It is 2011 and we are still being fooled by vested interests telling us that carbon dioxide is a pollutant; that we must get rid of it.
All the big companies recognise that there is money to be made from supporting the concept. They will pay 'x' dollars for the licence and then charge their customers for that cost - plus interest. They cannot lose. Their shareholders will not be losers.
Who will the losers be?
The ordinary family that has no savings, litle superannuation and a very basic wage.
PM Gillard is going to compensate those families? Every cent collected will be paid to low income families?
How will she collect the licences fees? Who will calculate those fees? Who decides who qualifies for assistance?
An administration fee of thirty percent is quite normal.
Will the rest of Australia cover the extra admin costs or will they reduce the gross fees collected?
Prof S. Fred Singer got it right when he wrote that this is a plan to get the poor of rich nations to pay cash to the rich of poor nations.
After the Little Ice Age, the temperature will rise as the planet resumes an equilibrium. In the 20th Century it rose less than one percent (1%)
Barnaby Joyce for Prime Minister. He might get his words back to front but he is very understandable and believable.

Graham- Rather than conflate your worthy opinion polls with wild guesswork about Labor's present woes, why not steal a march on the other pollsters and pundits by carefully tracking how opinions change with time after a major event? The glimpse of this in your comment on the resources tax could be expanded.

An interesting issue would be nuclear power. It took several decades for anxiety to subside after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The past 5 years or so has seen a major campaign of the nuclear boosters, which has put nuclear in a more favorable light. It will be interesting to see how those opinions change following the recent nuclear incidents in Japan.

But maybe the public won't get concerned about nuclear power. The ABC and your benefactor, The Australian, was very quick to enlist that renowned "expert nuclear scientist" Ziggy Switkowski to placate its readers- I must say a highly risky strategy for both The Oz and Dr Z. With a bit of ingenuity, The Oz might find a way of blaming the nuclear reactor problems on dithering, left-leaning bureaucrats.

Coles and Woolworth gives everyone who wants it a discount on each litre of petrol purchased. Similarly to the discount we could give everyone who purchases petrol a credit equal to the value of the carbon tax. If these credits were now invested in renewable non polluting ways to create energy we would soon build up our renewable energy production.

This is similar to compulsory superannuation. It is not administratively expensive to achieve and should cost no more than 2% of the money collected.

All forms of renewable energy are profitable at current prices if financed this way. That is the credits over time will return more value than the amount invested.

So this approach

Puts a price on carbon
Gives purchasers of energy a long term asset that more than returns the extra money spent
Supports the coalition's view that we should be taking direct action
Reduces our dependence on imported oil

It is even easier to do with electricity as we only pay electricity bills quarterly.

This could be introduced almost immediately and it satisfies the stated aims of all the political parties.

We forget the real aims of a carbon tax – to encourage everyone not to need to pay it.

Australians do not look at what overseas countries are doing about reducing emissions – they take them seriously.

They do not think about their own behaviour.
The best way to start reducing emissions and wasting unrenewable resources would be to stop taking one-person trips in large cars.

That would bring home to us what we are doing ourselves, instead of keeping the debate always leaving our own actions out of it.

We can live better lives without emitting so much greenhouse gas and wasting unrenewable resources.

85% of the cars going down our street have one occupant. Hundreds daily.
80% of the households in our street have two or more cars – one of these cars could be a small Australian-made car, for those single trips.

Doing something ourselves would help us to see the whole political scene a bit differently.

Graham - good article. I see your article has attracted a more than usually mixed group of posters.

In fact, I had suggested to a publisher the idea of a book on the carbon tax, 'The great carbon carbon tax con'.. He tentatively agreed to test the market (although he wasn't very enthusiastic), but I dropped the idea. There is too much risk that Gillard will simply dump the proposal if it becomes an electoral liability, which is looking very much the case. That might happen even before I could write the book.

My thought is the only reason it has been proposed is to shut the greens up for a time - but then again, I never thought Gillard would be mad eneough to propose it in the first place.

Such a tax would be straight madness. No one else has anything like it. There are limited trading schemes in Europe, New Zealand and parts of America - and other schemes here and there - but nothing like a comprehensive, national carbon tax.

Further, no international action in the form of stringent, enforcable agreements is possible. It just isn't going to happen. A carbon tax would put Australia out there, alone with a costly, pointless ideological gesture.

" In 2013 the carbon tax will be a fait accompli ... At 30% primary vote in the latest Newspoll Labor is probably at its nadir. It will probably improve, but under Gillard, probably not be enough to win next time."

