carefully avoided mentioning nuclear, which can do the job, only because it would deflect attention from my arguments
For
the audience of BNC however, I'm sure this conclusion about nuclear as a
viable and proven fossil-fuel replacement comes as no surprise!
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How clear is the roadmap to a 'clean energy future'?
Guest Post by Dr. Tom Biegler. Tom
is a physical chemist and former CSIRO divisional head, spent much of
his career managing technological research and development related to
the resources industry. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological
Sciences and Engineering and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.
To go with Clean Energy Week comes a new
report
from The Climate Institute telling us that Australians overwhelmingly
support renewable energy but don’t understand how carbon pricing will
work. Not surprisingly, they are also sceptical about the political
motivations behind its introduction. I think their scepticism is
misdirected. Their target should be the carbon tax itself.
Carbon
pricing (of which the tax is a temporary start) is the standard
economic remedy for problems like carbon dioxide emissions. As Tim
Colebatch, an economist, wrote in
The Age recently: “
Give us a price incentive, and we find ways to reduce emissions with little damage to profits or our standards of living”.
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The
tax should work in two ways. It should encourage substitution of
high-emission fossil fuels by lower-emission alternatives (“our clean
energy future”, as the government puts it); and discourage energy usage
in general (“behaviour change”) by raising energy costs. Clean energy
will cost more. After all, if low-emission technologies were not more
expensive there would be no need for a tax.
Fine in principle, but will it work?
I
need to assert here that I am not a climate sceptic. And I see the
timing of Australia’s tax and its explicit contribution to global
climate change as important but separate issues.
The
carbon price policy is based on two premises: the right technologies
will be there when needed; and significantly less energy will be used as
its price rises.
Underlying
the whole matter is energy’s key economic role. Energy is the lever
that multiplies the output of human personal effort to give us our
unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Energy builds economies.
Whatever its shortcomings, the bonanza of fossil fuels we inherited has
given us our present living standards.
Both
of the above premises have major problems. Firstly, in my opinion
(after all, this is a journal of opinion) the expectations regarding
renewable energies have been raised to quite unreasonable levels. The
proposition as accepted by the public is that feeble, intermittent
solar, wind, ocean energy, etc, can effectively replace intensely
combustible, high energy fossil fuels as drivers of prosperity. The
enormous scale and associated cost of collecting and processing this
weak energy is what makes the proposition extraordinary. Extraordinary
propositions need extraordinary evidence. That’s the sceptics’ slogan,
and that’s why I am sceptical about renewables.
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Coal. It's cheap, abundance, polluting... and tough to replace.
The evidence is in fact very ordinary.
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