My response:

Dear NRMA,
Your promise to “seek assurances from the Australian Government that the Carbon Tax would not force up the cost of fuel” is absolutely ridiculous! I’m a member and I strongly object to any attempt by the NRMA to campaign against what will be a minuscule rise in petrol prices. You are also ignorant of the current proposal to more than adequately compensate low income earners for any increase caused by such a price on CO2 emissions. For you to ignore this and insist that petrol prices remain the same is attempting to negate any benefit of such a policy.

I didn’t see the survey to take part in it, but rest assured if you do go down this path you will not get another year of membership out of me. I don’t want to belong to and fund any organisation that digs in on climate action, I’ve got a reliable enough vehicle that I don’t need your services.

Where was the NRMA voicing its concern on the gulf war when it resulted in a massive increase in petrol prices? The whole idea of a price on emissions is to drive (no pun intended) people toward less polluting ways.. How does that happen if you succeed and the CO2 price is matched by a reduction in other taxes. The poor/low income earners will be compensated, so you’re going in to bat for people who can well afford any small increase in petrol prices.

How about you lobby the petrol companies as they seem to have forgotten that our dollar is up and that the hikes they jacked up during the last instability in oil prices seem to have stayed high.

The NRMA should be exercising some social conscience and supporting the price on CO2 emissions, something which excessive car use and failure to invest in public transport, electric cars etc.

Arguing that price at the petrol pump is the only thing that matters is the trademark of a sociopath. It’d be like going back a few decades and arguing that removing lead from petrol was too expensive and that kids getting lead poisoning wasn’t an important factor. Transport emissions are a significant slice of the overall green house emissions and you are arguing that they be ignored.

A bit of advice: take your feigned outrage over a tiny rise in petrol prices and instead use your lobbying effort to campaign for charging stations, commitment to electric vehicle research and roll out.

To argue for the govt to make sure it reduces tax by exactly the same amount that the CO2 price puts on is missing the whole point. Yes, it will cost more, that’s so that people reduce their emissions to keep their costs down. Low income earners will be compensated, so you aren’t doing this for poor people who can’t afford it.

Perhaps spend the time to look at what you’re asking and to consider the environment a bit more. You seem to be pushing for some good quality greener outcomes elsewhere, so just try a bit of consistency. The CO2 price/tax/whatever rise is nothing compared to the middle eastern oil price rises.
If we can get on to electric: we can rely on Australian sunshine rather than scamming oil company petrol prices.

regards,
Nathan Lee

I would urge other members to tell NRMA what you think of their attempts to sabotage action on climate change in this way. Reduction in emissions from driving would also reduce a slew of other pollution that our obsession with cars has given us. We need to move to electric cars, widespread public transport (filling existing black hole areas and people getting out of cars) and fund renewable energy. The NRMA demanding petrol be taken out of the equation is not helping any of that.

Climate change denier and creationist. God help us if Abbott gets in.

I really wish Abbott hadn’t back stabbed Malcolm Turnbull out of the Liberal hot spot. He’s at least got half a brain more than Abbott and was prepared to take a stand for the environment (before the liberal party bribepolitical donation companies got their claws into him). If elected he’ll be our version of George Bush: ignorant, smarmy, religious as anything and completely unsuitable for the top job. He couldn’t keep his religion out of the Health ministerial workings imagine how things will regress with him in the PM seat.

Abbott was so bad as health minister I wrote to John Howard suggesting he should be sacked.

Although I’d prefer the Greens to get a bit more of a say (to make up for Labor’s back-down on taxing carbon and capitulation to mining interests) or perhaps a wild-card like the secular party to reel back in the massive bribery/infection of church into state. But for no other reasons than the National Broadband Network (NBN) and the GFC recession free status of Australia (unique in the developed nations) Labor should get another round. It seems the dummies are hung up on Rudd’s disposal and yes, it was rough, but let’s look at policy instead. The situation is as it is: both leaders trampled the guy before them. Deal with it.. Who stabbed who in the back is kinda expected since the “Et tu, Brute?” story has political origins.

Et Tu Brute...

Anyhow, if Abbott gets in all this talk about stopping the boats won’t be important. If Abbott wins the NZ PM had better get a boat phone system in place because hoards of Aussies will be paddling their way to New Zealand strapped to anything that can float!

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

The report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

78 percent! Assuming of course they can actually do it at all. To me it still smells like good old snake oil:

Premium quality clean coal snake oil. Guaranteed to prolong the inevitable.

