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SILICON
SILIC
CHIP
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
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2 Silicon Chip
Publisher’s Letter
Global warming is causing
panic among politicians
and the bureaucracy
Whether or not you believe in global warming
and whether or not you think human industrial
activity is responsible, it seems that many of the
proposed counter-measures will not help and may
even worsen the problems. For example, federal
and state governments are keen to give substantial
financial incentives for people to install solar
hot-water systems and solar cell arrays. All the
environmentalists are very enthusiastic about these
measures and they cheer on the politicians, albeit with the rider: “They’re
not doing enough on climate change!” or “John Howard’s asleep on climate
change!” or something similarly inane. In the face of such a barrage, is it
any wonder that the politicians and bureaucrats are anxious to be seen to
be “doing something”.
However, as described in this and last month’s article on “How to Cut
Your Greenhouse Emissions”, pushing solar hot-water and solar cell arrays
is probably not the best way to go. Using solar cells to generate electricity
in domestic installations is simply a poor economic decision. Similarly, a
recent proposal to make some Sydney schools “carbon neutral” by installing large solar cell arrays is a crazy economic decision. It would make far
more sense for those schools to do the best they can in cutting back energy
consumption and then use their hard-earned budgets to improve their
teaching resources.
This is not to say that Australia should not invest heavily in solar power
generation; simply that giving substantial financial incentives for small
domestic installations is probably not the best allocation of scarce financial
resources. Of course, to suggest this as alternative government policy is
likely to bring forth catcalls from the environmentalists with such emotive
labels as “climate change denier”.
Similarly, setting up carbon trading schemes seems quite pointless when
you think about it. Planting trees is fine and good for the environment. Trees
do take quite a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere while they are immature
but the trees must exist for all time for the carbon to have been permanently
removed from the atmosphere. The only way to make a permanent carbon
removal is to bury the tree after it dies – not very practical!
Carbon dioxide geo-sequestration is also likely to be extremely costly, even
if it does become workable on a large scale. To us, geo-sequestration seems
to be a futile attempt to postpone the eventual acknowledgement that coal
mining and coal burning do present serious problems.
Ultimately, as pointed out in the Greenhouse Emissions articles, we really should make major cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from our existing
coal-fired base-load power stations, particularly those using brown coal in
Victoria. And while gas-fired and nuclear power stations could certainly
lead to major cuts in emissions, a better way for the long term will be to
use our huge geothermal reserves or so-called “hot rocks” such as in the
Cooper Basin in South Australia. While this requires enormous investment
to provide and exploit, the pay-off will ultimately be huge, both in economic
terms and for the environment.
Leo Simpson
siliconchip.com.au
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