"Australia has significant raw resource availability, it drives the nation’s economy, but who would have imagined, in the face of peak oil and the damaging effects of fossil fuels, the Victorian government would be entering a minerals extraction boom with a major focus on coal."

Who would have imagined? Erm, I would have. And just about every other person in the country would have if they'd thought about it for more than five seconds.

I mean, does anyone really think that the Vic Govt is anywhere near seriously addressing climate change or steering away from fossil fuel exploitation and towards a sustainably energy regime and society??

Queensland is just as bad when it comes to coal. And every state is just as bad when it comes to ignoring the sustainability imperative.

Worst of all is our Prime Minister, with his unbelievable 'big Australia' policy direction, fed by the greatest population growth rate that this country has ever seen...by far!

"... not only is Australia spending $7 billion a year in signing the Global Warming Treaty (money that is to be passed on to countries such as China and Bangladesh to offset adaptation to climate change in developing countries) but could also be faced with enormous fines - “10 times the market price of carbon” - if the governments’ green policies do not meet the UN expectations"

While on the face of it our Government is indulging in self-destructive insanity there is some method to this madness.

Appeasement is what counts. If rich Australia can pay homage (protection money) to poor China (the world's third richest country by many measures) Australia can:

- return to China some of the profits that China sees us making from overly high coal and iron prices (a la Hu detention); and

- cross subsidize China's huge spending on its military machine particularly nuclear weapons fueled more easily as an end product of Australian supplied uranium.

And coal sequestration? A great idea:

- justifies use of the dirtiest carbon chewer (brown coal) in Australia today

- justifies our profitable coal trade without guilt or thought

- uncosted, untested on practicle industrial scale

- all geared to dubious new carbon credit tax broking schemes

- begging for natural calamities (we know how these once in 100 or 1,000 year events come up ever more frequently these days):

- and, in the end, we get to pay much higher electricity bills to fund this Green Big End of Town extravaganza.

Move to France, 70+% CLEAN nuclear generated electricity, before its too late.

Pete

It's clear that the Victorian government has no intention of cutting back on brown coal, they even want to export it. The Federal government is either gullible or stupid and has shown itself equally incapable of reducing coal emissions. Evidence is the 90% free permit holiday under the ETS and seriously entertaining TRU Energy's outrageous blackmail claim for compensation. Mind you the Feds have taken over payments for asbestos compensation by James Hardie so there is a precedent.

With CCS I'd rank the issues in order as
1) can enough underground storage space be found?
2) is that storage space secure?
3) what CO2 price makes it economically viable?
The densest form of CO2 turns out to be the gas phase at near room temperature and pressure at about 2 tonnes per cubic metre. For Hazelwood quality coal a cubic metre creates over a tonne of CO2 when burned as the heavier oxygen atoms attach to the carbon. Another quarter cubic metre will need to be burned to power the chemical scrubbers and pumps. That 1-2 tonnes of CO2 will need about another cubic metre of storage space. Thus a kind of 'negative' Latrobe valley will be needed just to store the CO2. For Australia as a whole it is reckoned half a million cubic metres of undergound storage space will need to be found every day for the next 200 years or whatever. So the answer to Q1 looks like 'no'. The answers to Q's 2 and 3 will have to wait for another day.

In short the governments are in cahoots with the coal industry and are trying to deceive the public with stalling tactics.

Totally agree, we should stop mining and selling coal - if, we can create "Green Jobs" developing and selling Nuclear Technology.

So we could become the world's leader in multiple generation Nuclear Power sources if we get onto it now before the rest of the herd and get a head start.

We can replace our dependency on coal for electricity, power all the desalination plants since the eco warriors won't allow any dams to be built, and power our economy.

You can't possibly want to just stop using coal fired electricity can you, without replacing it? What do we tell our children about killing off their chances for a modern future if we have no electricity and have decided to go the Wong way and stop coal fired electricity production.

Wind, thermal solar, nice ideas, but hardly mature enough to power a city are they? They are all still in the hobby domain, in 50 years, they might be mature enough, but right now - only Nuclear can provide us a future.

The Vic government needs money to pay for all the various bandaid solutions to green policies, like no dams, like no new electricity plants, like no freeways .. so why not sell coal, there's no law against it and if you are waiting for moral stances from the ALP (or Coalition), don't hold your breath. Politics is short term, you don't want to do something you won't reap the benefits of.

Like Pete says, Move to France, or have the benefits of what France has here! (unless we're Caldicotted that is)

Well said Chris. I would just quibble with "Coal sequestration is the new technology ...". It is not a "new" technology, it is a potential future technology.

CCS is in fact the most conjectural of the main options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The vast quantities potentially involved make it almost laughable that anyone would consider it. The Earth's crust is very messy, riddled with faults. Whenever oil companies pump oil out or water in they a liable to trigger small earthquakes, just as big dams trigger earthquakes. And so on.

I think CCS needs to be labelled as a big con, a tactic merely to delay the inevitable decline of the coal industry.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see positive comments so far, though predictably your post is attracting pro-nuclear enthusiasts. Good luck to them but nuclear is also in the future, costly and with many attendant risks, despite so-called "third" and "fourth" generation schemes. The option that would allow us to see emissions declining from tomorrow, that would be much cheaper, and that has multiple spinoff benefits instead of multiple spinoff problems, is radical energy efficiency. See
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/cut-emissions-and-boost-economy/
and other posts on that site. With a transforming economy, other energy sources become much more feasible.

"The science on coal sequestration presents as very impressive from the computer generated modelling but what do we really know ..?"

A climate changer casting aspersions on computer modelling.

To quote James Ellroy: "I will not comment on the attendant irony."