I believe the source for @Venise’s ‘40% illiterate’ statement is this ABS survey from 2006.

Amongst other things, its results were that 46% of working-age Australians failed to meet a literacy standard defined as the “minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy”. The proportion failing to meet the equivalent numeracy standard was 53%.

Make of that what you will.

Well, since Gillard has excluded from her stern “no more dirty coal plants will be built” “policy”, the 12 to 14 coal-fired generators which already have their approvals, then no there will be BAU and a slight reprieve. Though the unsolved issue for the BAU lobby is that no finance is available which raises the issue of whether the government will be “forced” into providing some sort of guarantee, not dissimilar to Obama’s loan guarantees on nuclear power (which his Office of Management and Budget has said exposes the government to very high risk — ie. the loan guarantees are likely to turn into grants).

One thing is sure, our carbon emissions per cap will continue to climb.

But if the potential wind turbines were actually installed (whatever cost blah, blah) then that could also provide some further room to manoeuvre (by which I mean avoid the issue).

However maybe those blackouts are not such a bad thing, a wakeup call to the public and politicians? It seems that we Anglos need to be on the edge of meltdown before we do anything. (Once were Victorians…). Witness today’s train network meltdown in Melbourne and the continuing farce of Myki and the Sydney ticket system.
Of course not, that is why those new coal plants will be constructed. And since the future test merely requires new coal plants to be “CCS ready” there is in effect a charter for exactly BAU.

A recent poll found that forty percent of our workforce to be illiterate and/or innumerate. Would you trust these morons with the construction of a nuclear power plant? Shiver, shiver.

Speaking as a teacher I can say that functional literacy and numeracy is much higher than that. In any event, highly skilled workers would be employed in construction and operation of the plants.

…there will be absolutely no change to the factors that give rise to those tortuous approval processes…

If that’s the case, and if we proceed with the plans to entirely replace our coal-fired generation capacity with renewables, then blackouts and curfews is exactly what we will get.

This is Australia, and Australia only does what other countries did fifty years in the past.

Your writing is eloquent, well researched and you use logic. Even worse, you appear to have reason on your side.

The only politician I can think of who would understand what you say, and be able to do something about it, is Malcolm Turnbull. He of the ‘being turfed out of the Liberal Party leadership because he believes in Climate Change as having been caused by Homo Sapiens’ (his arrogance didn’t help either).

It has taken Australia until 2010 AD to come up to par with the 1970s of other nations.

Whether this is because of the inherent stupidity of the Australian people, or the fact that the mining industries have billions of dollars of vested interest in making sure our technology lags so far behind China, as to be laughable.

Fran, how would the Australian workforce cope with the advanced technologies of which you speak.

A recent poll found that forty percent of our workforce to be illiterate and/or innumerate. Would you trust these morons with the construction of a nuclear power plant? Shiver, shiver.

Cheers

Venise

I don’t discount the political problems but in this as in many things, every journey must beging with a first step. That first step is lifting the ban on discussion of nuclear power as a policy option. If you are right, and the cost or other issues are indeed the obstacle you say they are, then we will stand no worse than we are now. We will still be asking ourselves how best to deal with the specific challenges of climate change and industrial pollution.

Yet surely we must at least have an open and rigorous examination of these issues? That has never been done in this country. Instead, nuclear power has welded together Nimbies and the merchants of moral panic, in a way that is very similar to arguments about asylum seekers and Mosques in our neighbourhood or gay adoption. Issues that can cross the political divide like this are always the hardest to deal with.

The history of this discussion in this country is briefly that initially, the ALP favoured nuclear power, and dealt with the issue on basic resource sovereignty considerations, but when it was ejected from office in 1975 it began to be identiified much more strongly with the coalition, who, unlike Rex Connor, naturally wanted to hand over the resource to private industry. The issue then became part of a partisan bunfight and the ALP activists dragged in concerns about safety, and land rights and suddenly it was existential.

At no point though was a careful scientific and economic exmaination of the merits of the technology undertaken, and post-Argonne, this seems particularly absurd. The Russians will have a GenIV plant by 2014. We could certainly have a brace of them by 2020, if we got going with it.

I do agree with a price on carbon though — ideally an ETS, possibly a carbon tax with a price starting at about that nominated by the Greens and rising to about $AUS(2010) 100 by about 2015 across the board.

