If we began today to sort out the few remaining minor difficulties with MSR thorium we'd have a manufacturing plant able to mass produce stock standard 350MW generators inside 7 years and at around one or two a month? Truck them to their sites for final bolt together, assembly over a couple of months.

Coal has a future, just not in power station but similar sized plants where flameless Solar thermal or nuclear heat will cook out the methane and then if we want, pipe it through a national gas grid to the home, or filling stations, for CNG road transport.

Or, by rail freight, to rural and regional Australia, where we would store it, and run it out in microgrids on demand.

Use it in (wear-free, solid state) ceramic fuel cells, as domestic or industrial power. And as the first consequence reduce combined transmission and distribution losses from around 75% combined to just 20%.

Transmission lines could come down to be replaced by recycled Aluminium pipes and or steel one where they need to cross roads.

Methane is a reductant, so this buried system should last for several generations where an 80% energy coefficient will make this combination into one more economical than coal-fired power pushed at considerable expense down miles and miles of expensive wires. And at the mercy of wildfires and wind storms, (and retailers)!

And bound to get ever more severe as we pump more and more CO2 into the atmosphere, even though it's already at record levels and in uncharted territory?

This gas stored in bladders at the home or factory, to iron out peak demand and consumed in ceramic fuel cells.
Produces power on demand and an exhaust product that is mostly pristine water vapour.

The residual products from this conversion would be a bitumen-like product and carbon. one could be used as pavement on sealed roads? The other as the basis for manmade Graphene. The strongest material on earth?

We'd recycle the transmission lines as a national gas grid? And essential if we won't transition to Nuclear power! Seriously reduce emissions!
Alan B.

Eric

You got the last paragraph right but you wasted a lot of time getting there. The arguments you used against Australia taking action on climate change were morally bankrupt. You should instead accept that climate change is indeed an existential threat and then argue that population growth makes it worse, along with most other environmental problems. Then we can go hand in hand into the sunset.

It does not matter one iota what Australia's 25 million do when there are cities with more people than the whole country here.
What Australi could do but never will is to work on sustainability which other nations could adopt & refine & that would make a difference to pollution but it still wouldn't stop climate change.
Climate change is the nature of Nature just as being thick is the nature of the beyond their ability to comprehend their education educated.
Humans are becoming an out-of-control cancer for which the only cure is common sense.

popnperish one of the significant blind spots of many greenies and environmental supporters is lack of respect for opponents or "non-believers." I've been in too many discussions with passionate, dedicated environmentalists who respond to the question:

"How can we get people to support action on climate change / biodiversity / pollution reduction / population stabilisation etc.?"
with
"They are all just idiots."

You will never change anybody's opinion when you start the conversation with "you are an idiot." It might make you feel superior (and sometimes that is the goal of being a greenie), but it won't get the massive action needed to get policy changes from governments.

It is important to try to understand why opponents or the apathetic feel the way they do. They aren't idiots just because they disagree with you. If you really want to go hand and hand into the sunset with people resisting a carbon tax or other measures to limit climate change, you're going to need to work with them and understand them.