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Australia: States begin setting own greenhouse targets
Kerry Brewster, 7:30 Report
As the Prime Minister continues to entertain the possibility of nuclear power as part of Australia’s response to the looming greenhouse threat. The states are starting to set their own challenges. Victoria plans, within a decade, to generate 10 per cent of its power from renewable sources such as wind turbines. And a month ago, the South Australian Government announced, or introduced legislation which requires 20 per cent of the State’s electricity to be generated by renewable energy within eight years. The Federal Government, meanwhile, has decided against raising the national renewable energy target, and one federal minister has publicly derided wind farms as “expensive white elephants”. But other countries foresee a vital role for wind power, and the local wind power industry claims the lack of support at home is already driving Australian jobs and know-how offshore. Kerry Brewster tests the claims and counterclaims.
(24 July 2006)
Contributor SP writes:
I can think of no other time when Ministers thought that companies leaving the country be considered a succesful export scheme… export the product yes, upping stumps and leaving, no.
Apart from the idea that the MTRE scheme was ‘too successful’, the comment by McGauran that the taxpayer shouldnt support renewable energy is hypocritical, given the government is paying for a large share of the research into coal and carbon sequestration, for example:
CRC Clean Power from Lignite
CRC Coal and sustainable development
CRC Greenhouse Gas Technologies
King County (Washington) to join climate exchange
Keith Ervin, Seattle Times
The King County Council authorized County Executive Ron Sims on Monday to make the county the first in the nation to join a marketplace whose members buy and sell “carbon credits” as a way of trying to slow global warming.
As a member of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the King County government would make a legally binding commitment to reduce its atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering greenhouse gases each year.
Members of the exchange include manufacturers, power companies, forest-products companies, cities, universities and Amtrak. The county’s carbon emissions in 2010 would have to be 6 percent below average emissions from 1998 to 2001.
If the county misses that target, it would have to buy carbon credits from members that reduced emissions beyond what they agreed to do. If the county cuts emissions more than its agreed level, it would receive cash payments that would be used to further reduce air pollution.
“Global warming is a very serious threat … to our economy, our national security and our environmental health, and I think in fact to our very way of life now and in the future,” said County Council Chairman Larry Phillips, who sponsored the ordinance.
Sims had urged joining the climate exchange, saying membership would give King County a voice in setting rules for the trading of emission credits. He particularly wants to make sure transit operators like King County aren’t penalized for putting more buses on the road, and get credit for the cars those buses are intended to replace. Sims, who convened a conference last fall on the regional effects of global warming, this year created a team to address global warming and ordered steps to reduce the county’s carbon emissions.
(25 July 2006)
Australian policy on climate change is mostly hot air
Tim Colebatch, The Age
Climate change is one of the toughest issues facing Australia, and every other nation, yet two things last week showed how confused and incoherent our response to it is.
In Melbourne, the Bracks Government decided to make electricity retailers buy 10 per cent of their power from renewable sources by 2016, despite its own consultants finding that this is an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile in Sydney, Prime Minister John Howard trumpeted it as a virtue that his Government is doing nothing to set up a market-friendly framework to reduce greenhouse emissions, while forecasting that rising exports of coal, gas and uranium could make Australia a future “energy superpower”.
The PM said Australia needed a “pragmatic, rational and flexible energy policy”. So it does. But let’s be honest: we don’t have that now. Our policies are driven by interest groups, irrational and inflexible.
And so they will be until we get the fundamentals right, by adopting a mechanism for the market to find its own way to reduce greenhouse emissions.
To be pragmatic and rational in this debate, the starting point is that if the scientists are right, then global warming implies colossal risks for mankind, and policies should actively try to minimise them.
(25 July 2006)
Contributor SP writes:
The report Tim Colebatch cites is publicly available. Chapter 6 (p 75) has the relevant information displayed as a graph (figure 6.2) comparing cost of generation vs carbon intensity. Here it is shown that Nuclear, Wind and Solar all emit zero emmissions! If construction costs are included then none would emit zero, but of course once again the fact that mining operations are excluded (no mine runs on electricity that does not emit CO2) gives nuclear an unreasonable edge(IMHO).
The difference in generation cost between nuclear and wind is ~20$ per MWH. Has waste storage and decomissioning been factored into these prices? Probably not.
I also note that Tim (and other opinion writers) continue to take ABARE’s opinion as fact. As was pointed out by one submission to the “Inquiry into Australia’s future oil supply and alternative transport fuels”, ABARE has made the same erroneous prediction about oil prices for the last ~ 5 years.
We’re all heading for the fiery furnace if we go on taking these cheap flights
Magnus Linklater, UK Times
JET TRAVEL is a sin, says the Bishop of London, and of course he is right. How can it not be a mortal sin to contribute actively to the end of the world?
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When one 747 from London to New York spews out more CO2 emissions than a motorist does in the course of an entire year, when the 16,000 flights taking off each year generate 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, destroying the planet’s upper atmosphere, when global warming is melting the ice-cap and threatening the poorest nations of the world with starvation or drowning, when mankind, in the memorable words of the climate guru James Lovelock, is “ perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease”, does this not add up to a most grievous offence against nature, to say nothing of God? Is the Bishop wrong, then, to suggest we should all take personal responsibility?
I note that he fell short of a thundering pulpit denunciation by conceding that a cheap flight to Benidorm, or the use of a gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor on the school run might only be a “symptom of sin” rather than the actual burn-in-hell thing itself.
But at least his words were stronger than the milk-and-water follow-up from the Church of Scotland, which bleated that “our souls are not in any imminent danger from large cars or flying”. Why ever not? I should have thought that if God did indeed create the heavens, the earth and all that is therein, he would be mightily displeased to see us collectively disabling it. The Kirk seems to have forgotten its own Westminster Confession of 1646, which teaches that “every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the law of God and contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal”.
That’s more like it. Along with the thundering language, it introduces that powerful motivator, guilt.
