Australia is a moderate player in global terms, but decarbonising is literally a symbolic gesture with real negative consequences. The only response that makes any sense is to focus on better bushfire prevention methods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Germany showed enormous leadership with their Energiewende. It was expensive, convinced nobody and has had what appears to be a marginal effect on their actual emissions emitted. Hoping that Australia charging into the breach would help in any meaningful way is wishful thinking. Business as usual until economic forces cause the US and China to switch away from fossil fuels is what is going to happen, we can't make their decisions for them. Fight that diplomatically, sure. But tank our standard of living for a symbolic gesture and there is going to be very stiff resistance.
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/csiro-sells-concentrated-s...
There is legitimate, marginally viable technology honed and perfected in Australia that always remains on the cusp because of endemic favourable treatment for fossil fuel and lack of strong support and willingness to invest.
To argue that the quality of life would be hit by changing govt funding priorities is like arguing against the construction of roads before automobiles were mainstream.
Also the suggestion that Australian research cannot make a difference I find unfathomable. Leave it to the "major players", so China and USA will just give away the technology for free? Why do any research at all, ever, there will always be someone better...
Cars are unsafe, expensive and make cities unwalkable. I would rather Australia beefed up its train network & river freight rather than this mania for cars.
> There is legitimate, marginally viable technology honed and perfected in Australia that always remains on the cusp because of endemic favourable treatment for fossil fuel and lack of strong support and willingness to invest.
Sounds pretty marginal, he might not be factoring in the consequences for grid stability in his calculations. It isn't just a raw numbers game.
> Also the suggestion that Australian research cannot make a difference I find unfathomable.
We are doing research, it probably is making a difference. If you go to UNSW the first building you run in to is the great big energy research facility. It wouldn't be too hard to get support for more research into better energy if anyone cared. And for all people blame the Australian right for coal they are the ones who push for dropping the effective ban on nuclear power in Australia and maybe doing some R & D on that front. It was much more promising technology than solar for most of the lest 50 years.
But the raw numbers are not doing the same sort of damage as a 10% increase in general energy costs. So far it has been 1,516 homes. Australia will have something like 5,000,000 homes. That is bad, but entirely tolerable averaged over the continent - we build about that many homes in a month or two. The damage is a small % of GDP contained to one year.
We need to improve our bushfire management & crisis response, but there is no need to do anything rash.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/woma...
Ouch. That is bad. It does require a response. However it is close enough to normal that it wouldn't change any rational decisions about our energy mix. This crisis is small enough that we only need to respond to the threats directly, without winding in a decarbonisation scheme that doesn't actually do anything.
[0] https://soe.environment.gov.au/theme/ambient-air-quality/top...
I take issue with this. Australia's contribution to GHG emissions does contribute to warming. Even if it's only 1.3% (greater if you take exports into account [0]) it has an effect.
Also, more than 20% of global emissions are emitted by countries with lower overall emissions than us [1]. If they all used our excuse [2], do you think that would be acceptable?
We also have among the highest per capita emissions in the world [3].
And I haven't even talked about historic cumulative emissions, which have to be taken into account for an equitable solution.
Australia is already suffering from the effects of a climate emergency, with conditions predicted to get orders of magnitude worse this century. We should be taking a lead in the decarbonisation effort so we can urge the rest of the world to do the same, for our sakes, as well as theirs.
Instead, our government sabotaged negotiations at COP25 [4], and is acting for the short-term benefit of a few fossil fuel miners, even to the point of wanting to make secondary boycotts illegal [5]. They are criminally negligent at best, and an absolute disgrace.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/fossil-f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-01/australia-called-a-fr... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-16/australia-climate-car... [5] https://reneweconomy.com.au/morrisons-crackdown-on-climate-p...
The compliment of 20% is 80%. Those countries could all drop their emissions to 0 and any problem from emissions would still be 80% there and so still be about as bad as it ever was. So yes everyone smaller than us can use the same excuse. What matters policy-wise is the leadership in China & the United States.
