Saturday 12 April 2008

Australian Emissions Trends

A collection of images from the 2008 report from the Australian Department of Climate Change. I put them here for us all to study.

"With Measures" includes the new Rudd Labor Government measures, in particular the 20% Renewable Energy Target, and yet it continues to show an increase.




These show that not only is the stationary energy sector (e.g. electricity generation, etc.) the greatest contributor, it is also by far the fastest growing in absolute terms.

... and here we see that despite the 'measures', stationary energy related emissions are to continue to - in the best case - remain the same.

Above we see the impact of ongoing efficiency and conservation programmes. The economy remains strong, but it's taking less emissions to achieve the related outputs. Those who promote efficiency and conservation as if it were something new are either misled or misleading.

I admit that significant scope remains to be tapped in this area. But we will be lucky if the results are enough to compensate for projected demand/population growth.

Here above, we see that stationary energy is projected to increase by 56% from 1990 to the Kyoto measuring period of 2008-2012. And worse, below they project emissions will further increase 64% beyond 1990 levels by 2020.

Also during this time period the report projects our per-person emissions will decrease from 33 tonnes per person down to 28 in 2008-2012, but then climb back to 29 tonnes per person by 2020.

Realising that these projections include fairly aggressive renewable targets and the 'Australian clause' regarding land use [a one-off perk for us]. I remain convinced that Australia has no hope of achieving anything near 60% reduction without significant nuclear power deployment in parallel with other measures well beyond those currently planned.

The data supports no other path.

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