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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from the national electricity grid jumped by 6.4 million tonnes in the financial year after the Abbott government repealed the scheme that required big industry to buy pollution permits, according to analysis by consultants Pitt & Sherry.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: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 07 2015, @04:42AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 07 2015, @04:42AM (#205989) Journal

    You may "we fully expect to have working fusion before this happens", but you shouldn't feel too certain. The universe may be so set up that only large lumps of gravitationally compressed matter spontaneously fuse. One *hopes* that this isn't the way things are set up, but to be certain seems to me to be excessive hubris.

    We *know* that solar energy systems can be made to work. We *know* that wind power systems can be made to work. We *expect* that reasonably good storage systems are developable. But human scale fusion reactors? Expect may the the correct verb to use, but it's an optimistic assumption. And we don't know what the hidden costs will be. I *really* hope that we can develop decent fusion reactors suitable for powering apartment complexes, but I'm not at all sure that anything stronger than "hope" is a reasonable term to use.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:42PM (#206276)

    (Same AC)

    Well, if it comes to that we will be unable to build human scale fusion we still will have an extra couple of hundred years of research - and by that time we probably have built either a space elevator and/or a launch loop and therefore can launch solar power satellites cheaply..

    Regardless nuclear is a decent stopgap until something better comes along (and current solar and wind still falls short)