Dr. Ziggy Switkowski predicts 8 nuclear plants for Victoria by 2050 and speaks of the role carbon trading will play in any attempt to reduce Australia's pitiful emissions.
Sadly, Dr. Switkowski has hopped on the bandwagon of looking at Australia's emissions from a nation-state perspective. To me this makes absolutely no sense. Why shouldn't larger nations, particularly those that are developing such as India and China have the right to as much wealth, as much productivity, as much energy and as much emissions (per person) as we Australians.
Do we really think that a do as I say, not as I do approach will work? Is this global leadership at it's best? I believe we can do better. And better we MUST do, because as I've said before in this post - it's our backside that's going to get burnt first.
Also from this Editorial from The Australian:
The Opposition Leader, and his cheer squad in the media, also show signs of being outfoxed over climate change. This is an issue Labor thought to make its own, by attacking the Government on its supposed lack of interest in global warming. Mr Rudd's call for greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by 60 per cent by 2050 certainly looks like a winner to the Left. But while Labor and the Greens have talked a lot about the evils of coal and the risks of nuclear power, they have never explained how Australians are to heat and cool their houses without cheap electricity, or how the country could ever replace the export earnings - and jobs - generated by uranium and coal exports. While Mr Rudd's supporters have huffed and puffed about wind and solar power, in early 2005 the Prime Minister began a serious debate about why we should contemplate nuclear power at home. That Labor continues to support uranium exports but opposes a domestic nuclear industry makes it a good question. Our vast coal resources mean nuclear power for domestic use will never be economically competitive, but this is not the point. As the Government's nuclear adviser, Ziggy Switkowski, says, if Australian initiatives led to nuclear-generated electricity increasing from 15 per cent to just 16 per cent of the worldwide total, the effect would be the same as a 60per cent reduction in our greenhouse gases. And it could be achieved in a bare decade. As the economic impossibility and environmental folly of relying on inefficient alternative energy becomes ever clearer, the trap Mr Howard prepared for Labor with Dr Switkowski's support is now sprung. Mr Rudd is likely to find it hard to explain in an election campaign why he will not support the clean power generation that is used in all the "Kyoto powers" of Western Europe. A scare campaign about nuclear power plants will fall as flat as the Work Choices scare campaign inevitably will.
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