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Tag: subsidies

Fossil Fuels and Subsidies in Australia

 
Anyone who claims that coal mining or other resource production is subsidised in Australia is trying to sell you something.. It isn’t. Claims it is are deliberately misleading.
 
There are no subsidies, just the same tax reductions for business costs that apply to all Australian businesses. “But that amounts to a subsidy!” No, it doesn’t. Subsidies are when money is taken from one group – taxpayers or businesses, and given to someone else to give the someone else an artificial advantage in the marketplace. Not taxing business input costs is not a subsidy.
 
Even then, some people are not happy. “But they get a huge discount on fuel!” No, they don’t. Like all primary producers, coal and other energy companies do not pay road tax on the fuel they use when on their own properties, and on roads they themselves have built and maintain.
 
The only incentive given by government to the mining industry is the Research and Development tax incentive, and this applies to all industries.
 
“The weekend release of the Productivity Commission’s (PC) latest industry assistance review again confirms that Australian mining receives ‘negligible’ government assistance.
The report states that the effective rate of combined assistance for the mining industry is just 0.2 per cent, having fallen by half a percentage point since 2010-11.
 
The effective rate of assistance is the ratio of total assistance to output.
 
The net tariff penalty on mining has increased since 2010-11 and 85 per cent of the budgetary assistance attributed to mining consists of the R&D tax incentive – a measure applicable to all industries.
 
The PC’s finding is consistent with the message successive Australian governments have reiterated to their G20 partners that Australia does not maintain fossil fuel subsidies.
 
The review shows that despite claims by the anti-mining lobby, the Fuel Tax Credit scheme, which refunds the tax paid on diesel fuel used off road, is not industry assistance or a subsidy.
 
Refunding the tax paid on diesel used in mining ensures that diesel – a critical input-cost – is not taxed. All businesses and industries in Australia do not pay tax on diesel fuel consistent with the basic tax principle to not tax business inputs.
 
Over recent years, the anti-mining lobby has sought to characterise the Fuel Tax Credit scheme as a subsidy for Australian mining. This is false and is confirmed by the Productivity Commission.
 
The Fuel Tax Credit scheme ensures that businesses in the manufacturing, mining, farming, construction, irrigation and commercial fishing industries do not pay road tax on fuel used in off-road activities.
 
Without the scheme, tens of thousands of Australian jobs, especially in rural Australia, would be at risk.”

Let That Be A Lesson To You!

It seem unlikely Australian political leaders (those allied with the Greens, anyway) will take any notice of this story, which is yet another reason to dump them at the next Federal election.

From Canada’s National Post:

We have long argued that the Ontario government’s headlong rush to convert Canada’s industrial heartland to “green” energy would turn out to be nothing but a colossal waste of money. Since most alternative energies remain commercially impractical (that’s why they’re still alternative and not mainstream), the blind rush by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government to substitute wind, solar and bio energy for coal and oil was never likely to produce much new energy, just higher power rates for residential and industrial consumers. But even we underestimated the extent to which the Ontario Liberals’ 2009 Green Energy Act had failed in just over two-year’s time.

In one of the most scathing indictments of government mismanagement we have ever witnessed, Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter reported Monday that Mr. McGuinty’s green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.

Update:

I was amused to see in this weekend’s Adelaide papers (which I never buy – the supermarket was giving them away), advertisements for rooftop solar panels, telling readers that with recent dramatic increases in domestic electricity costs, there had never been a better time to buy solar. Not a hint, not a sausage nor a whisper to indicate that the primary cause of the last two years of huge price rises has been government subsidies for the capital cost of rooftop solar installations, and the government’s forcing power companies to pay owners of rooftop installations a feed in tariff as much three times the retail price of electricity.

These schemes have been so ridiculously generous that I was briefly tempted to have solar panels installed. But I don’t approve of ripping off ordinary taxpayers despite the possibility of a temporary benefit. Welfare agencies (generally in favour of meaningless green schemes) have pointed out that the tax breaks and feed in tariffs are actually subsidising richer households who can afford solar panels, at the expense of poorer families who cannot.

Let’s see. Ugly, expensive, disadvantage the poor. Sounds like a perfect Labor Party programme.

Ignoring Reality

In a natural follow up to the story below, where a bunch of toddlers attempt to pretend something does not exist, the UK government and the BBC pretend something does exist – cheap renewable energy.

Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph:

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

Even shorter on hard facts, however, was Shukman’s report on a monster new wind farm off the coast of Cumbria, where a Swedish firm, Vattenfall, has spent £500 million on building 30 five‑megawatt turbines with a total “capacity” of 150MW. What Shukman did not tell us, because the BBC never does, is that, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, these machines will only produce a fraction of their capacity (30 per cent was the offshore average in the past two years). So their actual output is only likely to average 45MW, or £11 million per MW.

Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

It is on the basis of such utterly crazy sums – which neither the Government nor the BBC ever mention – that our politicians intend us to pay for dozens of huge offshore wind farms. In a sane world, no one would dream of building power sources whose cost is 22 times greater than that of vastly more efficient competitors. But the Government feels compelled to do just this because it sees it as the only way to meet our commitment to the EU that within nine years Britain must generate nearly a third of its electricity from “renewable” sources, six times more than we do at present.

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

That ‘renewable’ energy (in fact it is no such thing) needs such enormous subsidies is a sure sign that it is a rampant waste of taxpayer money.

If you can’t produce something without subsidies, this means you cannot produce it it at a price people are willing to pay. If you can’t produce something at a price people are willing to pay, you shouldn’t be producing it.

Subsidies hide the real price of a product. They discourage investment and inventiveness.

For example, the cost of the NBN to each household in Australia is about $6,000, whether they connect to it or not.

There is no business case for the NBN. If there were, business would be doing it. The NBN can only survive at huge cost to the taxpayer, and by sabotaging competition from existing copper wire networks and developing high speed wireless technologies.

The NBN will discourage research and investment into alternative internet technologies – just as massive subsidies for currently popular green energy schemes will discourage investment in other energy research. Who can compete when the government is throwing billions of dollars at your less efficient competitors?

That the government choice of technologies is less efficient and more costly, whether in power generation or internet transmission, means our costs are higher and consequently our industries are less efficient. So inevitably we are less competitive, we make less profit, and wages, employment and tax income all suffer.

Which means more people are unemployed, and there is less company profit going into superannuation funds, which means even greater burdens on social services, and less money available to support them.

Which means lots of misery.

But that’s what you get when ideology trumps reality.

So Scary It’s Profitable

A couple of excerpts from Matt Ridley, writing in The Australian:

No matter how many scares are proved wrong, the next set of dispatches of doom are treated with the same reverential respect.

Remember what the media said about the Y2K computer bug? “This is not a prediction, it is a certainty: there will be serious disruption in the world’s financial services industry . . . It’s going to be ugly” (The Sunday Times); “10 per cent of the nation’s top executives are stockpiling canned goods, buying generators and even purchasing handguns” (New York Times); “Army Fears Civil Chaos From Millennium Bug: Armed Forces Gearing Up To Deal With Civil Chaos” (Canada’s Globe and Mail). In the event nothing happened, but the media were soon saying the same thing about the next scare.

There’s a broad constituency for pessimism. No pressure group ever got donations by telling its donors calamity was unlikely; no reporter ever got his editor’s attention by saying that a scare was overblown; and no politician ever got on television by downplaying doom. …

Governments all round the world are interfering with markets to try to bring about this environmental revolution. One of the policies they have adopted has taken 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop and turned it into biofuel to power motor vehicles. This has driven up food prices, increased malnutrition and encouraged the destruction of rain forest, while enriching farmers.

Yet, given that the planting and harvesting of biofuels use about as much oil as the fuels they displace, it has had precisely zero effect on carbon emissions. Nonetheless, it is considered a green, progressive policy.

Another policy is to bribe rich landowners to festoon the most picturesque landscapes with concrete pads on which are placed gargantuan steel towers topped with wind turbines containing two-tonne magnets made of an alloy of neodymium, a rare earth metal mined in inner Mongolia by a process of boiling in acid that produces poisoned lakes filled with mildly radioactive and toxic tailings.

The cost of this policy is borne by ordinary electricity users and their would-be employers. So far, the wind industry’s contribution to cutting carbon emissions is precisely zero, because it provides less than 0.5 per cent of world energy use and even that has to be offset by keeping fossil fuel plants running for when the wind does not blow.

Oh, and wind turbines have killed so many white-tailed eagles in Norway, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania and golden eagles in California that local populations of the species are in increased danger of extinction. And this is a green, “clean”, progressive policy?

Writing in the American Thinker a year ago, Andrew Walden made similar points about the astonishing waste associated with government subsidies to wind farms – they are vastly expensive to build and maintain, they kill wildlife, they save no carbon emissions or fuel.

The same applies to large scale solar power installations.

But still Western governments are intent on spending our money on these utterly uneconomic, wasteful, and non-renewable ‘renewable’ energy plans.

We continue to face a major economic crisis, exacerbated by idiotic ‘stimulus’ spending which sucked up money from sectors which produce and employ.

At the same time, the Australian Federal government is determined to introduce a carbon tax which, even if the worst climate alarmist theories are true, will make no difference to the world’s climate.

