There are no alternative electricity generation systems that can
anywhere near supply our needs except nuclear and hopefully geothermal.

Face it, no one is going to permit the shutdown of one single station
unless an alternative is available.
Our food production system relies on refrigeration.
Want your food to go bad ?
Live in a block of units ? want to walk up 10 floors ?
Sit on the floor of the lift and wait for the power to come back on ?
Lie on the operating table just as the surgeon starts cutting and the
power goes off, and the backup failed to start ?
Going to work on the train, and it stops.

That and many other failures is what you are facing if you just shutdown.

It is no where near certain that the cost of mitigating problems as
they occur is greater than all the proposed prevention solutions
which don't look like working anyway.

BTW, the Barrier Reef is doing fine thank you ! Stop panicking.
When the Kyoto treaty was planned China was an exporter of coal and
oil and the producer of exports has the emissions counted against them.
Now China is importing large amounts of coal from Australia the
emissions are counted against us. Do we divide by 2 our petroleum
emissions as we import 50%. The suppliers should have it put on their
carbon account.

Solar cells will come down in price but only marginally as there is
a significant overhead in just handling them. In anycase they still
need the base load power unless by some miracle of chemistry a form
of battery is developed that can store enormous amounts of power
per cubic metre. That is the real challenge but it might be
chemically impossible.

Bazz: "BTW, the Barrier Reef is doing fine thank you ! Stop panicking."

You made a similar comment once before, and I guess as you would expect I went looking. The opinion from scientists working in the area range from the positive: "its OK now, but we if hit the Copenhagen limit of 2 degrees C its doomed" to "its doomed no matter what we do". I guess the former could be loosely translated into "the Barrier Reef is doing fine" if you added "for now".

As for your advice to "Stop panicking", perhaps you should send it to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. They have whipped themselves into a right proper panic as a result of this report: http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/corp_site/about_us/great_barrier_reef_outlook_report

From the summary: "[at] atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide between current levels and about 400ppm ... habitats of the Great Barrier Reef have low or moderate vulnerability to climate change. ... If the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increases beyond these levels then there will be serious consequences for the Great Barrier Reef. At a concentration of 500ppm ... hard corals would likely become functionally extinct and coral reefs would be eroding rapidly."

Bazz: "That is the real challenge but it might be chemically impossible."

Very unlikely, as in effect coal and oil are just chemical ways of storing energy. They are efficient because one the reactants, oxygen, comes from the atmosphere. The same thing is being looked at for batteries: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22780/

Bazz: "There are no alternative electricity generation systems that can anywhere near supply our needs except nuclear"

No, this is wrong. Nuclear as it exists now can't do it. If we swapped over to nuclear generation for power using current technology there is but a few decades of available fuel. If nuclear is going to solve our energy problems we need plants literally 10,000% more efficient that the current ones. Theoretically, this isn't hard. But commercially no one has made it work, and each "experiment" in trying to find something that does work costs billions of dollars.

Bazz: Interesting comments but PRChina has never been a net oil exporter or a significant importer of Australian coal. Our largest coal customers are Japan and Korea.

Australian industry doesn’t care how its electricity is generated as long as it is available 24/7 and is relatively cheap. Bazz rightly suggests that the only alternatives to coal are nuclear and/or geothermal. Neither is likely to make a useful contribution to our electricity needs much before 2020 and even then may do little more than supply the difference between our present and increased future energy needs.

Wind and solar can make a useful contribution to reducing, rather than replacing coal burning and power generators always have the option of converting their stations to burning gas rather than coal. That would certainly be more efficient and reduce our CO2 emissions. But would coal-burning power station owners be prepared to invest in converting to gas? I don’t think so.

Jedimaster and others note that technology is not going to stagnate and over the next 15 years. Very true Technology will make advances in important areas such as ability to more efficiently convert sunlight to electricity and store solar energy and electricity. These developments will see the demise of coal, both for domestic use and as one of our major exports.

My prediction is that over the next 10 years coal use will diminish as the international community increasingly makes a choice between solar, geothermal and nuclear, the latter 2 being able to produce electricity at similar prices. Irrational policies block the nuclear path in Australia which, in the medium term leaves us with the new start-up industry, geothermal.

Australia has the advantage of being endowed with the hottest (250-300C) most accessible (4,000m) rocks in the world and is well placed to meet all its energy needs from that one source, though cheaper wind will always play a supplementary role. The Rudd government is providing geothermal with financial assistance and my bet is that we shall see the first small power (50MW) station up and running by 2015, quickly followed by others.

Chris, I'm not sure we can afford another decade or two of indecision of how to get effective emissions reductions; so far all we've gotten is ineffective policy proposals that have mostly failed even to make it past proposal stage. The latest from Abbott is to give funding to the biggest polluters merely to keep from increasing emissions - no use of price incentives. The real, externalised, accumulating costs of AGW continue to be left out of the opposition's (as well as your own) economic equations - Abbott's most likely because he prefers to dismiss what CSIRO, Chief Scientist and all the worlds scientific institutions have to say about the impacts of emissions on climate as "crap". And of course the impacts of continued expansion of coal and gas exports continue to be counted only on the plus side of virtually every ledger; that it will feed emissions growth far greater than the most optimistic estimates of Australian emissions reductions is passed over completely.

Ken Fabos,

I agree, but even more important than what we do at the national level is what happens at the international level. The rise of global emissions needs to slow and hopefully stop.

What it comes down to is simple we are energy gluttons

If we as a nation choose to stop using our cars for two days per week we could almost double our energy use everywhere else and still meet our CO2 targets.

It is simple drive less now, pay less for power in future
Drive more now pay more for power forever.

Smarter use of limited resources is the answer, to make small changes in the biggest problem area is better than making large changes to a lesser problem areas.