Murray:

Climate change can be addressed comprehensively ASAP without harm to the economy or the environment! In fact, economic growth on steroids!

We can address climate change by transitioning to CARBON FREE nuclear energy as MSR thorium, the cheapest energy we are able to create. In so doing, force our economy into overdrive.

If we include genuine tax reform as part of that scenario, we will be almost killed in the stampede by high tech manufacture, to relocate.

A 15% flat tax that's entirely unavoidable, above a generous tax-free threshold will allow every business to return all tax compliance (averaging 7%) outlays to the bottom line. This will allow the best minds in the company to focus more exclusively on building the business/sales!

8% is not a huge amount to contribute to all social amenity, road, rail, port facilities, health and education.

Every business is better served by and healthy and well-educated workforce, good roads, rail and Distibution networks. As public amenity along with energy supply!

All which better served if keep in public hands, out of foreign price gouging, tax avoiding, profit repatriating hands!

Co-ops may be considered as private business models supply some of the above. Add the economic factor of numerous players providing fierce competition for your energy dollar.

We need to get back to the sanity where energy bill was far lower than the wages bill!

Moreover, cheap nuclear energy can be tasked with, using known science, turn inexhaustible seawater into all manner of carbon neutral hydrocarbons. Alternative fuel, plastics and fertilisers.

MSR technology can also be used to burn free nuclear waste, which is up to 95% unspent fuel. Thereby reducing the half-life to just 3-400 years as opposed to thousands. Supplying the world's cheapest industrial energy!

Thus, we have addressed climate change/given a great boon to the environment!

Thinking within a fixed circle of ideas, limits the questions and by inference, also the answers.

Take the blinkers off Murray and take a look at the available answers, not your politically motivated ideological imperative!?
Alan B.

There isn't an environmentally catastrophic project that won't be rubber stamped because it will "save the planet". Yet the same people will be sent into paroxisms at the mention of nuclear power.

The hypocrisy is amazing. The people who used to fret about the environment have changed their religion. Environment out. Climate in.

The environment they used to be into is being ruined by solar panels stretching to the horizon, and windmills that required the environment to be ripped up to accommodate them. The sky line will soon be criss-crossed with thousands of kilometres of pylons and wires.

All supported, or instigated, by our political duopoly, so there is nothing we can do about it. Ah, let's face, not many Australians want to do anything about it.

The time will come when even these Net Zero, anti-CO2 nutters will have to face up to the fact that nothing that they are doing to kill the economy and the environment will have had any affect on the climate at all.

I'm not likely to be around to see what their next fantasy will be.

>many of the proposed remedies infringe upon the principles of environmentalism

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They're not really remedies though are they ? It's like suggesting a remedy to cancer is praying, or leeches or reading your star sigh. If they're not remedies then they shouldn't be called that. This mistakes actions for solutions. Jumping up and down on the spot and calling that a remedy for climate change, is it really a remedy were doing "something" ?

The only "remedy" is severe curtailment of energy USE in the developed world not ecars or other such nonsense, which are just more business as usual but no private cars, no flying, way less meat etc ... that's it, we've run out of time for anything else.

Anything else beside that is just business as usual consumption and exploitation. There is no time left for nonsense non solutions like nuclear etc We won't do that so were on a course to watch the destruction of civilization, fascinating in the abstract and the Fermi Pardox writ large.

You called it Fester and Valley guy hopped in to prove you are right on the money! It's (brain washed) idiots like the aforementioned that force us to keep using coal and hugely expensive intermittents, simply to satisfy and entirely insane ideological imperative. That would throw us back to the dark ages and the survival of the fittest!

As Forest Gump noted, stupid is as stupid does!

And God help they have the vote and enough numbers to decide most election outcomes. Critical thinking is a bridge to far for that brainwashed from birth cohort!
Alan B.

Alan has made the case for nuclear in one form or another.
As oil fades out there will be very significant changes to be made.
Australia has to start and build an energy system from scratch.
The so called renewables are completely out of the picture.
It is now obvious with experience the world has had with them that
Renewables means you RENEW them every 20 years.
That ongoing cost has to be added onto your electricity bill.
By the time our current program is finished they can go back to the
beginning and start replacing them.

Like it or not the petrol & diesel vehicle is finished.
We have to have an energy system that can replace those fuels.
Any suggestions ?

The author really does build his arguments on a house of cards doesn't he.

The claim: "Solar farms create ecological impacts, including the loss of habitats for indigenous wildlife and flora." is just silly. There are no great swathes of bushland being levelled for solar farms. There may be an argument that they are removing agricultural land from production which is valid, but cropping is usually of an introduced monoculture and grazing is usually an introduced mammal on introduced pastures, both create virtual bio-deserts.

There is growing research showing in this context that solar farms enrich local biodiversity. http://reneweconomy.com.au/how-solar-farms-can-double-as-havens-for-our-wildlife/

If so this completely negates a principle plan of the author's argument.

Good for you Steele. It is nice to see you discussing something of consequence. 20,000 square kilometres of renewable energy infrastructure to generate power for about 1.25 million homes: That in itself is a bloody disgrace, environmental or otherwise. No wonder there is anger at such projects and the lunatics proposing them.

All Labor needs do is agree to remove the nuclear ban, then we will all know the truth as to whether nuclear can deliver energy cheaply, reliably and safely. But that won't happen as Labor has a large contingent of tinfoil hat anti-nuclear exponents. Nuclear is by far the cheapest source of dispatchable energy. When you look at the Gencost report, the CSIRO boffins removed conventional nuclear from their report for a rather odd reason. I think that they did this so they wouldn't have to acknowledge that nuclear power plants in operation for several decades produced dispatchable energy at a similar or slightly lower cost compared with non-dispatchable wind and solar. When you look at the data from Europe, nuclear energy is around a third the cost of renewable energy and has a far smaller footprint.

Remove the nuclear ban and I would guess there would be much interest in building conventional nuclear generation in Australia.

Yes Fester, just call for tenders and then you will find out the EXACT
cost of nuclear in its various formats.