Our exporting industries, our high-fliers and those in remote suburbs condemned to a long-distance commute produce the lion’s share of our local carbon dioxide emissions.

We can’t appreciably reduce Australia’s aluminium or iron ore production merely by reducing domestic consumption of those products, because the vast majority of what we produce here is exported. Only about 60% of coal mined here is burned locally to produce electricity and a huge fraction of that electricity is sold (at a subsidy!) to exporting producers.

Add agriculture (and its non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions: methane nitrous oxides) to the equation and the picture is only a little different: we do consume more meat in Australia than we export, but we export more crops than are consumed locally, enough to feed not our mere 20-odd million but over 50 million people.

Of course we do import a lot of stuff as well, and the related emissions happen, obviously, in the country of origin.

In every case but that of agriculture, most of the emissions are to do with energy production. Aluminium exports and similar energy-intensive production are a traditional way for countries with cheap energy to profit from it, since bauxite and other raw materials are very widely available but electricity is far more expensive in some places than others.

If Australia were to pursue its non-carbon energy resources with vigour, we could continue indefinitely to exploit our natural advantage in the electricity department. Yes, renewable energy is *presently* more expensive than our coal energy, and we would lose *some* advantage to countries that continue down the path of exploiting local coal resources. However very few countries have such an abundance of coal as does Australia — China in particular will hit ‘peak coal’ in the next couple of decades, and the price of energy in that country will consequently soar as it turns to alternative sources. Which, incidentally, will push down the price of the equipment needed to produce renewable (and nuclear) energy elsewhere in the world.

We are stardust
(Billion year old carbon)
We are golden
(Caught in the devil’s bargain)
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

(With Joni on the jukebox, no funny cigarettes required for bliss!)

Noble ideas, Guy, and as a science-geek kid that was sent home from school to watch the Moonwalk I reckon I can match your romantic imagination.

But yes, we have a few problems on the little garden planet, and if we (H.sapiens) want to be around to see it in another 100 years perhaps we should focus a tad more on those problems and get ourselves back to the garden. But wait, the two things are not mutually exclusive; let’s send Wilson Tuckey, Ron Boswell, Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding to Mars! Please. Oh, let’s not deprive the boys of some female company on the long trip: squeeze up lads to make room for La Albrechtson. Truly we will have Planet Janet! And dare I say, a fine gene pool to create the first generation of Martians.