I quite like, as in interim measure if neither of these can be sold, the idea of removing both subsidies (e.g. diesel fuel rebate, LPG conversion) and the tax deductibility of “dirty energy”. A benchmark for dirty energy would be established (stationary: industry average CO2-intensity for anthracite plants; Transport: BTU/CO2 of petrodiesel) and deductibility wouild be relative to dirty energy. The money clawed back would be used to fully rebate those on or below AWE and partially rebate those up to 120% of AWE and to fund soft loans for cleaner energy projects, reafforestation, quality sustainable housing and transport etc.

Because you are hand waving away one of the biggest problems, certainly in Anglo democracies. In my written arguments I deliberately avoid the most contentious issues — politics and safety being the big ones — because they are irresolvable by argument. You cannot address them by scientific rational persuasion. It simply doesn’t matter what you or I or Barry Brook, or Ziggy Zwitkowski say. In places like the UK, USA and even Germany and Sweden (as is now happening) where there remains huge resistance but nevertheless they have lived with nuclear for 40-50 years, they may be able to build some new ones, keep the old ones going for another 20 years.

But Australia would have to start this tortuous political debate from year zero, actually in a far worse situation than any of those countries were in the late 70s which is when they stopped building new plants. There is no conceivable way in which to short circuit that argument and once it starts for real (do you see any sign for even the next parliament, or the one after that?) it will immediately bog down. We cannot even decide to store some relatively innocuous waste in the vast empty interior of our country, let alone build reactors on our eastern coastline.

If nuclear was as cheap as some advocates claim, or even say about within twofold of FF, then I would say just possibly it might be worth the long and tortuous road. If, by the time we got enough built to make a difference — -by most realistic estimates not before 2040 — and on the same time scale there was unlikely to be any other alternative that was approx. cost competitive, then maybe. BUT none of those are true statements. I don’t think you quite understand what the real costs of nuclear are. That $9B effective subsidy from Obama is just the tip; Grunwald still estimates new reactors at almost double that (from industry own estimates); you don’t understand that nuclear has subsidy and hidden assistance all the way, from before it is conceived to hundreds of years after a plants life. In the US some electrical utilities have obtained permission to surcharge existing customers now to pay for future nuclear plants. The economics is crazy except if a government decides there really is no alternative (France, China, Korea etc) and at least in those cases it is run and financed by the state, instead of the sham that occurs in the US. (Incidentally the claim that France produces the cheapest electricity is absurd, and now the whole country including winter heating and summer air-con is locked into electrical everything hence their system fragility and dependence at peak times on imports from elsewhere. Luckily they also have the world’s largest percentage of power from hydro without which their countrywide system could not function; we have no such buffer and in case you didn’t notice we don’t have any near neighbours to run the extension lead over to when a 75% nuclear system cannot deliver.)

You evidently cannot believe that for that kind of money and the time involved (another 25 years) that renewables and geothermal etc will not have reached the point of viability. Of course the Greens with their much improved political realism these days, support CCGT, as I do. But you are exactly what Richo claimed (falsely) of Christine Milne on QandA last night: you are implacably opposed to anything but your single fixed vision which is a house of cards which collapses on any of a number of hard questions (top of his list would be politics). Nuclear for Australia is a dead parrot, Fran. Wake up.

Finally, given the inevitable timetable of nuclear, I say, well let us wait for the 4th gen/next gen which will be mass produced cheaply like cars, be actually fail-safe and proliferation resistant etc. If they really will be like that and can be installed from bare ground to 1.4 GW in three years then there is no reason to rush in today with cruddy expensive current-gen tech. Meanwhile let us put all our limited resources, especially political and citizen activist energy, into a small number of good bets for which we have existing pilots underway and a track record. And which could quite feasibly produce a world export industry for us. Oh, and of course, yes, a carbon tax is one of the few things we can bring in today! (Except that neither major party — -do you see any other rulers in 20 days time? — nor a great swathe of the unwashed public, want a bar of it.)

Your approach seems to be to bundle up things that are complex behind slogans and then to “fire scatter-gun style responses (the “Gish Gallop”).

Let’s simplify some of the issues.

1. There is no particular reason why the approval processes for nuclear plants ought to require more regulatory complexity and delay than any large industrial facility handling hazardous materials. Large petrochemical plants, coal and gas plants, aluminium smelters etc certainly have more scope in practice to cause nuisance and worse to surrounding populations than do contemporary nuclear plants. You surely know as well as I that nuclear plants are treated differently from these others because of the emotional resonances of events like Chernobyl and, to some extent, unreasoning connection between the plants and weapons proliferation, with Hiroshima etc …

So Fran, you do not seem the type to want to see governments sweep aside all the democratic and community processes involved in the approval of a nuclear power plant.