What it will do as a certainty, is increase the cost of transport and energy, the cost of living for every person in Australia, and reduce our productivity and the competitiveness of the agricultural and mining exports on which our economy depends.

Somebody is making money out of these scares. But it isn’t me. Or any other ordinary Australian.

Big Wind

No, that is not my Native American name.

Gary Jason at Liberty Unbound draws attention to two recent WSJ articles about the cost of ‘green’ subsidies.

The first is about those annoying annoying and expensive energy saving light bulbs:

California’s utilities alone spent $548 million over the past seven years in CFL subsidies. In fact, California utilities have subsidized over 100 million CFLs since 2006. And on the first of this year, the state started phasing out incandescent bulb sales.

Of course, when I say that the California utilities have been subsidizing the CFLs, I really should say that the aforementioned hapless consumers have been doing so, because all the subsidy money — about $2.70 out of the actual $4.00 cost of the CFL, i.e., more than two thirds of the actual cost — is paid by the consumer in the form of higher utility rates.

Naturally, the rest of the country — and, for that matter, the world — is set to follow California’s lead on CFLs. A federal law effective January 1 of next year will require a 28% step-up in efficiency for incandescent bulbs, and bans them outright by 2014. One consequence of this federal policy — unintended, perhaps, but none the less foreseeable — is that the last US plant making incandescent bulbs has been shut down, and China (which now makes all the CFLs) has seen even more of a jobs expansion, and is able to buy even more of our debt.

But now — surprise! — California has discovered that the actual energy savings of switching to CFLs were nowhere near what was originally estimated. Pacific Gas and Electric, which in 2006 set up the biggest subsidy fund for CFLs, found that its actual savings from the CFL program were collectively about 450 million kilowatt hours, which is only about one-fourth of the original estimate.

And of course, they contain mercury, and you are not supposed to put them in the trash, they don’t last nearly as long as the manufacturers claimed they would, the light they produce looks artificial, and there are stories of their exploding.

So they cost jobs, are expensive, potentially dangerous, and don’t save much energy. Naturally perfect candidates for extensive government subsidies.

The second article is about the abject failure of big wind (the multi-billion dollar wind and solar power industry) to make any appreciable contribution to electricity needs, while consuming vast sums of taxpayer money:

The second Journal story (Jan. 18) reports that Evergreen Solar has closed its Massachusetts plant and laid off all the workers there.

This is deliciously ironic. Evergreen Solar was the darling of Massachusetts. Governor Deval Patrick, devout green and all-around Obama Mini-Me, gave Evergreen a package of $58 million in tax incentives, grants, and other handouts to open a solar panel plant there. In doing so, he simply ignored Evergreen’s lousy track record — a record of losing nearly $700 million bucks in its short life (its IPO was in 2000), despite lavish subsidies from federal and state governments.

Now Evergreen is outsourcing its operations, blaming competition with China, and whining like a bitchslapped baby about China’s subsidies of its solar energy and its lower labor costs. But Evergreen has itself sucked up ludicrously lavish subsidies, and it knew all along about China’s labor rates compared to Massachusetts’ …

It turns out that the wind industry — aptly dubbed “Big Wind” — copped a one-year, $3 billion extension of government support for wind power. It was part of the end-of-2010 tax deal.

Originally, this government subsidy was a feature of the infamous 2008 stimulus bill, under which taxpayers were forced to cover 30% of the costs of wind power projects. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) begged for the subsequent bailout, because without it 20,000 wind power jobs would be lost (one-fourth of all such jobs in America). But despite the billions in subsidies, Big Wind is sucking wind; its allure is dropping like a stone. The AWEA’s own figures show a 72% decline in wind turbine installations from 2009, down to the lowest since 2006.

Besides trying to make the 30% subsidy(!) permanent, the AWEA is pushing for a national “renewable energy” mandate that will force utilities to buy a large chunk of the power they sell from renewable sources (mainly solar and wind), irrespective of the fact that the price of renewable energy is sky high. The association has gotten more than half the states to enact such mandates, with higher energy bills for consumers as the result.

The cost of energy is the base cost of every mined, grown and manufactured item. So why are current administrations in both Australia and the US putting such enormous amounts of taxpayer money into schemes which make energy more expensive?

I don’t think there is any devious leftist plan to undermine primary industry and manufacturing.

It is just wanting to look ‘green.’ Sheer stupidity.

Of course, talking of big wind, President Obama in his STUFU address last night called for a massive increase in investment in remewable energy.

So we and the US are to follow where Spain and Germany have bravely gone before. On a short day’s journey into a cold dark night.

© 2024 Qohel