Thank you RPG, you said all I wanted to say although spoiled brats is a bit much. Pretentious adolescents would be better, yes I know it's the same but it sounds better. These brats need all the education we can drill into them.

I wonder of Anita knows what a Luddite is? Maybe she should read "Geological Storage of Carbon Dioxide" published in 2004 by the Geological Society in the UK - special publication 233. And maybe she needs to understand that new technologies often take years to prove that they do or don't work, so one has to wonder why she's not prepared to give carbon capture and sequestration a chance to prove itself, one way or the other.

Surely the question is specification writing? How much carbon per kw/hr will your 2012 then 2020 power station produce? Then all else being equal, even if you sequestrate successfully and yet your competitor produces zero or less, you still lose and the lesser carbon emitter wins?

Zero beats farts under the doona anytime?

In reply to rpg, nobody is proposing technologies that don't exist yet. Today's renewable technologies can supply 100% of our energy. This was not the case 5 years ago. However, if this wasn't the case, surely we'd still choose the biosphere.
You believe that climate change is a myth, but you'll excuse me if I believe the overwhelming scientific and public opinion instead of somebody I have never met from an internet forum.
In reply to JBowyer, I am neither adolescent nor pretentious (not that that is any excuse for ageism - we should not dismiss our younger people). As far as I understand education, it's about a search for empirical knowledge, rather than a grab for whatever conspiracy theory is winning the day.
In response to Bernie, thank you for your post. It seems to be a lot more civil than many of the posts here. I think it would be fantastic if geosequestration were available in time. Unfortunately, for the moment we need to urgently reduce our greenhouse gas emissions using currently available technologies. If sequestration becomes available in twenty years' time, then we can use it then, but we need to reduce emissions now, not in twenty years' time.
Thanks for your pragmatism, SapperK9.

hopeleft, I think the current global recession which we're just entering into will do more to reduce the rate of increase of GHG emissions than all the ETS schemes that are currently being talked about. It should buy us time to come up with the technological advances that I'm confident are just around the corner (but there still remains the need for political support of course).

hopeleft - every day in the media are stories proclaiming that we'll all get rich by selling new technologies to reduce CO2 footprint, so we should all get on board, look around. These are the technologies that don't yet exist, that we want to set up research centres to develop, it's exactly what people are proposing. Maybe you personally are not, but it's what endless media time is spent on.

In fact no one is saying we should sell existing technologies overseas, we don't have any - and the sequestration thing is a failure so far, we can't keep CO2 underground, the dang stuff leaks out! If there was something better, we wouldn't be trying something as flaky as CCS.

The existing technologies cannot supply 100% of our requirements, there is no room, or infrastructure or many other reasons - but the bottom line is cost - the existing technologies cannot compete, ergo they are not good enough yet. Are you seriously saying there is technology, deployable today that could supply the energy needs out into the future of Sydney? That's great, you should share it with the rest of us as no one else seems to know about it. Just repeating as a mantra "but we have the technologies now" will not make it a world saver, you have to actually do stuff to be successful, not just talk.