There is only one 'option' for climate change - get over it; it happens, and we have to live with it. One more thing: ignore what politicians have to say on the subject, and all other subjects. We can't stop them yabbering, but we don't have to listen.

Neither the RET nor Direct Action will achieve the 26% emissions cut by 2030. We're still on roughly the same emissions as 2005 so it hasn't done enough so far. Combining some figures from a Newscorp article in 2017 the LRET will cost 26m Mwh X $86 LGC= $2.24 bn. I don't have an exact figure but I believe Direct Action or ERF has spent most of its $2.55 bn budget. In any case it wasted millions on actions that would be taken anyway or were temporary or unverifiable. Money that could have been spent on schools or hospitals.

The matching effort option has some merit. Brazil wanted a backdated credit for 150 years of carbon capture by the Amazon jungle. Well they shouldn't be chopping it down in that case. India says it has the right to elevate 1.2 bn to middle class instead of a quarter of that number. Perhaps they should get their population more sustainable. If everybody puts in a matching effort now in terms of carbon constraints all that other stuff is in the past. A second advantage is those countries can slap carbon tariffs on countries that are not in the club eg on imports from Trump's America if he repeals the EPA plan.

While I agree with the broad thrust of David Leyonhjelm’s argument I think it has the same deficiency as most other recipes for reducing emissions. It lacks a strategic framework, that is, it is not part of a bigger plan to reduce global emissions to a level presently believed necessary to stabilise climate.

There are elements of such a plan here, like aligning with other nations’ targets, but apart from the mention of nuclear energy there is little indication of where we really ought to be heading in the longer term. This contrasts with the overt strategy of the green lobby, which is to move to a 100% renewable economy. If that were possible then current tactics might be excusable, even justified. But it isn’t and they aren’t, and that simple fact defines the starting point for a sound government energy/climate strategy. Without such a strategy there is a serious danger that everything we do in the interim will turn out to be an expensive waste.

2016, the hottest ever year, on record! And occurring during a solar waning period that previously, would have ushered in a mini ice age!?

Three shrewd options, don't ever include, absolutely ignoring compelling, almost irrufutable evidence to the contrary!? Even more so, when there's an even more compelling economic case to be made for adopting and embracing, economy growing change!

Change that will be resisted to the very last breath by intractable recalcitrant David, the suppository of all wisdom, with a vested interest in the Status Quo?

Why else are such myopically focused folk able to completely ignore the compelling evidence? And easy enough if you never ever look with the blinkers or blindfold off, or objectively?

If you are able, get online and on U tube and take a OBJECTIVE look at thorium and the absolutely compelling ECONOMIC case for replacing coal with the most energy dense material in the world! And just ignore the fact that this abundant easily recovered material, is cheaper than coal, cleaner than coal, safer than coal, carbon free energy!

Or alternatively? Run true to form like all the tin ear conservatives you and your ilk are David? And just refuse to look!?

And wait, like a frog being slowly brought to the boil, warm and comfortable until it's too late, when our combined goose, is well and truly cooked and our fossil fueled economy completely ruined! The planet and your and my Grand kid's prospects destroyed? Because that is what's on the table David, patently the senate's most able intellectual giant!

Keep on keeping on with this self serving risible recalcitrant rubbish. The next election is just a little over 2 years away! Then wonder why you and your carved in stone mindset are rejected and for all time, by folk no longer able to be fooled or reject the ever accumulating, mounting, irrefutable evidence!

Turn the lights off, when you leave, there's a good chap.
Alan B.

I will believe that 2016 was the hottest year on Record when our Eco 'Scientists' stop 'homogenising' the previous century of Climate Data.

Until then , they are in the Emperors Clothes ..

David, only when the last litre of oil and the last kilogramme of coal have been auctioned off on E-Bay will we see any one entity actually do something positive about renewable technology en mass.

Until then the oil barons have it stitched up.

Whatever happened to Ralph Sarich's 'Orbital engine' ? Oh yes, sold off to BP many years ago.

What happens with our brightest minds beavering away on all those projects at various universities around this wide brown land ? They get snatched up by the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto & others to be bogged down & buried by the dinosaurs of industry. Their cartels pour billions each year into party coffers around the world. Did I hear someone say: " What, another mining boom pissed up the wall like the pay-packet of a sailor on shore leave...?"

Australia - one of the most suitable countries to utilise solar technologies, with the spare acreage to do so and yet we see the likes of incumbent state/federal governments kow-towing to the coal barons at Adani and Co. Dinosaur brains with fossil fuel mentality and chronic political myopia on a 3 to 4 yearly cycle. Mega bucks CEO's and cartels shovelling billions each year into party coffers.

Places like Carnarvon in WA with thermal water sources (several others in the NT as well)...sweet Fanny Adams done in developing this technology which can be used to cool "refrigerate" in more arid regions, as well as supply heat to generator units. Infinitely much better to 'frack' and extract CSG than to keep unique sites like Mataranka/Bitter Springs as they are for posterity hey Gina ?

"Pave paradise and put up a parking lot" as Joni Mitchell would have said.

Holes in the ozone layer I hear you ask? DuPont de Nemours patents on CFC's were running out in the early 1990's so to be prudent, several "studies" were commissioned in the 1970's to find the cause(s)...et voila we now have ongoing patents for HCFC's and the newest generation of gases aka LNG/LPG derived refrigerants from CSG/petroleum bases.

The reality is that reducing CO2 emissions costs too much money and the greenies won't accept neuclear power. Consequently most countries are only committed to tokenism. If global warming caused by humans is today's reality, we will have to get used to it!

If you really want to reduce fossil-fuel usage, then your very first action should be to stop supporting the practice of procreation. In fact, it should be penalised.

Is it acceptable to preach others to reduce their energy footprint while at the same time polluting the planet indefinitely with perpetually multiplying progeny?

What's done is done, but with a 9-month notice, all support for new-borns should be dropped. No welfare, no maternity-leave, no medical-care, no child-care, kindies, schools or tax-rebates for them. Those who still wish to infest the planet in their image should not only bear the full expenses, but also be named-and-shamed.

Once there are no longer "future generations" to worry about, or at least fewer of those, one no longer needs to be concerned about the fuel they consume during their remaining few decades.

Where are the schools that educate children about the tyranny of their genes, teaching them that rather than being blindly obeyed, these little monsters are unworthy selfish mechanisms that should best be ignored or spat at?

In this my imagined greatness is in rare agreement with Senator for Guns Lino's dog's balling gonadness*.

Every WEEK China's and India's construction of coal fired power stations cancels out a whole YEAR of any greenhouse gas reductions Australia can painfully achieve.

This is not good my mistress, not gud at all, Julia.

The end result being all of Austraya emulating South Australia's mad back-to-cave-dwelling Luddite** breaking. Breaking of perfectly good hydrocarben power stations in favour of renewable electricity production that must anyway be supported by Victoria's remaining hydrocarbon power stations.

South Australia's never to be achieved nuclear power aspirations are unpopular with its populous, and but a distraction for the simple.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonad speakum truth.

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Where to now? Australia should heavily utilise gas powered power stations rather than selling the gas to ingrates who are prepared to pay too much for it. Counter-intuitive? Yup.

Poida da Great

South Australians are finally waking up to the fact that our politicians have ostensibly, sold them down the river?

That their energy is now so expensive as to preclude, industrial production and that privatization, wherever it has occurred hasn't result in cheaper power bill or a better maintained system? Just a gold plated one?

This being so, we need to return public amenity, to former, not for profit, public ownership! And a far better deal than that offered by debt laden, tax avoiding, profit repatriating foreigners. Whose only self evident goal seems to be, aided and abetted by some of our self serving pollies? To screw us over, while we pay them, way beyond the natural cost, for the privilege?

Every western style economy rests on just two support pillars, energy and capital! Neither of which should have ever been privatized in any way, shape or form!

Given, keeping them as exclusively ours, is all that in truth, guarantees our economic sovereignty! S.A. learned the hard way, how little it prospers them to be at the whim and caprice of profit orientated foreign investors!

Nothing intrinsically wrong with foreign investment just the control and inherent unreliability that invariably goes with it, thanks to some of the most asinine policy objectives ever seen in this (sold down the river) country?

We need change we can believe in! And maybe that's a brand new political party that patently places Australians and Australia first and foremost! And telling like it is, would be good start!

We need nuclear energy and that needs to be walk away safe, molten salt thorium energy! Even if that means exposing the national grid as the great white, gold plated, elephant it truly is!
Alan B.

Here we go again !
Pages of posts all pontificating about CO2, different ways of reducing
it, arguing this or that solution.
It is all redundant.
It does not matter whether global warming is real or not !
All that matters is can we build an alternative energy system that
can give us reliable electricity quick enough before the whole
structure comes crashing down ?

The quick answer is yes we can, the long answer is can we afford it
and is it already to late to start ?

These are the questions for which the politicians are paid to find the
answers as it will take at least a couple of decades to complete.
The key question is do we have the time ?

Then to complicate the answer is that Sydney's population alone is
expected to rise by 200,000 a year or some such mad number.
With all that is going on in the energy scene could this only be
done by insane politicians ?