Said much the same in regards solutions in my submission to the 2020 Summit climate change stream.

Baseload and think big aside – they will be solved as efficiency, market penetration and competition improves, the problem *right now* is the amount of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere.

We have to reduce that *right now* at every level. And let’s face it, we all know, starting with households, that it’s a doddle. Reduce waste, improve efficiency, increase share.

I’m a convert already – got my 1.1kw grid connect system, my solar HW system, my energy efficient light globes and my house insulated, and most of the other “usual” solutions.

It’s reduced my emissions by more than 50%, to about 4 tonnes py (from more than 12).

Now, just imagine every household in Australia having a similar set up!

There are approx. 6 million single dwelling/semi detached homes in Australia. Not every one will be suitable, but lets get ambitious eh? What say we aim for 50% 1.1kw and Solar HW installed base by 2020?

At the same time, let’s do an audit on the sq metres of retail/commercial, and industrial flat roof space.

I have no idea what it is, but I’ll bet it’s more the 50 x 50 kl.

And home, business* and industry could generate and use a good portion of their energy at source, with the accompanying reduction in transmission loss to compensate for relative conversion inefficiency. Plus – any excess goes back into the grid. Oh and did I mention cheaper power bills?

(* BTW, a mob in California – figures!, are already doing very nicely targeting small businesses with a solar grid connect to their locally owned generating and distribtion system.)

How’s them apples for addressing the “financial crisis”?

From little things big things grow.

We know all the solutions are out there. It merely requires political will to implement, and I’m sad to say that I see precious little evidence of that so far.

Cheers
CST

P.S. The problem *right now* is the amount of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere.

The problem *right now* is the amount of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere.

The problem *right now* is the amount of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere.

The problem *right now* is the amount of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere.

;-)

So the capacity for continuing to do what will eventually cause us harm is quite strong, (exceeded perhaps by the capacity for doing what will eventually harm others), but the record of human achievements is cause for retaining some hope. The crucial part still appears to be convincing the world that it’s real and serious and urgent. I do worry that we could see a combination of factors that will make it look less real, serious or urgent – warming masked by Pacific Decadal Oscillation and La Nina and those other cyclic swings and climate noise, plus economic activity slowing, reducing the price of coal and oil and slowing emissions growth, making renewables less attractive.

Grid improvement and storage are needed, but I’ve never been convinced that utility scale storage is such a difficult challenge – compressed air and thermal storage are pretty basic stuff that would benefit from economies of scale, but with coal running 24/7, there seems like little immediate need even now to develop or build any. Illusory lack of need. The lack of development work on such storage ought not become the catch-22 that means we can’t shut down coal plants, because we won’t need them until after we shut them down. Sure, it would be a massive challenge, but definitely not impossible. Meanwhile can coal plants get redesigned to switch on and off quickly enough to be squeezed into the role of backup for renewables while the work on grids and storage get serious?

Barry – as you said in your rebuttal of this crap it is sunny and windy somewhere as long as we have the transmission lines. However does the esteemed Pallywood and his ilk ever think about when the fossil fuel power stations are down for maintenance or failures? All types of electricity generation needs backup. There are nuclear power stations that have been out of action for two years with faults.

The required transmission lines can be HVDC. The beauty of HVDC is that it requires large power converters at either end of the link. Where there are power converters it is easy to add storage in the form of flow batteries or Zebra batteries to even out the flow in the HVDC link.

I did once think about a HVDC link connecting the Eastern Australia with Western Australia. This way surplus Eastern states power could power us in the West in the morning peak and we could supply the East for an additional 2 hours after your sunset. Also solar power plants and superconductor storage could be strung out along the length of the link. Finally the path of the link would go close to the vast geothermal Hot Rocks of South Australia and the equally vast wave resources of the Southern Ocean. Who needs coal?

growing bush tucker like that would be a great job in the communities for the women. that could of course start off as a way of providing better nutrition in their communities first but later into some sort of export out.

no reason why real bush tucker restaurants couldn’t open up with this stuff and would be a real hit with tourists. an old man out there told me once that he’d like to farm many bush animals like bush turkey and goanna.

but in more direct relation to the subjects on this blog they could lease out land for thermal power stations.

“This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.”

Read on in link above.

(1) working with (sort-of) the current system, at least in some form recognisable to most marketeers (since people, being people, aren’t going to switch to an alternative until it is far too late, or will manipulate any ‘perfect’ system such as socialism or communism so that it simply becomes a caricature of capitalism anyway, a la China).
(2) Having much more energy, not less (despite the huge short term gains we can make from energy efficiency), including for geoengineering or mass carbon sequestration in some form.
(3) Maintaining and enhancing our global society, not contracting it and encouraging nationalism.

Geoff, I know what I said might appear to be anti-competitive or nationalistic, but that is not the intent, nor do I think it will be the reality. First mover advantage means that we are recognised as a global leader in the tech, not that we have exclusive rights to it. We do it well, we have the practical ‘know how’, and we have the economic and infrastructure incentives in place to continue to foster innovations in deployment, R&D and those rare ‘breakthroughs’. Not that we foreclose options to others. For example, China is THE world leader in manufacturing of computer tech these days, and makes a lot of money out of it. But Silicon Valley and parts of Europe are still the great innovation hubs in this area, and so also make squillions. You can have both. Same deal with renewables.

Now I’m no sceptic… but the last month or so has certainly made me much more sceptical of the market based solution… because the markets appear to be an eleborately constructed scam. I posted a comment about a month ago, largely in jest, about a mate of mine advising that the big Govts and Big Banks were creating a solution to AGW that essentially propped up those big banks and the global finance system. Nothing to do with AGW, everything to do with propping up markets… and then once those financial players decided that carbon trading was their big savior then there was to be no more debate, no consideration of alternative science, and a solution put in place…

Rudd the leader in the economic crisis, Europe on board, the US dragged kicking and screaming to the “solution”… sound familiar at all?

I must admit that leads me then to be much more open to Barry’s preferences AGAINST a cap and trade system…

The market is rooted, and for mine the AGW solution is fraught with danger if it is totally market based…

My god I’ve become what I loathe the most – a CEC/Larouche propaganda machine!!!! Somebody help me!!!

It looks as if the Wonder Boys on Wall Street, who caused the current disaster in the world’s financial system, are going to rescue the family of humanity from a meltdown of the global economy.

Is it too much to ask some of these multi-billionaires to provide wealth to save the world from the global “meltdown” of Earth’s ice pack that is occurring in Greenland, Antarctica, the high mountain ranges from the Arctic Cordillera, to the Andes to the Himalayas?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php