> We also have among the highest per capita emissions in the world [3].
Yeah. We don't have any nuclear plants. Puts us a bit behind the 8 ball. We should fix that up too and build some. Labor needs to be more vocal about supporting nuclear energy.
There is a link between counties that make heavy use of nuclear energy and countries that have low emissions and air free of coal dust.
> Australia is already suffering from the effects of a climate emergency, with conditions predicted to get orders of magnitude worse this century. We should be taking a lead in the decarbonisation effort so we can urge the rest of the world to do the same, for our sakes, as well as theirs.
Germany already did that, it didn't impress very many people; it looked expensive and didn't actually help their emissions much. We should restrict ourselves to trying things that are likely to work and actually address the issues we are facing, which decarbonisation does not. There isn't anyone here who can seriously argue that Australia decarbonising would have had any impact on these bushfires. If Australia were completely decarbonised and had stopped exporting coal they would still have happened.
A positive actions in anyone's book happens to be just waiting another decade until it becomes economic to build photovoltaic solar; according to the Finkel report.
In NSW tourism is worth $40B[2]. The situation is similar there.
Say this costs between 10 and 20% of that. That is roughlt $10B in direct costs this year alone.
Additionally your 10% additional cost of energy is nonsense. Australia hasn't had a functioning energy policy is 10 years, which is the primary reason costs are so high. Any kind of policy which both sides of politics agree on (at least roughly!) will provide investment certainty and cut that cost.
[1] https://www.business.vic.gov.au/tourism-industry-resources/t...
Finkel review [0], page 201, Levelised Cost of Electricity in 2020 estimates solar at ~91 $/MWh vs ~76 $/MWh supercritical coal.
So you were right that I was using an unsourced number. Now I've sourced it and am revising it to 20%. And I have a source that says if we just twiddle our thumbs for 10 years we should get a much better deal, with no extra cost given we produce somewhere between 1 and 5% of the worlds emissions depending on how we account for exports.
[0] https://www.energy.gov.au/sites/default/files/independent-re...
A future where (according to exactly the same reference!) solar will be cheaper than coal by 2030 (~61 $/MWh vs ~76 $/MWh supercritical coal).
I'd also note that this report was done in 2017, and the LCOE for solar has decreased more rapidly than expected. This Lazard report done only a year later puts large scale solar at US$36-43/MWh (= A$51-63/MWh).
> I'd also note that this report was done in 2017, and the LCOE for solar has decreased more rapidly than expected. This Lazard report done only a year later puts large scale solar at US$36-43/MWh (= A$51-63/MWh).
If it started to make commercial sense to build solar in 2017 then it really doesn't make sense to change anything we're doing after these bushfires since any problem will will resolve itself. The underlining point is that this crisis isn't a catalyst to rethink our energy policy. The two things just aren't realistically linked. We don't emit enough carbon for it to be relevant for global pollution.
Which is why you start transitioning now, so we get a resilient energy system.
it really doesn't make sense to change anything we're doing after these bushfires since any problem will will resolve itself
No, because the current government actually wants to build new coal fired power stations and open new coal mines.
The underlining point is that this crisis isn't a catalyst to rethink our energy policy.
Yes you keep parroting this line. But I noticed you ignored the tourism industry costs above as well as the arguments about how successful the German transition had been.
But we could be supplying SE Asia with clean energy instead: https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/australia-po...
We produce over 1% of the world CO2 emissions, one of the highest in the world, and we worked hard to wreck the Paris agreement.
And you think all we can possibly do is to try to prevent bushfires?
Maybe we could do that and try to become world leaders in clean technology?
It's not as if climate change would be reverted or even stop if we stopped burning fossil fuel now. There is a lag on the effect, and the situation would still be getting worse for a century or so.
The comparison is between all the extra future damage of burning even more than we already have vs the economic gains today.