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February 8, 2011
So far economic growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries such as Australia, as they have an energy system that relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels.
So the Earth is warming up. The regularity and severity of recent events--drought, floods, cyclones and bush fires are increasingly a result of global warming in that a warmed up world leads to stronger force cyclones, more severe floods and more intense bushfires.
Climate change certainty is needed for increased investment in generator capacity. The trouble is that we are in the midst of a renaissance of coal, because oil and gas (sic) have become more expensive, but coal has not.
It is the national climate policy uncertainty that remains the major factor in preventing investments in renewable energy and low carbon sources of energy. As Frank Wolak observes in The Guardian:
The choice is stark: either we can continue to wait to implement the perfect climate policy, and in the meantime pay higher prices for oil, and watch countries like China that are able to provide climate policy certainty to investors move forward with this new industrial development; or we could commit to a modest climate policy and so unleash the new technologies and new jobs made possible by this more favourable investment environment.
Australia is going to have bit the bullet sometime because it needs to invest in much more electricity capacity to meet rising demand.
We need energy from renewables, and we need jobs. Renewables can deliver both. The 2020 target is quite low--20 per cent of our electricity to come from renewable energy sources by 2020--not the replacement of the fossil fuel energy infrastructure. So we are stuck with power stations, cars and homes that use carbon-based energy sources.
The big miners and their publicists are not convinced by the need to invest in wind and solar power They say that the real solution for cost effective and reliable electricity in an industrial society is to go nuclear is their spin. They add what happens when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The lights go out. So renewables cannot provide base load power. Only nuclear can do that. The bottom line is that these will not be privately funded--they are hugely expensive, dangerous and will take too long to build.
The problem with this kind of spin---myth making--- is that nothing will happen when the wind stops blowing simply because it never stops blowing, suddenly, over the whole of Australia. The sun does stop shining at night, but that means the national electricity grid or network requires diverse sources of energy--an energy mix.
Is the policy to run down existing carbon-polluting energy sources rapidly and to replace them with atmosphere-friendly equivalents? No. The political reality is that Australia is going to build new fossil fuel power stations in the near future. It's the light touch in energy policy.
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"ALP: lacking vision or principle?"
Both but, IMO, the real problem is it is lacking courage.
Lacking the courage to tackle the issues, the courage to tackle the big vested interest groups [big coal, the mining giants, irrigation lobby, the churches, etc] and the courage to tackle the mass media, Murdoch in particular but not only.
You can forget about the COALition they are essentially a sideshow of the power groups, tackle them [the power groups that is] front on, loudly, clearly and the ALP, and Oz, would be much better off.
Too hard apparently.