The basic idea behind “Carbon Capture and Storage” is enticing: remove carbon-dioxide emissions when coal is burnt and store them safely – so we can enjoy cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy with no negative greenhouse impact. Fantastic!

The Greenpeace perspective on CCS

And there’s the problem… while a nice idea in principle, the proposal remains, in effect, a fantasy. It’s possible future technological breakthroughs will eventually make the fantasy reality. Such things have happened before. Even so, our boffins haven’t had 100% success in making science fiction come true.

Yes, we now have supersonic aircraft – even spacecraft – things Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could only dream about. But we still don’t have time machines. Some things are imaginable – but very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

“Carbon Capture and Storage” is of that type. It’s clearly not easy. After all, the incentive to make it work is enormous. CCS would assure the coal industry a secure future in a world compelled reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, the coal industry worldwide – with all its vast resources – has failed to develop large scale, affordable CCS. The most optimistic estimates for when CCS may become a working reality stretch out decades in the future. By any standards, it’s a long shot.

The case for spending public monies on CCS research and development is therefore very slim. Why should the public fund research that’s so strongly in the coal industry’s own interests? Coal is big business, after all.

The best mainstream media reporting I’ve seen on the Rudd Government’s greenhouse policies has been by Kenneth Davidson in The Melbourne Age.

Veteran Australian economic journalist Kenneth Davidson, who has retained his critical faculties

Davidson has become increasingly sceptical of the Rudd Government’s proposals for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). He’s helped document fatal rorts embedded in the proposal, such as huge give-aways to some of Australia’s worst polluters. In general, Mr Davidson favours a carbon tax, which he sees as simpler to implement and less amenable to cheating.

But Davidson has also moved towards embracing the more radical view that ‘economic instruments’ have been over-hyped in the quest to control greenhouse gas emissions.

He’s part of an international shift in thought towards advocating massive direct government investment to bring down the cost of emissions-friendly energy and activities.

As concern has intensified over global climate change, commentators have often compared the challenge facing humanity to a war.

Yet real ‘wars’ were not fought, in the past, primarily by the use of ‘economic instruments’. Churchill and his team didn’t set up an economic strategy conducive in the long-term to the production of armaments – then sit back and let economic forces win their war.

They commissioned armaments and deployed armed forces – borrowing, begging (even stealing!) as required to achieve their war goals. That’s how to do big things if you’re serious. It applies to almost anything, really.

Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong: Expert at the 3-Card Trick

Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a new ‘Clean Coal’ Institute – backed with the injection of an initial $100 million in taxpayer funds.

James Wolfensohn: loves a challenge

The full title of Mr Rudd’s new initiative is the ‘Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute’. The Institute will have an advisory panel chaired by James Wolfensohn, formerly Head of the World Bank. It’s a nice touch; suitable employment for out-of-work investment bankers is hard to find these days. Wolfensohn’s last two much-feted public roles were ending world poverty and brokering a just deal for the Palestinians. ‘Clean coal’ gives him a go at the hat-trick.

Environmentalists and other nay-sayers have suggested the Government’s infatuation with ‘Clean Coal’ is merely a fig leaf for its pro-coal agenda. They claim ‘Clean Coal’ research is essentially a PR exercise that helps rationalize the continuing expansion of Australia’s coal production and exports at a time of escalating concern over climate change.

That’s an uncharitable view. Better to see the policy as a bold experiment in science fiction. Mr Rudd seems to be trying out the Improbability Drive described by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Real Games, Real Easy

$100 million is $5 per person for every man, woman and child in the country. Launching the new Institute is like forcing everyone in Australia to buy a Lottery ticket. It has about as much chance of paying out. Of course, the priesthood who will work on this obscure branch of improbable technology at public expense are all odds-on winners.

Because You Care!

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Darkness can be thought-provoking…

Is Earth Hour the ultimate in tokenism?

Is it Australia’s silliest export ever?

Do the marketeers, politicians, show-biz personalities and other media-promoted talking heads actually perform a useful role as ‘Change Agents’?

Or are sneering eco-sceptics right for once?

I for one believe that scepticism is misplaced. Effective marketing of tokenism can be a wonderful thing and should be more common.

British and German troops take a day off from killing each other, Christmas 1914

If only the troops in World War One, who fraternized across the trenches during Christmas 1914, had been backed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Who knows, we might have ended up with a peaceful 20th century – leaving humanity the resources to pursue happiness and wellbeing?

Another interesting exercise in tokenism is illustrated by the chart below. It shows world opium production between 1990 and 2004. The contribution of Afghanistan is so large it’s indicated separately.

Note the one year – 2001 – when co-operation between the Government (then under Taliban leadership) and the UN was so successful that Afghanistan’s opium harvest almost dropped to zero.

The world nearly began the new millenium junk-free – but the War on Terror soon fixed that.

Tokenism is all very well, but the War on Drugs is serious business. A limited supply is good business, but no supply= no business.

Victoria Bushfires, February 2009; photo by Andrew Brownbill, EPA

The tragedy of the 2009 Victorian bushfires – the deadliest in Australia’s recorded history – is something one watches, from a distance, in sadness and horror.