Regarding the prospects of carbon tax adoption, given the following considerations:

that there is no scientific evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have caused any measurable global warming;

that there is no scientific or economic justification for imposing a carbon tax;

that any new green industry jobs would be far outweighed by employment reductions in other industries;

that there would be substantial economy-wide costs but no benefits;

that the cost of living will be raised substantially;

that the electorate is realising that it has been conned about man-caused global warming;

that there are no other countries lining up to adopt a carbon tax;

it will be interesting to see how the Government is going to argue, and claw back support, for a carbon tax.

Jedi Master, because speculation does not accord with your own, it does not make it "wild". The reason I do the polls is to reduce the amount of speculation involved in political commentary, and I think that my results prove that they work.

I should have some old figures around on nuclear power, because we polled on it once, but there's plenty of polling in the public domain on the same issue, which would give a more secure basis for anlaysis.

Not that it will tell you much because you will have to speculate about why people were thinking that way, and conventional polling gives you only a narrow look at motive. But that would be better than my results which consist of only one datapoint.

If you want to curb CO2 emissions, you'd better hope that the Japanese disaster doesn't damage nuclear too much, as it is the only viable technology for the foreseeable future, certainly within the 10 to 20 year window that the IPCC seems to thinks exists to fix the "problem".

Shame on those Scientists who promote the 'Carbon is pollution' idea. They are a blight on Science and history will show them up for the self interested con men and women they are. The idea is completely nonsensical to anyone with a basic understanding of Biology and would have led to a deserved failure in any High School Science exam of more than 20 yrs ago.

Under a Carbon tax, carbon will not be taxed. That's how dumb the Labor party and this scheme actually is. Certain emitted compounds of Carbon will be taxed including the harmless CO2 and certain compounds with NO CARBON IN THEM AT ALL will be taxed. Its basically a tax on efficient energy sources to fund inefficient energy sources like solar power. Some of our money will flow to dysfunctional regimes for climate abatement which is particularly disturbing.

The Labor Party are allowing themselves to be conveniently hoodwinked by the new secular scientific left and dominated by the Greens.

Raycom

I agree with everything you have stated

...John Howard so successfully played the “yesterday’s man” card as a deliberate ploy. It was a ploy that entrenched his power in Politics UNTIL he launched himself into the zone of reform insecurity with his “Work Choices” blunder.

...Labor have learned exactly “NOTHING” from their own historical past, or that of the Liberal past, with a study of the history of calamitous reform agendas that have littered the highway of Politics in Australia.

...People in Australia place the greatest value on “No Change”, and wish only for Politicians to butt out of their lives, allowing them to fathom the future for themselves. If global warming brings sea level rise, then we simply move further up the hill. The philosophy for life is a simple one needing no outside dictate of madness and self-serving direction from self-serving Politicians, bent on inflicting their own “opinions” on the community.

GrahamY

The point that I was making about polls was to try to develop methodologies to see how long the chickens take to settle down on the roost after they have been scared by the latest "Chicken Licken" series of opinion pieces and overblown journalism.

With regard to nuclear power- even if all goes smoothly in future for nuclear it is unlikely to make a significant contribution to ameliorating either energy bottlenecks or global warming (if one acknowledges its possible existence). The numbers simply don't stack up: Nuclear presently provides about 6% of global energy and 15% of global energy from almost 500 power plants. Even if all of the presently proposed plants were built in the hoped-for time-frames (less than 200 over probably 15-20 years), it would add another 2% to PRESENT energy supplies and another 5% to PRESENT overall energy supplies. In that same period, total energy demand is likely to increase by at least 20% and maybe double that.

The same argument could also be applied to solar, but unlike nuclear it won't be limited by safety concerns or fuel supply limitations.

Poor Labor! It seemed like such a good idea when everyone was running scared: attack the nasty carbon, gain the gratitude of a relieved public, get the scientific establishment on side, chalk up a new source of government revenue and pass a whole slew of new laws to keep the populace in check. They forgot how quickly fear can pass into indifference when evidence is not forthcoming. HV Evatt could have told them something about that, I suspect.

The sad thing is that there really are lots of good reasons to try and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But by focussing on the one reason which can be conclusively shown to be nonsense, Labor and the alarmists have probably destroyed our chances of taking any real action in this area for a generation at least.

Your comment is highly relevant Graham regarding nuclear(power)for Japan when they have come to rely upon that source of power.

An extract from a paper.

How clean is it?
We learn that nuclear waste has to be stored for 100,000 years. Yes, it takes that long for high-level radioactive waste to break down. Storage areas for this waste are very expensive and take up huge amounts of space. Is nuclear power cheap? England's first nuclear power plant has stopped producing energy. But the decommission process will continue for the next 120 years. The plant produced energy for only 47 years. Now people have to work there the next 120 years to deactivate it and clean it up. That is simply part of the what nuclear power means. – Torness Nuclear Power Station

After meltdowns the work begins for the next hundred odd years.

