This isn't an all-or-nothing deal even with exports. The richer countries should take on the costs of better efficiency first and we can trickle those technologies down to other nations as they become cheaper than LNG and coal.
It is stupid, with less Gas available on the LNG Market other LNG Producers will increase production or they will use other Energy sources such as coal.
Except that it won't be that way forever. 30% of that generation goes away in 4 years. The rate of solar and wind generators coming onto the grid is massive, putting pressure on the brown coal generators.
We are also not talking about ripping out the existing install base of appliances.
It will take at least a decade or two for that switch to reach a critical mass. That's the point when it becomes uneconomic to continue operating the domestic piped LNG network in Victoria.
It costs money to transport LNG abroad. Ships, terminal infrastructure maintenance, people, it's all overhead. Ultimately if people stop using natural gas domestically there will be a reduction in production because that overhead eats into the profits of the producers.
Interesting. Of course transporting gas across the Australian continent and selling it cheaply is a lot less lucrative than selling it abroad in lng form. So, I can see why they would focus on exports rather than a relatively small domestic market that is on the other side of the continent.
Anyway, Australia has no excuse for not using solar energy. Which is exactly what they are doing over there despite conservative governments trying to slow that down for the last decade or so. I doesn't need to depend on fossil fuels.
I'd recommend the book Jutaku by Naomi Pollock to get a sense of how uniquely innovative Japanese housing architecture is. Ironically a major reason is tax depreciation rules for houses which encourage homeowners to demolish and rebuild rather than renovate.
Fujifilm also sells Instax printers (https://instax.com/printer/) that you can print to using smartphone apps. Note that the printers use the same film cartridges as the Instax instant cameras.
What a fascinating thread. Here's an interesting sentence from a comment there:
> This is a cultural problem because majority of the immigrants are from India and they focus on education too much. We need to get people in to trades and creating new job opportunities in energy and lumber our natural resources or infrastructure.
I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 and I'm very happy with it. It's fast, quiet, absurdly light, has a 16:10 screen, a decent selection of ports and the famously good ThinkPad keyboard. I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu without any issues. For me it's the perfect laptop.
Africa doesn't have the grid capacity to support a shift to electric vehicles. Right now South Africa (i.e., the richest country in Africa) has daily rolling power cuts (aka "load shedding") because they don't generate enough electricity for current demand, let alone for widespread EVs.
The major advantage of liquid fuel compared to electricity is that it's easier to transport and store, and harder to steal, which is why I don't think EVs will see significant take up in the third world.
They can't generate enough electricity because of corruption. When you have people actively sabotaging power generation, there are bigger concerns than the transition to EVs. If you attempt to transition the country to renewables, then you'll be killed.
Thanks, my mistake! I did misread it as China having a surplus of EV cars instead of ICE cars. Either way Africa is a tough market. But I think my point about a stable electric grid as a prerequisite for EV take-up still stands.
A cheap and easy way to increase the size of the car you already have is to buy a roof box. Our previous car was a small hatchback and interstate trips with our three kids in the back would have been impossible without the roof box. I only bought a bigger car when my oldest kid was pushing 6 feet and running out of legroom in the back seat of the hatchback.
Sure, but I only used the roof box on occasional long trips when we had lots of luggage (e.g., visiting the grandparents interstate for Christmas). So I might have paid a few tens of dollars extra in fuel, but it was certainly far cheaper than buying a bigger car when we otherwise didn't need the extra space.
The roof rack and Thule box cost maybe $1200 AUD. But the rack was also useful for attaching bicycle carriers.
A larger car is likely going to have worse fuel economy and/or range than a smaller car. If you get the larger car, you take that hit every single time you drive it. If you get the smaller car and a roof box, you take that hit only when you mount the roof box. If that's most of the time, then sure, it probably makes sense to get the larger car. But I don't think that's the GP's use case.
The larger car is likely more expensive to purchase in the first place than the smaller car plus the roof box.
Meh, I'm currently on a cross-island road trip with. Family of four in a >10 year old, manual, brown diesel grandtourer/station wagon. Trunk and roof box fully loaded.
Long range fuel consumption at 5.3L/100kms, as usual at summer conditions.
> Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns
Yeah, all of these cities also have long, harsh winters.
FWIW I'm a Canadian who lived in California on work visas for several years and relocated to Australia in 2011, where I'm now a citizen. I've never regretted leaving Canada.
Banana belt, what on earth are you taking about? Hogtown sure. Maybe even “the big smoke”, and not because of the current wildfires. But banana belt? First time I’ve heard it
> "The 'banana belt' or Carolinian Canada is a region in Ontario found south of a line which runs approximately from Grand Bend to Toronto." -- http://erintown.blogspot.com/
Canadian here, lived in Toronto for about a decade.
There are many names that Canadians from outside Toronto call Toronto...few repeatable in polite company...but I have never heard this Banana Belt term either.
Not compared to most places in Canada its not. Toronto I would say is between 2C to -10C on average during the winter, -20C in the extreme. Cities like Regina and Saskatoon for example have winters in the range of -20C to -40C on average, and extremes can reach -55C. Its like comparing Alaska and NYC.
For photos or documents like wills I think the best long term storage solution is still physical prints in a shoebox. Yes, they'll fade slowly over time, but will still be viewable for decades, or even centuries if printed using pigment inks on archival papers.
Of course there's still a chance that physical prints can be lost, stolen or destroyed in a house fire. But I think overall that's statistically much less likely to happen than digital media becoming obsolete or unreadable, or data stored online being deleted because the original uploader stopped paying the storage bill or didn't arrange for transfer of their accounts after their death.
The chances of losing digital and physical copies at the same time are pretty low.
I have gotten into habit of printing photos and ordering photobooks for not just us but also for relatives. The idea is sort of distributed backup of physical photos. Also they love it.
I used to walk over it almost every day when I worked at a coworking space in the old Lonely Planet HQ building. I think a lot of locals drive over it without ever realizing it's there.