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.