The costs involved in the clean up process over another decade, far outweigh benefits for 30% of electricity generated using an estimated 54 power plants.

What of the soils, land and contamination over the next 100 years - 100,000 years in relation to nuclear power plants placed into the disused basket? Some iodine is great for soil yet toxic in high doses.

These power plants defeat the purpose environmentally until most people use public transport [rail or non-fuelled vehicles], chemicals and smoke from sources emitted into the air daily are ceased or reduced along with most of the other causes we know exist are not addressed here and around the world.

Curmudgeon,
If you are in the book writing mood I have a subject for you to explore.
AGW is a 50 year time frame problem, at least in the mind of the believers.
Peak Crude Oil is now history since 2005.
Depletion is expected from approx 2015 +- 3 years.

Here we have two major problems with quite different timescales.
A book that enquires into the markedly different responses by
government to these problems is surely worth while.
The book could question whether the government has its priorities right.

The book could also reflect on the effect of one upon the other.

Carbon of itself is not pollution.

The problem is when there is TOO MUCH Carbon.

Plants also only take up Carbon 12 and much of what we produce is Carbon 13.

This wasn't discovered by Al Gore a few years ago. This has been known and observed for decades and it's the reason why the IPCC was created in 1988 once it could be measured effectively and it was shown to be true.
Even Ronald Reagan admitted it as fact.

If you want to be played for suckers by the Marshall Institure and its acolytes to keep the Coal, Oil and Gas multinationals rolling in cash then go ahead. They've done it to you before with passive smoking, DDT, acid rain and the ozone hole but this time there's a financial cost.

Just don't keep claiming it as being an on-going debate where the science has not been settled. Re-quoting already discredited "evidence" as being fact is not enough no matter how often it's done.

G'Day, Qld. especially, is exporting Co2 and this will increase with the possible opening of mines/gassification of coal on the Darling Downs. Who pays for this export of C02? Residents put up with the coal dust, the pollution of aquifers, noise of coal trains, etc. Yet, the Qld. govt. does misuse the royalties it receives from coal exports!

Bazz - while I think you for your book suggestions, you do realise that peak oil, as a cause for any real concern, died completely recently? Check out all the stuff on "fracking" on the net. Apparently recently developments have suddenly made huge shale oil deposits commercially viable.. particularly at current prices. also lots and lots and lots and lots of natural gas.

May well be some intermediate problems as they switch over from easy-lift to unconventonal oil, but that's all the original peak oil forecasts were about anyway.

Certainly don't agree the peak was in 2005 - I was always a "late topper" - but it doesn't matter now.

wobbles - quite interested in your C12 C13 thing - you know they measure the concentrations of those isotopes in the atmosphere and track them? These show that industrial CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere but the unfortunate part is the actual proportion. There are estimates that industrial CO2 makes up just 4-5 per cent of CO2 in the atmos.

Now this issue has been studiously ignored by the global warming fraternity. You won't find anything denying this, or much confirming it. The IPCC 2007 report doesn't really say anything much on the point at all, although reading the atomic signature to work out concentrations should be simple, the report doesn't give a figure from the atomic signature.

A Norwegian scientist Tom Segalstad has been spruiking this point for years but has been ignored. He has also been spruiking the point that it had been confirmed endlessly in the refereed scientific literature, before the onset of global warming science, that CO2 had a life in the atmospher of about five to seven years.

All very strange, as you will agree.

Wobbles - This is complete nonsense. We don't have "too much carbon'. There is no more Carbon now than there ever was. We are NOT creating new Carbon!

Your comment on C12 and C13 is also inaccurate. C13 is a naturally occurring isotope of Carbon and found in living creatures since the Year Dot.

This is the lunacy of the Carbon Tax proponents. They don't even understand what is being taxed. Gillard included.

Wobbles, you've wasted around 10 minutes of my time. Plants use C12 and C13, but prefer C12, but only by 2% difference in the ratio. Google will help you work this out, as it did me. If you can't do better than this you will damage your credibility (and I use the future tense advisedly).

JM, I've been a big fan of solar energy for around 40 years. It has yet to deliver. I was opposed to nuclear, but I've changed my mind. It is the only source of power that doesn't emit CO2 and can deliver our current standard of living. You're overstating the disposal problems.

