Whatever course we adopt, it will cost. I make the following proposals for laws and expenditure to meet the menace of global warming brought on by the burning of coal and oil:
1. Postpone the introduction of carbon trading until after the next Federal election. We need more time for the formation of a public consensus and sound community support for meaningful action, for something more than mere soft support for laws that will keep the government in office. The political imperative may well lie elsewhere.
2. Side by side with a licensing and carbon trading regime, we need taxes of the nature of ground rent of mine sites and of an excise on coal produced for use, or for domestic and export markets.
3. The government proposes to reduce the excise now levied on some petroleum based fuel consumption. This is not enough. We should impose an equal excise on all fuel used in all categories of consumption, and not least on those now exempt as well as add in a tax on coal. All excise rates should be set upon a basis of thermal or carbon equivalents.
Excise for revenue remains a regressive tax unfit for an egalitarian society. It bears heavily on the less well endowed among whom it is now having political consequences that can destroy the government. It is said to be feeding into grocery prices, already affected by monopoly pricing. Moreover, the present exemptions from fuel taxes are subsidies to foreign economies in the main, a form of foreign aid, and they are definitely not in aid of price signals directed to promote or having the effect of restraints on CO2 production.
4. Only 30% of fuel now used in Australia is taxed.There should be no longer be exemptions of any kind for fuel used in agriculture, coal, gold and iron ore and all other mining and primary industry.This reform could reduce significantly, by about two-thirds at first sight, the existing rate at which fuel is now taxed by the excise without affecting the quantum of revenue flowing to the federal budget.
5. Freeze all Commonwealth direct outlays and taxation expenditure for the sequestration of CO2, and for wind, wave, and domestic collectors, at least for the time being, and turn to large-scale generation of solar power.
6. Concentrate Commonwealth outlays on the investigation and development of energy to be won in inland SA and WA from hot rocks and solar energy plants there and upon building solar collector installations such as are proposed for the United States in the source cited above. And the conversion of CO2 into something useful instead of being discarded as waste should be put under study. (Scientific American has recently published an article, also noted on www.climatedebatedaily.com, that a California firm is turning CO2 into cement. What this practice of sequestration projected in making cement from sea water will do to life in the oceans is a nice point for consideration.)
7. Abandon all further direct and indirect outlays and taxation expenditure in aid of coal producers for the cost of equipment used in coal production and handling beyond maintenance of infrastructure of existing mines, railways and ports.
8. Cease the provision of electricity to industrial and domestic consumers at unequal prices per unit on any basis that does not merely reflect the cost of production and delivery. Prices for power should cease to be set to promote its consumption or to fetch industrial investment in one place rather than another on a common grid.
9. Custom Regulations (Exports) should provide
(a) that coal may not be exported from any mine site or district not already in operation and production during the financial year 2006-7 and,
(b) that coal may not be exported from any coal mine site or district in excess of the coal exported from that site or district during the financial year 2006-7.
This is a compromise in the face of the claims now promoted on every side. It invokes the precautionary principle expressed in law directed not to make matters worse. It proposes to uphold the status quo ante in an industry which is expanding rapidly, and perhaps dangerously, under the inducements of the China trade.
10. Our mines are mainly foreign owned. Foreign companies pay very little or no tax here on their profits. Our ordinary domestic company rate of tax is 30%. Not so for foreigners. The dividends and interest payments that they send abroad are at worst taxed at a mere 15% . Indeed, if they are British companies they are not taxed at all on money sent home. It is another form of foreign aid. The usual rate written into our double taxation treaties is 15%. These treaties, as they affect the production of coal, should be repudiated.
Why take these steps? Carbon may kill us. Someone has to be first to act. We produce four times more carbon per capita than China.
The planet's atmosphere is one single undivided whole and we are all in it together - from Mongolia to Melbourne. If the atmosphere is polluted and even crippled by behaviour in one place, there will no escape for others elsewhere. If we send coal to Mongolia, the CO2 from its burning may well affect us here. If it affects the atmosphere there, it may well affect the climate here. It is of the very nature of things.
