The Indian poor would be doing a lot more for themselves if they reduced their breeding rates.
Selling them more coal will do a lot more harm than good with the increase in pollution it will cause.
We have only one home, this planet Earth.
Remember that Mr Johns before it is too late.

Here is another Liberal Neocon dreamer.
Coal is good and nothing else is any good is the chant.
Of course the fact that the BIG coal corporations are major donors to political parties has nothing to do with this.
Now please listen to this, I will say it only once.
Solar thermal works a treat.
It would and should provide power for India.
It is a proven technology that is working now in the US and Spain.
If all the coal in the Galilee was burned, it would increase global warming so much that life on earth would disappear.
I know that billionaire Indians would be down to their last billion but it would be worth it.
Gary Johns please take up knitting instead of pushing your mad ideas.

Solar thermal? Not for poor people Robert.

You can knock this guy's motives but the numbers tell a story:

https://papundits.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/solar-thermal-power-concentrating-solar-fail-just-look-at-spain/

Firstly I don't have an issue with digging up the coal so long as the mine doesn't impact local residents.

Secondly I don't have an issue selling the coal to India, if they want to purchase it.

Thirdly, It's not our place to tell India what is is isn't right for their country or people.

Fourthly, there's a global push to end coal mining and power creation with coal.
This is increasing the cost of energy globally and its bad for business and trade all around.

(Also its a push for Agenda 21 and global governance but that's another story.)

I don't have a problem with digging the coal up and selling it.
To not do so will cost the Australian people, and with the coming cost of aging baby boomers and a continual tightening of the purse strings someones gonna lose out.

Should single mums and their kids go hungry so environmentalists can have their agenda met?
Should the aging baby boomers be asked to just die quietly without medical care by financially focused death panels?
Should we force all the unemployed and handicapped people to get low paying socialist-like 'work for the dole program' type jobs?

You decide.
I say sell the coal, its not up to us to dictate domestic policy to foreign countries.

But finally, IS THIS NOT the same Adani that wants to build a port in the Great Barrier Reef??

If so, best think again.
Build yourself a rail link to the other side of the Cape or forget it.

I'm sure as hell not gonna support selling out our reef so the Indians can have electricity when they cant even build toilets and sewerage for themselves.

As proven in California, solar thermal can be rolled out for comparative to coal costs; and given the latest technological advances, able to also compete with coal as a base load solution!

Typical of Johns, he can't see the trees for the forest; and simply ignores things like cheaper than coal thorium ,and twice as cheap, endlessly available Biogas connected to ceramic fuel cells; able to provide very local electricity, for quarter of the price of coal!

We are entering unprecedented territory in relation to the amount of Co2 we're pumping into the atmosphere!



Because it happened before around 90 million years ago when volcanic eruptions added enough Co2 to the atmosphere to increased ambient temperatures by just 2C.

Enough in turn to start melting formerly permanently frozen permafrost; and in so doing, releasing millions of tons of formerly frozen methane.

Which being 21 times more efficacious than Co2 as a greenhouse gas, pushed the ambient temperatures up by around another 3C!

Or a combined total of 5C!. 5% enough to bring on a recorded extinction event that very nearly wiped out life as we know it; and writ large in the paleoecological record; an open book for those who can read it!

Which tells us for example that the british Isles, was a salt laden windswept desert, where the wind speeds were as high as a totally destructive 300 klms, together killing all plant life.

And where no plant life could survive; neither can anything else?

As is the case when plants are subject to months long inundation!

Look I know that coal "earns this nation", oops, foreign investors billions; and a few millions for Aussie quisling investors for whom there is nothing more important than making a few bucks and to hell with the predictable consequences for our Grandkids?

It doesn't matter where the coal is burnt, it still produces invisible Co2 we all have to tolerate!
Rhrosty.

Robert Le Page and Rhrosty

Again you guys have repeated stuff that has long been disproven, or is not even part of the debate. Solar thermal cost competitive with conventional power? I've never seen any figures making that claim. I don't think even green groups - at least none with any sense - claim it. Wind power can be cost competitive on a per-output basis but as an intermittent source its valued quite differently when part of a network.