However, I'm much more relaxed about the CO2 heat effect than I used to be. I think the main problem is that we will run out of CO2 to emit into the atmosphere via peak oil, although I accept Curmudgeon's drawing our attention to the gas boom going on around the world using fracking techniques.

GY- you said
"JM, I've been a big fan of solar energy for around 40 years. It has yet to deliver. I was opposed to nuclear, but I've changed my mind. It is the only source of power that doesn't emit CO2 and can deliver our current standard of living. You're overstating the disposal problems."

First, solar IS delivering. Water heating already competitive; PV reaching grid parity in about 5 years; wind competitive; solar thermal not far off. Sure, not dominating the market yet, but inexorable positive progress. No meltdowns.

Secondly, nuclear. You didn't respond to my previous comments about future significance. All other issues aside (tell that to the Japanese), nuclear CAN'T solve anyone's problems any time soon. We can't (and probably now won't) build enough reactors to make a difference.

Thirdly, nuclear not emitting CO2. You've heard me bang on about life-cycle analysis now for some years. When are you guys going to get it? Simply displacing the CO2 production to the front-end and back-end of the nuclear life-cycle doesn't reduce it. It's the same as saying that a Prius is CO2 free. And I still claim that least cost is likely to be least CO2. Prove otherwise.

Fourthly, I've never gotten into the disposal argument, other than as a physicist, I probably understand the issue of radiative waste longevity and statistics (including Black Swan events) as well as Ziggy.

Less "belief" and more facts are needed to form strongly held opinions than are being displayed by the AGW-bashers.

@Jedimaster, if you think the percentages you put up mean "nuclear CAN'T solve anyone's problems any time soon", try holding solar to the same standard. The same argument CANNOT be applied to solar because the numbers for solar look worse by somewhere between ten- and a hundred-fold.

If it's life cycle emissions of CO2 you're concerned about, again, solar is something like five times WORSE than nuclear, per MWh. See http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf

Jedimaster - I hate to burst your balloon but who told you that wind was competitive? It most certainly is not.

Even the wind advocates will say, reluctantly, that its somewhat more expensive than conventional. But there is evidence to suggest that its many times more expensive.. look up what I've written (Mark Lawson) plus the key word wind on this site, and then waste time denying the various reports.

There is also "Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources" 2009, Gabriel Alvarez, King Juan Carlos University in Spain(its avilable in English). Yes, I know the activist sites have since claimed (on thin evidence) that its discredited, but they were most worried about the paper's estimates of the number of jobs destroyed by wind energy. They haven't been able to deny that the electricty authories in spain pay at least twice as much for wind as conventional power (I think its more than that). And that's before all the costs of transmission lines and revamping the whole network to accommodate the stuff.

The ability of wind advocates to ignore or deny evidence that wind energy is a very expensive way not to save carbon is truely amazing. No it has not delivered.

Well in the end I guess it's all just some elaborate international conspiracy set up to establish a world government and/or a huge financial scam designed to make some mysterious faceless people a lot of money.

There's no politician I can think of that could win extra votes from imposing these restrictions so why would they even bother to do it?

Then again, some think that the moon landing was a hoax too and can produce all sorts of evidence.

Rache, when Kevin Rudd and his counterparts overseas set the political response to AGW in motion they were reacting to a widespread public fear. If that fear had remained at 2007 levels they would have been hailed as saviours, Rudd would probably have still been PM, and they would have romped home in the 2010 election.

But fear needs to be fed, and despite the enormous sums lavished on compliant researchers by government bodies (approaching $US100 billion) they simply can't come up with enough conclusive evidence of AGW and its threat to keep the fear simmering at the same level. They are left with the choice of holding an increasingly daft and unpopular policy or abandoning it, losing their main point of difference to the Libs, and being ridiculed for inconsistency. (Most unfairly, of course -- like anyone else, governments SHOULD change their policies when the available facts change). So far they have decided to tough it out.

There's no conspiracy; just one group of people in government hoping to take advantage of public fear, another group of people in the media who know that fear sells papers and boost audience figures, and a third group of scientists who want to feed themselves and their families and work in nice conditions. Everyone benefits from the AGW scare, so why wouldn't they support it? Everyone except the public, that is.

It is interesting to see poster 'rache' attempt to tar this issue with the 'conspiracy theory' brush. I see the use of this tactic as a form of pre-emptive derailment of discussion of anomalies and inconsistencies that otherwise beg for resolution. Pre-ridiculing discussion, as it were.

The article presents in its first paragraph one such seeming anomaly. It reads:

"Australia is unique. Nowhere else
in the world has climate change
featured as a major issue in national
elections in the way it has here."

