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.