So all that bleating about “nuclear is expensive” or “solar is expensive” is garbage. The alternatives are only expensive because their manufacturing waste needs to be dealt with rather than just puffed up the chimney into the atmosphere (well, unless it is pollution in China I guess.. Then it all probably ends up in the air, land or river regardless). It’s assuming there are the magic clean coal breakthroughs that allow the long term storage of carbon dioxide such that it won’t just float back up (I wonder if the cost of developing a brand new technology factors into this figure?).

The Government will spend $2.4 billion over nine years developing two to four commercial scale carbon capture projects.

It’s money spent on what will have to be dead technology. I mean it’d be great to have some magic process for capturing the CO₂ but I’d have to think the energy/resources that go into that will be so high as to be a waste of time in the long term.

I think we can do almost anything if we exert enough money, manpower and energy (hell, that’s why I want widespread renewable energy to have oodles of energy to do crazy stuff like desalination to overcome drought and remove pressure on rivers.. if you have the electricity for “free” then you can do that sort of thing AND repair the environment). But at some point you start making so little energy that it isn’t worth doing or you compromise on your original goal. I suspect coal companies will settle on a massive compromise. Like a small dick Hummer driver recycling a softdrink can and proudly proclaiming they are green, the coal industry will settle on locking away some small fraction of emissions or in such a way as to be non permanent. Perhaps it will be enough to deflect opponents sufficiently to milk another few decades.

Money spent on solar or wind generation is money on a real technology that works now and has many large scale installations worldwide. Carbon sequestration technology today (as far as I can tell) has no real viable option to long term lock away the gas. The closest we have to “capture” is pumping it into oil wells (to help squeeze more oil out). That notion of using it to help get out more carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels seems to me to not really be helping reduce overall emissions (e.g. “oh look, the coal’s emissions are buried to help us get hard to get oil which is then burnt in cars”).

The Glowing Green Green
I’d say if we’re going to have money spent on currently theoretical but likely looking: go the new generation IV reactors I reckon. We know that nuclear power generation works, because it powers big chunks of the population around the world. It’d power even more if not for the scaremongering.

Generation IV Nuclear reactor timeline. If we only get over demonising nuclear!

The advantage of some of these designs are that they can run off what we currently call waste, unlocking some of the large amount of remaining energy thus making use of the current stockpiles of waste from aging nuclear facilities.

But let’s get back to renewables.

Ideal “best” approach

The ideal best solution overall would be a combination:

1. using less energy to begin with
2. re-using things rather than endless/mindless consumption
3. solar
4. wind
5. geothermal/tidal/hydro/whatever other clean energy sources there are available for the locality

I think massive amounts could be attained via the first 4 of those things which require no new technology (next gen nuclear or magical as-yet-no-working-scale carbon dioxide capturing).

The first is definitely achievable as an article today “Pull the plug, it’s socket science” says:

ALL over the world, electrical appliances are blinking away on standby – and burning so much energy they need 60 coal-fired electricity stations a year to power them, analysis by the International Energy Agency has found.

And they go on to say that “efficiency is the fastest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions” and discuss the role of legislation (since market forces aren’t usually enough):

Dr Jollands believes legal standards on energy efficiency are important where the market is failing to deliver reform and cited the example of set-top boxes for pay television, which are usually switched on all day, every day.

In most homes and offices, set-top boxes are supplied by a company that has no incentive to make them energy efficient because the electricity bills are paid by the consumer. An analysis by the energy agency found that in the United States about 150 million switched-on set-top boxes burned the equivalent of six supertankers of oil a year.

Dr Jollands said there was a cultural aversion to regulation in some parts of the world, but if the market was not working, regulations could be effective without imposing additional costs.

I agree we need legislation to push this stuff forward. History has shown that left to their own devices things do not progress past the “what ever is cheapest”. You have to put a cost or penalty on polluting in order to get things cleaner.

Consumption is not success

The second thing (reusing and cutting back on consumption) would require a major shift in how we view a successful economy. This is probably a topic that requires its own blog, the idea of banishing consumption driven measures. But basically I think that consumption should NOT be the primary measure of success as it is currently because it largely consists of rewarding inefficiency and celebrating unnecessary buying of items. Consider the reuse of something in a consumption based economic model: bad! Bad because no new products are consumed, thus no new jobs making stuff, delivering stuff, stocking shelves, retailing etc.

Consume! Consume!

Should goods cost a bit more to be made robust, repairable and reusable? Hell no: that’s going to damage consumption down the track!

But back to clean coal: it’s no surprise the cost estimates are high because they’re just subsidised by society at large copping the pollution. Naturally when they start adhering to environmental standards they, like every other industry subject to environmental controls, will start to cost more. We already force other types of polluters to wear the costs of filtering, processing or otherwise dealing with waste: coal should have to do the same.