Smelters could require less onsite or offsite emissions by higher recycling rates for scrap metal. I doubt whether green hydrogen could ever economically replace coking coal in steel smelting. Renewables enthusiasts tell us aluminium smelters could use variable power with better insulation of the potlines; again let's wait and see. Synfuel suitable for aircraft seems likely to be triple the price of current jet fuel. Sydney to Melbourne commuters could use a very fast train (perhaps electric) instead of the world's no. 2 air route.

The way to test all this is with CO2 pricing or constraints. Then we'll see what's possible. If it doesn't work out then the economy may have to shrink. The alternative may be 50C summers and annual megafires.

I was wondering to myself this morning, where is Taswegian.

I read your thought out solutions to climate change, but there is a void in your thinking on two levels. I’d like you to address them.

One is why the greater impact of remedying always falls on those who can least afford it, and secondly, why should Australia be involved with those remediations at all when in Global terms, our pollution is insignificant to those countries most responsible for pollution, namely Asian?

Dan

Then fact that equally qualified scientists do disagree means that what is going, and what it is costing people, should have been knocked in the head long ago. The damage that has been done - not by natural climate change itself, but by the scientists who have been wrong in their predictions time after time - is a scandal. The acquiesce of gullible, ignorant politicians is a crime.

Dear Don,

Mate, you really have to stop flogging this dead horse. The physics of AGW is robust, the data supporting it is robust, and besides a few fringe scientists profiting from fossil fuel companies the consensus in the part of the scientific community that matters is robust.

I know there are people like you who won't let the contrarian view go which is fine, just stay out of the way while the rest of us do our bit.

However I will ask whether you have elevated the credentials of your 'hero'?

When you say "And my thanks to and admiration for the late Emeritus Professor Bob Carter" you might get away with a lower case 'e' but he doesn't appear to make the roll at either James Cook University nor the University of Otago.

http://www.otago.ac.nz/study/otago701059.pdf

http://www.jcu.edu.au/alumni/Honorary-Degree-and-Fellowship-Holders

He was cited as being deemed "emeritus fellow and science policy advisor at the Institute of Public Affairs" but the fossil fuel financed IPA is hardly a glowing standard for unbiased scholarship now is it.

Hi Don, I am intrigued by the quote you included and the inferences you drew from it. Please give me a complete reference so I can see the quote in its context.

Sorry, Don, but this game is over!

If we can't use or sell our coal or gas? Then we will need to find something we can use! If that something is cleaner, safer and cheaper than coal, gas and or any of the renewables? Then that's the logical Alternative!

And that logical alternative is MSR thorium. Thorium is so abundant we can never run out of it during the life of the universe.

Moreover, MSR technology can also be tasked with burning nuclear waste. that other folks will pay us annual billions to store.

And we would, but not before we've extracted thousands of years worth of virtually free electricity from it

! Electricity for the arc furnaces that will smelt all manner of metals. And the waste heat can be used to create cheapest ever hydrogen.

Hydrogen that can replace coal in metals smelting.

Electricity so cheap that we can pump water anywhere. And that water will be desalinated, using new deionisation dialysis, that produces 95% potable water for four times less than reverse osmosis!

Nuclear power will enable the production of endlessly sustainable synthetic fuels from seawater! using proven technology!

Graphene highways will enable recharging on the go and allow the new electric vehicles to travel then length and breadth. and that some superconductor can be the core of the cable we use to ship far more energy than we ever sold, to offshore customers and local manufacture, manufacturing for everything/anything for a global market! Making us an energy superpower!

Last but not least is the medical tourism we'd create in annual millions with the bismuth 213 we'd create as a virtually free byproduct of MSR thorium!

I get that the only obstacle is troglobites who will not see! That's all! And every boy and his dog knows who and what they are!
Alan B.