A fully renewables grid is not possible in Aus at the moment, let alone on the unsophisticated, ricketty Indian grid. Any major user has backup diesel because the grid keeps on failing and Le Page wants them to go renewable! Talk about being divorced from reality.

Curmudgeon, solar thermal is capital intensive, so whether it is competitive with conventional power depends very much on the interest rate. At 4% it's cost competitive. Lower it's cheaper. Higher it's more expensive.

Whether or not a fully renewables grid is possible has no bearing on whether or not we should increase our use of renewables. The same is true for India, and solar thermal does not have the supply problems that wind does, and can be built with gas backup.

Excellent article Mr. Johns. These people care absolutely nothing for the poor. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

I generally agree with Gary, but not on this occasion. Not because I care about a snake (horrid things, snakes). Not because of some small animal that few have seen, or heard of, or even care about. There is water there for birdlife, and the area is not without outback charm.

No. My concern is the suggestion that the 'poor of India' are Australia's problem, and we have some obligation to sell them cheap coal.

When Australian politicians are not actually selling off our land to the Chinese Government, and actively encouraging them to buy our real estate, they are sucking up to foreign companies to come and pillage our natural resources for foreign benefit.

True, there might be a FEW jobs in it for Australians, but how much comes back to Australia in taxes is a closely kept secret. China, for instance, buys our land, works it, and sends the produce straight back to China without, we have every right to assume (because of government secrecy) any benefit even touching Australia.

Adani, I understand, is a private Indian company, and that has to be an improvement on the Chinese situation. But, we still do not know what, if anything apart, from a FEW jobs, is in it for Australia.

There also the hypocrisy of the whole thing. If it is good enough for India to burn coal, it is good enough for Australia to continue burning coal for cheap power. The coal is in Australia; it should be developed by Australia, and used in Australia for our benefit. Any spare can be exported to India. Australian natural rescources are for the benefit of Australia, not the poor of India or anywhere else. We have blown manufacturing. Natural rescources and agriculture are all we have left. With current low prices for raw materials we should be squeezing every cent we can out of them.

The same goes for uranium: dig it up, use it oursleves and export it. If we can't dig our own holes and trade our products, we are a very, very silly country.

Curmudgeon it's not figures you need look at, but actual electricity Producing solar thermal projects in California and Arizona!

What, you think hard nosed American investors are going to throw billions at projects that just don't stack up?

It's just not a figment of my overactive imagination!

I know you just don't want it to be true because your patent (full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes) obsession with coal!

Even so there are other even more cost competitive examples to look at that are carbon free or carbon neutral!

And cheap enough to actually resuscitate and revive our manufacturing base!

And our punch drunk and staggering economy!

If we used our remaining smarts and converted our economy to half price thorium power; we'd still have to mine and process it, and employ possibly more folks in the power industry.

But more than saving what that costs us by the fact we just don't need to dig up and transport millions of tons of no longer competitive coal!

It's not the workforce that make coal increasingly uncompetitive with these alternatives; but rather the cost of the tons of fuel that must be burned in them!

And indeed the fact that the cost of this form of fuel never ever goes down; or the fact that the great white elephant of a national grid make the eventual supplied reticulated energy twice as expensive and carbon emitting as it could be.

My rationale is based solely on sound economic grounds; rather than some half assed green ideology.

I mean we have enough thorium to power the world for 700 years and ourselves for thousands, if we were just smart enough to kept it for our on industries!

These solar power projects are built and producing cost competitive power, thanks to essential economies of scale, and forever free fuel in the most competitive free market in the world!

But then the fact you don't know about them just doesn't surprise!

It's hard to see anything from where you've patently buried your fact free head!
Rhrosty.

Where the whole article falls apart, is that if you are poor in India you don't have access and cannot afford electricity anyway.

Some of the comments ignore evidence and valid opinion by competent people. I have done the sums and at 50% efficiency (actual efficiency likely to be less than 10%) all the worlds annual production of food grains and sugar, converted to biomas energy, would supply about 5% of the world's liquid fuel consumption annually. Biomas is no solution.

