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Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part III). He also wrote a brilliant recent piece for The Punch: Fukushima was no disaster, no matter how you spin it […]
Filed under: Impacts, Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions | 45 Comments »
Last week, the influential weekly news and international affairs publication, The Economist, ran an essay on the future of nuclear energy – The dream that failed: Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal. As you might have guessed from the title, it was decidedly cool towards nuclear’s future prospects. […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 69 Comments »
Guest post by Dr Mark Diesendorf, Institute of Environmental Studies, UNSW. Click here for a printable 6-page PDF version of this response. ——————- This is a personal response to Lang’s (2012) article critiquing the peer-reviewed paper Elliston, Diesendorf and MacGill (2011) ‘Simulations of scenarios with 100% renewable electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market’, referred […]
Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 63 Comments »
Guest post by Dr Ted Trainer, University of NSW (http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/). Wood, A, T. Ellis, D. Mulloworth, and H. Morrow (2012) No Easy Choices: Which Way to Australia’s Energy Future. Technology Analysis. Grattan Institute, Melbourne. This report is a valuable addition to the literature on the prospects for renewable energy in Australia, providing some recent data on key […]
Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 68 Comments »
Download the printable 33-page PDF (includes two appendices, on scenario assumptions and transmission cost estimates) HERE. For an Excel workbook that includes all calculations (and can be used for sensitivity analysis), click HERE. By Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout […]
Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 153 Comments »
Late last year, Tom Blees, I and a few other people from the International Award Committee of the Global Energy Prize answered reader’s energy questions on The Guardian’s Facebook page. The questions and answers were reproduced on BNC here. Now we’re at it again, this time for the website Eco-Business.com (tagline: Asia Pacific’s sustainable business community). My section […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 27 Comments »
Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part II) —————— Welcome to Part III of my still presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050. I […]
Filed under: Emissions, Future, Impacts | 52 Comments »
The Guardian newspaper’s Environment Facebook page recently put the following to their readers: Ask the Global Energy Prize‘s expert panel your toughest energy questions and they’ll be back here on Friday with their answers. What should power our cities, homes and industry in the future — renewable energy, nuclear power, or fossil fuels? How significant […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 34 Comments »
Guest Post by Jani-Petri Martikainen. Jani-Petri is a theoretical physicist doing fundamental research in the field of ultracold quantum gases. Most of his current research activities are computational and involve bosonic or fermionic atoms in optical lattices. He has a lively interest on environmental, climate, and energy issues. He runs the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti, which is mostly written in Finnish. […]
Filed under: Emissions, Renewables | 112 Comments »
Today I was in Melbourne, joining a panel of five who are the chapter authors of a new policy monograph called “Australia’s Nuclear Options“. This event was to formally launch the 61-page report, which was commissioned and published by CEDA (Committee for Economic Development of Australia), edited by CEDA Chief Economist Nathan Taylor (who also […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 88 Comments »
I saw two particularly depressing trend lines this week. Both were confronting enough to make me stop, sit back and just contemplate. It was not as though these came as a great surprise — I’d been following these data for years. But for some reason, the seriousness of them really struck home like never before. […]
Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Hot News, Nuclear | 121 Comments »
Guest Post by Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 262 Comments »
Guest Post by Jani-Petri Martikainen. Jani-Petri is a theoretical physicist doing fundamental research in the field of ultracold quantum gases. Most of his current research activities are computational and involve bosonic or fermionic atoms in optical lattices. He has a lively interest on environmental, climate, and energy issues. He runs the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti, which is mostly written in […]
Filed under: Emissions, Renewables | 101 Comments »
Guest Post by Martin Nicholson. Martin studied mathematics, engineering and electrical sciences at Cambridge University in the UK and graduated with a Masters degree in 1974. He has spent most of his working life as business owner and chief executive of a number of information technology companies in Australia. He has a strong interest in business […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 109 Comments »
I’ve long argued on this blog that that fossil fuel replacement this century could, on technical grounds, be achieved via a mix of nuclear fission, renewables and perhaps also fossil fuels with carbon sequestration, with a high degree of electrification; nuclear would probably end up supplying over half of final energy. A key component of this […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | 123 Comments »
In a recent issue of Dissent magazine, a regular commenter here on Brave New Climate, industrial engineer Graham Palmer, engaged in a debate with Mark Diesendorf on energy futures. Unfortunately, this exchange of prose is not available online, although Graham did send me a scanned version (because of potential copyright issues, I won’t post it here). The […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 193 Comments »
I have given lots of talks on climate change over the last few years. In these presentations, I typically focus on explaining the basis of the anthropogenic climate change problem, how it sits in the context of other human and natural changes, and then, how greenhouse gas emissions could be mitigated with the elimination of […]
Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Policy | 59 Comments »
Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Greenpeace’s Plan for India —————— Switzerland. It’s smaller than Tasmania, but rather more famous and never missing from maps of Europe. Cheese and chocolates, pocket knives and […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 28 Comments »
A common refrain from politicians and members of the business community is that moving from coal to natural gas is an effective way to cut carbon dioxide emissions and therefore address global warming. This argument is flawed, as I detailed last year in two posts, Santos Chief’s gassy vision (Parts I and II). Yet, gas is […]
Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Policy | 78 Comments »
In the previous TCASE post, I considered how various low-carbon energy technologies meet the following criteria: commercial readiness, scalability, dispatchability, fuel constraints, load access, storage requirements, capacity factor and emissions intensity. Here I consider the next issue: cost of deployment, based on expert consensus. The primary data again come from the work I had published in 2011 […]
Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, TCASE | 91 Comments »
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