Australia is rooted.

A few things Don. Uranium isn't a fossil fuel. We sell coal and uranium to all comers but fail to use uranium here. For no apparent good reason.

I mean we have a Nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights and no good reason to have several more if we can guarantee, for peaceful power, generating purpose and medical isotope spinoffs only! And we can!

We could simply buy a few MSR reactors off the shelf, e.g., the FUJI 350m MW adapt them for fluoride salt and passive, walk away safety!

Just site three or four in one place (a thousand plus MW's) to run several turbines. As we need to decommission aging coal-fired power plants?

Possibly utilise the very same sites to keep local power plant dependant economies afloat?

Given we make a start now, have all the locally trained technicians up and ready to rock!

As for thermal coal, we can use more or all of it here. And cook it with flameless heat (nuclear) to cook all the methane gas out of it. Use that for as long as we need to power almost all our conventional engined transport with CNG. (methane)

Which as the first consequence, will lower our locally produced CO2 emission by as much as 40% and particulates by 100%? And make diesel and jet fuel alternatives as well!

Further, use it as our preferred source of domestic and industrial gas! Always providing we are smart enough to use cheap flameless heat to cook it! (nuclear)

Moreover, where this gas ( or scrubbed biogas) could be also used in stationary ceramic fuel cells for electric power which in combination produces, an 80% energy coefficient 4 times better than coal and an exhaust product mostly pristine water vapour.

We may not be able to do more than lead by example when it comes to action on climate change but we cand drought proof this wide brown land and adapt, while we have time and the will as a united country fighting it and our adversaries, rather than our fellow Australians! TBC.
Alan B.

Given we employ MSR nuclear technology and thorium. We should be able to make the world's cheapest quality steel. Utilising locally invented single step process and huge electrically powered arc furnaces.

And should we be capable of that? Well, we used to have a steel industry and invented the single step steel smelting process right here! Use some of this reinvigorated steel making ability to make locally invented two tank bio-digestors that as sealed systems are able to covert all biological waste into usable methane gas.

Every Australian family make enough biological waste to power their own domiciles 24/7

Add in food scraps and food waste (Insinkerator) and they can create a salable surplus.

Substitute the methane burning diesel with locally invented ceramic fuel cell and scrub the biogas to make it suitable. Then the salable surplus could be in excess of 50%!?

And as we roll this local innovation out. Give our steel makers a local and very much improved, ongoing market. And guarantee, we will never ever run out of gas.

Byproducts include completely sanitised and safe to use, for many agriculture pursuits and food production, reusable nutrient loaded waste water! And carbon-rich soil improver which improves the ability of soil to retain moisture, as well as, lock up carbon (carbon sequestration) for centuries and beyond!?

Simply put, we simply must stop pouring billions of annual litres of perfectly good water out to sea! And no more blindingly apparent! Than right now!
Alan B.

With coal closures and nuclear banned we'll have to pay whatever is the going price for gas. Some think the east coast will eventually get four LNG import terminals not just the one. I beggars belief that SA is building a new gas fired power station on the 50 Year old Moomba pipeline. Deep greens assert that gas will soon be unnecessary so we wait in hope. I see today east coast gas producer Santos is eyeing off WA acquisitions.

I'm a bit puzzled how coal exports don't count as Australia's responsibility. Why not export asbestos if it's not our problem? It's not hard to predict greenhouse concerns if this summer repeats the 47C in western Sydney last January. Neither the federal LNP or ALP appears capable of solving the emissions-price-reliability trilogy.

Yes a real problem Don, & it's going to be hard to fix, before we are frozen solid.

Unfortunately the thing has become political. Whether it was designed by the UN to push a political barrow, or was simply grabbed by them it no longer has anything to do with actual science.

You can see many here who have been told what to believe by their political masters. They would run a hundred miles before they would read a scientific paper that challenged that belief. The truth is the last thing they are interested in.

There are obviously a few who know it is a fraud, but again as it suits their politics, they are never going to change their stance on the story.

There are those who never had anything like the Math or Physics to understand the science. Mine were once pretty good, but it took weeks & more than a few headaches to get back to where I could even reasonably follow the science.

Unfortunately Belly said it all when he mentioned, "opinion different than yours". This is a subject critical to so many of us, that opinions are the problem. We have to follow the science not opinions handed down from on high.

Perhaps the worst thing in the whole mess is that those misguided are arguing from the highest moral standpoint. They "BELIEVE" the fraud, & are doing just what they believe is right for humanity. They are doing the wrong thing, for all the right reasons.

How the hell do you counter someone trying to do what they believe is right.

Hasbeen

You just summed up the whole problem with left wing politics today.

They actually believe anything that suits their ideology, regardless of obvious
truths.

I said right from the start, “but it’s not Australia using huge quantities of coal, it’s the countries with big populations,
like China and India. That was obvious. Or you would think it was.
Not to the left (and some right wing)environmentalists it wasn’t though. The left shrugged that off and didn’t want to hear it, even now they never mention it or address it, because they only wanted to bash evil, white oppressive, capitalists.

There needs to be some law that when the universities replace old professors, they must have equal numbers of right and left wing and independent people appointed to those positions. The appalling lack of questioning and real debate in today’s universities has led to people who will believe anything, because they’ve never been taught any kind of counter ideas or had access to any kind of history that doesn’t favour
and support the left wing narrative.

At this point In the debate about whose the scariest, the Left or The Right.
I reckon it’s the Left. Although the Right needs to stop the trickle down economics ideology and bringing in cheap workers on visas because they never leave,once they are here.