Of course not.

It has long seemed to me that a first step in the process of taking the hysteria out of the way in which we look at these things here would be to establish some sort of standing commission to examine and distinguish the nuclear facilities we have to day from past iterations, to accept publish submissions from those with expertise and those without on matters of concern and to publish robust reports on them. Perhaps this is where something like a “citizen assembly” might have a valid role to play. We could perhaps allow 12-18 months in which to examine the generality of matters in absolute and comparative terms and if the process went well, we could begin to select some designs which could be mass manufactured reliably and swiftly, and to specify, with reference to other comparable facilities, the kinds of regulatory burden and process that should underpin approval of construction at any specific place.

Let’s keep in mind that between now and 202 that there are plans in train to substantially augment energy capacity on the Eastern seaboard, and despite the fact that all these plants will pose substantially greater hazard than the nuclear plants we might otherwise build, these will not in practice be subject to the serious delays and queries over “safety” that nuclear plants get. The Greens will (not unreasonably) favour CCGT and OCGT over coal, because on balance, this is a good risk trade (despite the fact that gas plants are rather more likely to kill people in critical incidents than coal plants). Yet like large swathes of the population, the concept “nuclear power” simply provokes unresolved generic anxiety and animus. It seems to me that if we could get clarity on what is reasonable and tightly specify what procedures have to be done to allay reasonable concerns, we could coterminously approve 8-10 plant proposals. This should be especially easy if the plants were being built on sites currently housing coal or other similar industrial facilities, since the particular environmental issues attending them would already have been sorted through and the people living near them would actually benefit from cleaner air and water. One can easily imagine placing such a facility adjacent to a water treatment works or in replacement of a gas or coal plant.

Once we had a regime in place, and were able to mass manufacture the components at suitable local facilities I see no reason why any specific proposal ought to take longer than five years to go from initial design to operational plant, and in the case of replacement of coal facilities, perhaps a couple of years quicker than that. We just need to make sure that matters are not burdened by interlocutory delay or vexatious challenge. Instead, we define what “approval in principle” requires, then “specific approval of a development proposal” and then “oversight of installation”. Once requirements are satisfied, challenges would be denied or narrowed to questions of compliance — a task to be determined purely by those with pertinent engineering expertise. Since the components themselves would be examined at their source of manufacture and be highly standardised these phases ought not to be extensive and if we were building 8-10 in the same time envelope, we could, at the other end roll them out in quick succession. This in turn would allow us to put the retirement of our target facilities on a definite time-line and to recruit/train the required local engineering expertise. Once we had secured the approval for such facilities, the way would be open to establish local engineering training centres focused on developing our longterm skills base.

I would favour a sharp carbon price at the beginning of the process (long before we got anywhere near resolving the matters of principle on nuclear — essentially now — which, by 2015 would have reached about $AUS(2010)100 per tonne. That in itself should both raise much of the capital to purchase these facilities (since most of them would be close to the end of their useful life of 40 years (and Hazelwood, — a mid 1960s plant — a good deal older than that). With the facilities in state control, they could be progressively taken off line as nuclear facilities became ready to shoulder the burden. By 2030, the whole phased conversion could be complete.

You say that:

For Australia nuclear power is a huge, huge, monstrous distraction from better alternatives that, on the same (actually better) timescale, will solve the problem — just not today or one decade.

Yet there is simply no warrant for such a claim, here, or in any advanced economy. There are no “better” or even adequate alternatives that can do what coal and gas can do, leave aside what nuclear could add to our local capacity in terms of desal, fuel synthesis, surplus industrial heat etc … The cost of connecting facilities to the grid alone and providing the redundant storage/capacity utterly dwarfs the costs of nuclear. Had these thing been remotely feasible, we would already have seen them rolled out at scale somewhere, but as yet they haven’t. In the US, CST has stalled and in some places being abandoned. Wind everywhere is being paired with gas and hydro — and indeed, it is these people who, unsurprisingly, are keen on it, because it locks them in.

It is the RE side of this debate that is the huge, monstrous distraction, and worse a cover for the very fossil fuel forces they claim to oppose.

…you do not seem the type to want to see governments sweep aside all the democratic and community processes involved in the approval of a nuclear power plant…

Without wanting to speak for Fran (who is more than capable of doing that herself), I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Certainly people like Clive Hamilton have advocated exactly that (albeit for climate action generally, not nuclear power plants in his case).

