Given the need for speed in reducing CO2 emissions, it is reprehensible for the any government to lose an opportunity to assist households and/or businesses to reduce their carbon emissions. What the alternative energy industry needs, is large scale uptake of their technologies, with which will come economies of scale, and ultimately lower prices per unit of energy produced.

Muddling the pursuit of social equity with the need to reduce carbon emissions will sadly come back to bite the very people the government is endeavouring to help and that is lower income earners.

The fast adoption of alternative energy technologies will and can be assisted by government policies that lowers costs for private enterprise. That is what all governments should be doing poste haste.

Don’t play with the future!

A really interesting idea (perhaps a bit challenging for Greens though) is selectively logging mature trees (that are no longer rapidly extracting CO2) and burying those trees about a metre below the ground. At the right locations they have been shown to last thousands of years without decay in such conditions. That may be enough time for earth systems to renormalise our CO2 levels, or some other solution to arise, assuming we decarbonise our civilisation soon.

You can continue to grow forests from where you logged the now buried tree. So the newly planted trees keep pumping CO2 out of the air and storing it as wood. You can even bury the tree in the forest itself.

The crux of it is you manage the forest (by selective logging) to ensure it is always operating at its maximum CO2 extraction rate.

If a tree operates at maximum extraction rate for 30 years and the buried trees are sound for 3000 years, then you potentially get 100 times the total CO2 sequestration that would have been available from a steady state forest.

I wouldn’t describe it as a silver bullet, just possibly one of the potential strategies to deploy within a larger suite.

PS: If we do end up heading for an ice age, we can always dig up the fantastic resource of buried trees we squirrelled away and use them for firewood

Once the ice is gone, it’s going to be harder to stop runaway climate change; we all know this.

Perhaps we should start looking at projects which will actively suck carbon out of the air rather than reducing the amount we put in there. Yes, we need to stop emitting which is why we need to switch to renewables for electricity and public transport over the car. We also need to get as much carbon out of the air as possible.

Here’s some thoughts I put out at LP regarding getting moving:

Garnaut’s further input isn’t actually required in order to make some first steps towards clean generation. Those first steps are so obvious that they will not undermine any plan by Garnaut and they aren’t even expensive in 2008.

All the government needs to do is announce a tender for proposals due by Nov-2008 to build say a 500MW clean generation plant fully operational by Dec-2012 where the tenderer is the ultimate plant owner. The various bidders can estimate the cost and indicate how much of that cost should be government funded and make a convincing case that they can build it, showing how they have selected sites and thought the process through.

The government can then review the tenders and award a winner by say Feb-09 and start the process which will take a few years to complete. The drawdown of government funds will happen out till 2012 or so, in plenty of time for the future surpluses to meet the cost. The likely total government cost of the process out to 2012 is probably much less than $400M, with industry and financiers meeting the remaining cost (since they get to own the plant).

The cost in 2008 is close enough to zero. The cost in 2009 is probably around $50M.

Such a process would teach us important things and enable faster future replication. The point is it is possible to embark on meaningful action now and take genuine steps in the right direction with what we have and know now.

Can anyone who wants urgent action honestly really rather wait until the ETS is running in 2010 and then start such a process (as the one above) two years later than we could have?

Re your second point, we are. We are calling for a massive infrastructure fund on that level to fund renewables, efficiency, public transport, etc. Have a look at what Christine called for in her Budget Reply Speech.

Unfortunately, in current politics, the latter (which you call realistic) is actually unrealistic (it ain’t gonna happen under this government), while the former (reinstating the solar rebate) is realistic (it just might). We work for both.