2020 Ideas

April 2008

I’ve put together some thoughts on climate change policy and actions. They are split into two groups with the first focussing on how to enable the general public to be ‘part of the solution’ and the second on steps the Government can take if it has the courage to face down its detractors.
Being Part of the Solution

To achieve widespread involvement and adoption of climate friendly products and activities, there needs to be an alignment of individual economic benefits with behavioural changes that speed the transition to a low carbon economy. This can be achieved by costing in externalities and encouraging efficient resource use. The proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will achieve this to some extent for power and manufactured materials and there other emerging schemes that will achieve this for water.

A more direct, and possibly more successful, involvement in the solution can be through enabling the general public to profit from the growth in clean technology solutions:

• Dedicating, or even mandating, a proportion of superannuation savings to investment in companies that are providing the solutions would certainly spur growth.
• A simple option to encourage take up of household technologies such as solar panels and water tanks, would be for the high street banks to facilitate the costs of such purchases to be added to an existing mortgage.
• Perhaps more interesting are community funded projects such as Hepburn Wind Co-operative in Victoria. Such projects benefit not only the environment but the communities involved as well.

Courage
Australia’s extensive coal reserves lend support to the proposal that it lead global efforts into making carbon capture and storage (CCS) a viable economic and environmental option. However, the doubtful sustainability of filling up reservoirs to store sequestered carbon and the question of large scale cross country liquid carbon pipelines seems to limit the long term viability of CCS.

There are two large scale projects that the Government could pursue that would have significant impacts on reducing the source of emissions as follows:

• In his interim report, Garnaut discussed using the proceeds of the ETS auctions for publicly funded infrastructure to facilitate the uptake of low emissions technologies. To encourage utility scale development utilising Australia’s best resources, a DC power cable network could be laid starting near Ceduna in SA, running through the prime locations for geothermal and solar thermal and connecting into the NSW grid somewhere in the west of the state.
• Given Australia has much of the world’s uranium that we are happy to dig up and sell to the world for use in nuclear power stations, it is difficult to argue against the development of a world’s best practice nuclear plant with an on-site integrated uranium supply and disposal chain.

These are brave calls on long term infrastructure projects that would fundamentally change the country. Will the Government have the courage to follow through and establish the infrastructure to allow the long term exploitation of its greatest sustainable assets of natural nuclear power, wind and solar rather than backing an ‘end of the pipe’ solution for the power source of the industrial revolution?

This is an edited extract of an article written by John O'Brien. Full a copy of the full article please contact info@auscleantech.com.au