A Carbon Tax

Australia and the world needs a carbon tax and the money from this providing green cheques to the community and towards the growth of renewable energy.

THE WAY TO GO

On many many occasions those who have insisted that there is an inextricable link between nuclear power and nuclear weaponry and that this is a serious thing have never gotten the publicity they deserve. All the time trust; trust that no state will use their resources to achieve nuclear weaponry by stealth. is all we have between those who haven’t got the bomb yet. and trust is all we have between those who have. There is no other deterrent than trust and the love we have for the human species and indeed for all of life on earth. Unfortunately brought down by evolution we have in our genes and used by ideologies the desire for disastrous confrontation to resolve problems. Spare plutonium and fissionable unaccountable material floating around the world is not a good mix in this situation. But sixty-eight tones of plutonium destined to be for weaponry has had a strop placed on it both by Russia and the United States. That’s only the accounted amount. More is floating around and it’s this stray unaccountable amount, together with yet unprocessed fissionable material, which causes greatest concern. There are still countries that are nuclear weapon states that will not sign up to the NPT and there are countries that want nuclear technology and we in Australia have a pro-nuclear lobby gaining strength believing that nuclear technology is the answer to global warming. There will be lots of countries in the world and through Asia developing nuclear reactors and some of them will want to have nuclear weaponry and the more nuclear material floats around the world the greater the chance of disaster. Nuclear reactors are very safe and there would have to be multiple things to go wrong for present generation reactors to melt down. I am a ‘not in my back yard’ person though even so. To sum this up:
1 We don’t have the genes as a result of evolution and as a result of ideology encouragement to resist using nuclear weaponry to resolve confrontations.
2 More nuclear material floating around as a result of civil projects means a greater risk of disaster through states wanting a nuclear weapons program too.
3 There is only one way to mitigate against this and that is to encourage the use renewable energy and not go anymore into nuclear energy.
4 Solar thermal with storage, wind, wave, and geothermal are just some of the many renewable energy systems to produce base power and all the power we need.

AREVA AQUIRES 100% OF AUSRA

This sounds a wonderful step forward for CSP but I can’t help being cynical about it. What happens when a big fish swallows a small fish? The big fish remains and grows even bigger but the small one is gone forever and the big fish can continue doing what it was always doing i.e. eating the small fry. Companies all over the world are eating the smaller companies and getting even bigger dominating the market, dictating the price and closing down that which they deem not to be viable. It would be easy to engineer it this way for CSP and other renewables.

World Wide Tax For The Polluters

Tony Abbott the leader of the opposition in Australia has joined Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in paying the polluters. His idea is that everyone will be paying much much less to reduce carbon in his direct action approach but he is still paying polluters to continue polluting. We all know that to reduce carbon we will have to pay to do it. It certainly is not going to happen by itself. In my opinion there’s only one way to do it that will work. A universal carbon tax all over the world directed at those that pollute. If you pollute you pay, and if you pollute more you pay more. This tax can’t be traded or sold in any way but is administered by a worldwide authority (to be decided) and this tax money is given to those who do not pollute i.e. the renewable power generation sector. This of course is very severe and is a double whammy for the polluters because they will be paying for the renewable sector to grow and this stick approach will also push them into stopping their own pollution. They (the polluters) will eventually morph into the renewable sector. And it has to be a universal tax being simpler to administer and each country will have the same conditions.

Copenhagan Was a Failure

Yes it was. Well if you really wanted to see the results that should have happened. Will that happen in a years time when the next conference occurs? I think we will not see the result the earth needs. But who cares? Skeptics say the earth is cooling. But cooling is just as serious. Greatly affected parts of the earth will wipe out population anyway. Veritical farms using city skyscrapers are touted as being a way of producing food and there are many unused sky scrapers in all cities but they will need lots of energy especially in cool or frozen environment. And so we get back to the energy question. Renewable energy will be of utmost importance to keep the ship sailing. Mining coal,uranium, and oil will be all that much harder in a frozen environment and will therefore become prohibitively expensive. Wind blows almost continuously in polar regions. It probaly will do the same when the earth is frozen over large parts of it and wind generation will be one of the main power sources.We had better get on greatly increasing renewable energy NOW and not wait if what's has happened in the Northern Hemisphere this last twelve months is any guide.