The former CEO/Chairman of BHP, Sir ian McLennan, and the senior coal mining union official in the Hunter Valley were both of the opinion than coal is too valuable (actually essential )to future generations to be burned now simply for its thermal value.

Warmair; many poor rural Indian communities have reportedly found they can actually afford very local power; when it is provided utilizing homemade biogas produced in digestors utilizing human waste?

The averaged 40% energy coefficient produced by the old noisy diesels; can be literally doubled when this same endlessly available virtually costless bladder stored gas,is scrubbed and then piped through ceramic fuel cells!

Which after supplying the world's cheapest power; thanks to the then vastly improved 80% energy coefficient, also add forever free domestic hot water!

The exhaust product being mostly pristine water vapor!

Australia has produced a vastly superior smell fre variant that could power all the impoverished places in the world; and something that would pay handsomely in the future, if we donated a few exported projects with currently largely wasted aid dollars?

Which would be better spent as a direct donations supplying water pumping windmills; and the aforementioned cheap as chips power projects!

Which by the way, solve several otherwise intractable problems, associated with untreated human waste, all too common in impoverished communities

However, her at home, we're just not smart enough to emulate that ultra-thrifty example; because it doesn't suit our gold plated national grid; or the captive market used like herded cattle; to make it very profitable for our "essential" command and control, foreign investors?

And only possible as an outcome, because all the visionary self actuated leaders died out with Ben chifley and P.M. Curtain, who just weren't terrified of borrowing for income earning infrastructure!

Something visionary Leaders would emulate, if we had ANY!?
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty Aidan

again you ability to ignore reality and make up the most bizarre stories is entertaining were it not so alarming. All the projects you mention require big subsidies to compete. This statement "These solar power projects are built and producing cost competitive power, thanks to essential economies of scale, and forever free fuel in the most competitive free market in the world!" is quite wrong. I have no idea where you got it from but go back and look. You'll find its from an activist web site, and even they would have qualified it.

Aidan was at least a little closer with his statement about capital intensive, but again, sorry no. All the energy projects are capital intensive, not just solar thermal - those plants have capital requirements per MW far in excess of conventional plants and don't last as long. So again, I don't know where the 4 per cent figure came from but its wrong. There are various cost-output comparisons (search on levelised costs).. but they are not the full story, and solar thermal loses out even on those..

I'm sorry, but any new coal mine opening anywhere actually *does* increase emissions. We should be mass producing passive-safety LFTR's that can eat nuclear waste and convert today's nuclear waste storage 'problem' into 500 years of clean energy for the entire planet!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

LFTR's can be mass produced like an airline, with one 300MW reactor coming off the line every day for about the price of coal, but *without* coal's 'externalised' health costs! Given that coal's health legacy practically DOUBLES the cost of coal, LFTR's would therefore pretty much HALVE the true cost of coal to society. Or think of it this way: we'd pay the same for electricity, but have about 10% less on the public health bill. (Forbes).

Once again the usual suspects have gone off topic. The article is, and responses should be, about Australian coal and who exploits it; its benefit to Australia; the Australian environment, or whether the first two have anything to do with the poor of India.

Bilge about different kinds of energy resources is irrelevant.

INDIAN PUNKAWALLA POWER nongs

It is my belief that all youse miss the point, are scum, and I am right, as per usual.

None ya wind, solar, coal or nucleeya.

What India really, really needs is the return of Punkawalla Power.

Note Exhibit A http://englishmaninitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/punka_wallah.jpg

Exhibit B http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/exhibits/e-exhibits/india/pc3d18b.jpg

As you can see a Punkawalla is a renewable resource with minimal emissions and learns a trade.

Bloke just stands there and waves a fan or pulls a chain. Any nong can do that!

As any cretin knows:

In India and Pakistan, a punkhawallah or punkha wala is a manual fan operator. A punkah is a type of ceiling fan used in the Indian subcontinent. The punkhawallah is the illiterate untouchable who works it, often using a pulley system, for a rupee a month. The word pankha originates from pankh, the wings of a bird which produce a draft when flapped.

Poyda

Pete,

I think all the punkah wallahs are now IT workers in Australia enjoying air con.

