To quote someone else. If you were about to get on a jet, 100 aircraft engineers entered the terminal and 90 of them said the plane was going to crash, would you still get on the plane?
I have to believe the majority of climate scientists are right but I don’t think it’s the debate we need to be having at the moment. If we want to have a debate it should start with a simple fact – we are going to run out of oil, gas and coal in a relatively short time and our world’s economy depends on them. The question is – what will the effect be on our civilisation while it’s happening?
At the moment, the rise of the Asian economy is something we’ve never experienced. Two countries that house almost half the world’s population are seeing a peasant class being elevated to working-class and middle-class at a rate we haven’t seen before. As a result, it’s estimated that the number of petrol driven vehicles on our planet will double in the next two decades, which leads many experts to assert that we have almost reached, or have already reached, peak-oil.
Demand will begin to outstrip our ability to supply it and we all know what happens to price in that event. The only people who paint a rosy picture of the life expectancy of the coal industry is the coal industry, because demand will enable them to sell the stuff no matter what the price is.
Even though we have estimates of up to 150 years of coal reserves it’s generally thought that peak-coal will happen somewhere around 2030 to 2050. The trendline for the price of coal is therefore inexorably up, and with it goes our cost of living.
The Industrial Revolution showed us that a country that innovates will dominate many industries. In those days it was possible for other countries to eventually catch up to Britain but in modern times the mentality of public companies means that, when an industry dies in a country, it’s unlikely to return. The country that bases their energy intensive industries on such energy sources as tidal-river and geothermal will have a head start. Those energy sources are free and limitless and, with our government using the receipts from a carbon tax to partner with the energy sector (on construction costs), we could end up with significant carbon reduction as a by-product. If we don’t find a way to provide clean, cheap energy to our highly energy intensive industries, such as the aluminium industry, they will disappear.
Somewhere in the world someone will construct channels to make use of a river’s tidal power as they did in the industrial revolution or they’ll dig a deep well and develop a binary cycle geothermal power plant and use that cheap limitless free power source to provide power to an aluminium smelter.
That day WILL come and that’s the day our aluminium industry dies. Somewhere in the world someone will develop hydrogen powered cars in a quantity that will make it a viable industry and that will kill off any country’s auto industry if it can’t immediately adapt.
If we change the debate to one of future Energy Security using clean and cheap energy, we will have a better carbon outcome than if we concentrated the debate on global warming.
I don’t want to see a reduction in spending on health, education etc, so the money will have to come from somewhere. Our economy adjusted to a 10 per cent GST which is a giant tax compared to any proposed Carbon Tax.
All we need to do is make sure that the money is targeted at industries that will make us energy independent in the future. Our rising cost of living isn’t caused by domestic politics and anyone who thinks it is should pull their head out of the sand and look at what’s going on in the rest of the world.
Energy costs and greed are to blame and the only one we can fix is the cost of energy. Waves, wind, river tides and sunlight don’t go up in price and never run out as long as we revolve around the sun and the moon revolves around us.
All it needs are politicians who are willing to bite the bullet and a populace who are intelligent enough to reject mindless slogans like “great big new tax” and start thinking about what comes next.
Adrian Wollaston
Lighthouse Beach
