Paul

This is my huge gripe with Costalotello latest budget. It’s just more of the same, when it can’t be more bleedingly obvious that large-scale changes are needed.

Most urgently, we need huge measures to ease the pain of conversion from the fossil fuel era onto renewable energy sources. This would go a very long way towards addressing climate change issues. A few extra measures would be needed to fully address sustainability, and then we would well and truly be on the right track.

But no. We’ll continue to prop up the current system, including high population and economic growth, until it just collapses. Then maybe people will start realising just how incredibly irresponsible Costello and Howard have been.

Beazley is barely any better, although he did have something to say about something vaguely related to something to do with peak oil or greenhouse or something!

No, the liblabs are a dead loss. They are just going to continue taking us down the road to ruin.

I desperately hope that peak oil will cause a backflip in one or both of these politicodinosaurs and make them see the great error of their ways. But it won’t come easily.

Afterall I would have thought that after a few years they would be seriously questioning the merits of continuous high population growth in centres that have very serious water-supply issues. But noooooo, its just maximum growth as though there is not an issue at all with one of the most fundamental resources. Crazy stuff.

They’ll do anything to keep the growth (and the antisustainability momentum) happening, and this will no doubt mean supporting nuclear power more strongly as we become more resource-stressed.

The latest budget was a complete disappointment to me as well. Nothing, nothing to enhance rail - thus reducing trucking. Nothing towards sustainable energy. Nothing towards public transport - reducing need for cars.

What did Beazley have to say - nothing as well. Another opportunity lost.

We will be forced on nuclear power as a last ditch option when we could've have set up viable and sustainable industries with such a huge budget.

And what is Costello on about increasing family size while we run out of resources? Madness.

“And what is Costello on about increasing family size while we run out of resources? Madness.”

Absolutely! In fact, it is the nearest thing to pure lunacy that I have struck in Australian politics.

Even full-on support for a nuclear industry couldn’t be more profoundly stupid.

As a fuel scientist, I wonder how you can maintain nuclear power is unsustainable. The uranium is going to undergo fission whether it is dilute and buried in a mine or concentrated and sitting in a power plant, where there will be a critical mass of its kinfolk to do some useful work. The amount of fossil energy used to build the plant is trivial and probably about the same to build a coal- or natural gas-based electricity plant, but the comparison stops there. Once commissioned, the plant consumes no fossil fuel nor does it contribute to the anthropomorphic inventory of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So long as a coal-based plant runs, it helps to open the Canadian Northwest Passage and destroy habitat for polar bears. Oh yes, and displace 30 million souls in the Ganges delta, along with Manhattan Island, Galveston the Gold Coast etc.

Hells bells billwells, what an extremely selective focus!

As a fuel scientist you would know all about the arguments against nuclear energy, including the enormous consequences of Chernobyl-type accident, the insidious nature of the waste product, the risk of sabotage, earthquakes, targeting by hostile forces, etc.

What about the fact that overall economics, taking into account decommissioning, are well and truly on the negative side?

And who is saying that nuclear energy will replace coal? It won’t. It will just add to it. Coal will continue to be burnt for as long as it is a ‘good’ economic choice.

So why do you give us such a one-sided perspective?

Anyway, welcome to OLO. Straight into the thick of it eh!

billwells,
Good on you! Get stuck into these illinformed leftwing greens, who want to take us back to the beginning of time when they believe the Earth was pristine and no man inhabited this planet.