Cool down on warming

In Sydney this week a meeting was held on climate change.

Participants were from the six Asia-Pacific nations which together will account for 70 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.

Four of the six nations represented at the meeting -- Australia, the United States, China and India -- have rejected proposals to massively reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide, the satanic gas that it is said will bring global warming.

The US and Australia have however put taxes on coal-based electricity plant to encourage a move away from this, the lowest-cost source of energy.

In Victoria, Environment Minister John Thwaites, whose public utterances increasingly appear to be written by a Greenpeace fanatic, is urging an intensification of these measures.

The problem is that if increased emissions of carbon dioxide are causing significant levels of warming we can do nothing about it.

An early apostle for aggressive emissions reduction action, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has now agreed that this is unachievable.

Mr Blair has acknowledged that no nation will take the economically crippling decisions necessary to bring about the massive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that some are calling for.

Only two of the 20 nations that signed up to emission restraints at the 1997 Kyoto Convention will meet their targets.

Those targets would in any case have only a trivial effect -- theoretically they would reduce average warming by just 0.15°C by 2100.

Increased carbon dioxide emissions do not mean ecological disaster.

Mankind has lived through far greater oscillations in global temperatures than might occur from releases of carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels.

And let us not forget, the carbon dioxide thus released is simply some of that which has been "unnaturally" soaked up by living matter over billions of years.

Notwithstanding the collapse of the Kyoto agreement, there remains a great deal of posturing on the matter.  Victoria, with its endless supply of very cheap brown coal, has more to lose than any other region in the world from taxing carbon dioxide.

Extracting carbon dioxide from brown coal, even in the embryonic pilot schemes now on the drawing board, would double the cost of electricity generation.  Not only would this have a direct on the consumer but it would, at a stroke, undermine the State's commercial competitiveness.

If we were serious about reducing carbon emissions we would be embracing nuclear power.

At least we know this is only double the cost of coal power.

But even such a modicum of commonsense wilts in the hands of ministers who are prisoners of the green left.

Mr Thwaites released a paper shortly before Christmas calling for a doubling of the electricity derived from wind power.

We know wind power is expensive and unreliable but in making the proposal, he did not even try to estimate its cost to the ordinary consumer or to the State.

Victoria needs better leadership than this.

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