Barnaby Joyce outlines a 'tactile' climate policy after releasing Twitter rant

Barnaby Joyce says Australia's climate policy should be practical and pragmatic, suggesting nuclear power, a day after releasing a Twitter video in which he suggested a tax won't fix climate change and people need to respect a "higher authority" at play.

New England MP Barnaby Joyce says Australia should pursue
climate change policies that deliver "tactile" outcomes.

"We need things that are tactile and make a difference to a changing climate," Mr Joyce told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

The Nationals MP and former deputy prime minister says successful climate policy would include stimulating the economy with dam building during drought, and working on infrastructure such as the Inland Rail to reduce freight vehicle emissions, as well as developing nuclear power and clean coal technology to reduce emissions.

Mr Joyce also said the Nationals should take a more prominent role in drought policy, arguing the recent appointment of a national drought co-ordinator should have been selected by Drought Minister David Littleproud, a member of the LNP.

Read the story from The Age by Mike Foley - “Barnaby Joyce outlines a 'tactile' climate policy after releasing Twitter rant.”

The idea of producing nuclear energy in Australia before 2040 is absurd

The debate about nuclear power in Australia flickered to life with the suggestion by the New South Wales deputy premier, John Barilaro, that small modular reactors could be constructed in regional centres. Prominent backbencher Barnaby Joyce followed up with a call for a parliamentary inquiry.

We don’t need to call on the phantom of nuclear power
 to secure a reliable, carbon-free electricity supply for the future.

Joyce and Barilaro revived this idea after the release of a report by Industry Super Australia, which took as the starting point the need to replace most of Australia’s coal-fired power stations by 2040. The report concluded: “It is difficult to see how the the problem can be resolved without some nuclear in the mix.”

It would perhaps be churlish to observe that the small reactors advocated by Barilaro exist only as designs and may never be built. There is a much bigger obstacle which is essentially impossible to overcome.

Read the story from The Guardian by John Quiggin - “The idea of producing nuclear energy in Australia before 2040 is absurd.”

Barnaby backs coal unless Australians want nuclear power supply

Barnaby Joyce has called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommendation to phase out coal by 2050 as “wrong and ridiculous”, while once again suggesting Australians need to look at nuclear power.

 Grasp the mettle: Barnaby Joyce said that if Australia
wants zero admission then nuclear power is the obvious
solution following the IPCC report.

Last weekend the IPCC, the world’s foremost panel on climate change, issued a report stating global greenhouse gas emissions must reach zero by 2050 in order to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The authors warned that if warming was allowed to reach 2C, the world would risk hitting "tipping points", setting a course towards uncontrollable temperatures, as well as the complete destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, and devastating rises in sea levels.

Read the story by Chris Bath from The Northern Daily Leader - “Barnaby backs coal unless Australians want nuclear power supply.”

(Challenged over the safety and legitimacy of Roundup (and its active ingredient glyphosate) the coalition government rushed to the shelter of science, but now when that same science tells them that unless they make significant changes to nearly all of society’s behaviours to avoid catastrophic climate change, that it is “wrong and ridiculous”. It’s Barnaby Joyce who is wrong and ridiculous - Robert McLean)

Australia should add nuclear to the clean energy mix: Minerals Council.

Australia should develop a nuclear power industry to reduce its emissions, the Minerals Council says, and the Turnbull government should take the first step by removing legal road blocks.

U.S. nuclear power.

In a new paper titled Removing the Prohibition on Nuclear Power, the lobby group argues just four words - "a nuclear power plant" - need to be cut from the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act to begin clearing the legal path to the development of a nuclear industry.

It argues that any nuclear power plant would still be subject to Australia's strict environmental laws and that nuclear power offers zero emissions, base-load energy that can run day and night, and that it is operating in 30 countries around the world.

Most contentiously, it argues the technology is safe, citing a British study by Friends of the Earth - a claim opponents would dispute by highlighting the Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters - and affordable, which opponents would also  dispute.

Read James Massola’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Australia should add nuclear to the clean energy mix: Minerals Council.”

(Nuclear power should not be included in Australia’s future energy mix - many things make it unviable, but among them is the mining and transport of the uranium, the power plant’s construction, the safety considerations, and, most importantly, the time it would take build the complex facility.

Reliable research illustrates that the carbon emissions from the fundamentals of a nuclear power plant, building suppling and maintaining such a facility are quite high, but probably the most important consideration of all is that we simply don’t have the time - climate change evolving far faster than ever anticipated and so Australia, or the world, simply can’t wait the ten, or even 15 years, before the new energy source is commissioned.

Renewable energy technologies, such as solar and wind already exist and can be employed quickly and relatively cheaply, while a nuclear facility is at least a decade away and comes with a price tag in the $billions, and so for the price of one nuclear power plant, the Australian government could bring largely clean solar and wind power, pumped hydro and battery back-up to much of the country - it’s a solution  that makes social, environmental and economic sense - Robert McLean)

Switzerland votes to ban nuclear power and invest in renewable energy

Switzerland opts for
renewable energy,
bans nuclear power.

