We've solar, tidal energy – let's use it

Addressing climate change requires the world, including Australia, to move to a sustainable energy supply. What part should coal and nuclear play in this future energy regime? To put it bluntly, no part at all!
Yet our leaders insist that the answer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions lies in so called ‘clean coal’ and the possibility of Australia building dozens of nuclear power stations.

The most immediate problem with this strategy is that neither clean coal nor nuclear will deliver any greenhouse gas savings inside fifteen years. We need to cut emissions now, and there is little doubt that Australia could do so if we aggressively adopt existing renewable energy technologies including wind, solar thermal, tidal, geothermal and biomass.

Clean coal technology is as yet unproven. Countless questions remain unanswered such as the capacity and safety of pumping carbon dioxide into underground crevasses or deep under the ocean.
Nuclear energy presents the largely unsolved problem of dealing with waste that will be dangerously radioactive for a hundred thousand years or so.
In both cases the fuel is a limited resource. While Australia has among the largest uranium deposits in the world they will, by some estimates, be depleted within 50 years. Similarly, while our coal reserves are significant, the rate of extraction is expected to go into decline by mid this century.

A sustainable energy supply will have two main attributes. First, it will use a fuel that is essentially limitless and the only known sources are solar (including wind and biomass), tidal and geothermal. Second, it will not generate waste that must be stored indefinitely. Coal and nuclear fail on both counts. They do not head us towards a sustainable future. Pursuing them is taking us up a blind alley. We should instead be leapfrogging these outdated and dangerous sources of energy and making the transition to a truly sustainable energy supply. We should ignore the fact that Australia happens to have been endowed with large coal and uranium deposits and focus on the fact that we have also been endowed with lots of solar, geothermal and tidal energy. Let’s use it.

This originally appeared in the Fraser Coast Chronicle on 27 February 2007.