///Once again the usual suspects have gone off topic. The article is, and responses should be, about Australian coal and who exploits it;///
No one should, because climate change will destroy the world's poor...

///its benefit to Australia;///
Marginal short term financial gains while climate change gather's steam. It's like selling the shop, you get a cash injection but kill your longer term method of earning an income. Coal is killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and any other cliche you can think of. Why cliche's? Because your 'contribution' here is one of them: strawman the real subject, energy, and typecast it as only coal.

///the Australian environment///
See climate change comment above

///whether the first two have anything to do with the poor of India///
See climate change comment above

///Bilge about different kinds of energy resources is irrelevant///
See climate change comment above

You're clearly no Punkawalla Max.

Max,

You are clearly obsessed with climate change. I am not. You also appear to be better at copying and pasting than you are at expressing yourself. I tried to work out how your comments were relevant to my post, to no avail. I'm not sure if you are telling me what I should be thinking, or whether you think that I have misinterpreted the theme of the piece. Climate change certainly wasn't an issue with the writer or with me.

What an interesting reply. You’re either having genuine problems with comprehension, or are just so stubbornly ignorant about climate change that you can’t see this article screams against climate science. Phrases like ‘rent-a-crowd’ greenies denigrate the average Australian citizen that is concerned that a corporation like Adani should not be receiving a government built railway to then ship coal across our Great Barrier Reef all the while giving worldwide climate agreements the finger! Apparently, in your view, because we’re discussing an ‘article’ about a ‘mine’, we are immune from the flow on effects as spelt out by the laws of physics, and then the laws of human nature.

“Stopping Adani would abate no net carbon dioxide emissions.”
Yes it would: it would stop the emissions from that coal mine. Others are fighting for climate stability in other parts of the world. They respect the laws of physics, whether or not you or this author calls them ‘rent-a-crowd ‘greenies.

“Stopping Adani may, however, raise the price of electricity for poor Indians.” Or they could do what the French did and fast-track clean, CO2 neutral nuclear power. Oh wait! The Indians are! They’re even building test breeder reactors because one day they want to extract 60 times the energy from uranium that today’s LWR’s extract: in other words, burn nuclear waste!

It appears the author made a typo: I’ll fix it with capitals below.
“Foreign aid charities that profess to care about world poverty should NOT back this project.”

Climate change will bankrupt the poorer nations of the world before it does the rich. More coal is definitely NOT in India’s long term interests!

Rhosty,

You keep repeating this type of post regarding biogas.

"twice as cheap, endlessly available Biogas connected to ceramic fuel cells; able to provide very local electricity, for quarter of the price of coal!"

"My rationale is based solely on sound economic grounds"

This is the third time I've responded asking if you have invested any of your own money in these projects, as you seem convinved they are no only feasible, but ranging anywhere from half to a quarter of the price of our currently cheapest option. So, again, have you invested any of your own money, and if so, where?

India REALLY needs more coal! Like, REALLY!
(What are we, racists that think Indians need wiping out? They're breeding too fast so we may as well contribute to bumping off a few million?)

"Proof of the grave air pollution problem confronting India is seen not just in the suffocating smog that on many days crowds out the sun in New Delhi, the world’s most polluted city. It can be measured as well in the fact that the country has the world’s highest death rate from chronic respiratory diseases, which kill an estimated 1.5 million Indians every year. A 2014 World Health Organization report concluded of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, India has 13."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/opinion/cutting-through-indias-smog.html?_r=0

The best energy projects are ones that literally walk out the door, such as homemade biogas made in India by impoverished villages, pooling their limited resources! REPORTED FACT!

If I had some still lazy money to invest stezza, it would be used in apple shares; given they have been smart enough to outfit their new HQ, with cost cutting solar power; and biogas powered fuel cells.

You don't have to be among the smartest folk on the planet to invest in lower costing alternatives like biogas and ceramic fuel cells to produce storable power available 24/7. But it surely has to help!?

And given methane powered ceramic fuel cells have a reported 80% energy coefficient!( the best in the world)

Able to massively undercut coal, which at best can only manage a 20% energy coefficient!