Our coal may, and some say will, bring on changed weather patterns here to our detriment, wherever it is burned, here or in China. Chernobyl illustrated how 'nasties' in the atmosphere move around. Some, but not all, are sure of this. Others urge us not to be first out of the blocks. They prefer to barter the curse and condemn the purchaser. They manifest the optimism of Dr Strangelove and Vera Lynn about what may be nigh.
If you dig up something that has been secreted away from the atmosphere as a simple mixture deep beneath rock and other forms of overburden for vast periods of time, and you burn it in and combine it with components of the planet's atmosphere, whereby some of the product burned (carbon) combines with a component of the atmosphere (oxygen), and you inject this new molecule CO2 in vast tonnages into the atmosphere for a couple of centuries where some or more of it remains, not falling to earth or into the oceans, where it may do harm anyway, you should not be surprised if something results, something changes in the atmosphere, on the ground and in the oceans and in the influence of the sun upon the planet, and that something may be significant to the character of the planet and its atmosphere, for better or worse.
I do not know whether anything bad has happened or is happening. I would be surprised if nothing was happening. Nothing much happens in nature for the better. Man has a poor record in fiddling with nature.
Some are certain that our coal is drawing us towards a disaster, and want things done differently. The coal owners resist. The coal companies got to the Howard government and reduced it to passivity. There is huge opposition from the coal industry against restraints on production. Howard was emphatic in his day about coal and "the economy" until he realised that climate change was a real electoral issue in the community and that he was on a loser in being a sceptic about it: "I will never do anything that threatens the jobs of coal miners", he used to say. His opponents of the day now stand beside him - all for coal. We have three State governments and their Treasuries dependent on the mining royalties and rail freight charges paid in by the industry. Rudd has recently declared, on July 1, "I'm a Queenslander - I'm a big believer in coal", and Swan wants to build more and more infrastructure, rail, roads and coal ports, for the export of Queensland coal.
Anna Bligh has announced grand plans for the expansion of coal exports. They are certainly grand, and down, she did not say, with the consequences to a single, whole atmosphere undivided by national boundaries which we and the purchasers share.
I draw attention to three contributions to the discussion of global warming:
1. www.sciam.com/article/id/a-solar-grand-plan/SID/mail (The journal 20 July 2008 records 690 responses and comments).
2. www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/mackay_on_carbon_free_uk/print.html
3. For a diversity of views, go to www.climatedebatedaily.com. For imminent global heating and cooling, see also http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080103/94768732.htmland http://en.rian.ru/science/20080122/97519953.html
The first is a study published in Scientific American six months ago in which the three authors propose a scheme for a solar collector in their south western deserts providing sufficient energy for remote cities for daytime consumption and for the pumping of air compressed at 1000psi for storage and release at night to drive alternators. Their editor summarises their case thus:
# A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
# A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
# Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
# A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
Sequestration is a proposal to capture CO2 in the chimneys of the coal-fired power stations, send it by pipe to a hole drilled into rock and then pump it down sites in the inland and cap the hole. A pressure of 3000psi is proposed. This pressure tends to save sites, space and drilling but it threatens escape of CO2 gas over time due to error, earth movements, poor workmanship, sabotage, machinery failures, corrosion, perished materials, fires, broken pipes, leaks from valves and connections, to name a few suggested by life's experience. Things go wrong in these modern times. And you need good sound rock to hold the gas forever.
The authors, in Scientific American, have written of air pressures of 1000psi retained overnight.
Sequestration itself will cost us hugely and we are not even assured at this stage that it will work. Research and experimentation is needed. The government is already engaged in outlays without any certainty at this point of the expenditure that carbon can be captured and kept buried for forever and where. There has been talk of spending in the order of a billion dollars merely for research and development. Sequestration of CO2 is absolutely untried anywhere in the world. It is an ad hoc, rushed quickie, promoted by - and intended - to keep the coal companies and the power companies in business, their labour force in jobs, the politicians of the coal fields in office, geologists busy in the search for safe repositories and provide employment on the side in the construction phase for others.