…how exactly do you and BNC see this nuclear scenario playing out?

Many, and not just on BNC, have equated the scale of the climate challenge with that faced by the western democracies in the Second World War. They did not hesitate to limit freedoms, suspend aspects of normal civilian life and generally pursue every possible avenue (including nuclear technology!) to victory. Now we might not be at the stage of needing blackouts, curfews and war cabinets quite yet, but by golly I’m sure we can do a damn sight better than the ridiculous overengineering of14-year approval processes if we have to. And we do have to.

Naturally I reject the accusation of parochialism which is a silly name to apply to what I described/intended. It is silly to give examples such as France (though in my article which it seems you still have not bothered reading, I did point out that it is much more valid comparing us with UK and USA — respectively 14 and 19 years since the last nuke was brought into service). Or to use as a model various non-democratic places like China, UAE etc.

One of the big points about nuclear, after economics, would be inability to deliver on time (unless you live in the BNC fantasyland). I lived in France when they were in the middle of their 40 year program to free themselves from FF (imported oil) for electricity (of course they are still not free, they have had to import lots from UK and other neighbours, for which they pay premium peak prices, while when they sell power back to those same neighbours it is at rock bottom baseload nighttime rates). I retain immense scepticism that the UK can fulfill their proposed nuclear program — although it will mostly be contracted to EDI/Areva which at least solves the technical side — but at least they and some of the other countries undergoing the so-called nuclear renaissance, have an established industry with many established nuclear power sites. They can build new ones on old sites prior to decommissioning (actually just stopping since there is not a single properly decommissioned reactor in the world) the old ones. Those first two new nukes for which Obama provided loan guarantees, are also to built on an existing site.

So Fran, you do not seem the type to want to see governments sweep aside all the democratic and community processes involved in the approval of a nuclear power plant. Like the previous UK government (and probably the current one excepting the LibDems, we’ll see). I mean how exactly do you and BNC see this nuclear scenario playing out? Only the Coalition would want to force through nuclear power and they also have avoided commiting to it and in this they are at least being rational. The last enquiry in the UK to approve Sizewell B (their last one built) took 14 years. Fourteen years. (As it happens I was living there when it started, went for a decade to France who meanwhile probably built 20, then returned to Oxford before the thing was approved.) If we could swap our politicians and technocrats (yes please) and our voters, there could be a chance but it still could not be done overnight or even in a decade. No wonder all governments have avoided it since! So to turn your question back to you: what would you do to get nuclear (or anything) to replace coal power TODAY?
For Australia nuclear power is a huge, huge, monstrous distraction from better alternatives that, on the same (actually better) timescale, will solve the problem — just not today or one decade. If renewables research had been properly funded the last two decades, and if the nuclear fan club (almost as culpable as the coal fan club) could discard their fantasies, we could achieve that nirvana a whole lot quicker.

Has war-weariness made wimps of so many nations? Where is the emotional passion? I suspect that, after the middle eastern oil wars or religious wars or wars against terrorism or whatever they were for the past decade, George W Bush’s real legacy is becoming evident.

I disagree. The world is run by and for privileged elites — the owners of productive assets. Good policy’s first requirement — one may call it the fundamental constraint — is that policy should, at worst, not leave the privileged elites less empowered relative to the mass of working people. Accordingly, even if policy is scandalously bad, if no other policy serves these elites so well, that is the policy we shall have. Governments simply iterate these policies.

Every now and again, the elites have a falling out and then it gets interesting because they have to choose between the interests of their own fraction and the risk that the working people will strip away some of their privileges and control. Wars are a good example of that. Luckily for them, the poor always pay a heavy price for these fissures in the firmament.

The current imbroglio over mitigation highlights this problem very well. Clearly, some elite interests are threatened by rising sea levels, damage to coastal property values, human displacement and so forth. On the other hand, doing anything to harm the asset values of coal and oil is obviously something large swathes of them are loathe to do. Look at the squabbling over the Gulf of Mexico for example. The worst environmental disaster in US history and yet, nothing happens in policy terms. Ditto the hideously expensive, brutal assaults on Iraq. Afghanistan too is occupied at huge cost. When their asset values are threatened, no cost is too great for governments to pay. It has ever been thus.

Until the mass of the working people can seize control of public policy, this is what we shall get. Of course, as a leftist, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

I recall a short piece of verse that applies here:

the poor complain
they always do
but that’s just idle chatter
The system brings
to all who need — 
at least to those who matter

It is this: We three are bashing our collective heads against different sides of the same rock.

