When the DOT-COM bust happened 11 years ago, a lot of people lost their shirts. Investments in junk stocks like walk-my-dog.com lost everything. Those stocks were worthless. But there were still some stocks that were based on real value, google, bestbuy, yahoo, etc., dropped in value but not to zero.
Last year, the mortgage backed securities crashed because of government required sub-prime mortgages, but not to zero. They were based on real estate that physically exists.
There has been atmospheric cooling the last 8 years, and no new high global annual temperatures in the last 11 years. When the carbon credit scheme goes bust, because earth decides to prove CO2 does not control climate, ALL carbon credits will be worthless. There will be no good carbon credits vs. bad carbon credits. Who will be holding these worthless credits after investing hundreds of billions of dollars? Power companies, manufacturers, bakeries, farmers, delivery companies, you name it. They will ALL go bankrupt.

A couple of developments are in the pipeline that may change public perceptions. One is a shift back to El Nino conditions and the other is crude oil depletion. We will need more desalination plants and electric transport. We will probably convert trucks, buses and many cars to compressed natural gas fuel thereby lessening supply to gas fired power stations. While Australia appears to have a lot of coal many northern hemisphere countries are running short and we will be hard pressed to share our resources. We will also be tempted to export a lot of gas in the form of LNG. I think emissions trading and carbon tariffs will be too weak to make any real difference.

There is little evidence from any country that expensive wind or solar power has actually reduced coal consumption. It is thought that global coal production will peak around 2030 then go into a slow decline. Thus we have to prepare for a lower carbon future global warming or not. I think our best options are aggressive conservation backed by tough carbon caps, steady retirement of coal replaced by nuclear and wind and solar for niche applications. It just takes political will to make it happen.

Nicholson's article has added nothing to this important discussion other than his own opinion. Without citing any evidence, he retails the popular fallacy of nuclear power having "significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions". Where is his evidence? The net energy analysis (NEA) simply has not been done. ISA Consultants provided a very comprehensive review of NEA for the Zwitkowsky report to the Howard government a couple of years ago, but it only demonstrated that no useful work has been done on this vital subject for almost 30 years. The fact that nuclear power stations do not have smokestacks does not mean that lots of carbon isn't been consumed in other parts of the nuclear life cycle and value chain. Evidence please!

Further, he does not address the critical issue of the finite supply of uranium. This issue was canvassed by me and others only 2 weeks ago in OLO (see Lynch, OLO 27/7/09). Without a radical shift in technology, nuclear fuels won't last out this century, and despite a lot of wishful thinking, none of these new technologies are acceptable from net energy, safety and viability criteria.

We have some real problems with future fuel supplies. Resolving the problems will not be helped by bland assertions and misinformation. Try putting a few (substantiated) facts to your opinions, please.

"The difficulty is that electricity can only be stored as another form of energy (such as chemical or kinetic energy) and this is expensive."

In fact a lot of the energy used in a household is to heat water, and this energy not only can be stored, it most often is stored. It would cost approximately nothing to adapt existing off-peak storage hot water to heat up when sun, wind, etc is abundant.

Of course this stored energy cannot easily be converted back to electricity, so the author's statement is true in that sense.

However, until we see this cheap effective option for energy storage used to accommodate the variability of some renewable energy sources, no-one can complain about the variability of solar/wind electricity and the difficulty of storing their output.

Regarding the future potential for natural gas as a replacement for gasoline and diesel, see this comment:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5615#comment-524089

and the EIA concludes much the same, see the section "Substitution of Natural Gas for Petroleum Consumption" a little more than half way down the page:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/issues.html

and then see these data about how fast oil supply reduction is occurring for the U.S:

http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/2009/06/net-hubbert-curve-what-does-it-mean-by.html

The capital for natural gas conversions and supply infrastructure will disappear as oil supply reduction impacts the global economy.

And these article do not even take into account declining oil supplies and how that will impact the economy:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/439656-arbitrary-vote/11018-economic-fragility-underestimated-collapse-may-be-imminent

http://www.commodityonline.com/futures-trading/currency/Why-you-should-get-out-of-the-US-dollar-now!-734-1.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/08/g8-recession-plan-global-economy

And the IEA indicates that "the oil crisis begins to grip after 2010:"

http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/2009/08/indendent-london-warns-about-peak-oil.html

Best regards,

Cliff Wirth

Cliff Wirth
Cliff - you should look at your own links. I glanced at the first two. I couldn't quite work out what you were referring in the first link and the seond tends to prove the article's case rather than yours. In both cases (at least as near as I could work out for the first one) they refer to American conditions. In Australia the use of LNG in cars is well established - there is no talk of the use of natural gas for cars here as we have plenty LNG. There is also a distribution network for LNG, although it is not nearly as extensive as the network for petrol, and an established industry for converting cars.
As for the use of coal, I can see no viable way to kick the habit, assuming we wanted to. As has been pointed out before, renewable energy is so variable that generators generally have to back up most of the output with conventional power. Basically its there as a way to make the greens think the government and the power utilites are doing something, nothing more.
Switching to gas power generators, where possible, will do a lot more to reduce emissions than messing around with renewables.