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posted by janrinok on Monday July 06 2015, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the burning-more-than-beds dept.

A year on from the abolition of the carbon price, greenhouse pollution from electricity generation has rebounded as Australia burns more brown coal to meet its power needs.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the national electricity grid jumped by 6.4 million tonnes in the financial year after the Abbott government repealed the scheme that required big industry to buy pollution permits, according to analysis by consultants Pitt & Sherry. The 4.3 per cent increase unwound part of an 11 per cent fall in emissions across the grid in the two years the carbon price was in place.

It can mainly be attributed to Victoria's four large brown coal generators running at greater capacity more often as the electricity they generate became cheaper. Output from the ageing Latrobe Valley quartet was up about nine per cent.

With the exception of burning oil for power – a practice favoured in Saudi Arabia – burning brown coal is the most greenhouse-intensive way to create electricity. Cutting emissions from the electricity supply is widely considered the central battle in tackling climate change in coming decades. It pumps out about a third of Australia's carbon pollution.

The new data comes as the federal cabinet is set to this month consider Australia's climate change targets beyond 2020 amid international pressure over Prime Minister Tony Abbott's contrarian stance on the issue.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday July 06 2015, @07:08AM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday July 06 2015, @07:08AM (#205504) Journal

    At worse, it denies solar inputs into the atmosphere's conduction/convection cycles. Which causes climate to change.

    This is just climate altering harvesting of convective solar energy.

    These are the dark corners we prefer not to look into, but which MUST have some effect somewhere down the line.
    We tend to dismiss this out of hand, saying that one more windmill or one more acre of solar cells can't make any difference.
    But mention one more smoke stack, and everybody comes unglued.

    When wind patterns and velocities are permanently changed over a mountain ridge, you have to allow for some eventual impact. Not just there, but down wind for many many miles.
    And when a boat load of insolation never reaches the desert floor or the hillside, and instead is whisked away as electricity, that has to have an effect down the line. Maybe some of that is good, reducing the heat island effect. But who knows?

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