Unless this observation is itself able to be disputed, it has to be asked why this should be so. The only satisfactory answer would appear to be along the lines of the Australian electorate being held to be both more environmentally aware, and more willing to act contrary to its own perceivable economic best interests in this matter, than any other electorate in the world. I doubt that such an argument could be sustained, as, if anything, apathy and cynicism seem to be more frequently applied descriptors with respect to Australian attitudes to public affairs.

Given the likely rejection of the above 'satisfactory answer' as an explanation as to Australia's uniqueness in political interest in climate change, other explanations are required. Could it be that in some way Australia's possession of relatively vast coal, thorium, helium and other resources poses a perceived threat to the mix of established world energy supply interests such that it has been seen as necessary to politically, electorally, nobble the country such that it will be difficult to develop these resources for the benefit of its own citizens at large?

Posing such a wicked question would seem to pre-suppose that it was even possible to politically, even electorally, nobble the country. As 'rache' says:

"There's no politician I can think of
that could win extra votes from imposing
these restrictions so why would they even
bother to do it?"

Leaving that pre-supposition up in the air, I observe the bipartisan acceptance of 'privatisation' of Australian electricity supply, and wonder as to who ultimately benefits.

Graham, if there is anything unique about Australia in relation to AGW and politics; it is probably just that, Politics!

Europe in general and the UK in particular, drove earlier, harder and faster into the AGW phenomena than anywhere else. As the crippling costs of the renewable energy obligations and verifiable low efficiency meets EU-wide austerity, governments are “reviewing” many of their AGW generated policies. The trend lines are unmistakable as momentum begins to drop past the top of the “Bell Curve”.

In Australia, regardless of the advocacy blocks’ determination to boost the debate and the media’s “gate keeping” activities, the Australian public interest is in decline. This could possibly be because we are late entrants at a time when the rest of the world is in retreat.

Whilst it might be just NSW polling, climate change ranked 9th out of 10 key issues in last weekends Newspoll. Perhaps the Australian electorates have better tuned “bulldustometers”? More importantly, this might also indicate just how out of touch our advocacy media and politicians really are? The volume of AGW advocacy has reached nauseating levels and seems to be directly proportional to the decline in public interest, as we would expect.

Raycom nicely itemizes the AGW dilemma; the UN’s single orthodoxy is critically flawed, the more the advocates try to sell Australians the proverbial “dead parrot”, which died of injuries sustained from Climategate, the more Australian’s are likely to disengage.

The advocacy block in general, much of our MSM and in particular our public broadcasters, have nowhere to go except more proselytizing and to crank it up.

Rather than just being unique, Australia has a unique opportunity that was never available to Europeans, and that is “look before you leap”. Rather than the endless divisive, vexatious and futile debate about “what” to do about AGW, we have the opportunity to have a public inquiry into “why” we should do anything.

We know just how wrong and flawed the advocacy is by their determination to prevent Australians having the benefit of addressing the issues highlighted by Raycom

Mark Duffet- if you read my earlier post carefully, you would have seen the statement:

"The same argument could also be applied to solar, but unlike nuclear it won't be limited by safety concerns or fuel supply limitations."

Despite 40 years of involvement in sustainable energy matters, I'm no pie-eyed optimist, and over the years I have surprised many of my sustainability colleagues with my hard-assed approach.

As I have said many times, our "carbon footprint" methodologies are inadequate, as they invariably only take into account direct process energy use. Nonetheless, the same (5 year-old) UK article lists the carbon footprint of wind as similar to nuclear. Why didn't you mention that?

As I have said many times, PVs are presently more expensive tahn nuclear, but on a steeper cost reduction curve. (See "Updated Capital Cost Estimates for Electricity Generation Plants November 2010 U. S. Energy Information Administration Office of Energy Analysis" 189 pages). Note that nuclear costs are blowing out, although if one reads "The Economics of Nuclear Power" by the World Nuclear Association (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html) one sees that the Chinese, as usual, seem to be producing nuclear power plants at half the cost of most others, due to economy of scale and labour costs.

That does not affect the basic arithmetic that I stated before- the number of nuclear power plants that were under construction, or planned pre-"3/11" cannot make a big difference to overall baseload supplies.

If you, or Mark L, or any of the data-free-bloggers, can come up with numbers to refute mine, I will adjust my view accordingly.

Dear weareunique, I have a colleague who has spent the last 40 years in the nuclear industry. We call him the “nuclear garbage man” because his job is to process and safely dispose of nuclear waste from nuclear power generation and the even more toxic waste from nuclear weapons.

He would weep buckets if I showed him your post. You are clearly very concerned about the many issues associated with nuclear power generation, and rightly so as we should all be concerned. That concern however, must also be tempered by what is “real” and what is driven by emotion and ignorance.