When people choose not to be convinced about climate science, GHG, nuclear power pro’s and con’s, renewable energy, demand management, demand reduction, etc, this is a personal decision. What I find most disappointing is not that universal agreement regarding energy options and climate science has not been reached.

I am dismayed that Australian and many other governments in this world have shied away from their moral and democratic duty to address these issues unambiguously. Australia’s governments are only a subset of those world-wide who have been elected to do the best for their people, yet are prepared to stand idly by whilst this is happening.

Has war-weariness made wimps of so many nations? Where is the emotional passion? I suspect that, after the middle eastern oil wars or religious wars or wars against terrorism or whatever they were for the past decade, George W Bush’s real legacy is becoming evident.

So many have been stuffed around for so long by those with agendas to run that they simply don’t want to get involved. Whole governments are metaphorically hiding under their beds, cuddling a teddy bear with a thumb in their mouths, wimpering while waiting for mummy to come and make everything OK.

After 200+ posts here, I look forward to your contributions on related topics. I’m calling it a day for this thread.

JB

Regarding European reduction of GHG output, I have heard somewhere that they are counting discredited credits for GHG abatement elsewhere on the planet. If/when I find the report I will be able to satisfy my curiosity on this point.

I simply do not believe that they have done enough to reduce their emissions significantly below pre-1990 levels, as is their stated aim, entirely by just thinking about it and installing a few wind turbines.

OK, then… they have a small amount of solar PV and solar thermal, but nowhere near the gigawatt quantities needed to produce an effect. Sure they haven’t simply loaded their dirty indudtries onto China and India? There’s more than meets the eye going on here.

Back to Australia, where I happen to live and to vote, I am still convinced that the effective 30% per capita reduction in power consumption upon which the ZCA report is based is achievable in Australia by 2010, if ever, especially when our federal government is in stasis on this issue and the Opposition is in denial. What are the drivers? Where is the action?

I am despondent and fearful of the future. One big methane burp from Siberia and our world may never ever be the same again. Australia should be setting an example by allocating resources to this threat as if for a war, and by this I do not mean a political-religious follow the leader excursion in the Middle East, I mean a no holds barred, all in together real stoush.

When I was Green’s candidate for Higgins I spent one month in the streets (ie about 30*24 hours) with climate change one of my main issues. So I’ve put in lots of effort to try to prevent climate change.

That’s admirable. The problem lies not with your subjectivity. You are keen on the issue, obviously.

The problem is that you are, for one reason or another, unreasonably hostile to the only industrial-scale means of addressing the problem, and naive about the way politics works in this country.

I’m not sure why that is. In about 1980, I had much the same view on nuclear power. I found it a frightening and difficult to grasp technology, noted that reactionaries seemed to like it and had little inkling about just how dreadful fossil fuels were and how much reactionaries also liked these. And beyond that, renewables just sound so much more intuitively appealing. Who doesn’t like the idea of getting power “locally” and “for free” and from things as nagtural as the sun and the wind. Every pre-literate human society has had gods of the sun, the wind and even the moon (tidal power). Renewables hacve all sorts of built in cultural advantage that makes them far more marketable than nuclear power. Perhaps that is what I am hearing here.

The point is that these arbitrary prejudices — and that is what they are — are an obstacle to society avoiding a calamity.Bear in mind that the course you suggest will, in practice, underpin the continued use on a very large scale of fossil fuels regardless of your personal preference. I would urge you to reflect upon that.

This discussion is going nowhere, so I think I’ll just shut up now and we will have to agree to disagree.

A plan for shutting Hazelwood was put up recently by I think Environmental Victoria.

And again, this plan was deeply flawed. Also it essentially comes down to mainly replacing Hazelwood with gas (plus a bit of wind), the former of which is evidently not a renewable resource.

As Lang notes in a detailed reponse:

Replacing Hazelwood with wind and gas generators (Scenario 1) is only 3% better than the gas only option for the amount of emissions avoided. However, the wind and gas option (Scenario 1) is much more costly than the gas only option – see Table 3. The wind and gas option is 3.7 times the capital cost, 3 times the emissions avoidance cost, and, importantly for most people and industry, the cost of electricity is nearly double that of the gas only option. Thus, their stated criterion of “minimising any increase in electricity bills” is not satisfied.

On this basis it is clear that the wind and gas option should not be considered further. For currently available replacement technology in Australia, the gas only option is by far the cheaper option, and has only slightly (3%) higher emissions.

