Understanding the 2019 federal election results and what to do about climate change

The problem for Australia is that we produce about 1.4% of global CO2 emissions. With atmospheric CO2 levels increasing by about 4 parts per million every year, we’re responsible for 0.056 parts per million, with developing countries adding between 1.6 and 2.4 parts per million each year. In other words, Australia could radically change its economy overnight and go carbon free tomorrow, but our CO2 savings would be swamped by the increased emissions from China alone within 19 days! So spending between 200 billion and one trillion dollars (depending who you want to believe) is a severe waste of our taxpayer money.

 

But Australia is a rich country and there is support for us doing our fair share to help combat what is a global problem of which we are part. So what do we do?

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Contrary to what some climate change commentators claim, we still don’t have the technological solutions needed to allow the world to go carbon free which still providing energy to a world where a billion people still live in poverty and another 2 or 3 million are desperate to raise their standards of living. Yes, we can generate electricity cheaply with renewable solar and wind but we still need batteries or pumped hydro or some other way of storing that energy in a way that will provide dispatchable, non-intermittent, affordable and industrial-scale energy. Regardless of what the activists say, such technologies simply do not exist (with the possible exception of nuclear power but it remains expensive and socially unpopular in Australia).

 

So, Australia is rich, we’re contributing to a global problem and we should be doing our fair share. I believe we should radically change the way we’re spending taxpayer money in Australia and redirect most of it into finding and developing the technologies the world still lacks if we are to become a carbon-free world. We should therefore be putting our money into the CSIRO, our universities and private industry to undertake the R&D and commercialisation on these needed new technologies.

 

We can do no bigger favour to the citizens of developing countries and to the entire world than to use our brains and imagination to find the technological solutions to their and our problems. Throwing more money at rooftop solar or even large solar farms located hundreds of kilometres from infrastructure and with no nearby industries wanting to use such energy is inefficient and just plain stupid.

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 If we really want to save the planet, we have to think globally and develop new energy-related technologies that we can sell or give to a world desperate for effective solutions to the problems of climate change.