Dagget,
thankyou for making me aware of EROI when you did your original post. I had known ethanol net return was poor but didn't know how it compared to others forms of energy production. Bio-diesel with a 3:1 return seems a much better result. As oil approaches an EROI of one (currently about 10) it is no longer worth extracting no matter how valuable it is (unless we have a cheaper energy source with which to do the extraction).
Nuclear at 4 or 5 to 1 isn't particularly flash either when compared to historical energy gain from oil , but I'd still be happy if I could make a 400%+ return on investment.
Hydropower and wind power are excellent at a 10:1 gain, but can they be relied upon. Certainly not possible in all areas.
Solar as it approaches 10:1 will be good but night time and longer nights in winter mean an energy coversion must take place and consequent energy loss. I've read about solar power roof tiles that really are the roof, not just stuck on. The potential of solar power is enormous.

Bull:

"I won’t like it, but it will not change how I live."

Well, petrol prices are already changing how I live. $2600 from your after-tax income each year is quite a lot. If it were to go up to $3900 a year, as per your 50% suggestion, then you would consider alternaitves.

There are two major points you are missing though:

1) They wouldn't all go up by 50%. Some might double, while others might only go up only 20%. This will give you a much stronger incentive to save where it is most effective at reducing emissions

2) Most emissions are hidden from you and are reflected in the cost of items you buy. There will be a much faster response from industry through a few different mechanisms. For example, some industries will grow and some will shrink as consumers change their spending patters. More importantly, industries will change the way they do things. Some changes will occur becuase you buy different products, and soe will occur because the products you buy are made and transported differently.

"I just can’t see that becoming a reality, no politician or political party would go for that level of Tax and survive an election."

You need to keep pointing out to people that their income tax, or some other tax, will go down. If the people are informed of the situation, the politicians will follow suit. I obviously wouldn't expect a politician to try to force this onto the public. However, both Labor and the Greens support the idea and John Howard sounds like he is about to do a backflip on it.

"It may effect some usage for some people, but I can’t see it happening to the extent needed to avoid an alternative to more Coal fired power stations."

If the tax is high enough to make renewables competitive, then there will be a shift to renewables.

"I’ll put my money on building more power stations of some description and the price being only marginally higher. "

If the price is only marginally higher, then you won't need a high tax to make the shift sensible. However, in reality the cost of renewable sources for electricity will be at least 2 to 3 times as high.

"last I heard was about 100 windmills to power a town of under 20,000 people, in a good windy area"

That's about a single cattle farm's worth - not much. A bit of money to grease the wheels and hey presto, we have a wind farm.

Ludwig:

"Let’s stop thinking about ‘subsets’ in isolation and start thinking about overall sustainability in a holistic manner! PLEASE!!"

That's the whole point of a green tax shift.

"How quickly do you think we can reduce emissions"

I would guess that 50% over a decade could be achieved fairly easily with a green tax shift, not that I am an expert or anything. The faster you force the change, the more it will cost.

"Even if by some miracle we can reduce them substantially and quickly, how long do you think it would be before population growth cancelled out the gains?"

It would be very easy for emissions reductions to outpace population growth by a factor of at least two on an indefinite basis. Not that I think we should encourage population growth.

I'm not really sure what your point is with this line of questioning anyway. If you are trying to say that reducing population is a way to reduce consumption, I agree. But a green tax shift would work a lot faster.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/green-tax-shift/green-tax-shift-FAQ.html

Another way of putting my point above about EROI this is that it is becoming necessary to divert an ever greater proportion of the available energy into the capturing and storing of the energy itself. And more must be necessarily lost in order to convert the kind of low-grade energy sufficient only for tasks like heating water or cooking into the kind of concentrated high-grade energy necessary to move, cars trucks and trains around. In order to obtain the even higher grade energy necessary to sustain manufacturing processes such as the smelting and forging of metals and welding of metal objects, even more energy will be lost.

