Retired Dave, 3.29pm,
I live in a rural area and use propane gas for cooking (and oil for central heating and wood for the fire to try to keep oil burning down). When we first moved here 26 years ago we had a lot of power cuts being at the end of a spur and at least I could boil water for a drink and a hot water bottle, or cook by candle light. The electricity board did something which significantly improved the supply and it has been very good for years, although we have had a lot of blips recently and I have been grateful to have the propane.

So, we don't have a gas main, which is why we have propane. The electricity supply is not always 100% reliable. It is prudent here to have a mix. To stop the use of propane in new rural builds is plain stupid, not to say discriminatory.

Oil is expensive and so is propane, but surely it is a matter of choice. So much for consumer freedom and so much for those small local businesses who deliver my gas bottles.

Hopefully, in Australia, Ms J Gillard will be heaved by Rudd, but will it change the Government makeup...This from www.stuff.co.nz...read on

LATEST: Australia's Labor Party will undergo a leadership ballot on Monday morning after Kevin Rudd quit his post and flew back to the country to challenge Julia Gillard for the job she took from him 20 months ago.

In a dramatic escalation of the turmoil that has paralysed the federal government, Mr Rudd stood down as Foreign Minister midway through a visit to Washington, just as Ms Gillard was preparing to sack him for disloyalty when Parliament resumed next week.

Indicating he would call for a challenge next week, Mr Rudd sent a direct message to the 103 members of caucus that he, not Ms Gillard, stood the best chance of beating Tony Abbott.

''There is one overriding question for my caucus colleagues and that is: Who is best placed to defeat Tony Abbott at the next election?'' Mr Rudd said.

''Mr Abbott, I believe, does not have the temperament or the experience to ever be elected to hold the high office of prime minister of Australia.

''But at present and for a long time now he has been on track just to do that.''

Ms Gillard, who was in Adelaide yesterday, received no warning of Mr Rudd's decision other than a formal letter which arrived as he began speaking on the other side of the world.

''I am disappointed that the concerns Mr Rudd has publicly expressed this evening were never personally raised with me, nor did he contact me to discuss his resignation prior to his decision,'' she said.

Labor Senator Doug Cameron, however, has called on Gillard to delay the ballot until next Friday.

Ms Gillard will hold a press conference from her hometown in Adelaide at 9am (11.30am NZ time).

Last night, prominent Rudd backer, Senator Cameron said that a ''rush to a ballot'' on Monday would not be a ''fair go'' for Mr Rudd.

''I think that would be a travesty of democracy within the Labor party,'' Senator Cameron told the ABC's Lateline.

This morning Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said a leadership ballot was inevitable.

''We have to put this issue to bed,'' she told the ABC. ''We have got to be mature.''

Ms Roxon noted that Mr Rudd had led the ALP to victory in 2007 and had achieved ''some amazing things.''

But she added that he was very difficult to work with as Prime Minister.

''That decision [to dump him] was made for very strongly held reasons that I think are still true now.''

Senator Cameron - of the Labor left faction - said that Mr Rudd needed time to return from overseas and campaign.

Mr Rudd, who is due back in Brisbane tomorrow morning, indicated he would spell out his case for change, unlike those who plotted the coup against him in June 2010, which largely caught the general public by surprise.

''I promise you this, there is no way, no way, that I will ever be party to a stealth attack on a sitting prime minister elected by the people,'' he said.

''We all know what happened then was wrong and it must never happen again.''
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The Environment Minister, Tony Burke, rubbished Mr Rudd's claim, saying it was the ''worst kept secret in Canberra'' that Mr Rudd had been undermining Ms Gillard and the government for months.

"Fakegate" now has its own website, evidently put up by the HEartland Inst. folks:

http://fakegate.org/

Fakegate reaches the Mail.

As someone who has had an interest in low energy housing for 35 years I believe these two related articles are well worth a read.

http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/site/pagina.php?id=3541

http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/site/pagina.php?id=3542

I have long thought energy use reduction has to be way forward and I am sure more research in that area would bring benefits, even if you don't think CO2 is bad - and I don't. There is no reason to use more resources than we need, especially as we have to import most of it.

You have the ludicrous situation with the government's code for sustainable building working against houses that use less energy in the first place, in favour of others that use expensive "renewables" to generate energy (not to mention subsidies). One house that used some low-power electric panels occasionally in the coldest part of winter was judged worst than another house where the "renewables" heat pump ran all the time (using electricity of course). How little electrical energy was used didn't come into it - just a cross in the relevant box.

The Climate Change Act has lead to such lunacies - from 2016 you will not be able to build and use propane gas in a rural area, forcing many to use heat pumps instead. The efficiency of heat pumps is always exaggerated in the sales blurb ( a bit like windmills), but I couldn't square the reasoning for this until I read the Matt Ridley article below. It is so the government can make its ill-advised 2020 20% target for "renewables" which will be met by generating electricity by burning bio-mass. They can argue that the electricity used by the heat pump is "renewable" when obviously propane gas is not. Make one bad decision - pile another load on top to cover it up.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/bioenergy-versus-planet

SHOCK!!!

You may find this difficult to believe. I do not think it is a hoax/fake...

It is...
In the Telegraph
Written by Louise Gray
Quotes supplied by an ex BBC Blue Peter and current BBC Country File presenter
and... and... and it is critical of wind farms

Have they been taken over by aliens? I demand answers now...

Matt Baker questions effectiveness of wind farms

Feb 22, 2012 at 2:06 PM | Jiminy Cricket>>>>>>>>>>>

Oh dear, I do hope David Attenborough's mind isn't going in the same direction as the rest of us 'old gits'

He talks about using wind farms as "back up", whilst conveniently forgetting the huge [CO2 generating] fossil fuel powered generators, required to be on 24 hour low level standby to 'back up' the windfarms he finds so beautiful.

A very surreal world these media personalities seem to exist in.

SHOCK!!!

You may find this difficult to believe. I do not think it is a hoax/fake...

It is...
In the Telegraph
Written by Louise Gray
Quotes supplied by an ex BBC Blue Peter and current BBC Country File presenter
and... and... and it is critical of wind farms

Have they been taken over by aliens? I demand answers now...

Matt Baker questions effectiveness of wind farms

Feb 22, 2012 at 1:35 PM | John Shade>>>>>>>>>>>

As with Maggie Thatcher's and Ronald Reagan's steadfast policy in dealing with the USSR - Keep up the pressure, no matter how many soviet funded pressure groups use the media, until the other side's corrupt infrastructure simply bankrupts itself and collapses.

Thank you, Jane Coles (Feb 22, 2012 at 12:28 PM) for that link. As well as a lot of penetrating insights, it contains images of the forged document itself. A pathetic sight it is too. A link well worth a click, and a few minutes of anyone's time. I'd say it was also one to file away as an important critique of the memo. About one of the most foolish of the paragraphs in it, he writes:
'This is almost unbelievably stupid, and it was obviously written by a left-winger who has never read any of Heartland’s sophisticated critiques of global warming hysteria. The idea that conservatives want to “dissuade teachers from teaching science” is the ultimate left-wing fantasy. On the contrary, as Heartland has explained in painstaking detail, it wants teachers to teach science at a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated level than the cartoonish global warming hysteria that is peddled by the likes of Al Gore and Peter Gleick. It is safe to say that no representative of Heartland could have written this paragraph.'

Powerline belatedly catches up with the Gleick story:

Peter Gleick: if I am wrong, sue me.

This isn't bravado. Hinderaker is a heavy duty lawyer and Powerline is one of the most widely read conservative US websites (it was also one of the first to document the Rathergate scandal as it unravelled).