“Are politicians and business serious about effectively addressing climate change?”

That’s an easy one. Of course they are not serious. Politicians (both sides) are not serious about climate change when they continue to talk about high population growth. Rudd and cronies are not serious about climate change with their manic urge to install a tax system which will do nothing to stop emissions, but will certainly transfer wealth from Australia to backward countries with despots who will use the money (laughingly called carbon credits) to erect more palaces and monuments to themselves – while the Australian economy goes down the gurgler.

Prof. Barry Brook, chair of Climate Change at Adelaide University, and Access Economics both have schemes that would be much more effective and much cheaper than the Rudd Tax, but Rudd is just not interested. Brook even believes in the CO2 theory, but he decries Rudds tax on the Australian economy. Turnbull is a wimp whose limp amendments would not alter the silly scheme much even if they were accepted.

As for coal, clean or otherwise, it’s going to be a long, long time before we can do without it. Despite the chattering of the Greens etc, there is no base-load energy source available; nor will there be in the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, Australia decides to go nuclear: which would solve most of the problems.

But our pig-headed, ignorant government (and opposition, it now seems) is hell-bent on ruining Australia with a stupid and immense taxation scheme which will reduce Australia to a Third World country

"Coal sequestration is the new technology being used for extracting the harmful C02 from coal, ...The carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are to be injected into the earth’s cavities, some of which lay in strategically unstable and ecologically sensitive environments... This is because they already have the vacuous channels required in the form of aquifers or old mine shafts."

In geosequestration CO2 is injected into stable porous rock, not old mine shafts. Similarly CO2 is not extracted from coal but separated from the waste gases of power stations etc.

If you want to know more about how the technology actually works there is plenty of good info on the web.

Scientists have known for decades that CO2 was going to cause climate change, and it has taken that long for the public and politicians to become aware of the problem.

Similarily, the evidence is clear that nuclear power is the safest and most applicable technology available to provide a stable reliable alternative to coal.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html

Is it really going to take another couple of decades before the public and politicians realise that there is only so far one can go with renewables, CCS, efficiency etc?

Have we just swapped climate skeptics for nuclear skeptics?

As the increase in power demand continues to outstrip the increase in renewable power, it is not surprising that coal consumption is still increasing.

The way we are going, we will hit 2020 with increased emissions, and as Rudd has suggested, we will be setting an example to the rest of the world, but not the one he intended.

Shadow Minister

"Have we just swapped climate skeptics for nuclear skeptics?"

I would have thought most climate skeptics were in favour of Nuclear Power, and most AGW believers against it .. even though you would expect AGW believers should be rabidly in favor of it, since it is the most eco friendly power generating solution.

Coal generates jobs as well as power, but it looks like the "wuckers" don't seem to be getting that. I'm surprised they are just rolling with the whole eco "get rid of coal" thing, that's their jobs, futures, mortgage payments - why are they not worried, what do they know that we don't?

We are destroying the planet, there isn't going to be anything left for our grandchildren, we are going to see an increase in natural disasters, cyclones, floods, droughts, storms, tornados, and earthquakes, and it's all because of the wickedness of mankind's greed, all the fertile areas of the world are going to turn into deserts and species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. We need to tax cows for farting, control brown coal, and we need to stop burning fossil fuels, by taking money from productive activities (which are evil because human beings are noxious pests), and put it into covering every inch of the world with solar panels and wind farms, while making it compulsory to have rain-water tanks, keep out foreigners, be self-sufficient and await the apocalypse. Everybody needs to stop consuming so much, and if a large number of people were to die, who could say that would be such a bad thing? Somebody else that is, not me, I mean. We all need to use dim light bulbs otherwise the world will dematerialise because of our sin. All human beings should be shot because they are bad for the environment. The government should fix everything.

Don't laugh. This is the mental level of the snivelling morons behind this imbecile crapola. They are merely a re-run of the religious apocalyptics that appear throughout history, the sack-cloth-and-ashes brigade of Biblical times, the self-flagellating ostentatious of the middle ages, the pious puritans of the 1600s, the utopian socialists of the 20th century. If they were just painfully preening and vain, it wouldn't be so bad, but they insist on imposing their destructive delusion on the entire world's productive activities, and neither know nor care what the costs in human suffering will be.

<<and neither know nor care what the costs in human suffering will be.>>

This statement applies far more to the deniers than the supporters of climate change.