Switzerland just passed a new energy law that promotes renewable energy and bans nuclear power plants. 

The landmark vote brings the nation closer to meeting its goal of generating 4,400 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of renewable energy by 2020, and 11,400 GWh by 2035.

 Over the weekend, approximately 42% of the population turned up to vote in the national referendum, which marks the eighth time in recent history Swiss citizens have voted on the issue.

Watch the inhabitat slide show - “Switzerland votes to ban nuclear power and invest in renewable energy.”

Toshiba’s nuclear flagship goes bust after $10 billion losses

The rapidly-evolving nuclear power crisis escalated dramatically yesterday when US nuclear giant Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for bankruptcy.

Where Toshiba's $10bn nuclear debt came from:
 the Vogtle AP1000 construction site in
Georgia, under inspection by NRC
Commissioner Svinicki.

The Chapter 11 filing took place in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City.

Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba are in crisis because of massive cost overruns building four 'AP1000' nuclear power reactors in the southern US states of Georgia and South Carolina.

Read Jim Green’s story on the Ecologist - “Toshiba’s nuclear flagship goes bust after $10 billion losses.”

Despite the politics, good news on climate

Anyone following the news on climate policy might well incline to despair. Not only is the Turnbull government continuing to promote the idea that coal is the energy source of the future as well as the past, but many of its backbenchers also think that the best alternative is nuclear power. 

Gesture politics: Donald Trump signing executive
 orders relating to climate policy in late January. 

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, what Australia does or doesn’t do counts for little. That’s not a justification for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing – with a couple of exceptions, no single country counts for much. The biggest exception to this rule is the United States, of course, followed by China and India. So the real concern is that the Trump administration is adopting a similarly retrograde position.

The good news is that it’s almost certainly too late for Trump and Turnbull to derail the progress that’s being made towards a decarbonised and sustainable global economy. They are engaged in gesture politics designed to appeal to culture warriors on the right, not a serious strategy to revive coal and nuclear power.

The case of nuclear power is the clearest. The only hope for nuclear power is the adoption of a single low-cost design that can be built in large numbers, thereby achieving economies of scale. France managed this in the 1970s, but no one (including France) has managed to repeat the trick.

Read John Quiggan’s Inside Story piece - “Despite the politics, good news on climate.”

Put nuclear in the energy mix, Coalition MPs tell Malcolm Turnbull

One in 10 Turnbull government MPs say nuclear power should be on the table as federal and state governments grapple with Australia's future energy needs.

Coalition MPs say nuclear power should
 be on the table as Australia grapples
with its energy future. 

The 11 Coalition MPs - Andrew Broad, James Paterson, Tony Pasin, Tim Wilson, Chris Back, Craig Kelly, Eric Abetz, Andrew Hastie, Warren Entsch, Bridget McKenzie and Rowan Ramsey - are from both the Liberal and National parties and come from the moderate and conservative wings of the government.

The MPs, from all across the country, publicly confirmed their support for nuclear power to Fairfax Media on Wednesday, arguing Australia has the world's largest deposits of uranium, is geologically stable, and that nuclear power is a reliable source of base-load power that offers low emissions too.

Read the piece by James Massola and Adam Gartrell in today’s Melbourne Age - “Put nuclear in the energy mix, Coalition MPs tell Malcolm Turnbull.”

(Using throw-away lines designed to make the speaker sound as if he or she knows what they are talking about are references to things such as nuclear power or carbon capture and storage, which illustrate that they are as confused or ignorant as most of us about how we should sustain a reasonable life. 

Nuclear power will be massively expensive; so controversial that making it a reality will be hugely time consuming and beyond that it could 10 or 15 years to simply physically build anything useful; it is about the corporatization of our energy supplies contrary to wind and solar which can be democratised; and, importantly, considered objectively in a “cradle to grave” scenario, nuclear energy is still a significant contributor to carbon dioxide emissions.

Also, carbon capture and storage has only been demonstrated to work on relatively tiny projects and so there is no certainty it can be scaled up to work at the massive dimensions needed to make it globally significant.

The acronym “CCS” glibly rolls of the tongue of many as if it is just waiting a decision to deploy it - its not, it’s not it’s not ready with many questioning whether or not it will actually work and what its real value is - Robert McLean).

New, strange denial emerges from shadows of historic Paris decision

Naomi Klein - now there's a new,
strange form of denial.

After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Read the opinion piece by Naomi Klein on The Guardian - “There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don't celebrate yet.”

Bill Gates talks up the benefits of nuclear power

Ted Talks introduce us to some fascinating people, their ideas and different ways of doing things.

Bill Gates with his fire-flies.

Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

The man from Microsoft discusses energy and in doing that explains the need for: “Innovating to zero!”