Another completely irrational “climate change” money waster. Even in sun-beaten Australia solar power is simply too dilute to be competitive with our superabundant coal and natural gas supplies. Expensive, high-maintenance and pointless. That’s why they use the alleged justification of carbon constraint to avoid catastrophic global warming but that dog won’t hunt either.
THE federal government is paying 10 times its carbon price to cut greenhouse gas emissions at thousands of schools, according to a highly critical audit that warns of safety risks under the program.
Labor’s election pledge to install solar panels in every school has emerged as one of the most expensive schemes to reduce emissions, prompting the Auditor-General to question the policy’s cost and value for money.
The audit challenges big claims made during the 2007 election campaign, when Labor promised to make “an important contribution to the planet” by giving every school $50,000 to spend on solar panels and other equipment.
While Labor’s carbon tax will cost $23 for every tonne of emissions, the Solar Schools program will cost about $284 per tonne in an estimate that is likely to understate the “considerable” cost of the scheme, the audit concludes.
Policy experts cited the new audit as grounds for concern. “If you’re really about reducing greenhouse gases, you should be doing it as cheaply as possible so you can get the most abatement,” said Frontier Economics managing director Danny Price.
“This type of scheme makes no economic sense whatsoever. It’s just ridiculous in terms of the total cost of abatement.”
“This type of scheme makes no economic sense whatsoever. It’s just ridiculous in terms of the total cost of abatement.”
Hey, it’s polititions spending Other People’s Money, buying the votes of greenies. It makes sense, you just have to understand what’s going on.
No one is disputing that the solar energy industry is still in its infancy, and that the costs today of producing electricity this way safely is way way higher than burning fossil fuels. But if we never make a start on developing new forms of power generation and simply insist on always taking the cheapest option, where does that leave us for the future on the effects of carbon footprints? Nothing will change until it’s too late because the carbon fuels have run out, the Middle East has sparked a worldwide oil war which will have largely destroyed us, and we’ll be struggling to breathe because of smog and CO-2.
The same applies to wind, tidal energy, hydrogen & fuel cell technology, and nuclear fusion generation, They are all uneconomic today, but if we resist research and development and field trials with them purely on today’s short-term economic grounds, it will be too late. These technologies are going to take many years to become economically viable. They need to be tried, tested, improved, and tried again many times before they’re right.
I believe Oz currently sports just about the highest carbon footprint per capita in the world. How do you feel about that?
Sorry Sleepy John but solar is something humans have been using for a very, very long time. We are currently major users of it – it powers our crops, which is the most efficient way of harvesting such a diffuse resource. For baseload electrical generation it is simply too dispersed to ever be of real value and will always be a niche power product.
If we could both return in a thousand years I’d be willing to bet humans are still utilizing abundant carbon although possibly not as a primary power source.
As far as struggling to breathe goes, CO2 is an asset – it triggers exhalation – and there is no possibility of humans driving levels to such concentration that it is toxic in the free atmosphere.
Wrt your alternate power source suggestions, tidal: maybe; fuel cells: probably; fusion: likely never. Fission is likely to overcome the irrational fears that make it currently uneconomic. That’s for future generations to figure what best suits them.
And as for how I feel about Australia’s per capita “carbon footprint”? Go Aussie! Returning previously sequestered carbon to the active carbon cycle is the best thing humans have done for the biosphere, albeit accidentally. The Western world’s current case of dioxycarbophobia is an embarrassing case of mass sociogenic illness, driven by misanthropic nitwits and scam artists. Carbon dioxide’s “crime” is that is serves as a proxy for a healthy capitalist economy, or at least economic activity and that is why gaia-freaks hate it so.