But, as this thread has shown, nuclear is a very effective way of diverting discussion away from what should be done in the short term.

Actually what it shows is the persistent refusal of renewables advocates to grasp the scale and time envelope of the challenge, and to try diverting discussion into marginal issues while dodging the principla issue — how to retire existing fossil thermal capacity.

Fran, by suggesting that Green supporters should vote informally, and supporting nuclear and dismissing renewables (even for something as trivial as replacing Hazelwood) could not be doing a better job for the anti-Green cause if she really was a liberal party undercover political activist.

Retiring Hazelwood is not trivial. It accounts for about 9% of stationary emissions (5% overall), and contrary to your suggestion, has just been renewed until 2031.

I am uninterested in what serves either major party over the next three years. I am much more interested in what will serve humanity over the next 250 years. Unlike you, the idea of continuing to push the biosphere towards catastrophe merely so the ALP can chalk up another win over the equally repulsive Liberals strikes me as a very poor trade.

A plan for shutting Hazelwood was put up recently by I think Environmental Victoria. So at least one plan exists.

What is more, it is very likely that Hazelwood will be shut down sometime in the next ten years. As it is so symbolic of dirty coal even the Victorian Labor party are now looking like they will shut it down.

Even when Australia is finally forced by international pressure to take real action on climate change I feel pretty confident that this will be done without going nuclear.

Just thinking through the political implications of nuclear, especially the need for political consensus before any such large scale long term projects can be started, show that nuclear in Australia is very unlikely.

But, as this thread has shown, nuclear is a very effective way of diverting discussion away from what should be done in the short term. It even allows those promoting nuclear to appear concerned about climate change.

Fran, by suggesting that Green supporters should vote informally, and supporting nuclear and dismissing renewables (even for something as trivial as replacing Hazelwood) could not be doing a better job for the anti-Green cause if she really was a liberal party undercover political activist.

I think that it is very unlikely that most of the EEC’s cuts are slight of hand.

This is because if this was the case I’m sure we both would have heard about it.

Environmentalists would be pointing this out because they want the cuts to be real. And anti-action on climate change people in the USA and Australia would be busy proving that the EEC was not making real cuts as a justification for not doing things in their country.

Australia (under Rudd and Gillard) is trying to set the international rules so that credit can be claimed for things like planting trees and not cutting them down, but wants to exclude bushfires and logging from counting as emissions.

It is your third point that I disagree with. See the beyond zero emissions dot org site for their zero carbon australia by 2020 report.

BNC has responded to this at some length. ZCA is wildly optimistic.

I put to you the proposal I put to Mr James:

show me how renewables today can be used to retire Hazelwood, or Muja or Playford B. Specify costs, grid integration, storage match to load curves etc …

Australia, thus far, has not been corrupted by this particular virus, which counts fictitious and/or temporary trees in a jungle somewhere instead of real long term action.

I have yet to hear of a new round of closing down of dirty industries, so where else did their “reductions” come from?

(As my 10:10 am post is still being held up for moderation, here is the same post but without a link)

It is your third point that I disagree with. See the beyond zero emissions dot org site for their zero carbon australia by 2020 report.

And note that the EEC has REDUCED its emissions as per its Kyoto commitment. Though some countries in the EEC have nuclear, I don’t think there have been any new nuclear plants involved in this reduction. It has all been the non-nuclear things like greater efficiencies, renewable energy, etc

You speak of the time constraint and of feasibility and yet you ignore the most pertinent feasibility question: schedule feasibility. If the resources required to forerclose the disaster are either not at hand or cannot be contrived by the time required, then they are of no value at all. It matters not a jot that one day renewables might do a reasonable job, if that one day comes to late to avert disaster.

My focus is always going to be Australia because it is a ridiculous conceit to start discussing how to save the world when we refuse to address our own relatively minor problems.

Parochial to the end. This is not a problem that can be addressed purely by any given jursidiction and it is unworthy of you to oppose the local to the global. One can always maintain that if nobody else acts adequuately then we might not bother either. That gets us nowhere. We must model what we would have others do and support others in taking that course.

You don’t like dealing with the planet. OK … much simpler: show me how renewables today can be used to retire Hazelwood, or Muja or Playford B. Specify costs, grid integration, storage match to load curves etc …

If you can’t propose that, then all your advocacy is exposed as mere posturing to salve your own angst — a position you plainly carry over into your voting choices.