More renewables, more mining, more child slavery. No more steel making, not much manufacturing. China is now the big steel procedure because it uses coal, coal and more coal, sold to them by hypocritical Australian governments who don't want us to continue having the benefits of coal.

As for oil: not having it will turn Australia into something like the pre-1788 country it was.

According to Patzek et al the EROEI of food production is 0.1. That is 10 calories or kilojoules in, mostly oil based, for every 1 in the final energy of food. I haven't seen a lot of hydrogen powered combine harvesters about. This is why I see the end of oil as a bigger threat to humanity than climate change. Rising food prices are an early sign.

I fear that green steel and green cement will require some fudging of the figures. If world population was say 2 bn then Mother Nature could absorb pollution more easily and we wouldn't have to delude ourselves. Things will be crook by 2030 I reckon.

Read the "Statement of Expectations" that Jim Chalmers has given Danielle Wood, his modish new Productivity Commission chief.

It says that none of this matters, that the real world in Australia will bend itself to the woke Chalmers economy of "harnessing data and digital technologies, delivering quality care, and getting to net zero and becoming a renewable energy superpower".

This risible rubbish. As is becoming a renewable energy superpower. Wind turbines need to turn for thirty years, just to offset the carbon used in their manufacture.

Nuclear energy can make electricity and if it's cheap enough, MSR thorium, using established known science, turn seawater into all manner of hydrocarbons. When we add coal to iron ore, we deoxidise the hematite and that then becomes steel.

What coal adds is hydrogen and some lamp black to make high carbon steel. There are other sources of the above that can supply the above. Recycled plastic, tyres and hydrogen plasma.

The carbon we need for high carbon steel can be CO2 added as plasma.

Management teaches, there's always a better way. Even if Grandpa allus did it the old way.

ttbn, owe you an apology for calling a pea brain. You've probably got a normal sized brain. But it could have atrophied from lack of use?

Sorry, just joking. A fractured hip, a fractured spine and 24/7 pain, makes me a lot less tolerant these days. Moreover, I have never suffered fools gladly.

No offense meant.

We need to find and use alternatives to coking coal, which has become too expensive.

Cement can be made using the old Roman very low carbon formula, which by the way, hugely outlasts modern cement. Not certain, but I think it may have been burnt lime and steel making slag combined?

The heat can be nuclear as opposed to burning wood to burn/cook the lime?

As for steel making, a giant blast furnace can just as easily burn hydrogen as Gas. Methane/natural Gas, is mostly hydrogen with few carbon atoms bonded on.
Alan B.

I haven't seen a lot of hydrogen powered harvesters about. But before very long we may well do. There have been some breakthroughs in the extraction, via hydrolysis, of hydrogen from water.

And there's solar powered panel that just produces hydrogen. Imagine having a few of those on the farm and making all the storable harvester fuel you need.

The current price of diesel makes just a matter of time!

We need to produce food every boy and his dog can afford! And not via taxpayers' subsidies!

Taxes shouldn't be used/wasted that way. Not on farms nor mining sites! Taxpayers were never consulted!

Jobseeker is ok if you are not earning a quid.

There's been a stupid practise by badly advised farmers over the years, of buying new machinery, even as the old reliable was still going and serviceable. Just to avoid tax.

Then as the as the bad years hit, the non-consulted taxpayers were tapped again and again.

If they'd invested during the good years in off farm assets, they'd be getting a quid during the bad years and paying some money into the tax pool.

Just like nobody asked if we wanted more taxpayer funded migrants. Especially, when we cannot house the folks, we already have here!
Alan B.

Suppose one cannot expect more from the Atlas or Koch Network linked US fossil fuel Heartland Institute (as is AIP, IPA, CIS etc.), sentimental agitprop versus reality?

FT 'Opinion Data Points: Economics may take us to net zero all on its own. The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions.

JOHN BURN-MURDOCH

In 2009, coal was still an attractive option for countries looking for affordable energy, its average costs coming in well below renewables. But by 2020, both wind and solar had become far cheaper per unit of energy. In some markets, capital-intensive new installations even worked out cheaper than existing coal plants.'

https://www.ft.com/content/967e1d77-8d3c-4256-9339-6ea7025cd5d3