PAID TO POLLUTE

If you pollute you get paid and if you pollute more you get paid more. That’s the policy of the Rudd government now and it’s the policy all over the world. Who pays for this? Those who don’t have the money to pay, and don’t have the money to lobby and buy government and therefore democracy- if you are in some sort of a so-called democracy. And if you are in a totalitarian nation state you can’t even try and buy it! Democracy is not for all, even in a democracy, but its very much better having at least some democracy in a democratic state and if you are of the majority, and the majority in Australia is 70% who believe that global warming is real and is happening at ever increasing rates and will threaten our very existence soon, then you would want to do something about it now!! No you can’t! At least you can’t do all that’s necessary to save the planet. And you wont be able to channel enough money into the right areas. You haven’t got the money to do that even if you are of the majority because the Pondsi schemed financial sector has ensured that they will be paid for the pollution they’ve created, the crash of the economy they’ve created and the threat to the environment they’ve made and go on business as usual continuing the lie and hoodwinking you. But the environment is not silly even if we are. We are basically environmentally, economically and ethically bankrupt.The environment has limits and we are seeing those limits right in front of us as we smash into the world’s finite resources. Like it or not we are going to have to change immediately!! Otherwise we will keep on smashing into the environmental limits and we will be bounced back each time. None of the proposed options to reduce CO2 emissions by the polluters will work in any effective way because to do so will close their businesses. The polluters will probably control the Copenhagen meeting in December and make promises and perhaps listen to the poorest and most affected nations. That’s likely all that will happen. Effective emissions reduction means a total cut in emissions now!! The anthropogenic triggered rise in CO2 has tipped the fine balance between positive and negative feedbacks of this planet resulting in a summed positive warming effect rising exponentially. This is a disastrous situation to be in. Disastrous global warming will now happen certainly at least in our grandchildren’s lifetime or possibly sooner instead of playing out over the millennia. We need to understand that the planet is a heat sink gradually absorbing heat from the sun hence the rise in temperature as result of positive feedback. We can’t say the planet is cooling because of local temperature decrease. Or warming because of an increase in local temperature but we can say it is warming because we see more extremes of weather everywhere. And we all know about the polar icecaps melting. An analogy would be to see convection currents becoming more vigorous as more heat is applied to a pot of water on the stove eventually resulting in boiling. Already just a half-degree sea temperature rise has caused fish to migrate out of their usual areas to other areas. This is both good and bad as we are now seeing fish we never have seen before resulting in the collapse of some fishing industries. Overfishing and pollution has exacerbated it. More warming and hence more vigorous convection currents in sea and air –well you know the result. There now is a never-ending list of environmental degradation and collapse that could be cited. Carbon capture and storage for the coal industry, with all its other pollutants, will never work on a global scale and certainly the amount of money being spent to realise this is far too small and it will never happen. Nuclear power has its inextricable connection to nuclear weapons and is very costly. The pebble bed nuclear power system has not been proven for global scale and still involves transport of uranium with its inherent dangers and has more waste to deal with. The only way forward is to dump the model we have, understand how we are interconnected with the environment and all its ecologies and build an economy based entirely on the environment. We can use immediately already proven technologies for the energy sector using the environment for energy production and using it in a way that doesn’t destroy it and us, as we are part of the environment. We have taken a long time to learn and as an example we have built and are still building large-scale hydroelectric schemes but they have tended to destroy the environment at best and at worst destroyed it entirely and with it also peoples livelihoods. We need to know how to not do it that way. It’s hard to see how future projects of damming rivers to produce hydropower could help the environment. So we need to concentrate on technologies that impose little or no degradation and are not dangerous to human, and environmental health or security. Large-scale wind farms spread throughout the country in uninhabited areas or out at sea away from sight an analysis has shown will provide base power if connected to a grid over a sufficiently large area as at any one time there will always be a third of them producing base power 24/7. Tide and wave power together with direct absorption of photons from the only safe nuclear reactor we have-the sun in solar thermal installations with storage will provide the rest of needed base power. Solar thermal installations can be sited in desert areas. There’s plenty of desert in China, the Middle East, North Africa, Australia, America. And only relatively very small areas would be required and connection to where the power is needed by High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines which loose less power typically 3%. The present push for carbon capture and storage system of credits, it would be better to have a carbon tax all over the world where carbon taxes can’t be bought. This tax could then be put into financing renewable power systems. Worldwide cooperation will be needed. The Copenhagen talks should work along these lines.

DID GLOBAL WARMING DO THIS?

A few days ago Sydney received the worst dust storm in history. Of course Sydney has had many dust storms over many years as has most of Australia, but this one was THE WORST for Sydney. In my opinion global warming could be the genesis of more of these to come. After all the world’s weather is doing strange things nowadays resulting in horrendous destruction more often than usual, and even more extreme events could occur in future, and not too far down the track at that. It blew many many tones of top soil and fertility away but for this dust storm, what is of concern also is the fact that this dust came from dust in the heart of Australia where uranium mining is active, in particular Olympic Dam. A mine which is intended to be increased in size to a hole three kilometres wide, four kilometres long and one kilometre deep. True, the radioactive dust was diluted in the mix, but it spread out all over the Eastern States and even as far as New Zealand. With greater intensity and frequency of extreme weather events expected as global warming occurs it would not be too difficult to imagine, that we may be entering a time when carcinogenic certainties manifest themselves in the same way as we have seen in the asbestos scenario, as we will be receiving more radio activity than we would have normally from background radiation, this dust once driven deep into the lungs could cause 20-100 times more problems. And it only takes a minute particle size of plutonium to cause cancer once in the lungs as specks of plutonium are still lying around from the Maralinga atomic tests in the 50’s and we also have rare earth metals associated with uranium and all tailings from mines release radon gas. With the new scenario emerging this time all of Australia’s population will be at risk, which will have even greater consequences. And this of course will happen anywhere in the world where this scenario occurs. It must be added to the list of reasons why we must not go down the nuclear path and why we must adopt the very sound reasons of producing our power from renewable sources.