New to my blog? You may want to think about subscribing to be notified of new posts. Thanks for visiting!
Kevin Rudd led his party to victory last year on a platform of change, to industrial relations laws, education, broadband, indigenous affairs and climate change. Since taking office, we have had the symbolic signing of Kyoto and apology to Stolen Generations, all very nice and all but almost meaningless in practical terms.
The approach to all of these areas of policy has been troubling. Sure, they've only had six months in office and they've launched lots of broad reviews which are yet to report back, but for a Government which was elected with such enthusiasm there seems to be a profound lack of leadership or willingness to make tough but important decisions, or at least look at them with some sense of urgency.
Climate change is particularly troubling, if only for the fact that we have the technology, the resources and incredibly, the public will to deal with it right now. But we're not. We're arguing about cutting a few cents off petrol prices, giving $500 million to the coal companies to research 'clean coal' while cutting the solar panel rebate which cost $50 million, and waiting for a climate change review by Professor Garnaut. The review comes out tomorrow, and, now that it has become clear that Garnaut is going to recommend urgent and wide-ranging action on a number of fronts, the erstwhile poster-boy of Labor is now being distanced and almost disowned by Rudd, Garrett and Wong.
John Birmingham has an excellent essay about it all in July's issue of The Monthly. Here are a few choice excerpts:
Despite the most fervent wishes of Bob Brown, coal isn't going anywhere. According to the Australian Coal Association, coal-fired power stations produce 84% of Australia's electricity and 38% of its greenhouse emissions, significantly higher than the global average of one-quarter. In part this is because the nation does not rely on nuclear power. Contrary to popular belief, Australia does not control the world market for coal, but it is the biggest exporter, with nearly a third of the global trade in black coal, and 60% of trade in metallurgical coal, which is used for smelting. Regardless of the Kyoto Protocol or whatever scheme succeeds it, world demand for coal is very conservatively forecast to rise 73% by 2030.
China and India will account for a good deal of that increase. At the moment, for instance, only 3% of our coal exports go to China, which is - according to a New York Times report of 11 June - opening a coal-fired power station every ten days. That is not a typo. "Every week to ten days," the report said, "another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego." The People's Republic does have its own vast reserves of coal, but at least half is the dirtier brown variety, unlike our minty-fresh export-quality black stuff. The Australian coal industry is also more mature, efficient and technologically advanced than its competitors in China. As more and more of the hundreds of coal-fired power stations China has planned come online, their appetite for high-quality Australian coal will become more voracious. This is why Kevin Rudd has remarked on the natural congruity of the two nations' interests, the world's largest exporter and the world's largest consumer of coal.
It's at times like this that you have to wonder about the nature of democracy. In this country, in the US and others, all our thinking and actions are handcuffed to three of four year election cycles. Everything is about getting elected and staying elected. Countries that aren't burdened with elections at least have the luxury of being able to plan and execute a vision over several years or even decades. So do terrorist groups for that matter.
More from John Birmingham on clean coal:
Even the federal government's most ardent clean-coal believer, Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, speaks only of "deployment of low-emission technologies out to 2030". (The emphasis is mine.) "It's particularly telling," says the Greens' climate-change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, "that on the morning of World Environment Day, while Peter Garrett was out getting his photo opportunity with energy-rating stickers for televisions, the real powerbroker, Martin Ferguson, was having a chummy breakfast with coal lobbyists, talking up mega-polluting liquefied coal as a transport fuel ... Ferguson holds the purse strings when it comes to energy, and he has been quite blatant in turning his back on renewables while doling out the cash to coal."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that while a modern supercritical coal-fired plant could theoretically capture up to 90% of its carbon emissions, the vast amounts of energy required to do so would drive up the fuel needs of that plant by at least 25%, and the price of electricity generated there by up to 80%. The figures are based on a best-case scenario, with a purpose-built power station sitting atop a suitable storage dump. Older plants, the panel's investigators found, could use up to 40% of the energy they generated in powering the carbon-capture process, thereby requiring more coal-fired plants to be built to replace the lost capacity.
All this while proven renewable technology already exists, developed right here in Australia. We could create a new green industry and secure our future by exporting products and expertise in a field with skyrocketing demand globally, instead of hitching our fortunes to a resource everyone is trying to wean themselves off.
Rodger Meads, of the solar-energy company Conergy, cites the near-impossible task his industry will soon face attracting skilled workers in competition with the coalmines. "Our business depends heavily on electrical trades," he explains. "A young, four-year-trained electrician can fly up to the mines today and get a job paying between $120,000 and $150,000 a year. And we have to get those guys and ask them to go back and do a training qualification to be able to install our products. Not everyone can put these things on your roof - you have to be a trained, qualified electrician. You can build panels all over the world, but you have to install them locally. Nobody's developed a low-cost Chinese package that somehow morphs them onto a roof. We need to develop them through TAFE; we need to have jobs for the electricians when they graduate."
Meanwhile, researchers like Max Lu will struggle to fund the development of alternatives. Building a new weatherproof super-cell with his nano-engineered crystals is not as tricky as it sounds. Finding the $5 million to do so, particularly in this country, is. When Lu discusses the difficulty of what lies ahead, as he moves from the arcane world of materials science to the real world of dollars and cents, his endearing ebullience dissipates and you can hear a cold wind blowing out of the abyss. "In research you try and pursue a worthy cause, a big goal," he says, for the first time sounding tired. "But the reality is that you have to get grants or industry support. The industry-innovation culture is not so conducive here and some of the people don't want to take any risk; they say, ‘Oh, I would rather invest my money in a shop.' No matter how passionate you are about your technology, no matter how promising your technology, if you do not get continual support you have to drop it and move on to something else. That's the reality. A lot of our technology is unsuccessful, not because of the science - this country has tremendous capability in science - but because we have a lot of inventions which end up overseas, or just dead, for want of money."
Advance Australia Fair.
{ 0 comments… add one now }