"ttbn,
Do you seriously think the severity of the bushfires is unrelated to climate change?".

Yes I do. And so does the IPCC whose spokespeople have recently repeated that climate change has had NO effect on bushfires or the drying out of the land. You just listen to, and read, the bits that suit your extremist ideologies. Summers in Australia continue to be the same as they always have. You need to start reading history.

Not a bad idea, provided Coles and Woolworths let their customers know that prices of goods sold in their supermarkets will go up as a result. If their customers are happy with these price increases, well and good, but I suspect so many people are doing it tough in Australia at present that they won't welcome higher food prices.

EVERY building should have solar panels and a solar HWS on its roof ! !

"And if the 14 largest telecommunications, IT, and technology companies - like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone - powered their operations with 100% renewable energy, it would lead to 1GW of new wind and solar projects, enough to power over 600,000 homes, and create around 2,000 construction job-years."

Yet more wishful thinking!

With 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone would have service outages during coincident sunless, windless and drained back-up battery periods -- hardly the way to run modern, reliable telecommunications services.

Cont. It is only a question of time before we cannot give coal away? Unless or until we can come up with a practical affordable alternative. And doable!

We robotise coal mining! To reduce the eternally mounting cost and remove the control of the CUMEF from it! Then take washed coal and cook it with flameless heat. Could be a solar thermal project built on reclaimed coal mines. or where once stood power stations? Then the gas scrubbed and passed through fractional distillation to remove any CO2 as dry ice.

Then the storable gas pumped into a national gas grid, that could use existing energy corridors! And available on-demand 24/7!

Methane/NG is a reductant and therefore extends the life of any such pipeline by reducing or eliminating oxidisation.

Also transmitting energy as gas would remove most of the current transmission and distribution losses, remove the necessity of boilers, turbines, and staging transformers and all their associated maintenance costs! Over 75% of the current combined cost of reticulated and gold plated, price-gouged energy!

The methane then fed into the client's onsite ceramic fuel cell(S) Where the exhaust product is mostly pristine water vapour!

We build something like that here as a clean coal demonstration product that is actually cheaper than all the much-vaunted renewables and we will sell coal until all we have is holes in the ground!

Robots will work 24/7, won't strike, control the labor party, take sickies, demand overtime rates or leave, holidays etc, won't die of black lung disease etc.

Incidentally, may be able to replace coal with hydrogen in steel smelting

And we can make hydrogen from methane by passing it through a catalyst that hives off a few hydrogen molecules to make methanol, a substitute for fully imported petrol.

Any jobs lost in the transition, replaced by the new much more permanent fuel technologies! TBC.
Alan B.

There is absolutely no link between Co2 and temperature, in fact scientific fact clearly shows (from ice cores in Greenland and conclusively backed up from ice cores from Antarctica) that over the past 500 or so million years there is no correlation between Co2 and temperature. The opposite over long time periods is scientific fact.

Had it not been for man’s contributions to Co2 resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, it was possible the declining levels of Co2 occurring naturally may have been devastating as at around 150ppm Co2, all vegetation begins to die. So thank you man made Co2, the more the merrier.

3 thousand odd years ago when Co2 levels were much lower than today, temperatures were approximately 2 degrees warmer. Man survived and thrived, another couple of scientific facts which are conveniently denied.

Current global temperatures are well within natural climate variability, another inconvenient scientific fact being ignored.

The current fires have resulted from normal weather and man made impacts at the local level. Ever heard of drought and strong fuel loads with associated high temperatures and strong wind, all within the bounds of natural variability.