Whatever course we adopt, it will cost. The provision of energy costs us now , just as it cost us resources in the past to get to this point of its provision. There is one question to be faced in respect of turning to solar and away from sequestration: are the resources available. They are. No one suggests that the sun will stand exhausted of its power in under four or five millions of years,
The solar/compressed air idea for a country rich in sunshine, as we are, is interesting, creative, plausible, clean, safe, pertinent and persuasive. It appears to be an application of existing, proven technology. Compressed air is a whole lot safer, I would think, than compressed C02 when it escapes, as the latter surely will. Solar power and underground steam in South Australia could perhaps be used together day and night on the one distribution network. Google carries a lot of information about the hot rocks under South Australia from Adelaide to Lake Eyre.
The whole idea of solar/compressed air is worthy of a place even in the gloomy and prophetic minds of the political Shylocks all around mouthing budget-speak to those of us who have fierce sensations of costs tingling in the hip pockets of our very own pants, who claim to know what they will feel. Sequestration is slated to cost us bigtime. So will solar. The one seeks to bury the problem - it hopes. The other avoids it entirely. The coal industry would paralyse us before a menace that may destroy us. We should tell them that coal is old technology and they must step aside.
There is a change of sentiment back towards nuclear power in Germany where piecemeal solar has been in high favour in official policy for years: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,565363,00.html. Even there, green energy contributes only about 14 per cent of Germany's power consumption. A return to nuclear power may have its attractions in a desperate world, but it remains the case that nuclear plants are massively expensive to build and require everywhere state subsidies for their construction. They are dangerous in the case of breakdowns, use water for cooling , are plagued by shut-downs for technical emergencies, are costly to de-commission, and produce waste that is expensive to store safely and which remains dangerous for innumerable millennia. The waste includes plutonium, a gram of which is said to be capable of inflicting death in a minute. Moreover, the proliferation of nuclear power stations increases, at the very least proportionally, the risk of illicit appropriation of the fuel and waste, and its application for malicious purposes. Because, in some cases, nuclear power stations are now profitable, the temptation to multiply them is not small.
In Europe the European Union is talkng now of importing power undersea from the Sahara to avoid resort to nuclear power. In contrast, we have our own 'deserts' close by and abundantly sunlit, to boot. See www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/23/solarpower.windpower/print.
Retreat from CO2 remains the order of the day. Basically, what the coal industry does, in the large, is make a great big mess, down here and up there.
Currently a director of Civil Liberties Australia, Jim Staples is a former industrial relations and arbitration judge and, before that, a leading barrister at the NSW and Federal bars.
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Comments
CO2 sequestration a real concern
Thank you for highlighting some of the research already done into the area of CO2 sequestration. I share your concerns that the technology is in no way ready for commercialisation, and find it difficult to understand the on going retiscience to support existing power generation alternatives.
The major concern I have with CO2 sequestration is that we do actually succeed in developing the technology to the point where very large quantites could be sequestered. But we are then left with VERY dangerous underground deposits of poisonous gas - which will need to remain underground for, well forever in our case.
If there were to be a serious leak, so far as I understand it it would release a cloud which would effectively suffocate all animals and humans in its wake. I am astounded more hasn't been made of such a threat, we would end up in a situation not unlike that which we face with regards to the storage and disposal of nuclear material.
Why introduce this new and very real danger into the equation when Mr Staples so rightly suggests we already have many of the technologies we need to make the tranisiton from dirty to clean power generation.
We've wasted ten years poisoning our planet by supporting a coal industry rather than developing existing technolgies to the point where they are widely commercially available - Although I'm not sure that it makes sense to focus on the cost of the transition. It's more of s structural readjustment - winners and losers perhaps, but the overall net benefit of switching to renew albe sources of power far outweights any cost assotiated with the transition.
HOW COAL WAS FORMED
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock composed mostly of carbon and hydrocarbons. It is the most abundant fossil fuel produced in the United States.
Coal is a nonrenewable energy source because it takes millions of years to create. The energy in coal comes from the energy stored by plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, when the earth was partly covered with swampy forests. For millions of years, a layer of dead plants at the bottom of the swamps was covered by layers of water and dirt, trapping the energy of the dead plants. The heat and pressure from the top layers helped the plant remains turn into what we today call coal.
Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.lincenergy.us