Can I suggest that people try the thought I have tried to conduct over and over in my own head ever since I started thinking about renewables and long before the penny of EROI dropped in my mind?

Try to imagine the chemical and physical processes which would be necessary in order to convert the relative trickle of energy to be obtained from wind or solar energy into the form of energy which could be used in order to mine, and extract all the materials necessary to make the solar pannels and wind generators.

How could this be achieved? Could the energy be used as elecricity to create molecules able to store the energy? The obvious example is hydrogen. However, hydrogen is exceptionally difficult to store due to the small size of the molecules and does not contain very large volumes of energy for a given volume in any case. It is hard to imagine many industrial processes being efficiently run in any case with hydrogen alone. A chemical process that could convert carbon atoms into larger hydrocarbon molcules that we find in petroleum would be much more difficult to set up.

(ToBeContinued)

“That's the whole point of a green tax shift.”

Freediver, tax-based incentives to improve efficiency and frugality with energy use do nothing to address the continuously increasing number of consumers in Australia. Therefore, a green tax shift is not in itself a move towards sustainability.

It could be part of a push for sustainability in conjunction with measures implemented to reduce the rate of increase in consumers and approach a stable number. Or it could be just the opposite; part of a means of making us all reduce our consumption so that more people can be squeezed in under the same resource/energy supply mechanisms, as I stated earlier.

At any rate, the whole point is that concentrating on a green tax shift is certainly not a holistic approach to energy or carbon emissions issues.

“I would guess that 50% over a decade could be achieved fairly easily with a green tax shift…”

Wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve that sort of reduction. But pigs will fly first! I’d say that even with very strong tax-based disincentives and even perhaps quotas and strong penalties for those who abuse them, we would not get anywhere near 25% reduction in ten years.

If population growth continues at the current rate for the next ten years, which it almost certainly will, then even with a 25% per-capita reduction, the real reduction would be only about 13%. And unless we had very significant gains as well in other areas of resource consumption, waste production and environmental impact, the overall effect of this population increase would be highly negative, and highly anti-green.

So even if a green tax shift is successful in reducing carbon emissions, it may well actually worsen things in other areas of the green agenda, if it is addressed in isolation from the continuous growth factor.

“If you are trying to say that reducing population is a way to reduce consumption, I agree.”

I have never suggested that we go for a reduction in population. But I’m pleased that you, and Daggett, agree in principle.

Fester

You express concern over "my" figures which appear to conflict with those of Dr Switkowski's.

The figures I stated are those released by the Federal government, through the DEH's NPI submission of annual figures on its website. They were accurately assessed before I posted them to this thread and therein lies the problem.

Mr Switkowski stated in his report: "It will be up to the Australian community to debate the issues raised in the review." This is not so easy when our government relays conflicting figures to the public.

He advises that nuclear power will reduce GHG by 8 - 17% by 2050, with an overall reduction of 60% for GHG, however, he also advised that Australia's energy needs will have doubled by 2050. I see no big deal in the puny 8-17% mitigation of GHG by 25 nuclear reactors as a result of perhaps some 40 additional uranium mines.

There are 443 reactors worldwide supplying only 15% of the world's energy needs. America has more reactors (103)than any other nation yet they are the biggest polluters on the planet.

If the coal industry is able to reduce its GHGs to almost zero, (by pollution prevention control) then there may be some accuracy in his predictions. My concern is that there are many other large sources of GHG being emitted such as within the metal ore industry.

It is interesting that little reference has been made to other sources which cause considerable environmental destruction. Self-regulation of these industries has achieved little in the mitigation of GHG where companies release massive uncontrolled fossil fuel emissions without enforcement for pollution management.

The federal government's product stewardship (oil) where industries are rewarded to burn waste oil as a fuel requires immediate review. This practice is also unregulated where dehydrated waste oil emits extremely dangerous and pollutant releases of uncontrolled fossil fuel substances and other damaging chemicals.

The current economic rationale of our governments in their attempts to mitigate GHG, seriously conflicts with my degree of common sense