Emotion is something only you can deal with however; there is absolutely no excuse for ignoring 60 years of industry facts, for inventing your own facts or for misrepresenting others. Most of what you presented is utter nonsense, which could explain your highly emotive state.

All you have to do is conduct some basic research on the web and most of your fears will be eliminated. Yes there are concerns but this is the most highly regulated industry on the planet and has the highest safety record on the planet. Distressing and high profile as any nuclear incidents may be, you do need to develop a sense of proportionality to replace your irrationality.

Jedimaster - there is a real problem with your arguments. You seem to be saying the there is no way nuclear can grow fast enough to save enough carbon to make a difference - which is probably true. That its expensive - true again.

But then that would seem to imply that wind saves carbon. Sorry, wrong. Again, go and look at the articles I've written for this site. Thanks to the need to completely reorganise the grid, run the generators on its differently and change the spinning reserve backups, any supposed savings by wind should be discounted by at least 50 per cent and probably 75 per cent (a proper audit would be required to work out the right discount.)

And this is all for vast subsidies. the Spanish study I cited before say that the wholesale price for wind is three times the price for conventional power (not twice as I had in the original post). the more you look at wind, the more you realise what a total waste of time it is.

Jedimaster,

“Supporters of wind power chant the mantra that Denmark proves that wind power works. BWEA says it “now gets 20% of its electricity from wind turbines”. This is a cynically deliberate confusion of production with consumption. The 20% is of production and applies only to West Denmark which has most of the wind turbines. For the whole country the percentage is c.13%.

More to the point, much of the electricity has perforce been exported to adjacent countries because it was produced when it is not needed. In some years over four fifths of the annual production has been exported, sometimes at zero income, thus costing the Danish public about DKK 1 billion per year although more recent estimates put annual losses at above DKK 1.5 billion.” (Approximately A$100 million).

US physicist Howard Hayden rightly remarked some years ago. “The little country Denmark has made a name in recent years with their wind turbines. No, they don’t produce much electricity, they sell them to suckers”

Source: “The Wind Farm Scam” author, Dr. John Etherington.

I think I’m with Howard Hayden.

Curmudgeon- By no reasonable use of syllogistic logic (or any other kind) can you infer that, because I am commenting on likely CO2 outputs of PVs and nuclear, that I am saying that wind is less.

I simply present the view that total life-cycle cost is likely to be highly correlated with total life-cycle energy (therefore CO2) cost.

Wind power is no exception. Total life-cycle costs have got to take into account the costs of backup, along with all other costs. I note that Wikipedia has a well-referenced (to the IEA) article on wind power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power) which includes consideration of increases in costs due to variability, which of course increase with its proportion of the total, but are considered "manageable".

But back to GrahamY's article (we should try to keep on track): Public opinion is certainly important when it comes to winning elections. That does not mean that the public is sufficiently well informed to make a reasoned choice based on adequate data. I know (in an unquantified way), from my experience of involvement in solar energy, that most (I guess 90%) of people who are genuinely interested in solar energy do not even know that the sun's path across the sky varies throughout the year, or how much energy is received per square metre, or practically anything else in detail.

I would surmise, similarly, that very few people know anything useful about nuclear power or the proposed carbon tax. This does not disqualify them from voting and makes them prey to those who would substitute fear for facts to achieve their political ends.

And for all those who think that we have, and always will have, the best of all possible worlds, I recommend that they read Jared Diamond's "Collapse". I can't see any difference in their attitudes and those of the many civilisations that have gone blissfully into oblivion.

Things I believe to be true;
1. That most of the public believe that AGW is true.
2. Most politicians believe that AGW is true.
3, A majority of Labour politicians believe AGW is true.
4. A large minority of Liberal politicians believe AGW is true.
5. Liberal party policy supports some action because most voters do.
6. 90% of Green party members believe AGW to be true.
I believe the politicians genuinely hold their opinion and that there is no conspirosey.

With that as a foundation even if proof positive that AGW is not true
appeared not one top level politician would change their stance.

After all that the three PMs and Kevin Rudd have said could you see
a climb down like that happening ?
I think that is the biggest risk that we have.
The whole AGW machine has its own momentum. Even if there were
indications that the effects of AGW were to be less than expected
I think the spending and taxing would go on uninterrupted.
I asked one relative that I have what would she say if AGW was shown
to be completely a fraud.
She could not reply, even to a hypothetical. It was simply unthinkable.

