Secret Societies are not needed. Great leaders are not needed.

When Michael Costa stood up and said "If we employ these carbon trading ideas, jobs will be lost," he didn't have to say any more. The general population says if jobs will be lost, then carbon trading must be no good. If being more sustainable is going to cost money (even if it might save money in the long term) it is no good. We want money now.

When we hear that the price of electricity will go up, even though its the cheapest in the world, we say "Don't do it." Renewables are "too expensive." Who cares if we will need them someday and they are sustainable. They are "too expensive," end of story. Money is more important than sustainability. Very few understand sustainability. Everybody understands money.

We want an engineering or technological solution so we don't have to make any hard decisions. Lets have carbon sequestration even though it won't work, then we can delay having to make hard decisions.

Bill Clinton said "It's the economy, stupid," and won the 1992 election and carried on for 8 years. Nothing has changed. Elections are won based on who will make us richer. We only make big changes when the Nazi's march through Poland and the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour.

The environment deteriorates slowly. No Nazi tanks or Japanese bombs.

I love the idea of a massive program for renewables in Australia. Lets go from 2% to 5% renewables producing power by 2012. That would hardly make any difference to the price of power, but it would go up slightly. We could then count on Michael Costa and others to say it was a bad idea.

Ericc,

A few facts. Our electricity is by no means the cheapest in the world. We have coal fired power stations, and the coal costs money, so the electricity is much dearer than hydro systems, where the water comes free. As far as I am aware the cheapest electricity is in Ontario, Canada, where they get 95% of their power from hydro, and the retail cost is around 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The other fact relates to renewable electric power. All renewable sources are intermittent, and are only practical on a large scale when you have hydro backup, such as the situation in Germany and Denmark, which can use hydro backup from Switzerland and Norway. Being the driest continent, we don't have much hydro. This limits our ability to use renewable energy, if we want the network voltage to be stable. In current practice the maximum safe contribution to the south-east network from renewables would be about 9%.

The fundamental problem with electricity over the last 125 years is that you cannot store it cheaply. This problem has plagued the electric car industry, as well as the design of power networks. It is interesting to note that John McCain is promoting the idea of offering a $US300 million reward to someone who can invent a practical, light, cheap battery that can be used in cars and power systems.

Thanks Plerdsus. I think you have responded the same way that 99% of the population would respond. Renewables are too expensive. We are used to cheap power and so that becomes a right. Nothing about sustainability because to you and 99% of Australia (and the world), sustainability is not important. Money is far more important.

When fossil fuels run out, we will worry about it. Until then, party on. Our system doesn't cater for saving for the future. Use up everything we have now, get as much cash for it as you can, and worry about the future, when the future is here.

Renewables can be wind, solar, waves, geothermal, biomass, mini-hydro, ethanol, vegetable oils and more. Storage is not just in batteries, it can be making hydrogen when the wind blows, pumping water back up to the dams when the sun shines and more. All these will be expensive and we will leave it up to our children to work out the bugs. It would be easier to start working out the bugs now, when we have plentiful power and we haven't overstocked the country and further stressed our ecosystems and water systems, but that is not the way we have set the system up.

Please tell your children, nieces, nephews, etc that they will have a huge task in front of them, if they want the kind of lifestyle we have had.

WE NEED TO DRILL AND WE NEEDED TO DRILL NOW. WE NEEDED TO DRILL 20 YEARS AGO.
We must think toward the future, both short term and long term. The long term solution is finding alternative sources of energy, those that are economical and sustainable. We must trust in the ingenuity of private enterprise to find our solution, we must not seek government intervention, instead we need to demand that the government simply get out of the way. There have been huge advances in hydrogen and solar energy in the past decade in the private sector. These advances seem to be viable alternative energies on a large scale in the future. However, these technologies are not ready yet. In the mean time we need an economical and viable short term solution. There are three parts of a broad, short term solution: us oil drilling, nuclear power and coal liquefaction.
Domestic Drilling-drilling in areas that are currently off limits due to government regulation. These areas include ANWR (Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge), outer continental shelf, and interior continental areas. This also includes extracting and using oil shale and tar sands.
Nuclear Power- Building more nuclear based power plants, which over its recent history has proven to be a safe and clean alternative to petrol based power.

Coal Liquefaction-a process that's been around for some time. It involves extracting an end product from coal that can be used as diesel fuel and help mitigate the demand of oil based energy.
Ethanol is NOT the answer.It takes more energy to produce corn based ethanol than the ethanol itself produces in return. The government also has placed high tariffs on sugar based ethanol, which has a higher energy yield and is more efficient than corn based ethanol. These tariffs are supposed to help domestic production of ethanol and serve as price protection, which they most certainly do. The problem for us, is we are burning one of our major sources of food to make fuel, when we could be using and promoting a more efficient and cheaper source for ethanol.

"Sooner or later, everyone and everything, sits down to a banquet of consequences".
Within only a few years, OPEC countries will have control over virtually all of the exportable surplus oil in the world (with the exception of Russia's petroleum, the production of which may reach a second peak in 2010, following an initial peak that precipitated the collapse of the USSR). The US -- whose global hegemony has seemed so complete for the past decade -- will suffer an increasing decline in global influence, which no amount of saber rattling or bombing of "terrorist" countries will be able to reverse. Awash in debt, dependent on imports, mired in corruption, its military increasingly overextended, the US is well into its imperial twilight years.

You forgot to mention Haleys comet. I hear it's responsible for at least SOMEthing important...