Which by the way is the published result, which makes biogas( methane) connected to ceramic fuel cells; able to not only provide the world's cheapest power, but produce mostly pristine water vapor in the process!

My challenge to you remains prove anything I've claimed here untrue, which is the tricky slimey inference; in your patent attempted character assassination?

I fatuously thought you were above that!?

My share holdings remain my private business thank you; suffice to say, win or lose, I have thousands invested in visionary innovation; as does my Granddaughter!
Rhrosty.

One word: quantity?

"Supplying the United States ' current energy needs would require an area of one million square miles. That's roughly one-third of the area of the 48 contiguous states. There is no way that plantations could be implemented at this scale, not to mention that soil exhaustion would eventually occur. Biomass cannot replace our current dependence on coal, oil, and natural gas, but it can complement other renewables such as solar and wind energy."
http://www.altenergy.org/renewables/biomass.html

The moment you start growing a serious amount, you also seriously undermine food. It becomes food V fuel. This is so serious that the Australian Medical Association put in their concerns to the 2004 Australian Senate Peak Oil enquiry. However, nuclear can provide the world's energy needs many times over for many millions of years

Rhostry,

I don't want to see you do your dough. As I think I once told you, fuel-cells fed with hydrocarbons produce CO2, so don't help the AGW equation.

Whatever, investment in anything with a massive gov't subsidy is not silly, at least until the curtain comes down on the whole renewables farce.

I wish you and your grand-daughter well in your investments. Take care.

Oh, fossil hydrocarbons? No, that won't do at all. I thought he was talking about "homemade biogas", some kind of sewer-system brewed up methane or farmed biomass. Unless someone cracks a magic algae solution and a way to feed them all the NPK they need cheaply enough, I don't think any biomass solution is going to come to the rescue.

As you know, France has shown us the way...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/07/coal-is-not-the-answer-to-indias-energy-poverty-whatever-tony-abbott-says?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Twitter

EAS Sarma - "As a former secretary of India’s ministry of power, I know India’s challenges. Australian coal doesn’t make economic sense for us – but renewables do."

"Adani’s huge Carmichael coal mine – the biggest in Australian history – has been overturned by the federal court, causing much consternation for coal advocates, chief among them Australian prime minister Tony Abbott.

He contends that Carmichael is critical for the human welfare of tens of millions of Indians and will provide power for 100 million people in India who currently have none.

But the claim that 100 million will be lifted out of energy poverty by a new wave of coal exports – driven largely by Indian companies Adani and GVK’s proposals to open Queensland’s vast Galilee Basin coal fields – reveals a deep lack of understanding of the real situation in India and other countries, where large populations remain without access to electricity.

India’s population of 1.24 billion comprises 247 million households, 68% of whom live in rural villages. According to the 2011 census, 45% of these rural households – 75 million – have no electricity. Of urban households, 6 million remain without electricity, or about 8% of the total.

These figures have not changed appreciably since 2001, though around 95,000 MW of new largely coal-based electricity generation capacity was added during the intervening decade.

In other words, the benefits of adding new generation capacity accrued largely to the existing, affluent consumers. There are a number of reasons why this is the case.

In the rural areas, many remote villages are beyond the reach of the electricity grid. There are also many families in electrified villages who cannot pay for expensive electricity.

It is therefore simplistic and simply inaccurate to assume that new electricity generation capacity added to the grid will automatically reduce electricity deprivation among the poor.

To address energy poverty and energy security, India’s focus must be on encouraging locally-generated and indigenous renewable energy systems and moving towards decentralised electricity generation based on renewables."

Or decentralised electricity based on baseload, reliable, sun & shade, summer & winter micro-nuclear. Small Modular Reactor's (SMR's) are on the way that basically act like nuclear batteries. Some are just buried, are so heavy it would take days to jackhammer through concrete and have a crane lift them out (by which time security would well and truly have grabbed any terrorists), and are basically indestructible. After 5 years a company truck turns up, buries the next one and leaves that running while they take the old one away. There are a variety of approaches, and all generate *reliable* day and night, summer and winter electricity.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/