It was a small natural disaster by global standards. But Australia is not the world. It’s population is approximately 20 million. An equivalent per capita death toll in the USA would be around 3,000 – or many more than 10,000 in China.

Australia is a large continent, very scantily populated throughout most of the typically dry land mass, with some large urban centers and a rural area – perhaps 20% of the continent depending on how one draws the boundaries – that’s been lightly settled by modern Australians.

Googlemap of Australian Terrain: remaining forests shown in dark green

At the risk of GROSS oversimplification, one could say there are three Australias: the cities (c. 1%), the desert (c. 80%) and the rural areas (c. 20%).

In desert, there are no forests or even woodlands capable of sustaining large-scale bushfires. Fires occur there – but by far the biggest concerns about major life-threatening bushfires are in the higher-rainfall, more wooded parts of the continent, which I’ll call ‘rural’.

The ancestral forests of Australia were rainforests, which were very widespread tens of millions of years ago. Today, rainforests occupy a tiny area (around 0.25%) of the total land mass. They are not fire-adapted. A massive fire destroys rainforest – or at least triggers a lengthy succession process that would require many hundreds of years for mature rainforests to return.

A Response to Climate Change Sceptics

This is not an account of the latest, very contorted international negotiations over climate change. Nor is it about the Rudd Government’s rather dismal progress on climate change policy so far. If it was, I’d have chosen a different title.

This short essay is a general response to ‘climate change critics’, also known as ‘climate change sceptics’ and  ‘climate change deniers’. For reasons I explain, I prefer to say ‘climate change gamblers’.

Sceptics may well regard me as biased, because I worked for several years as an environmental activist in the past. But these days I work for no interest group and speak for myself alone. I write this simply as one human being to others. I do invite comments and criticisms.

I began lobbying for action on greenhouse emissions about two decades ago. I remember a session with a senior politician in his Canberra office during the late 1980s.

His reply to my initial pitch was what seems to me the basic case of ‘climate change scepticism’ to this day. It was an argument along these lines:

“there’s no SOLID evidence that human-induced global warming is really happening, so it’s unwise to take action that might have negative economic impacts”

My reply to him at the time was that he’d missed the point.

I tried to summarize what I meant:

1. We know there’s been a STRONG correlation in the geological past between CO2 levels and global temperatures.

I’m very grateful to the Agmates.com website, which published one of my articles last week. The article carried the provocative title Rudd’s Greenhouse Target: Disaster For Our Grandchildren? (a copy is also on this website). It has provoked quite a discussion over there..

The Agmates community is based in the Australian bush. Like any group of people, it includes quite a range of opinion. But it would probably be accurate to say that the majority view is sceptical of the case that climate change is a significant threat.

So Steve Truman, the editor, shows guts to publish these articles and invite comment. It’s exactly what media should do much more, but actually do very little: stimulate discussion and exchange of views.

Today, Agmates also published my follow-up article: Not Far from Climate Change Consensus for Action – A Response to Climate Change Sceptics.

You can also read it on this website.

The article is an attempt to put the case for strong and rapid action on greenhouse emissions reduction as best i can.

It’s written from the perspective of someone who’s been concerned for many years about this subject, but didn’t ‘make a career’ out of it.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in the science of climate change. If anyone spots errors in my arguments or the data I rely on, please let me know. Feel free also to post comments in this blog.

Kevin Rudd

Playing cards with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is an unusually frustrating experience.

Take Greenhouse Poker, for example.

In most poker games, each player makes successive bids in one or rounds of betting.

But Kevin only makes conditional bids. Example: “I’ll raise 15% – as long as you all raise your bids at least the same amount”.

Penny Wong

It makes for a slow and quarrelsome game.

When playing Climate Bridge, Kevin and his slick young partner Penny refuse to place their cards face up, even when they’re playing dummy.

“We must see everyone else’s cards first” Mr Rudd demanded.

Climate Fraud

“It’s the responsible course of action. At the end of the day, we take balanced decisions, going forward.

“We expect (hope) to be criticized on all sides. That proves we’ve got it right!”

Mr Rudd’s grandchildren were not available for comment.

As our mainstream politicians and major polluting industries are apt to remind us often, Australia is only a bit player when it comes to global greenhouse emissions. We contribute a relatively small proportion of the global total, overshadowed by the USA, Europe, China and other more populous regions of the planet.

Hazelwood power plant: Australia's dirtiest power plant? Not due to close until 2030

On the other hand, Australia’s per capita CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world. Australia’s ‘historical responsibility’ for the increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since industrialization began is also disproportionately high.

Climate Action Network Australia issued a Position Paper called Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction for Australia in August 2008. It mounted a case for a 40% emissions reduction target for Australia by 2020.

Here’s the nub of CANA’s argument:

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report concluded that, for 2° to 2.4°C warming scenarios, global emission reductions in the range of 50 percent to 85 percent by 2050 (compared to 2000 levels) are required36. To keep global warming well below 2°C, the global community must aim for the upper end of this range. This was confirmed more recently by Martin Parry, Co-Chair of the Working Group II of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, who also highlighted the need for global cuts of 80% by 205037.