I've just experienced 39C temps in autumn in SW Tas. The air has been thick with smoke for weeks with water bombing aircraft overhead every day. The hydro dams are looking perilously low. If this is the new normal I don't care for it.

The single biggest contributor to climate change is the burning of coal. Therefore Australia is harming its own people by burning coal and exporting it for others to burn. Under the article's daft reasoning we might as well resume asbestos mining. After all our asbestos may be less harmful than someone else's so we'd really be doing the world a favour.

Therefore I think we are morally obligated to phase out coal mining as soon as practical. That will allow other lower carbon substitutes to take its place. In time their nominal costs may decline with the bonus of not creating as much hidden cost in the form of greenhouse gas. Coal apologists should ask themselves how long they have got before public opinion swings against them.

Coal is certainly part of our economic future, just not the way we and the world currently use it! With burn baby burn and to hell with the consequences including the worst and most enduring drought in the Middle East in 900 years.

And here, the very worst in living memory. As sightless coal investors are willfully blind as were both the tobacco and asbestos industries! And like the Author, focus exclusively on the economic implications.

And again fail to see that this industry may well be our economic undoing/albatross. As demonstrated by dozens of coal-ships cooling their heels in Chinese harbours.

Moreover, due diligence by the banking sector and financial forensic examination by the corporate sector has made this industry very unreliable.

Only corporate crooks want a bar of this. And I made no mention of Adani's well-publicised reputation in context with the last remark.

But allow the reader to draw their own conclusions about whether the average Australian voter is ever going to trust foreign-based, tax avoiding profit repatriating, price gouging foreigners to purloin our mineral wealth for what?

55,000 tenuous tempory jobs and billions more tons of climate-changing CO2 added to the atmosphere.

That said, we can still use thermal coal as a power source by first, cooking out the entire methane content with flameless heat. (MSR thorium) Then piping it to the end user, where it's fed into ceramic fuel cells, to produce, on demand 24/7 power, free hot water and pristine water vapour.

Eliminating all the inertia losses of the current power generation system and most if not all the transmission and distribution losses as we do so.

We could also decide, it would be far more pragmatic and economically sound, just to leave coal out of the equation and just rely on the aforementioned, MSR thorium!?

Moreover, methane used as CNG able to replace/substitute all portable transport fuel as a transitionary measure that brings with it 40% less CO2!?
Alan B.

"Coal apologists should ask themselves how long they have got before public opinion swings against them".

Public opinion is only just swinging away from the lies about coal and climate change. One hot day in Tasmania doesn't doesn't represent the new normal.

I do find it amazing that even those who know that CO2 is good for all the planets flora, & via the flora the fauna, & the whole global warming scam is simply a ploy by the elites, are starting to believe we should reduce our CO2 anyway.

Those that keep up know that the lack of sunspots is indicating a long period of increasing cold. We are going to need everything we have to try to keep warm, & it would be great to have much higher CO2, if only the stuff really could increase the planets temperature. It won't, & the increasing cold will reduce the real "green house gas" water vapour in the atmosphere.

Coal is not the solution in transition, but is the solution to mans comfort & wellbeing, for as long as we have it.

The global warming scam crowd obviously know the cold is coming, [they do know the real science] & are panicking to try to get their agenda through, before the increasing cold completely shuts down their com job.

Meanwhile the usual useful idiots will keep bleating the sky is falling. God help us.

Hasbeen, the hysteria over global warming is such that we are going to move away from fossil fuels. But while we can't agree on the science, we can, I think, agree on solutions. It is increasingly apparent that so-called renewables cannot cut it. The logical solution therefore is nuclear. Not that this can happen overnight, but perhaps over the next 50 or so years. It won't be as cheap as fossil fuels, but it won't be as ruinously expensive as the so-called renewables.

Fossil-fuels, generally, have a bright future as long as grid-scale storage for renewables has none, i.e. without some major cost/technology breakthrough raising its viability by an order of magnitude.

Due to large environmentalist protests Bangladesh, rather than hoping for such a breakthrough, it is bypassing coal-mining/burning for nuclear generation, while supposedly first-world countries don't contemplate this. We'll meet Bangladeshis on their way up in the world while they'll meet us on our way down.

Australia's industrial potential appears squandered, whichever party wins government, unless the LNP is just mouthing a renewables future without real intent. Before carbon pricing in other parts of the world hits coal exports, we must act on nuclear.

Good to see such sensible comments on this article. Sorry, Taswegian, but I suppose you're typical of Tassie's tiny green heart.

>>I've just experienced 39C temps in autumn in SW Tas.

Yep, it's called weather. And we're now at only the sixth day of autumn.

>>The single biggest contributor to climate change is the burning of coal.

And your evidence is...?

>>That will allow other lower carbon substitutes to take its place.

At least it's good to see you favour nuclear generation.

Yes calwest I do favour nuclear. If Merkel still runs Germany in 2022 it will be interesting to see if she unplugs the remaining nukes in favour of more coal or Russian gas.

Weather is when temps and rainfall stay within long established error bars. When they exceed them by a margin year after year that is climate change.

Come on Taswegian, how about a bit of bidding.

I'll see your one day of 39, & raise you the snow you had yesterday, just 5 days after the end of summer.

You see, 2 can play your stupid game of talking one day events.

Were I king for a day, I'd react to the Chinese embargo on our coal by cancelling all coal export licences. And ask those who want to remain? Turn it into methane gas we can use here, as our principle transport fuel.

And allow us to pocket the 26 billion plus we're currently forking out for fully imported fuel. Moreover, the transition to nuclear ought to be far sooner than fifty years, but in around seven. And for far-far less than coal, if it's MSR thorium.

However way it's spun, far-far safer than conventional nuclear power and far-far less costly than coal.

We here in Queensland should go first and then having created the cheapest energy in the world, start exporting it to southern states.

As we do so, extolling its virtues as carbon-free electricity! Plus its walk away safe, reliability and affordability! I mean, even if coal-fired power was transmitted at cost? MSR thorium could still undercut it.

Earn annual billions if a few of these plants were reserved for nuclear waste burners, even as they treated it as merely unspent fuel with years of thermal reaction and electricity left in them!

Moreover, for little or no cost given the annual income earned as waste disposal/burn. Could pay for all the essential infrastructure!

Finally, if we want to remove union involvement in either coal mines or power generation of the future?

They could be rolled out as union-free co-ops if that paradigm was facilitated and funded by government!

Not going to happen any other way!
Alan B.