We urgently need to start working on alternative energy systems.
Irrespective of AGW this is the most important project that the country
has before it.
Our oil imports now seem to have reached 60% of our consumption.
This js costing us about $20,000,000,000 a year on our balance of
international payments.
In two years it will exceed the total cost of the NBN every two years.
However it will not stop there as our production decline is around 5% per year.

Our coal is being shipped out at an increasing rate as the rest of the
world is declining after peak coal in China, US and Europe.
Natural gas is a buffer but when it declines it will decline very fast.

The one argument that we do not need with the AGWs is the need for
alternative energy sources. There is nothing remotely available
in the next ten years, except nuclear and geothermal that can possibly
fill the gap that is starting to open up between what we are using
now and what we will need from now on.
The failure to find an alternative will mean starvation for billions.

Raycom,

all your dot points support Grahams hypothesis that

'At 30% primary vote in the latest Newspoll Labor is probably at its nadir. It will probably improve, but under Gillard, probably not be enough to win next time.'

So Gillard's tenure is terminal.

We all know that and so do the near-facelessmen.

Their problem is that 'this time' the only prospective leader who is out-polling their current PM is their former PM! The one they all knifed!

lol

So their choice is to knife Julia and install Kevin 07 for a re-run or to knife Julia and instal a Labor apparatchik like Combet or Shorten who will both be less experienced than both the knifed Julia and Kevin.

Yep not only is that laudably laughable but this current Government under their current choice is fatally farical.

now consider the labor goons in the 'mainstream' media and the near-faceless men have all invested heavily in Latham, Rudd and Gillard ... well Tony the destroyer of two labor saviours will have a good ole fashioned "turkey shoot" while serenading the labor goons in the mm and the near-faceless ones to the sounds and words of the first verse of Midnight Oil's 'Cold Cold Change'*1 or the chorus of 'US Forces.*2

*1

'Cold cold change, we were so excited
But you came and went so soon
Cold cold change, we were not invited
We smiled all the while we were taken in'

*2

'Sing me songs of no denying
Seems to me too many trying
Waiting for the next big thing'

lol labors a joke ... everywhere ... lol

@JediMaster, I did read your earlier post reasonably carefully (but see below), which is why I denied your statement quite specifically. My point was that solar and nuclear are not even comparable on that basis because of the orders of magnitude difference in starting points.

However, I did miss that you'd mentioned wind; I'd like to think I'd have put up that comparison as well if I hadn't.

As for numbers, are you aware of (for instance) this collection? http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/

Hmmm..... Not much sound out of the pro-nukes today. I wonder why?

But Mark D- I'm not in the position to question steel and concrete tonnages per MWe, but the point that I constantly make is that the resources required aren't just those used on-site. As I have said, ultimately one has to track every skerrick of energy used at all stages of the life-cycle of the generator- not just the excavators digging uranium ore, but the energy used to build the dongas for the fly-in/fly-out miners, the things they buy with their salaries etc etc. But as I hypothesise, money is a reasonably good proxy for energy and it all gets accumulated in the final cost- so long as externalities are included- such as decommissioning, environmental spoilage, etc.

Yes, at present nuclear scrubs up quite well economically. I suspect that costs will go up significantly after 3/11- both more engineering and higher insurances.

In the meantime, as I have said, the cost of renewables are reducing- you can't take a snapshot of the past decade's average cost and infer future costs from that- you have to loook at cost projections- which are pretty well known. You can get them all via Google pretty quickly.

jm "Hmmm..... Not much sound out of the pro-nukes today. I wonder why?"

because it would be churlish to exploit the current disaster in Japan to support your own personal views .. oh

what a guy eh .. nice one jm, all's fair in politics isn't it mate .. let's not get confused about true compassion for the environment when you can score points on the back of a disaster and reveal your real motivation isn't the environment at all, it's just politics isn't it?

This is so typical of the lefties on this site, berate the conservatives for all manner of "not caring", but then pump up when you might be able to have a tiny little win at someone else's expense

exploiting such tragedy is below what normal people would do but clearly at the forefront of a lefties politics

I saw all the posts online from people who said Japan deserved the disaster because they hunted whales .. and the finger pointers who immediately linked the earthquake to climate change .. but didn't expect to see such blatant churlishness

you must be rolling on the floor laughing jm .. "yay, Japan has had a disaster, I'll be able to score points on OLO!", and though we know bugger all apart for hysterical news reports, you could not resist having a go .. as I said, what a guy!

the technical types out here, will wait to see what happens, since the IAEA says there is no danger, there have been minor issues and the sites are built to withstand earthquakes .. you called yourself a physicist .. clearly you have abandoned science for politics, the AGW way isn't it?

am I disgusted with your comment, sure, surprised .. not at all

rpg- and YOUR comments?

