Various comments on CO2

Clean coal: Miracle or mirage? - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Four Corners devotes an entire show tonight to the issue of "clean coal" and it would appear from the preview at the link that it will confirm all my suspicions that it is not going to work.

Meanwhile, in the Australian this morning, the much derided Bjorn Lomborg makes the point again that concentrating on CO2 targets without putting adequate investment into new technology is going to ensure the targets are not met. (I would also add that concentrating on a establishing a system which has a built in incentive to invent phoney offsets - such as an ETS - is not going to help either.)

He appears to advocate a very low initial carbon tax but (if I read him correctly) all of the money thereby raised would be going into new technology development. I guess the problem with this is that it would be a case of governments trying to pick winners out of a range of potential useful technology, which has its own risks of failure. But if the problem is urgent, I don't know that we have much choice.

Besides, to a significant degree, we already know one thing that would help - ramping up nuclear power. And my inclination - much repeated here - is to go with small systems that can be quickly deployed. The next generation of big reactors, which do have their advantages, can follow through later.

Fran Barlow has been making comments a lot at John Quiggin and LP about nuclear power. Like Barry Brook, she appears to be a lefty (well, I assume Brook is - he is a scientist who believes in AGW, after all) who has become completely convinced of the need for nuclear to be involved in reducing CO2. Yet, she thinks it is pointless to politically promote this in Australia.

I made a comment at an LP thread about this a couple of weeks ago, to which I think no one replied. I'll make it here then:

I must say I am somewhat puzzled with the attitude that seems to be “sure, we know nuclear would be good, but we may as well forget it as we can’t get it through politically in the foreseeable future.”

Seems a very defeatist attitude towards changing Labor Party policy from a bunch of people who are (I presume) Labor supporters! Of course, you’ll never get the Greens on side, but if you actually had Labor policy change you’re not going to have a problem with the conservative side of politics. That would then render Green control of the Senate irrelevant.

So the crux of the matter is getting Labor to accept the inevitable sooner rather than later. What percentage of sensible Labor Party members do you need before they’ll have the temerity to challenge Labor policy on this?

Barlow's big concern is that, even with the Liberals and Labor both "on side", enough Labor voters will desert to the Greens to be a major problem. But surely not enough to prevent a government being formed in the House of Reps, and to allow for a combined conservative and Labor Senate vote to get it through there?

So when will prominent Labor identities start the push to get their policy changed? Dithering around on blogs about how it is needed is not going to be enough.

UPDATE: if anything, I thought the Four Corners show last night was a little too soft on clean coal. For example, there was very little talk of the practical challenges of how many places around a country are geologically suitable for carbon sequestration, and how you get the CO2 to those spots. I think it could have had more detail on that and other aspects.

UPDATE 2: As I have a rare link here from LP, I'll point people back to this previous post about clean coal from 2007, which may be of interest. This post was pretty worthwhile too, if I do say so myself!