Monday, November 26, 2007

A New Hope For Renewables

What a great day to see John Howard and the Liberal Party out of office and John Howard loosing his seat!!!

Now at last there is great hope we should see renewable energy going down the path it should have gone at least 30 years ago, being seriously taken as THE major alternative to coal and nuclear power with gas being only a backup-if at all. We all know a liberal government would have secured the nuclear industry and renewables would have only become a niche market at best. We need to put the case to the politicians that renewable energy is the way to go and leave the coal in the ground-and also the uranium. Right now of course they (Labor Party) have no perception of this and the liberals don't even want to know. The first thing to do is to show that renewable energy can provide all power simply because as any renewable energy scientist knows, there is enough free energy there to provide ALL the world with power indefinitely and we are getting better at extracting it and transmitting it to the people. And we need to continue doing this full bore because it's the safest strategically and environmentally, and is economically the best way.

In taking this road all renewable options should be put on the table as opponents will always argue that there is not enough capacity to provide reliable base power 24/7 e.g. wind or solar photo voltaic, solar thermal or even wave power and therefore requiring coal or nuclear to provide base power and that all the eggs should not be put into one basket-just so long as coal and nuclear have the most eggs and baskets! The argument usually centres on one renewable source completely forgetting that renewable energy is wide spread and is available from many sources and combined is continuous. And the public needs to know that in Australia alone there are many companies involved in renewable energy, perhaps several score, and many have their parent companies overseas but that we in Australia should be home to them and our scientists should be brought back.



Sunday, November 18, 2007

Renewable Energy-The Safe Way Forward

The planet is not going to wait and it doesn't care about our costs or economies. We have to stop emitting CO2 immediately! This is a war and it means turning off fossil fuel produced power now! This leads governments to increase nuclear power but we can more easily and safely plow money into renewable energy eg wave,tide,wind with storage, concentrated solar thermal with storage, solar photo voltaic with storage, and not forgetting geothermal from the only safe nuclear reactor the sun. Every country can tap into renewable energy. Many countries can tap into a number of them. There's enough power there to supply the whole world with power for ever. Pity we went down the wrong road with fossil fuel and nuclear. Nuclear is not safe because the world is entrenched in crazy ideologies and nuclear reactors have shown not to operate reliably in a warming climate and we all know what fossil fuel is doing to our planet. Had we gone down the renewable energy path 50 years ago we would have been able to produce all our energy this way including power for motor vehicles. It's not too late-yet. It just means we have to have the political will and get stuck into it. It can be done. Scientists know renewable energy (apart from hydro) can supply base power and is doing it in many parts of the world be it in only a minor way yet. But the nuclear and fossil fuel industries don't know and don't want to know. It's time they unfossilized themselves and came into the 21st century!

In a panorama of the evidence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared Saturday that the impact of global warming could be "abrupt or irreversible" and no country would be spared.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed to political leaders to push for "a real breakthrough" at a key conference running on the Indonesian island of Bali from December 3 to 14. "We cannot afford to leave Bali without such a breakthrough," he said, branding climate change as the "defining challenge of our age."

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