A life-threatening wintertime flooding emergency is hitting state of New South Wales and the state capital Sydney, with the Sydney Dam having been overtopped Sunday night. The southeast of the country is under a La Niña condition and already suffered severe rainstorms and flooding in March and April. It is also suffering electricity shortages and facing the threat of blackouts.
Regardless, the newly elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese found that “global NATO” duty required him to present himself personally to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Kiev on Sunday—such a trip could not be cancelled!—bringing APCs and other armaments and pledging more “for as long as it takes.” Zelenskyy told Albanese, of course, that nothing Australia could do would be “enough.”
Australia’s governments have been all for “global NATO” since the time of the AUKUS deal, but the country is learning that global NATO’s war policy comes without electricity. Australia has no nuclear power; solar and wind have rapidly increased from 8.5% of capacity a decade or so ago to 25% now; natural gas was supposed to increase at the same rate but no pipeline infrastructure has been built to bring it from its basin sources in the west of the country, so it has increased only from 18% to 20%, according to the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. And baseline coal infrastructure has been allowed to age out. Wind and solar have grabbed a big chunk of supply from coal; and in a very familiar story, this year the interruptibles have been failing to produce reliable power.
