I feel obliged to respond to the comments by your correspondent in Issue 402 about ethical and moral concerns relating to energy provision, mistaken assumptions about my position and the reality of the situation on carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere.
For a start, how is it ethical to flog millions of tonnes of coal overseas (where they will burn it) and at the same time claim to be clean and green in Australia?
Simple arithmetic will tell you that as some 0.4 per cent of the world’s population, whatever we do will have negligible impact on future CO2 in the atmosphere.
Australia’s position on this (we need the money from coal exports to maintain our standard of living) is both immoral and hypocritical.
It is all right if it is burned in your backyard but not in ours, if you pay us.
I can’t think of anything more immoral.
If you believe the world will become unliveable soon due to atmospheric CO2 accumulation we must take our share of the blame for our extinction as a species.
Nuclear has its problems but (is) perhaps manageable.
To be very clear I have not advocated nuclear as mindlessly as we are doing with renewables.
I am advocating that we investigate its usefulness in all respects for our situation.
I thought I had made that clear in previous contributions to this paper.
A mix of generating types would appear to offer the best answer.
Society expects reliable, affordable and carbon free electricity.
Stand-alone renewables are not fit for this purpose.
As to denying future generations access to parts of our country’s landscape – have the clean, green renewable stalwarts considered the useful agricultural land now being taken up by solar gardens and Quixotic windmills?
Have they also thought of the problem of disposal of spent solar panels which is now emerging?
Have they thought about the strategic consequences of being dependent on China for solar panels?
Have they thought about the environmental damage caused by the mining of silica and rare earth metals for the solar panels and windmills?
Many Australians, especially those well off, have no conception of the attitudes and experiences of those who live under primitive conditions in most of the rest of the world and I am sorry to say we have a very insular conception of the physical world.
I say we should consider whether what we are doing is really worthwhile if you consider that CO2 is a miscible gas and the critical thing is the global emissions are what should be contained.
Funding of health, education and reliable affordable carbon free electricity are of more use than solar gardens and Quixotic windmills and fantasy beliefs that we are good global citizens.
We should get real.
Email, Aug 10
Charles Hemmings, Woy Woy