I guess you have to give John Howard credit for being honest. The Aussie PM is excited about the prospect of Australia becoming an “energy superpower” by expanding its share of the fossil fuel market. Howard rejects not only the Kyoto Protocol but also any alternative (such as a carbon tax) other than end-of-the-pipe carbon cleanup technology. Burning fossil fuels comes first, because that’s what will make Australia rich. Protecting the environment can’t be allowed to interfere.
Australia is well placed to be an innovator in clean energy, with its cloudless skies and wide-open spaces ready for solar and wind power. But those kind of innovations won’t make money right away for established mining companies, and Howard is clear on whose back he’s watching.
Howard repeatedly cites “pragmatism” as a reason to focus on older forms of energy. It’s a common rhetorical trick, portraying older energy technologies as known quantities while renewable energy is speculative and risky. The problem is, if we demand that our energy source be clean — which Howard gives lip service to — the plausibility of that claim goes out the window. Is it really “pragmatic” to aim for a massive engineering fix that will turn dirty energy technologies into clean ones, but not “pragmatic” to expand the use of already-existing technologies that are intrinsically clean?
Interesting post.
Australia is well placed to be an innovator in clean energy, with its cloudless skies and wide-open spaces ready for solar and wind power.
If this is true – if this is empirically true (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), then there will be a commercial market for clean energy.
Here is the basic question you have to ask:
Am I free to go out into the desert somewhere, build ten acres of solar panels and a big ol’ transformer on my own land, and sell the power that I’m outputting?
If you are free to do so, and if Australia really is advantageously positioned for energy tech, then clean energy companies will spring up.
If you aren’t free to do so, then perhaps the problem is with your government and/or its laws, and not with fossil fuel exporters. Energy companies tend to think of themselves as energy companies. Exxon doesn’t hate solar power; Exxon would like to see some large-scale projects that it could use to sell juice. The numbers just aren’t there for those projects. Some cool pilot projects have demonstrated that it can be done – so there’s a certain amount of justified complacency about humanity’s prospects for energy in the long term. But right now it just doesn’t pay.
In the meantime, it makes perfect sense to use the fossil fuels we have readily available. There’s no need to set them all on fire at once. And certainly, let’s look at how and why we use them as we work on mitigating global climate issues.
Well, it only makes sense because of massive externalized costs. If you factored the cost of the loss of most of the world’s estuaries and the drowning of the most low lying cities (or the massive expansion of dikes to prevent that drowning) into the price of gasoline and coal and natural gas, you might find that the cost of other energy sources were reasonable by comparison.
And, of course, that is what Kyoto attempts to do, and what Australia and the US are unwilling to do.
[Inappropriate comment deleted by Amp.]
The whole concept of blaming the government, not the energy companies for this mess is an odd one, because there’s damn little seperation between the two. Governments roll over for large energy corporations regularly. If a large energy company wanted to invest time and energy in alternate fuels, they couls ask the government, and even ask the government to subsidize them.
They’re *not* doing that. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want to.
Robert: Just because something isn’t profitable doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good idea. And in any event, big established companies would much rather defend their rut than go looking for new opportunities.