Below is a graph of per capita carbon dioxide emissions for various countries around the world. Which countries have an emissions level consistent with an 80 percent reduction from the world’s current total emissions?
The answer is is Haiti and Somalia.
From Prometheus: ‘Carbon Emissions Success Stories’
Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia should promote strong global action on climate change and be prepared to match the commitments of other developed nations. Well, 80 per cent, rather than 60, seems to be the preferred rate, so good luck!
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Why that would drop Australia on par with France’s worthy effort. So long hot showers, ‘eh?
France is 80% nuclear isn’t it. Could Howard have been right? If Rudd is not just waffle we are in for a 100% rise in electricity costs soon!!! If bring our usage down to Somalia’s I doubt it will be measurable on a world scale. CO2 is 0.038% of the atmosphere what is 1.5% of that?
Note that China’s emissions (2.6t/capita) only need to double to reach the same level as Sweden (5.4t/capita) and France (5.99t). So why is Garnaut relying on a projection that assumes that China, India and Indonesia and (can you believe it)Pakistan, will all mimic the USA with 19.5t/capita?
Of course Howard was right to go nuclear. Just as he was absolutely spot on in saying that interest rates will always be lower under a liberal government. It is now an incontestible fact of history.
The bow you have drawn here is so long that the ends must extend outside the atmosphere! And the assumption appears incorrect in any case.
If Australia is currently at 34 GtC and we reduce by 80% to 6.8 GtC then how could we be on a par with Haiti.
Regardless of that, the post, thinly worded as it is, seems to suggest that to reduce our levels of emmissions we would have to move to a Haitian standard of living.
Its the most ridiculous obfuscation I have seen since the AWB were last before the Senate.
DHMO, generation is typically only half the cost of our energy, sometimes a lot less. There is a lot of cost wrapped up in transmission, distribution and losses. Price increases will be driven in large part by the need to upgrade creaky burgeoning T&D infrastructure which is maxing out aronud the country, managing peak demand and creating headroom for profit hungry private enterprise to make a buck off captured consumers.
Either way, predictions are for solar to be cost competitive with coal within about 5 years, in part driven by technology, in part driven by business models – http://www.beyondbuildingenergy.com/
so nuclear is probably not a good idea for Oz, considering we have no skill in developing it.
Grendel at February 22, 2008 10:29 AM
The target garnaut is suggesting is 90%, so now we’re getting closer to the haiti mark…though not spot on…yet at the end of the day, even at 90%, the difference we will make globally, is not worth measuring.
It will be interesting to see how the Government reacts to this….
They were very strident in their calls for nuclear to be taken off the table as an option but if they take Garnaut seriously, nuclear is now the elephant in the corner of the room.
Wonder how they’ll react when their asked to nominate the sites/electorates where the new reactors are to be located?
Plenty of long hot shower in France, also plenty of nuclear power which explains how 50 million of them have a much lower carbon footprint than 20 million Australians.
The lurid headlines about China adding two new coal fired power stations each week is exposed as another in a long line of deceptive climate reporting.
For China is busily closing down old Coal fired power stations and replacing them with newer ones. In 2007 they CLOSED DOWN 553 PLANTS! See
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2008-01/30/content_6430665.htm
That is,10.6 eachweek that had a total capacity of 14,340mW (average 26mW each). And they are replacing them with larger stations at the rate of 2/week. The installed capacity of their replacements was 100,000mW.
But given that these were stand alone stations, not part of a large grid, it will obviously take some time before they are operating anywhere near full capacity. It is totally misleading to imply, or allow any false implication to stand, that each of these new plants will be immediately running at full capacity from day one.
This replacement and upgrade program will deliver substantial efficiency and emission improvements and will involve a total of only 550 new plants over a period of 5.3 years, ending in 2012. The program certainly will not continue into the late 21st century as the bozos at the IPCC would have us believe.
And contrary to Garnaut and his preposterous A1F1 projection, Chinese emissions are projected to grow, along with the rapid economic growth, for only 10 to 20 years. This will be followed by a plateau of another 10 years followed by a decline.
This, according to the World nuclear Association, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html will be part due to the addition of 86 new (1000mW)nuclear power plants in the 2011-2015 five year plan alone.
The two large Hydro projects that Garnaut appears to have also ignored will deliver the equivalent of 30 new 1000mW stations.
So one must ask what, exactly, has Garnaut and his mates been smoking?
Dont think Jennifer was far off the mark.
Garnaut has recommended a lot harsher cuts than Kevni’s election “policy”-and I dont think there’s much to be emulated in standards of living below that world total line!
BTW wondering at the spin for the point Wong has to promote–the ALP figure of 60% and Garnaut’s the expert’s higher one, how to do it?
Somehow they both need accommodating ,we cant have the expert seem out of touch can we?– or else Wong will have to wear it betcha.
Naw!!the spinmeister will talk it around somehow and not be quizzed for details or backflips by the Australian BehindLabor Collective or Fairfax!
I can’t figure out what the bar chart means.
Does the per capita emission include energy exports of coal, oil, gas,uranium oxide for instance?
The political reality is that a reduction of carbon emissions as envisioned will not, cannot, be achieved (precluding nuclear) without coercion.
Welcome to the brave new world http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article464.
anthony,
“nuclear is probably not a good idea for Oz, considering we have no skill in developing it.”
So I assume, that when you have any electrical problem, you buy a new house!? because you may have no skill in fixing it?
Jesus Christ man, ever heard of paying for skills you don’t have?
I had a better opinion of you until this.
