Which brings us back to the real solution which is nuclear http://www.theage.com.au/national/union-boss-calls-for-nuclear-energy-20090818-ep4b.html

But if one's attitudes are rooted in times past then people of present (and future) suffer.

Pete

Politicians do not care about anything but the grand gesture. The present crop will all be gone long before any of this fluff looks even remotely like coming to fruition. Now talk about their pensions and perks and watch them all jump up and down, even the Greens. Our politics is certainly based on the absurd and unsustainable Public Service Pensions.
Follow Paul Keating's lead and put an assets test on ALL public pensions. You have lots of money you do not need any of our hard earned coin. Also you have to make the tax on ALL fringe benefits payable by the recipient.
This is an excellent piece showing the stupidity of politicians why not give them something else to consider, like right now!

Thanks for this Martin.

It highlights the point about politicians not being good at the long term solution.

Secondly, it is a little bit disappointing that the television and print media have not asked the simple question "If you are proposing X, then how do you plan to get it done." The Greens propose 30%. How will they get it done? The Rudd government proposes 20%. How will they get it done? The Rudd goverment is even boosting immigration making it even harder to hit these targets because we will need more and more power for the rapidly increasing population. Rudd believes that high immigration boosts his re-election chances and that is much more important than Australia's future.

The lack of follow-up on the "magical solutions" and "grand gestures" is highlighted well in this article, but it is common in almost any political situation. Somebody escapes from gaol and the shadow minister is on TV in a flash saying that the pertinent government minister should resign. The TV interviewer never asks him "So if you were in power how would you prevent this from happening. Do you plan to stand guard at each prison yourself? Would you increase the budget for prisons and if so, would you then increase taxes or take money from schools and hospitals." You don't have to have any solutions or ways of getting the grand gesture done. You just have to stand up and talk and everybody nods their head and says "Oh, yes, good idea." TV and newspapers have really dropped the ball on this.

Setting these policies and making them work isn't easy. It is really hard. The public needs to be aware of that and the government needs to let the public know that there is not a glib answer for every problem.

The author of the article is quite right to say that large amounts of renewable energy may destabilise any grid the energy supplies, so typically it has to be backed up by conventional power sources. This happens with the German power company E.On Netz GmbH, which has substantial amounts of wind power on its grid. Whenever the wind stations are contributing energy, the company typically has the equivalent of 80 per cent worth of that energy in conventional power stations still operating but off the grid. In other words, when wind towers are operating the emissions they offset are typically only 20 per cent of whatever they are producing.
In other words, if the energy retailers are forced to buy 20 per cent of electricity from renewable sources, this won't avoid 20 per cent of emissions, it will avoid just 4 per cent. For various reasons the actual result may be much less than that.
When this problem is pointed out, the Greens usually refer to how wind forecasting systems or smart networks, or how spreading the wind towaers around Australia will reduce the problem of backup generation. It will? What studies have been done? How successful are these wind forecasting systems? Will a wind tower in Queensland be able to substitute for a wind tower in SA when the wind in SA dies? Answer: nope, but basically not a scrap of work has been done on any of these problems in the Australian setting, and they certainly haven't been solved in Europe.
The renewables policy is activist-driven madness and the sooner it is abandoned the better everyone will be.

And politicians wonder why we don't trust them! If they stopped talking nonsense that would help.

But the sinister side to these 'magical' solutions is that they empower governments and their agents to take draconian measures against people who are simply behaving rationally. Like the 'magical' anti-terrorist policies which resulted in the Haneef case, these will result in bizarre politically-motivated stunts which cause pain and distress to ordinary people going about their daily lives. Many efficient and reasonable business operators and researchers will suffer as a result of these absurd targets; and the Rudd government will be out of power long before the inevitable backfire.

Magical solutions are a tax on common sense.

Two months ago, this article would have attracted a horde of posts denigrating the author. Today the whole of Australia seems to have taken a deep breath and stepped back a couple of paces.

The wish bone is never going to replace the backbone, and the engineers with ther practical slant on things are having their say. This is reality and the lawyers, Penny Wong, Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull have just got their dreams brought back to earth.

Good article and the reality of inertia versus the imagined magical properties of legislation, seems to have hit home. Merlin may have been a magician, but that was 1400 years ago. You may say the tsunami of uninformed public opinion has dashed its hopes on the reality of a very rocky shore