Coming over the event horizon — a project so bad it could break the nation

Snowy 2.0, the pumped hydro "battery" is far worse than we thought, and we thought it would destroy lakes, rivers, farms, cheap electricity and national productivity. But it's worse than that.  Now it's been infected with Victorian Union style contract bombs, which will spread to all the attached transmission tentacle projects, and blow out their budgets too.

The government (us) is backing everything, guaranteeing profits for foreign companies and super sweet salary packages for union workers and the project is "too big to fail" and the debts promised for years to come. Imagine if you took witchcraft masquerading as science, hyped it with childish modeling,  managed it with world class incompetence and mixed it with the worst union cartels, then locked it all into a 35 year contract. "Hey ho!"

For foreign readers, the CFMEU is the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, which is being investigated for corruption that may have cost the Victorian government people some $15 billion dollars. In the words of the administrator the Victorian branch of the CFMEU was "no longer a trade union but more like a crime syndicate".

You might wonder what union corruption has to do with bad science, but they all grow from the same self-serving pot. Bad science was used to justify Big Stupid Projects (like trying to use power stations to stop storms in 2100!). And Big Stupid Projects attract stupid people and greedy people. So we end up with stupid government managers that accept terrible deals from greedy unionists — deals that are so bad the government doesn't even want to reveal the true cost because it's too embarrassing. And none of the scientists want to speak up because their salaries depend on keeping the myth alive that renewables are cheap and worth pursuing.

And thus Snowy 2.0 becomes the black hole that bends space and time in every direction. It consumes land, money, energy, Australian productivity and industrial relations.

One trillion dollars is about $40,000 for every man, woman and child — wasted on a frivolous quest to make the weather nicer a hundred years from now. Let's just ask Australian's who wants to buy this?