The trouble is that there are now so many of us with pressing demands that unreliable and expensive sources of energy cannot meet our needs. It is impossible to run an aluminium smelter 24/7/365 with energy costing less than 5c per kwh if it has to come from wind and solar. Instead of adapting to expensive energy we simply get the Indians and Chinese to do the dirty deeds for us.

For wind and solar to do more of the heavy lifting will require massive overbuilding and/or energy storage. That require much higher energy prices than the weak carbon tax achieves. The energy investment per person will have to increase several fold. To even have a shot at it means diverting decades of present consumption into energy investment and perhaps reducing population. Since I see few signs of this we'll ride the fossil fuel train to the end of the line.

Go the Lancashire Luddites!

< Many of these rioters and wreckers were either executed or transported to penal colonies in America or Australia. >

So modern Australia is founded on a tradition of Luddism!

But we totally lost it along the way. We DESPERATELY need to get back closer to the basics.

We need to work towards a balance between supply and demand, for energy and all resources. We need to embrace solar and other renewables and get the bejeezus off of our addiction to oil!

We’ve got to sort out which types of growth are good for us and which are bad and embrace the good and eliminate the bad…. instead of treating all growth as good!

We've got to develop a much more realistic, logistic and Luddistic approach!

In short, we DESPERATELY need a powerful wave of Neoluddism to sweep over us!

Reminds me of the song in My Fair Lady 'Oh wooden it be luvverly ... Lots of chocolate for me to eat etc'. Blimey, what a load of codswallop. This abundant Earth is blessed with unimaginable quantities of minerals and energy. The term 'fossil fuels' denies that the major source of our coal, oil and gas comes from deep within the Earth as methane - totally independent of fossilised dead dinosaurs of which there are certainly limited resources (refer Thomas Gold, The deep hot biosphere). Coal, oil and gas remain the fuels which should be more correctly called 'carbon fuels' supplying cheap and abundant energy until well into the future when our children will find access to even better and cheaper fuels to supply their food, shelter and transport needs. A trace, life-essential gas called carbon dioxide has been demonised to the extent a tax has been imposed on it. Like the stupid window tax, this will one day be exposed as the fraud it is. Luddites who live today owe their very lives to the Industrial Revolution which allowed longevity into the equation. During this period the birthrate remained relatively constant but people lived longer because many of the causes of premature death were overcome. Famine was eliminated in the Industrialised world. Luddites should wake up. Their wonderful solar panels and windmills (manufactured and transported courtesy of cheap, reliable, coal-fired base-load power) will be providing landfill within the next decade or so unless ways can be found to economically recycle these government subsidised toys.

Sophie Love,

“Global citizens are recognising that reliance on fossil fuels is destructive.”

Why don’t people like you recognise that renewable energy is even more destructive?

For example:

Renewables require an order of magnitude more materials, per TWh of electricity supplied, than nuclear; that means renewables require more mining, processing, manufacturing, fabrication, construction, decommissioning and disposal, and transport between all stages, than with nuclear.

Australia’s federal government has committed us to waste about $25-30 billion on subsidies for renewable energy by 2020. That is for a negligible amount of energy. It is an enormous waste of money. It’s massive waste - similar scale as the NBN.

If the NEM's electricity was to be generated by a mix of solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, wind, hydro and either biomass or natural gas as the backup the CO2 abatement cost would be about $300/tonne CO2 avoided:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2012/02/09/100-renewable-electricity-for-australia-the-cost/ (Figure 6). That’s about thirty times the current EU carbon price and thirteen times the Australian carbon tax.

The world’s largest and most recent solar thermal plant, Ivanpah, http://www.ecc-conference.org/past-conferences/2012/BrightSource_ECC_Presentation_combined.pdf will cost about $19/W of average power delivered.

Nameplate capacity = 370 MW.

1,000,000 MWh/year. This means average power output is 114 MW (about 1/10th of a new nuclear plant).

Capacity factor is 31%.

Cost = US $2.2 billion = $19/Watt average electricity delivered.

This is 3x the cost of some recent nuclear powerplant builds that most environmentalists have accused of being prohibitively expensive.

The heliostats used in the project weigh in at 30,000 tonnes. That's 262 tons of heliostats per MW electric average. That's just for the heliostats, not even the foundations, not to mention the tower and power block.

The powerplant area that had to be bulldozed over is 20x larger than a nuclear reactor of equivalent average (real) capacity (twin unit AP1000).

Lastly, nuclear is safer than any other electricity generation technology, including wind and solar:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Jock,

Go industrialisation - like the clappers, if you will : )

Of course, "moderation", doesn't get a look in - it's all about growth.

Here's a country that's been going gangbusters in the growth department:

http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/

So China's environmental controls and work practices are based on the early industrial model, but hey, they supply the majority of the West's geegaws so it must be worth it.

The most important things of all are for us to get a handle on the scale of our activities, to strive to achieve a balance between demand and supply and to make sure that the demand sits comfortably within the sustainable supply capability with a big margin to spare. This is the essence of sustainable societies and a sustainable planet.

You’d think it would get top priority, however it is all too often left out entirely.

Most people who espouse recycling, renewable energy, more efficient food production and technological advances of all sorts, don’t even think about this. All they seem to think about is increasing the supply!

For as long as they do this, they are actually helping to WORSEN the problem, because they are essentially pandering to the ever-increasing demand for everything!

Global population stabilisation and then gentle reduction is of paramount importance. In fact, it is as important as everything on the supply side of the equation put together.

This makes it far and away humanity’s most important issue.

And yet it probably doesn’t get any more than about 1% as much attention as it should.

PS. Of course my first post was TIC. We don’t need Luddites. We need SUSTAINABITIYISTS!