Considering energy and considering climate change

A core group of 16 gathered Beneath the Wisteria today (Saturday, April 28) to energy, its use and within that how we could best mitigate climate change difficulties as the decades unfolded.

Beyond those intensely and intimately involved with the conversation, a few others listened from the fringes, coming and going.

Several others also apologized, and of those two sent in the views on energy use, including one of those driving GV Community Energy, Geoff Lodge, whom some will remember was at the March gathering, helping us understand some of the realities about renewable energy, primarily solar.

In an email Geoff said:

I will be an apology for this morning’s activity.  I trust it will go well.

My thoughts on energy include a series of complimentary measures;

·         Energy efficiencies in buildings, manufacturing and transport,

·         A paradigm shift in personal lifestyle/values so as to move towards a lower consumption of materials,

·         Generation of energy from low carbon & renewable sources,

·         Decentralized generation of energy,

·         Community ownership of energy generators.

Cheers,

Geoff Lodge.

Alan Wilson was another apology and in providing his views on energy use said in what he described as “Opinion from one absent friend”:

The supply of energy in the form of electricity is essential to our civilization. Any idea of doing away with it is not going to happen.  However, to avoid overheating the globe we have to learn how to make it in large quantities without putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – mainly CO2, but also methane

Before we go to work on this, we need to define the context:

1.  We are a democracy:  nothing will happen until the people agree that it should – We haven’t reached this point yet, so education about the problem is still uppermost.   Only then can government make the rules for it to happen.  Our first step has to be in education about how global warming works and why simple physics make it inevitable if we continue along the current path.

 2.  We are a free market economy: It has to be economic for private enterprise to operate.   Large plants will generally be more economic than small ones and they will be placed where it is most efficient to do so: wind turbines along coast and ranges, solar at places like Mildura.  Having said that there will be niche markets for smaller local initiatives, such as co-generation, roof-top solar or efficiency savings, but they will not be game changers.  We should think about what could we, in the Goulburn Valley, might be most efficient at doing in our back yard. 

 3.  Both the economy and the problem are global:  We can’t get far out of step with other nations. International influence and diplomacy remain important, but these also depend on No 1 above.

 4. The government can bend economics to a certain degree by either taxes or subsidies.   They can assist in the development of new technologies that will be essential to the solution.  They should not rule out any new solution, nor support weak solutions, on ideological grounds. We should support the government in putting big dollars into research and pilot plants.  Don’t decry big business –only big corporations can command the resources needed to do the job.

Convenor Robert McLean said:

The use of energy, which in Australia is almost exclusively the outcome of our exploitation of fossil fuels, which are the absolute villain in relation to carbon dioxide emissions and so the worsening of human-induced climate change.

Considering that we should be absolutely focussed on finding some form of a base-load energy resource that will allow us to maintain some semblance of life as we know it.

Therein is the difficulty - sustaining life as we know it – most everything we like and enjoy depends almost entirely on energy that is produced by fossil fuels.

I admire and applaud efforts that encourage people to use one form or another of a renewable energy, be that solar, wind, geo-thermal, wave or the myriad of other sources that regularly come up in conversation.

Despite the enthusiasm some have for the different energy sources, I don’t know of any one, or even a combination of several, that will meet the world’s present base-load energy needs.

However, there is one fossil fuel that will meet all our needs and if the appropriate procedures are followed it is largely free of carbon dioxide emissions – it is nuclear power, but not as it is commonly understood and presently used.

The US government was just a few years away in the mid-1990s from completing a rather complex project to build a nuclear powered Integral Fast Breeder Reactor (IFR) when the Clinton Government pulled the pin on what was happening – I don’t know why, but I can only suspect it was pressure from the fossil fuel industry.

The IFR, like all nuclear power plants is virtually carbon dioxide free; produces very little radio-active waste compared to what exists and what it does, is far less dangerous than that from present nuclear power plants; IFRs are designed to ensure they will not melt down, if does something does go wrong they automatically close down; they do not require a nuclear energy that is easily refined for use in weapons; they will successfully run on nuclear waste  presently accumulating around the world and in fact the world has sufficient waste from existing power plants and decommissioned nuclear weapons to power plants around the world with base-load energy needs for millennia.

There is now something of a groundswell in support of the IFR and several books explaining their advantages are presently available – including “Prescription for the Planet: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy &Environmental Crises” by Tom Blees, also “Plentiful Energy, The story of theIntegral Fast Breeder Reactor”, by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang."