Money talks and the coal industry has deep pockets so expect a lot of noise.

Coal will direct big $ into the realm of “independent scientists” that,understandably, will research on till the cows come home.

Delay, obfuscate, make more money, and hope science will save the day.

The Aus. economy and the emerging economies are reliant on coal, and so politically is Mr Rudd. Well, crikey said, “blatant self interest”!

Cheap clean energy will eventually come but I don’t think it will be from be from old king coal!

As to China and India and coal. Look at what is happening in China with wind and solar. The goal for wind in China until recently was for 20GW by 2020. Because of rapid progress on this pretty worked out technology, the new figure is 100 GW by 2020. If they keep going the way they have been going over the last couple of years I wouldn’t be surprised to see a wind target in China of 500GW…. when they do that, you start to make coal irrelevant. On solar, China had a goal of 2GW for 2020 until recently, but with thermal solar coming on stream they have raised their goal with solar to 20GW by 2020. Same logic as for wind. Watch how they grow it. Once you have a technology, it is just rolling it out and China is brilliant at completing projects.

Not so sure about India (I don’t have current figures), but we need to understand that at the end of the day no government is going to hurt their citizens if there is another way. The current problem is that the coal lobbies with their disinformation and fear of change have paralysed decision making, slowing action in directions that are going to work. China at least seems to be less hindered.

Hence, if there is a legitimate quibble here, it’s with Ralph Hillman’s billing of CSIRO people as “independent scientists”. If such a beast exists outside the realms of retirement, it’s probably more in the direction of universities that you’d have to look.

we need more retiring engineers and scientists to come 0ut - not anonymously - and tell the truth about CCS. but they had better nail down their super packages first.

tony kevin

A good one is the role Australia played in drafting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To quote Robertson “… the Australian delegation, instructed through (Doc) Evatt’s cablegrams from Canberra…carved out a presence and position that at times confounded the Soviet Union, at other times defied the US and was often independent of Britain. In fact, in the endless to-ing and fro-ing that it took to hold the draft of the declaration together, as winds of the approaching Cold War threatened to tear it apart, the Australian delegation became crucial to the entire project because of the way it was able to win support from the unaligned but mildly socialist countries of Latin America, and eventually build bridges with the Soviet Union…. (paraphrasing) … our tiny nation (whose population then was only seven million) played a remarkable part in the eighty-one drafting sessions over two years..”

Me thinks if Penny Wong showed courage and her (Chinese speaking) Prime Minister backed her up, we are once again positioned to lead the world on climate change policy rather than cower in a corner and act as if coal has a future. Be in no doubt Europe, the US and China are already on a path to substitute renewables (wind, solar etc) for coal and our main export will one day soon be a product that no-one wants to buy.

Wake up Australia, we have a proud history of leadership.

“It’s all bullshit mate!”

Ed Moran

“clean coal” is spin and no more believable than “healthy cigarettes”. Burying the CO2 MIGHT cut atmospheric emissions “by 90%”, if someone could actually get it to work on a large scale before it is too late. Extremely doubtful. The time and money wasted on this diversion could be put to far better use elsewhere.

“has been blamed” and “climate scientists tell us” implies doubt. Whoever made these statements is therefore in denial about climate change. More spin of the classic kind. As Clive puts it, “sowing doubt”.

“changing behaviour at the individual level” and so forth, is spin, pure and simple. It attempts to deflect attention from big polluters and blame it on individuals. It is essentially a “do-nothing” approach, while deceitfully pretending to take a finger wagging, high moral stance. If we really want individuals to change their habits we would charge more for carbon intensive energy. For everybody. Especially the big polluters. No exceptions.

Then there is furphy that what Australia does makes no difference. If one of the world’s worst polluting economies cannot reform itself, then we are truly lost.

As for the CFMEU, there are many ex-miners who know what a con job is being perpetrated. They might serve their members better by pushing for greater assistance for ex-miners as the coal mining inevitably winds down. One hopes places like the Hunter Valley will still be a green and pleasant land after the coal miners have left.

The rest of Clive’s piece is fairly self explanatory. A list of corruption and perfidy that should make any sane citizen ill.

So what are you saying Clive? Are you challenging their knowledge, their capacity or their personal integrity or is this just a bit of the dog whistling that - in another situation - you so might be be railing against?

FYI, the site has been running since last November and has attracted more than 175,000 unique visitors.

The Australian public gets the independence it pays for. It’s been quite some time since CSIRO was anything like fully funded by the government.