Climate change

Now that the Australian political reality on climate change is starting to catch up with actual reality, the Howard government has been going out of its way to be seen to be doing something.

They can hardly not now that most people are finally convinced that there is something seriously wrong, in large part thanks to the Stern report that said it will cost a lot of money, and the fact that people are concerned they will soon have to wash with a mildly damp cloth passed around the entire family.

Howard has of course had to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way and is still trying to argue that it isn't that big of a problem, but even if it is a problem it will be solved by "clean coal" and nuclear power.

Clean coal, a term undoubtedly dreamed up by some public relations hack, is the argument that climate change can be forestalled if we somehow buried all the pollution from coal underground. It is the somehow that is the hurdle here because at the moment there is no way to do it and won't be for at the very least another decade.

Now the technology for nuclear power obviously already exists though we don't really have the expertise for it in Australia at present. However nuclear power has come a long way over the last few decades and is indeed relatively safe compared to the days of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

However it isn't a solution to climate change no matter how you spin it, not even a significant part of a solution. It will take probably fifteen years to build a nuclear power station, let alone dozens of them simultaneously, a production process that will itself significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Assuming all these nuclear power stations could be built they would still only account for a minority of our power generation needs and would do nothing to address greenhouse gas emissions from sources other than power generation.

The new nuclear power stations are reportedly safe from meltdowns but you have to think the danger from terrorist attack is still real. Even if direct attack is less of a threat they produce radioactive waste which isn't exactly the safest stuff to leave lying around.

And of course nuclear power stations are inherently centralised, compared with sustainable alternatives, and therefore more vulnerable to attack, or simple failure as vital infrastructure. A distributed generation capacity makes a lot more sense in terms of risk and also in terms of the ability to be brought online, one module at a time.

Nuclear simply won't get the job done. Even accepting all the government's arguments it would be a stop gap measure for a part of the problem. Uranium afterall is not a renewable resource and demand is likely to increase fast. Good for uranium companies but bad for people who have just made themselves dependent on uranium. It will run out.

All the while during the nuclear diversion the government has virtually eliminated funding for research and implementation of viable alternatives. We are afterall a sunburnt country... it shouldn't be this hard to get the government to face reality.

They are so desperate to prop up the current industries rapidly becoming obsolete but still cashed up and subsidised that they are sabotaging the future ones. We should be ahead of the curve but we are falling ever further behind and the government seems determined to go full steam ahead in the wrong direction.