Air travel...a favourite pastime of many women like my mother (bless her) who are desperate for a climate tax, yet can't see the link between CO2 emissions and her overseas holidays.

When I first read this article, I thought it must be Tony Abbott having a rant, given the authors assertion that jobs in existing industries were much more important than reduction of CO2 emissions. Those emissions would not be reduced by proposals to tax carbon or by reducing export of our lovely clean coal. All that would be achieved would be to deny the poor their right to a better life. The article concludes by claiming that UN development goals such as eradication of hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability have nothing to do with climate change. Well, let us take a closer look at these unsubstantiated claims.

There is no such thing as “clean” coal, or for that matter “clean” any fossil fuel, though some are cleaner than others. Australian coal production and use is destined to decline over time because of two things: the rising cost of using coal to generate electricity and the declining cost of electricity produced from renewable sources such as solar and geothermal. When base load power from renewable sources costs the same or less than that produced from coal, investors and consumers will switch to it and domestic demand for coal will decline.

This does not mean, as claimed by the author, that carbon leakage will result in export of industry and jobs to countries with more lax attitudes to CO2 emissions. Some trade-exposed industries will be compensated for the higher cost of electricity arising from a carbon tax. Others, like cement production, can and will adopt new technology enabling on-going production with much reduced or zero emissions.

A carbon tax will cause decline in domestic demand for coal. However, until countries importing our coal apply technology for generating electricity from renewable sources at a cost less than that of coal, demand for coal exports is likely to rise over the next decade.

Short-term expansion of the coal miming industry is therefore likely but decline after 2020 is likely. By then, electricity generation from renewables is likely to be cheaper than using coal.

Continued.

Countries now importing our coal will switch to using the cheapest source of energy and reduce their current dependence on Australian coal.

It is true that poorer, less developed nations can’t achieve prosperity and higher living standards unless they generate and widely use electricity. That does not mean they must generate electricity by burning fossil fuels which have to be continually imported at unaffordable cost. What it does mean is that the developed world must assist poorer countries to adopt and use energy which can be and increasingly, is being generated from renewable sources, probably solar.

The author claims that hunger has nothing to do with climate change. This is wrong. Hunger arises from lack of affordable food because of inability to produce sufficient food to feed a too rapidly growing global population. That has everything to do with climate change arising from global warming. If warming continues, it will cause increasingly sever climate events (it already is) making it increasingly difficult to produce food. Try growing wheat in drought or heatwave conditions. Try sowing a crop or harvesting it on flooded land.

Finally, let us consider a sustainable environment. It is one where flora and fauna has time to adapt to changing climatic conditions. Our present problem is that as a result of anthropogenic global warming, climate is changing so rapidly that flora and fauna have insufficient time to adapt to or withstand increasingly harsh climatic conditions.

If we decide on business as usual and do nothing to limit global warming; if we pursue short term profit rather than the longer term gains of climate stability, we shall develop an increasingly hostile environment, with potential to kill rather than sustain us. We still have a choice – though not for much longer. The choice is simple. Do we ignore global warming and its effects or act to limit it? It is not as though we did not know how to limit it. We do know and we can do it.

Continued

Those who produce and use fossil fuels, particularly coal, prefer to pursue profit and convince us that global warming is good and nothing to worry about. Rather like those engaged in the tobacco industry who would have us believe that smoking is good. It is, for tobacco profits. The problem is that smoking kills half of those who do it. Global warming will kill us all if we fail to curb it. Most people know it, including those who are loath to be parted from high profits and let there be no doubt, coal is a very lucrative commodity!

The author is not connected to the mains so he may not know that over the past 4 years, electricity is Queensland has risen by over 50% and further increases are promised. This has nothing to do with measures to limit global warming or CO2 emissions reduction but, we are asked to believe, because of the need to maintain and extend the grid.

Queeslanders know that permanent electricity price increases are not needed to rectify the neglect of the last decade. Answers to some thorny questions from a Royal Commission would seem more appropriate. And, as previously discussed in this forum, the wisdom of State Government increasing its dependence on revenue derived from coal mining should also be questioned. Bad policy made dangerous by failure to plan for eventual decline of the coal industry.

Agnostic;
Until the IPCC reruns their computer models using the data
for the availability of fossil fuels, then the whole thing is pointless.
The Uppsala Universities Global Energy Group last year surveyed all
oil, gas and coal fields and found that the data being used by the
IPCC is incorrect and the real data is much less fossil fuel available.

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/validity-of-the-fossil-fuel-production-outlooks-in-the-ipcc-emission-scenarios/

Down the page there is a blue link to the published paper itself.

I gather that over the last few years others have been trying to tell
the IPCC the same but they will not listen.
It appears that climate scientists won't listen to the geologists.

At present the IPCC's projections are guesswork on duff data.