It was good enough for Ziggy S to be all over the media on Sunday and Monday saying that all was fine when he had neither the information nor the qualifications to do so, but for me to ask why he and other nuke boosters were now quiet is sufficient for you to unleash a disgusting diatribe against me.

I have reported your comments to the editor.

well done jm ..

gosh, you should report me to wikileaks as well! what a coup! that's a dobber's site isn't it? .. occasionally used by whistleblowers but it appears more often by attention seekers .. but I would never say that.

By the way Ziggy is qualified to comment on Nuclear Power .. He has a Bachelors degree and PhD in Nuclear Physics .. more eminently than anyone else, and apparantly more than those who believe churlish premature hysteria is the way to go

regardless of the breathless hysteria nuclear is still the best option for the future is you really care about reducing CO2, I want nuclear because more of it will lead to better reactors. This will then supply our offspring with the best chance of a brilliant future, and not have to live in caves, the way of the greenies.

We would have better reactors now and less waste if the world had not been held up by hysterics in the 70s .. who have held progress back

in fact this may lead to many countries improving their reactors by pouring in R&D funding, renewables are far too expensive and are hobby technologies at best we need to stop funding and get away from populist R&D analysis and into something with real potential.

Nuclear is better thought of by the community than the AGW alarmists think .. then again, the majority tends to be quieter about such things.

The Japanese disaster is the result of a Tsunami, not nuclear reactor problems .. let's wait to see what happens, and not sign up to hysterics all trying to trump each other with disaster BS

Jedimaster, I support rpg’s observations, not that he needs my support as he makes the points very eloquently. Please feel free to report me to the editor also.

The proposed CO2 tax is a product of the AGW phenomena, the advocacy block is captive to these phenomena, and the “organic” nature of the advocacy block requires it to react to a wide range of “trigger words”. This weeks’ trigger word is “nuclear” meltdown.

Fundamentalism never has anywhere else to go other than more fundamentalisms, which is where you, the ABC and much of the MSM have just driven yourselves. The ideological salivating over and trivializing of a human tragedy of this magnitude seems perfectly acceptable to the organic advocacy block.

We should be grateful that it is both on display for all Australians to see and is entirely predictable.

without claiming to be a prophet, it is likely the nuclear reactors in Japan will eventually be bought under control with little or no loss of live.

And once again we will see a major problem with power generation by nuclear reactor be overcome and controlled like at Three Mile Island.

Now since loss of live in neither has occurred nor any great malaise inflicted on populations that would mean nuclear power generation in the west is pretty well fatality and sickness free.

It could quite concievably argued after the current crisis is controlled that nuclear power generation in the west is in fact quite safe.

Rarely a follower but right here I'd go along with all rpg and spindoc's comments ... so go ahead and report me to the headmaster too.

Wind farms and solar are promoted very strongly, however there are
very significant drawbacks to both alternatives.

Wind turbine's output falls to the cube root of the fall in wind speed.
This means output falls very rapidly in a falling breeze.
This why you see such figures as average yearly output being 15% of
nameplate rating. The problem applies to all the supporting
infrastructure, such as transmission lines, switchgear etc etc.
If the wind falls by 33% the output falls to 1/27 of maximum rating.
Some say if you have windfarms spread out over the country then when
the wind stops in one place it will be blowing elsewhere.
Well I have news for you, the Germans found that indeed the wind does
fail everywhere at the same time all over Europe.
Remember it has to be near gale force over 66% of the continent.

Solar of course is weather dependent and also seasonal dependent.
Shorter days in winter, cloudy days.
Energy storage is always suggested but just imagine the size of the
battery bank or other storage medium needed !
Whatever is used, is there enough lead or salt tanks or whatever to
support every house in the world at evening meal time ?
That is what the task is, no matter how green you are, it is a task
that verges on the impossible and is likely to be impossible even if
it was affordable.

So, assuming no miracles, solar and wind are no more than a small contributer.
What is your suggestion ?

Graham Young wrote 14 March 2011:

>Australia is unique. Nowhere else in the world has climate change featured as a major issue in national elections in the way it has here. ...

No. A search of news items produces more referring to climate change in America than Australia:

A search of news items mentioning "national", "elections", "climate change" and "America" but not "Australia" produced 5,560 results: http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&tbs=nws%3A1%2Car%3A1&q=national+elections+%22climate+change%22+-Australia+America&btnG=Search

With "Australia" there were only 4,460 results: http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&tbs=nws%3A1%2Car%3A1&q=national+elections+%22climate+change%22+Australia+&btnG=Search