Good point Johnathan. Any time we need nuclear expertise (we have it already) just give me a brown bag full of resident visas and I’ll get us one of the 86 Chinese teams doing new plant installations for 2011-2015.
And for anyone who might have seriously believed all Enders crazed hallucinations on the cost of nuclear power and waste disposal etc, take a look at these costings, based on the French, assembly line, construction model. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/TheBenefitsOfNuclearPower
For anyone that believes the crazed writing of nuclear power proponents need only read this which is mentioned.
http://www.stormsmith.nl/
“The nuclear system has some unique features, no other energy system has, being:
• the energy source is a metal to be extracted from ores,
• the irreversible generation of immense quantities of radioactivity,
• the extremely long-term commitments of 100-150 years,
• very large uncertainties regarding the completion of a nuclear project.
Once started, a nuclear reactor generates unavoidable and very large amounts of radioactive waste, posing immeasurable risks to man and society. The safe cleanup of the nuclear legacy requires a number of processes, each consuming large amounts of materials, human effort and energy.”
Modern nuclear reactor fuels are not generally metals but oxides or flourides of the metal so they do not need to be extracted.
http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/fuel-fab.html
weapons need the metal, the oxides are just as fissile but do not go well in bombs but are just fine for modern reactors.
If the spent fuel is remixed and sintered with the slag from the mining it is no more radioactive than the original ore with a shorter half life than the original U238 which has a half life of 4.5 Billion years. So the large amounts of materials used to dispose of the waste is waste to begin with.
Mind you some of the waste can be reprocessed into reactor fuel especially from and for integral fast reactors and used for other things so isn’t really waste.
Ender clearly has not read, or chose not to retain this important information.
“Since 1987 the (USA) cost of producing electricity has decreased from 3.63 cents per KWHr to 1.68 cents per KWHr in 2004 and plant availability has increased from 67% to over 90%. The operating cost includes a charge of 0.2 cents per KW-Hr to fund the eventual disposal of waste from the reactor and for decommissioning the reactor. The price of Uranium Ore contributes approximately 0.05 cents per KWHr”.
Ender has consistently quoted from costings from the 1970s and has consistently claimed that the cost of waste disposal and de-commissioning has not been included in the price of nuclear power. This is dead wrong.
As for waste disposal, “In the USA, Nuclear Power operators are charged 0.1 cents per KW-Hr for the disposal of Nuclear Waste. In Sweden this cost is 0.13 US cents per KW-Hr. These Countries have utilized these funds to pursue research into Geologic disposal of waste and both now have mature proposals for the task. In France the cost of waste disposal and decommissioning is estimated to be 10% of the construction cost. So far provisions of 71 billion Euros have been acquired for this from the sale of electricity”.
That is 71 billion euros, Ender, by the French alone, and the fund is still increasing each year. The interest earned on these funds each year (at 6%) would build three new stations.
Lets just repeat that for Ender, raw material cost is 0.05 cents/kWh while disposal and de-commission is 0.2 cents/kWh.
There is also a comprehensive demolition of the claimed life cycle costs of nuclear power, as quoted by Ender, further down the page at;
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/TheBenefitsOfNuclearPower
When solar and wind can match 3 cents/kWh we might take it seriously.
At the end of the day the work Garnaut is doing, with or without his comb over, and the cabal of publically funded crimatologists, are going to have to explain to the Australian people why spending billions to achieve a reduction of 0.000043 degrees by year 60,is worth bothering with at all.
Just what sort of distorted sense of reality is it that says that 20m people will have any effect of the International community,such that would it would mean our 0.000043 contribution would have any leverage at all, is beyond me.
If the greeny flakes that inhabit this blog come back and say well its because we need to be more efficient in the way we use energy, then I would accept that,irrespective of whats happening on the AGW front
But that ( being more efficient) should be based upon its own analysis and business case, and not spun off from something already seen as a mix of political/economic spin, and scientific humbug.
I agree, Malcolm. “Saving the Planet” is the ultimate onanistic response of the narcissist. It gives them the opportunity to pretend they are actually achieving a “worthwhile” outcome while never actually doing anything at all.
Their favourite ploy is to identify a trend in natural variation, call it a threat, do a great deal of attention seeking stunts that do nothing, and then claim the credit when nature moves, as it always does, in the opposite direction.
Garnaut is the classic product of his Labor Party links. He basically has done nothing of merit for the past 12 years. Just sat in hibernation like a desert frog waiting for the next downpour of ALP funded bull$hit, his elixir of life.
Ladies and gentlemen the Haitification of Aus has began. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23263832-661,00.html
“Trinity Grammar is making an environmental stand, planning to remove all its air-conditioners within five years.
Small windows to allow natural air flow will replace air conditioning in all areas of the school except rooms that house computer servers.
Students and staff have been told to be “resilient” and teachers will alter their lesson plans on extremely hot days. ”
All this time, I thought I was making an environmental stand by turning on my air conditioner. Raging against the heat and such.
Began begin begun. Screwed the pooch on that a little.
Interesting, James. It will be interesting to see how the parents react to the lower grades that they have paid big buck for their kids to achieve. There are numerous studies that confirm the drop in retention levels of students in hot weather. And of course, in very cold weather as well. Will they be turning off the heat in winter as well. Will less education be more education?
To paraphrase one of the late Bob Hope’s best gags,
“our boarding school was so carbon sensitive that we had to sleep four boys to a bed. If it got cold the Headmaster would throw on another boy”.
For the benefit of those worried about the disposal of nuclear waste there are two simple options. The empty chambers of spent oil wells and/or ocean sink holes.In either case the waste is gone forever – unrecoverable and a danger to no one.